by Jenn Bennett
“I suppose that depends on what you need . . . and why. Forgive me, but how do we even know you’re who you claim to be?”
“It’s all right, Evie,” a deep voice said from across the room. “It’s her.”
A tall, thin man with silver hair and black-rimmed glasses stepped into the lobby. His quilted smoking jacket made him look a little like Hugh Hefner’s less decrepit brother. And as he padded toward me in black leather slippers and silk pajama bottoms, I recognized the square jaw and the dark eyes behind the glasses.
“Hello, Magus Rooke.”
“No one calls me Magus anymore. Or Grandmaster, thank the gods. I’m just plain old Mister.” He squinted at me. “Heavens, you’re all grown up. It’s like looking at a living ghost.”
“Real girl, I promise.”
“I had a feeling you weren’t dead when I saw your parents on the news last year. Do I need to worry about them showing up here, too?”
“I banished both of them to the Æthyr months ago,” I said. Not a lie. Not the whole truth, either. “They tried to ritually sacrifice me, so I can assure you that any loyalty I once had for them has vanished.”
He looked mildly shocked for a moment but recovered quickly. “Enola was always one for high dramatics.” He flicked curious eyes toward Lon. “And who might this be?”
“Someone who watches over her,” Lon said, slipping his hand around the back of my neck. “We need your word that you’ll keep this meeting quiet.”
Mr. Rooke gave Lon an amused smile. “I’m not sure who you think I’d tell. I haven’t had contact with another E∴E∴ member in years, and I don’t plan to change that. Although I must admit, I’m rather interested to hear why you think I can help you.”
I lifted my chin. “Perhaps you could start by telling me if a private detective came to see you about me?”
“Ah.” Rooke stared at me for a moment before gesturing toward the inner door leading into the gardens. “I knew this would come back to haunt me. Why don’t we take a walk outside and discuss it privately?” When I protested, he cut me off and gestured to Lon, saying, “Your watcher here can follow along with Evie, but I can’t talk about other Ekklesia Eleusia members with an outsider. I’m still under magical oath.”
“You discussed it with Robert Wildeye,” Lon said, slanting Rooke a cold look.
Rooke tugged the lapels of his smoking jacket together and shuffled toward the garden door. “And I hope you are smart enough to realize what this tells you about that man.”
Wildeye was one of us.
“Come, Miss Duval. I’m an old man with limited stores of energy.”
I didn’t want to be separated from Lon. And I definitely didn’t want to leave him alone with Tits Ahoy, but the magical oath was a real thing—all the lodge leaders had to undergo it. And I needed information he had, so I tamped down my uneasiness and followed him out the door.
The night air was warmer here than on the coast, and the wide cement path that snaked through the lush grounds was lit by tiny white lights and the occasional gas lamp that stood over benches or the warm spotlights artfully installed at the trunks of trees. I walked side-by-side with Rooke, who didn’t speak until we were several paces ahead of Lon and Evie.
“Quite a showstopper, that guardian of yours,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of odd things in my life, but that was new.”
“Puts other Hermeneus projections to shame,” I agreed. But I didn’t come to swap magical pointers with him, so before he asked how I’d managed to end up with a guardian like Priya, I said, “Wildeye was E∴E∴?”
“Vancouver lodge in the 1980s. His family’s there. He apparently never broke with the order officially—”
“Unlike you,” I said.
He shrugged casually, a smug smile on his lips. “No, he never caused a stir. I asked an old friend to look into him when he first contacted me last fall. His family had been in the order since the 1930s, but they were quiet and forgettable.”
But memorable enough for Dare to want to use him. “Did he tell you who he was working for?”
“He wouldn’t give me a name, but he indicated that it was a client with more cash than sense and someone powerful enough to make his life miserable. I felt a little sorry for the man. He was warded to the hilt with charms when I met with him in September.”
