Banishing the Dark

19

We warily followed Payne out one of the back doors into a covered breezeway. Lon’s face was a stony cliff. One hand twitched over the bump beneath his jacket, the other protectively held the back of my neck. I wished like hell he was transmutated so I could communicate my thoughts to him. Even more, I wished I could read his thoughts. What was he reading from Payne?

The breezeway opened up to a stone path that circled the eastern group of bungalows, some of which had boarded-up windows or junk piled in front of the doors. I scanned the grounds for signs of other people and saw no one. Only a curving pool, mostly hidden by a dilapidated wooden fence. A few broken boards allowed me a quick peek inside as we passed. Lightning streaked across the dark storm clouds, illuminating piles of beer bottles on the cement patio surrounding the pool. A hose hung limply from the broken diving board, and the pool itself looked half-filled. The dark surface of the water rippled unsettlingly.

But we weren’t headed there. Payne was leading us away from the compound, toward the rocky cliff walls of the canyon, where another rounded adobe-style structure jutted out from the cliffs. Half clay, half sienna-colored stone, the temple looked as though it had been built in stages by a madman who’d run out of funds halfway through construction. But Payne assured us that this wasn’t the case.

“A sacred spot for the Serrano tribes who’d settled the oasis before the miners came in the nineteenth century,” he shouted back to us as his shoes kicked up dust. “I extended what was already built.”

The first thing I noticed when we were a few yards away was tire tracks leading to a small utility cart with an attached trailer. What did Payne haul out here? My mind jumped to the boa constrictor in the back of his Jeep.

The second thing I noticed was the spider web of carvings that covered the clay walls. Sigils. Strange ones, reminiscent of the spells Lon and I had uncovered last Halloween when we were tracking the Sandpiper Park snatcher and ended up going toe-to-toe with Duke Chora, the demon my mother recently murdered in the Æthyr.

The temple’s carved symbols had to be Æthyric. And the closer we got, the more I was certain their purpose was to keep the temple hidden. How that was possible, I wasn’t sure, because they weren’t lit with white Heka or with the pink magical light I associated with Æthyric magick.

A stained-glass window was set into the clay wall above a wooden door—it looked like a figure of some sort, but it was hard to tell with no light behind it. Payne took out a set of keys to unlock and open the door. Darkness lay inside. No way in hell was I walking in there. But Payne opened a rusted box on the wall and removed a metal striker, which he used to light two oil lamps inside the door, exposing the first few feet of the temple entrance’s dusty mosaic-tiled floor. And spelled out in the broken chips of earthen tile were the words we’d been chasing: NAOS OPHIS.

“Come on in,” Payne said. “No live serpents in here today, don’t worry. Might find the occasional rat or a lizard or three. The scorpions don’t come out in the day.”

As he circled the outer walls lighting lamps, Lon and I hesitantly stepped inside. Kerosene and a strange, leathery scent filled my nostrils. The room was larger than I expected, shaped like a dome. A ladder led to a wooden balcony circling the walls beneath the rounded ceiling, and rough beams crisscrossed from one side to the other, from which hung something that looked like Spanish moss, dangling in clumps.

I scanned the shadows. No real furniture here, just three pews facing a sunken fire pit in the center. A couple of display cabinets with glass doors stood against the walls near some odd paintings of snakes devouring cities. Serpentine dragons. A human woman giving birth to a litter of cobras.

Storm-gray light filtered in from glass windows above the balcony. And now that Payne had lit more lamps, I began to be able to see better what dangled from the balcony and the rafters.

Not Spanish moss.

Preserved snake skins.

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, tacked up with nails. All shapes, colors, and sizes. This was the leathery smell in the air. Bile rose in the back of my throat.

“Would you like to hear a story?” Payne headed to the far end of the room and climbed stairs onto a wooden dais, where he began lighting candles at an altar. “The Great Serpent traveled down from the Æthyr to see the new world. He settled in a tree in a lush garden, only to have his nap interrupted by a man and a woman. The Serpent was intrigued and tried to converse with the couple about his world, but the man was jealous and forbade the woman to speak.”

Candlelight illuminated a sculpture sitting at the back of the altar, as tall as a person: a clay tree whose trunk was being strangled by a massive snake with arms and the head of a man biting an apple. Crude renditions of what could only be Adam and Eve cowered below the branches.

“But the woman was curious,” Payne continued. “And she came to the Serpent in secret and willingly offered herself to him. And from her womb was born Sophia, the essence of wisdom. Mediatrix between the two worlds. A gift to all humans. But when Sophia grew to be an adult and started giving her knowledge to the people in this world, the man saw that she wasn’t blood of his blood. He saw the Serpent’s light in her, and he knew what the woman had done.

“In his petty jealousy, he tried to snuff out Sophia’s light. So the Serpent hid her inside a copy of himself, a green snake in the grass. And he told that snake to go out into the world in secret, carrying Sophia’s light in its flesh. And the Serpent gave the snake venom, to protect itself from the evil man.”

