by Jenn Bennett
“Mmm.” He chuckled, eyes narrowing in humor. “Come here, girl.” Sweaty and sticky, he pulled me back up onto his chest and wound his fingers into my hair, now the consistency of a bale of dried hay. “I want you to shock me with Heka like you did last time,” he added in a husky, seductive voice, “right at the end.”
“ ‘Bite me, Cady. Shock me, Cady.’ Christ, you’re demanding, aren’t you?”
He grinned against my cheek. “Are you complaining?”
I wasn’t. Not one bit.
32
Craig Bailey lived on the outskirts of the Village. His narrow, three-story brownstone was modeled to look like an English country estate, complete with trellised vines and plenty of stained glass. I watched from a distance, waiting nervously in Lon’s coupe. The driver’s-side window had a radiating crack in the glass and the hood was dented in two places, but he didn’t say a word when we found it like that outside the Hellfire caves.
Watching him stroll out of Craig Bailey’s driveway, I couldn’t decipher his body language. Like me, his wrinkled clothes were stiff with sea water, and we were both sporting rat’s-nest hairdos; we looked like homeless people who had stumbled upon evening wear in a trash bin. He opened the driver’s door, got in, and closed it without looking at me.
“Well?” I asked, barely able to contain my curiosity. “Did he have the talon?”
“He’s dead.”
I closed my eyes. Not out of reverence—I didn’t know the man from Adam—but in mind-numbing frustration. “What?”
“Died of a heart attack yesterday morning,” Lon elaborated. “I talked to his son. He was pissed as hell that Craig spent the family money on worthless occult collectibles. Would have been more than happy to sell the talon to me, but it wasn’t there.”
“Wasn’t there? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. That fucking piece of shit sold Bailey the talon, then stole it back.”
“Who? Spooner? Why would he do that?”
“Because then he could make money without losing the talon. He’s pulled stunts like this before—at least, that’s what I’ve heard.”
“So he sent us out here on this wild-goose chase, and he had it all along?”
“I’d bet my life that he does.”
Desperate for a hot shower, I scratched the back of my head; my scalp was dry and itchy. “How do we get it from Spooner?”
“We’ve tried asking nicely,” Lon said with a bitter smile.
I nodded. “We’re going to have to take it by force.”
“Yep.”
“You think you can remember the incantation for that memory spell we used on Riley?”
He tapped his temple. “Mind like a steel trap.”
“I think I can remember the sigil, if you can do that part.”
“Hmm … I might have something better in mind. It’s in the trunk.” Carefully considering whatever scheme he was cooking up, he idly stroked his mustache with his thumb and index finger. I pulled aside his collar and winced at the nasty indigo tooth marks I’d left on his neck. He lifted his eyebrows, inspected the bite in the rearview mirror, then gave me a smug smile as I covered it back up.
“You got a lighter in that tiny purse you stashed in my glove compartment?”
“I do.”
“Good. There’s some valrivia hidden in a box under the car manual. It’s not fresh, but I don’t care at this point, if you don’t mind rolling it up for us. We’ll stop somewhere and get food along the way.”
“And some coffee, please.”
“And some coffee,” he agreed as he started the car.
It was just before one in the afternoon when we arrived at Spooner’s place of business, an art deco building in a commercial district on the outskirts of Morella, just ten minutes away from my house. Lon identified Spooner’s car parked in the alley by the back entrance, so we pulled behind it and marched up a short flight of steps bounded by a painted metal railing.
“I thought you said Spooner didn’t work.”
“He doesn’t. He’s a collector. This is where he cons people out of money.” Lon battered the metal door with his fist, cigarette dangling between his lips. He leaned forward, ear to the door, and listened for a response inside. Seconds ticked by, ten stretching to twenty … a minute.
“I hear movement,” Lon reported before banging on the door again and yelling, “Delivery!”
I heard it too, then a series of approaching steps. Locks began clicking open from the other side of the door. When the door swung inside, Spooner stood a few feet away in the same garish suit he’d worn the night before. With shocks of orange hair shooting out at all angles from his head and bloodshot eyes, he looked even worse than we did.
