by Jenn Bennett
I nodded my head and swallowed. “Pretty much.”
“Well, do you want to summon her and ask?”
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“Before, when we didn’t know if we had the right one, I was going to summon any of the demons you researched to find out if they were present during the killings. Now I know it was Nivella, and to ask who originally summoned her, well, some Æthyric demons, especially the primordial ones—”
“They’re only obligated to answer truthfully one time.”
I nodded. “I don’t want to waste my only shot if I don’t have an audience. The Luxe Order isn’t just gonna take my word for it. I need them to witness it.”
He studied me quietly. “When are you going?”
“Tomorrow. Midday, I guess. It’s a seven-hour drive to San Diego.”
“I’ll make arrangements for Mr. and Mrs. Holiday to watch Jupe.”
I shook my head. “I’ve got to do this by myself. If something goes wrong, you can’t be in the middle of it—Jupe depends on you.”
His protest was interrupted by a soft crackling noise. A fine network of blue lines formed along the floor, walls, bookshelves …
“What’s going on?”
Lon sprang to his feet. “The house ward.”
The air distorted in front of us. Bits of smashed shards from the servitor’s clay doll crunched under my feet as Lon hauled me off the floor.
A soft white light appeared before us, one that quickly manifested into a wispy, floating figure. For the shortest moment, my heart leapt when I thought it was Priya, somehow miraculously reborn. Before disappointment fell, though, I realized that the being was familiar to me, even if I hadn’t seen it for a few years … my mother’s guardian.
“Scivina!” I cried out. “It’s okay, Lon. It’s just a projection from the Æthyr.”
Fragile, closed wings skimmed the shoulder tops of the Hermeneus spirit. Like Priya, Scivina was birdlike in the face, and vaguely human below. But where Priya had carried the face of a young owl with pointed ears and big eyes, Scivina’s was a hawk, fierce and proud. As projected images that never fully materialized on earth, they were both a translucent milky color, lacking color and definition.
Scivina’s halo appeared as a soft puff of cloud. She was calm, the epitome of service and decorum, as most guardians are. No emotion registered on her face at the sight of me. She blinked once, canting her head in greeting, then spoke in my head, like Priya used to.
Seléne, your mother requests your presence.
“When? Where?”
Anno IVXIX, Sol twenty-two degrees in Libra, Luna twenty-nine degrees in Aries.
“Gregorian calendar, please.”
Tomorrow night at ten thirty. The Luxe Order’s Sapphire Temple in San Diego. Do not be late. This is important.
“Yes, I’m headed there already. My parents will be there? Do they know about the council?”
I will tell them you have accepted the appointment and will prepare myself to locate you when you arrive. Do not enter the temple or approach anyone. It is not safe. Wait for me to find you, Scivina said before bowing her head.
“Wait! Tell them that I can prove their innoc—”
It was too late. Scivina dissipated without acknowledging my final words. The air wobbled and bent, then became still again.
A chilly dread began eating away at my chest. It is not safe. That warning had come from my mom. My parents were probably worried sick about me; they always were. But they didn’t know what I’d found. Didn’t know I could save them. Once they realized this, we could go up against the council together.
“Hmph,” Lon said. “I guess they do know about the Luxe mandate, huh?”
“You heard Scivina?”
He nodded. “Like I can hear people’s thoughts when I’m transmutated.”
“Maybe they’re planning to turn themselves in. I better get there a little early to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Seconds ticked by while neither one of us said anything.
“Nerves getting the best of ya?” Lon asked with a weak smile.
“I just want it to be over.”
“Stay here tonight,” he murmured.
“I need to take care of some things at my house.” I also needed a hot shower and a good, long nap.
“Then come back later tonight and stay here. Leave in the morning.” He intertwined his fingers with mine. “Please?” he amended.
There was no need to answer, I supposed, because he could probably sense that his proposal not only pleased me, but also ignited an unexpected tenderness that echoed deeper. Too bad it was all being drowned out by the worry coiling in my stomach.
