Banishing the Dark

11

Splintered wood and dry earth.

I caught the scent of both as the massive boulder smashed through the wall of windows and turned Wildeye’s bed into kindling before ripping through the floor in front of us as if it was made of butter.

“Cady!”

Lon rammed into me. Boards cracked. The room tilted. For a moment, I thought we were going to slide into the hole. Then a joist snapped in two, and the entire floor collapsed, along with my stomach. One second I was upstairs, and the next I was rocketing downward with Lon through a cloud of dust.

A sofa broke Lon’s fall. Lon broke mine. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. Everything seemed to be vibrating inside—my nerves, bones, teeth. Wood and plaster and glass rained over my back as he covered my head with his arm. When it stopped, we both gasped for air at the same time.

My ears rang. I coughed up plaster dust while attempting to stand, but Lon was holding on to me like grim death. I was terrified he’d broken his back or neck. “Lon—”

“I’m okay,” he said through a cough.

I barely had a chance to feel relief as another rumble shook the house. It sounded like the whole damn mountain was coming down. Adrenaline fired through my limbs. We pushed off the couch and stumbled over broken boards into the kitchen.

Another rock roared through the living-room wall.

“Out!” Lon shouted, grabbing my arm to shove me toward a door.

I didn’t even think. Just shouldered into it like a human battering ram and broke the whole damn thing down. Believe me, I couldn’t have been more surprised when it exploded off its hinges, but I didn’t have a chance to wonder how.

Morning sun blinded me as we burst from the rubble into open air. It took me a second to get my bearings. We’d exited through the cabin’s side door, where Lon’s SUV was parked—I almost ran into it. And by some miracle, it was unharmed. But not for long.

The driveway quaked. I glanced past the car toward the mountain. Nothing but dust and cascading rocks. A wave of destruction tumbling from the heavens and blanketing Wildeye’s backyard in stone.

The driver’s door swung open, and a hard hand shoved me into the SUV. I half sailed, half scrambled over the center armrest, banging my head in the process. I’d never seen anyone start an engine so fast. Dirt flew from the wheels as Lon threw it into reverse and swung the car around. Metal crunched. I yelped as my head bounced against the headrest.

“Shit!”

He’d hit a boulder. Or a boulder had hit the SUV. Either way, it was in back of us—not in front—and the back window was still intact. Teeth rattling, I twisted in my seat in time to see a giant oak crack and sway toward the back of the house. It crashed into the roof with a massive boom!

“Go, go, go!” I shouted.

Lon slammed the SUV into gear and tore down the driveway like a bat out of hell. In seconds, we were speeding onto Diamond Trail, away from Armageddon.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Lon repeated several times, staring wide-eyed at the road ahead. After sobering up a little, he asked, “Are you okay?”

“Considering? Yes, I think so. What just happened?”

“Hell if I know. Did we set off a ward?”

I knew what he was thinking: the putt-putt golf course last fall. But that was strange Æthyric magick etched in pink light, not earthly white Heka. I would have definitely noticed something like that in Wildeye’s house. The warding magic he’d used in the closet was an oldie-but-goodie spell, nothing all that special. A kindergartner could cast it—at least, I could when I was that age.

“I didn’t see anything. And no warning whatsoever,” I said. “Are there a lot of landslides out here? Could it have been a coincidence?”

“You don’t believe in coincidences.”

“I’m willing to start now. Slow down. I see a car over that next hill. I don’t want it to look like we’re fleeing a crime scene.”

“We are.”

“But we didn’t do that!”

He grumbled and slowed to a speed barely under a reckless-driving violation. The car I’d spotted was now cresting the hill and turned out to be a truck. The truck belonged to a park ranger. Orange warning lights flashed as it sped toward us, sending a fresh flood of panic into my brain. It took me a couple of seconds to realize the ranger had zero interest in us. He passed us and continued on his way. Headed to the landslide, I supposed.

Lon banged the heel of his palm against the steering wheel. “All of that for nothing.”

“You didn’t see anything in the files?”

“They were all several years old.” He flashed me a glance. “How did you knock down that door?”

“Adrenaline?”

“You snapped a fork in two, and you ripped the lock off the patio door.”

And nearly knocked the leg off the table in the diner, but I didn’t say this. “You think it might be part of the moon magick, some kind of Superman strength?”

“You aren’t experiencing other demonic abilities, are you?”

“Not that I know of.” Just to ease my mind, I tried to manage the most common of knacks—telekinesis—by willing something to rise into the air, a pen rolling around an open compartment in the console. Nope. Nothing.

“Are my eyes . . . ?” I pulled down the visor mirror. Still had the elliptical pupils. Great.

Lon gestured at me. “What’s that you’re holding?”

I glanced down and was surprised to see my hand balled into a fist. My fingers were stiff, locked around a couple of scraps of paper. I loosened my grip and flattened out the wrinkles against my knee. “It’s from Wildeye’s notebook.” I must have lost the notebook itself in the landslide, but by some miracle, I’d managed to hang on to three pages. The tops were torn off, and the bottom two pages were empty. But I’d snagged the one I’d been looking at when the mountain smote us.

“Looks like coded notes from September,” I explained to Lon. “But I think these could be my initials.”

“He was investigating you back in September?”

Not long after I’d met Lon and before Dare had revealed that he knew my real name. “Guess so, but don’t get your hopes up too high. Only three things are listed. One is a street address with no city. The second thing is just a note that says ‘3AC 1988.’ ”

“Not the year you were born.”

“No. But it’s my fake identity’s birth year. And I have no idea what ‘3AC’ would have to do with that.”

He grunted. “What’s the third thing?”

“Variations on spelling for ‘Naos Ophis.’ ” I spelled it out for him.

