by Jenn Bennett
The bugs were venomous.
“Can’t . . . breathe,” Bob choked. “My heart—”
“A little help over here!” Hajo shouted frantically. He’d found another piece of pipe and was swatting at the bugs with savage swings. Squishy, crackling roach deaths echoed off the walls, but the bugs didn’t stop coming. They were still pouring from the cracked skull like brown lava.
I blocked out the scuttling and the hissing and the horrifying flitting of wings to concentrate on a solution. Hajo had definitely tripped a spell when he entered the oval around the skeleton—some kind of magical ward, something big and nasty that I’d never seen before. But if it was just a ward, then these bugs weren’t real. They were thought-forms; illusions designed to instill fear. That seemed more reasonable than a spell that opened up a hole in the cosmos into a nest of Æthyric cockroaches.
“It’s just magick,” I said. “Not real. The pain is psychosomatic. Listen to me, Bob. It’s not real.”
Lon bent over Bob and ripped his shirt open. The black rings were inching up Bob’s throat. His face was dark red. He couldn’t breathe.
“Real or not,” Lon said, “he’s going to have a goddamn heart attack.”
“The bug juice is burning my skin,” Hajo yelled from somewhere nearby.
I glanced at my jeans. He was right. Like acid, the roaches’ pudding-like innards were eating away holes in the fabric.
“Aagghh! Shit!” Lon kicked out, then fired a booming shot, so loud I recoiled in shock.
He dropped to his knees and let the Lupara clank against the floor.
“Lon!” I jerked up the hem of his jeans as he groaned in pain. A craggy puncture wound on his leg, a little higher up than Bob’s. The damn bug had bitten right through his jeans. A moment later, the first black ring circled his skin.
“Counterspell,” Lon shouted at me, gripping his leg in pain.
Meanwhile, Bob was going into convulsions, the heels of his shoes rapidly banging against the floor. I tried to steady him, but it was useless. Nearby, Hajo continued to scream for help as he played baseball with the bugs. I forced myself to focus, reaching inside my jacket for the red ochre chalk. If this was a tripped ward, then I knew exactly two spells that could possibly negate the magick. One of them I’d used several times successfully in the past. The other spell, Silentium, was more powerful, but I’d never used it. I only knew that it required a huge blast of Heka to power it. Kindled Heka—my natural magical mojo reinforced with outside energy. Bodily fluids weren’t going to be enough. I needed electrical current for the kindling, and the cannery had probably been dead for years. . . .
Bob’s convulsions picked up speed as Lon gripped his own thigh, gritting his teeth and squinting into the harsh glare of the flashlight. In the distance, I could feel the rumble of thunder outside. The storm—I wondered if it was close enough for me to pull down lightning.
All I could do was try.
I began sketching the Silentium seal on the floor in front of me, holding the flashlight in my other hand, but before I could even form a small circle, the chalk broke. I was bearing down too hard. I scrambled to retrieve a nub, but one of the bugs dove out of the darkness and lunged for my fingers. I beat it back with the flashlight. As metal collided with cockroach, its glossy brown body cracked . . . and so did the glass lens. The flashlight bulb broke with a pop, and the precious cone of white light sizzled out.
Darkness blanketed the room. Anxious shouting broke out around me. Bob was going to die. Lon was groaning in pain. Hajo was fighting for his life.
Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch.
I opened myself up and reached for any current—battery, electricity, lightning. Come on, come on, I thought. As I strained to ferret out a source of energy, something dark stirred inside me. The air shifted. The sounds in the room slipped away, replaced by an unearthly hum. A cold power poured from me into the darkness. The familiar blue pinpoint of light.
My Moonchild ability.
The one bred into me by my psychotic parents. The one I hadn’t used since that horrible night in San Diego weeks ago. The one that tempted me the other night with Hajo. No, no, no! My body shuddered as I desperately tried to shove it back down. But it was like trying to abstain from sneezing. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I wanted to reign it in, I just couldn’t. It was too strong.
Death by magical roaches or use the Moonchild power? Wait, why was I fighting it? I couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter, because I wasn’t going to be eaten alive by creepy brown bugs the size of rats. I stopped pushing the power away and let it come.
