Kindling The Moon

by Jenn Bennett

  I licked dry lips. “I had been, but I’m feeling pretty drained from that binding.”

  “Maybe you should wait and try them tomorrow. If this Riley Cooper person was able to bargain with that Pareba to track you down, you might be in more danger than you thought. Maybe you should take the time to ward yourself first. If you’re dead, who’s going to help your parents?”

  He was right, of course.

  “And if you don’t mind,” he added, “I’d like to watch you summon them. I’ve never seen it done before.”

  “Sure. But only if you tell me what you have seen and done as far as magic goes.”

  He nodded once. “Deal. Get some rest. I’ll continue looking through goetias tomorrow and let you know what else I find.”

  “Thanks, Lon.”

  He sniffled and glanced back at the SUV. “Better get him home and into bed. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  I watched him retreat down my driveway and get in the car. Jupe’s lanky form slipped through the seats as he took my place up front while Lon drove away. As the red taillights disappeared, a final reminder of the Pareba demon’s red eyes, I felt an unwelcome hollowness settle in my chest.

  Though I wasn’t comfortable accepting help from other people, I wasn’t too proud to listen to good advice, and Lon was right about protecting myself. But that was easier said than done, since I didn’t even know what or who the enemy was. The Pareba demon had given me a name: Riley Cooper. That was a good place to start.

  An hour of internet searches gave me squat on any Riley Cooper with occult affiliations. But a lot of magicians used alternate names; Bob Smith the VP might not want his corporate colleagues to know about his occult leanings on the weekends, so he’ll be known as Frater Wolverine in his order. Some occult organizations even issued new names to members who achieved higher grades. And in the E∴E∴, only the highest-ranking officers had access to members’ actual surnames.

  After assessing my options, I figured if Riley Cooper had used magick to track me down, then I would do the same in return. And now that I had her name, I decided that a servitor was the easiest way to find her.

  Servitors are Heka boomerangs: roving balls of focused magical energy that I can shoot out into the world. They’re able to perform simple but mindless tasks, like remote viewing and spying, information gathering.

  Creating servitors is an advanced skill that most magicians never master. My parents thought they were too risky and hard to control, so they discouraged me from learning about them; despite this, after I was on my own, I taught myself the basics through trail and error.

  First, I needed a physical vessel to anchor the Heka. I stockpiled a supply of crudely sculpted clay dolls for this purpose; only a few inches tall, they looked like miniature versions of the First Emperor of Qin’s Terracotta Army. Whenever I needed to send out a servitor, I’d draw an appropriate sigil related to its task on the body of one of the dolls. Then it was just a matter of conducting a simple life-giving spell. The servitor itself didn’t look like much, just a loosely humanoid shape made of light. Once charged, it would emerge from the clay doll like a tiny fairy and be on its merry way to do my bidding.

  To ensure that the servitor returned to me, I had to keep the clay doll safe. After creating and sending out a servitor to locate Riley Cooper, I stashed the doll in my pocket and put it out of my mind; it might take a day or so for it to return from its mission.

  After I faked my death with my parents, I was terrified that Luxe or another order would use servitors to track me down, but it never happened. The caliph thought it might be whatever my parents had bred into me during my conception—that my energy was hard to track. Or maybe it was all the magick I did to keep myself hidden. There were dozens of minor wards that would protect someone from being found by another magician’s servitors, and if Riley Cooper was able to control that Pareba, I should expect resistance. But I had to at least try; maybe I’d get lucky.

  Creating a servitor to track down Riley Cooper exhausted me, so I slept for a few hours, thinking I’d eventually call Lon and find out if he still wanted to watch me summon the albino demons he’d found. However, I woke up early the next morning with a left-field idea that made me change my plans.

  Shortly after my parents and I went into hiding, the Black Lodge slayings were the subject of several talk shows featuring guests who were loosely connected to the killings—mostly former police officers who profiled serial killers and occult “experts.” But two people caused a minor uproar: Mr. and Mrs. Tamlin, former members of the Luxe Order.

