Over time, she came into possession of a vast working knowledge of magical artifacts, their specifications, their uses, their limitations. She also came to know the wizards who wanted to use them.
Maybe more accurate to say she learned their types: the art of magic was truly a multi-disciplinary field, encompassing a vast array of practices and practitioners. The biggest classification, of course, was Natural mage versus Scholar wizard—those who were born into an inherent ability for magic as opposed to those non-magic folk who studied the art and learned to manipulate the power of the ley.
It generally made no difference at all, in the long run; what mattered was the wizard’s devotion to the art. Either one practiced and became skilled, or one didn’t. Being a Natural, or a “Natch” as had become popular to say, didn’t necessarily mean better. Aerie knew plenty of scholars who could give her a run for her money when it came down to it.
There were also the non-human magical folk. For some reason, there was plenty of strong opinion in the community about who mattered and who didn’t, and it was often the non-humans who suffered the most. Some, like Mrs. Draconal and her fire-breathing brethren, learned to shape-shift in order to blend in. Better to hide a difference than to lead a movement for equal rights.
Blending in was something the Elemental folk had difficulty doing because their differences weren’t as easy to disguise. They did not shape-shift, as did the dragons. They chose to remain in the open because of their ethics and their pride.
And, because the law forbade them to conceal their otherness.
Few Elemental folk came into the shop looking to lease an artifact. They had no need for them, being more like artifacts unto themselves. The non-human clients that patronized the shop were more like Draconal—dragons who wished to augment their powers to amass greater wealth, dwarves who needed equipment to run their mines, or any other sort of magical beast who needed a leg-up in the Twenty-first Century. Technology wasn’t the answer to every problem.
While non-human wizards made for interesting people-watching, it was the plain old human wizards, with their schemes and their secrets and their personality traits, that fascinated Aerie the most. She taught herself how to read people at a young age, a skill that became increasingly helpful in her eventual line of work. She even developed a knack for picking out those wizards who posed potential liabilities in their contracts.
Pop contracted with them all the same, even after Aerie began sharing her intuitions. Was it that he didn’t listen to her, considering her too young or inexperienced?
Or did he trust her assessment, sensing a doubled return on his investment when he could all but bank on repossessing the contracted item later?
“Child.” The clearing of a throat and a gravelly voice interrupted her musings. Greysen. He’d never venture into the vault, not even under duress. The wards on this room rubbed against his magical grain. Although he never explained what would happen if he pressed through the wards, he’d made it clear to her the results would be dire. “Come out, so we may speak.”
“In a moment.” She set the box on the utility cart. “Let me get this put away.”
Opening the box, she peered in at the bubble-wrapped lump a moment before circling her fingers. “Reveal switch.”
A faint glow pulsed through the translucent plastic. She carefully pulled the tape off and removed it, unwrapping the relic. It looked like a pocket-watch surrounded by an electric-charged soap bubble. Tiny streaks of lightning swirled across the surface of the globe. A tiny nub glowed near the top, the source of the lightning.
Circling, she tapped the nub with her thumbnail. The containment spell dissipated, popping in a splash of dripping sparks, and the relic dropped into her waiting palm.
Without the spell, it felt as heavy as a simple pocket watch, rather than a pair of steel-toed boots.
Scanning the packing slip, she located the description and classification and copied them onto the receiving log. Witchball
Yikes, she thought. This would have to go in the back section, where the other potentially destructive things were kept. Those things were never for sale. Pop said some things had to be collected and kept so they wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. This was definitely one of those things.
As she walked to the rear corner, she tried to imagine what might happen if the wrong sort of spell were cast in here. One wrong spell might set them all off, like a lit match tossed into a pile of dynamite.
The destruction would be immense, despite the containment wards. But it was the loss of the treasures, more than the loss of the building—heck, the neighborhood—that alarmed her the most.
Setting the witchball down onto an empty slot, she noted the location tag and trotted back to jot it down on the receiving log before leaving the vault.
“I’m out, Greysen.” She swung the heavy door shut and glanced around the sales floor. “What do you need?”
He handed her a file folder. “Would you be kind enough to reconcile these shipping charges for me? I cannot locate the original invoices.”
“No problem.” She took the file but lingered. “Can I ask you something? How does a spirit turn into a demon?”
Greysen nodded and removed his glasses. “Are you asking from a scientific perspective, or a faith-based one?”
“Scientific, of course.”
He gestured to indicate she should follow him back to the counter and drew forward a stool so that she might sit. His pale eyes caught the light in a peculiar way, the irises glinting like diamond dust. “Well…a spirit is the metaphysical remnant of energy that continues to exist after the corporeal mechanism is exhausted.”
“It’s called a body, Grey.” Aerie suppressed a grin.
“Yes, I know.” He sounded sullen. “I simply don’t like that word.”
“Like…moist?”
Greysen shivered in response, a weird thing to see considering he was Stone and didn’t have a lot of wiggle-room in terms of flexibility. “Refrain from using such language.