The pinpoint of light grew into a flat blue disk, begging to be used. The Silentium seal crowded my thoughts, then the sigils and lines transferred from my mind to the blue light in front of me. Negative space fell away and the seal glowed in the darkness.
It felt . . . good. Heka was being funneled from me in a small stream. I could feel it leaving, but where was it going? Was my body using it to kindle moon energy? I couldn’t grasp how it worked, but I sure as hell felt it when it rushed back through me like fire and overflowed into the blue seal, charging it. On instinct, I pushed the silver seal with my mind, slamming it down to the floor while shouting the arcane words to complete the Silentium spell.
A spark blossomed into an explosion. For a lingering moment, the entire room was alive with white light. Bob’s convulsions halted; Lon and Hajo craned their necks upward. The silver seal bounced off the floor, expanded around all of us into a glittering cloud, then imploded.
Darkness dropped from the ceiling. The room fell silent. No more tickity-tick, scritchity-scratch of tiny feet. No more squishy crackles. No more buzzing wings.
“Are they gone? Are they?” Hajo said.
It took me several moments to get my balance. I braced for post-magick nausea, but it never came.
“Cady?” Lon’s voice broke with emotion.
I reached out for him, our hands colliding as Bob moaned.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Pain’s gone,” Lon answered as he wound his fingers around the back of my neck and pulled me close. “You used it?” he whispered.
“Not on purpose,” I whispered back.
Quick and rough, he kissed the side of my head. “I thought . . . Never mind.” He kissed me again, then released me.
I bent down to inspect Bob, my fingers still wary of colliding with bug exoskeleton, but all I felt was warm skin. Bob whimpered in relief and clamped his sweaty hands around mine as Hajo mumbled exclamations behind us between labored breaths.
Metal scraped over cement. After two flicks, a soft, orange glow ballooned from the Zippo, which Lon now held. He moved it over Bob’s skin, then his own leg. The black rings were gone. Bite marks too. Even the holes burned in my jeans by the blood had disappeared. He inspected the floor around us. No trace of the magical cockroaches remained. No smear of bug pudding, no twitching legs. Nothing. Only the wildly scattered bones of Bishop’s skeleton and the monumental crack running the length of the room remained as witnesses.
Lon crawled to the shattered skeleton and reached for the skull, grabbing the object that Hajo had first spotted, the one that started this whole damn mess. He inspected it under the Zippo flame, then handed it to me.
It was a rolled-up Polaroid photo. The backing was peeling away, the image was dark and indiscernible. I shoved it into my pocket and hoarsely said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
No one disagreed.
It took us half an hour to get to the Village. I shook the entire way. Prickling terror still lingered under my skin, and my muscles twitched with the memory of the blue-eyed bugs. In the moments when I was able to push away images of the abhorrent bugs and the realization of just how enormously powerful that old magick had been—We could have died!—I mused on the Moonchild ability and how good it had felt. I didn’t have any regrets. I thought I might, but I didn’t. At least not right now.
After we made bac
k to the Singing Bean and watched Bob and Hajo walk to their vehicles, Lon and I sat alone in his car till the rain tapered off a little.
“Good goddamn riddance,” Lon complained, shoving the Lupara under my seat. “If I never see either one of those idiots again, it’ll be too soon.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t hope for the same. Once Bob got over all this, he’d be back at Tambuku. And Hajo, well . . .
“I can’t believe you’re going to have to bind someone for that piece-of-shit junkie dowser,” Lon mumbled.
Two someones, actually, but a deal was a deal. And asshole druggie or not, I’d give the guy one thing: he didn’t cut and run in the middle of the hissing cockroach fight.
“I thought you were dead,” Lon said.
“Me? Why?”
“In the cannery, when you stopped the bugs. I . . . couldn’t hear you.”
“You couldn’t read my emotions?”
He shook his head quickly. “No. They were there, and then they were gone. Like listening to a radio that suddenly gets turned off.”
“That’s strange.”
“It’s never happened to me before. Not even when you’ve used the moon magick. Definitely not in the Hellfire caves when you banished that incubus. And even though things were crazy at the time, I think I would’ve noticed if it happened in San Diego, when your parents . . .” He gestured with his eyes, as if to say “you know.”
