by Jenn Bennett
I glanced around in shock. A peculiar silver light swathed my vision. Raindrops hung suspended in the air—illuminated by light from the house’s windows, they looked like clusters of misshapen glass beads. And on the balcony, Merrimoth’s body stood stock-still, his mouth open, hand poised in the middle of some unrealized gesture like a wax figure. As if I’d pushed a pause button. I peered over the arch of ice at my feet, dreading what I might find.
Lon!
He was suspended in the air a floor below me, caught in my magick, falling facedown, his halo and long hair streaming behind.
I’d never, never done anything this big—never even imagined I could. But the amount of energy it took to power it was already draining me.
Screwing up my courage, I chanced a couple of small, cautious steps on the slick ledge until my hand wrapped around the railing. I took a deep breath and awkwardly pitched myself sideways, scrambled onto the balcony, and skidded, almost crashing into Merrimoth. Silver fog swirled around his legs. Creepy as hell. Even creepier when I realized he wasn’t completely still. His arm was rising in slow motion, a hair at a time. His angry gaze struggled to shift in my direction.
A wave of dizziness unsteadied me. My Heka reserves were draining and I was running out of time. I shuffled around Merrimoth, spotted Lon’s vintage gun in his hand, and pried it out of his fingers. Then I scurried through the balcony doors into the house.
I found myself inside a cavernous bedroom, decorated with restraint and neutral colors, like the rest of Merrimoth’s home. Automated ceiling sprinklers doused everything with circular sprays of water. I stumbled across polished wood flooring, frantically looking for a way out, and found more than I wanted: three cameras on tripods, a bed outfitted with black rubber sheets, an object that I initially thought was a curly dildo (and upon closer inspection, was, I thought, a butt plug with one end shaped like a pig’s tail), and a gleaming, shiver-inducing metal speculum. I scurried around a black leather swing hanging from an exposed beam and darted into the hallway.
Silver fog eddied around my feet as I galloped down the main stairwell and rushed through the living room. The layout was disorienting. Lon and I had only been in this room a few moments before Merrimoth went apeshit earlier and chased us upstairs. I finally spotted a pair of glass doors. My fingers shook as they flipped a dead bolt and flung the doors open.
A small set of stairs led to the beach. Trudging over wet sand, I slipped the bulky Lupara inside my jacket and scoured the shoreline. Lon’s golden halo hummed in the darkness. He was still hanging in the sky over the foaming water, though he’d descended a bit. If he dropped a few more feet, I could reach him . . . if he weren’t suspended a few yards out over the ocean.
Minutes ago, the crashing tide would’ve pounded me to a pulp against the rocks here, but now the water was eerily still, silver fog clinging to the quiet surface. I plodded into the winter-chilled water. My steps left dark holes in the foamy surf. Utterly surreal. I marveled at the way the splashes around my watery footprints hung in midair, how they deepened as I waded knee-deep. Farther away, somewhere beyond Merrimoth’s house, I could hear the surf pounding: my moon magick apparently had limits.
Lon was above me now, his black peacoat billowing at his sides like the wings of a fallen angel. I focused on climbing the rocks to reach him, a task more difficult than I initially thought. They were slimy with seaweed, rough with broken mussel shells, and it didn’t help that shivers racked my body. When I got to a point where I could stand without falling, I stretched and nabbed Lon’s ankle, then tugged. He moved a few inches. Holy Whore—it was like pulling a box of bricks out of the sky. I tugged harder and, with a series of groans, dragged him through the air, retracing my steps to shore.
My lungs felt close to bursting and I was seriously dizzy from the amount of Heka I was using. But I knew that once I let go of the moon magick, Merrimoth would inflict some sort of insane Narnian winter across the beach. Maybe even turn us into frozen statues. Or set us on fire. I shoved Lon closer to the ground, leaning across his back, then finally sitting on him when that didn’t work.
Screw David Merrimoth and screw Dare for calling me up in the middle of the night to bind him. As I considered whether I had the strength to wrangle Lon up the driveway and into the car so we could just get out of there, a figure materialized in the shadows beneath the stilted house.