  On a popular talk show, the Tamlins claimed that the killings were done by a big, bad horned demon. In the human public’s mind, this was the equivalent of saying that they’d been committed by Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster. Their claim was ignored, but they were so insistent and quirky that their five minutes of fame became a popular internet clip for several months. A few parodies even popped up, along with creatively edited versions featuring comical music.

  The Tamlins might have been ridiculed by the public and dismissed by the authorities, but they’d also been booted from the Luxe organization. This fact was only mildly interesting to me back when my only concern was staying hidden; but now that my family’s lives were on the line, I was willing to exhaust every thread of possibility that might get me one step closer to finding the albino demon. And just maybe the Tamlins lost their membership because they had actual information that Luxe wanted to cover up.

  I did some quick research and discovered that the Tamlins were now living in San Francisco, only a couple of hours north of Morella. I gave them a call in the morning, posing as a reporter covering the recent appearance of the Duvals on the security tape in Texas. I said that I believed their story from years ago and wanted to speak with them in person. Surprisingly, Mrs. Tamlin agreed immediately and asked me to come before dinner … which was at four. Some days I hadn’t even eaten breakfast by that time. But I consented and made the trip north in a rental car.

  I arrived in San Francisco around three and threaded through a couple of beautiful old neighborhoods until I found their address at the bottom of a long hill in Noe Valley. Even though I loved the Bay Area, I detested parallel parking on steep inclines; in my new rental car that had a spiffy park-assist feature, though, I felt a little invincible. And with my deflector charm on a new chain and the large ward that I’d drawn on the hood of the rental car in clear ink, I also felt safe. Well, somewhat.

  I staked out a parking space up the hill, then made my way back to the Tamlins’ address on foot. It was a small, blue Victorian row house with bay windows and crackled white trim. The front stoop was in disrepair and the windows were dirty.

  After knocking, I stepped back as locks clicked. A tiny elderly woman peered from behind a cracked door, then smiled when she saw me and opened it. With white hair pinned in a bun, she was dressed in a pink sweater and had a painful-looking hump on her upper back. She squinted up at me in the afternoon sun.

  “Hello,” I said with a smile. “Are you Mrs. Tamlin?”

  “I am. Are you the reporter?”

  “Yes, Amy Smith.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Come in, won’t you?” Mrs. Tamlin led me through a narrow entry into a formal living room and called out to her husband. “Frank! The girl on the phone is here.”

  A tired grunt came from another room, and shortly after, Mr. Tamlin emerged. Not much taller than his wife, Mr. Tamlin was a bald man with thick white eyebrows. He sported a red polka-dot bow tie.

  “Frank, this is …” She looked up at me apologetically.

  “Amy,” I finished, and held out my hand.

  “Oh.” He looked me over, then said with profound disappointment, “A blonde.”

  I’d worn a long wig and glasses to complement my new role as reporter. Better safe than sorry.

  “She’s not here for your entertainment, Frank,” Mrs. Tamlin said angrily. “Angie, please sit. Would you like tea?”

  Ang
ie, Amy. It didn’t really matter. I declined her offer of tea and sat in the worn armchair she offered as they slowly sank into a pink love seat across from me.

  “Where did you say you were from?” she asked once they got settled.

  “Sacramento.”

  “Oh, yes. We’ve never been there. More familiar with the southern part of the state.”

  “That’s right; you haven’t lived in San Francisco all your life, have you?”

  “No, we’re from San Diego. After we left the Luxe Order, though, there was no reason to stick around there. Our grandchildren live up here and in Portland.”

  “Speaking of the Luxe Order, can you tell me exactly why you left?” This seemed as good a place to start as any.

  “Oh, we were dismissed,” Mrs. Tamlin said.

  “Kicked out was more like it,” Mr. Tamlin corrected. “Over forty years in the order, and the bastards refused to stand by us after we appeared on that talk show.”

  “Because you told the truth?”

  “What? No. Because we”—his fingers curled to make air quotes—“embarrassed the organization and broke our vows of silence. That’s what our discharge letter said.”

