Cerberus met my eyes and curled its lips back. “Good parting, to one who is marked by the sign of Asmodeus.”
The doors slammed shut and I was left staring at them, listening to the moans of the girls and the primal grunting of the daemon. I didn’t even feel Kendra tugging at me; all I heard was that voice, terrible and soft like the skin of a drowned man.
One who is marked by the sign of Asmodeus. Cerberus had spared me because I was already another daemon’s property. Marked. Marked by Asmodeus. It was the only explanation, and the one I positively could not stomach. Of course.
“Move,” Kendra said, shoving me. Bud watched us impassively from his spot beside the door, shotgun dangling loosely from his arms. I shut my eyes, allowing the were to creep into the forefront of my mind. They stung, and when I opened them again Kendra’s gasp told me they were gold.
I could phase again. Thank the gods for small favors.
I ripped my wrists free of the plastic cuffs, starting blood afresh, and shoved Kendra away from me and into Lucas, who shifted on the fly and caught her up in his skeletal Wendigo arms, sinking his talons into her chest. He was nearly my height, like a prehistoric wolf made of bones and molten silver, graceful as the wind and cold as the grave.
Pauline screamed, running for the door, and I let her go. Bud was the more pressing problem, as he raised his shotgun and drew down on Lucas.
I caught Bud in the midsection with a knee, and knocked the shotgun toward the ceiling. It went off, louder than thunder in the enclosed space, and rained plaster down on my head as I wrestled with Bud.
“Were bitch,” he managed. “Get the hell off of me!”
I was getting tired of struggling with guys who slung insults about my DNA, so I lunged forward and knocked my forehead against Bud’s nose. He folded like a dirty suit, and I picked up the shotgun.
Lucas released Kendra, who twitched feebly on the floor, bleeding from the five thin wounds in her chest where Lucas had drunk her heart’s blood down into his Wendigo shape, fed it, so that all of his veins turned black under his translucent skin. Lucas shifted down to his human form bit by bit, and Kendra slid to the floor.
He was flushed and covered in moisture from his shift, while Kendra was pale and still, not breathing. I stared, silent. A Wendigo feeding is not something you ever really get used to.
“I had to feed on her,” said Lucas. “I’m sorry—I saw what she did to you in there and I couldn’t think of another way.”
“Never mind that,” I said. I tossed him my purse. “Go outside, get the car running, and don’t lose that bag. It cost me four hundred dollars on the Internet.”
Lucas flashed me a smile. “I like a woman with priorities.”
“You’re damn right you do,” I muttered, turning to pound on the door. A second later Myra’s face appeared.
“Did you get rid of—”
“I think it’s safe to say that’s a no,” I said. Beyond her purple-clad body the girls lay on the floor, limbs akimbo, sweat and blood coating their bodies, but breathing to a woman. None of them looked particularly upset. In fact, they looked like they’d just had a full weekend of fantastic sex, possibly with Brad Pitt.
Cerberus hovered over them, grown twice in size, his feet leaving deep scratches in the floor. Solid. Corporeal. Swollen on the girls’ energy.
“Crap,” I whispered.
Myra’s face went pale. “You can’t kill me. I’m a person. It would be wrong.”
“Lady, if I had a dollar for every time some two-bit witch said that to me.” I pressed the shotgun barrel against her clavicle. “Try another working like what your friend did to me and I guarantee that I’ll turn you into a sieve before I drop this thing.”
Sometimes old-fashioned threats work better than any magick or trickery ever will. Myra’s lips tightened, but she put up her hands and backed away from me. I reached out and snatched her by the shoulder of her wrap.
“You stay out here. I think you’ve had enough fun for one night.”
“I can do no more,” said Myra. “You are foolish, and you don’t know a thing about us. Your fear and ignorance blind you to the truth of all things.”
“Not this,” I said, shoving her onto the sofa. “I know what that daemon is. I get that you’re feeding him with some kind of sex magick. Gross and wrong as that is. All I need now is the real name of the Maiden.”
