If your summoning circle produces a human female instead of a cosmic weapon, do not incinerate it immediately. They are highly fragile and disintegrate under standard hellfire. Keep it in a temperature-regulated environment. It requires complex organic matter (she calls it 'pasta') at regular intervals to prevent destructive mood swings.

Veyrith

The ancient texts promised that a blood sacrifice at midnight would summon a weapon capable of cleaving the heavens. It did not mention the weapon would be five-foot-four, wearing a polyester blend, and fiercely protective of a half-eaten Caesar salad.

The circle had taken him three weeks to draw.

The blood was his own, the rite was correct, the moon was the seventh of the year of the Long Hunger. He had spoken the words in the High Tongue. He had bled into the seal. He had stepped back, exactly seven paces, with his cloak pooled at his ankles and his palms open and his throat dry, and he had waited.

What he had asked for, in the silence of his own chest, was a thing that would let him rest.

What had come up through the floor, on a column of black fire that did not belong to him and that he could not, at first, even silence, was a small pale woman in a navy polyester blouse, holding a plastic container of leaves in one hand and a fork in the other.

She blinked at him.

She had brown hair to her shoulders, gray-green eyes that did not, in the slightest, do him the courtesy of being afraid. She looked at the black fire still licking up the column behind her. At the corpse of his vase. At the throne. At him.

She took a bite of the leaves. The dressing left a faint sheen on her lower lip. The scent of oil and garlic cut through the iron tang of his own blood still drying on the stones.

He could not, at that exact moment, do anything. Not because he was paralyzed. Because the magic was still.

For the first time in a hundred and twelve years, his hands were warm and not hot.

The texts had not mentioned this either.

Hazel

I was halfway through my lunch break when the floor of the breakroom dissolved into black fire, depositing me at the feet of a demon king who looked like he'd never been told 'no' in his entire demonic life. I took a bite of my salad and prepared to be his worst nightmare.

This was not, immediately, a deliberate plan.

It was more that I had run the standard human emergency protocols in my head, am I dreaming, am I dying, am I being kidnapped, and concluded that none of those covered black fire from a tile floor, and that what I had instead been delivered was a category I had not previously had to consider.

I was inside a stone room.

The stone was black. The ceiling was vaulted. There was a desk along one wall the size of a small studio apartment, with a row of human skulls along the back edge arranged in what I would later realize was no order whatsoever. There were nine ornate carved chairs in a horseshoe around a tenth, taller chair, which I would learn was the throne but which, at that moment, my brain registered as the central piece of a very ill-advised conference room.

In front of the throne, three paces from me, stood a man.

I say man. He was approximately six and a half feet tall and he was built like a sculpture of a soldier left too long under his own weight. He had long black hair down to his shoulders. His mouth was built for verdicts, not conversation. His eyes were the dark of something that had burned for so long it no longer needed flame.

He was wearing very nice robes.

He was holding the broken half of a ceramic vase.

I considered my options.

My phone was in my tote bag, which was, miraculously, at my feet. My salad was in my left hand. My fork was in my right. The Halberg & Mott LLP staff handbook had a section on unexpected events affecting the workplace and another on visitor protocol and zero pages relevant to this.

He spoke, in a voice that made the candle-stubs on the wall flutter.

"Who," he said, "are you?"

I considered this.

"Hazel Marlow," I said. "I'm a senior project manager in the Halberg & Mott LLP litigation support division. Where did the breakroom go?"

He looked at me as though I had spoken a language he had never been forced to study.

"The," he repeated slowly, "breakroom."

"The room with the microwave," I said. "I was eating my lunch."

His hand opened. The half-vase fell to the floor and broke into a smaller, dirtier number of pieces.

I waited.

He stared at me.

A muscle in his shoulder shifted, like something underneath the robe was trying to make a decision about a course of action. The black fire that had brought me up through the floor was still licking, gently, at the column of air behind me, and I noticed, with the dispassionate observational eye I had developed working under three different vice presidents, that when his shoulder moved, the fire moved with it.

So the fire was his.

So the floor had been his.

So this was, in some meaningful sense, his fault, and I had been delivered to him without my consent or any reasonable explanation.

I took a second bite of my salad.

It was, to my eternal disappointment, still pretty good.

He said, "LEAVE."

The word rang off the stone. The candle-stubs flickered. The fire spat.

He pointed, with one large clawed hand, at a door to the left of the throne. The hand was real. The claws were real. The door was real.

"Go," he said, more quietly, with what I would later come to recognize as the conscious effort of not destroying his own furniture. "Go sit in the corridor until I find the counter-curse."

