by Duncan, Lex
Aralia got the last of the glass swept into a dust pan and paused to assess her work. “There we are. Clean as a whistle.”
“Awesome,” I said, joining her in the assessment. The foyer looked okay but the rest of the house needed picking up.
We stared at our work for a few more seconds, then Aralia kicked off her heels and went to dump the glass in the trash can. “We're not very good at being normal, are we?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Right, well,” she returned to my side and leaned over to prop her elbow on my shoulder. “We ought to do the Halloween thing now, yes?”
“What about the rest of the cleaning?” I asked.
“Do we look like maids, Beatrice?”
“No, Aralia, we don't.”
“So it's settled. We do the Halloween thing now, we clean later.”
I smiled. The nuns at St. Agatha's could learn a thing or two about work ethic from Aralia Spinosa.
***
We did the Halloween thing. Cleared the kitchen table off, covered it with old pages from the Stone Chapel Gazette, and got to work carving the pumpkins Aralia bought from some farmer on the side of the road. Mine ended up looking like a three year old's version of Dracula while Aralia's was a work of pumpkin art. Of course it was.
We grabbed a couple of candles from the stairs to complete our jack-o'-lanterns, then carried them up to the TV room to give it a more appropriate atmosphere. When that was done, I picked a Sylvie Karlov movie from Aralia's extensive DVD collection and popped it in the player.
The Demon and the Dame, it was called. A possessed lawyer and a beautiful socialite fall in love against all odds. Sylvie's character―Bernice, I think―shot the lawyer in the end. I enjoyed it.
Aralia thought it was stupid.
A storm began to roll in as I selected another movie. Aralia checked her phone. It was well past midnight.
“Dante should be home by now,” she said, getting up from the couch to peek out the window. A fruitless effort, considering the tree blocking her view.
“Maybe he met someone,” I mumbled. Maybe he was on a secret date. Maybe she was gorgeous and nice and maybe she didn't yell at him on a daily basis. Maybe she was blonde. Or a man. Did he like blondes? Why the hell did I care? I shouldn't care.
I wasn't going to care.
I didn't care.
Definitely didn't care.
Aralia turned away from the window with a laugh, interrupting my forced apathy. “I doubt it. He's terrible with women. You should know that.”
“Should I?” I asked. I narrowed my choices down to two movies. Another Sylvie Karlov feature―That Girl Lilith―or The Exorcist. I was leaning toward Lilith.
“You should,” Aralia wandered to the desk, moved some papers around. Then she gasped. “What is this?”
I'd seen The Exorcist more times than I could count, so I popped the Lilith movie into the DVD player and went to see what Aralia was making a fuss about. Thunder rumbled and a steady downpour of rain pattered against the roof. “What's what?”
“This,” she turned the piece of paper she'd been reading around so I could get a better look. “This is Dante's stationary. See the letterhead?”
The top of the paper listed Dante's name, occupation, and phone number in stately black lettering. Like the card he'd given me when we first met. The space below was filled with his scrawl. I could barely read it. “Uh, what am I looking at here?”
She balled the paper up. Crushed it in her fist. “The damn grocery list! He forgot my wine! Again!”
“You have a problem,” I said, though I was kind of disappointed that it wasn't anything more interesting. Dante was always in here or his study. Signing papers, reading papers, sorting papers. I reasoned that most of them were probably bills or government forms, but with the way he kept secrets, they could have been something else entirely.
“I do not,” Aralia replied. She tossed the list in the fire and stood there until it turned into a lump of blackened ash.
“Uh-huh,” I said, sitting on the couch. That Girl Lilith was stuck on its menu screen. I didn't press play. Not yet. “Aralia, can I ask you something?”
She sat down next to me. “This isn't another game of twenty questions, is it?”
“No, just one.”
“I suppose you can ask, then.”
