by Duncan, Lex
With that, I made the dramatic exit I always wanted to make. Slammed the door to the TV room as hard as I could to enhance the effect. God, guys were dumb.
Aralia, who'd been sitting on the couch watching Casablanca, agreed. “Those two are very stupid.”
I flopped down next to her. “Tell me about it.”
Rising from his spot in front of the fireplace, Morgenstern came to rest his head in my lap. Okay, Maybe all guys weren't dumb.
Together, the three of us watched the movie while the fire crackled and a steady downpour of rain washed in from ocean. It was the most normal thing I'd done in weeks. No mention of demons, no crazy guys in top hats, no letters from dead girls. Just me, Aralia, and Mo.
When the end credits rolled an hour later, Aralia spoke. “For the record, Max fancied me when he first got here, too.”
I groaned. “Can we not talk about this?”
“Oh, Beatrice,” she sighed, reaching over to pat my head affectionately. “You'll figure it out one day.”
I made a face and stuck my tongue out at her like the mature adult I was.
She arched a brow, but a corner of her mouth twitched in a grudging smile. “Attractive.”
“I try, darling,” I mimicked her accent, scratching Mo behind his ear. He'd gotten the impression that I'd make a good pillow and jumped up on the couch in the middle of the movie. Evidently, I was comfortable, because he hadn't budged since.
“Do you enjoy mocking me?” Aralia asked, sounding offended.
“I'd never mock you, darling.”
“Oh, you're so clever.”
“Indeed, Ms. Spinosa, indeed.”
We burst out laughing despite ourselves. What an emotionally compromising day this had been. I laughed, I cried, I yelled, I kissed. Rosie would have loved hearing about it.
My laughter dried up.
Aralia’s soon followed. “Are you all right?”
I sighed. There wasn't really any good way to tell someone that your best friend was going to die soon. “Rosie doesn't have much time left. She was put in solitary confinement today. Attacked a nurse. They wouldn't let me see her.”
Aralia’s frown betrayed her sympathy, but it was promptly covered with her usual smirk. “Want to break in? I'll be the Bonnie to your Clyde. It'll be fun.”
“You have a criminal past I know nothing about?” I gave her shoulder a shove, grateful that she didn't go the Brother Luke route. “Let's hear it, Bonnie. How many banks have you busted?”
She twirled her hair with her index finger, looking coy. “Wouldn't be much of a secret if I told you, hm?”
“C'mon,” I was genuinely curious. “I've been living here for more than a month and I have no idea what you do or who you are. You could be a serial killer and I'd have absolutely no clue.”
“Wouldn't that be something?” She folded her hands in her lap, the light from the fire reflecting in her dark eyes. “What do you want to know?”
“Your middle name?” I'd start with the small stuff. Work my way up.
“I don’t have one,” she said.
Oh. Huh. Okay. “Where did you grow up? England?”
“India. Though my family and I moved to London when I was five.”
That explained the accent. I'd try something more personal now. When we first met, she mentioned that she had decades of practice hunting demons. But she didn't look a day over twenty-five, like Dante. “When's your birthday?”
“June 12th, 1915. I look damn good for my age.”
“Aha!” I exclaimed. “I knew it! I knew something was off about you! I knew―...Wait.” 1915 was a long time ago.
“How the hell were you born in 1915?”
She shrugged. “I'm a succubus.”
The grass was green, the sky was blue, exorcism didn't work, and Aralia was a succubus. I probably should have seen that one coming. “You're a succubus?”
“Pick your jaw up off the floor, Beatrice. You'll catch flies.”
“Okay, but you're a succubus?”
Succubi and incubi were rare, the products of willing possession. I didn't know much about them other than that you had to literally sell your soul to the devil to become one. Exchanges had to be made, blood had to be spilled. It was messy. Aralia didn't like messy.
“Surprise,” she said flatly. “I'm a succubus. Next question.”
She was going to regret saying that. “If you're a succubus, how are you so old? I thought they died young.”