“Tried to sacrifice me?”
He grunted affirmatively. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. At least your magick scared the piss out of the death dowser,” Lon said. “Bob too. They’ll think twice before crossing you.”
Maybe, but we had bigger problems.
We now knew Bishop was dead and his body entombed in that warehouse. But if he’d been killed by the Snatcher thirty years ago, that raised a whole new set of possibilities. Had Bishop helped the Snatcher and later been betrayed? Or had he been trying to stop the Snatcher and gotten caught in the crossfire?
As Hajo sped by us on his green motorcycle, Lon and I reviewed the photos I’d taken with my phone. The seven binding mandalas clearly served a different purpose than the oval seal around Bishop, but what, exactly? Containment? A magical cage? Hajo had confirmed that there weren’t death-threads around the seven carvings, so they hadn’t been used in ritual sacrifice. If Lon could track down that Æthyric alphabet in one of his goetias—assuming that it was Æthyric—maybe we’d understand.
We attempted to smooth out the crinkles in the old Polaroid. I wondered if Bishop had swallowed the thing, or if it had been shoved down his throat. Either way, we couldn’t make head or tail out of the image. It looked like it might’ve been taken at night. Somewhere with trees in the background. Hard to be sure, though. It would take some time and patience, but Lon said he could scan it and find out more. He had a few professional Photoshop plug-ins that would help restore the image.
Until then, we needed to figure out what we were going to do next. Because if we weren’t looking for Bishop anymore, just who the hell were we tracking?
The day after the cannery incident, we still didn’t know. Discussing the situation with Dare gave us no further insight. While Lon worked to decipher the image on the old Polaroid, we waited for Dare to discuss the Bishop development with his “people” and get back to us. Until we could all agree on what to do next, life went on. Lon still had a kid with a knack he shouldn’t have, and none of us knew how or why. So we drove to Jupe’s school, just shy of noon, to take him out of class and bring him to someone who might have some answers.
Dr. Spendlove’s office was across town, on the other side of the Village, in a quaint two-story Tudor with stucco walls and decorative half-timbered wood detailing. Bold orange and yellow chrysanthemums were planted in green window boxes below narrow leaded-glass panes. His practice was quietly announced in medieval lettering on the sign that swung from a protruding iron rod next to the door: RED SKY WELLNESS CENTER—COUNSELING, THERAPY, PSYCHIATRIC CONSULTATION. Carved into the cornerstones above the door was the same interlocking circle Nox symbol that’s printed on Tambuku’s sign—indicating that the business was demon-friendly.
Inside, what was once a home had been converted into a business. A desk near the door greeted patients for the three doctors who shared a practice here. After Lon filled out several forms and checked Jupe in, we sat together in one of two waiting rooms decorated with Colonial American artwork, much of it featuring subtly haloed Earthbounds. I looked around at the other people waiting: not a single human in the entire office. A few people glanced up at my silver halo, as demons always did, but soon returned to their magazines and mobile phones, unconcerned.
Jupe, nervous and fidgety, was swept away to the second floor. The doctor kept him up there for almost forty-five minutes, and when he returned with one of the center’s assistants, he was all smiles.
“Dr. Spendlove will see you now to complete Jupiter’s file,” the blond assistant said to Lon with a polite smile.
“Why don’t you do your homework while we’re seeing the doctor?” I suggested to Jupe, gathering up my purse to follow Lon. Maybe I really could live up to the whole “positive female role model” thing his teacher was talking about.
“On it.” He formed his hand into a gun shape, pointed at me—“Pow!”—then snapped open a gossip magazine and slouched into the lavender waiting chair.
Dr. Spendlove’s upstairs office was spacious. More Early American artwork hung on the navy blue walls, along with several painted vases, tools, and a small collection of wooden tobacco pipes in glass cases. A few chairs were grouped together on one side of the room, but no psychiatric fainting couch, to my disappointment.
The doctor stood up from behind a large desk that sat between two narrow stained-glass windows on the far wall. “Lon Butler, how wonderful to see you. Come in, come in,” he said enthusiastically, waving us inside. The assistant softly closed the door behind us. “It’s been ten years? Is that what we were saying on the phone earlier? Goodness.”
