A Lower Deep

Chapter Three

His hair had grown back salted with white, and his lips had mended imperfectly. The upper lip tugged hard to the left so that a shard of his yellow canine would always be partially exposed in a delighted sneer. One eyebrow was mostly missing, a dark stretch of burn scar replacing it. He looked twenty pounds thinner, nearly gaunt, with his cheeks covered in blue shadow and his chin now a bony point with the barest smidgen of a goatee. He'd always had a nervous habit of plucking at it while he talked to men he was about to kill.

If he knew I was here, then he paid no attention. At his desk, he pored over a small pile of dirt, inspecting and combing through it with a letter opener. He divided the earth into lines-first horizontal, then vertical, and diagonal, realigning them over and over. His familiar, Peck in the Crown, had been purified and accepted to heaven by one of the lowest Sephiroth angels minutes before Dani had died. Peck in the Crown could never be replaced after its redemption. Now Jebediah, despite the awesome amount of arcana at his service, seemed less than half the man he'd once been, betrayed by his beloved familiar. His glare forever held righteous hatred and incredible overconfidence, but loss and transgression tinged his eyes as well.

That final night I'd prayed that Jebediah would be dissuaded from his left-hand path and join the monks of MageeWailsIsland, the way his brothers had. Only Uriel and Aaron possessed the gifts needed to keep him in check. The tolerance and patience and tenacity to resist most manners of temptation.

Afterward, when I'd curbed the infection of my father's bites, buried Dani, and laid out the charms to keep anyone from toying with her remains, I'd kneeled before her tombstone and couldn't even cry. The grave had never seemed so warm.

There are times when the future is more obvious than the present; our pain and rage and separate fates couldn't coexist. Jebediah and I could not escape each other. Both of us were damned, but one's damnation would have to be forfeited to the other. I'd known that the day I'd met him.

He smoothed the dirt on his desk and wiped his hands, looked up, and said, "Hello."

The anticlimax of the moment rocked me. We stared at each other and a lost lifetime of loathing flooded my skull. Self clapped and shuffled a two-step, digging the images running through my thoughts. The migraine and memories drove down like spear thrusts and I wondered why the hell I was still alive.

Jebediah stood and made a weak gesture of greeting, a half-formed attempt to shake my hand, or perhaps he was going to try to hug me. Revolted, I gagged and spun aside. He grinned as if we should talk about high school and football games, old movies, and recent bestselling novels. My heart rate doubled and the cold sweat streaked my back. My fingers twitched like crazy.

He said, "Welcome home."

My jaw dropped and I choked out baby noises, the hexes suddenly pouring from me, black sparkling motes rising to my eyes, fists burning. So much horror stood between us that I could almost see a violent red ocean rising over our feet. He stepped away, amusement playing beneath that sneer. I said something but didn't quite hear what it was. I said it again and missed it again. He cocked his head, puzzled. Finally I understood what I was asking him.

"Why?"

It was a stupid question.

He smiled, that jagged sliver of tooth as pointed as a needle. "I need you. We've finally come full circle."

"You have. I just wanted to be left alone."

"That's never been a possibility, no matter how much you desire it. We're a covenant. You made a vow to be one with us. Despite my studies you remain the Master Summoner. My summoner."

"Our vows are hardly sustaining or enduring. There is no coven anymore. You murdered them all."

"I've found new members."

"I met one. I don't like her."

"We're even stronger than we were before, and capable of doing so much more than we originally dared to dream. Think of what we might accomplish, now that we've had these years to grow wiser and gain in strength. More pacts and more power. Don't try to deny your talents or capability. You cause a stir in the aether wherever you go. And you've been extremely busy since you left."

"Not that I've enjoyed it much."

"When has that ever mattered?"

We could have gone on like that forever. The pause lengthened. Those rocks that had crushed Giles Corey but failed to break him seemed to regard us witches with contempt. Jebediah stared into the dirt and I knew what it was, and from whose grave it had come.

"Aren't you even going to ask if anyone else lived?" he asked. "About what happened after you left, who fought and who was redeemed and who died crying in the mud crawling on their shattered legs? After all this time, now that you're back, aren't you even curious? Another survived, you know, even if you don't truly care. I'll tell you anyway. Only Gawain lived."

I already knew that. Gawain had survived, protected in his unique blind and deaf muteness, but I didn't want to think about him.

I said, "They're dead because of you. Whatever you've got in mind, let it go, Jebediah. Draw Iblees from me and cease this Fetch and maybe we won't have to kill each other for another few years."

"Are you sure we have to?"

"Let's put it off a little while longer before we have to find out." The burn slash rose like an eyebrow cocked in offense. "But I swear if I have to look at you for another minute here, we'll have our death match now. So I'm asking you, please, let me go."

