by Jenn Bennett
Lon’s face told me everything he was thinking, namely that this was a violation of Jupe’s no-sugar rule, and that he was considering the possibility that Bob had filled the candy with razor blades. I put a hand on Lon’s arm and shook my head. It was the boy’s birthday, for Pete’s sake.
“Hey, do you know Kar Yee, too?” Jupe asked.
“Sure. I see her every day.”
“Every day? Do you work there or something?”
“He likes tiki drinks,” I said.
Jupe eyed him suspiciously. “You must like them a lot.”
“Cady’s the best bartender in the city,” Bob said proudly.
“She makes good smoothies,” Jupe said matter-of-factly. “But my dad’s a better cook.”
Don’t spare my feelings, kid.
Bob leaned against the sofa while I got my jacket. “So,” he said, still attempting to woo Lon’s good grace through his son, “I heard all the schools had closed in La Sirena. What about yours?”
“Yep. Good thing, too. It was getting crazy stressful up in that place.”
“Oh?”
“The teachers turned into tyrants. I’ve got this one teacher, Ms. Forsythe, who’s really cool, but she’s super-religious, and she’s always giving me extra homework for cussing in class, because she says it’s wrong.” Jupe rolled his eyes. “But she was so stressed out the day the school closed that she said ‘I don’t give a damn’ in front of one of the parents.” Jupe gave a single, loud laugh. “I almost lost my shit. It was awesome. I wonder if she’ll have go to confession for that?”
“Jupe,” Lon warned halfheartedly.
Bob shifted. Foxglove started barking again.
“Hush, you damn mutt,” Jupe complained. “We’re in the city tonight. You can’t act like that here.”
Bob moved away from the dog as she quieted. “What did you say her name was?”
“Foxglove,” Jupe said as he forced her to sit.
“No, your teacher.”
“Oh. Ms. Forsythe. Why? You know her?”
I zipped up my jacket. My ear was ringing. I tilted my head to the side and jostled it. “Bob lives here in Morella, Jupe. He doesn’t know her.”
“Ms. Forsythe lives out here in Morella, too,” Jupe argued. “She just works in La Sirena.”
Bob had a strange look on his face. “Grace Forsythe?”
“Yeah, Gracie. That’s what the other teachers call her,” Jupe said.
“That’s weird,” Bob said to me. “When he said she was religious, I thought he meant traditionally. But”—he glanced back at Jupe and lowered his voice, speaking to me conspiratorially—“Grace Forsythe goes to that, uh, temple you were asking me about the other day.”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“She used to be a patient at my father’s clinic before he died. All the Silent Temple members went to him.”
I have the support of my church. I’m quite blessed.
“Oh . . . God,” I murmured as I blinked at Lon. “Could it be?”
“No,” Lon insisted. “I know Grace. I can read her. If she’s involved, she has no idea.”
She was being used. Merrin was the getaway driver. Ms. Forsythe was unknowingly possessed by the duke.
Thirty years ago, Bishop was the getaway driver and Merrin was possessed by the duke. Only, Merrin was willing. Merrin struck the deal with the demon, but he was too weak to host him; too human. Merrin found someone stronger. Bishop’s old house was near the school. Ms. Forsythe worked at the school. She knew all the Earthbound kids. She was a member of the Silent Temple.
She was easy prey.
“Dad, what’s going on?”
Lon grimaced. “We can’t be sure, Jupe. I know she’s innocent—”
“No—that sound. Can’t you hear it? Foxglove’s whining. Where is that coming from?”
My ringing ears.
A shadow darkened the living room window, blocking out the setting sun.
Someone was testing the wards.
The shadow shifted out of sight. The ringing continued intermittently—softer, then louder.
“Oh, hell,” I said.
“Hasn’t reached the house ward yet,” Lon said. “No blue web.”
Lon and I set that ward together, strong magick that incapacitated anyone who crossed it with the intent to do harm. When tripped, it became visible, a network of bright blue lines. However, my own personal wards didn’t do that. Most of them alerted me with instinctive warnings that popped up in my mind, but I’d put up so many over the last few months, the windows and walls were covered with invisible ink, symbols from different traditions. One of them must issue an audible warning, and now was not the time I wanted to discover this detail.
