Banishing the Dark (The Arcadia Bell series)

by Jenn Bennett

  Jupe glanced between Grandma Vega and Leticia.

  “A magical supply shop on the highway between Morella and La Sirena,” Leticia explained. “It closed down a few years ago when the owner died.”

  “Got it,” Jupe said. “So, wait, they were here in the area? Were they visiting the lodge in Morella?”

  Leticia’s grandmother slurped the last of her juice and shook her head. “That was the surprise. If they were on official business, they’d be staying in Morella at the lodge. It has guest rooms for traveling dignitaries. Makes it easier when other members come down from San Francisco or if the caliph visited, may the gods rest his soul.” She kissed her hexagram pendant in tribute.

  “So if they weren’t visiting the lodge on official business, why were they here?”

  “They had a winter home in La Sirena.”

  Jupe frowned. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same Duvals? They’re from Florida.”

  “Enola and Alexander,” she said, grunting as she pushed herself out of the recliner. She shuffled across the room to a bookshelf and removed a worn photo album before plunking it down on the coffee table. “Where is it . . . ?” She paged through thick black sheets of old photographs affixed with paper corners. “Here we are. Mrs. Pendleton took this of us—she was the Gifts of the Magi owner who died a few years back. That’s me, in the middle.”

  Jupe squinted at a three-by-five photograph taken inside the magical supply shop. He recognized the Duvals instantly from pictures in the true-crime books he’d read about the Black Lodge murders. They looked uncomfortable and were flanking a much younger Grandma Vega, who was smiling from ear to ear.

  She tapped the photo with a long fingernail. “They made me promise to keep their winter home hush-hush because they were busy writing a book and didn’t want people from the order popping over and interrupting them. Understandable, of course. And I kept my word.”

  Jupe leaned closer to read the squiggly handwriting on the bottom of the photo: “The Duvals, January 1989.” Crap! That was the year Cady was born . . . only, she was born October 1. He knew, because her driver’s license had her fake birthday, but she’d told him her real birthday back when she first started dating his dad. Jupe counted backward from October 1. Nine months would be January, the same time her parents were here in La Sirena. What did this all mean?

  “Hold on,” he said. “They spent January 1989 here in La Sirena. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, but that was only the first year, right after they’d bought the winter home. They came back the very next winter solstice with their new daughter, the Moonchild. She was only three months old, I believe. I was the first person outside the main lodge to see her in person,” she said proudly.

  Cady! She’d seen Cady as a baby. This was crazy. Jupe’s mind was speeding off in ten different directions at once. He’d come here expecting to get some information on summoning a demon and ended up uncovering something Cady herself didn’t even know. “So you saw them twice? In 1989 and 1990?”

  “And every winter after that. They wrote their books here because it was peaceful,” the old woman said. “They usually came by themselves, especially after their daughter got older. But every year around the holidays, I’d have breakfast with them at that vegetarian diner near the farmer’s market. Well, that is, until they died in that terrible car accident with their daughter seven years ago.”

  She chuckled to herself and closed the photograph album. “You know, I could’ve sworn I’d seen them last year at a gas station on the north end of Ocean Avenue, but Leticia’s mama said that was impossible. And she was right, of course. Can’t see dead people, can you? My eyes aren’t what they once were.”

  Santo mierda.

  I was dreaming about shrimp again. This time, Lon was showing me how to catch them with a fishing pole in a stream. But while he was struggling to reel one in, I walked away and found myself in a strangely familiar field. Tall grass. Wildflowers. And standing in the middle of it with her back to me was a tall, leggy woman with graying hair.

  A terrible anxiety came over my dream body.

  The woman turned around and smiled triumphantly. “Ma petite lune. You are awake.”

  Snapping out of sleep, I tumbled off the bed in a cold sweat. Several panicked moments ticked by as I jerked my head around, looking for my mother in the shadows, unsure of where I was. Or when it was . . .

  Twentynine Palms. The cheap motel. Two in the afternoon.

  Daytime. The safe time to sleep. So that was only a dream. Right? I pushed off the floor and looked at Lon. He was stretched out on the bed, softly snoring. His halo was still healthy. But when my gaze slipped over the rumpled sheet, I found the problem.