The lip quivered, skewing his smile even farther. "So, it is true. I'd heard whispers in the circles that you still pine and rage, and Bridgett mentioned you refused her gracious offer of flesh."

"Listen-"

"You're still angry with me for what happened to Danielle? You've actually never gotten over those adolescent urges?" He had a natural talent for making the most meaningful aspects in life sound so hideously insignificant. "You're better off really, if you approach it from an objective point of view. In time she only would have destroyed you."

Calm down, Self told me.

What?

Don't . . . don't . . . shhh . . .

"I'm willing to pay what you most want," Jebediah said. "I'll help you bring her back whole, with her entire soul, if you'll rejoin me."

"That's impossible."

"You really ought to know much better than to ever say that to me."

The venomous rage caught me low in the guts and Self growled and nearly doubled over. "All your faith and four hundred years of knowledge, your deceits within the craft and deals in the devil's circles, and you still managed to ruin the authenticity of our last sabbat because of your insecurities and inadequacies, Jebediah."

The color drained from his cheeks, making the bags under his eyes stand out farther. "You've no right to judge me," he whispered.

"You're a failure as Grandmaster, leader, and friend. Rather than lunge and parry for the remainder of our lives, let's skip the banter. We've always known it would happen this way."

"It didn't have to come to this," he said. "Perhaps not a decade ago, before you shoved us all into hell. Not before you killed my girl. Now it does, Jebediah."

"For you have said so."

How we enjoyed our tortures. The monks of MageeWailsIsland had developed a taste for vinegar and self-flagellation with cat-o'-nine-tails. Danielle existed as the most perfect core to my soul and the greatest horror of my conscience-guilt was a salve of sorts, and one I wouldn't give up. Jebediah demeaned love like no one since the Inquisition.

I remembered how she would laugh and compliment him on his wit and character, proud of our brotherhood, so trusting in me, and me in him. Her face kept flashing in my mind-beautiful and wet as she'd once been lying on the shore of the pond after we'd made love, sediment in her eyelashes and water cresting on her naked shoulders-and spitting blood, choking in the church, and grinning a red smile.

"You're insane," he said, and I burst out laughing. So did my second self, slapping his knee, and then we looked at each other and suddenly it wasn't so funny anymore.

Jebediah tried to chew his lip but that tooth kept passing through the tear. Fiery shimmering sigils began to float and flame in the air before him, products of his madness, or only mine. He wanted to play with the dead some more. "I still need your help," he told me, "but if you need to die to become willing, then by all means, proceed."

"Sounds good to me."

So many hints and taunts and minuscule torments. He'd enslave me after death, if he could, like the rest of his soulless minions wandering the house, just another eggshell puppet and afterimage of the doomed. Jebediah's body brimmed with spells, crimson sparks now skittering along his fingernails, popping and arcing to the buttons of his vest. He stroked his goatee.

The majiks in the room soaked the back of my neck, those cursed authors returning to some trace of life through their lore. Why the hell not? We all knew one another, and what had brought us to this. He held his fist out and the occult violet flames burned up his arm the way they had that final sabbat night.

Pierre's lute began to play, the plucked strings straining for melody. Antiquity is myth, and his past was steeped in the shrouds of witchery from the hanged to the hangsman.

"I actually did need your help, you selfish son of a bitch," he said calmly, and made as if to fling the fire at me backhanded.

Self dove from behind Jebediah, grabbed his wrist, and wagged a claw under his nose. No, no, none of that. You sent the invitation but that doesn't make you King of the Hop.

"You never knew what to do with this companion of yours."

You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Self's DeNiro needed a little work. You must be. I'm the only one here. Peck in the Crown couldn't put up with your folly any longer.

Jebediah refused to address Self directly. "It's grown far too articulate and willful. It even has your face. Can't you see that you've given too much of yourself to it? Perhaps you're not as strong as I thought."

He hurled the flames up into Self's face, grabbed him by the throat, and heaved him high over the desk. Self flew backward across the room into the far shelves and landed atop a copy of the grimoire of Pope Honorius. His feet dipped down through the binding as it opened wide on its own and rippled like a black pool. Self grimaced and tried to get free. He bit and tore at the book, his knees drawn into the cover, sinking deeper and deeper until it had swallowed his legs and was sucking him down farther.

What have I done that you treat me with such disrespect? he asked. His Brando wasn't much better. The pages bulged as they engulfed him. He squealed, I could use a little help.