Myra’s face darkened. “You know a lot for a bitch-in-heat werewolf.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Tell me who she is.”
Myra raised her chin. “Never.”
“I don’t have time for this,” I warned her.
Myra smirked. “Do I look like I care about your problems, were?”
So she wasn’t afraid of me. Fortunately, I wasn’t the scariest thing in the room. I grabbed Myra’s arm, shoving her back into the altar room.
Cerberus gave a growl and rose onto his front legs, two of his three heads swinging toward us. I’d seen drawings of the dog at the gates of Tartarus before, but seeing him in front of me, smelling the rank charred odor that preceded daemons, was so horrifying I struggled to keep myself from screaming aloud.
I shoved Myra toward him and she collided with his enormous barrel chest, falling to the floor with a yelp. Cerberus caressed her cheeks and shoulders with his three tongues.
“She’s all yours,” I told the daemon. “Unless she tells me who the Maiden is and what they’re trying to do.”
“I don’t know!” Myra’s voice rose into a panicked shriek. “Only Grace and Pauline know the inner sisters who surround the Maiden. We’re just acolytes! I came from Ohio two months ago. Please. Please.”
And I’d let Pauline get away in the chaos surrounding Cerberus. Fantastic.
“What are the Thelemites doing in my city?” I said, as Cerberus scented Myra through his giant nostrils. “What do they need the heartstone and that codex for?”
“I just do what I’m ordered,” Myra sobbed. “They found me. I was like those girls, but the Maiden’s benevolence shone on me and I was saved. I just do what they tell me to do. I just say the names and let the power through my vessel.”
Cerberus’s serpent tail wrapped around Myra’s bare leg, traveling up and up, and she let out a shriek.
“It doesn’t seem so wonderful when it’s you, does it?” I said. “One last thing—how is Grace Hartley getting information from inside the SCS?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know! Make him stop!” She was beyond coherency, screaming and rocking, trying to draw herself into a ball under the daemon’s ministrations.
“Enough,” I told Cerberus.
He raised his heads. “And who are you to speak to me as equal, skin-changer?”
“You said it,” I told him, bringing the shotgun to bear on the largest of the heads. “I’m the one with the mark of Asmodeus.” I’d figure out what that meant and what awful repercussions came with such a title later.
“You believe I owe allegiance or fear to Asmodeus?”
“I think you would have already sucked me dry if you didn’t,” I said.
Cerberus inclined his heads. “There is a code of courtesy among the Abandoned, skin-changer. Be fleet. I will not extend such courtesy again.”
He stepped over Myra’s prone, shaking body and ambled out the door, mounting the stairs and vanishing in a streak of magick and smoke.
I picked up the codex and left Myra on the floor, sobbing. “You may want to reevaluate the life choices you’ve made,” I told her. “Ohio is very pleasant this time of year, and I don’t think they make you wear that ridiculous outfit to serve donuts at the Krispy Kreme.”
“The Thelemites will kill me,” she whispered. “Their kindness is infinite …”
“You tell me what I want to know and I’ll protect you,” I said.
Myra laughed, cold and dry. “You can’t protect yourself. How can you help me against their kind of power?”
Well, I tried. “Best of luck to you. And do som
ething about that tattoo.” I nodded at the eye emblazoned on her forehead. “It’s way over-the-top.”
I hobbled up the stairs on feet that were starting to ache from the damn cheap shoes, and walked out the front door with the codex under my arm. Lucas was waiting in the LTD, tapping his fingers impatiently on the top of the steering wheel.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said, sliding in and slamming the door.
Lucas looked at the house. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but shouldn’t we call in the body?”
“We will,” I said, leaning my forehead against the glass. “From a pay phone, when we’re away from the house. That informant is still in the wind, and after what I just went through I don’t feel like dying today.”
Cerberus was out there, in the darkness sliding past the window. I thought of the thing’s flat, pure black eyes, like a road slick from the rain, and shivered. I had seen daemons, talked to them, even willingly summoned Asmodeus once before, but to see something that was never supposed to exist in this world, solid and real as Lucas and as close to me, triggered every instinct I had, to run and bare my teeth and aim for the throat.
