White salt, black salt, gray salt—in grains of every size: from near-powder to flakes to great, rough hunks of it. Salts for protection against darker powers. Against demons. Many Vanir built their houses with slabs of salt at the cornerstones. Rumor claimed that the entire base of the Asteri’s crystal palace was a slab of salt. That it had been built atop a natural deposit.

Fucking Hel. He’d never seen such an assortment. As Bryce peered down the darkened hall to the left, where the shadows yielded three doors, Hunt hissed, “Please tell me—”

“Just keep your snarling and eye rolling to yourself,” she snapped at him, and called into the gloom, “I’m here to buy, not collect.”

One of the doors cracked open, and a pale-skinned, dark-haired satyr hobbled toward them, his furred legs hidden by trousers. His pageboy hat must have hid little, curling horns. The clopping of the hooves gave him away.

The male barely came up to Bryce’s chest, his shrunken, twisted body half the size of the bulls that Hunt had witnessed tearing people into shreds on battlefields. And that he had faced himself in Sandriel’s arena. The male’s slitted pupils, knobbed at either side like a goat’s, expanded.

Fear—and not at Hunt’s presence, he realized with a jolt.

Bryce dipped her fingers into a lead bowl of pink salt, plucking up a few pieces and letting them drop into the dish with faint, hollow cracks. “I need the obsidian.”

The satyr shifted, hooves clopping faintly, rubbing his hairy, pale neck. “Don’t deal in that.”

She smiled slightly. “Oh?” She went over to another bowl, stirring the powder-fine black salt in there. “Grade A, whole-rock obsidian salt. Seven pounds, seven ounces. Now.”

The male’s throat bobbed. “It’s illegal.”

“Are you quoting the motto of the Meat Market, or trying to tell me that you somehow don’t have precisely what I need?”

Hunt scanned the room. White salt for purification; pink for protection; gray for spellwork; red for … he forgot what the Hel red was for. But obsidian … Shit.

Hunt fell back on centuries of training to keep the shock off his face. Black salts were used for summoning demons directly—bypassing the Northern Rift entirely—or for various dark spellwork. A salt that went beyond black, a salt like the obsidian … It could summon something big.

Hel was severed from them by time and space, but still accessible through the twin sealed portals at the north and south poles—the Northern Rift and the Southern Rift, respectively. Or by idiots who tried to summon demons through salts of varying powers.

A lot of fucked-up shit, Hunt had always thought. The benefit of using salts, at least, was that only one demon could be summoned at a time. Though if things went badly, the summoner could wind up dead. And a demon could wind up stuck in Midgard, hungry.