Rooke’s words came easily, and it felt as if he was being honest, but I wished Lon could verify it for me. I briefly glanced over my shoulder to spy him talking with Evie, who was smiling and using sweeping hand gestures to point out things along the path. I supposed if Lon heard something in her emotions to raise his hackles, he’d let me know.
“What exactly did the detective want to know about me?” I asked Rooke.
“If I knew whether you were alive and, if so, where you’d been hiding. As I said, I suspected you might be alive when I saw the Duvals on the news. But it was just a passing curiosity, and I didn’t care one way or another, to be perfectly honest. No offense.”
“None taken. What else did he want to know?”
“Mostly about your parents. How well I knew them, for how long, whether I believed they were capable of all those killings.”
“Believe me, they were.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, my dear. Enola was one of the reasons I left the order.”
“I remember you fighting with my parents. And with the caliph.”
Rooke sniffled and glanced at me. “You heard he passed away last month?”
I nodded stiffly.
“Made me sad to hear it, frankly. I don’t know how he’s fared over the last decade, but when I knew him, the caliph was a decent man.”
“Not decent enough to keep you in the order?”
“He wasn’t the reason I left, but I’ll admit that his lack of action frustrated me. He was blinded by his loyalty to Enola and her New Occult Order malarkey. Anyone could see she had no interest in uniting all the orders. She was a power-hungry manipulator who’d use anything at her disposal to get her way—sex, medicinals, dark magick. Nothing was sacred. The E∴E∴ was her playground, and she used every resource it had for her own personal agendas.”
That I could believe.
“Even your father was her dupe. I apologize for being frank, but he worshipped the ground she walked on and would’ve done anything she asked, no matter how immoral or dangerous. Enola was a tornado ripping through the order, and Alexander was her one-man cleanup crew, sweeping all the evidence beneath the rug.”
“Even bodies?”
“Takes a special kind of evil to murder your own child.”
“My brother,” I murmured, studying Rooke’s face. “You’re the one who told Wildeye.”
He nodded. “I hadn’t thought about little Victor Duval in years. When I was grandmaster of the Pasadena lodge, I traveled to Florida twice a year, so I saw Victor a handful of times. Your parents proclaimed him the first Moonchild, but he was a sickly child, physically and mentally. I think they knew fairly early on that their conception ritual was a failure.”
“So they killed him?”
The garden path split in front of us. A wrought-iron signpost held two hand-lettered signs, one pointing to a succulent garden, and the other to “Sacred Trees.” Rooke headed toward the trees. “I don’t know for certain, but a rumor circulated among some of the officers. One of the caliph’s magi, Magus Frances—did you ever hear about her?”
“Vaguely. I think she died when I was a toddler.”
He nodded. “Back before you were born, she had a vision during a psychotropic ritual and claimed to have seen your father drowning Victor in a bathtub.”
“Dear God . . .”
“The caliph dismissed it, was furious at Frances for making accusations. Frances wasn’t exactly the most stable of magicians, so the rest of us dismissed it, too. And your parents appeared to be grieving. I didn’t know your mother very well at the time, so I just chalked it up to Frances partaking of one-too-many magic mushroo
ms.”
“When did you discover her vision was real?”
He pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. “No one did, to my knowledge. It was only the word of one crazy old magician against your parents’. But as I came to know your mother, I began to wonder.”
“Why? What else did she do?”
“Nothing concrete, really. Just the way she treated people. She was beautiful, and she had this way about her that made you feel as though she were royalty—aloof and bored one moment, ripping you to shreds the next. You never knew what to expect. People secretly called her Queen, comparing her split personality to one of two Lewis Carroll characters. Was she the calculating Red Queen today or the furious Queen of Hearts? We never knew.”
This astounded me. Growing up, I never saw her angry. Not really.
Rooke stooped to pick up a slender broken bough and, after snapping off a few dead branches, wielded it like a walking stick, tapping its tip against the path. “People were frightened of her anger, but it was the coolness that bothered me.”