He was also very, very surprised to see us.
Lightning fast, he shoved at the door to shut it, but Lon wedged his foot against the kickplate before it closed. He stuck his Remington inside the humble opening and racked it once. Slowly, the door opened again. Spooner stood in the doorway, hands apathetically raised in submission.
“Hello again,” I said brightly.
“Let’s talk,” Lon added, prodding Spooner’s chest with the gun’s barrel.
We dogged Spooner down a sterile hallway until he halted in front of a frosted glass door. He opened it and entered.
All four walls of the intimate room were lined with locked glass display cabinets. In the center, a low, square metal table was surrounded by four green armchairs and a swing-arm lamp.
Lon was wrong; this wasn’t the room of a collector. It wasn’t carefully arranged and tended like his library, and the items weren’t cherished or admired. They were displayed with the care of a pawnshop owner. Spooner was a fence, not a lover of rare mysteries.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t a jackpot in here. A multicolored supernatural fog swirled around the haphazard arrangements. Pink, green, yellow, blue—nearly every item in the cabinets was Æthyric in origin. Hundreds of them.
I looked closer. Horns, bones, teeth, and talons cluttered one crowded shelf. They gave off the strongest visual marker, but they weren’t the only occult treasures. He also had a staggering selection of metal and clay pendants and charms … dozens of books and scrolls. The earthly items were nearly as interesting and varied as the Æthyric ones: a small animal skull covered in precious gems, a leaf-shaped Aztec sacrificial blade, a golden Middle Eastern puzzle box with Jinn markings.
“Shut the fuck up,” I whispered, in awe at the breadth of the collection.
“Your collection has grown since I last saw it,” Lon commented. “You used to specialize in earthly amulets, now half of this shit is glowing with Æthyric dust.”
“I’ve expanded.”
Lon glanced at the shelf I was inspecting. “The Æthyric demon body parts are new.”
“To be fair, some of them are angel. One Banshee tooth, or at least that’s what the former owner claimed.”
“Go big or go home, huh?” Lon observed.
Spooner shrugged and straightened his green ascot. “I only discovered their existence a few years ago. Most collectors aren’t willing to sell what they’ve acquired. It’s a tough but profitable market.”
“Tough enough that you had to steal back the glass talon from Craig Bailey?”
A cruel smile boosted Spooner’s freckled cheeks. “He knew he didn’t have much time left on this plane. He wanted to … give it back to a fellow collector.”
I investigated the shelf of talons and bones. Nothing remotely glass. However, one empty display stand cowered alone in a back corner, a wire clamp attached to an indented metal base. The right size to hold a talon?
“Where is it now?” I asked.
Spooner squinted his eyes. “Hmm, I’m not sure if I remember. Cady, isn’t it?”
Lon looked at me and nodded. “You’re up to bat.”
Right. I surveyed the amount of space I’d need. The chairs would have to go. I began moving them aside.
“What are you doing
?” Spooner asked.
I left one chair in front of the table and motioned to Lon.
“Have a seat,” Lon said, raising his gun. Spooner complied.
From the small pocket in my wrap dress, I removed a fat stick of red ochre chalk that we’d purchased from a local occult shop on the way over—the only one in La Sirena: more of a catch-all New Age-slash-Pagan supply shop, really, but it was convenient and they had what I needed so no sense in being too snobby about it.
The chalk marked the cement floor beautifully. A dark red, dusty line trailed behind my sketching hand as I bent at the waist to sketch the binding triangle, nice and big, to enclose Spooner right where he sat.
“What are you doing?” Spooner asked.
“What does it look like?”
His eyes followed me, head swiveling. I began hashing out the binding symbols surrounding the borders. Ancient symbols, arcane fortifications. It flowered at my feet like a beautiful, complex math equation scribbled on a scientist’s blackboard.
“It looks like one of the Hellfire’s vermilion seals,” Spooner noted, his voice betraying the tiniest bit of panic. “Which, by the way, is going to cost us thousands of dollars to repair.”