A loud crack of thunder rattled the walls. “I'm better at it than most.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know how to control myself.”
“Is it true that you kill people by having sex with them or is that just a myth?”
Her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Definitely a myth. A slanderous one.”
“What made you want to―?”
“If you're searching for some tragic backstory, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed.” She picked a piece of lint off her pant leg. “I welcomed a demon into my body because I was dissatisfied with my former life. I wanted more than what my station could offer, so I decided to make a change. That's all.”
“That's all?” I couldn't imagine making such a rash decision so lightly. Willingly harboring a demon...It was the stuff of CADP pamphlets, gothic horror novels, urban legends. The few succubi and incubi that existed were reviled. Feared. No wonder Aralia hadn't told me.
She yawned, bored with her lack of tragic backstory. “That's all.”
Wow. Aralia was a succubus. The only other one I knew of Sylvie Karlov. She worked a lot in the film noir circuit in the 1940s, but when word got out that she was a succubus, she was exiled from the movie business. With her career destroyed, she moved to France, bought a giant house, had an affair with her pool boy. Whether she was still alive today or not was up for debate.
Finding her and asking her for her autograph was one of the many things on my bucket list. At least now I had another succubus to pester with questions. In preparation for my meeting with Sylvie.
“What do you do, exactly? Here, I mean?”
“You've been waiting a long time to ask that question, haven't you?”
Subtlety wasn't really my strong suit. “Sort of.”
“Oh, Beatrice.” That was her go-to phrase for whenever I said something stupid. She used it a lot. “D'you know that pendant Max wears? The one in the shape of the banishing seal?”
I affected Dante's overly serious tone, twisting my expression into one of austere disapproval. “Don't you mean the Seal of the Fourth Sacrament?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, that one.”
I grinned. My Dante impression was getting good. “Yep, I know it.”
“I made it,” Aralia said. “Forged it from iron, fortified it to ward away possession. Though I think I'll have to make him a new one after what that Gershom cad did. I've also warded the house to keep any unwanted intruders out.”
“How do you handle the iron? I thought—”
“Succubi aren’t full demons,” she said. “The iron stings a little but it isn’t overly painful.”
“So you're a succubus and you're like some magical demon blacksmith?” Images of her sweating over a forge in Mordor danced in my head. “One pendant to rule them all, one pendant to find them?”
“What?” Genuine confusion clouded her face. “Are you making fun of me?”
I ventured on hopefully, praying she'd get the reference. “One pendant to bring them all and in the darkness bind them?”
She just stared at me. “Oh, Beatrice.”
“What is with you people?” I huffed. Mo lifted his head at my distress. “Dante doesn't know who Mary Poppins is and you don't know Lord of the Rings? It's so sad. We need to have a movie marathon over Christmas break.”
Aralia sniffed haughtily, casting me a sidelong glance. “We all can't be nerds like you, Beatrice.”
“I'm not a nerd!”
“You're also a bad liar.”
&n
bsp; “And you're mean.” I got up off the couch and stretched the day's stress from my body. Between the fire and the rain and the crying, my eyes were getting heavy. Time for bed. “I think I'm gonna turn in early. Thanks for the movie and telling me all that stuff.”
Aralia nodded, draping her long legs over Mo's motionless body. He didn't seem to mind. “As long as you don't start running your mouth.”
I snorted. Who did I have to tell? One of the hundreds of friends I had? “Your secret's safe with me.”
“There's a good girl.” Mollified, she closed her eyes. “Shut the door on the way out, will you?”
I did, then went straight to my room to avoid any unwanted run-ins with Dante. I thought I washed my hands of this sort of thing when I moved out of my apartment.
I guess I didn’t scrub hard enough.
Rain whipped at my window as I changed out of my clothes and into pajamas. Tonight, no moon appeared to light the stormy sky and the chill felt particularly biting, seeping in through the cracks in the walls. It tasted like autumn and ocean, like salt and Halloween. My favorite holiday was a couple weeks away. Rosie and I always spent it together, sanatorium or not.