  I’d forgotten to charge the ward.

  No protection. I had slept without any protection, and now my mother knew I was no longer in a coma. Worse, she’d managed to tap into my dreams during the daytime.

  Mad at myself and scared, I sat on the floor next to the bed and wilted into a shaking mess. My breathing quickened. It didn’t take long before I was hyperventilating and nauseated. I stuck my head between my knees and tried to count myself into a calmer state. The mattress creaked. A warm hand smoothed across my shoulders as Lon settled on the floor beside me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What isn’t wrong?” I said before telling him what had just happened.

  He listened, rubbing circles on my back, while I talked into my knees. When I finished, he exhaled a long breath, and said, “Cady—”

  “What am I going to do, Lon? I’m out of ideas. I don’t know what to do next.”

  “Cady.”

  I looked up at him. He pointed in front of us. A ball of cotton-candy-pink light hovered in the air above my overnight bag. My servitor! That was fast. Too fast? We both watched the pink light disappear inside the bag, heading back into my soap doll.

  “I need your pocketknife again.”

  I both dreaded and couldn’t wait to see what it had found. I pulled out the soap doll and wasted no time drawing the series of symbols that would trigger the servitor to spill its contents. I only needed a tiny bit of Heka to charge the retrieval spell, so I stuck my finger in my mouth and rubbed saliva over the scribbled sigil while stabbing the carved bar of soap.

  Cool energy surrounded me as the servitor’s collected images unfolded. Like a psychic film, it replayed the spell’s journey: leaving the hotel room last night, floating into darkness. Then it sped up in a flash of blurry light, the shift making me dizzy until it settled on its final destination.

  A forest, heavily wooded. A dirt road. A dark green house sat at the end of it, the roof covered in leaves and pine needles. Dozens of white antlers hung around the door. A hunting lodge? No identifying house number. No mailbox. No signs. The image moved through the door like a ghost to show the inside of the house. A spacious great room with a rustic fireplace. Sparsely furnished. Dark. Blinds drawn.

  I strained to see anything that might indicate location: mail, calendar, family photos, letterhead. But no. Nothing and more nothing. It was the blandest, least personal house I’d ever seen.

  “Come on, give me something,” I murmured, as if that would help. It wasn’t sentient; the images were already prerecorded, so to speak. What I saw was what it had retrieved. I hoped it would move into another room where I might see something more—magnets on the refrigerator or a takeout menu on the counter. But the servitor’s metaphysical lens only moved to the far end of the room, where an oversized grandfather clock sat near the fireplace.

  Deer and trees and wood nymphs were carved into the massive wooden base. A stag’s antlered head jutted above the gold clock dial. A terrible familiarity washed over me at the sight of it. Some dusty, long-forgotten memory cowered in the corned of my mind.

  I’d seen this clock before.

  The servitor’s gaze bobbed and floated down to the bottom of the clock. In a swift movement, it pushed forward and ghosted through the b
ase, but there was nothing but darkness. Darkness, and more darkness, then—

  Pop!

  The servitor’s transmission ended, leaving me sitting on the hotel floor with Lon’s pocketknife stuck into the bar of soap.

  “What did you see?” Lon asked, squatting next to me.

  “A house in the woods, no cars. I couldn’t even tell where the woods were—Oregon? Maryland? Florida? I don’t know. There was nothing identifiable, Lon. Just a grandfather clock. But maybe that was the clue the servitor was trying to show me. And it’s weird, but I think I remember it from when I was a kid.”

  “Your parents’ house in Florida?”

  “No, that’s long gone. And we didn’t have a grandfather clock. Maybe I saw it somewhere we went. Another house.”

  “Family vacation?”

  “We never went on vacation.” Like, never. And strange, but the word vacation triggered a whole other nagging feeling inside my brain, that déjà vu sensation. Plane tickets. Skiing. Mountains. Christmas. Where the hell was this all coming from? Someplace more recent? I couldn’t piece it together.

  “Did you ever visit anyone?” Lon pressed, unaware of my warring memories. “Friends of your parents? Another lodge, maybe?”