  I crossed my legs and tried to breathe in through my mouth instead of my nose; the room smelled musty. “On the talk show, you said that a demon killed the three victims of the Black Lodge slayings.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Tamlin agreed, her eyes fixing on mine challengingly. “Do you believe in demons, Anna?”

  “I believe anything is possible.”

  Together they gave me identical, slow smiles. Really creepy smiles. These people were part of the reason that occult practitioners had a bad public image.

  “You never said exactly how you knew that a demon did it,” I noted. That was primarily because they spent all their on-air time yelling back and forth with the studio audience, trying to convince them that demons really existed. UFOs and demons were equal in the minds of savages—just conspiratorial BS. Anyone who cried demon or claimed to be abducted by spaceships was gullible or uneducated at best.

  Mr. Tamlin leaned forward to pick through a small crystal bowl of colorful hard candy that stuck together in clumps; I wondered how old it was. “We knew it was a demon because we were there when Magus Dempsey was killed.”

  Magus Dempsey was the third murder victim, the head of a small Portland organization called Societas Mysterium Anglia. I’d counted on the Tamlins to relay bits of gossip about the fourth botched murder attempt at the Luxe temple—their own order’s temple in San Diego—but I hadn’t expected them to be witnesses to the third murder. What in the world were they doing in a rival order’s temple?

  “Was that known publicly?” I asked. “Because I thought you were witnesses to the Luxe attempt—the fourth incident.”

  “That damned talk show,” Mr. Tamlin said. “Their producers got the information wrong. We weren’t there during the fourth attempt.”

  “But the talk show aired after the Duvals were killed in the car accident,” I pointed out. “Why did it take you so long to come forward?”

  Mrs. Tamlin sighed heavily. “The killer cast some sort of confusion spell on us after Magus Dempsey was murdered. We found a sigil drawn in sand on our doorstep when we got back home from the crime scene. Not soon enough, though. We both stepped through it before we noticed it. As soon as we did, wham! All the events got muddled.”

  “We didn’t even remember the murder for weeks. Once memories started trickling in and we realized we’d been crossed, it took us more than a month to shake off the spell,” Mr. Tamlin explained. “We tried everything to clear the fog. All that magical talent in Luxe, and would you believe that not one of the officers could remove that damned spell? In the end, we finally got an old hoodoo priestess to do a successful uncrossing.”

  “After she removed the spell, all our memories came back sharp as a tack. That’s when we told the Luxe leader everything that happened a few days before he was attacked.”

  Uh-huh. I was beginning to doubt my bright idea to interview this couple. “So you told him at that time that you’d witnessed the third murder?”

  “Not the murder itself,” Mr. Tamlin admitted. “But we did walk in shortly after.”

  “Can you explain in detail what you saw and who was present?”

  Still poking around the bowl of hard candy, Mr. Tamlin finally found the piece he wanted and struggled to pry it away from another. “Sure. I’ll tell you exactly what we told Luxe. We drove up to Magus Dempsey’s house early in the evening—”

  “But Magus Dempsey was head of a rival organization, not the Luxe Order,” I argued. “Why were you at his house?”

  “Yes, he was the head of the Portland order. His daughter married our second son. We were good friends.”

  Interesting. If anyone from the E∴E∴ married someone from another occult order, it would be scandalous. It surprised me that Luxe wasn’t the same way. I knew our order was definitely more of an old-world organization, and that others were more liberal, but still, who knows? Maybe all that crap my parents wanted to do with their United Occult Order plan would have been more universally accepted than I’d imagined.

  “Like I was saying, we had flown in to meet him for our quarterly ghost-banishing ritual. He had terrible problems with ghosts, you see—”

  Oh, Mother of God. Them too? Come on, folks; it’s just imps. Say it with me: There are no such things as ghosts. Sometimes I really wished other people besides Earthbounds could see what I could.