As I kept an eye on Lon and Evie, Rooke went on to relate a story about my mother unemotionally slapping a teenage boy in the middle of a ritual for flubbing his Latin and another about a time she calmly stabbed a waitress’s arm with a fork after the girl accidentally knocked a glass off the table. When Rooke started a third story, I cut him off.
“You don’t have to convince me that she was damaged,” I said. “I know it firsthand. I’m more interested in the circumstances of my origins, my conception. What can you tell me about the Moonchild spell?”
He lightly tapped the end of his walking stick against an open-mouthed gargoyle molded into the arm of a cement bench. “Ah, yes. Call down a great spirit into the womb, and give birth to a goddess. A classic ritual. I’m assuming you’ve researched my grandfather’s version.”
“We both know she didn’t use Crowley’s version or the older standard ritual.”
“She claimed to have perfected it. Altered it somehow. The order toasted her success when she gave birth to Victor, but after years of watching him catch every virus known to mankind and be shuffled in and out of the hospital, people began to wonder. And when he showed no magical aptitude whatsoever? Well . . .”
“What changed between my brother’s ritual and mine?”
“It was modified—no doubt about that. Enola told the caliph she came across the solution during one of her trips home to France. One of her secret magical partners oversaw your conception. Someone from another order—”
“Frater Blue. He showed up with my parents to oversee me being sacrificed last year. I sent him to the Æthyr with my parents.”
Rooke raised a brow. “My, someone’s been busy. I suppose there’s no point in suggesting you track him down and ask him for a copy of the ritual.”
“Dead end,” I quipped with a tight smile.
We passed an unusual tree from India known as the sleeping almond. A small metal sign identified the bark as having properties “similar to milk of the poppy” during certain years of its growth. I blinked at it for a moment; the geeky magician in me was awed. Powdered and charged with Heka, the bark of this tree was a valuable ingredient in a couple of the medicinals I made. On a few occasions, I’d ordered it from shady overseas vendors, shelling out several hundred dollars a pop for a sliver of bark the size of a fingernail. Crazy that Rooke had it here. And at the tree’s base grew a thick shrub of a rare variety of silver jasmine. No wonder this man was rich.
“You know nothing else about the modified ritual?” I said, breathing in the scent of the jasmine as we continued strolling. “How the Moonchild is supposed to manifest? What my mother hoped to accomplish?”
“Oh, she promised to give birth to the greatest magician known to the world. My grandfather would be a mere footnote, she bragged, forgotten under the Moonchild’s superior abilities. Magick would become respected across the globe, and we’d no longer be pushed to the fringes of society.”
“Yes, I heard that on a regular basis,” I said sourly.
“We all did. I’m sure it was humiliating when she realized we all knew you weren’t a messiah. Skilled with Heka, yes. But you didn’t bring about the ‘New Aeon’ that Enola promised.”
“Which is probably why she eventually snapped and went on a killing spree. Were there no rumors about her documenting the Moonchild ritual somewhere? I can’t believe she wrote all those books about magick theory but didn’t want to publish her greatest achievement.”
“That is a puzzle, isn’t it? From my perspective at the time, their Moonchild rituals were a lot of talk without substance, like everything else your parents embarked upon. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“But it wasn’t them alone. One day, I looked up and realized that I was sitting around with a group of men and women, supposedly the most talented magicians in the world, yet half of them were déclassé trash with boring middle-class lives. They got cancer, suffered through divorce and depression, lost their savings after making poor investment decisions.”
“They were only human.”
“Precisely. If they were so prestigious and talented, why couldn’t they use magick to better their lives? They should all be successful politicians or great actors, wealthy and healthy. Magical talent was a gift, and they were squandering it. I was surrounded by fools, murderers, and some of the dullest people I’d ever known in my life. So I left before their bad karma brushed off on me and my family.”
I couldn’t really argue. I hadn’t been active in the order since I left home at seventeen. Lon always joked that he wasn’t a “joiner,” and maybe I wasn’t, either.