I hesitated. Aralia was supposed to be Dante's best and oldest friend. By that logic, she should've known him better than anyone. Which meant she had an answer to my question. All I needed to do was ask it. “Do you ever get the feeling that Dante's hiding something?”
“Frequently,” she said, staring into the fire as though his secrets were burning there between the logs. “I told you long ago that he'd likely lie to you under the pretense of protection. He's done it to me before, the idiot, and now...Seems he’s doing it again.”
“But why?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She waved her hand, flippant. “Men and their nonsense egos, thinking they need to protect us poor women from the truth. He does care about you, though. Enough to act the way he’s been acting, I suppose.”
That didn’t make it right. “If he really cared about me, he'd let me help. He'd let Max help. He can't keep pushing us away.”
“No,” Aralia conceded, “he can't.”
We were quiet. That Girl Lilith waited on screen, somber music accompanying the black and white picture.
“Want to go break into his study?” Aralia asked.
I blinked. “Seriously?”
“The answer to your question may very well be in there,” she said, an impish smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. When I didn't answer right away, she grabbed my shoulder and gave me a shake. “Oh, come on. It'll be fun.”
“He'll get so pissed if he finds out.”
“Your point being?”
“He's mad enough at me as it is.”
“Oh, please. He won't stay mad.”
I chewed my bottom lip. Fought a smile. Breaking into Dante's office would be a direct violation of his privacy. It would also be wrong. Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back, right? If Dante wasn't going to tell me the truth, I needed to go and find it. I deserved a little honesty and at this point, I didn't care who or what it was from. “Okay,” I said at last. “Let's do it.”
The door was still locked.
Aralia picked it open with a couple of bobby pins and in we went, easy as pie. Since the lamp wouldn't work because of the storm, we lit a few candles, then got to snooping. I went to the bookshelves first. Combed the spines of the tomes held there for suspicious titles. Most of them were boring demonology encyclopedias written by dead guys with Roman names. Nothing out of the ordinary.
I gave up on the shelves and went to Dante’s desk. Tried the drawer. Also locked.
“Is there a key for this somewhere?” I asked Aralia.
She looked up from the file she was thumbing through. “Underneath the phone, I think. I’ve seen him take it from there a few times.”
Aralia was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a liar. The key was right where she said it was. Grabbing it, I unlocked the drawer and slid it open. Bills, bills, demon diagrams, paper clips…and a book? I dug it out. Ragged and old, its cover was stained with something dark—blood?—and in the middle, embossed in silver, was the seal of the First Sacrament. There was a note written on the first page. I could barely read it.
Dante,
You are better than you think you are. Use this well.
- Fabius
“Do you know who Fabius Serafini is?” I asked.
Aralia put her file back atop a haphazard stack of them shoved in a corner. “Yes. Do you?”
“Yeah.” In hindsight, it was surprising that Dante would even tell me that. “There’s a note in this book from him to Dante.”
She arched a brow. “Truly?”
“Truly.”
“Hm.”
That didn't sound like a good hm. Then again, was t
here ever a good hm?
I got up. Handed her the book. “Here. Take a look for yourself.”
She wasted no time in cracking it open. She flipped past pages of Latin text, of demon sketches rivaling the ones Dante did, of symbols representing every Sacrament, of symbols I didn't recognize. There were a few recurring elements, including a word that started looking familiar. It showed up on nearly every page.
“What is that?” I asked, pointing to the word.
Aralia's face fell. “Amarax.”
“Amarax?”
“An ancient demonic name.” She flipped the page. There it was again.
“Aralia?” I asked. She looked...well, disturbed was a good word for it.
“Hm?” She flipped once more and an envelope fell out. It looked recent enough, but there wasn't a stamp or a return address. Why didn't anyone ever put a damn return address?
“To one Mr. Dante Arturo,” Aralia read. She turned the envelope over and lifted the flap. Inside was a letter, which she promptly unfolded and read aloud for my convenience. I scooted my candle over so she'd have more light, but she waved it away. She didn't need much light to see by. “If you believe your father to be involved, we need to contact Janika. She'll want to know.”