“Take the expressway north,” I told Lucas. “There’s someone I have to talk to.” The codex sat on my lap, far from the forbidding leather-bound tome I’d first thought, and more like an old ledger with pages falling out, handwriting cramped and running off into the margins, pages stained with moisture rings and dabs of dark, dried blood.
We sped along in the dusk, me holding the thing on my lap and Lucas keeping his eyes straight ahead. “Thanks for trying to help me,” I said after the lines of the highway smoothed out, Lucas pushing the car to top speed. “I’m sorry it turned out … well … it was FUBAR.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said. “I owe you.”
“You don’t …” I started.
“You didn’t turn me in when you could have. I owe you,” he said again. I stayed quiet, and didn’t tell him that I didn’t like owing or being owed anything.
It seemed to be the safest thing, for now.
Twenty-One
My grandmother and Sunny lived in a cottage that overlooked the water, waves the same color as the gray rock they washed pounding away at the bottom of the cliff, slowly eroding. In another fifteen years the cottage would be in the ocean.
I tripped up the steps, skinning my knee because of the shoes, and fell against the front door. “Fuck!”
The latch clicked and the door drew back just as Lucas was helping me to my feet. My grandmother stood there silently, stern and silver-haired as she’d been my whole life, her stony eyes narrowed. “Luna. To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“That smarts,” I muttered, rubbing my knee.
“Luna,” my grandmother snapped, putting one hand on her hip.
“Lucas Kennuka, ma’am,” Lucas said, stepping forward and extending his hand. “Are you Luna’s mother?”
She looked at the hand like it was made out of maggoty steaks. “Hardly. I am her maternal grandmother. Rhoda Swann.”
“Good meeting you,” said Lucas. “Luna’s told me a lot about you.” Bald-faced lie, but I was amazed to see my grandmother’s face soften.
“Has she? Odd. She usually gives the impression to strangers that she sprang fully formed from the foreheads of the gods.”
“I’m hardly a stranger,” said Lucas. “Your granddaughter and I go back quite a bit.”
Rhoda looked him up and down, and I felt the energy crackle around us as she pushed on Lucas to see what manner of creature he was. “As far as boyfriends go,” she told me, “I’m frightened to say that this one is an improvement over that were you brought around.”
“Thanks, Grandma,” I said. “Really. You want to whip out the baby pictures while we’re at it? Go for maximum collateral damage?” I brushed myself off. “Are you going to let us in or not?”
“Of course I am,” she sniffed. “I was raised in a civilized household and mine is the same. Come in, Lucas. Luna.”
We stepped over the threshold, the familiar shiver of my grandmother’s ward marks slipping over my bare skin. Lucas looked around the neat living room with its hooked rug and blue denim furniture. “Cozy,” he said.
My grandmother was squinting at me. “What on earth are you wearing? It’s a bit trashy even for you, Luna. Aren’t you bitter cold showing so much skin?”
“Hex you, Grandma. Seriously.”
Sunny came down the stairs from the small second floor and saved us from hair-pulling and biting. Lucas just watched us like we were a particularly salacious episode of Maury. “What are you doing here? What is that?” Sunny pointed at the codex.
“It’s the thing that Pete spoke to you about earlier,” I said, sliding a look at my grandmother. I didn’t know how much Sunny had told her about our little arrangement with her know-how and the SCS’s cases.
Rhoda glared at me, and stepped forward. “Let me see that book.”
“Hey, I hate to trouble you, but could I get a cup of coffee?” Lucas stood and beamed at her, his thin face innocent and open as could be.
Rhoda pulled her hand back to her side. “Of course you can, Lucas. Luna, where are your manners? Go make your boyfriend some coffee. And Sunny and I will have tea.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “He’s just a friend.”
“I’ll help,” Sunny said quickly, pulling me toward the kitchen.