Foxglove rocketed to the side door and barked her head off. My pounding heart mirrored her warning.
“Did you lock it when Bob came?” Lon said.
“Both locks.”
Lon grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun off the dining room table.
“Is it the Snatcher?” Jupe said, then squeaked out, “Ms. Forsythe?”
“Everyone upstairs,” I shouted. “My bedroom is the safest room in the house. Go!”
Jupe scooped up Mr. Piggy. “Foxie, come!”
The dog obeyed, darting up the stairs alongside Jupe. Once we were all inside my room, Lon slammed the door shut and locked it. “Help me move this, Bob.”
Bob scrambled to Lon’s side. Then they dragged my chest of drawers across the room and wedged it against the door. Jupe and I retreated into a corner and watched the door. If the main house ward was tripped, we’d all know. That’s what I kept telling myself as Foxglove paced the room, panting, alert. The ringing in my ears stopped.
I crept to the window and peeked through the curtains. Not much light left outside. The line of trees that created a privacy screen at the front of my lawn cast long shadows. I couldn’t see any movement below. My street was quiet. No one walking, no cars passing by. No trick-or-treaters, thanks to the countywide ban.
Jupe whispered in my ear, “I can’t hear the noise anymore.”
Foxglove snarled.
A dark shape bobbed outside the edge of the window. Jupe jumped back. Foreboding chills slithered down my back as the shape glided fully into view. It was a face. Grace Forsythe’s face. She was floating in the air like a ballon.
Her gentle blue halo was now fireball-red. It rippled around her head and shoulders like a wind-whipped cape. A fragment of Duke Chora’s goetia entry popped into my mind: He appeareth from above as a Goodly Knight with a Cloak of Red Velvet.
Not a cloak, but a halo, from above: Chora could fly without wings. That’s how he was snatching the children unnoticed.
Ms. Forsythe dipped and rose, peering into the window with a foreign intelligence behind her eyes—the hippie teacher who encouraged Jupe’s wild imagination was no longer home. Her gaze flicked around my bedroom until it lit on Jupe. Then something changed. Her face twisted unnaturally like she was in pain. The red halo pulsed and disappeared. I saw a dim circle of her old blue halo shimmer around her bobbed hair as her eyes fluttered shut.
Her shoulders sagged and without further warning, she went limp as a rag doll and plunged downward—no floating or gliding, just a limp weight being dropped from the sky like a bag of discarded garbage. The fleshy thud her body made when it hit the ground was muted and distant.
We all gasped in horror. I pressed my face to the glass to see if she was moving below, but I jerked back when a blinding ball of light exploded next to me and Bob screamed. I crashed into Lon as my eyes focused on what was now, inexplicably, standing in my bedroom—a towering demon dressed like a colonial soldier in a long, trailing gray coat with rows of gold buttons. His face was pale, his horns dark and burnished. He carried the impressive build of a warrior and held himself with a dignified posture that came with power and rank.
Despite the change in attire, it was, without doubt, the same beautiful demon that Merrin summoned into the fiery cir
cle at the Silent Temple.
My memory from that day suddenly overlapped with the engraving of the demon who commanded two legions of Dragoons. . . .
Grand Duke Chora had materialized inside my bedroom.
All my wards went off at once and blared inside my head as a network of fine blue lines bloomed in the air around us. The demon wailed in pain; a scaled tail whipped out from beneath the hem of his military coat. He growled a single foreign word, and the blue lines transformed to pink—the same pink that had lit the Æthyric wards at the cannery and the putt-putt course. The ward shattered into fragments and disappeared.
A clever and sly thinker, this Grand Duke uncovereth Hidden Paths and knoweth High Magics to Trap and Snare Enemies.
Someone who knows how to set traps knows how to get around them. And once he’d disabled the main house ward, Chora didn’t hesitate. His arm swung and slammed into Jupe’s head with terrifying force. Jupe cried out as his body snapped sideways and crumpled to the floor at an awkward angle. He didn’t move. I shrieked and dropped to my knees beside him. A groan slipped from his mouth when I touched his face. But only for a moment. He flew out from beneath my fingertips when Chora seized him by the leg. With one violent tug, the demon dragged Jupe across the floor and effortlessly slung him over his shoulder.