“Who's Janika?” I asked. “And Dante has a dad?”
I mean, yeah, he had a dad, but it was a strange picture to form. Dante seemed so self-sufficient, so independent, so detached from personal relationships that connecting him to anyone but Aralia and his dog required some suspension of disbelief.
Aralia's face fell even farther as she scanned the rest of the letter. “Yes, he does, but we haven't heard from him in a very, very long time. But if Dante suspects him to be involved, then...”
An icy feeling flooded my veins. “Then what?”
She didn't answer.
“Then what?” I urged.
“Then we're going to be in very big trouble.” She looked up. Stared past me to the door.
I turned around in my seat, followed her gaze with my own. Yeah, we were going to be in very big trouble.
Dante stood motionless in the doorway. His hair dripped with rainwater and his clothes fared no better. Even as a silhouette, he looked ragged.
“Hi,” I said dumbly.
“What are you doing here?” He asked, the words flat and dead as he spoke them.
I hated it when he talked to me like this. I hated it when he acted like he didn't care about me. I hated it because I knew he cared. He cared about everyone. “Aralia invited me over.”
“She shouldn't have,” he said.
I swallowed the urge to yell at him. “Well, she did. So I'm here.”
“You broke into my office.”
“You won't tell either of us anything so we decided to find the answers ourselves.”
I thought I heard him sigh. Or maybe it was the wind. “The answers to what?”
“Everything, Dante!” I guess I wasn't swallowing that urge very well. “Who's Janika, huh? Who's your dad? Where have you been all this time?”
“Beatrice,” he took a step forward.
I took one back. “Answer me. For once, just tell me the truth.”
He remained where he stood. I still couldn't see his face, but the smell coming off him was repugnant. Like he hadn’t showered in a few days. “Nothing is ever as simple as you'd like it to be, Beatrice. It's well past time you learned that.”
Oh, that’s rich. I wasn't the only one who needed to learn something here. “You know what you need to learn, Dante? You need to learn that this whole lone wolf routine you've got going on isn't going to work. You need to learn to swallow your stupid pride and admit when you need help.”
Pot, meet kettle. In my defense, taking your own advice wasn't nearly as easy as giving it to someone else.
A booming clap of thunder rattled against the windows. Dante tilted his head up a fraction. “You need to leave. Please.”
So that's how this was going to be. Shocker. Dante didn't want to deal with the fact that someone was calling him out on his stupidity so he wanted me gone. He wanted to go back to being broody and prideful and dumb.
Well, fine. He could be broody and prideful and dumb by himself. I was done.
“You’re not kicking me out this time,” I told him. “I’m leaving because you’re being an asshole again.”
“Where are you going?” He asked, but he didn't make the effort to sound like he cared. I suspected he wouldn't have cared if I shot him in the foot, either.
Aralia tossed her hair over her shoulder and linked her arm with mine. “That is none of your concern, Mr. Arturo.”
“Fine,” he said. “Leave. Both of you.”
“Gladly,” Aralia replied.
Filled with bravado, we stormed past him. I had to breathe through my mouth until we got out of range of his smell and down the stairs.
“It’s happening again,” Aralia said as we ducked into her car.
“What?” I asked, rubbing my hands together to generate some warmth.
She gunned the engine and turned up the heat. “Dante, he just…”
It looked to me like he was having a depressive episode. I was all too familiar with those. Not showering for days on end because the mere thought of getting out of bed is too much to bear. Struggling to feel anything beyond the emotional equivalent of a flatline. I haven’t been that low in a long time.
“I know,” I said. Because I did. More than I wanted to. “He’ll come out of it.”
“I know,” Aralia sighed, guiding the car out of the driveway and onto the highway. “He always does. Though he’s always a bit of an arse first.”
Depressed or not, he was hiding something. And it was long past time for me to find out what.
