by Jenn Bennett
Years of lukewarm relationships, noncommittal and joyless, lined my stomach like a lead weight. No happiness, no friends, no love, all because of my parents.
Hiding from the law, living a lie …
While they were running around scheming up crazy rituals to harvest some stupid power from me, I put my life on hold and lived in fear and silence. I ran from their enemies— the Luxe Order, Riley Cooper … I took the brunt of it for my parents. Their sins, not mine, but I paid for them. Me! How stupid was I?
“One minute,” my father whispered to my mother as they took prearranged places in front of me.
I was out of options. Broken. They won. Nothing I could say or do would stop them.
But just as I’d accepted my fate, a light flashed. Not in my head, but out in the woods.
It floated and moved like a torch in the distance.
Flames bobbed and flickered.
It was a halo on fire.
37
I didn’t know how, and I didn’t care; hope sprang through me.
Oh, Lon, I thought, please let that be you. My parents are crazy. They killed all those people and they’re going to sacrifice me. I’m so sorry for dragging you into this mess.
As soon as I finished my thought, the fiery halo went out.
I choked on a sob.
Maybe it wasn’t him after all.
My father sauntered to the edge of chalk circle with something in his hands. Intoning a spell—not in Latin or English, but in some Æthyric language—he walked the circle. As he did, Frater Blue followed.
My father blew a breath onto the triangle that held the winged demon. The air around it got brighter. Then he walked behind me, repeating the incantation. Next was the watery female demon at the western point; he sprinkled liquid on her triangle to lighten it. Last, dirt was scattered on the demon with the barklike skin who represented earth. Not only did that triangle get brighter, but my father yelled out the spell and threw Heka down at the ground. The entire circle roared to life.
A blue glow emerged from the earth and spread over our heads like a gigantic umbrella, enclosing all of us inside a dome of light.
The circle was now fortified; it couldn’t be breached from the outside. Not by a person, or even a gunshot.
“Let us begin,” my father announced.
He dropped what he was holding and picked up the glass talon. My mother joined him and they approached me, strutting like deranged peacocks, both wearing horrible, repugnant smiles. Whatever image I’d once had of my parents, I couldn’t reconcile it with the two alien beings standing before me. My family was gone. Lost. Dead. Worse: I’d never really had one at all.
Frater Blue’s robed figure moved around the inner edge of the circle, vibrating with a low noise. A background spell, an underpainting to serve as the base for the layers of the main incantation.
My father began droning the Æthyric words to his ritual.
“Oh-ele sohnef vorereh heg-heh. Goho-he iehadah bal eh teh.”
I wriggled desperately against my bindings, then tried to rock the entire oracular bowl with my body. It gave ever so slightly, scraping against the rocky ground below me. My mother put her bare foot on top of the rim to still it. I growled at her, but neither one of them made eye contact with me.
“Koh meh mateh—”
“Fuck you!” I spat. “Fuck both of you … you … lunatics!”
“Ah-deh nah gorgan-mal—”
“I hope you both burn in hell.” Angry tears ran down my face.
Movement outside the circle caught my eye. Three dark figures appeared at the top of the rocky hill outside the circle. My heart rammed against my chest. Please …
The caliph was the first. The head of the Luxe Order— Riley’s father, Magus Zorn—was the second. And the third? Lon.
A wave of wild joy broke over me, but this was soon tempered when my mother turned her head to peer over her shoulder. She saw them, but she didn’t react. Didn’t care. All she did was nod at my father to continue. Cold terror trickled down my spine.
“Oh-reh kalheh, zod a dehess—”
The caliph was the first to approach the circle, calling out as he galloped down the hill. “Enola! Alexander! Stop this right now,” he hollered.
My parents didn’t look up. My mom just squeezed my dad’s hand harder.
“This is lunacy!” the caliph said. A ghostly shape trailed him … his guardian. They stopped at the dome of light around the circle, and the caliph reached out to touch it with his hand. The fortified barrier sparked, and he flew backward, tumbling to the ground with a yelp, his guardian disappearing when he did.
