Banishing the Dark

28

“Cady!”

I blinked, and Lon’s face appeared above mine in full color. No silver light. I shoved him away and flicked a look around the room. I was back in the present. The great room was empty. No playpen. No toddler me. No parents.

“Are we alone?” I asked.

“What the hell just happened?”

“I-I don’t know,” I stammered. “A time warp? Or a memory came to life. I was here in this room twenty-some years ago. I saw my parents, and I saw . . .”

He swiveled me back around to face him. “Saw what? Did we set off a magical trap? I don’t see any Heka or spellwork.”

“Did I transmutate?”

“I suddenly couldn’t hear your thoughts. I turned around, and you were standing there like you were in a trance. Your pupils—”

“What?”

“Your pupils disappeared. Just silver. You wouldn’t wake up.”

“How long was I out?”

“A minute?”

“Holy . . . Lon, I relived something that happened in this room. I walked around and watched myself as a two-year-old girl.” I looked around and pointed to the far corner. “There. I hid behind that chair. I watched the whole thing like it was actually happening. I don’t know if it was induced by some sort of knack. What is it when people can see in the past?”

“What did you see?”

“I saw how my parents found out I had a halo. I always thought it was Scivina who told them—”

“Your mother’s guardian?”

“—but Scivina only confirmed it.” I grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled him close. “The person who first saw it was Dare. My parents were working for Dare.”

Lon paled.

“They built the glass summoning circles in the Hellfire caves. They were doing winter solstice work. My God, Lon. They could’ve done some of the transmutation spells.”

“Not mine. I already told you who did mine, remember? Merrin’s brother.”

That’s right. I knew this. A small relief lifted me; I really didn’t want my parents to have put their evil hands on Lon. “Dare told them not to bring me here anymore, which must’ve been why I started spending Christmas alone in Florida. They were working for Dare and keeping it secret from the E∴E∴.”

Lon pulled back and paced several feet, swinging the Lupara at his side. “I couldn’t have ever been introduced to them. I would’ve recognized them when the Black Lodge slayings first hit the news. But they were working for Dare, and Jupe told us that Mrs. Vega saw them every winter until they faked their deaths. That means they were working for Dare while I was still active in the Hellfire Club.”

“God, I’m going to be sick.”

“No, you’re not.” He stopped pacing and forced me to look up at him. “We aren’t done here, Cady. Your servitor saw this house. The snake handler’s stolen parchment is here.”

“Right,” I said, taking a deep breath. The grandfather clock. I looked across the room and flinched. To the right of the fireplace, where the servitor had shown me the carved clock—where I just saw it in my vision of the past—there was . . . nothing.

“The clock is gone,” I said. “It was right there.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“Maybe it was moved.”

We rushed over to the empty spot and looked for scuff marks on the floor or a secret panel or door in the wood wall there. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.

“How is this possible?” I said, nearly in tears. “The servitor doesn’t show me things that happened in the past. It has specific magical instructions. If it showed the clock to me before we drove home from Twentynine Palms, then that means it was here earlier today.”

“Cady. Put your hand here.”

He was holding his hand near the empty spot. I did the same.

“What is that?” he said. “Something’s there.”

“Holy—You know what that feels like?” I tapped the sleeve of my coat. “Ignore.”

“What?”

“One of my tattooed wards. Ignore.” I left him there for a moment and raced back to the front porch to retrieve the can of blue spray paint. “Fucking genius. How the hell did they turn it into a permanent spell? And where’s the Heka? Move out of the way.”

I shook the can and tried to gauge exactly where the clock had stood. Then I sprayed the wall. Like a shaded pencil mark exposing a pen imprint left behind on a pad of paper, the paint stuck to the air and revealed a hidden form.

The grandfather clock.

“Amazing,” Lon murmured when I’d sprayed enough to give us a rough idea of its shape. He touched his gloved hand to a still-invisible spot uncoated by paint. “I still can’t feel it. Just the strange sensation from before. The spell’s still active.”

“No telltale Heka, no sigils. Oh, of course. It’s not on the front.”

“On the back,” Lon said, setting the Lupara down on the fireplace. He felt around the clock’s invisible side, mumbling as he tried to get a good hold on it. After several tries, he grunted loudly and pulled. The massive clock moved an inch. God only knew how much it weighed, but now that he had some wiggle room, he got a better grip on it and slowly pulled one side away from the wall.

