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Midnight found me on my knees, drawing a summoning circle in flour.

The old grimoire was propped against a bag of sugar, its pages yellowed and brittle. My great-grandmother's handwriting crawled across the margins in faded ink, notes about summoning rituals and binding contracts. I had found it years ago, hidden in a box of her belongings my mother had meant to throw away.

She had been a kitchen witch too. The family preferred not to talk about it.

"This will not work," Turnip announced from his perch. "You cannot summon demons in a kitchen. The ambient food magic interferes with the binding circle."

"I know that now," I said, adjusting the flour line for the third time. "But I do not have access to a proper summoning chamber, so we are improvising."

"We are dying. There is a difference."

I ignored him, focusing on the circle. It had to be perfect. Summoning circles were like recipes. Miss one ingredient, get the proportions wrong, and the whole thing fell apart. Except when recipes fell apart, you got lumpy gravy. When summoning circles fell apart, you got portals to dimensions that should stay closed.

The candles I had arranged at cardinal points flickered despite the still air. Their flames bent toward the circle, drawn by the building magic. Good. That meant the spell was taking shape, even if the shape was probably wrong.

I consulted the grimoire again. The summoning required three things: intention, offering, and invitation. My intention was clear. Desperate, but clear. I needed a fake fiancé powerful enough to impress my family but controllable enough to dismiss after one week.

The offering was trickier. Proper summonings used blood or precious materials. I had neither. What I did have was magic. Kitchen magic. The kind that smelled like cinnamon and tasted like brown butter and could infuse intention into anything I baked.

I placed a plate of cookies in the circle's center. Chocolate chip, made with the last of my good ingredients. I had poured every ounce of my frustration, my anger, my desperate need into the dough. The cookies glowed faintly gold.

"You are offering baked goods to a demon," Turnip said flatly.

"I am offering magic in a form they can consume." I lit the final candle. "There is a difference."

"There is not."

The invitation came last. Words of power, spoken with conviction. I had copied them from the grimoire, though I suspected my pronunciation was wrong. Latin had never been my strong suit.

"I call to the spaces between," I began, voice shaking only slightly. "To those who hunger. To those who seek. I offer sustenance in exchange for service."

The candles flared. The flour circle began to glow, pale blue-white light that definitely should not be happening. Magic crackled through the air, raising the hair on my arms.

"Cathy," Turnip warned.

"I offer myself as contractor. One week of service for one taste of power." The words were tumbling out faster now, pulled by the spell's momentum. "I summon you by flour and flame, by salt and sugar, by the magic of the hearth that is the oldest magic of all."

The temperature in the kitchen spiked. The candles went out. Darkness rushed in, thick and sulfurous.

Then light. Blinding, golden, wrong. The kind of light that came from fires that burned in places without oxygen. The summoning circle erupted, flour exploding outward in a cloud that filled my tiny kitchen.

Something crashed through my ceiling.

Not through the door. Not through a window. Through the actual ceiling, raining plaster and wood splinters down around us.

I hit the floor, arms over my head, choking on flour and sulfur. The apartment shuddered. Something large and heavy landed where my table had been moments before.

The flour cloud began to settle. Through the white haze, I saw him.

Tall. Inhumanly perfect. Covered in my exploded flour like some kind of culinary ghost. His eyes were the first thing I registered. Forest green, too bright, too intense, too aware. They fixed on me with the focus of a predator spotting prey.

Then they went black. Completely black. Pupils dilating until no iris remained, just endless darkness that promised hunger and consumption and things I did not have names for.

"Oh," I whispered. "Oh no."

"Cathy," Turnip hissed. "What did you do?"

The being in my kitchen smiled. It was not a comforting expression. His teeth were too sharp, too white, too many. The smile of something that had perfected the art of looking human but had not quite committed to the performance.

"You summoned me," he said, voice silk over gravel, "with stale herbs and desperation."

I scrambled backward, hands leaving glowing gold prints on my floor. "I was improvising."

"You were failing."

He took a step toward me. The floor cracked under his weight, not from force but from the sheer wrongness of his presence. The ambient food magic in my kitchen recoiled, the wards I had built into the walls through years of cooking screaming in distress.

This was not an imp. Not a lesser demon I could bargain with and dismiss. This was something old. Something powerful. Something that definitely should not fit in a studio apartment in downtown Boston.

His eyes tracked my movement as I tried to stand. The black receded slightly, letting slivers of green show through. Calculating. Interested.

"Tell me, little witch." He tilted his head, studying me like I was a particularly interesting specimen. "Do you have any idea what you have done?"

My hands blazed brighter. Defensive magic rose without my conscious permission, every instinct screaming at me to run, fight, do something other than stand here while a demon prince decided whether to eat me or evict me himself.

"I summoned you," I said, proud that my voice only shook a little. "I called for someone who hungers. Who seeks. And I offered a bargain."

"A bargain." His smile widened. "How delightfully pedestrian."

He lunged.