Jebediah shrugged off his jacket and I saw the muscles rippling on his wiry frame. I jerked back my arm and launched a Mohammeden hex straight toward the point of his chin, hoping to fry off that pretentious goatee. The tomes around us pulsed with our passions and hatred. Mesopotamian dark spells flowed from my fists and battered aside the Philistine fires and rising cones of incantations burning within him. Welsh Celtic war cries and epithets from the Zohar spilled out between those creased lips. He fused sorceries in fashions never done before, and still I sensed he was holding back.

Self attempted to find leverage by driving his claws into the binding. It ripped and bled like flesh as he was drawn deeper, his chin nearly under the pages. He said, Uhm, hey now-

Hold on.

Oh, that's helpful.

The strings of the lute twanged out melodies that Jebediah's raped ancestors had been forced to listen to, slower and sweeter than those Bridgett and I had danced to in the restaurant. I didn't have many defenses here in Jebediah's lair and he hammered away at my mind and soul as our wills met and spat and battled savagely.

Gawain entered from the other side of the room through a pair of sliding doors, and I felt the pressure of his presence rushing against me.

Born perfectly normal, Gawain had been brought home by his mother and immediately had his eardrums punctured, corneas seared, and tongue snipped so that it forked. He'd been raised as a feral and pure child and led into the craft. Without those senses he was unhampered by the tactile world and found realities beyond it.

Bridgett stood beside him and struck her pose once more, all those curves doing wondrous things again. Self's mother perched high on her shoulder with talons tangling in her hair. Thurnmim stroked the two sweeping curls away from Bridgett's mouth. Behind them stood the dwarfish corpse of the governor and another dead man painted black and white like a harlequin, sticking his tongue out and making faces. His hat and clownish costume was full of bells that jangled as he pranced closer.

Even demons know some form of love. Thummim screeched and reached for Self but the various tomes about the library glowed brightly and whispered at her proximity, snapping open, reaching for her. Forty-seven years before the birth of Christ she'd ridden the shoulder of Julius Caesar when he'd ordered the library of Alexandria razed, hoping to destroy the Ta Biblias, the earliest Hebrew Bible. These books would never forget, and forever be her enemies.

Jebediah hissed, "Stay back," and Bridgett lifted her chin and blew me a kiss with those exquisite pink lips. Thummim jerked toward her as if a leash had been yanked but continued to shrilly squawk and stretch out for her child.

"Sorry, lover," Bridgett said to me, as perfectly unerotic as possible. "I'll have to make you some other time."

Please! Self cried. Paragraphs and diagrams from the books scrawled over his face now, running black and red.

I was barely holding my own. I reached into the depths of Jebediah and found the silver cord tying his own vicious soul to him: rusted and sharp as razor wire it slid against my psychic reach and cut me deeply. He tried the same thing, hunting for my heart, digging and driving past the ghosts of my life. He sought all the sweet weak spots, and I slashed him worse. I held back a scream and the blood poured into my mouth reminding me of Danielle at the end, so beautiful and broken.

He laughed out the back of his throat. "Not that easy. You don't even know what to do with your hate." His soul was at ease with its fury, the cord sheathed in something I could feel but couldn't manage to cut through.

There are times you've got to just duck and run like hell.

I. rushed over and punched him in the face as hard as I could and knocked him on his ass, the dirt from the grave of my love showering over him. I hefted one of Corey's rocks off his desk ready to crush Jebediah's skull but those minor blazing sigils floating in the air spun in front of my nose and erupted like mines.

No time. I whirled and plunged my arm down into the Black Pope Honorius's grimoire just as my drowning second self faded beneath the pages, his mouth stuffed with the mad pope's curses. My mouth and nostrils were suddenly full of scraps of paper too, the script writhing and spilling upward, crawling off the papyrus. I grimaced and shrugged backward, hauling Self up, the writing holding on like nets pulled tautly across his head. Words were written across the whites of his eyes. I planted my feet and dragged him out inch by inch, Pope Honorius's ink slithering loose and finally splashing back into the volume. Self and I tumbled to the floor and lay there gasping.

Thanks, he told me.

Always my pleasure.

"We're going to resurrect our coven," Jebediah said. "I need them still, and I can't do it alone. The pacts and vows make it far too meticulous and exacting for my talents. You're the Lord Summoner, master of the art. You will help me."

Gawain, dressed in a lavender cloak, his bleached white hair and pale lost face nearly translucent in the night-my friend for a time back when I believed we could be friends-mouthed my name, that serpent's tongue slithering forth and blindly held out his arms for me.

Behind him the harlequin tittered, and I knew I hadn't quite reached the lowest depth yet. His voice was familiar. A shiver quaked through my spine and I slowly turned to face him.

There the fool stood, lips and tongue black, unimaginable weariness written into the painted and ashen lines of his silly white dead face.

Oh God.

My father.