“Kahsah reh zod-heh bessmah—”
“You can’t breach it from the outside,” I shouted.
Magus Zorn, the leader of our rival order and the man I’d believed to be my enemy all these years, reached to help the caliph back on his feet. Everything was wrong. Backward. I began to feel dizzy, until my focus shifted to the gold and green light behind them.
Lon walked the edge of the circle. We locked gazes. No pity darkened his face. No anger, either. No emotion at all. In the midst of all the craziness around me, the sight of his dead-pan countenance calmed me. I took in shaky, labored breaths, forcing myself to extend them as long as I could, never taking my eyes off him.
“It can’t be breached or broken from the outside.” My voice was rough and strained as I spoke directly to him over the drone of the ritual words. “Not by anything physical. Nothing.”
I tilted my head as something pierced the fog of my drug-addled brain.
“Not from the outside,” I repeated. But if someone on the inside were to step out of the circle, it would break. I was bound, so I couldn’t, and my parents would never step outside. Their eyes were shut. They were nearly in a trance, lost in the ritual.
Not me, not them … but what about Frater Blue? I hesitated, wavering. It was risky. Outside the circle, Lon was safe. I was already doomed, and there was no guarantee that he could save me, even if he was able to break the ward. What if they hurt him? They were psychotic killers and would clearly have no problem doing whatever it took to get my power. Maybe he would be better off if I just told him to leave.
But before I could weigh my uncertainty, Lon closed his eyes. A ripple distorted the blue light of the ward where he was standing. Like an ignited pyre, his halo flared up behind his head, and his horns began emerging. Zorn and the caliph looked up at him with a quiet awe. They couldn’t see his halo, but they obviously spotted his horns. Yet they handled the transformation without fuss or protest; I wagered they’d already seen him do it.
He didn’t look at me after he’d shifted. My nerves stretched like thin wire as he calmly marched around the outer edge of the circle and stopped near Frater Blue. It happened so fast. I saw Lon’s mouth moving, and frantically wondered if he could he manipulate Frater Blue without touching him. The answer to that was reflected in Frater Blue’s face when it drew up in fear.
“Qeh-noh koheh dah—”
My mother’s eyes opened, drawing my attention away from Lon. She kneeled down in front of me. Her fingers lifted the hem of the shroud off the ground and gathered it up into her hands as she stood. If I hadn’t been naked enough before, I was now. She pulled the shroud over my head like I was bride about to be kissed, exposed and humiliated, insult to injury. I spit in her face. Anger flared as she squeezed her eyes shut. But she merely wiped it away, then stepped back.
My attention flicked back to Lon. Frater Blue stood staring at him, his back to me. I couldn’t tell what was going on. Lon’s chest was heaving. He was mumbling something to himself. Frater Blue’s head jerked around. He peered outside the circle at the caliph, eyes filling with panic.
My mother took the glass talon from my father’s hand; the sharp point gleamed in the circle’s charged light. She brought it to my breastbone and pressed down. The tip punctured my skin, stinging as she slowly slid it down between my breasts.
“Oh-reh-
reh-heh. Oh-reh-reh-heh,” my father chanted, louder and louder.
Blood welled as the talon slashed. I gasped in pain. In shock. In disbelief. My hands tingled; my vision swam. I was on the verge of passing out when a sound roused me. With bleary eyes, I glanced beyond my mother to see Frater Blue smacking his hands against his ears. He abandoned his droning dirge and cried out, lunging forward with outstretched arms. The moment his foot crossed the circle, the domed blue ward fizzled, then broke into millions of tiny blue stars. Like dying fireflies, they furiously blinked out of sync, then imploded.
Lon did it! He broke the fucking ward. Frater Blue was kneeling in front of Lon, pleading and crying. Whatever Lon had told him, he believed it. And I was so distracted by the spectacle that when my father’s continued chanting registered in my ears—when I looked down and saw the glass talon still tearing through my skin—I was stunned.
