Summoning the Night

by Jenn Bennett

  A proud smile spread across Lon’s face. “There’s more.”

  He handed me another photocopy of the spell from the silver tube. His finger moved across the paper, pointing out seven letters within the strange text. I never would’ve been able to pick them out myself, but when he put the cannery photos in my lap, I made the connection immediately.

  “Seven stars,” I murmured.

  “Seven stars that open seven doors,” Lon said. “This spell opens doors between worlds.”

  “Between earth and the Æthyr?” Definitely not good.

  “They can only be opened during a planetary alignment.”

  “One that occurs when Saturn completes an orbit?” I guessed.

  “It’s not just about what’s going on here. It’s when Saturn’s orbit conjuncts with a planetary alignment in the Æthyric plane.”

  “Alignments on both planes open doorways between.” I stared at the photos in fascination. “But are these doors temporary? Only open during the alignment, or . . . ?”

  “Even if they were only open for a few hours of the earth alignment, it could be disastrous. All of the goetic information I can find on Chora jibes with what your incubus told us when he claimed that the duke controls two legions of Dragoons in the Æthyr. You remember the etching of that nasty Pegasus? Can you imagine what would happen if hundreds of Æthyric demonic warriors broke into our world riding beasts like that? What about thousands of them?”

  I remembered the pointy teeth and scales on Grand Duke Chora’s winged horse and grimaced. “And if these are permanent portals between the planes . . . ?”

  “Oh, we’re screwed.”

  “So we know what the ritual is, and why it’s happening now, and we know that the kids are part of it. What went wrong back in the eighties? Why didn’t the doors open back then?”

  “Maybe it had something to do with Cindy Brolin escaping.”

  “They had to go with a second choice.”

  “Maybe the second choice fouled up the ritual.”

  I tucked my legs sideways in the chair. “Merrin bit Cindy when he tried to take her. What if he made a pact with Chora to allow the demon to possess him back then? Maybe with Chora inside him, he was able to taste something in the blood that was needed to ensure the ritual’s success.”

  “It’s entirely possible. There’s been blood at some of the recent crime scenes.”

  “Lon,” I said, “if the ritual failed the first time, it stands to reason that the demon’s going to try harder this time. That’s why he’s going after transmutated descendants. It’s not revenge against the Hellfire Club—Dare’s wrong again. There must be something stronger in the blood of those kids. You told Dr. Spendlove that your empathy is stronger than it was in either of your parents’ knacks.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe it’s because children of transmutated parents have fortified demon essence,” I said quietly. “And maybe that’s really why Jupe’s knack is stronger.”

  Lon’s face fell.

  “It’s just a theory,” I said quickly. “But it might explain why the demon is choosing these kids this time around. And as much as all of this explains the ‘why’ of things—and no matter how much warding magick I did today—we need to find Merrin more than ever.”

  “He wasn’t possessed at the Silent Temple,” Lon argued.

  “But I’d bet my last caduceus that he knows who is.”

  While Lon retreated to the kitchen, deep in thought and a million miles away, I tracked down Jupe, moping in his room. His mountain of dirty clothes had been cut in half since yesterday. Mr. Holiday must’ve gotten fed up and hauled some away to be washed. My hedgie was now lounging on Jupe’s bed, gumming a hunk of banana.

  “You just missed out on some projectile pooping,” Jupe said, moving Mr. Piggy over.

  “Oh, darn.” Hedgehogs are sometimes overachievers. Mr. Piggy was trained to use a small litter box in my house, but was having trouble remembering it at Lon’s. Luckily he spent most of his time in Jupe’s room, who was totally fine with cleaning up hedgehog droppings. Score.

  “So, taxicab confession time,” I joked.

  “Huh?”

  “You have something salacious to tell me?”

  A faint smile crossed his lips. “It’s not that interesting.”

  I perched on the edge of his bed, moving his book bag to the floor. “Thank the gods for small miracles. Come on, now.” I patted the mattress. “Tell me.”

  He bit his lower lip and made a sour face. “Promise me you won’t tell my dad.”