It was a woman, possibly fifty years old, long and lean. She was wearing odd clothing—a toga-like gray dress. Silver fog clung to her bare ankles. Her dark hair was pinned up and dusted with gray at the crown. She had intelligent eyes, cheekbones that could cut diamond, and a full, sensual mouth. French, through and through. She crossed her elegant arms with an air of superiority and smiled at me like she’d just won the lottery.
When I realized who she was, I screamed bloody murder.
Complete shock severed my connection to the moon magick, and the woman disappeared in a flash. Newly reanimated, Lon faceplanted into the sand just as the ocean roared back to life, echoing Merrimoth’s angry shouting somewhere above us.
My heart raced around my chest like a fox outrunning a hunter. A terrible feeling of hopelessness took root.
Enola Duval. Never in a million years did I think I’d see her again. Gifted student of the occult and author of multiple books on magick. Infamous former member of the highly esteemed Ekklesia Eleusia esoteric society, or E∴E∴, as it’s known in occult circles. One of the Black Lodge Slayers. Number 37 in a set of American Serial Killer trading cards. On the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
Mom.
My mother had been gone for months, claimed by a primordial albino demon named Nivella the White and taken into the Æthyr with my father as payment for crimes they committed. Nasty crimes. Unpardonable crimes. Long before her stint as a serial killer, my mother conceived me during an arcane ceremony that invoked something big and secret and unknowable from the Æthyr inside my cells—all so that she and my father could steal its essence through good, old-fashioned ritual sacrifice.
Mom was evil. She was crazy. And she could not be alive—Nivella wanted my parents dead, and had every reason to kill them as soon as they crossed into the Æthyr.
What I saw just now was only . . . a hallucination, or something. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be my mother. Period.
Lon’s muffled swearing wrenched me away from my panicked thoughts. As he pushed himself to his feet, I bent to help him and brushed sand from his jacket.
“You did that?” he rasped. “Stopped my fall?”
“I’m as surprised as you are.”
His eyes quickly narrowed in concern. “What—”
“Don’t read my thoughts right now, okay? Later.”
He nodded, and with his typical economical way of compartmentalizing emotional situations, promptly tabled his curiosity and focused his attention toward the underside of the house, listening for Merrimoth. “Can you bind him from here?”
“Is he coming? Can you read him? Where is he?”
As if in answer, the sound of the crashing waves suddenly stopped. The nearby surf was white. Not foamy white—snowy white. Not my magick this time. Lon and I cautiously glanced around the stilts.
Merrimoth had created a sludgy, half-frozen iceberg on the ocean’s surface. If he had been aiming for us and just missed, I didn’t want to risk him trying again and succeeding.
Time to get this over with.
I zeroed in on his voice and called up the moon power again. How could I have had so much trouble reaching it earlier? It came so naturally now. Power hummed inside me, ready to be wielded, as I warily scanned my surroundings for my mother. Not there. Good. Whatever had caused her image to appear earlier, it must’ve been a product of my mind—some sort of witchy glitch. At least that’s what I told myself.
The blue dot of light that marked my starting point appeared in my line of vision. I expanded it, molding the light into a standard binding triangle with all the proper seals and symbols. Then I shut my eyes, concen
trated, and projected it upward through the house, searching for Merrimoth.
I lassoed him, but something felt wrong. He should be trapped, unable to do anything but pace and moan inside my binding, but he was moving. Lon shouted something incoherent. My eyes snapped open. I saw the blue light of my binding nose-diving through the night sky, spinning in circles around Merrimoth. I tried to yank the binding toward me like a leash. Tried to will him to stop—to slow time again. It was too late.
Two terrible realizations twined inside my head. Merrimoth had already jumped from the balcony when my binding trapped him—he’d constructed the snowy iceberg as a landing pad to soften his fall. Whatever he’d done to amp up his knack’s once meager power, he now believed himself to be infallible. Godlike.
And by yanking on my binding—even though I’d been trying to save him—I’d pulled him off course. His grotesque scream was abruptly aborted when a sickening crack! pierced the air.