Twenty-Four
Breaking into St. Agatha's at two in the morning in a thunderstorm wasn't quite as easy as it sounded. Aralia parked her car out front and we ran for the door, only to find it locked. So, for the second time that night, we had to break into a place we probably shouldn't have been breaking into.
“This is a nightmare,” Aralia said, hoisting me up through the first window we could find that wasn't sealed shut.
Silvery torrents of rain poured down from the black sky, soaking through my clothes and plastering my hair to my skull like glue. I chose a bad night to forget my coat. “Ow, ow, hold on for a second, my head's stuck.”
“Well, unstick it!” Aralia snarled. “I'm getting soaked out here. You know how much I dislike getting my hair wet!”
I bent my neck at a painful angle and pushed myself the rest of the way through. I fell the six or so feet to the floor and landed―just barely―on my feet. Aralia followed much more gracefully.
“Here we are, Your Majesty,” she said. “I've successfully broken into your cloister for you.”
Getting inside was one thing. Getting around the inside was another. St. Agatha's was a big place. It was also a very dark place. There were plenty of windows, useless on a night like tonight. There were plenty of candles, snuffed until the dawn. Despite appearances, this place had electricity, too, but turning a light on had the potential to draw unwanted attention from disgruntled nuns. We didn't want that.
I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and pressed the button to turn the screen on. Two missed calls from Max. I made a mental note to return them later.
“Okay,” I whispered, holding the phone up as a kind of torch. Wasn't as bright as the chandelier above us, but it would have to do. “We need to get to the stairs and―...Aralia?”
Two seconds ago, she'd been right beside me. And now she was gone. Great.
“Aralia?” I tried again.
No answer.
Her abandonment didn't really come as a shock. I was always too slow for her liking. Poor puny human couldn't keep up with the centuries-old succubus. That's what my life boiled down to these days.
I needed to write a memoir.
Grumbling, I pointed my phone in the direction of the stai
rs and got to walking. If Aralia wanted to get lost in here by herself, fine. I knew my way around. Mostly. I knew my way to my room, at least.
I found the stairs with relative ease (correction: I ran into the banister), then took them to the second floor. One more to go. Take that, Spinosa. I'll bet she was wandering in the dining hall somewhere.
I then rounded the corner to the next flight of stairs, only to backtrack immediately after. Voices. I definitely heard voices. Coming from the stairwell. Hushed voices. Secret voices. Urgent voices.
I shoved my phone back in my pocket to snuff the light. Prayed to the Virgin Mary that the owners of the voices didn't see it.
A moment passed. Then two. Then three. Apparently, praying in a Catholic institution worked because the voices continued their conversation without pause. They didn't see. Or if they did, they didn't care, which was fine with me. Thanks, Mary.
I waited another minute or two for the voices to cease. When they did, I peeked around the corner. Not sure why, because I couldn't see anything, but I figured that if I squinted, I could make out a few details or―
“Boo.”
“Jesus Christ!” I clutched the wall, my heart jumping into my throat.
“No, just me,” Aralia said. “But thank you.”
Though I hadn't quite recovered from that newest bout of cardiac arrest, I managed to form a coherent question. “Where the hell did you go?”
“Where the hell did you go?”
“I didn't go anywhere. You were the one that disappeared two seconds after we came in.”
“They're gone, by the way,” she gestured up the stairs.
“Who?” I asked, then remembered the voices. Being scared shitless had a funny way of making you forget what was important. “Oh. Them.”
“Do your nuns make a habit out of having these rendezvous so late at night?” She asked.
“Not that I know of.” I glanced around the corner again. I didn't see anything. Because it was dark. And they were gone. Aralia just said so. Come on, Beatrice. Get with it.
She did her arm-linking thing and led me up the stairs like a seeing-eye dog. “There was only one of them, though I didn’t get a look at who she was speaking to. She said something about needing to catch someone.”