  “I’m not lying to him.”

  “Okay, promise you won’t tell him if he doesn’t ask first.”

  I groaned. “Deal.”

  “Now promise you won’t get mad.”

  “If you don’t just go ahead and tell me, I’m going to get more than mad.”

  He shut his eyes, and for a second I nearly flipped out, thinking he was going to use his knack on me. But instead of straining with his fists, he merely grimaced and pulled the edge of his shirt up to reveal his stomach. Then he carefully tugged the loose waistband of his jeans down over his left hip, and I remembered his scratching problem.

  For a second, I didn’t know what I was looking at.

  Then I did.

  And it shocked me. Hard. Maybe worse than finding Bishop’s bones in the cannery. I was horrified . . . and thoroughly embarrassed.

  “Holy harlot.” I murmured. “Oh, Jupe, what have you done?”

  A soft choking noise drew my gaze upward to his face. Jupe’s big green eyes flooded with tears that quivered at the border of his thick lashes, ready to spill. Goddammit. Seeing him broken was worse that just about anything. Like a contagious yawn, it jump-started waterworks for me that I had to wrestle to hold back. Apparently all the magick I’d done that day had also stripped away my immunity to kid-crying.

  “I’m sorry,” he squeaked. One tear dropped, snaking down over his sharp cheekbone before cascading down his cheek.

  “Come here,” I commanded in a soft voice. “Let me see what you’ve done—but for the love of Pete, keep your boxers on.”

  He hiccuped, holding back a sob, and unbuttoned his jeans, shimmying them down to expose his entire left hip. The tattoo was so badly infected that most people probably wouldn’t have been able to make out the design. But I could.

  It was my personal sigil. My identifying mark as a magician. About two inches in diameter, the occult rose-and-moon symbol with my given middle name was now branded into his café au lait skin.

  “This is what you’ve been scratching at all week?”

  He nodded.

  “How long have you had it?”

  “Since a few days before we got mugged in the parking garage. After I got my cast taken off.” Which is exactly where he’d lifted the symbol—I’d sketched it onto his cast, feeling guilty that I’d been the one who inadvertently put him in the damn thing. It was one thing to casually mark it on his cast, but on his skin . . . You just don’t screw around with magical symbols there. I should know. The white sigils tattooed on my forearm were not for show.

  “Who the hell would tattoo a thirteen-year-old kid?”

  “Fourteen, in two days.”

  I swiveled him so I could study it, pressing my fingers against the surrounding swollen skin. He winced, and his skin burned with fever. Yet, despite the inflammation and the disgusting oozing, the ink underneath looked precise and sharp. Better than my sketching on his cast, and pretty damn accurate. “Who did it? Did they use clean needles?”

  “It’s not a prison tattoo, Cady. I’m not stupid.”

  I lifted my brows. “Really? You’re not? Because I’m having some doubts here.”

  He brushed away another tear, steeling himself. “It was Jack’s cousin, Kenji. He works at Dragonfire Ink, in the Village. He’s apprenticing, but he’s been doing it for two years.”

  “Isn’t there some law against tattooing minors?”

  He mumbled som
ething under his breath.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “I said, I used my knack on him, all right? It was the first time I tried it on purpose. There were two times before, but I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Okay, calm down.” So it was professional, not done by a bum in a back alley with dirty needles infected with hep C. Best to focus on the positives. “Did he tell you how to take care of it?”

  “He told me, uh, not to get it wet?” Jupe said this like he was guessing.

  “Did you?”

  “Just in the shower.”

  “That should be okay—”

  “And I went swimming in Jack’s pool once. The day after I got it.”

  I was pretty sure you were supposed to avoid swimming pools when you had a new tattoo, but still. “Have you been keeping it clean? What did you wash it with?”

  “Regular soap.”

  “Not the soap in your bathroom, I hope.”

  He smiled nervously.

  One time I almost used that soap to wash my hands then changed my mind when I saw all the grit and dirt packed around the pump. Probably teeming with boy-bacteria. Disgusting.