I didn't know what I'd be doing this year.
Shivering, I wrapped myself in a cocoon of blankets and nestled into bed. The house creaked around me, but all its noises had become familiar. Even the crickets didn't bother me anymore.
Though I was certainly tired enough, sleep didn't come easily. I tossed and turned, counted sheep and hummed lullabies. Nothing worked.
“Okay,” I said to the ceiling. “This isn't working.”
I was wide awake. I couldn't do my usual thing, which was visiting Dante in the TV room or his study. I didn't have any homework. So what did I do?
I rolled over onto my side and found my answer on the nightstand. The envelope Brother Luke had given me at the sanatorium. A letter, I assumed. From Rosie. She didn't want me to open it until I was ready. I wasn't sure if I was, but if I wasn't, when would I be?
Sitting up, I opened the nightstand's little drawer and felt around for the matchbox I kept in there. When I found it, I lit the lone, half melted candle that'd been here since long before I moved in and grabbed the envelope, taking a moment to gather my courage before I opened it.
It wasn't a letter, waxing nostalgic about our friendship. It wasn't a heartfelt goodbye. It was a tip.
Check underneath the floorboards.
Below that, she'd drawn the seal of the First Sacrament.
I kicked my blankets off. Put any and all differences aside. Barged into Dante's office and slapped the note down on his desk.
He looked at it, then looked at me. Judging by his shocked expression, we finally agreed on something.
“Dante,” I said, “we have a problem.”
Eighteen
Dante paced. He never paced. But he was pacing now and it was getting on my last nerve.
“Can you stop?” I asked as nicely as my mood would allow. “You're driving me nuts.”
“Agreed,” Aralia slumped against the bookshelves, sinking to the floor. “Can we get this over with, please? I need my rest.”
Dante ignored us. Kept pacing.
Max dozed off in the chair next to me and Mo lay by the door, torn ear twitching. I stared down at Rosie's note, trying to discern its meaning. Check underneath the floorboards. And then there was the symbol to consider.
The symbol very few people were supposed to know about. The symbol that accompanied Henriette's letter. The symbol that should have been used to create life, but was instead branded on those whose lives had ended.
It didn't make any sense.
“How would she know about this?” I wondered.
“I don't know,” Dante said, pressing his palms to his eyes in frustration. “Did she mention anything to you about it?”
“Not a word.”
“Damn it.”
This was the first time I'd heard him cuss. “Dante, sit down. We'll figure this out.”
“You're going to give yourself a stroke, darling,” Aralia supplied unhelpfully.
Dante ceased his pacing for a blissful moment, exhaled, then resumed pacing. “The book, she has to mean the book.”
“Why are you freaking out about this?” I asked. “We’ll figure this out, we always do.”
Outside, the storm intensified. Rain hammered the roof and thunder rippled like a sound effect in a horror movie. Max snored on, oblivious. I gave him a shove.
His breath caught in his throat, body jerking violently in surprise. He would have fallen off his chair if he hadn't grabbed the edge of Dante's desk. “Huh?”
“You were snoring,” I said.
He rubbed his eyes. “Oh. What's, uh―What's going on?”
“Dante's having an aneurysm.”
“Why?”
“Did you forget the cryptic note Rosie gave me?”
“Yeah, that. Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, that.” I passed it over. “Have any ideas?”
He shook his head. “No, I―”
“The church!” Dante stopped pacing and snatched the note from Max. “Check underneath the floorboards. She means the church.”
I was getting whiplash from all his mood swings. “How do you figure?”
“Think about it, Beatrice,” he said. “The root of all of our problems is in that church. If the book has anything to do with what's been happening, what better place for it to be than there?”
I stood up so fast that my chair toppled over. “The church!”
“The church,” he agreed.
“You're a couple of odd birds, aren't you?” Aralia muttered.
Max tipped his glasses up and rubbed his eyes some more. “Uh. What're we doing?”
