“Morning, sunshine,” I said with a bright smile. Yeah, let’s just keep pretending everything’s nice and normal.

He startled a bit, then smiled. “Morning, sleepyhead.”

“It’s not that late,” I pointed out. “You’re not exactly an early bird yourself today unless this is the second pot of coffee.” I retrieved two mugs from the cabinet, filled them.

“Nope. I’m running late.”

I placed the mugs on the table and sat. Okay, I was awake, and I had coffee. What the hell was I supposed to do now?

Ryan pulled out the chair opposite mine and dropped into it. “Now what?” he asked in an eerie echo of my thoughts.

I started to say I didn’t have a clue, then shook my head. “We can’t keep on pretending everything’s normal,” I said. “We both know it’s not.” He gave a grim nod, and I continued. “I need training still. I need to find out if Paul is all right. And I need to talk to Mzatal.”

“Sounds like you have a plan.” Ryan picked up the mug nearest him, took a sip, then made a that-doesn’t-taste-right face.

I winced a little. “I guess I do.”

“That’s half the battle.” He stood and moved to the spice rack.

I dumped sugar and cream into my coffee. “And what’s the other half?”

“Perseverance and follow-through,” he told me. “A lot of people have plans. They’re useless unless you do something with them.”

I gave him a wry smile. “Time to get my ass in gear then.”

“Drink your coffee first,” he said, then returned to the table to put a scant spoon of sugar and a shake of cinnamon into his cup.

I quickly lifted my mug to my mouth to hide my mild shock. Ryan always drank his coffee black. Was this whole Ryan-appearance simply a pretense to make it easier on me, or did Szerain need to keep it like this? A pang of loss went through me. Was there any of my Ryan left? I sipped my coffee and, for a moment, wished that I could go back to that beach in the demon realm where I’d gone with Helori, and simply be away from everyone and everything for a while. And just as quickly pushed the whiny self-pity down. This wasn’t about me, and I wasn’t going to run away from my problems. Too many others depended on me.

“What about Zack?” I left the question wide open to see where he’d go with it. I’d assured Zack that Szerain wouldn’t abandon him as all the others had, but it was an assumption.

He set his cup on the table, swallowed. A weird ripple passed over his face as though he’d almost lost the Ryan features. “He’s broken,” he said in a strained voice. “I’ll take care of him. I know broken.”

I exhaled softly. “Yeah, I guess you do. Thanks.”

He nodded. “When are you planning to follow through with your plan?”

“After I get caffeinated I’ll go down and top off the storage diagram.” Luckily I maintained a habit of keeping it as full as possible at all times. I sighed, rubbed a hand over my face. “And then I’ll summon a little after noon, I guess.”

“You’re reluctant to do this,” he observed.

“No, I’m not reluctant.” I grimaced. “It’s sort of a weird nervous-dread-anxious-resigned hybrid emotion.”

“Well, that narrowed it down,” he said with a twitch of his lips. “Caused by?”

I set my mug down, leaned back in my chair. “Caused by the fact that my demonic lord lover brought down the fires of heaven and would have killed me and everyone else if you and Kadir hadn’t helped me stop him.”

Ryan winced. “That would do it. He lost control.”

“And then he closed me out,” I said, then sighed and rubbed at my temples. “Weirdly, that was the worst part.”

He looked at me sharply. “Closed you out?”

The ache tightened my chest again. “We have this connection, and he . . . went totally silent.” I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. “Like he didn’t hang up the phone, but wasn’t talking on the other end of the line.”

He breathed a curse—in demon, I noted with another weird pang. “I understand the hybrid emotion now.”

“I guess I get to see if he’ll still train me.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “I don’t even know what to expect.” I dropped my hands and grimaced. “And he might be pretty pissed off I didn’t give him Vsuhl when he asked for it.”

“You’re a good student. He’ll teach you,” he assured me. “And if you’d given him Vsuhl, you would now be Rowan, anchoring the mini-nexus for Jesral and Rhyzkahl.”

A shiver ran over me as the memory of those bizarre few minutes as Rowan surfaced. Szerain had saved me, as had Bryce. I rubbed my arms, found myself smiling at Bryce’s fierce loyalty. He’d called to me, had never stopped. Kara . . . Kara . . . Kara . . .

Like Giovanni called to Elinor.

“Shit!” Ryan surged up from the chair. “I’m late and I have a meeting.” He quickly came around the table, pulled me to my feet and gave me a hard hug. “Summon Mzatal. If you don’t think you can train with him, don’t go with him. And if you do go, we’ll hold down the fort here.”

With that he kissed my cheek, grabbed his briefcase, jogged to the front door, and was gone before I could even form a reply.

Blinking, I stared after him. A disguised demonic lord in a meeting with federal agents. That was fun to wrap my head around. Then I scowled. A disguised demonic lord who’d left before I could ask him about Elinor. Or the twelfth sigil. Or anything else.

“You win this round, Szerain,” I muttered. “But just you wait.”

With the decision made to summon Mzatal, the rest of the morning turned into a frenzy of activity: I topped off the storage diagram, woke Bryce up and told him to pack since I knew he’d want to come with me to be with Paul, did my own packing, had a quick talk with Jill and confirmed everything was okay with the bean and that Zack had called her that morning—all the while forming, discarding, and reforming arguments to use with Mzatal for why he shouldn’t shut me out and why I needed to be able to train with him and why I’d kept Vsuhl and then given it to Szerain. It was sure to be an entertaining discussion, one way or the other.

As soon as everything was ready, prepped, and packed, I called Tessa and wasn’t surprised when it went to voicemail. She was still in Aspen and wasn’t the sort to be glued to her phone when out having fun.

“Hi, Aunt Tessa,” I said into the recording. “Looks like I’m going back to the ‘retreat’ for a while. I’ll, uh, write as soon as I can. Love you.”

I hung up. It felt oddly unfinished to leave without speaking to her, but we’d been successfully sending messages and letters back and forth for months now. Everything would be fine.

The thought of messages reminded me to do a final check of my email. There was only one item in my inbox, and I realized that Paul had probably worked some of his magic to get rid of my mountains of spam. My pulse gave an uneven lurch as I noted the sender. I opened it, read the attached DNA test results, then read them again.

“Welcome to the family, cousin Idris,” I murmured, pulse thudding weirdly. I’d suspected for a while, but having it confirmed raised even more questions. Or rather, one question in particular. One I dreaded asking.

I called Zack, held my breath as it rang. I’d made him promise not to answer the phone if he wasn’t up for a call, but voicemail wouldn’t cut it for what I needed to say and ask.

“Hey, Kara.”

“Hey, Zack,” I replied, relieved, though it quickly shifted to apprehension about the pending question. I stalled and took a moment to fill him in on my decision to return to training unless everything went pear-shaped between Mzatal and me.

“I’ll miss you for sure,” he said when I finished, “but it’s what you need to do. I’ll talk to Ryan tonight. We’ll keep things together here.”

I heard the unspoken “somehow,” yet I still thought he sounded a bit better. He seemed to be holding it together at least.