“Anything?” I asked as he peered behind it.

“Invisible, just like the rest of it. No Heka.”

“Has to be. Oh! On the inside, Lon.”

He moved back so I could spray the back side of the clock, and there it was: the outline of an imperfect rectangular panel that had been cut into the bottom half of the backing. Lon pried it off with the crowbar. Soft white Heka glowed on the inside of the panel for a moment before it fizzled and faded away to nothing.

The clock materialized right in front of our faces.

“Ha!” I shouted.

“Fucking brilliant,” Lon agreed before peering inside a dark cavity at the base of the clock’s back. He reached inside and retrieved a metal container about the size of a safe-deposit box. “This must be it. Here.”

I took it from him and set it on a console table. Lon cocked the Lupara and aimed at the box while I took a deep breath and opened the hinged top.

Nothing jumped out. No magick sigils or Heka anywhere in sight. Only a pile of papers, a couple of notebooks, a box of red ochre chalk, and an envelope with a stack of bills, both American and old French francs.

“These haven’t been in circulation since the 1990s,” Lon said, removing his paint-stained gloves.

“Maybe that means this stuff hasn’t been touched since I was a kid.”

“They probably hid it all when Dare started poking around in their business. What’s that?”

I cracked open one of the notebooks—just a plain old composition notebook with a cardboard cover. My mother’s perfect penmanship covered the pages. French words, variations of magical sigils.

“Experiments,” Lon said, able to read some of the French. “Mostly failures. Look at the dates. This is before you were born.”

“And after they’d killed my brother. Were there . . . other children?”

“No, but not for lack of trying. Here’s a home pregnancy test result, negative. And here again, the next month.” He flipped through pages and stopped on one, turning the notebook to read the page horizontally.

A chart. It started on my date of birth. Lon read it aloud, interpreting the French for me as he went.

Sélène Aysul Duval: Notes and Observations

3 months: No reaction to 100 V, perceptible distress at 5000 V.

6 months: No reaction to 1000 V, perceptible distress at 7500 V.

9 months: 10,000 V burned skin; taken to hospital for treatment; no internal damage.

“Jesus,” I whispered. They were experimenting on me?

15 months: Shocked Alex with kindled current when he reached for her. Continues to defend herself when prodded. We are extremely hopeful now.

18 months: Charged first spell successfully.

27 months: Scivina confirms halo.

5 years: Caliph’s nanny called police about suspected abuse. Adapting standardized parenting techniques in attempt to make S. more socially acceptable. Induced brain hemorrhage in nanny. Wiped caliph’s wife and children’s memories.

7 years: Able to charge adept 6 level spells. Shows interest in summoning.

8 years: Kerub demon summoned for Walpurgis identified S. as “Mother of Ahriman.”

9 years: Magical health of S. far exceeds first Moonchild experiment. Becoming rebellious, studying magick in secret, stealing books from lodge’s library. May need another major memory wipe.

10 years: No Moonchild powers demonstrated during ceremony. Rumors circulating within order. Third memory wipe on caliph. Hiring private nanny for winter months.

11 years: Alex found documentation of previous Moonchild abilities remaining dormant until puberty.

13 years: First menses. No Moonchild powers.

14 years: Incident at school required another memory wipe.

15 years: Alex fired from day job. Have tried Moonchild ritual six times this year. Doctor says I may be unable to conceive again. Beginning secondary plan to siphon power. Unsure what to do about S.

16 years: Magical ability markedly increasing. Dare still asking about her, so still have hope that all of this was not in vain. Alex says we should consider selling S. to Dare, but I am not ready to give up on her quite yet.

“Selling me to Dare?” I murmured, surprised I could even be shocked by the depth of their depravity anymore. “What else?”

“That’s where it stops.”

I tore the book out of his hands and flipped to the next page. Blank, just as he said. “Sixteen years old,” I murmured. “That’s when the Black Lodge slayings started, so that last entry must’ve been the last winter they worked for Dare.”

“And after they faked their deaths and sent you packing with a new alias, they found out you were worth hiding from Dare after all when they uncovered the old grimoires in France.”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “Must have been a joyous day in the Duval household when they discovered that the so-called age of magical maturity brought out the Moonchild attributes, not puberty. All they had to do was wait until I hit twenty-five and slit my belly open.”

“But we stopped them.”

Or delayed the inevitable, but I didn’t voice my negative thoughts.