  “They never took me anywhere. They were gone half the time, traveling.”

  Lon’s phone rang, tearing me out of my brain strain. He slid his fingers over the screen to answer the call. Even with the phone against his ear, I could hear Jupe’s urgent voice. Then Lon said, “Hold on.” He put it on speakerphone and held it between us.

  “Cady?”

  “I’m here,” I confirmed. “What’s wrong?”

  “You guys need to come home,” Jupe’s voice said. “Right now.”

  Nine hours later, after speeding our way across the state, we sat on the most comfortable sectional sofa known to mankind, in the cleanest-smelling, coziest home in the world. Stack stone and pale wood. Soft rugs. Black-and-white photographs. Large plate-glass windows and sliding doors that looked out onto a covered patio and a redwood deck and the dark Pacific beyond.

  If I could, I’d never leave Lon’s house. Ever. In the midst of the shitstorm that was my personal life, his home felt safe and familiar and good—so good it helped dull the shock that trickled through my body like medicine dripping down from an IV.

  “Are you sure that’s everything Mrs. Vega knew?” Lon asked. “You positive she had no idea where this winter house was located?”

  “I’m sure,” Jupe said from my side, then reluctantly added, “I used my knack on her.”

  Lon’s jaw twitched. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Jupe’s long legs were folded up against his chest. He leaned hard against my shoulder, smelling faintly of coconut oil and chamomile, while Mr. Piggy sniffed his bare toes. I knew he was still worried that he was in trouble for sneaking around; considering Lon’s simmering, barely restrained anger and this latest confession about his knack, I was pretty sure a long grounding was in Jupe’s future.

  But I personally wasn’t mad at the kid. Confused by what he’d learned from Mrs. Vega? Oh, yes. Very confused. Which was probably why I couldn’t stop holding his hand. I craved comfort, and he was the only thing between sanity and a whole lot of travel-weary, sloppy-ass tears.

  “I made Mrs. Vega not want to tell anyone about our visit and what she told me and Leticia,” Jupe added.

  “How did you meet this Leticia?” Lon asked. “She doesn’t go to school out here.”

  Jupe’s groan was so low I felt it more than heard it. “She kind of, well, she goes to school in Morella. I sort of, kind of, met her . . . well, it doesn’t matter.”

  God, he was the worst liar in the world. I forced myself not to laugh as I tried to put a face to the name. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Leticia Vega; I’d only ever talked to Grandmaster Vega on a handful of occasions. I never attended the Morella lodge as a member; I only went to them for help when I needed it. “She’s your age?” I asked.

  A dreamy sort of daze breezed over Jupe’s features. “Uh-huh.”

  Oh, boy. I’d seen that look before, whenever Jupe was in the same room with Kar Yee. “So she’s cute, huh?”

  Slow grin.

  “And she’s helping you, so she must like you.”

  He teased, “I mean, who wouldn’t like all this?”

  “I’m not liking you much right now,” Lon complained.

  “But—”

  “Don’t even bother,” Lon said. “You’ll be telling me whatever it is you’re lying about tomorrow when we sit down with the Holidays and get everything out in the open. Count yourself lucky we’ve got more important concerns at the moment.”

  “When you say it like that, I don’t really feel all that lucky,” Jupe mumbled.

  Lon snorted. “You and me both, son.”

  Foxglove jumped onto the far end of the sofa and sneaked her way over to Lon’s lap, stretching her front paws over his thighs. He mindlessly scratched her behind her ear, let out a slow breath, and slunk lower on the couch, staring at the ceiling.

  Damn, he looked exhausted. All that driving today didn’t help. I’d checked his snakebite a couple of times when we stopped for gas or a restroom; it was still tender and a tiny bit swollen, but at least his skin didn’t feel numb anymore.

  The way he was sprawled on the couch pulled his shirt tighter across his chest. I could just make out the bump from the ring hanging around his neck. I hadn’t asked him about it, but God, how I wanted to. I guess he must have heard this in my emotions, because he hassled me the entire ride up here about my memory problems.