Lon bellowed and lunged at the demon. His arms grabbed air. Chora had already disappeared with Jupe’s limp body in his arms.
Shocked silence fell as we stared at the spot where Chora had just stood. Having summoned and banished Æthyic demons for years, I mistakenly thought for half a second that the demon was taking Jupe back to the Æthyr. Then my brain unknotted and I ran to the window, just in time to see Ms. Forsythe’s body reanimate and float up from my lawn.
In one arm, she grasped Jupe’s doubled-over body by the waist. Her other arm dangled strangely and was covered in blood that had seeped down from a large wound in her head. Her body was half broken from the fall but Chora was using it anyway. She rose higher, clearing the trees lining the front of my lawn.
Why was he back inside an injured body? He had just been solid in his own body inside my house—surely that was preferable. I recalled Merrin telling us in the restroom of the Vietnamese restaurant that Chora had gathered enough strength to become temporarily corporeal after the ritual. Clearly he had done just that, right here in my house . . . in order to slip inside my wards. He must not be able to remain in that state, or he wouldn’t be using Ms. Forsythe’s damaged body again—Chora needed it to move around.
We all watched in horror as the silhouetted shapes of Jupe and his teacher glided over the rooftops of the houses across the street and disappeared with the last slice of daylight.
Lon’s anguished cry echoed around my bedroom, shattering my heart into a million pieces. I didn’t know what to do. My mind didn’t want to accept it—utter disbelief. It took every ounce of willpower I had to shut down my out-of-control emotions and focus.
“He’s still alive,” I blurted, knowing this was little consolation. “Chora needs a vessel for the ritual, not a dead body. Hajo will find Jupe’s trail. It’ll be even easier for him than the kid from the parade float, because I just touched Jupe, and we have lots of Jupe’s things here for Hajo to use as dowsing objects. Strong energy. Fresh.”
Lon wasn’t listening. He was shoving the chest of drawers away from the door; Bob stood by in shock.
“Wait—oh!” I said as a loose thought congealed. “Ms. Forsythe’s house is being tented for termites. Remember? She told us when we picked up Jupe from school. What if the termites aren’t real? Think about it—if the Æthyric magick in the cannery could produce gigantic magical cockroaches, magical termites would be a breeze. And it would keep Ms. Forsythe out of her home.”
He heaved away the drawers just far enough to get the door open.
“Don’t you get it?” I said. “They could be keeping the kids there!”
Lon’s hand paused on the door’s lock.
“Where does she live in Morella?” I asked. “Bob?”
“No idea, but I can call and find—Cady!” Bob said, his voice panicky. “What’s that?”
He pointed at a fine thread of light stretching across the room. It shimmered in the air and languidly floated out the window like a single strand of spiderweb spun from gold. Lon approached it and hesitantly reached out. His finger passed through the thread. It wasn’t solid; like a laser beam, it didn’t break when he waved his hand back and forth across it. His eyes followed the wispy line, looking for the source. He picked up my left hand. Right there, the golden thread was spooling out of the tip of my index finger.
“What the hell?” Lon continued to hold my hand up like it was science experiment ready to boil over and positioned me toward the window. He unlocked it and pushed it up; stuck our heads out and leaned over the sill. He waved my hand in the air. The thread moved with a corresponding ripple. I could see it better now, especially in places where it glinted in the streetlights. It shimmered over the road, across the rooftops, stretching in the same direction that the demon had floated away with Jupe.
The realization struck me like lightning.
“The tattoo on Jupe’s hip—my sigil!”
He’d marked himself as mine. He was in danger—and magick linked us. I’d never seen anything like it, but when I concentrated, I could feel my Heka draining and funneling into the thread.
“Does it go through any object?” Lon asked, tugging me back inside and shifting me in front of a wall. He looked through the window. “Right through the damn house,” he said. “We don’t need Hajo. We can track him through you.”
