by R. L. King
He sighed. “Ms. Ruiz, I won’t argue theology with you. I wouldn’t presume to do that. Your beliefs are your own, and it’s not down to me to say whether they’re right or wrong. But I do have experience with this sort of thing. I’ve studied it for many years. I’ve even done it a time or two. Never quite so extremely, true. I’ve never gone to a spirit’s home plane, but I have summoned them and bound them to help me. I wouldn’t be going to Hell, because this isn’t really a demon I’m summoning. It’s more of a…spirit. So I’d be going to its home dimension.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Spirit, demon—it’s still against God’s will to have anything to do with them. You’re not even supposed to commune with your own dead relatives. The Bible’s very clear on that.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything like that,” he said. He stopped pacing and faced her. “Do you think I would ever put you in that kind of danger? I don’t want you to help with the ritual at all. You don’t even have to look at the spirit if you don’t want to. But—” He spread his hands. “I’ll admit it. I’ll be separating my spirit from my body, and traveling somewhere I’ve never gone—somewhere quite likely extremely dangerous. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t scare me. It does. I just don’t want to do it completely alone.”
He didn’t meet her gaze as he said it—the admission was a difficult one for him. Asking for help had never been something he did easily. In truth, asking Grace had been a last resort, after running through and dismissing all his other possibilities. All of them were either unavailable, would take too long to get here, or would take too long to explain things to—if they’d even be willing to help at all. That, and after reading Robert Goodwin’s account of his and Father Eustace’s final battle with Archie, he was convinced that a vital part of dealing with the demon involved someone with both strong faith and magical ability. Aside from his acquaintance back East (whom he’d tried to contact and been unsuccessful), that left only Grace.
But if she wouldn’t help—if he’d finally reached the end of her willingness to reconcile what she was doing with her strong faith—he couldn’t force her. He wouldn’t even if he could. She’d already helped him more than she knew—hell, she’d almost certainly saved his life at least twice, possibly three times. He hadn’t been ready for Archie to show up in person last night; if she hadn’t been there to drive him off, not only would he probably be dead, but Archie would have his previous work and be that much closer to achieving his plans for large-scale corruption.
“All right,” he said, letting his hands fall to his sides. “All right, Ms. Ruiz. I understand. It was wrong for me to even ask you to do such a thing.” He faced her again. “I wish you well. If I’m successful tonight, then you’ll likely never hear from Archie or his lot again, and you can put the whole unpleasant business behind you and get on with your life. If not—” He shrugged. “Be careful. That’s all I can say. Thank you for everything. It’s been an honor to know you.”
“I’ll be praying for you, Dr. Stone,” she said. “I promise, I will. I wish I could help you more.”
He nodded. “So do I. But I understand.” He paused, and then: “There is one thing you can do for me, if you’d be so kind.”
“What is it?”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out the spare key to the townhouse, then scribbled his home address and a phone number on the back of one of his business cards. He handed it to her along with a twenty-dollar bill. “Come by my house tomorrow, and if anything’s gone wrong, make sure my cat’s seen to. He’ll need a new home. Take care of him—he’ll probably be fairly traumatized. The money’s for a cab. That other phone number is a friend of mine named Jason Thayer. He knows about me. Call him too, and let him know what’s happened.”
Tears glimmered in Grace’s eyes as she took the items and stowed them in her pocket. “I will. But not to do all of that. Just to see you. You can…tell me about how it went.”
“Yes, let’s hope that’s the way it works out.”
“Here,” she said suddenly, reaching into her own pocket. “Take this. Please.”
In her open hand rested a silver crucifix, larger and more elaborate than the one she wore around her neck, on a heavy silver chain. Instead of a Christ figure in the center, it included a stylized representation of a heart with a crown over it.
He shook his head. “You keep it. I don’t think it will do me any good.”
“I think it will,” she said firmly. “I’ve prayed over it. It might help you.”
“Even if I don’t have any faith in it?”
“I have faith in it,” she said. “God loves and watches over all His children.”
He hesitated a moment, then took the crucifix and put it in his pocket. “Thank you.” He still didn’t think it would help, but he supposed it couldn’t hurt.
He turned and headed back toward the car, already going over what he’d need to do. The ritual was a long and complex one, requiring two parts: the actual summoning, which he’d done before, and the travel to Archie’s home plane, which he hadn’t. He wasn’t even entirely sure he could do it—he had the theory, but he would need a lot of help from the spirit he summoned. That meant he’d have to put far more trust in the spirit than he felt comfortable with, but he didn’t see a way around it.
He turned back once, when he reached the car, to look back. Grace still sat where he’d left her, perched on the picnic table. She was staring down at her hands, looking as if the weight of the world rested on her thin shoulders.
He watched her for a moment, but she didn’t look up. He got in the car and drove off. Tonight, it would be him or Archie.