Like an afterthought, the iceberg melted all at once into the sea and the renewed surf pounded against Merrimoth’s torso, impaled on a jagged point of rock.
I’d just killed someone. Again.
• • •
Shock silenced us for several heartbeats as we stood in the rain. Lon finally prodded me away from the shore and we retreated beneath the cover of the stilted house.
I felt a tickle in the back of my nose, then a familiar drowning warmth. Nosebleed. I lifted my hand to catch the first drop, then untucked the hem of my T-shirt and used it to pinch my nose. Cool night air drafted across my bared stomach.
“Oh, Cady. Not again.”
“I didn’t mean to,” I said, my voice muffled inside my shirt. My eyes brimmed with prickly tears.
Lon offered me a waded up paper napkin from his coat pocket. “I meant the nosebleeds. Of course you didn’t mean to—”
Kill the second most powerful person in the Hellfire Club? I thought back to him in response.
“Just because he was Number Two doesn’t mean he was second in charge,” Lon said. “You know that. He just got the second slot when my father died. Dumb luck.”
Dumb luck or not, Merrimoth had been a fixture in the club for twenty years. Dare wasn’t going to be happy. If I hadn’t bound him . . .
“He might’ve broken his neck instead of his back. He was seventy-two, Cady, not seventeen.”
He was in good shape.
“I’m not sure if a cat with nine lives would’ve survived a fall from that height. Damn sure thought I was a goner until you saved me. What the hell kind of spell was that?”
It wasn’t a spell, exactly. I just wanted to stop you from falling and it happened.
Lon’s eyes tightened into slits. “No spell?”
I shook my head.
“That’s —”
Scary as shit?
“Amazing.”
A slow, salt-tinged wind blew rain beneath the stilted house. Lon pulled his coat closed and began fastening a row of oversized buttons. His next question was spoken in a low, quiet voice. “Why were you thinking about your mother?”
Ugh. Trying to control my thoughts when he was transmutated was impossible. It took me a few moments to answer. I saw an image of her, or something. Over there, I said internally, and nodded my head to my left.
Lon glanced at the sand. A flat patch of evening primrose grew around the stilt where I’d seen her standing. His brow knitted as he dug around inside my thoughts. “She looked solid but disappeared when you dropped the moon magick.”
It was probably nothing. Just a memory. I tried to push her image out of my head and failed. Maybe my brain’s broken. I don’t know why I’d be thinking of her. She can’t be alive. That albino demon took her— She just can’t, Lon. She can’t, I repeated, as if saying it made it true.
“You’re right, she can’t,” Lon agreed, but the way his eyes drifted made me wonder if he was lying to make me feel better. And though he surely heard me thinking this, he dropped the subject and shifted down to his human form. Horns spiraled and disappeared, fiery halo receded to his usual gold-speckled green, and our telepathic connection was severed.
After my nosebleed slowed, we made our way to the front of Merrimoth’s house and waited for Dare under a wide porch bordered by a grove of Monterey cypress trees. The rain ended as two SUVs finally arrived. A few bulky Earthbounds exited the first vehicle—people on Dare’s security team—then, from the second car, Dare himself.
Dressed in a tuxedo, the elderly Hellfire leader shoved fisted hands inside his coat pockets as he marched up the driveway. A green halo trailed as he nodded his bald head in greeting. Dare was easily the most powerful Earthbound in the area, not to mention the wealthiest. He owned a successful energy company, was invested in half the businesses in La Sirena, and put the mayor in office. Forty-some years ago, he started the Hellfire Club with Lon’s father. After the senior Butler died, Dare became Lon’s de facto father figure.
When Lon and I started dating, Dare did some digging into my background and discovered my true identity. He knew my most dangerous secret: that Arcadia Bell was just an alias. No one else but Lon and a few people in my former magical order knew that I was Sélène Duval, daughter of the Black Lodge Slayers. If he chose, Dare could use that information to ruin the independent life I’d struggled to build as Arcadia. And that’s how I ended up working two jobs: bartending at Tambuku Tiki Lounge, and being on-call for Hellfire magical work.