She fluttered her eyelashes, feeling a bit wicked. Pretty much any water-related word gave him the heebie-jeebies. She just got a kick watching him squirm. “Sorry.”
He cast a glance at her that said he knew that she teased and he wondered when/if she’d ever grow up. The Otherworlder had the patience of a saint. Or, at least, a saint’s statue. “When a human dies, the spirit is quantified in terms of moral content.”
“Which is totally scientific,” she said, snorting.
“Actually, yes. It is. The binary code for right versus wrong has been extensively calculated—”
“Um, Grey?”
“And after applying a long, boring, math-filled equation…” Greysen didn’t roll his eyes, but he may as well have. “A final calculation determines whether the spirit is damned. If declared damned, it is constrained to Hell and becomes reclassified to demon-class.”
Now, for the questions whose answers truly mattered. She drew a deep breath. “And mages?”
“If that person is magic in ability, they become a rank-and-file demon.” Greysen bowed his head.
She rubbed her mouth, choosing her next words, and digging deep for the courage to say them. “How bad do you have to be to get damned?”
“I am sure it isn’t your own soul you’re searching.”
She gave him a weak smile. “Am I so transparent?”
He folded his hands and pondered her. “I cannot say that I knew your mother. When I crossed into the Mortal Plane, this shop, your father, and you were already here.”
“So, you don’t know if she…”
“Child, I have learned something living amongst your people. Your insides rarely match your outsides. But I have observed that, more often than not, offspring breed true.”
She stood, suddenly needing something to do with her hands. She paced a few anxious steps away, her insides tighter than guitar strings. �
�They…do?”
“Indeed.”
“So, if a parent is not the best person, their kid…”
“May not be the best person, either.”
“That’s what I thought you meant.” She nodded firmly, as if to convince herself. It was one thing to hear criticism from a guy like Pop, but Greysen, somehow, was harder. “Okay. I was just making sure.”
“One can never be sure, Aerie. Which is why I might subscribe to the theory that perhaps the spirit inside that particular amulet was mistakenly Hell-bound.”
“Mistakenly?” She whirled on him so fast she nearly upset a display. “Either you’re damned or you’re not. How is a mistake even possible?”
“The easiest explanation is magical interference. That is an Asmodeus amulet, purported to have been created by John Dee, himself. It is specifically tuned to work the demonic ley. It would not require a spirit be damned before harnessing it. A spirit can be…altered, provided the conditions.”
“You mean, morphed.”
“I believe that is the colloquial term, yes.”
“This amulet…” She traced the edge where it joined the skin, noting that she felt the touch, as if the amulet shared her skin nerves. “What are the chances that could be the case with this one?”
“No one but the Divine can say. Or perhaps, one only needs examine the offspring, who has bred true. I know you, Aerie.” He urged her to look at him. “And I know your father. It is difficult for me to believe you could be a daughter of the damned.”
His expression lightened, and her heart lightened, with it. The Otherworlder never smiled, exactly, his features seeming to be carved more from granite than flesh. To know what he felt, one had to look at his eyes, and she knew his eyes very well. And his eyes told her what her heart needed to hear.
So, there was hope, then, even if hope was an extrapolation of data with long-shot odds. A guy with a grudge might tell her whatever it took to give up the amulet, but Greysen wouldn’t lie.
The not-demon divinity test result, the inherent magic involved—those things pointed to manipulation. Manipulation meant morphing and morphing might be a process that could be stopped.
“You have more questions, I know. However. I think the answers you seek are his to give, not mine.”
Just what she wanted. A nice long chat with her father about dear old mom. “Yeah, well, you don’t know how hard it is talking to him sometimes.”
“Perhaps it is difficult being a parent, knowing one’s daughter is grown and capable and no longer in need of parenting. All beings try very hard to hold on to the life we know. Changes threaten the world order we create for ourselves.” Greysen dropped his gaze. “And choosing to change is the most difficult choice any being must make. Change does not guarantee results. It is more of a random outcome generator.”
“Yuck. More math.”
“Unfortunately, mathematics form the structure of physics, and physics rule the atoms of the universe. Additionally, if you don’t talk to your father, the possibility of your finding the truth about the spirit within your amulet is quite close to zero.”
She chewed her lip. “Yeah, I guess. I just don’t want to give this thing another opportunity to go at him.”
“Perhaps…you are not the only one who needs answers.” He gestured to the file in her hands. “Don’t keep your father waiting.”
Nodding and flashing a half-hearted grin, she trotted upstairs to the office and set the folder on top of the file cabinet.
“Hey, Pop?” Without being invited to do so, she pulled a chair from the wall and sat down. “I want to know about Dez.”
He turned off the monitor and swiveled, the chair creaking under the sudden shift in weight. “What has she told you?”
“Nothing. I’m not talking to her.” She shrugged and scratched the back of her head. “I mean, I’m trying not to listen. I’m confused. When she takes over—”
“Aerie, this isn’t your fault.”
“It is. You can say it. I’m used to hearing it, anyway. I just wanted—why did she leave us?”