Lucas stepped over to my grandmother and took her elbow, guiding her to the sofa. “Rhoda, what can you tell me about the house? It’s so well cared for. I’d be interested to know how old it is.”
I mouthed, Thank you, over my shoulder as Lucas took the bullet, sitting my grandmother down on the sofa. I just hoped he didn’t get so annoyed that he ate her. My grandmother has that effect on people.
“I can’t believe you stole that thing,” said Sunny.
“I didn’t so much steal it as jack it,” I said. “There was a shotgun and a lot of yelling involved. I wasn’t real sneaky about my intentions.”
She sat down at the table in the eating nook and paged through the book, shaking her head. “I recognize sections of this—it’s from caster witch texts. Some blood witch workings as well. Thelema is the thrift store of disciplines. If it works, they can cast it.” She pursed her lips, rifling the pages. “Sometimes I think my life would have been a lot easier if I was a Thelemite.”
I remembered the women, the daemon standing over them, the crushing feeling of their power. “Don’t be too sure about that,” I murmured.
Sunny stopped reading through the codex. “What’s wrong?”
“They called a daemon,” I said. “Cerberus. It’s loose, Sunny. I let it out.”
“What? Luna, what are you saying?”
“It fed off the energy of these girls, these prostitutes … and it was real. It talked to me.” I pressed my hands over my face. The gravity of the night was finally dragging me down.
Sunny held up her palms. “Whoa. A daemon actually manifested fully, and then it talked to you?”
“I should have helped those girls,” I murmured. “What it did to them …”
“Sex magick,” said Sunny. “It’s sort of a hallmark of Thelema.”
At least now I knew why Milton Manners had needed all of that Viagra. “It talked to me,” I told Sunny again.
She put her hand over mine. “I believe you. What did he say?”
“Well, it sure wasn’t Luke, I am your father.”
“Cerberus is a gateway guardian,” Sunny said. “A totem spirit that guards waypoints between the daemon and human realm.”
“Somebody’s going to be late for work today,” I muttered.
Sunny bent her head back to the codex. “This means something. If they summoned him instead of one of the other names in here, they must need him for something. He’s not particularly powerful on his own. More like a watchdog that barks but doesn’t bite.”
“We are talking about a dae
mon here, Sunny. The same thing that almost destroyed part of the city, that requires blood sacrifice, that …” That has marked me with something.
“Daemons are like people, Luna,” she said. “Dangerous and unpredictable, but there are many kinds and many species. Caster witches are forbidden from them for exactly that reason—meet one with a lesser power and the control you have over it can be seductive. Then you meet something stronger than you are and—” She snapped her fingers. “Poof.”
“You sure know a lot about them,” I grumbled.
Sunny lifted her shoulder. “There are a lot of things I know about that I’m not supposed to, Luna. I don’t tell Grandma about what you did when we were kids, and you won’t tell her about what I read. All right?”
“Yeah, yeah, your weird secret is safe with me,” I sighed. I pushed back from the table, feeling cold in all of my limbs. “I need to go upstairs for a minute. Do you think you can figure out what the Thelemites are doing with Cerberus, a heartstone, and that codex?”
“Maybe,” Sunny said. “I can certainly extrapolate some scenarios from the workings in here.” She eyed me suspiciously. “What are you doing?”
“I just need a minute to myself,” I said, backing out of the kitchen. I crept past Lucas and Rhoda, and up the stairs into Sunny’s room. It was painfully neat, purple velvet bed covering and matching curtains without a speck of dust, no clothes or makeup cluttering the dresser, books lined up by height in the bookshelves. Witches tended to be a little bit OCD.
In this case it was in my favor, as I opened Sunny’s desk drawer and found all of her casting supplies laid out neatly before me. Her caster was there, in its velvet bag, and her oils, herb bags, and chalk for emergency circles. I took out the chalk, kicked out of my shoes, and pulled her carpet back, revealing the blond wood floor beneath. Wood was the best thing for a circle—alive, suspended, with magick still coursing through it.
Witch Craft Page 19
