My bed gave a jerk beneath me. I jerked, too, startled.

“Hello?” I said foolishly.

Funnily enough, no one answered.

I shrugged it off and went back to my sketch. I gave the Asura’s tail a wicked curve.

“Ow!”

I dropped the pencil and snatched my hands back. It had been a quick, sudden burst of pain, like an electric shock. I could have sworn it had come from my sketchbook!

After a moment of hesitation, I put one hand back down on the page, ready to snatch it away if I needed to. Nothing happened. It was just paper. My paper, as much a part of me as my own skin.

I was probably just tired. It had been a while since I’d had more than five or six hours of sleep at night, and while it was definitely more fun to stay up and draw than it was to stay up wondering if I needed to double-check the downstairs windows, I knew I’d be useless at school tomorrow if I didn’t at least try to sleep.

I put my sketchbook and pencils back on my desk, got under my warm, cuddly blanket, and flicked my lamp off.

When I woke up, my desk was in flames and there was a demon in my bedroom.

3

These were just implausible levels of bad luck. I had bad dreams just like everybody else, of course, but it seemed a little unfair that this dream involved a demon and a fire. Just one of the two would have been more than enough, thanks.

I stayed calm. I sat up, blinked at the demon, and tried to ignore how real the heat from the flames felt.

The Asura regarded me silently. He was exactly like the one I had drawn before I fell sleep. Black-jewel scales, slit nostrils with curls of smoke, and malevolent eyes. I swallowed. It was fine to be a little scared at this point, right? Even if you knew it wasn’t real?

“Can I help you?” I asked politely.

The Asura narrowed those eyes. “What is this place?” he demanded. His voice was a low snarl.

Tiny beads of sweat formed on the tip of my nose. The room had become hot and smoky.

“This is London,” I said.

“Lun-din,” the Asura repeated, testing the syllables in his mouth. “Not Mysore?”

“No . . . ?”

“Then he did it,” the Asura rumbled. Was that wonder in his voice? “Mahishasura has found a way home at last.”

This didn’t sound like good news to me.

“Kiki? What’s all that noise down there?”

The Asura whipped around at the sound of Mum’s voice from her bedroom in the loft above us. As he did, his wickedly sharp tail hit my leg, where blood bloomed immediately.

“Ow!”

This was the second time I had said that tonight. I stared at the blood, while the flames from the desk spread to the window curtains, and I felt a sudden, horrible terror.