Lon picked up the second book, a journal. This one had a black leather cover embossed with a sigil on the front. “My mother’s personal sigil,” I said, running my finger over it. “Huh. A variation, actually. This star shape at the base is new.”

“Or maybe it’s an older version,” he said, and opened the journal between us on the console. “More spells. Christ, it might take hours to go through, but this might be what you need. I think these could be the Moonchild rituals. The dates range from 1978 to 1988.”

“I don’t need all of them. What’s the last one? The one that applies to me.”

He flipped toward the end of the notebook and stopped at a drawing marked with a date nine months before I was born.

The Moonchild ritual.

“It’s a diagram for the ceremony,” I said, running my finger over the precisely drawn layout. “Here’s the main circle, the altar, the cardinals . . . Jesus, Lon. Doesn’t this look familiar?”

He let out a slow breath through his nostrils. “It’s the same ritual setup as San Diego.”

“Exact configuration. And look, a directional compass. A house and a road.”

We stared at it until Lon turned the diagram and pointed toward the road we had used to get here. “This house, Cady. The road we drove in on.”

He was right. “They conceived me here,” I murmured. “Behind the house.”

He flipped the page and began reading to himself.

“What? Is that the ritual?”

“Looks like more of a statement of intent. Almost as if she was writing it for one of her books, like maybe she thought of publishing it one day.”

“What does it say?”

“Give me a second, and I’ll tell you,” he murmured.

While Lon read to himself, I anxiously thumbed through the rest of the paperwork. More loose pages in French that I couldn’t read. A photocopy of a Moonchild ritual from the 1800s with red lines crossing out entire chunks of the text. A page containing a woodcut print of a pregnant woman with the head of a sun and a pictorial map of the world below her. It was labeled GEHEIME FIGUREN DER ROSENKREUZER, 1785. Gothic script above the woman’s sun-disk head said: SOPHIA.

I opened my mouth to tell Lon, but when I picked up the paper, I saw what was on the bottom of the box.

The torn fragment of parchment stolen from the snake temple.

Invocation of the Great Serpent.

It was in English, and the calligraphy and old spellings were mostly readable. It wasn’t a ritual, really. No instructions about laying out this or that protection circle, no binding or ward.

It was a prayer of sorts, a set of sacred words to call down a powerful, godlike being from the Æthyr. A strange summoning seal was crudely drawn in the center of the parchment, like no demonic seal I’d ever seen. And as I read to the end, skipping over the mumbo-jumbo, I realized something important.

This was not for summoning an Æthyric being into a circle for a chat. Nor was it a spell to draw down the creature’s essence into a womb to create a Moonchild.

It had nothing to do with a conception ritual.

It was a set of instructions to call down this creature into a living human body.

A male body.

Not my mother but my father.

Dazed and disbelieving, I let go of the parchment and watched it drift back down into the box, then glanced up to see Lon’s gaze lift from the fallen page. He cupped my cheek with his hand, and I heard his emotions echoing mine.

“The Moonchild ritual was just meaningless ceremonial bullshit,” I said. “All they did was invoke this serpentine being into my father. Any magician with half my skills could do it. All my mom did was have sex with my dad while he was possessed by some kind of nocturnal proto-demon creature.”

“Cady . . .”

“Don’t you get it? Priya said all I had to do was figure out what kind of magick my parents used and remove it, but he was wrong. How can I reverse this? I’m a stew of psychotic human and demon DNA.”

Lon didn’t deny it.

Tears burned my eyes. I backhanded the metal box off the console, sending my parents’ cache of money flying, and roared at the pain that shot through my knuckles. When Lon tried to reach for me, I stormed away and headed to the hallway I’d seen in my vision, where my parents first appeared. It branched off to two bedrooms with nothing in them but stripped mattresses. Empty closets. Another empty room with traces of red ochre chalk on the wooden floor. An avocado-green kitchen that looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the 1960s. I strode through it, opening cabinets and drawers, flinging silverware across the peeling countertops. Nothing and more nothing. Not a damn thing but old grease splatters and a door that led to the backyard. I unlocked it and marched outside.

Remembering the diagram my mother had drawn, I strode through dead grass and made my way through scraggly underbrush to a clearing ringed with winter-bare trees.

Here it was. A February moon shone down on the place where they’d made me. I stared up at the dark sky. No magical hot spot or carefully designed ritual space. Just a plain old clearing on some property they’d bought out of convenience, where rich old men hunted wild boars for sport.