My parents weren’t stopping. Nothing had changed. Ward or no ward, they were going to finish this.
The crimson line between my breasts got longer. Warm blood streamed down my belly.
“OH-REH-REH-HEH … KANILA.”
An alarm beeped on my father’s wristwatch.
Midnight.
38
It was a standard summoning. My father paused the incantation to perform it in the center of the circle, where I’d failed to recognize the large binding triangle and seal carved into the dirt, the channels filled with what was likely red ochre. Maybe even hematite powder, like Lon had used for my house ward.
A disturbance churned the air over the seal. The white demon was coming. Hot blood dripped down my legs as I waited for her to appear and answer my parents’ bidding. To harvest me. I didn’t want to watch the demon materialize, but I couldn’t close my eyes either.
Then something clicked inside my head: If this Moon-child ability was so powerful that it was worth killing me to obtain, then what exactly could it do? Could it trump their summoning? Even without the glass talon in my possession? I had no idea, but it was after midnight, and what did I have to lose by trying? I’d already lost everything anyway …
I rallied my determination and tilted my face to the moon. The same way I reached out for electricity, I willed the ability to manifest.
And it came like a bullet.
Every hair on my head immediately lifted and whipped around my face, charged with some sort of strange static; the red shroud, bunched around my shoulders and neck, fell away to the ground. Power hummed around me. My mother cried out. She flinched away from me, the bloodied glass talon gripped tight in her hand. Her eyes fixed on mine, and in that moment I saw realization … and fear.
The forest fell away into a black ocean. The rocky hill, gone; the ground below, swallowed. Only the people and the charged sigils remained. My mother, father, Lon—all of them—glowed like X-rays in the darkness, transparent as the Æthryic demons trapped at the cardinal points of the circle. They were stars floating in space.
Heka poured out of me, then like a crack of lightning, returned, kindled. It surged inside me, ready to be wielded. I couldn’t have stopped it if I tried. Somewhere in front of me a bright pinpoint of light glinted in the black void. Vivid electric blue. A thrill rose up in my chest at the sight of it.
This was my power. This was what my parents wanted. Their new Aeon of magick. The summoning symbols didn’t have to be written out by hand. I made them appear, just like I did back in the Hellfire caves with the incubus.
I spotted movement; Lon’s transparent form was dashing toward me, his fiery halo crackling around his head like white fire. “Get back!” I warned. He stopped immediately, with Frater Blue cowering at his heels.
My father’s charged summoning seal illuminated the ground; something was manifesting in the space above it, obscuring the sigils so that I couldn’t read them. But it didn’t matter. I pictured it clearly in my mind, just as I’d memorized it. And I willed it onto the blue circle of light. Black shapes fell away, leaving behind a scrolling map of bright blue ancient sigils.
The white demon’s form was almost solid inside my father’s summoning circle.
Time was up. I reached out with my mind … and pushed.
The blue seal spun on its side and crashed down onto the ground. Moon-kindled Heka streamed out of me, faster than the blood flowing down my body from the open wound on my breast.
“NIVELLA THE WHITE,” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
The black void disappeared.
And when it did, Nivella flickered out of my father’s seal, and reappeared smack in the middle of my blue trap.
A chorus of startled cries rang out around the circle.
Twice my height, she had skin so pale that her muscles and organs were visible beneath. She opened two large pink eyes and blinked. Her horns spiraled high over her head, just as they were drawn in the engraving in Lon’s book. She stretched four arms out like Kali ready for battle. Long, thin fingers stretched on her hands, each tipped with white claws. But in the place of her index fingers were crystal talons. Three. The fourth hand bore a stump of hollow flesh, its missing talon in my mother’s shaking hand.
“Who summoned me?” Nivella asked in an unfamiliar voice that skittered down my spine. I caught a glimpse of her serpentine tongue.
