This last had been aimed at me, and my hands clenched in my lap. “Like rip your heart out? Come a little closer.”

“Rachel…,” Al said as he reached across the table and patted my shoulder a little too hard. God, I felt like I was one of two little kids on a playground.

From her cushion, Newt cleared her throat. “Rachel should make us a new memory.”

The surrounding demons exhaled, the sound rising like a sigh of excitement. I turned to her, surprised. You want me to do what?

“Be reasonable, Newt,” Al protested, his face suddenly pale. “She’s only a few hours old. I haven’t had time to teach her anything yet.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Newt said as she ate a grape with an odd precision. “If she’s a demon, she can do it.”

Al looked deathly worried, and I watched Dali energetically stride to the jukebox and press his hands to it, invoking who knew what as it glowed a hazed black. “Splendid idea,” he was muttering. “Rachel, what do you want to call it?”

“Call it?” At a loss, I looked around the table, seeing worry on Al’s face and satisfaction on Ku’Sox’s. “Call what?”

“Give us a memory,” Newt prompted, the beads in her hair clicking. “Only a demon has the mental fortitude to channel enough energy to make a tulpa construct this size. One that anyone can share.”

Oh. My. God. I looked at the fake restaurant, the fire, the stars, the smells. “You want me to make something like this?” I squeaked. “Are you nuts? I don’t know how to do that!”

“She admits she’s not a demon,” Ku’Sox proclaimed, and Al’s grip on his wineglass became white-knuckled as he hunched against the raised voices around us.

“Lacking a skill doesn’t translate into a lack of ability,” he growled, but the demons were rearranging the tables, making an open space of sorts, wanting me to try.

Newt’s eyes narrowed. “Only a demoness can make a free-existing tulpa, and only a male demon can fix it into reality. I say it’s a fair test. Al, put your money where your mouth is. Or should I say where your student is.”

I looked wildly from one end of the midnight Mesopotamia to the other, despairing as I realized why Newt had “apologized.” She had killed everyone who could do this—except herself. I could not make this! It was immense!

“Of course you can,” Newt said as she leaned toward me, almost as if having read my mind. “Making a construct is easy. Every one in that box there was made by my sisters, and they weren’t nearly as clever as you.” Newt raised her goblet in salute. “That’s why I could kill them, you see.”

My heart pounded and I sat down before I passed out. “Uh, maybe I shouldn’t do it then.”

Ku’Sox laughed, but Newt poured her wine into my glass. “That’s not why I killed them. But that’s why Ku’Sox tricked me into it. To make a lasting tulpa, one that can be stored and lived in, one must have the ability to safely hold more than one’s own soul. Demons can’t do it. A demoness can. It’s on that little extra bit of X gene that they don’t have.”