I’m not sure if Lon thought Payne might be referring to him in an abstract sense, but he immediately stuck his hand inside his jacket and quietly thumbed open the strap on his holster. Not good. If I was going to get any information, it had to be now.

“Aren’t you an evil man?” I asked Payne.

“I am a being of light trapped inside a human body. Therefore, I am filled with sin. But I partake in the Serpent’s gift regularly to cleanse myself.” Payne waved his hand to the snake skins hanging above us. “When I consume their bodies, I gain the essence of Sophia’s wisdom. The more I consume, the closer I am to home.”

He was eating them.

Eating the snakes.

“Is that what Enola wanted from you?” Lon asked, recovering more quickly from that gruesome information than I could. “To find a way to bring Sophia back to life in a human body?”

He spun around to face me. “Enola feigned interest in Sophia, but what she really wanted was Sophia’s gift of knowledge.” He opened a box on the altar and removed something, then turned around to show it to me: a ripped fragment of parchment framed in gilded glass, a little bigger than his hand. I was too far away to read the writing on it, but the calligraphy looked old.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Take a look,” he said, holding it up for me.

My heart sped. I glanced at Lon. He quietly took out his gun and disengaged the safety. I took a step closer. Just a step. Just so I could see better.

“This is all that’s left, this small piece. For hundreds of years, my family has kept this. Hundreds of years, and Enola stole it from me within a few months of knowing her.”

“What is it?” I repeated.

“It is the Invocation of the Great Serpent.”

All of my muscles tightened. “A summoning ritual?”

“To call down the Lord of the Æthyr onto this plane. The Father of Wisdom. Eve’s lover.”

I’d never heard of such a thing, and surely this, much like Payne’s religious fervor, was overstated. But if it had a rare magical seal or some bit of wisdom that might help my mother tweak the Moonchild ritual, I could see why she’d want to steal it.

“It’s not the only written record of the Invocation,” he expounded. “There are older copies scattered around the world, but this was the only one in the States. And it is sacred knowledge that the Serpent gave to Sophia, so that she could call him back to this plane in secret. But this time, it wasn’t an evil man who wanted to erase the Serpent’s gift—this time, it was an evil woman who wanted to abuse it.”

“Enola, you mean.”

After pocketing the gilded frame inside his jacket, he turned to face me again while tugging at the fingertips of his gloves. “The Moonchild experiment. That’s all she wanted to talk about, her precious child of the moon, and how the ritual was wrong—how she could give me untold wealth if I’d only let her borrow the parchment. I refused. She stole it from me. And then she cursed me.”

Agitated, he threw his gloves onto the altar and held up his hands. They were a horrific sight, mangled and covered in scar tissue. It looked as if fire had melted off all the flesh and his body had barely been able to regrow enough skin to cover his finger bones.

His voice was low and filled with bitterness. “If I get within a mile of Enola, I burn from the inside out. The pain is the worst torture you could imagine. My extremities go first.” He yanked up his pants leg to reveal the top of a prosthetic foot inside his boot. “I lost this one the last time I tried to see her, about a year before the Black Lodge slayings started. I’ve tried to have her murdered, have hired other people to do the deed. They never came back, so I eventually gave up.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “There’s no such magick.”

He chuckled. “Having been a victim of it, I must politely disagree. Enola was a master at finding lost magicks and doing what other magicians could not, which is what drew her to my work. I found that out later. You see, we didn’t meet by chance—she’d had someone invite me to her book signing. She’d arranged everything, all so she could get her hands on the parchment.”

“For her Moonchild experiment,” I said, thinking aloud. “She used your invocation to alter her own ritual, so that she could call down a demon into her womb.”

“Not a demon. She wanted to create something new.”

“Like Sophia?” I asked.

He violently shook his head. “Sophia was the sun. Mother of Wisdom. She was made of golden light, like her father, the Light Bringer. What Enola wanted was a spirit of darkness. The essence of the moon. A creature of silver.”

He paused at the edge of the dais and pointed a scarred, bony finger at me. “You, wicked child, are not anything like Sophia.”

He knew. Of course he did. He knew the minute he set eyes on my halo. And although Mr. Rooke had been wrong when he told me in the gardens that Payne was a friend of my mother’s—Payne might have hated my mother as much as I did—he wasn’t wrong to warn us that we were treading dark waters in seeking his temple.

Payne was a threat. And we were in grave danger. Every cell in my body screamed this, even before Lon’s gun rose in the air to aim at the snake handler.

But I was closer to uncovering my mother’s secrets than I’d ever been. And a strange sort of fog was descending inside my sleep-deprived head, like the calm rhythm of a silent lullaby.

“What am I?” I demanded, swaying on my feet.

Lamplight chased shadows over his gaunt figure. “You are an abomination.”

Lon’s gun clattered to the tile floor. I spun around to see him collapse. He didn’t make a noise when his body dropped.

Was he unconscious? Dead? I couldn’t see any blood, and I heard no gunshot. Was he drugged? I felt drugged. But we hadn’t eaten anything.

I fell to my knees at Lon’s side. And as I reached for him, I slipped into darkness.

We’d underestimated the potential peril of Payne’s knack.