“Bill me.” I finished my work with a flourish, snapping my wrist, then stepped back to admire my work. Flawless. Retreating to scour the glass cases behind Spooner, I found what I needed without much effort. “Aha!” My eyes focused on a small caduceus lying next to some Nordic broadswords. “Do you have a key to this?”
Spooner eyed Lon’s shotgun, then reluctantly snapped his fingers in the direction of the cabinet. The door swung open.
“Spooner’s demonic talent is opening locks,” Lon explained. “Manual ones, at least. That’s one of the reasons I’ve got electronic locks. Ten years ago he stole a couple of books from me, before I built my house. But I got those back, didn’t I?”
“You did. I also fucked your ex-wife.”
“No, I believe she fucked you, along with everyone else in the Hellfire Club. Don’t flatter yourself.”
After examining the core of the caduceus—it was graphite, thankfully, not a dud—I walked over to the point of the triangle and exhaled.
“What’s she doing?”
“Looks to me like she’s putting you in a magical pigpen,” Lon said.
I pulled from the electrical current. The lights dimmed.
“How can you …?” Spooner was now alert and more than a little alarmed. “You’re a magician?” He stood up. Lon racked the pump shotgun again and aimed until he sat back down.
With a gentle push, I released kindled Heka into the carved staff, charging the triangle in a brilliant display of white light as I recited the binding spell. I teetered on my feet when the nausea came, but recovered quickly and gave Lon a dizzy smile. Ta-da.
Spooner squealed like a fifties housewife who’d just spotted a mouse on the floor, folding himself up in his chair, legs drawn up tight. He covered his ears with his hands. “Stop it! What have you done? My head—” He ground his teeth together. “Too much pressure. My head!”
He’d never been bound. Most Earthbounds haven’t. It’s always a shock the first time.
“Where’s the talon?” Lon asked.
The orange-haired man ignored him. “Oh, God, my head. Please make it stop.”
If I had a dime for every time I’d heard that during a binding in my bar …
“Spooner, you are now bound by me, and I command you. Those are the rules. Now answer me. Where is the god-damn glass talon?”
“In the table,” he intoned, voice low and obedient. His eyes shot open and he covered his mouth with both hands, shocked that he’d said it. “You could have just put the gun to my head and I would have told you. Please unbind me— please!”
“Do you know the name of the demon it belongs to?” I asked.
A confused look crossed his face. “Name? No.”
A long shot, but I had to ask.
I took a step, then rubbed my foot over a corner of the triangle, breaking the spell. Spooner fell over in his chair, a floppy puppet with slackened strings. He whimpered as I approached and set the caduceus down.
Each side of the thick tabletop bore a small indentation flanked by horizontal lines. Deceptively decorative. I pressed my finger into the indentation on one side. Nothing. Second side. Nothing. Third … a small drawer creaked open. Inside were two wads of dog-eared hundred-dollar bills bundled with wide rubber bands, a small ladies’ pistol, and in the back, a swirl of pink fog surrounding what could only be the glass talon.
I gathered it up with shaking hands. It was cool, and heavy. Not smooth, as I’d expected, but marred with long, rough ridges. The base was ragged and opaque ivory, the remainder clear.
After all the worry and frustration, there it was.
Could I use it to find the summoning spell for the albino demon?
I nestled it in the center of my palm and closed my hand around it, situating the talon between my index and middle fingers. Gripping it tight, it felt like a weapon in my hand. I slashed at the air once, wielding its power, testing. I relaxed my fingers and transferred it into my other hand, dropping it to my side.
Spooner continued to whimper. I glanced at Lon and nodded. He lowered his gun and spoke to him in a low, rational voice. “I wanted you to know what she could do. Don’t look for her, don’t ask about her. Don’t even think about her. If I find out that you have, I’ll come back, and I damn well won’t be happy. That goes for my kid too.” He gaze captured Spooner’s. “We’re not afraid of you, but you should be afraid of us.”
Lon turned his back and began walking away, then paused. He looked at the ground as he spoke. “Later today I’ll wire you the money you paid for it. I’m not a thief.” In a barely audible murmur he added, “Not anymore.”