I heard Lon’s boots crunching through the brittle grass and sighed as he stopped by my side and stared up at the sky with me.

After a few moments of silence, cold night air sent a shiver through me. I stuck my hands into my pockets. “All of this was for nothing. I spent my entire adult life on the run to protect them, and they didn’t need protecting. And when I finally decide to start living my own life, what do I do? I come here. Of all the places in the country I could choose, I come right back where it all started. How sick is that?”

“Cady—”

“I’ve been running in circles, and I just can’t get away. I send them to the goddamn Æthyr, and she’s still got her nasty claws in me. I feel like a puppet that can’t shake the puppet master. Was I drawn here because she’s still puppeting me? Am I still Sélène?”

Lon was silent for several moments. “You may not feel it now, but you love me. You’re fucking crazy about me, and you’re crazy about Jupe. So maybe you were drawn here because I needed you and because my boy needed a mother.”

I swiped away tears, unable to respond.

“Or that could just be coincidence,” he said, looking back up at the sky. “Maybe you were drawn here because you’re the only person strong enough to stop Enola.”

“Maybe,” I whispered.

“I’ll tell you one thing I know for certain. When I read that chart she made of your life, I didn’t see a puppet. I saw a girl who shocked her own father in self-defense, who was rebellious and had to be carefully controlled. A girl who was a threat to them, even when she was a child. So despite whatever your mother chose to call you, you’ve never really been Sélène. You’ve always been Cady. Be that girl now. Be yourself. Enola Duval has no power over Arcadia Bell.”

I stared up at him, breathing hard and tamping down chaotic sentiments. “You know, you’re probably my favorite person in the entire world right now,” I said, trying to be lighthearted about what he was making me feel. And oh, the intense emotion that radiated from him when I said that. Strong enough to make me suck in a startled breath. Whatever it was, it cut through my remaining indecision.

Shutting out my surroundings, I yanked up my coat sleeve and stuck my finger in my mouth. Then I swiped saliva across the white-ink tattoo on my inner arm to charge Priya’s homing sigil.

“Priya, come,” I commanded, willing my guardian to appear.

The air fluctuated a few feet in front of me. I backed up and watched a slim, bare-chested figure step out of the night, all silver skin and dark, spiky hair crowned with a halo of black smoke, with shiny black wings folded behind his back. A beautiful sight and a massive relief to see him again, unharmed and whole.

“Mistress!” His black eyes blinked rapidly, as if I were the one who’d materialized in front of him. “I am so happy to see you. So very happy.”

“The feeling is mutual, my friend.”

He pushed back a lock of black hair that had fallen over one eye. “Why did you summon me? You should be using the Kerub’s boy . . .” He trailed off and flicked an unhappy look at Lon before offering him a begrudging nod in greeting. “You shouldn’t be calling me directly,” Priya corrected. “It isn’t safe.”

“I know. But I need you to deliver a message for me. Can you do that?”

“Of course. Anything.”

“First, I want to show you something.”

I willed the transmutation to come, trying my best not to tap into moon power as silver coated my vision and my body began changing. I caught my tail just in time and guided it over the stretchy waistband of my yoga pants—much easier than jeans—letting it coil around my wrist as it grew.

Priya’s jaw dropped, flashing me two rows of pointy silver teeth as he gaped at the change. Then he dropped to one knee, black wings rustling as the tips dragged over the ground. “Mistress,” he said as he bowed his head.

“Look at me, Priya.”

His face tilted up to meet my gaze. “Mother of Ahriman. Your word is my command.”

“Then I’m commanding you now. Go to my mother in the Æthyr. Don’t identify yourself. Just deliver her a message.”

“Anything.”

“Tell her if she wants me, she’s going to have to come down here and face the monster she created.”

“Mistress, please, that is unwise. I believe she is close to uncovering how to cross the planes.”

I thought of my mother’s embossed sigil on her journal. There was a reason it was altered and a reason she’d kept that version hidden from the rest of the order. And when I considered every revelation I’d uncovered in that evil metal box of hers, this small detail might be the most important.

I knelt down in front of Priya and grasped his taloned hand in mine. “I don’t give a damn whether she’s learned to cross over or not.” I leaned close to his face and whispered, “I’m going to summon her psychotic ass down here myself.”