PART 1.
The young man triple-checks the markings on the floor against the pictures in his dusty, borrowed book. He didn't draw these pentacles. They've been hidden in the bowels of Whitehall, unused for nearly thirty years, but he was assured that they were perfectly safe.
Assured. By people that weren't putting their lives in danger. By people that weren't reviving an all but dead art just to acquiesce to the demands of a mad old woman.
He pushes his horn-rimmed glasses up his nose, squinting at the unfamiliar marks. The old woman assured him that the demon wasn't dangerous, but he knew as well as anyone that Devereaux's parliament had been eaten because someone gave a djinni too much leash.
Clutching his instructions in a sweaty hand, he steps into the smaller pentacle and begins the incantation.
Nothing happens.
For the first minute, anyway.
Then his world, his ideas about what was and wasn't possible, everything collapses. His eyes dart to the guttering candles, then back to the paper where the incantation is laid out in easy, phonetic text. The dark lines of the larger pentacle go red as though the very fires of hell are burning under the stone floor. Black smoke curls around the base, at first thin and translucent, but thickening by the second. The young man stutters, but continues reading.
A sound like a whip crack. Inside the pentacle, the smoke spins like a tornado. Three long silver claws rake the invisible barrier that keeps the demon trapped.
The young man solemnly folds his damp papers. He pushes his glasses up his nose again and brushes his flame red hair away from his sweaty forehead. The demon is his. It is bound. He is safe.
"D-demon."
The apparition growls from within its shroud of smoke. Its claws glint in the long candlelight.
"You will – you will recognise me as your master."
A hollow laugh. It echoes, as if it were in a much larger room. "There is but one master in this wretched place I recognise," it rumbles. "And you are not she."
The young man fumbles with his papers again. He swallows. "My–"
"What date is it?" The demon swirls as if to face him, and the young man can almost pick out two narrow eyes through the fug.
"I – I don't -"
"I can't have been in the Other Place for more than a few days." The candle flames behind it grow to furious length, illuminating a monstrous winged silhouette.
"It -"
"So please, human. Tell me just how long Kitty had to be dead before some idiot magician decided to enslave me again."
"K-Kitty?" The young man screws up his face in confusion. "You mean Ms Kathleen Jones?"
The demon dispels its smoke with one mighty beat of its wings. "Who," it spits, "else."
The young man can't help taking a step back. The thing is horrifying, standing on clawed feet with its knees going the wrong way and huge black bat's wings bursting from the narrow shoulders. Somehow the young Middle Eastern face doesn't mitigate the matter at all. It hunches dourly in its pentacle, clawed hands bunched into tight fists.
"Please!" The young man holds up a hand as if to protect himself from the apparition. "I'm here under her orders!"
The demon turns its dark gaze directly on him. "She is dead," it says flatly.
Kitty tidied the house before she made the summoning. She trusted Bartimaeus enough not to literally rip her limb from limb, but the djinni certainly wasn't above ripping her a figurative new one, and the last time she invited him to join her in the corporeal realm he had made a number of pejorative comments about her housekeeping skills. Hopefully this time he'd have to try a little harder to find something to give her grief about.
The pentacles she had painted on the floor (some years ago, how time got away from her) were starting to peel, but they would serve. They needed repainting, she knew, but her hands shook so much these days. No reason to worry about that now. She set herself the task of finding matches.
After at least ten minutes of going through what felt like every drawer in the house, she heaved a chair into the smaller pentacle – cursing the damn thing all the while for getting heavier every time she had to do this – and sat down. She gave herself a minute or so to catch her breath, then she let the familiar syllables weave into the incense and reach out to the Other Place.
And then, like she had been all her adult life, she waited for him, counting the long seconds under her breath.
Kitty stepped out of her pentacle before the silvery mist opposite her had even finished contracting into the grinning form of Ptolemy. "Bartimaeus, I'm sorry, I -"
"Always 'sorry' with you," the Egyptian boy said, waggling a cheeky finger at her. "If I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times: summon me when you like."
A little smile pulled at the corners of her mouth. "I know." And, if she wasn't mistaken, his expression softened too - away from his usual impish cheek to something more gentle, even tender.
"So!" Bartimaeus said sharply, clapping his hands and effectively murdering whatever moment had been going on between them. "What vastly important matter has you drawing on my unearthly powers? Is there another mouse behind the fridge that you need me to slay?"
If anything, that only made Kitty look even more apologetic. "I'm trying to move a bookshelf."
"So, what you're trying to say is, triumphal songs will be sung about it for the next thousand years?"
"Of course. It's through here."
Kitty had clearly made an effort at moving the bookshelf on her own, if the thirty centimetres away from the wall in her living room were anything to go by. Bartimaeus took one look at it and said so. "And really," he went on, "how long did it take you to realise that there was no conceivable way you could get it up the stairs all by yourself? Really Kitty, I never thought you could compete with my genius, but I had hoped you were smarter than the average amoeba."
Kitty didn't dignify that with a response. Almost thirty years of dealing with his potshots at her intelligence and species meant it would take more than that to get under her skin.
Bartimaeus sized up his current charge, hands on hips. "This looks like it calls for something… Bigger, don't you think?" He grinned over his shoulder at her and his body swelled. His bare legs erupted with fur, knees turning backwards, narrow chest expanding, two elegant horns curling out on top of a face no longer anywhere near human, but still wearing the same grin.
"You'll use any excuse to pull out that guise, won't you," she said, affecting disinterest.
"You love it." With surprisingly little fanfare, Bartimaeus picked up the whole thing, careful to tilt it backwards so all the books didn't fall out. "Now, where do you want this thing?"
Kitty spun on her heel, not watching the way the muscles in his back moved under the bookshelf's weight. "Upstairs, if you please. My study."
"Yes sir, milady."
He followed her, steps heavy and creaking on the stairs behind her. Her heart was racing, and dear God did that sound pathetic. Barely five minutes in his company, and this was how she found herself? Think about something else, anything else. "I still wish you hadn't eaten that mouse," she said with a grimace.
"You asked me to deal with it. So I dealt with it." The djinni pouted. It looked very odd on his minotaur face. "You didn't have to watch."
"I feel we have gotten off on the wrong foot," the young mansays carefully. "I summon you under orders. I have no wish to, um, enslave you." He pauses, taking in the demon's disbelieving stare. "We don't do that in London any more."
The demon waves a clawed hand at him. "And yet."
The young man coughs. "Just so I am sure before I do this... You are Bartimaeus? Of Uruk? Sakhr al-Jinni? The Serpent of -"
"Silver Plumes?" The demon scoffs. "Of course I am. Don't you understand at all how summoning works?"
The young man takes a nervous breath. "My name is Howard Kent," he manages, through gritted teeth.
The demon bares its yellow fangs. "I'm not interested in your fake little name, boy."
The young man screws his eyes shut. "It's not a fake name."
For a split second, the demon looks stupefied. "And you would just tell me that because...?"
"Ms Jones is alive. She wants you to go to her."