Chapter Fifty-One
Magical practitioners had known about other planes of existence for hundreds of years. The working theory was that an infinite number of them coexisted with the material plane, each one occupying the same space but shifted in reality. For some planes, this shift was slight—for example, the Overworld that modern-day mages used to travel quickly in minutes between specially constructed gateways around the globe, or some of the planes from which mages sometimes summoned spirits to do their bidding or to aid them in their magical study. For others, the shift was—theoretically, anyway, since as far as Stone was aware no one had proven it yet—so profound that it wouldn’t be possible for humans to survive on them in spirit or material form. Some, such as the home plane of the Evil, were so foreign that even if it were possible for the body to survive without being torn to pieces by the local residents, the mind would break in short order.
In the modern day, when the study of magic was on the decline and even most people who possessed the Talent didn’t take the time to train it to the extent required to perform advanced-level techniques, summoning spirits was rare and dangerous. Among those who risked it, most were of the black-magic tradition. As Stone had once told Jason Thayer while he prepared to summon a “demon” to help them locate Jason’s sister Verity, spirits hated being drawn from their home planes to play flunky to some human practitioner, and thus did everything they could to thwart the summoner’s will. Most successful summonings Stone had heard of or participated in had involved multiple mages, but over the last few years he had spent a fair bit of time working on techniques that would allow him to safely summon spirits—at least minor ones—on his own.
A part of these techniques involved using small bits of the strange magical tradition Trevor Harrison had shown him, the one that involved pulling power from yet another plane of existence rather than drawing it from within himself, as he did with white-magic practices. He’d finally, over the last few months, gotten to where he could use tiny bits of the energy in a highly controlled setting without burning out his magical abilities. He still couldn’t do it for anything but rituals—the last time he’d tried casting a minor spell with it in the wild, he’d still burned himself out for a couple of hours. But even that small bit of progress had e
ncouraged him.
The other factor that had aided in the improvement of his summoning techniques was a tome he’d gotten in Ojai from a woman named Suzanne Washburn. Suzanne was a mundane, but she had a strong interest in the occult and the supernatural. She’d purchased the book at a used bookstore after finding it in a collection that ended up being donated by the unwitting mundane relatives of a local deceased mage. After he’d helped deal with a renegade spirit she and her friends had managed to summon using a sort of “all purpose” ritual that relied on the wishes of the summoners to help define the type of spirit that showed up, she’d been only too happy to hand the tome off to him.
Stone had never attempted traveling to another plane, though, except for his jaunts through the Overworld when using the portals. He wasn’t even certain how to do it; not on his own, anyway. His hope was that, combining a bit of Harrison’s magic, a modified version of the “all purpose” spell from the tome, and what he hoped was the true name of Archie’s demon enemy, he could summon the demon, bind it, and force it to escort him back to its home plane and take him to Archie. Hell, if it truly still hated him, it might even be willing to go along with the plan voluntarily.
Not bloody likely, but he could hope.
The part he wasn’t so sure about was what he’d find when he got there. The plane could be incompatible with human life, spirit or physical. He doubted it, since Archie was a classic “demon,” defined by human ideas about what “demons” should look and act like. That generally corresponded to a plane that was fairly close in phase to the material plane, rather than somewhere so out-there that the denizens would be incomprehensible to the human mind.
He also wasn’t sure Archie would even be home when he got there. He suspected that something of him would be there, since spirits tended to be dual-natured beings that could exist in more than one place at once. Robert Goodwin and Father Eustace had destroyed Archie’s physical body, leaving only his indestructible physical heart on the earthly plane. Did that mean the rest of him existed on his own plane, and his spirit had simply returned there when his body was destroyed? If Stone was wrong, he’d show up and discover that Archie’s spirit currently resided fully in the physical body he’d made for himself. If that happened, he’d have to destroy Archie’s body before he could destroy his spirit.
Which mean he’d have to find Archie’s body first. And since Archie had no aura and was clearly an ancient and powerful practitioner, Stone had no way to do that.
No pressure.
When he got back home, Raider greeted him at the door. He picked up the cat and looked into his big green eyes. “Well, Raider, it’s been lovely knowing you. You’re not a bad little beast at all, and I apologize in advance if I end up traumatizing you again. Ms. Ruiz will take good care of you if that happens.”
Raider said nothing, but stretched out his neck and licked Stone’s nose.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Stone spent far longer setting up the ritual than he technically needed to. Whether it was due to a certain reluctance to get on with it or because he was taking extra care to ensure he didn’t mess anything up, he wasn’t sure. Probably a bit of both. Whatever it was, though, nearly three hours had passed by the time he stood back and examined his handiwork, satisfied that he could do nothing more to ensure things went as planned. This was the extent of what his ability and research could manage—if it wasn’t sufficient, he’d find out soon enough.