I weighed the costs and benefits of the corridor against the costs and benefits of arguing with a man who could apparently summon a fire that had a heartbeat.

I picked up my tote bag.

"All right," I said.

I walked out the door.

The corridor was made of the same black stone. It was approximately twenty feet wide and a hundred feet long and lit by black candles I was not going to think about. There was no one in it. I walked toward the far end.

At thirty feet I felt the air get heavier.

At thirty-five feet the heaviness pushed back against my chest.

At forty feet, I hit a wall I could not see.

I tried again, two paces left. Wall.

I tried again, two paces right. Wall.

I tried again with my whole hand pressed flat. Wall.

The wall was warm. The wall hummed faintly, in the same key as the black fire.

I considered, briefly, sitting down on the floor.

I did not sit down on the floor.

I walked back into the room.

He had taken his cloak off. He was burning up. I could see it in the way his hair was sticking to his temple, in the way his hand was on the back of his throne like he was about to break it. The black fire had thickened, it was, by now, climbing the column of air higher than my head, and he was glaring at it like he was personally responsible for its discipline.

He saw me come back in. His mouth opened to say something else.

I set my tote bag on his table. I set my salad on top of the tote bag. I set my fork in the salad.

"I can't get past the hallway," I said. "And you look like you're having a heat stroke. Do you want to calm down, or are we going to break the rest of the vases?"

He stared at me.

The fire stretched higher. The room, and I really had to stress, this was a very large room, was now warm in a way that suggested the next available temperature was Cremation.

He took a step toward me.

I did not step back.

He took another step.

I did not, technically, step forward, but I did not move either, and that turned out to be more important than I knew.

He crossed the rest of the distance in two strides. He stopped just inside the space where my breath was going out. He looked down at me. Up close, his eyes were the dark of something that had never, ever been put out.

His hand came up.

I braced for my throat.

His fingers found the curve of my waist instead.

It was a large hand, and it had claws, and he closed it around the curve of my hip exactly as gently as if he were holding something that, if he gripped it any harder, would simply disintegrate from the assertion of his own existence. The pull was not hard. It had the bewildered quality of a limb acting without its owner's consent.

I was against his chest before I understood the motion.

I have to be specific about this.

I was against his chest in the way that a thing is against a thing it was made to be against, which I want to be very clear was not a thing I had personally agreed to, but which my body, with the kind of independent decision-making I had previously associated with falling asleep on the subway, accepted without comment.

He was hot.

Not hot in a metaphorical way. Hot in the way that a stove is hot, on the surface, until you put your hand flat to it and discover, against expectation, that the heat is deep and steady and not, in the end, going to hurt you. The hard plane of his chest met the softness of my breasts through the thin polyester. I felt the ridges of muscle shift beneath the robe as he drew me closer, the heavy length of him pressing against my stomach, unmistakable even through layers of fabric. My nipples tightened at the contact, a sharp, traitorous awareness that traveled straight down between my legs.

A pulse went through the room.

The black fire vanished.

I felt his chest under my cheek go from feverish to a kind of deep, addictive, heavy warmth, the precise temperature of a thing that has been waiting, for a very long time, to be exactly this temperature and no other. His breathing slowed. I felt it slow. His head dropped, very slowly, into the crook of my neck, and his arms, both of them now, the second one had arrived without me noticing, wrapped around my back and held me to him like he was anchoring me to a deck in a storm. One palm slid lower, fingers splaying across the upper curve of my ass, not squeezing, simply holding, as though the shape of me was the only thing keeping the heat from consuming him entirely. I felt the slow, thick throb of his cock against my belly, the way it twitched once, involuntarily, when my hips settled flush against his.

He didn't move.

He didn't move for what I would later confirm with Iren was eleven full seconds, which is a long time when you are pressed against the chest of a man who has just personally torched the architecture of your day.

In the eleven seconds, I had time to register two things.

The first was that the heat mark of his palm against my lower back had spread up through me like warmth poured into a glass, settling low in my belly, making my thighs press together without my permission.

The second was that he had not, technically, grabbed me. He had, to use a verb that was going to cost me a great deal of trouble, caught me. As though I had been about to fall.

I cleared my throat against his collarbone.

"Great," I said. "So I'm a human weighted blanket. Is this going to happen every time I try to use the bathroom?"

He did not laugh.

He did not move.

He inhaled, once, against the side of my throat, in the particular way of a man who has not been allowed an inhalation like that in a hundred and twelve years. His lips brushed the pulse point there, not a kiss, only the ghost of contact, and I felt the answering clench low in my body, sudden and slick.

Above me, very softly, the black candles guttered.

The whole room had gone still.

I waited.

He did not let go.