"What do you mean, 'if I'm truly a wizard'?" Sehun demanded. "Of course I am!"

"You got me instead of a cat." Lu Han snapped the book shut, grinning triumphantly in a way that made Sehun want to slap him. "I could understand - maybe - if you'd been trying for a deer. But a cat?"

"Mind your own business!" Sehun snapped.

Lu Han sauntered across the room, to where the overstuffed easychair had been pushed against the wall, and threw himself down in it like he owned the place. "You called me to be your familiar, so I'd say it's my business."

It was at this point that Sehun realized the demon wasn't inside a circle, but free to roam as he pleased. A Destroyer-class demon on the loose, with no contract between them. Lu Han could do whatever he wanted and there wasn't a thing Sehun could do about it.

"You obviously can't be my familiar," Sehun said. "You can just go home, or wherever it is you're supposed to be."

"I can't." Lu Han leaned forward, hands on his knees, expression mildly irritated. "Not only did your spell open a channel to the wrong place and drag me through it, but it shut it after me. I'm stuck here until you open the channel again."

"I can't," Sehun was forced to admit, although every cell in his body called him a traitor for it. "If I try to open a channel to the Netherworld I'll probably turn us both into frogs. And if I try to summon a cat again, there's no guarantee it'll open the channel."

Lu Han stared at him curiously. "Are you that badly trained or just that unlucky?"

"Neither." Sehun didn't take kindly to being insulted, but this guy was so far above his power level it would be stupid to upset him more than necessary. "Magic...doesn't work right in my body anymore. That's why I was trying to call a familiar."

"Hmm?"

Lu Han sprang up from the chair and proceeded to inspect Sehun in as much detail as he could without actually stripping him. Sehun rolled his eyes and stared blankly ahead while the demon poked and prodded him all over the place, peering into his eyes and pulling his lips apart to examine the inside of his mouth. (Sehun hadn't missed visits to doctors and dentists. Being undead had some advantages. Though he'd never met anyone in the medical profession with Lu Han's looks.)

When Lu Han's hand slipped under his shirt, Sehun lost patience and slapped it away. Lu Han nodded at him, retreating a couple of steps.

"You've died, haven't you? That's why your magic's so unpredictable."

"Unfortunately, yes. Lucky for you, my boss isn't undead, so when he gets home he can open a channel for you."

"I'm not so sure I'd be able to use it, since he wasn't the one who called me. Nothing like this has happened to me before." Lu Han cocked his head to one side. "Which team do you play for?"

"That's also none of your business."

"I mean magically, idiot."

"Oh." That made more a lot more sense. Both sides had used familiars in the past, but white wizards didn't go in for summoning demons. "Dark - or I would be, if I could get it to work right."

"At least that's something. You look so uptight, I had you figured for the opposition."

"You'd be uptight too if you'd just had a demon turn up when you were expecting a cat," Sehun said.

"Oh, I don't know. Cats can't talk. A demon would be much more fun."

The gleam of mischief in Lu Han's eyes had Sehun intrigued. "And what's your idea of fun?"

"How do you feel about smiting villages?"

For a second, Sehun contemplated proposing.

"You'd like that, right?" Lu Han was thrilled. "You should hear about some of the things I've done..."

He proceeded to reel off an impressive list of wars, disasters and catastrophes dating back at least 600 years, if Sehun was any judge. Nice pedigree, but all true? Sehun didn't think so.

"I know for a fact that you didn't cause that storm that knocked out all the power in Seoul for five days," he said, somewhat smug at having caught the demon out in a lie. "I know the guy who did."

It hadn't been Jongin, though he'd helped Baekhyun with the spell.

"When you get to my age, you forget things sometimes," Lu Han said airily. "One electrical storm is much like another."

"Of course it is," Sehun agreed, unimpressed. "So long as you don't send one in the direction of the nearest town. My boss is there at the moment."

"You don't want him dead?"

"He's the one who brought me back. Killing him in return might be a touch ungrateful, don't you think?"

"Maybe a little. So what do you want to do?"

"Eh?" Sehun didn't know how to answer. "Other than not kill my boss?"