He’d cleared out the entire middle area of the large attic he used as a ritual space, leaving an expanse of wooden flooring roughly twenty feet square. The circle itself took up a little over half of that, consisting of the permanent part he’d painted shortly after he’d moved in (he was glad his landlord lived on the opposite coast; he’d never even met the man, and because he paid his rent well in advance and took care of any minor household emergencies on his own, there was no need for any unexpected visits) and the ritual-specific parts he’d added using a combination of chalk, tape, candles, and crystals. In the center he’d placed a large standing mirror with a table in front of it, with chalice, a knife, and a tome on a stand. The final circle was not beautiful—in fact, it had a certain rough, crude quality, as befitted the type of being he wished to summon. It included several of the demonic sigils around the outside, and he’d carefully copied the mishmash of ugly lines representing the demon’s name on a piece of paper on the table next to the tome.
After finishing the setup, he paced around the circle several times, checking for breaches, errors, or other potential problems. The one thing he couldn’t allow was a way for the demon to get free if something went wrong. If it broke his control and killed him—well, that would be unfortunate, certainly, but it was part of the risk one took when summoning such dangerous beings. But letting it escape and hurt other people, that was another matter entirely.
You’re stalling, he told himself. It was true, of course. He didn’t want to do this. He certainly didn’t want to do it alone. But waiting wasn’t an option either, since even if Archie was done killing people for office supplies, he still clearly planned to initiate his corruption scheme on a large scale, and soon.
His last attempt at doing something to avoid this ritual had been to call Maria Alvarez, to see if she’d managed to contact the woman who had Dennis Avila’s box. If he had that, he might be able to use it to trace Archie, since it had been in contact with his heart for so long. But Maria had no good news—the other professor was out of town for a conference and she wasn’t sure when she’d be back. She promised to see if she could convince the woman’s assistants to allow some time with the box, but she wasn’t sure when she’d have an answer.
Stone paced the circle again, then stopped on the side facing the mirror. He examined his reflection: his pale face floated against his dark hair, the deep hollows around his eyes, and his black Queen T-shirt. He did a few stretches, as if he were planning to go for a run rather than summon a demon that would most likely rather eat him than help him. Yes, that’s it—we’ll just go for a run together and then pop by Peet’s for a latte after. Very civilized.
Stop stalling. Get on with it. He glanced at the phone on the table. He wouldn’t admit it, but part of why he’d been stalling was that he’d been hoping Grace would change her mind and contact him. Having her here, given her apparent effect on Archie and his crew, would have been comforting and potentially helpful. But the phone had remained resolutely silent.
He’d thought about calling Jason—almost did it a couple times—but finally decided against it. Unlike Grace, Jason wouldn’t have been able to do much if anything got out of hand. The extra power would have been nice, true, but his friend was a minimum of five hours away even if he left right away. At this point, for good or ill, Stone just wanted to get on with it.
He walked over and switched the phone off—once he started the ritual, he didn’t want to be distracted by somebody wanting his opinion on gutter-cleaning options, but that also meant that if Grace did plan to call, she wouldn’t be able to reach him. He pulled his mobile phone from his pocket, switched that off too, and set it next to the other one. It felt like a gesture of finality.
That’s it, then. It’s just you and old whatever-the-hell-his name-is.
He was about to walk back to the circle when his gaze fell on the crucifix Grace had given him, there on the table next to the phones. He stood there a moment, studying it, and then picked it up, slipped the chain over his neck, and put it under his shirt. It sent a brief shiver through him as it touched his bare skin, but quickly warmed. He doubted it would do him any good, but Grace had been insistent. He could humor her, at least. It’s not as if it would do any harm.
With one more deep, cleansing breath, he stepped into the circle and took his place in front of the table, facing the mirror. He picked up the knife and contemplated his reflection one more time. “Here we go,” he said aloud, and then shifted to magical sight and b
egan the summoning incantation.
The ritual was a modified version of the one he’d done with Jason to find Verity. If all went as planned, the demon would appear in the mirror at the end of the summoning, but unlike the previous ritual, in this one he wouldn’t simply bind it temporarily and send it off to locate someone. Instead, he would bind it much more securely and compel it to open a way to its own home dimension. The mirror, instead of merely acting as a means of communication, would become a portal between the two planes for a couple of seconds. If he’d done the ritual wrong, the demon could come through to his own side. That was where all his care in casting the circle had come in—if it did that and the circle was sound, all it could do was rip him to shreds, not escape into the world. It wouldn’t need the portal to get back to its own plane, so eventually it would probably get bored and go home. Not an optimum outcome, certainly, but better than the alternative.
If he’d done the ritual correctly, however, he would force the bound demon to take him to its plane and, once there, lead him to Archie. After that, his plans grew much murkier—he didn’t have a specific idea how he planned to beat Archie once he found him. He’d done the best he could to prepare, charging up all his focus items even though he wasn’t sure they’d work on Archie’s dimension. Beyond that, he’d have to play it by ear, using his control over the demon to learn as much as he could about the new environment so he could catch Archie by surprise. He was at a disadvantage, sure, but this also wasn’t his first rodeo.
Besides that, there still was always the chance that if his summoned demon hated Archie as much as he did, it might even help him do the job voluntarily. Not something he’d in any way count on, but definitely something to keep in the back of his mind.