  “—and when we rang the doorbell, Magus Dempsey didn’t answer, so we walked inside. Saw him split in two on the living room floor. His body was lying in front of a demon that was being forced back into the Æthyr inside a binding triangle. Enola and Alexander Duval were standing beside it, and another fellow.”

  What? My parents were there? My heart began racing. There were too many questions I wanted to ask them at once. I tried to stay calm and work through them. “I wasn’t aware that the Duval couple was present at any of the killings—only the attempted fourth murder of the Luxe head in San Diego. Are you sure it was them?”

  “Oh yes, we were quite sure,” Mrs. Tamlin said. “Everyone in the magical community knew who they were. They had several occult books published in the 1980s and ’90s. Let’s see, The New Aeon and You, that was an early one. Why Magick Matters, that was popular.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of their publishing career,” I said impatiently, cutting her off before she recited every title they’d written.

  “Well, that’s how we recognized them—their photo was on the back of all their books.”

  That was true. I knew that during that time, my parents were representing our lodge in a series of annual occult meet-ups around the country. Plus, they were on friendly terms with Magus Dempsey. So maybe they really were present during the third murder; it still didn’t mean that they were guilty.

  “So, you walked in and recognized the Duvals, but who was the third person?”

  “Wish we knew,” Mrs. Tamlin said wistfully.

  “We only saw him for a second or two,” Mr. Tamlin confirmed. “He was turning to run out the door.”

  “And probably headed straight to our house to lay down that confusion spell,” Mrs. Tamlin added.

  “Did you have any contact with the Duvals after this? Do you know if they’d been crossed by the same confusion spell?” I wasn’t even sure if I believed them, but spells like that did exist, and it would certainly explain why my parents never mentioned being present during the Dempsey murder: Maybe they didn’t remember it.

  Her husband shrugged. “We never talked to them again. It’s not like they’re in the phone book.” Hardly. Even when we weren’t on the run from the law, my parents kept a low profile. My mom used to be a marketing manager; back then she publicly used her maiden name, Artaud. After my parents were accused of the murders, dozens of her former coworkers came forward to bitch about how they were now scarred for life that t
hey’d been working with a serial killer. Never mind that she’d been one of their favorite colleagues.

  Mr. Tamlin continued. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if that strange man had cast the same spell on the Duvals. They didn’t know who he was either. They were just there to meet with Magus Dempsey and had walked in a few seconds before we did.”

  “We were all shocked and trying to figure out what to do,” Mrs. Tamlin said. “There’s something called the Code of Silence among magical orders—”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that,” I said.

  “Well, it applies not only to the work we do in our order, but it also prevents us from talking to outsiders about order business.”

  I scratched the edge of my wig; it was starting to get itchy. “But surely that doesn’t apply when it comes to murder.”

  Mr. Tamlin shook his head. “We discussed it with the Duvals and agreed to share what we’d seen with heads of our orders—let them decide how they wanted to proceed. We called the police anonymously and parted ways.”

  Unbelievable. I knew all orders operated outside the law, but this was insane.

  “What did the third man look like?” I asked. “Can you describe him?”

  “He was a young gentleman with white hair—”

  “Blond hair,” Mr. Tamlin corrected. “Was it blond?” his wife replied, poking a finger inside her bun to scratch her head. “Yes, maybe you’re right. Anyway, he was much younger than us, dressed in his ritual robes.”

  “Oh? Ritual robes? What color?”

  “Blue, I think,” Mr. Tamlin replied as he enthusiastically sucked on his candy.

  “No, the robes were definitely black,” Mrs. Tamlin said impatiently.

  “It was dark,” her husband said. “There were candles lit. The room was prepared for our ghost-cleansing ritual. All the furniture was moved back as it usually was.”

  “What were the Duvals wearing?”

  He shrugged. “Everyday clothes. Enola was wearing a short skirt, I remember that much. What a looker that gal was. Dark brown hair, long sexy legs—”

  “Frank, keep it in your pants, why don’t you?” Mrs. Tamlin scolded, much to my satisfaction. That’s my mom you’re talking about, you dirty old man.