Lon slammed the window and locked it. “Bob, change of plans,” he said as we raced out of the bedroom and down the stairs. “Stay here at Cady’s and watch my dog. Call that bastard junkie and tell him we don’t need him. We’ll call you if we need backup.”
Bob was sweating again. “What if the demon returns?”
“Tell Foxglove ‘Squirrel.’ That’s her command to attack. Don’t feed her, and stay out of Cady’s underwear. I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“Right. Keep your phone turned on,” Lon said as he grabbed his coat on the way out. “If we make it back with my boy, I’ll cook you dinner.”
And with that, we raced across the driveway and loaded into Lon’s SUV.
“Keep your hand on the dash so I can see which way it’s pulling,” he said as he slammed the car into gear. We both fixated on the taut line of gold that passed through the windshield and pointed upward into the night sky. It was astounding.
“Is it part of your Moonchild power, or what?” Lon asked as he sped down my street fast enough to get pulled over. Luckily no one was around to stop him.
“No idea, but it if leads us to Jupe, I don’t care.”
“Agreed.”
Lon ran a four-way stop and swerved around a corner, following the thread.
“You watch the road,” I suggested. “I’ll watch the thread and call Dare.” I continued to hold my hand over the dash as I dialed Dare one-handed and updated him. He didn’t say much. Only that he would send people to Ms. Forsythe’s address in Morella and an instruction to call him if we ended up somewhere else. Good enough. I hung up the phone and gave Lon Ms. Forsythe’s address, 623 Monte Verde Street in the Rancho District.
“The Rancho District is out this way, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to assume anything, so I just watched the thread. I was really noticing the loss of Heka now. I wasn’t outright nauseous, but I was starting to feel a little low-blood-sugary. I kept the complaint to myself. If I passed out, Lon could just prop me up and continue to use me as a GPS.
After a few blocks flew by my window, Lon mumbled, “I think someone’s following us.”
He pointed out a dark sedan trailing a few car lengths back on the four-lane. When a white compact changed lanes to move behind us, the sedan went out of its way to speed up, weav
e around the small car, and slide into place again at our tail.
“Looks like an older model. Seventies or something. Dark green.” If Jupe was with us, he’d be able to identify it. My chest tightened.
“Can you see the driver?”
“No,” I admitted. “Too far away. Would Dare have sent someone local in Morella? Someone he’s hired?”
“Don’t know.”
We were on the outskirts of downtown, and traffic wasn’t heavy here, so I suggested he run the red light up ahead. Why not? He’d already violated a kajillion traffic laws and the intersection was clear. Almost. He slowed down, feigning a stop as he let a lone car cross, then slammed on the gas and ran the light. I gripped the armrest and briefly closed my eyes as someone honked at us.
“Where are they?” Lon asked as he sped away from the intersection.
“Shit! They went through the light!”
This was no friendly follower.
“Watch the gold thread and hold on.” He took a sharp right. The SUV’s wheels protested as we rounded the corner. I swiveled to peer out the back window. As we sped down the block, a pair of headlights made the same sharp turn.
“Still following!” I said.
“What the hell?” Lon mumbled. “How many people in the car? Can you tell?”
“Just a driver, I think. You think it could be Merrin?”
My head bounced as Lon raced across railroad tracks. The golden thread stretched straight ahead, but the sedan was gaining on us. We were going to have to do some fast maneuvering to lose it. I blurted out heated instructions to Lon. He ignored everything I suggested and cut across two lanes of traffic without warning, scaring the hell out of me.
We made another sudden turn and tore down a busy street filled with strip clubs and seedy restaurants offering $4.99 steak dinners. A few adults in Halloween costumes dotted the sidewalk as we wove in and out of traffic, nearly clipping off a car door that was swinging open on a parallel-parked van.
“Still following.”
“I’ve got eyes,” Lon snapped.
I ignored that—you know, his son being snatched by an evil demon and all. Besides, I was too busy feeling woozy, either from the loss of Heka or the crazy driving. I tried to watch the golden thread but was terrified to take my eyes off the road. Then I recognized a cross street. Lon did, too. We were in the Rancho District. He caught the tail end of a yellow light through a busy intersection and turned. Don’t follow, I thought, as if that would help.