  But as he told Jupe, we had bigger concerns.

  “My parents’ ‘winter home’ has to be the house in the woods,” I said to Lon.

  “What house?” Jupe asked.

  “None of your business,” Lon said.

  “But I helped,” he insisted, his gaze swinging from Lon to me. “I know you’re both mad at me, but I did help. Right?”

  Maybe it was the pitiful note in his voice or the earnest squeeze of his fingers around mine, but whatever it was, it turned me into a sucker. I slung my arm around his shoulder. “You helped,” I assured him, pulling him closer.

  Lon slanted me a ticked-off look, but he needn’t have bothered. I could feel the agitation rolling off of him in waves. So I was babying Jupe. Big deal. He really did help, even if he had to sneak around to do it. And who could blame him? We—that is, I mean, Lon—ran off and left Jupe alone for a week. That was the same shit my parents pulled on me all the time. Especially during—

  During the holidays.

  Every Christmas. They left me every December and returned a month later in January. And all that time, they were here. Here! How was that even possible?

  “Time for bed,” Lon said to Jupe.

  “It’s only eleven, and I haven’t seen you both all week.”

  Lon pushed off the sofa and headed toward the sliding doors. “Cady and I need to talk.”

  “But I helped,” he protested. “I might be able to help some more.”

  “Come here for a second.” Lon flipped on the outside lights and stepped onto the patio.

  “Crap,” Jupe mumbled.

  “Buck up,” I said. “It’ll be okay.”

  He gave me a unnervingly grave look. “Will it?”

  I stared into his bright green eyes, with all those dark, fanning lashes. His uncertainty and worry were almost palpable—almost something I could hear as clear as his voice—and it had nothing to do with whatever punishment he feared from his dad. He was scared for me. Me. And for us, and the future. And I wanted more than anything to assure him that he was worried for no reason, that everything was fine, and nothing ever went so horribly wrong that it couldn’t be fixed. That life was easy, and if you worked hard enough, you’d get everything you wanted. If you did right by others, they’d do right by you. That both humankind and demonkind were intrinsically good, and people you respected didn’t disappoint you,
and no one would ever break your heart.

  None of that was true.

  But unlike him, I was an excellent liar.

  “Trust. Me,” I enunciated firmly, pressing my forehead to his. “Everything will be fine.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” I repeated.

  “I really do like your eyes all silvery like that.” He’d already told me twice, after freaking out about them when we first pulled up to the house.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll like them better if your dad and I can use this new information to stop my mother.”

  “Me, too.”

  “You did good, kid. Now, go on. Your dad’s waiting.”

  He let out a long-suffering breath and eventually broke away to meet Lon on the patio. I watched them through the glass as Lon slid the door shut and talked to him. Lon’s face was intense, but he wasn’t angry. Not in the least. He was talking rapidly, speaking in a voice so low that I couldn’t hear anything through the door. And as he talked, Jupe’s stubborn expression fell away and was replaced by a taut anxiety.

  When Lon paused his rapid-fire, one-way conversation, Jupe flicked a look in my direction. Pity? What the hell was Lon telling him?

  Feeling like a third wheel, I left them to their father-son conspiracy and brooded my way to the cool oasis of the kitchen. It looked the same as it had when we’d left it, with its white subway tile and Lon’s neatly organized, well-used cooking tools.

  I raided the fridge for something to make me feel better and devoured two sweet clementines in a matter of seconds. Thank God for yoga pants; I’d given up on public decency halfway between Twentynine Palms and La Sirena, when I’d forced Lon to pull over so I could change out of those horrible skinny jeans in a McDonald’s bathroom. And with all my newfound stretchy yoga-pants freedom and my grumpy mental state, I decided I didn’t give a damn and ate two more clementines. Lon walked in and caught me stuffing the last segment into my mouth.

  As I tossed the mound of peelings into the garbage, I had the distinct feeling he was concerned. Maybe he’d never seen a grown woman attack a piece of fruit as if it was her last meal. But whatever he was thinking, all he said was, “Jupe took Foxglove upstairs for the night, but maybe we should set up camp in the library, just in case he tries to listen in.”