"You wanted a familiar so you could do magic again. So what did you have in mind?"

Perhaps now wasn't the time to talk about the harem of beautiful serving boys. Sehun had a more pressing concern, anyway. "I thought maybe I could use magic to fix myself, and then I wouldn't need a familiar at all."

"And then you could send me home." A slow smile spread across Lu Han's face. "Alright, I'll do it."

"Do what?"

"Be your familiar, of course." Lu Han raised one hand to the side of his face and clawed the air like the kitten he wasn't. "Miaow?"

He made a cute cat, if not as cute as a real one, Sehun thought. "But why would a demon want to be my familiar?"

"What's a cat going to do for you? Bring you dead mice as presents and scratch your face when you try to persuade it that you need its fuzzy little body for a spell and it can't go running off to chase birds in the garden."

"And what are you going to do for me?" Sehun asked. "Bring me dead humans as presents? Break my nose if I don't let you go outside?"

"You'd look terrible with a broken nose, and dead humans are small-time. I," Lu Han jabbed Sehun in the arm with his fingers, "am going to fix you - and we're going to have some fun along the way. Do you know how long it's been since someone called me out?"

"Not long enough?" Sehun suggested.

Lu Han's smile widened. He had a terribly expressive face, Sehun thought. "Oh, I like you. You're feisty. Maybe being stuck here for a while won't be so bad. You'll have to find me a bedroom, though."

Explaining this to Jongin was going to be interesting. There were plenty of spare rooms, but most of them were locked, with dust sheets over all the furniture so they didn't have to clean. Kyungsoo had never demanded one, but then, whenever he'd spent the night, it had been in Jongin's room. In Jongin's bed. Sehun didn't want to think too much about it.

"I need my own bed," Lu Han continued. "I don't care if you were planning on having your kitty nap on your pillow, but I don't share."

Plenty of room for Lu Han in Sehun's bed, but perhaps not on the pillow. As attractive as Lu Han was, Sehun didn't feel inclined to make the offer to a demon he'd only just met.

"Too bad you won't fit in the cat bed I bought," Sehun said. "It matches your hair perfectly."

"Try it and you'll be the one sleeping in the cat bed. Nothing wrong with my magic, remember?" Lu Han looked him over with a speculative eye. "Yeah, you'd make a nice cat. Something pale and elegant, always looking down its whiskers at the peasants outside. I never had a pet before..."

"You still don't have one now, Mr. Familiar." Sehun added grudgingly, "But you can share my boss, if you like."

Lu Han's full-body laugh caught Sehun by surprise. One of the highest-ranked demons, centuries old, with his mouth so wide his face practically split in two and his hands clapping in delight as he laughed with all the merriment of a delighted child. Sehun hadn't met many demons but so far they'd all been fluffier than he'd been expecting - less soul-crushingly evil and twisted, and more like the kind of friend you'd go to lunch with. Which wasn't to say Lu Han wasn't twisted. Nobody got to be Destroyer-class by being a nice guy.

"I can't wait to pet - ah, meet him," Lu Han said when he recovered his breath.

Somehow, Sehun doubted the feeling would be mutual.

##########*****##########

By the time Jongin called to say he'd be spending the night at Baekhyun's and Sehun wasn't allowed to terrorize anyone before he got back, Lu Han had made himself quite at home in the castle. Sehun had found him a suitable bedroom (nowhere near the treasure rooms, the library, or Jongin's room) and had the servants make it habitable. He hadn't mentioned Lu Han over the phone. That was the sort of surprise best sprung in person. It wasn't as if Sehun never had guests - it was just that usually, they didn't move in and promptly redecorate their room with the colors of a certain English soccer team.

"Can you even watch their matches from the Netherworld?" Sehun asked, lingering in the doorway as Lu Han casually zapped the curtains, turning them from blue to red.

"Streaming. Technology is evil, didn't you know?"

Hmm. Maybe Jongin was actually more evil than Sehun had considered. He did own six MacBooks, after all. (Five of them were currently being used as paperweights, but that was beside the point.)

"We've got the place to ourselves tonight," Sehun said. "I want to work on my body."

"Funny, you don't look like the type who works out."