34
Morning sun blinded me as I sneaked out of Lon’s bedroom. He was taking a shower, and I didn’t have the guts to drag out our good-byes. Dodgy feelings about the trip to San Diego trailed after me like an annoying child underfoot. He said when we woke that he didn’t have a dream flashback of my memories. I took it from his abrupt manner that he was either anxious about not having had one, or he was lying. I preferred to believe it was the former. If the caliph really wasn’t on my side, Lon wouldn’t dare let me walk into a bad situation unaware; I knew that much for sure, and it gave me some amount of solace.
Last night before I came back here, I left Riley with the instruction to be ready to leave when I returned. She acted genuinely sad to be going home to San Diego, but was overjoyed to be leaving the house. It was just after ten now, so I wanted to speak to Jupe before I left. When I’d come back here last night, he was asleep, so we hadn’t seen each other since that horrible night at his school.
With my tattered navy hoodie zipped to the neck, I shoved my hands in the pockets and shuffled silently along the hardwood floors of the second-story hallway. I tossed a look over the railing at the open living room below and desperately wished I could just chuck the whole trip and stay there.
Lon had told me Jupe’s room was three doors down. I’d been worried about Jupe hearing us the night before, but he assured me that the place was built like a fortress. I counted doorways, navigating my way past a bathroom and a guest room, then I found a closed door. A sign hung on it that displayed a still of Gene Wilder wearing a white lab coat. The sign read, DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR!
Pressing my ear against the blond wood, I listened for a second and heard rumbling chatter from a TV, so I knocked softly.
“Yep,” came the reply from within.
I cracked open the door a couple of inches. “Are you decent?”
After a short pause, Jupe answered, a little unsure. “Cady?”
I took that as a yes, so I pushed the door farther and leaned my head inside. Jupe was sitting up in his bed with wide eyes. He was wearing a faded Funkadelic Maggot Brain T-shirt and red pajama bottoms. He lit up like a Christmas tree when he saw me. I’d never felt so admired, but I tried not get too gooey about it.
“Hey, kid.”
“Cady! I tried to get my dad to let me call you on your cell but he said you were too busy so I called up your bar a couple of days ago but some bitchy woman answered so I hung up.”
He didn’t even take a breath when he spit all that out. My head was already spinning. “Uh, you probably got Kar Yee, then. She doesn’t have very good phone manners. Kinda like your dad,” I said with a smile.
His bed sat in the center of the room, a queen-size mattress resting on a low, modern platform a few inches off the floor. A corner of the bed was lit by a long slice of sunlight that streamed in from the large window above. I sidestepped over a hefty pile of books and magazines while evading another mound of dirty clothes to get there.
“How’s the arm?”
“It aches real bad when I don’t take the pain pills, but if I do take the pain pills then I forget that it’s broken and I do stupid stuff. I bumped it yesterday—on accident—and it hurt like hell.” Sitting cross-legged, he scooted back on the bed to make room for me. I plopped down
while he muted the volume on a large TV hanging on the wall across from us that was twice as big as mine at home.
“The cast is huge, Jesus,” I said.
“It’s heavy too—feel.” He tugged my hand so he could rest the elbow in my palm. “See.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty heavy. When do you get to take it off?”
“The human doctor at the emergency room said six weeks, but my real doctor’s Earthbound, and he said I can probably take it off in two, and he can heal it up the rest of the way himself then.”
“Being a demon sometimes has advantages.”
“I guess.”
I surveyed Jupe’s domain. Pretty big for a kid’s bedroom, but hard to tell from all the clutter. A door opened to a private bathroom on one side of the room. On the other, old movie lobby cards lined the walls, along with a signed poster of some Brazilian soccer star and another of Pam Grier as Foxy Brown. The wall in front of us supported floating shelves from floor to ceiling, each packed with neatly arranged vintage horror movie toys. A vertical series of three large black-and-white framed photographs hung nearby.
“Who are they?” I asked, pointing to the photos.
“Oh, that’s Aunt Adella.”