“Naos means shrine, or an inner temple.”

“A cella.”

Lon nodded. “That’s Latin, but yes. Naos comes from a Greek word. I don’t know what Ophis is, though.”

I stared at the paper for a couple of moments, but my brain was in no mood for solving riddles. The clock on the dash said it was half past seven. And whether it was the power of suggestion or my adrenaline running out, exhaustion hit me like a brick.

“We’ll research all that later,” Lon said as Golden Peak came into view in the distance. “Right now, we need to rest. If you don’t sleep, you’ll be nodding off when night falls. Or I will. And I need to watch out for you.”

My stomach tightened when I thought about being alone with him in a hotel room again. I hoped I’d manage to keep my clothes on this time. “I’m not sure if it’s the best idea to crash at the Redwood Motel. What if that waitress tells people she sent us up to Wildeye’s house?”

“They won’t be looking for two people who triggered a landslide,” he said. “But on the other hand, I don’t want nosy people knocking on the door or logging my tag number while we’re sleeping.”

I certainly didn’t disagree. So while he made a quick stop to pick up the things we’d left in the motel room, I futzed around with the search function on the GPS until it brought up the closest motel off the highway, about ten miles south of Golden Peak. It took us a half hour to get there.

Tucked into grass-covered cliffs facing the ocean, the Lucia Inn was all beachy clapboard and white picket fence, geared toward retirees taking leisurely excursions up the coast of California. We got the last room with double queen beds available and dumped our bags onto the creaking wood floor.

While Lon showered in the pale pink bathroom, I managed to get a broadband signal on his tablet and unfolded the scrap of paper from Wildeye’s notebook. I tried looking up “Naos Ophis” in quotes. Nothing. Not one single hit. How was that possible? Maybe Wildeye had the spelling wrong, after all. But searching for variations proved just as futile. Maybe Lon would have other ideas. He was the linguaphile.

Changing tactics, I typed Wildeye’s mystery address into a map search, which located it in fifteen cities. Better than hundreds of hits, I supposed, and most of them were in the West. But we couldn’t exactly traipse around the country searching for the right one. And what was I even looking for, exactly? Most of the locations looked to be houses in residential neighborhoods. One convenience store. And—

Rooke Gardens. Pasadena, California.

Long-forgotten memories bloomed inside my head.

I raced to the bathroom and knocked, shouting against the peeling pink paint. “Lon! I know the address in the notebook. It’s in Pasadena.”

The door swung open. I saw half a second of glistening naked male flesh. Mostly chest—holy crap, better than I remembered—and the vague promise of other alluring body parts in my peripheral vision.

For the love of God. Didn’t this place have towels?

Just because I’d gotten naked for research didn’t mean all bets were off. Rattled, I held out Wildeye’s torn notebook page in front of me to block the view.

He cleared his throat. “Repeat what you just said.”

I tapped the paper with my index finger. “This is in Pasadena. Rooke Gardens. It’s a private botanical garden owned by Karlan Rooke.”

“And I should recognize that name because . . . ?”

“He used to be a high-ranking member of the E∴E∴, but he quit when . . . well, I was about Jupe’s age, I guess. Caused a big hubbub at a national occult convention in Florida. He hated my parents. Hated.”

Lon made a small noise. “Interesting.”

“He was grandmaster of the Pasadena lodge, but when he quit the order, the lodge fell apart and eventually shut down altogether.” A droplet of water fell from Lon’s wet hair and plopped on his shoulder. Very distracting. I forced myself to look away and refocus on Wildeye’s notes. “Those words, ‘Naos Ophis,’ were scribbled below the address. Can’t find anything at all on that exact phrase—”

“I remembered in the shower,” Lon said. “Ophis is Greek for ‘serpent.’ ”

A dreadful chill ran through me. The hand holding up the torn paper fell to my side. “Temple of the Serpent.”

“Was that the name of the Pasadena lodge that disbanded?” Lon asked.

Each E∴E∴ lodge had a different name. Seventeen lodges in total, but the Pasadena lodge had been named Astera, and none of the other lodges was named after snakes or serpents. No dragons or lizards, either. “Naos Ophis definitely isn’t an E∴E∴ lodge.”

“A rival order’s lodge? The Luxe, maybe?”

I thought for a second, just to be sure. “No. Not Luxe. Not any of the other orders. I would remember.” Hard to forget when your parents made a habit of murdering other orders’ leaders.

“Maybe this Karlan Rooke started his own order.”

“It’s possible. Oh! And there’s something else—his father was one of Aleister Crowley’s secret bastards.”

Lon’s eyes narrowed. “Very interesting.”

“No proof, of course. But everyone in my order seemed to think it was true. I remember my parents talking trash about him, saying that he was no better than a commoner with no magical skills. Calling him slurs like ‘half-breed,’ that sort of thing.”

Lon grunted. “Wish we had a better idea of what we’d be walking into.”

“I could contact the E∴E∴, see if someone will talk to me about Rooke.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. The fewer people who know where you are, the better. Your order may rise to the occasion and help you—”

“But with the caliph gone . . .”

“Let’s not sound an alarm just yet. I say we follow this independently until we’re forced to ask for help.”

He was probably right. I just wished I knew whether Rooke would see me as friend or foe now that I knew the truth about my parents. He had to be in his seventies by now, which meant he knew a hell of a lot more about E∴E∴ politics than I did. And that made me both nervous and curious. Mostly nervous.

Lon’s fingers curved around the back of my neck, as though I were a wilting tomato bush needing a support stake. “Let me call Jupe,” he said in a soft voice. “I’ll tell him we’ll be driving to Pasadena later tonight.”