33
“Amazing,” Lon said. “It really does look like a fairy. Jupe was right.”
I gripped a freshly charged clay doll and watched my servitor’s small pink figure float above our heads in his library, hoping against hope that the glass talon would generate enough live energy to link it to a book containing the albino demon’s summoning name. Hoping also that the book was here. Only one day remained until the Luxe deadline, and if it turned out that the servitor could find the right book, but it was in someone else’s library across the globe, I was screwed.
It was early afternoon. Jupe was watching a movie in his room, but Lon had made him promise to stay in bed; he didn’t even know I was here. We stopped by my house after the confrontation with Spooner, to check in on Riley and pick up the supplies I needed to do the servitor spell, then I followed him in my rental.
The servitor hung at the ceiling. Not unusual. It sometimes took a few moments for it to get a fix on its objective and begin hunting. The pink light would either go through the ceiling, or float back down. Through … or down, through—
It floated back down.
My heart pounded.
Hovering near the tops of the bookcases, it glided in front of the fireplace, past Lon’s small sealed cabinet of stolen rarities, behind the desk, bobbed in place for a few seconds, and like a birthday balloon with a slow leak, it lazily dropped and floated to me, filtering back into the clay doll.
I had the servitor retrieval spell neatly prepared on one of Lon’s blue paper markers. Spitting on the drawing, I whispered the incantation and smashed the clay doll against it.
It was off-putting to be in the same room as the transmission image. I could see myself and Lon through its vision, the shelf of books it had spotted, and the particular book it singled out. A fat, red leather binding. “There!” I said, pointing as the image disintegrated.
The transmission acted like a magical decongestant; loosened Heka seethed inside me. Head swimming, I swayed, dropped to my knees, and fell onto my back with a loud thump. Closing my eyes momentarily, I waited until the nausea subsided. Lon’s knees hit the rug beside me. I squinted one eye open as a red leather-bou
nd tome was dangled in front of my face.
“Is this it?”
Goetia Demonica Muliebris, read the worn gilded title on the front cover.
I laughed. “Yep.”
“Goddammit,” he murmured, sitting back on his heels. “I never would’ve thought to look in here.” Cracking it open on my extended legs, he hunched over and began hurriedly skimming the entries.
“Why not?” I pushed myself up into a sitting position.
“Because,” Lon explained, fanning carefully through crackling vellum pages, “I just assumed from what you said that the demon was male.”
“That’s what the caliph told me.”
“This is an encyclopedia of female demons.”
Well, damn. I watched him flip through the goetia, carefully turning each page. Then he stopped. I moved closer to read the text along with him.
Next to the simple relief of a woodcut demon, the border of which was illuminated in flaking silver, was the name of the primordial being: Nivella Krustallos Daemonia.
“Not male, and not an albino either,” Lon said with wonder. “A White Ice Demon.”
I’d never heard of this class, but now that I knew it, I could look up the correct summoning seal.
Lon read the text out loud:
“NIVELLA THE WHITE. The sixty-fourth spirit is called Nivella Kurstallos Daemonia, or Nivella the White. She is a Grand Duchess, and appeareth in the Form of a Beautiful White Beast with pink eyes, horns, and four arms bearing four crystalline talons. Her Office is to teach the Mysteries of the Occult Arts perfectly within the Æthyric tribes. Her wisdom was sought in Olde Ægypt and Ancient Greece. She can be forced to answer those questions regarding the Harvesting of Æthyric energy, which the querent may wish to put to her, if desired. She is partly of the Order of Thrones, and partly that of the Seraphim Angels. She ruleth 10 Legions of Spirits.”
I silently reread the entry twice before Lon spoke in a soft voice. “Well, there it is.”
“Yes.”
“ ‘Harvesting of Æthyric energy?’ Maybe she teaches how to kindle Heka. Doesn’t sound like much of a bloodthirsty hunter, but I guess a demon can be forced into doing whatever they’ve been commanded to do by the magician.”