Dare stopped in front of us, a grave look on his face. “Show me.”
“Back here,” Lon said.
Dare signaled his men to follow and we hiked around the house to the beach. Lon pointed to the rock where Merrimoth’s broken body lay, now just a dark shape being battered by the surf. Dare requested a flashlight from one of his men and shined it over the outcropping. He made a despondent noise when the beam found its mark. We stepped closer, until the tide broke around our shoes. Dare held the flashlight on the body. “He wasn’t transmutated?” Dare asked. “You’re certain?”
“He wasn’t,” Lon said.
“No horns or fiery halo,” I agreed. “We didn’t see him every time he set the fires, but I watched him create ice right in front of me. No transmutation.”
Dare stared out at the sea for a moment. “Ever seen anything like that before?”
“Never.”
“I worry this isn’t an isolated case.”
Lon perked up. “Why?”
“Have you been paying attention to the news back in Morella? The robberies?” Dare swept a palm over his bald head. “A glut of them over the last couple of weeks. Home invasions. Burglaries. Stick-ups.”
“Not that unusual around the holidays,” I argued. “People get desperate.”
“This is different. Reporters haven’t noticed, but they will. The robberies are all being committed by Earthbounds.”
“Are you sure?” Lon asked.
Dare nodded. “Earthbounds using strange knacks.”
“Like Merrimoth.”
Dare nodded. “You couldn’t pick out anything from his thoughts that indicated what caused this?” Dare asked Lon as he pointed the flashlight beam across the burnt-out second-story window frame where Merrimoth had blown fire at us. “Anything at all? A spell? A person? A name?”
Lon squinted into the surf. “I almost caught an image of another person when he was bragging. Think it was a male, not sure. He blocked me out of his thoughts before I could fully catch it.”
Dare flicked off the flashlight and handed it to one of his henchmen. “Retrieve the body before it floats away and I’m forced to pay a boat and a crew to drag the water for it later. Have Caine comb the house and dump anything remotely incriminating into garbage bags. He can load them up in one of the SUVs and take them to Swan Drive until I can sort through it tomorrow. Then call the police.”
His man nodded and began following orders as Lon and I trekked to the front of the house with Dare. “Are you just going to wait and see how all this plays out
?” I asked.
“Right now most of the crimes are happening in Morella, but if it spreads here to La Sirena, then everyone’s going to be looking to me for answers. So what do you think, Ms. Bell?”
“I think you’re going to ask me to start poking around Morella.”
He gave me a tight smile. “Why would I want you to do that when you couldn’t even handle the simple task I gave you tonight? All you had to do was bind Merrimoth.” He looked at Lon. “And all you had to do was read the man’s mind. Instead, you not only fail to get the information I wanted, but you also managed to kill the target. My grandson could’ve done a better job. You’re both worthless.”
“Excuse me?” Lon was pissed—really pissed. So was I.
Dare ignored Lon’s stare and looked at me. “I’ll find someone else to do the job you couldn’t. Consider yourself temporarily relieved from your Hellfire duties. When I need you for something less important, I’ll call.” Dare pointed a gloved finger at Lon and me. “Regardless, appearances are important, so you’re both coming to David’s funeral. He wouldn’t have wanted you there, of course. But he should’ve thought of that before he decided to jump into the ocean. Goodnight.”
And with a half-hearted wave, he began marching back to one of the waiting cars.
Lon was seconds away from doing something he’d regret later; I could practically feel the anger radiating from him. But this was my fight—not his.
My fight, and what was I going to do about it?
I don’t know if I felt empowered by the magick I’d done, or stressed over the vision of my mother, or upset over the fact that I’d just accidently killed a man. But I did know that at that moment, I wasn’t going to just stand there and take any more shit from the jackass walking away from us.
I was finally ready to do what I should’ve done the first time Dare threatened me.
“No.”
Dare stopped and turned around. “What?”
I shook my head in annoyance. “Forget it. I’m done.”
“Fine,” Dare said. “I don’t give a damn if you come to the funeral or not.”