“Your mom’s sister?” I guessed.
“Yeah, and that’s my gramma. My dad took those this summer.”
Adella had a darker complexion than her sister, and a softer, rounder face. Strikingly pretty with a kind smile. My age, maybe a little older. Her hair was a mass of spiral, electric curls that stuck out just like Jupe’s, barely tamed by a wide polka-dot headscarf tied just above her forehead. A gray wisp of a halo was just visible. “Christ, you look like her.” More than his mother, even, just going from photos.
“Yeah, my hair, huh? Nose too. She’s so-o-o cool. You would love her. She’s supersmart and really funny. She emails me almost every day and I talk to her on Sunday nights,” he bragged, then added, “and I already told her all about you.”
An odd feeling tightened my chest. Something between embarrassment and pleasure. “You did?”
“Uh-huh.” He didn’t offer anything more, so I didn’t pry. “She asked me what I wanted for my birthday yesterday.”
He was totally fishing, but I took the bait. “When’s your birthday?”
“Next month. Halloween.”
“That’s pretty cool.”
He gave me a smug look. “I know, right? When’s yours?”
“Febru …” I paused. No, that was the actual Arcadia Bell’s birthday—the one I was used to spouting off on cue. I struggled for a moment to remember the real date. I hadn’t celebrated it in years. “Wow, I guess it’s tomorrow.”
“What? Tomorrow? Happy birthday! The big twenty-six, huh?”
“Twenty-five,” I corrected without thinking.
“I thought you were already twenty-five? That’s what my dad told me when I asked him.”
According to my fake driver’s license, I was. “Nope. Tomorrow.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me like he’d just discovered some salacious secret, then mumbled, “Talk about cradle robbing …”
I gave him a soft punch on his shoulder, then glanced back at the photos on the wall again. The last one was a shot of Adella and Jupe pretending to balance on a surfboard, their arms held out. They were both grinning.
“Those are the first photos I’ve seen of your dad’s—well, in person, anyway. At first I thought he only shot women in bikinis, but then I found his website and saw the other stuff, National Geographic covers and the local photos of the coast.”
“Yeah, he sells a ton of those in a shop down in the Village. You know how much people pay for some of them? The signed prints? Guess.”
“Uh …”
“A thousand dollars! Can you believe that? Who would pay that much for a photo of the stupid beach? All they have to do is walk outside and see it for free. Man, people are dumb.” Jupe shook his head and kicked several open video game cases off the side of the bed. God only knew where the games were or what shape they were in. “Wait a minute, why are you here so early?” He looked askance at me.
Busted. I had no idea what to say. On one hand, he might be angry or uncomfortable. Then again, he probably deserved honesty, and he wasn’t a child. But maybe it wasn’t my place to say anything at all. “Uh …” I hedged, trying to make up my mind.
Jupe’s pale green eyes widened. He looked away for a second, forehead wrinkled, then asked me straight up, “Did you stay here last night?”
“Kinda.”
“In the guest room?”
“Yes,” I answered quickly. I think it was the forcefulness of it that gave it away. All my well-cultivated lying skills seemed to be just out of reach.
“You stayed … with my dad?” He sounded like a gossip columnist uncovering the scandal of the year, shocked but titillated.
I squeezed my eyelids shut. “Maybe,” I said, then warily cracked one eye back open.
“Huh.” He sat back, wheels turning. “No one’s ever stayed over here before. Well, there was one lady, but my dad tried to sneak her out in the morning before I woke up. That was a couple of years ago. I guess he thought I was too young to see that. She never came back.”
“Hmm, well, you’re not weirded out about me staying here, are you?”
He contemplated this, then asked, “Do you like him?”
I nodded.
“I mean, do you like-like him?”
Lon’s whispered morning words still swirled in my head like a drug. Goose bumps blossomed over my arms and my neck became warm. I sighed, utterly defeated. “Yeah, Jupe. I like-like him. A lot, I think.”
A long pause stretched between us.
“Cool,” he finally said, grinning.