  “Little red dots were breaking me out after I swam in the pool,” he elaborated. “That’s when the itching started. So I used stronger soap to kill any bad stuff.”

  Stronger soap?

  “The stuff Dad uses outside.”

  “In the garage? Mechanic’s soap? That’s industrial heavy-duty grease cutter!”

  “Well, I know that now. It made it worse. I couldn’t stop scratching. It scabbed up and got all red and gross.” He pulled his boxers back up, then cried out when the fabric brushed against it. “It h-u-u-rts, Cady,” he whined dramatically.

  I sighed just as dramatically in response. “Why there, Jupe? It’s just inches away from . . .” Places I didn’t want to think about on him. I wrinkled up my nose, trying to drive away the disturbing image of all his future girlfriends getting an eyeful of my symbol at inopportune moments.

  “Where else was I going to get it without Dad seeing it?” He angrily kicked his book bag aside and flopped down on the bed next to me, morose and weary. “Better than on my ass.”

  True.

  “But why did you do it?” I asked, angling to face him. “You barely know me, Jupe. You don’t know anything about me.”

  He acted confused. “I know plenty about you.”

  “But not everything.” You don’t know what was bred into me with magick, or that my parents were killers, or that my real name isn’t Arcadia.

  “I know you hate ketchup. I know you make a weird dripping noise with your mouth when you fall asleep on your back. I know you always buy the wrong real estate when we’re playing Monopoly.”

  “That’s . . .”

  “I know you lost your parents,” he insisted quietly, “and I lost my mom. That makes us kinda the same in a way.”

  My voice caught in my throat. I started again. “My parents weren’t very good people.”

  “Neither is my mom.”

  Our shoulders touched as we leaned against each other, both quiet for a long moment. I glanced across the room, spying the promotional Halloween Tambuku mummy mug on a shelf. It sat next to a small statue of Frankenstein’s monster lying on an operating slab, a resin model he’d careful constructed and painted. He’d glued the legs on the slab backward.

  “It’s just that getting someone’s name tattooed on you is like a death sentence,” I finally said. “There’s a good chance you’re going to end up with a tattoo that you’ve got to get changed from Winona to Wino.”

  “But that only happens when you get your girlfriend’s name tattooed on you,” he insisted. “This is different. It’ll be fine.”

  My mind roamed back to Dare’s accusations the night before, when he said that Lon would get bored with me eventually. “Your dad and I are just dating, Jupe. What if we break up?”

  His face fell. “What are you talking about? You live here. You can’t break up with him.”

  “I don’t live here, I just—” Dammit, he was making me flustered. “Look, no one’s breaking up with anybody. I didn’t mean now.”

  “You better not mean later either,” he huffed, suddenly defensive. “My dad thinks this is serious.”

  “It is. Calm down.” I didn’t want to get into the messy business of relationships with him. He wouldn’t understand. Hell, I barely did myself. “Just forget about all that. What worries me most is that my sigil is a magical identifier. Having real symbols on you is dangerous. You know the seals on my arm are real. You know what I can do with them, right?” I flipped my arm over, exposing the inner flesh.

  He gingerly ran his fingertips over the raised scarring of the seals there, not for the first time. “That’s where I got the idea to put your seal on me,” he admitted. “You said this one”—he stopped above Priya’s seal—“was for your dead guardian spirit and you use the others for protection. You told me your sigil would protect me when you put it on my cast, so when I got the cast taken off . . .” He swallowed hard and finished in a tiny voice. “I didn’t want to lose your protection.”

  Oh.

  Dueling emotions revved up inside me, slammed down on the gas pedal, and collided into each other in one glorious wreck. Before I knew what was happening, my arms were around him and he was crying on my shoulder. “It’s okay,” I murmured.

  I couldn’t really remember ever comforting someone before. I certainly was never comforted much myself growing up. My parents were never “hands-on”—big surprise in hindsight.

