The Summoner's Sigil

by Renee Sebastian

  “They were going to kill me too,” I informed her.

  “If I had sent them for you, you would have died that night,” she told me before she snorted and hacked up something that she immediately swallowed. “They were very specific in their instructions. Don’t kill you, but kill the man.”

  “I don’t suppose you know why they want to kill me?” Colin asked.

  “Never told me,” she said as she stared into his eyes. Of course not.

  From the other room I heard some glass fall and shatter. Colin and I ran into the main room, and much to our surprise, the table and bins had been pushed aside and the door had been left ajar. We never heard Millie say a thing while she left, and now we were exposed once again.

  I helped Colin push the table back and then asked him, “Do you think Gertrude is telling us the truth?”

  “She is either delusional or she truly means neither of us ill will.” That was a disturbing thought, a delusional Gertrude.

  “She isn’t delusional,” I told him.

  “I don’t think she is either. I think, however, that she is just another victim in this game of chess,” Colin told me.

  “Could you tell anything from Millie, like her intentions towards us?”

  “No. She appeared to be frightened, but remained neutral when it came to us. But maybe that was an illusion too.” If it was, then she was more talented than I had thought.

  “Then let’s settle things with Gertrude and see exactly where she stands. If she is an enemy of my enemy, then an ally she will be.”

  I went to one of the bodies whom I recognized as the chief inspector. He had been on the force for at least the last ten years, I couldn’t remember his name, but his name tag read Chief Insp. E. Nadeau. I searched his pockets, which was somewhat difficult on his stout and putrefying body. Finally, I find what I was looking for, a set of keys, and with a little luck, one of these would open Gertrude’s cell.

  “She may be bait,” he pointed out.

  “I believe that you would be able to deduce that. I believe that she is only a low rung swamp Necromancer.”

  “Who happened to create an entire host of draugs,” he added.

  I walked back to her cell and asked, “Tell me true Gertrude. Why should we let you loose?”

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “What makes you think that if we release you that you won’t still die?” I told her. “Danger has been trailing us tighter than a moonshiner with his mash recipe.”

  “I am locked up, so they still see me as a threat, but more importantly, I am still alive, so they must think they can use me again. I would rather help you than them,” she said. Then she added with a sob, “They killed my dogs. I loved those critters. They were all I had left from Etienne. We’ve had that line of dogs for decades, but now they are all gone.” After she coughed a few times and sniffled loudly, she said, “I can help you.”

  He spared a moment to really look between Gertrude and me, and then he finally said, “Release her.” It took another few precious moments to find the right key, but after a few missed tries, I used my second sight to find the right one. When I tried to use my second sight on what was happening outside, I was blocked. Drats. All I got for my trouble was a headache.

  Once Gertrude was out, I took out two of my ochre sticks and handed one to Colin. I told him, “Just in case.”

  He nodded his head in understanding.

  I turned to Gertrude and said, “We’ve seen bodies that have turned into monstrosities. Are they attempting to get demons to possess people?”

  “That is exactly what I think is happening, and their bodies are rejecting them before dying.”

  “Did you know what they did to Father Chaput?”

  “Never knew the man, since I never go to church much anymore. Once Our Flawless Father closed down, I stopped going entirely. But they still searched me out. They knew what I could do,” she muttered sourly. I noticed that she was missing many of her teeth.

  “Do you normally wear dentures?” I asked her.

  She looked up at me and smiled a bloody smile. She next reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of teeth, with their roots shining prominently in the lantern’s light.

  “Took ‘em they did, when I said no the last time they asked me to make some more draugs, but I have a secret.”

  “What is that Gertrude?” I asked.

  “I am only a sea witch, but I can sometimes steal another’s dead and pilot it until it finally gives out. Depends if there is still enough salty fluids left in it or not.”

  “What if the dead have been prepared for mummification?” Colin asked.

  “Mummies in Convent?”

  “Yes, but only Father Chaput,” I told her.

  “No I haven’t, but if they can make one, you can bet they’ll make more.”

  “Could you take them over?” Colin asked again.

  “I can try, even though they don’t have much fluid left in them. They use lots of salt to make those things.” She cleared her throat and then said, “There is something else.”

  Colin and I looked at each other and then she said, “I’ve seen a revenant with a demon inside of it.” I took a loose curl and twirled it nervously. Gertrude added, “I don’t know how they managed it.”

  “Are you certain? How could you tell?” I asked her.

  “One of them was arguing with Pippa, and I heard them say it clear as day.”

  “Who else was with Pippa?” I asked.

  “A man I didn’t recognize, but Pippa was the one who dragged me in there and locked me up in that blasted cell. She called it a time out.”

  “What was the man wearing?”

  “Overalls and some worn looking boots.” Colin and I both looked at each other.

  “Millie must have gone back to report to the cobbler,” Colin said.

  “Or she might be watching to see when we leave,” I countered.

  “Don’t leave me here,” Gertrude pleaded. Maybe she was still a spy for them, or maybe she had learned her lesson. Who knew?

