“Well, if you consider being on the infernal plane death, then yes, but if not…” He gestured to the acorn and sat back.
“So, you want me to make that into a tree?”
“It doesn’t need to be a very big one since Kaz is pretty small.”
Amma settled onto her knees across from him. Her fingers toyed with her lip, eyes darting over the Chthonic he had written.
“For Kaz?” he asked in a voice meant to tug at that soft heart of hers.
“Oh, poor Kaz, yes, okay, of course.” Amma lay her small hands on top of the acorn, lips pursing.
He felt the arcana before it came, a prickling in the earth and a crackle in the air around him. Damien leaned backward, eyes wide as the acorn cracked, and a white stalk shot up so quickly between her fingers that she had to pull her hands back too.
“Well, well, well,” he said, smirking, “looks like someone was a mage all along.”
In the center of his summoning circle, the sapling bobbed from its sudden growth, the dirt disturbed, but the symbols intact. Damien called up fire, only a small spark that ran along the circle, and then drew a cut across his palm to drip blood onto Amma’s tree, whispering the Chthonic summoning words.
The flames enveloped the sapling, flickering over Amma’s skin in the growing darkness as she watched. But Damien only watched her, how she marveled at the spell she’d taken part in, breath coming shallow in anticipation. And then she grinned as the silvery strands of noxscura from the infernal plane opened up, and the imp’s shadow appeared in the column of fire that had grown up around the tree to devour it.
The flames and silver spun around one another, lapping above their heads, and then imploded, dousing their patch of forest into complete darkness.
“Kaz, welcome back!” cried Amma, throwing herself forward and scooping up the imp against her chest. Even in the shadows, he could see how happy she’d become, and once again Damien’s jealousy gnawed at him. Oh, to be a newly summoned imp, squeezed between her breasts.
But then she inhaled sharply, holding the imp away from her. “Uh, Damien?”
In the wake of the intense fire, Damien’s eyes readjusted.The thing she held was imp-shaped, with needlessly long forearms and curling talons on its feet, big batwing ears flopping down on either side of its head, but everything about the imp was floppy as it hung by its armpits from Amma’s hands, including its color, a milky sort of blue-green.
Amma turned it slightly, and Damien could see its face, a set of fangs that grew down from its flat line of a mouth, much longer and larger than Kaz’s crooked underbite. Wingless, Damien reasoned that in its last life, this imp probably had not been kicked off a parapet by a selfish, bratty, teen-aged dark lord, but it did have a tail with a little triangular end and dark, roving eyes that settled on Damien. “Master?” And that voice—that was not Kaz’s wet gurgle, but an unsettlingly heavy groan.
Damien cocked his head. “Guess that’s me. And you are?”
The imp took in a breath for so long Damien thought it might burst, followed by an even longer, slower sigh. “I am Katz, imp of the Infernal Darkness and servant of all those who hold the Sanguine Throne.”
Amma’s brows were knit, head tipping as she looked him over with a frown. “Are you okay, little guy?”
It was a more than fair question. Based on his voice alone, the imp had barely anything to live for, least of all his own station in life. Damien had always imagined this was what existence might be like for an imp but had never met one who was quite so depressed.
“Yes, Mistress,” said Katz, head roving back to her slowly, the rest of his body remaining completely limp in her grasp. “This is just my affectation.”
“Well, at least this one’s a bit more respectful to you.” Damien grinned. Darkness, did he like the sound ofMistress Bloodthornewhen he looked on her.
Amma set the imp gently on the ground, and he practically melted into a puddle of himself, shoulders limp, arms dragging.She looked almost as pained as the imp. “I messed it up, didn’t I?”
Damien’s eyes darted back down to his circle. “No, Amma, you did perfectly. I failed to record Kaz’s name correctly.”
“You meant to summon someimp else?” Katz asked, turning his face to look on one and then the other with such a uniquely miserable quality that even Damien could take no joy in it. “That makes sense. Nobody ever wants Katz around.”
“Oh, no, no!” Amma shook her head, patting the imp on his knobby shoulder. “I mean, yes, technically, we were trying to summon a different imp, but having you here is good too. Isn’t it, Damien?”
Damien screwed up his face—no, it bloody was not—then wiped the look off before Katz completed the excruciatingly slow turn of his head in search of confirmation. The smile he tried to put on actually hurt. “Right, yeah, it’s…fine. Unless, that is, youwantto go back to the infernal plane?” He slid his dagger from his bracer.
Amma’s eyes flashed at him, and she sliced a finger across her own neck. Damien sat up at that, encouraged—she had never been so eager to have him kill something before—but then as she lifted her other hand and waved both through the air frantically, he understood and resheathed the knife.
Katz, however, noticed none of it, too focused on the long, low groan he was producing. “I desire only what my master wishes of me.”
“Ah, well, sure, you may stay with us for now.” Damien squeezed his hand and the healing cut across his palm. “I didn’t exactly intend to have a whole retinue of imps following us through the mountains though.”
Amma yawned then. “I don’t think I can make another tree right now anyway. Kaz won’t be upset if he’s down there for a little longer, will he?”