“I told you.” He crossed his hands over his belly and rocked. “She went rogue.”
“The whole story. I deserve to know. All I know is how terrible she was, how nagging and know-it-all and bossy and hard to live with—”
“Look, it’s easy to villainize someone when they aren’t around. I was angry. I wanted to blame someone for what happened.” He leaned forward, wearing an odd look. Odd, because the lines around his eyes and mouth had taken on weight. It was sadness, and it seemed not at home on his face. “She was a powerful witch. The most powerful I’d ever met. Even as a child, I knew you’d be just like her—”
“Yeah.” She crossed her arms and grumbled. “Demonically possessed and utterly hated for turning the whole world upside down.”
“No, nothing like that. Like I said. Maybe I made her sound worse than she was. I remember—” A brief smile lightened the burden of his expression. “I remember her magic. I spent hours at the park, watching the two of you play together. How she made you laugh with her glamours. So real, so effortless. You wouldn’t even think it was magic. But…she—had an accident.”
Enough of the trip down memory lane. Aerie didn’t have any room to spare for emotional baggage. “Greysen said you bound her.”
“You know I’m not good with the whole ‘dad’ thing. I just couldn’t figure out how to tell you. There was never a good time to just come out with it.”
“Now is a good time.”
“Yeah. I guess it is.” He composed himself. “There was an accident and I—suspended her. Magically.”
“With an Asmodeus amulet, Pop. Why would you use a demonic amulet to hold her?”
“I was desperate.” He scratched the side of his head, looking very uncomfortable. “I grabbed the first thing strong enough to hold her intact. I didn’t have time—”
He raked back his hair, looking totally off-center. “I needed to find a way to protect her until I could undo the damage. It was only temporary. And I had everything I needed. At least, I did.”
He looked at her, a furtive glance. “Until it was lost.”
“The book.” Her voice was tiny and squeezed under the sudden weight of a lifetime of guilt and blame. Now, it wasn’t some crummy old book. It was the key to her mother’s salvation.
“Yes. The grimoire. That’s why it meant so much to me.” He took her hand. “Because it means so much to us.”
His touch was meant to comfort her. She was too messed up to feel anything of the sort. Right now, she only felt like dirt.
Tugging her hand free, she got up and went to the file cabinets, fiddling with Greysen’s invoices. “You mean, mom could have been saved if I didn’t lose it?”
“She still can be. You know how important it is, now. If you can remember…”
“I can’t. Don’t you think I tried? I tried every spell, everything. I would do anything to get it back just so that—”
“So that?”
“So that you’d, you know. See me. Who I am. What I can do. Not what I did, some stupid mistake when I was too young to remember.” She snuffled and scrubbed her nose with her cuff. “You don’t see me. And now, you hired Jels, makes me feel even more invisible. You know our history.”
“Look. Relationships don’t work out, especially when you’re that young.”
“It wasn’t a relationship, Pop.” She yanked open the top drawer, flipping through receiving logs. “He wasn’t my boyfriend.”
Charles looked confused. “Then why…”
“Because he made me think he was. Okay? Because he made me think that he liked me. And I trusted him. And I let him—make a fool of me.”
“But that was so long ago.”
No, it wasn’t. Sure, the distance could be measured in years at this point; to any bystander, it really was “so long ago.”
But to someone who lived it—to someone who’d been immersed in the original trauma—there was
no separation. It was a constant re-living of events, in dreams, in waking moments, in high-stress situations when the mind was overwhelmed and lost its defensive capabilities to block out the undesirable memories.
To someone who lived it, it was always “now” and a pervasive fear coated each and every moment with a sick sense of “could be again”.
Pop wasn’t a psychologist. He wasn’t even an intuitive parent. Such discussions about trauma and fear would only lead to reductive comments of you can’t let it defeat you or you’re stronger than that on a good day or get over it and quit acting like a victim when he was in one of those moods.
No matter the day, it was simply better to keep those things to herself. Talking wouldn’t help, not with him. “It doesn’t feel like it. And he’s still just so—barbaric.”
“Ignore him. He’ll be out in the field most of the time, anyway. Not like you’ll see much of each other.”
She slammed the drawer shut, jostling a loose file from the top of the cabinet and sending a flutter of pages to the floor. “You don’t get it!”
“I do.” He huffed, but scolded her only with a reprimanding look. “I didn’t send you after the amulet because I know it’s dangerous. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“But you’d send him.”
“I don’t care about him. Not like I care about you. I would never put you in harm’s way.”
“But I do get in harm’s way, every time you send me out—”
“And you train for it, and you are smart and powerful. And every assignment makes you stronger. You’ll get through this, too. I promise.”
“Pop? This accident. The one that happened to mom. Did someone do it to her?”
He held her gaze for several long, silent moments before he swallowed, his throat bobbing, and nodded.
“A very, very bad man.” Charles busied himself reorganizing the already-tidy stacks of folders on the edge of his desk. “Now, go get changed. You’ve got blood on your collar. I don’t want you upsetting Greysen. He’s already worked up.”
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