“So my advice to you would be to stop seeking the Moonchild ritual. Whatever evil intent Enola had when she conceived you doesn’t need to define your life. My grandfather was a great magician, but he was also a loathsome human being who didn’t give two goddamns about the people in his life unless they helped him reach magical nirvana. So when it comes to my bloodline and his legacy, I try to discard the bad and keep the good. Maybe you should do the same.”
If only it were that easy.
We stopped in front of a hedgerow labyrinth. Rooke held out his hand, offering to take me through the maze. He had to be freaking kidding. No way was I going inside something like that at night. A memory surfaced of watching the snowy labyrinth scene in The Shining at Lon’s house. I remembered holding Jupe’s feet hostage and tickling him during the scary bits. I think Lon was tickling me, too, but that seemed . . . odd for him.
At that point, the memory went a little fuzzy. My temples started throbbing, so I stopped trying to force it and turned around to track Lon and Evie. Watching her flirt with him in that low-cut red top of hers made me feel like a snorting bull, ready to charge. But I still needed one last piece of information from her father.
“What is Naos Ophis?”
Rooke didn’t respond right away. He watched his daughter step off the path to pick a stem of the jasmine we’d passed and hold it up for Lon to smell. After a time, he finally said, “Temple of the Serpent.”
“What is it, and what does it have to do with my parents?”
“Are you familiar with Ophites?”
I shook my head.
“It was a heretical Gnostic sect that popped up in the second century or so. They thought the serpent in the Garden of Eden was a hero, because it gave mankind the gift of wisdom, Sophia.”
“As in the Sophic Mass?”
All E∴E∴ lodges put on this dog-and-pony show one night every week or month, depending on the size of the lodge. I’d attended mass regularly in Florida until I went on the lam.
“Yes. Only this Gnostic sect took things to the extreme, shall we say, and believed Sophia and the serpent to be as important as Christ himself. For the most part, the sect died out in the third century. But a small group of followers persisted. There’s said to be a group of them in both Greece and France.”
“France? Is this w
hat my mother found there?”
“I don’t know. There’s rumored to be a secret sect of them in the States. Your mother mentioned them on occasion when she was visiting the Pasadena lodge in the 1980s.”
“What did she say about them?”
“Nothing substantial. She was always interested in other magical orders, so any comment she made went in one ear and out the other . . . that is, until Magus Frances had another vision. She said she saw your mother studying in the serpent temple in secret.”
“Studying what?”
“She didn’t know, but she said Enola was hell-bent on it. Whatever it might have been, Frances thought it would tear the order apart. Perhaps it was a coincidence that she and your father attempted the Moonchild ritual again and you were born a year later. I don’t know.” He bent his stick in the middle, snapping it in two, and tossed it into the maze. “But if you’re looking for the key to your origins, I’d seek out the Ophites.”
My pulse pounded. Okay, this was good, something substantial to follow. Worth the whole trip down here. But just when I was about to ask Rooke about the temple’s location, I got a little distracted.
Several yards behind us, Evie sat down on a bench to scribble something on a business card while Lon remained standing. She handed it up to him, then playfully snatched it back when he reached for it. Laughing, she held it out for him again, and when he took it, she slowly ran her fingers over his.
What the hell did she think she was doing?
Any temporary excitement I’d felt over Rooke’s information vanished under the flare of jealousy that twisted my stomach into a knot and made my face overheat. Violent girl-on-girl thoughts filled my head.
Her fingers fell away from his, only to trail down the front of his shirt and rest on the waistband of his jeans, which she gave a gentle tug.
Nuh-uh. No. Hell, no.
I felt the rush of power ripple over my skin but didn’t recognize what was happening. Hot anger mixed with an oblique energy that swirled around me and shot toward Evie like an arrow. Branches swayed. Leaves scattered. I hadn’t moved an inch, but I felt the bark and leaves and flowers as if I were a stormy wind howling down the garden path, as if I were touching them with my own hands.
