"Of course it's good tea, why would I make you bad tea?"

"How should I know what your definition of good tea is? You're a demon. An American demon. From another universe. Maybe in your world they make tea out of grass and goat shit."

"Ew."

He laughs.

"Anyway. What can you do which would be so insufficiently impressive on television?"

"Light candles, not very reliably. Other odds and ends. I haven't studied a lot of spells; I haven't found many that seem worth the trouble. Who wants to be able to turn themselves into a rat?"

"Can one change back?"

"Not with any spell I found in that book."

"Then yeah, that sounds like at best a last resort sort of thing."

"And honestly, I'd rather not learn how to turn myself into a rat even if someday I might be in a situation where every other option looked worse. There have got to be better last resorts than that."

"And do you have one?"

"Admittedly no. But I'd know where to find one if I thought I was gonna need it. More or less."

"So you're unprepared for nasty surprises but not for nasty predictables."

"I'm more prepared for nasty surprises than most people. I don't think it's possible to be prepared for all the nasty surprises this world has to offer."

"How well do you think my indestructibility will hold up against local magic and demons and such?" wonders Cam.

"...I wouldn't count on it," he says. "You might be safe against vampires."

"Okay. I'm not even actually invulnerable, just indestructible, this is occasionally inconvenient," sighs Cam.

"What a shame," he says dryly.

"And before that I was murdered at age twenty-two," says Cam, equally dry, "it was tons of fun."

"Sorry to hear that," he says, much more sympathetically.

"Speaking of which, whichever one of you summoned me might have becoming a daeva upon death to look forward to. If you're hooked into my world's afterlife setup and I am not wrong about how it works."

"...D'you want to maybe explain that some more?"

"I was a summoner, I got murdered, I woke up in Hell with demonic powers. Most daeva are not ex-summoners, but a small percentage of us are. Most dead people wind up in Limbo, but according to letters from Mom and Dad, they can't find any ex-summoners there at all."

"...so... Rayne's going to want both of us to summon - daeva? - as soon as he catches wind of that," says Ripper. "He'd hate the thought of going off to be a demon in another universe while I went who knows where around here. Or the other way around."

"Well, no guarantee you get to be the same kind. There are three."