The problem was, this was the part where I was meant to bind this entity by her true name. Which was going to be a neat trick, considering I almost definitely didn’t have the real Malachus at hand.

“And you, Malachus Azaranthinael, appear at my will and behest,” I finished, crossing my fingers behind my back. Hey, worth a shot; maybe the lore was just supremely off base on how Malachus was supposed to look. “Which means you must obey . . . and begone at once!”

“A fine sentiment,” the demon crooned, with another of those awful, spine-tingling smiles. In a streak of movement, she was on her feet, naked and stupidly gorgeous, a curtain of black silk hair draped over thick curves and long, smooth limbs. Her skin glowed like a paper lantern, as if lit from within. Too bad we’d started off on such a wrong foot; she probably had some killer beauty tips. “If I were, in fact, Malachus Azaranthinael.”

“If you are not, why do you appear in his stead?” I demanded, trying to enforce one final shred of protocol before this already wayward train went careening completely off the rails. Demons weren’t supposed to bend the rules like this; when you summon one by their true name, what you call is meant to be what you get.

“Because, as it happens, there is no Malachus,” she said, still grinning like the void, honest-to-goddess little flames dancing in her golden eyes. Sounds like something right out of a cheesy cartoon, but it sure didn’t feel clichéd when the abyss was staring you dead in the face. Chills crawled under my skin, crept into my knees—the type of nerve-jangling bullshit I lived for, the reason I went all in on such foolhardy antics as this in the first place. “There is, and ever was, only me . . . and the lies of Malachus I tell, to entice dim little deathspeakers like you into calling me up, unbound.”

I tried not to take being called dim too personally, and failed.

The books do tell you that daemonfolk lie easier than they breathe. By the sound of it, this one had invented a harmless-seeming demon as bait, embedded his name into the lore for gullible assholes like me to find, and then tied his summoning to herself, like one of those fugly deepwater anglerfish that dangle a little light for their prey. Which meant that once she appeared in answer to a Malachus summons, she’d be yanked earthside without any bindings in place.

Damn, I thought, with a grudging stab of admiration, well played. Demons were tricksters to the bone, and she’d gotten me good, fair and square.

“Deviously done,” I said, with a little dip of the head, making one last gamble. You’d be surprised how vain some of these tricky fuckers are, and how hard they fall for a little well-placed pandering. “And when they ask me into whose clever trap I stumbled, what fearsome name shall I say?”