Dante grabbed his car keys off his desk. “We're leaving. Get your coats.”
***
I hadn't been this excited since I was chosen to play the lead in my school's fifth grade production of Stone Chapel: A History. I'd gotten the part of Amelia Cromwell, Elias’s wife. I never went through with it because I developed a severe case of stage fright ten minutes before the show, but for every minute leading up to those ten, I was on Cloud Nine.
That was how the ride to the church felt. Except I refused to get stage fright this time. Too much relied on Dante's hypothesis being right. We needed that book. We needed to see for ourselves why the mayor wanted it.
“I do hope you're right about this,” Aralia said, voicing my concerns. She leaned on the armrest, kept her eyes trained on the window as the city rushed by in a gray, rainy smudge.
We'd gotten lucky in that the streets were largely empty. Not many people wanted to get out in this weather on a Sunday night at two in the morning. This allowed Dante to blow stop signs and ignore red lights. He hung a hard left and the ghosts of the Old Quarter resurrected themselves from out the shadows, looming there like they'd been waiting for us this whole time.
A purple bolt of lightning split the sky in half. The silhouette of the church flashed briefly into view. My skin prickled with anticipation.
We were here.
Dante stomped on the break, threw the car in park. He twisted around in his seat to address Max and I. “We're playing this safe. We don't know what else is waiting for us in there, so keep your weapons on you at all times, understood?”
We nodded.
“Good,” he unbuckled his seatbelt. “Let's go.”
We paired off two by two. Aralia and Dante took the front while Max and I circled around to the back. Both entrances were miraculously unlocked. We regrouped in the middle of the main aisle.
“Well?” Dante asked expectantly. His gun was drawn. As was Aralia's. I wanted to fit in, so I drew mine too.
“All's quiet on the western front,” I said. I wasn't hearing voices, nor was I having the compulsion to kill myself at the altar. Good signs. The rest of the place? Not so much.
The candles on the chandelier were lit. So were the ones on the altar. Someon
e had been here before us.
Dante's eyes darted around the cavernous space, ever alert. “Take a look around. Yell if you find something.”
“Now, I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Aralia butted in, grabbing my arm as I went to start my search. “But the floor's stone. Can't really hide anything under it. Are you certain your friend didn't mean someplace else?”
“Where else would she mean?” I asked.
“A home improvement store?”
“You're hilarious.”
“Ladies,” Dante interrupted. “Can we focus please?”
Aralia let me go, gripped his shoulder instead and looked him in the eye as though she were about to tell him something that would change his life forever. “Sweetheart, I don't think this is your place.”
He blinked. “Humor me.”
“Oh, for God's sake,” Aralia said. “Impossible man.”
Impossible or not, we had our orders. The four of us fanned out across the room, each taking a separate corner. Finding floorboards on a stone surface couldn't be that difficult, right?
I checked underneath the pews, feeling around for the smooth sheen of hardwood. Nothing. I lifted the velvet runner that spanned the length of the main aisle. Nothing. I swept my hands along the cobbles of the wall, searching for some secret lever to pull. Nothing. Hm. If I were a missing diary written two hundred years ago, where would I be?
“Are you lot finding anything?” Aralia shouted, her voice echoing.
“Nope!” I wandered by a door on my way to the altar. I remembered being enamored with it when I was younger. I'd waste whole sermons wondering what was behind this door, this one door. Mother Arden never let me look, but she wasn't here now, so...
I stepped forward and opened it a crack. Took a peek inside.
Nearly got a face full of claws for my troubles.
Throwing my arms up to protect myself, I scrambled backward into a pew to avoid getting ripped to pieces by a monster that almost looked like a person if you squinted hard enough. A seven foot tall person with a pair of leathery wings and twisted horns and bloody stitches where its eyes should have been. Maybe this thing was the owner of that dog I made friends with all that time ago. Maybe this church was their special meeting place. Maybe I needed to stop thinking about it and focus on not getting killed. Good plan.