  “How can we trust you?” I asked her.

  She spat to the side and said, “I hate them. I want to cut them up myself and feed them to my draugs. And then whatever they won’t eat, I’ll feed to the catfish on my farm.” She saw that what she was saying was having little impact on us, so she added, “Take my teeth. There are magic in those.”

  “For a Hedgewitch maybe,” I objected.

  “She is speaking the truth,” Colin said intervening on her behalf. The witch then held out her hand, and I stared at her yellowed and somewhat rotten teeth sitting in her palm. In no way could those be confused for pearls.

  “Your teeth are worthless to me, since I can’t work that kind of magic,” I told her, which was not entirely true. If I had certain instruments, I might have been able to track her using one of them. But what was the point of that, when she was here with us now.

  “Ms. Basquiat, what kind of magic do you propose we do with them?” Colin asked her.

  “I still consider myself a Mrs., Sonny.” But then she hemmed and hawed for the next three minutes about what she might be able to do with one. When she finally realized we were waiting for a definitive answer, she said, “I might be able to discern exactly what they are doing to their dead by using one.” Which sounded ominous to me. As if to accentuate her statement, thunder rolled in the distance.

  “How?” I asked.

  “Well, my teeth were once living organisms, like most cells in the human body. They have their own kind of life, even though they can’t hear, see, or move; they live on just the same. There is a lot of information contained in one cell, stuff like DNA and other mumbo jumbo stuff I don’t understand. Imagine with me, if you will, the wealth of knowledge from a tooth, which is in reality an entire blasted organ.

  “If one of these beauties is ingested, a lot could be learned, especially if I transferred what is up here,” she said as she pointed to her head. “To it, for
a spell.

  “It would be best if we could get it into one of those deaders walking the streets, so we might be able to see who is commandeering it. I should also be able to discern something, if I injected it into a living person’s body that has been afflicted.”

  I looked around and wondered which of the slain men would be the best candidate for this little experiment. While I was busy doing that, Colin told her, “Do it.”

  She hobbled over to each of the dead officers in the room and finally settled on the one that had had his torso ripped open. “The entry point is easiest in this one I think. I’m going to enter it into right here,” she said while indicating his solar plexus’s chakra point.

  She knelt down and shoved her fist into it. I didn’t know what her middle name was, but finesse was not it. She removed her hand with a sluicing sound, leaving the tooth I assumed behind, and then we waited.

  “Can you revive any of these?” Colin asked while looking around at the five or six bodies littering the floor.

  “They are all either twice dead already or unserviceable, so there is nothing that I can do with them,” she told him while she focused on the body before her. It looked as if she was working on Detective Summerland, but it was difficult to tell for certain.

  He had been in Convent for the last twenty years, and he had a wife, three children, and five grandchildren. No one deserved to die this way, but if his dead body could somehow help us to stop these tragic events from happening elsewhere, then I thought he and his family would feel that his death was justified.

  After another few minutes of nothing, I walked over to the window to watch the storm blow over the town. The low hugging clouds seemed to zip across the sky, like a fleet of dirigibles.

  Colin abruptly gasped, and it redirected my attention back to the Gertrude. To my amazement, Detective Summerland was flinching as tremors racked his body.

  After a few moments of this trembling, Gertrude collapsed onto the floor and began convulsing herself. Colin slid down next to her and pinned her shoulders down, keeping her from injuring herself. I grabbed a fistful of papers from a nearby desk, rolled them up, and then shoved the roll into her mouth to keep her from swallowing her tongue.

  She abruptly opened her eyes, her stare glazed over, not seeing anything. Then she let loose a shriek that hurt my ears, before finally collapsing into complete unconsciousness.

  “What is happening to her?” Colin asked.

  “I’m not sure. I’ve lived with a Necromancer before, and he never behaved this way.”

  He looked at me in obvious shock for a split second, but then he quickly schooled his features into a mask of impassiveness. He released Gertrude’s shoulders and then asked me, while looking at her, “What was the Necromancer’s name?”

  I smiled and said, “His name is Jeremy Tallow, and he is Wendy’s charge. He’s going to have a birthday soon. What do you think a thirteen-year-old would like?”

  He looked up at me, smiled in an embarrassed manner, and said, “Oh.”

  Gertrude chose that time to cough before sitting up on her own. She turned to face us and said with a toothless grin, “They are breeding.”

  “What is breeding?”

  “Demons.”

  Oh my.

  Chapter 14

  Crooks and Flails

  Rule number ten: Giving a little blood now, saves your heart later.

  I looked at Colin, who was staring at me, and said, “Don’t look at me, since you’re the one with all the advanced degrees.”

  “I never went to college and graduated with a degree in summoning.”

  I pouted and said, “Well, I’ve not been the one with access to rare and arcane texts year after year.”

  “I saw your library back at your lake house. It was substantial.”

  “Well, it’s not as if I’ve had tons of time to read through them while saving the world.”

  “If we get through this, is Britannia where you will set up your practice?”

