The Paradise Gate

Chapter 9.1 The Many Guises of Invitation

When Dalliance awoke the next morning, a few moments' disorientation was inevitable. The sunlight behind her eyelids streamed in from an ornate, brass-bound set of balcony doors to spill over the cozy confines of a damask-dressed feather bed. That soft glow felt so far removed from her days of shivering on the thin pallet in her cell at Farthingale that she was afraid to open her eyes for fear that she was dreaming.

Instead, she turned her face into a pillow that smelled of lavender and snuggled deeper beneath the covers.

The sun's rays were coming in from the wrong side of the room. That was odd, but she didn't want to examine that thought— or any other— too closely; thinking might fully wake her, and she was still tired from last night when her sleep had been so rudely interrupted by...

Last night! Yesterday, the tower!

Dalli's eyes sprung open and she sat up so quickly that she made herself dizzy. It hadn't been a dream. She was in a guestroom of the city manse she'd purchased, and she was in it because she'd been attacked in her own bedroom by masked killers who had, in turn, been killed by her daemon.

Seraphs, but that was strange to say, even in her own head. My daemon, she thought again, rolling the sound of the words around her brain like marbles in a mixing bowl.

A part of her still couldn't believe the calling had worked. Dalli trusted in her own calculations and theories, but still... Even if she weren't already a disgrace in their eyes, she'd have been laughed out of the Academy if she'd tried to suggest that there were spirits greater than the ones humanity had encountered before, and that it should be possible to summon them.

It almost hadn't been possible. A chill skipped hopscotch down her vertebrae as she remembered the eldritch storm she'd created in the crumbling tower, and how she'd very nearly lost control of the ritual. But she hadn't. Instead, he'd answered her call. It? No, construct or not, it didn't feel right to address a talking, thinking being like she would an object.

Besides, he had a name.

"Lycinder," Dalli whispered, thinking perhaps if she said it out loud, the whole strange ordeal would start to feel more real.

A great cloud of shadow appeared at the foot of her bed, startling Dalli nearly out of her wits until it resolved into the now-familiar form of her daemon. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized she'd been sort of hoping he'd grow less ethereally alluring overnight.

He hadn't.

"Good morning, mistress."

"Aack! What are you doing in my bedroom!" Dalli squealed, yanking the covers up to her chin.

Lycinder looked at her like she might be slow. "You. Called. Me," he drawled, enunciating with care.

Dalli put her face in her hands, messy auburn curls swinging as she shook her head.

The light of smug realization dawned in his glittering eyes, and his lips curved into a decadent smirk. "Oh," he said. "You didn't." That smirk became a full-fledged grin. "You just wanted to say my name. Any particular reason?" He waited with patience eternal for her to look up at him, one eyebrow raised suggestively.

"Ugh!" Dalli groaned and threw a pillow in his general direction. "You're intolerable! I was just... Oh, never mind," she huffed, a blush creeping across her cheeks. "Go away!"

Eiderdown ordnance neatly sidestepped, he clicked his tongue. "So very impolite, mistress. And after I hurried right up to wish you good morning..."