My father’s neck craned to see the demon as my mother dropped the glass talon. It rolled on the ground near her feet, leaving a trail of my blood behind.
“I did,” my father called out to the white beast.
Nivella tilted her head, puzzled, and looked at my father.
“No, you did not,” she replied without emotion. “But I remember you, mage.”
“I called you,” I shouted.
Nivella’s eyes blinked slowly, then fixed on me.
“Mother of Ahrimam,” she said, bowing her head reverently. “How may I serve you?”
Holy fucking shit. How many times had I heard that phrase and assumed the worst? It wasn’t a slur—it was a title of respect. What the hell had my parents drawn down from the Æthyr when they conceived me? Did they even know?
No time for that. The more pressing question was something much simpler: What in the world did I want from Nivella? Now that I had her, I didn’t know what to request. My mind emptied, then flashed back on the original reason I’d spent the last couple of weeks hunting her ass down. She was a witness. And though I wished like hell that she could recount a story with a different ending, I had to hear it.
“Do you know the couple in front of me?” I asked.
She glanced at my father, then my mother. “Yes, I know them. They summoned me many times, years ago.”
“For what reasons?”
“They questioned me the first two times I was summoned. The third time, they took my talon by force and trickery. The next three times, they called me to aid in the harvest of Æthyric energy.”
“How?”
“The woman slaughtered three people with my stolen talon and I collected the energy at the moment of death and fed it into the couple.”
“Enola,” the caliph cried. “You were one of my favorite adepts. Your parents would roll over in their graves if they could see what you’ve become.”
The Luxe leader stepped forward to stand beside the caliph. “I demand your parents’ lives,” Magus Zorn said in an icy voice, “as payment for the atrocities they’ve committed against the occult community.”
“No,” Nivella said, her voice sharp. “ I demand the lives of this couple as payment for deformation and harm to my corporeal body. They stole what was mine. I want it back, and I want their lives with it.”
My father backed away. Lon blurred past him, darted down, and scooped up the glass talon at my mother’s feet. Her leg flew out to kick it from his hand, but he jerked back in time. Frater Blue, still under Lon’s sway, put himself between them to defend Lon. With a wild growl, my mother’s head snapped back in my direction.
“ OH-REH-REH-HEH!” she screamed, her voice high and crazed.
My father called out in anguish and ran to my mother’s aid, but the caliph tripped him as he passed, sending my father skidding across the ground. He attempted to push himself up, but he was too slow. The caliph shoved his face into the dirt. Magus Zorn dropped to his knees, and together, he and the caliph both pinned my father to the ground.
“Hold still,” Lon murmured near my side. He flipped the glass talon in his hand and crouched to slice through my bonds. Within seconds, my ankles and wrists sprung free. I stumbled and teetered on wobbly legs as Lon steadied me. I rubbed my wrists as Lon stripped the shroud off my head and threw it to the ground. He inspected my wound, stretching out his T-shirt to stanch the blood, then murmured a quick assessment. “Not deep.”
Nivella’s pink eyes peered down at me from a smooth face framed in white scales. “Give me the lives of these people as retribution, Mother. Those are the rules.”
Were those the rules? I hadn’t personally made a pact with Nivella; therefore, I had broken no pact. Right?
“Your occult community holds a child accountable for a parents’ debts if the parents don’t pay them,” Lon whispered in my ear. He’d been listening to my thoughts. “It’s the same in the Æthyr. This is an old demon who follows old rules.”
My stomach knotted. I glanced at my mother’s limp body on the ground. Her arm twitched and a soft groan fell from her lips as she tried to move her head. My father was still struggling under the caliph. Even then, despite everything that was happening—everything they’d revealed—I was desperately thinking of a way to justify what they’d done, to forgive them or excuse them. After all, they were clearly insane. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen another magician derailed. All that power has a way of worming its way inside your head, making you feel invincible and above the law. And didn’t I feel that way too? Hadn’t I spent the last seven years living as fugitive? Maybe I was no better, so how could I judge them?