Dressed in a black corduroy blazer, Dr. Spendlove was a trim man sporting a gray mustache twirled into points at the corners. He wore his silver hair pulled into a short, tight braid at the base of his neck. His deep blue halo nearly matched the wall color.
“Guess I’ve been busy,” Lon replied, shaking his hand.
The psychiatrist turned to me, smiled, and offered his hand. “Lawrence Spendlove.”
“Arcadia Bell.”
“Lon mentioned you on the phone. So wonderful to meet you. Please, sit.”
Lon and I settled into two chairs in front of the desk as Dr. Spendlove unabashedly stared above my head. “I’m sure you get asked this all the time,” he said, “but would you mind telling me about your halo? It’s quite intriguing.”
Lon rushed to speak. “Cady, wait. Dr. Spendlove is—”
“I’m not demon. I’m a magician,” I blurted out over Lon’s words, fast as a snakebite.
“O-oh,” Dr. Spendlove cooed with excitement. “Fascinating.”
“He’s a truth sayer,” Lon finished. “I forgot.”
“Oh, God,” I moaned. I’d heard of that knack but had never been on the receiving end. “You can force the truth out of people?”
“Not ‘force’ exactly. My patients just open up a little more for me. Don’t feel uncomfortable. I promise not to ask anything about your sex life,” he said good-humoredly.
That was the least of my worries. “You . . . forgot?” I murmured to Lon. Dear God. I was going to murder him when we got out of there.
“Please don’t push her about her background,” Lon said.
The doctor raised his hands in surrender. “Not here to judge. But I am interested in your halo. Can we talk in generalities about it? Knack free. Cross my heart. It’s just that I don’t meet many magicians. Certainly none with halos.”
“Demons and magicians, natural enemies,” I said lightly.
“You’re certain you don’t have any Earthbound f
urther back in your bloodline?”
I nodded.
“Hmm. Well, you’ve got something rather Æthyric bonding with your DNA or you wouldn’t have a halo.” He tilted his head to the side, pondering. “You were born with it?”
“Yes.”
“I have seen one or two anomalies in my thirty-some years of practice. Tell me this: have you yourself conjured anything Æthyric?”
Of course I had. It was just oddly chilling to talk about it with someone outside the occult community. “A few Æthyric demons, a Hermeneus spirit.” Poor Priya, my lost connection to the Æthyr. The Hermeneus spirit who was once my guardian promised that it would regenerate and link itself to me again, but it could take years. . . .
Dr. Spendlove crossed his legs and leaned into one side of the chair. “Fascinating! So you know firsthand that there are indeed other Æthyric beings besides demons.”
“People in my esoteric order believe there are multiple Æthyric planes and that demons inhabit only one of them,” I said. “Then again, who knows how accurate that is. Most magicians don’t even believe that Earthbounds exist, because they can’t see halos.”
“But you can,” he stated, studying my face.
“Yes.”
“She co-owns the tiki bar in Morella,” Lon said.
“Ah! So you’re that girl. Yes, I’ve heard people make mention of you from time to time. Beat and bind, as they say in fencing, yes?” His cheeks were ruddy with interest.
“En garde,” I replied flatly.
He laughed like Santa Claus, minus the jiggling belly. “Indeed, indeed. Lon’s always shown a sharp interest in magick—since he was a small child, in fact. So it doesn’t surprise me that he’d connect with someone like you.”
A thrumming panic was surfacing. Not out-of-control panic, but it was there. Sweat was beginning to make my hair itch at the nape of my neck. Lon reached for my hand and threaded his fingers through mine.
Dr. Spendlove didn’t seem to notice my fear. “I once had a young patient from a small town in northern India with a dark orange halo,” he said, circling his hand in the air around his own in demonstration. “Never having seen another person with a halo, he lived his whole life thinking he was mentally ill. Had been prescribed antipsychotic medications. When he was eighteen, he came to the states for a job, right here in La Sirena, and voilà!” He clapped his hands together then spread his arms dramatically. “Halos, as far as the eye could see. He began seeing me to wean him off his medications, which I did. But I was never entirely convinced that he was demon. Earthbound like the rest of us, yes, but Earthbound what, exactly?”