  That came out of nowhere. I hesitated. What was he really asking me? Wouldn’t that be the natural conclusion? On the spur of the moment, I said, “I should sell the lake house and take the Council position in London.”

  He looked haunted for a moment, but then returned back to the matter at hand. “If what Gertrude says is true, how do you propose we banish the demons if they are constantly multiplying?”

  She said, “I knew that man, and he was an Ordinary. If they have been able to trap demons and then place them into Ordinary people for the purpose of breeding, then they are trying to exterminate them.”

  “Where would we find the most Ordinaries in this town?”

  “The Deist church,” Gertrude said.

  “Been there already. There were only about a dozen people there,” I told her.

  “The mayor’s house?” Colin asked.

  “No, Morlock Sr. keeps that place barricaded. If the mayor is still alive, it would be like trying to break into the National Treasury,” she replied.

  “Does this town have any tenements?” Colin asked.

  “Thankfully no. The unemployment is very low,” I replied.

  “Most of Congress could be evacuated to the libraries, if the need arose. Do people use a building as a shelter for emergencies?” Colin asked. I suppose that the Pentagon used to be their go to place, but they weren’t done rebuilding it yet.

  “The school would be too small. How about the Hotel Château Cyprès? It is large enough to hold most of the town’s inhabitants,” I said.

  “It could spread easily there too, without much ado,” he said.

  Just then, a rock five inches in circumference was thrown into the office through the broken window. We all eyed it warily until Colin said, “I think there is a piece of paper wrapped around it.”

  “Well, go read it,” Gertrude urged him.

  “Very well.” He picked it up, removed the twine holding the paper to it, and then read the note.

  “What does it say?”

  “It says nothing of import,” he replied before crumbling it up, but I noticed that he put the ball of paper into one of his pockets and not on the floor.

  “What does it say?” I asked more firmly.

  He hesitated and sighed dramatically, before finally saying, “It said that they have no intentions of hurting you and that I need to leave you now in order to prevent you from accidentally getting hurt. I suppose that this is their manner of giving us fair warning.”

  “They must want me to help summoning demons or possibly to control the demons that have been birthed.”

  “Where are all these free demons?” Colin asked.

  “I don’t know, but if we are estimating one demon is birthed from every body we have seen, then there is going to be a whole lot of them real soon.”

  “We stop them now, or we won’t be able to stop them at all,” Gertrude said.

  Knowing our luck, the demons that were already free would prove immune to our weapons of mass destruction. Gassing the whole town was no longer a viable option. The god squad would be eaten as a snack. Gertrude was correct. We had to end this now, before it became a National Crisis. If we couldn’t do it, I wasn’t sure who could. There was simply not enough time to bring in more Summoners before whatever is here explodes out into the world.

  “Who would do this?” Colin asked Gertrude.

  “I don’t know who would have done this,” she repeated herself. “Someone who wants to take out the Ordinary population and replace it with only Users and demons,” I said.

  “And who would want a world populated with demons?”

  “Only those who might be able to control them… Summoners.”

  “I think Convent might be hiding a secret, a very big secret,” Gertrude said before exposing her bloody gums in a grim grin.

  I looked around the room and couldn’t make heads or tails out of anything. The room was in such disarray. I was fairly certain that if there was ever a C.W. Hertzog machine in thi
s place, it wasn’t functional now. Instead, I focused on where we could get information that supported Gertrude’s theory.

  “We need to go to the Post Office. It will have the list of Users that live in this town and what their abilities are,” I said.

  “We don’t actually need to go there,” Colin said softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I already researched the town before I came here. Although it didn’t seem odd to me then, as I had no basis of comparison, I now realize my error. There are five registered Summoners for Assumption Parish, including yourself.”

  Five. That was an ungodly high number for such a small area. “What is the mayor’s designation?”

  “Summoner.”

  “His son?”

  “Summoner.” Blake never told me. This town was full of deceptive bigots.

  “We should clear the hotel before we go to the mayor’s house,” Gertrude said looking down, speaking more to herself than to either of us. Then she looked up at me and said, “We need a demon on the inside. Someone who might be able to spy for us or at least one we can trust. Can’t you summon a demon for us Summoner?”

  “Yes I can.” It was high time to call Calidum home. Since Calidum was currently in our reality, I couldn’t summon him in a traditional sense, but maybe if I drew out his summoning sign and used his calling name, he might feel a terrible desire to return to me. I was working on theory here, but I was prepared to do just about anything that might give us an edge in fighting this deplorable plan.

  I saw out of the corner of my eye Colin probing his bullet wound. As I added the necessary marks to call Calidum, I asked him, “Does it hurt?”

  “No, it doesn’t, but it does smell funny.”

  I looked up at him and said, “When I’m done here, I’ll come and examine it again.”

  “I’ll look at it,” Gertrude said and then she approached him. There must have been some resistance on his part, because she added, “I’ve lived a long time Mr. Townsend, and I’ve seen a man without a shirt on more than one occasion. I’ve also cured many an ill for the people of the swamp, including a touch of the trench foot for her grandfather. Now let me have a gander.”