"I mean," Sehun's smile turned brittle, "I want to try to figure out how we can fix whatever it is that's stopping me from working magic properly."

"We can do that - after some food. You wouldn't want your familiar to starve to death, would you?"

Sehun wanted to point out starvation was hardly likely to kill a demon, but Lu Han was making the most of his cute, innocent face, and somehow Sehun couldn't bring himself to say it. It would've been like denying a little kid. His own stomach had been grumbling at him for a while now, too.

Unlike Kyungsoo, who frequently cooked for them, Lu Han had no such skill in the kitchen. Fortunately, Sehun had managed to hire a replacement cook after the last one's untimely demise (promising them danger pay worked wonders), so they managed to enjoy a meal without endangering themselves. Not that Sehun was ever really at risk, because even world's worst case of food poisoning would wear off at midnight - anything that didn't kill him immediately (for the second time) lost all its power when the clock struck twelve. And Lu Han was clearly more robust than his somewhat delicate appearance would suggest.

After dinner, Sehun took Lu Han to Jongin's workroom, figuring it was the safest place to try working magic. Even if they destroyed the room itself, the shields around it would prevent the rest of the castle from being affected.

"Ok." Sehun stood in the center of the floor, waiting expectantly for Lu Han to say or do something that would miraculously solve his problem. "You said you'd fix me. So what do we do?"

"We do nothing," Lu Han said. "You, on the other hand, attempt to work magic so I can see for myself what happens when you try."

Just what Sehun didn't want to do - fail miserably in front of an audience. At least Lu Han already expected things to go wrong. "Anything in particular?"

"Something simple." Lu Han pointed to the spider plant sitting on the windowsill. "Kill that plant."

Sehun killed plants all the time, though mostly by accident - he rarely remembered to water them. That mattered less with a spider plant, however, so magically drying this one out probably wasn't an option. He chose poison instead.

He stood a few feet away from the plant, with Lu Han between the two of them, watching closely. Invoking his magic was easy enough. The power pulsed inside him, eager for release. He didn't use it nearly enough these days. He imagined the dark, malevolent magic creeping insidiously from his fingertips to coat the spider plant with its taint. Sehun's magic wasn't poisonous in itself, but he could change its flavor, twist it to his own ends. In his mind, his power warped the cells of the poor plant, robbing them of life and ensuring that nothing survived.

Outside his mind, the picture was rather different.

"Well," Lu Han said, pulling the dagger from the plant pot, where it had buried itself in the soil, "that might kill it eventually, if you started hacking it to pieces. I was thinking of something a little more immediate, though."

"So was I," Sehun said grimly. He definitely hadn't wanted to stab the plant to death, and the dagger suddenly appearing in the pot had surprised him just as much as Lu Han. "Did you manage to get anything from that?"

Lu Han cast an appreciative eye over the dagger and tucked it away in the waistband of his jeans, where it promptly disappeared into thin air. "I got that you need some serious help."

Sehun swatted him on the arm with a cushion. "Tell me something I don't already know."

"Fine. I'm no expert, but it looks like the problem is your boss's magic." Lu Han grabbed the cushion and returned the swat. "Your cells already have magic running through them - you need that magic to keep you from spending the rest of your existence in a hole in the ground, so it can't be helped. When you try to work your own magic, your body gets confused between the two, and things get unpredictable."

"You're sure?"

"Or you could just be really bad at magic," Lu Han said. "Some people are. But I'm probably right."

It was the perfect opportunity for a snappy comeback, but Sehun let it go, thinking about the effects of Jongin's magic. He needed it, of course. Without it, he'd be permanently dead.

But without his own magic, he might as well be.

"Are you going to stand there and mope all night or are you going to do something about it?" Lu Han asked.

"Like what? Ask Jongin to withdraw his power so I die all over again?"

"Eventually, yes."

Sehun gave Lu Han an incredulous look. So much for help.

"But first," Lu Han continued, "we have to make you self-sufficient." His eyes gleamed with a light a million times more devious than anything Kyungsoo had ever displayed. Here, at last, was the demon hiding behind an angel's face. "Sleep well tonight. Tomorrow we start your training."