  Despite my lack of experience, it somehow came naturally. As Jupe repeatedly told me he was sorry, I gladly absorbed his angst-ridden pain, selfishly appreciating that he was warm and his shampoo smelled good, and that his angular arms felt pleasantly familiar around me. Like Lon, but not. Same, but different. At that moment, it hit me like a ton of bricks that they were a package deal.

  If I was fully committed to Lon, then I had to accept that Jupe was part of that. I knew this, of course, but Lon and I didn’t exactly have a plan. One minute I was getting to know him, the next he was handing me a key to his house because “it’s just easier.” But even if Lon wasn’t vocal about the future, Jupe was already jumping ten steps ahead, marking himself as mine. Sure, the tattoo was a stupid, impulsive teenage mistake, but it said loud and clear that he was expecting me to stick around.

  It was easy to play house and enjoy the moment with both of them, not getting too close. But a person could do that only so long—could only test drive the car for so many miles before the dealer made you park it in the lot or buy it. There wasn’t a rent-to-own clause when a kid was in the picture . . . even one who was fourteen years old in two days.

  I rubbed his back and told him to hush, and he stopped clinging to me like we were in the middle of a whirlpool and he was saving me from spiraling away. He pulled back and sloppily wiped his wet face and snotty nose all over the front of his T-shirt.

  “Hey, Jupe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Have you ever used your knack on me?”

  His response was fast and emphatic. “No way.” Squinting up his tear-stung eyes, he added, “And you haven’t used magick on me, right?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Okay then.”

  Even without Lon there to evaluate his emotions, I believed him.

  “Your dad is going to wring both of our necks when he finds out.”

  Panic flicked over his face. “You promised not to tell.”

  “And I won’t, but you can’t hide it forever. He’s going to know. Besides, you should probably go see a doctor and get antibiotics. Or get a healer to pull out the infection. Did the Earthbound doctor who healed your arm when it was in a cast—”

  “Dr. Mick? No way! We can’t go to him. He’s friends with my dad!”

  “I know a healer who could probably take care of it, but if I took you to Bob, I’d have to tell Lon.”

&nbs
p; A low voice rumbled behind us, turning Jupe’s muscles to rock. “We’re not going to Bob.”

  Shit.

  Lon stood in Jupe’s doorway, slowly pushing the door all the way open with his fingertips.

  “How much did you hear?” I asked while Jupe ducked behind my back, using me as a shield.

  “All of it.”

  Ugh. That meant he heard me suggesting to Jupe that we might break up one day. I hoped he didn’t take that the wrong way. He’d been listening to our emotions too, right?

  Jupe peeped around my shoulder. “Are you mad?”

  Lon glanced from Jupe to me, and when our eyes met, his were tender. A little puffy, even. You’d think that he, of all people, would be resistant to Jupe’s infectious sobbing by now. Maybe not.

  “I’ll be mad if I cooked dinner for no reason,” Lon said at length, then joined us by the bed. “Let me look at it. After we eat, I’ll call Dr. Mick and see if he’ll let us drop by tonight.”

  Dr. Mick was on duty at the ER. While Jupe got his infected tattoo squared away, Lon and I sat in the waiting room. I nearly dozed off in my chair until Lon’s phone startled me fully awake. I watched his face while he answered the call. I knew it wasn’t good news, but when he closed his eyes and his head dropped, worry crept into my chest.

  He touched the screen to hang up, not bothering with good-bye, as usual.

  “Lon?”

  “It was Dare. A fifth kid, an hour ago. Mindy Green-burg.”

  I blinked, trying to remember the homes I’d visited earlier in the day. The Greenburgs—it was the last one on my route. I’d spoken with the father. “I warded her house,” I protested. Had I screwed something up? Was this my fault?

  Lon stared blankly across the waiting room. “She never made it inside the house. She was taken in the driveway. Her mother said that one second they were both getting out of the car; the next, she heard something in the bushes and her daughter was gone.”

  Outside the house. The ward didn’t work unless you were inside it. All that work, and it didn’t matter. I wanted to scream in frustration, but all that came out was a sob.

  “She goes to the public school,” he added in a fatigued voice. “She’s one of Jupe’s classmates.”