Whew.
“I’m just glad you gave him a second chance. He can be really dumb sometimes. I told him that if he didn’t apologize for acting like a dick that night at my school, he was the stupidest person in the world.”
“He kinda was a dick, wasn’t he?”
Jupe laughed, then gave me a confident look. “I set him straight. Don’t worry.”
I held up my hand. “Thanks for looking out for me.”
He smacked it with more force than I expected. “Anytime. Hey, wanna sign my cast?”
“Sure. Where’s a pen?”
He scrambled to snatch up a Sharpie that was sticking out from beneath his pillow and slapped it into my hand. I squirmed around to get into a better position and nearly knocked over a half-eaten bowl of Cheerios, wobbling in the covers at the foot of the bed. He was even more of a pig than I was.
On his cast were Mr. and Mrs. Holiday’s signatures, JACK in big, bold letters with a deformed Godzilla head drawing, and then in small, tidy print, a string of sentences that wound around the plaster near his wrist. “What’s all this?” I asked.
“Pfft. My dad thinks he’s funny.”
I leaned in and read it aloud. “IMPORTANT REMINDERS. One: I will not jump on the bed pretending to be a rock star and break my other arm. Sound advice,” I agreed with a smile. “Two: I will not leave dirty dishes in my room.” I looked at the cereal bowl. “Well, that one sure didn’t stick, did it?”
“That bowl’s only been in here a few minutes. It doesn’t count,” he argued with a grin. “Especially if I get it back down to the kitchen before he sees it.”
I shook my head and continued reading. “Three: I will only ask one question at a time. Four: I will not leave the freezer door open overnight and force my dad to throw away all the food inside and mop up the floor while I’m at school. Five: I will not call the dog a f**ktard.” Two bright red stars censored the word.
Jupe snorted loudly in amusement, and giddy peals of laughter incapacitated me for a few moments. He joined in halfway through, giggling like a fool. I had to force myself to stop.
“All right, all right, all right,” I said between breaths, fanning my face. After a brief string of hiccups, Jupe finally calmed enough for me to
sign his cast.
I drew a circular, flat open rose with three tiers of petals and a crescent moon cradling it below. Jude watched in fascination and—miraculously—waited until I was finished to speak.
“What in the world is that?”
“It’s my personal symbol … as a magician.”
“You have a symbol?”
“Yep.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means Moon Rose. That’s my middle name, Aysul. It’s Turkish.”
“Whoa. Is that a Turkish symbol above the wheel thingy?”
“No, that’s my sigil. And it’s not a wheel, it’s a rose. See, these three inner petals in the inside represent alchemical elements. The seven petals around those represent the classical planets, and the outer petals contain the twelve signs of the zodiac. Twenty-two petals total.”
“Twenty-two,” he repeated, tracing the rose with his finger.
“It’s an important magical number. It’s the number of paths on the Tree of Life in Qabalah, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and the number of cards in the Tarot’s major arcana.”
“Cool.”
“So, now you have my symbol, and that means you have my protection.”
“Whoa,” Jupe murmured.
“I’m real sorry about the mess that put you in that cast,” I said. “Your dad wasn’t being a dick about wanting to keep you safe. He had a right to be angry at me. It was my fault.”
“Don’t worry. I was never mad about that. You’re pretty strong. That was like an old-school wrestling move—you should be a luchadora!” An honest smile softened his face and lifted a huge weight from my shoulders.
I grinned back at him, suddenly much happier. “You, my friend, are insane.” Without thinking, I ran a quick hand through his springy curls. He leaned into my hand with the enthusiasm of a dog being scratched behind the ear.
“Will you teach me how you did that invisible spell? Because that was the best part of the whole night. I told Jack about it but he didn’t believe me. He thinks magick isn’t real.”
I tightened the cap on the marker and handed it back. The dread that I’d kept at bay in the hideout of Jupe’s room returned, bringing with it an aching sense of sadness. “To tell you the truth, Jupe, sometimes I almost wish it weren’t.”
