by Jenn Bennett
My father chimed in, cheeks flush with excitement and the warmth of the fire spirit behind us. “We tried to get people to think outside the box, but no one wanted to change. Everyone was happy with the status quo.”
“They won’t be now,” my mother said. “Because we can finally prove to them that progress is possible. With your powers inside of us, we will have an army of demons at our disposal, instantly. There is no need for any of this.” She gestured toward the hand-carved ritual circle surrounding us. “The old ways can stay in the past. We will tear down the tower and build a new aeon. We will change the world.”
They sounded like crazy people. I fell into their semantic trap, though, unable to see past the words.
“You always said ritual was important. You made me learn all the old ways … I’m the one who thought outside the box. I experimented with spells and mixed traditions—not you.” The red spiderweb was tickling my nose. I tried to blow an upward breath to push it away.
My father leaned in close. “We wanted you to have all the knowledge within you, but it’s your birthright that makes you think differently.”
“That stupid Moonchild bullshit?” I said, as fury rose up in me.
“Do not curse, Seléne,” my mother scolded. “It is unfitting for a messiah.”
“I’m not a messiah.”
“Of course you are. Everyone believed in the beginning, when you were a child, but their faith wavered when they became impatient for results. They doubted us. Talked behind our backs.”
My father nodded. “They made us doubt it too. When your powers didn’t manifest at puberty, we were all confused. We waited and hoped for several years, but nothing happened. You wore the silver crown of the messiah, but did not wield her power.”
“Who cares? Why are you talking about all this crazy stuff? What about the council? I came to prove your innocence—the Luxe Order will start a war if we don’t.”
My father laughed. “Let them! Once the ritual is complete tonight, there won’t be a single magician in the world who will doubt us or wield enough power to stop us.”
“Besides,” my mother added in a practical voice, “we aren’t innocent.”
I looked back and forth between them, my altered vision making it hard for me to differentiate who was who.
“We killed the three,” my mother said … or maybe my father. “Our plan was to kill all five heads of the major orders, but we were sloppy.”
“You—”
“When you didn’t manifest the Moonchild powers, it hurt our reputation as magicians. No one believed in our abilities anymore. People stopped inviting us to conferences to speak. Our book sales declined. Your father lost his job.”
“We realized that we had to do something big to shake things up,” my dad explained. “You don’t build a new city without razing the old one. And we tore it all down.”
My world began shattering. As pieces broke off, I tried my best to catch them before they were lost forever, but it was happening too fast. “Tore what down?”
“The entire occult community!” My father swept his hand across his throat. “We tried to get the orders to unite under a larger umbrella—”
“What?” I said in disbelief. “You killed those people because they wouldn’t back your stupid United Occult Order? You can’t be serious.”
“No, this is much bigger. It stands to reason if you take out the leaders, the order weakens. So in that regard, we succeeded. But we were also experimenting with an old, rare spell. One that Frater Blue helped us find. It enabled us to siphon the Heka from dying magicians and absorb it into ourselves.”
I recalled the white demon’s goetia entry: She can be forced to answer those questions regarding the Harvesting of Æthyric energy. Dear God, they were using her to harvest Heka from the murder victims?
“This increased our Heka reserves and created chaos among the orders at the same time—killed two birds with one stone, so to speak.” My father gave me his used-car-salesman smile; I thought I might be sick. “And it worked beautifully. We are so much stronger from conducting those rituals. We’d be even stronger if the Luxe Order hadn’t meddled. That ruined everything.”
My mother nodded with a pained expression, remembering. “It was a terrible time for your father and me. We felt as if we’d failed twice. Once in conceiving you, and then the Black Lodge scandal …”
“I was a mistake?”
My father shook his head. “That’s what we thought, but we were wrong. You, little butterfly, were not a failure at all, but our greatest success. Once we left you in the States, we found a cache of old grimoires in France. And that’s where we discovered a journal kept by a magician and his wife in the twelfth century. They completed the Moonchild ritual, and like us, thought it failed. But they had expected results too soon. The power wasn’t supposed to manifest at puberty. It came later.”
My mother pressed her hands together. “You are a modified human, able to evoke beings from the Æthyr at will. Able to control them without drawing the messy seals. Inside, you have the ability to summon not one demon, but an entire army! Imagine that—an entire legion of servants ready to do your bidding. A god’s power inside a human body. You, my love, are progress.”
“The new Aeon,” my father announced proudly. “Your power will allow us to usher in a new age. An Aeon ruled not by the laws of earth and man, but by the laws of the cosmos and the strength of the Æthyr! Your birth was engineered to save this world. Transform it. Cleanse it.”
“Oh my God, you’re both out of your fucking minds!” I said, laughing hysterically. “I’m not progress—your stupid Moonchild ritual didn’t work! I’ve got a halo and can see Earthbounds. Big deal. I still have to do the spells the same old way anyone else does them—by hand. And …” I instantly realized my error. “The incubus in the Hellfire caves. I was using Heka to kindle moon power …”
My mother straightened her robes, smoothing out the lines around her waist. “You’ve had only a taste of it. As we learned from that twelfth-century grimoire, your powers don’t fully manifest until you’re mature. The age of your magical maturity, twenty-five, will occur in … fifteen minutes.”
Twenty-five. Traditionally, there is a public ritual marking a magical adept’s twenty-fifth birthday. The symbolic coming-of-age, like a quinceañera or bar mitzvah.
“We realized a way to bring everything together. Learned from our mistakes.” My mother’s brows darted up in smug excitement. “Siphoning Heka from other mundane magicians wasn’t enough. But we could apply the same technique to siphon something much more important.”
My father lowered his head to look me in the eyes. “We’ve watched you over the years, you know. Through our guardians. You had a chance to make something of yourself. You didn’t have your full powers, but you had an advantage in your gift of preternatural sight. Instead of using this, you wasted it. A bar, Seléne? Really?”
“You’re soft. It’s our fault. We coddled you.”
“We did warn you many times that emotional bonds create weakness,” my father said. “Yet all you’ve done is settle into a normal life, surrounding yourself with people. And then, not even people, but Earthbounds? Demons are tools to be used and controlled. They are not our equals.” He shook his head. “We realized when your mother visited you in Seattle a few years ago that no amount of power would matter if you were that empathetic and soft.”
My mother nodded her head emphatically. “The world doesn’t need another benevolent goddess. It needs a fierce gardener to rip out the weeds. You were no longer our messiah, and we couldn’t play the roles of Mary and Joseph publicly with everyone shouting ‘killers.’ ”
“But it all happened for a reason. We learned from our errors. And that’s why we’re here. Everything will turn out just fine after all. Patience and time were all we needed.” My father grasped my mother’s face in his hands and kissed her.
The drug was wearing off. I could feel my heart squeezing, and it beat faster than a humm
ingbird’s. My pulse throbbed at my wrists. I tried to blow away the red obstruction again, then looked down. The spiderweb was a thin, red transparent shroud. I was naked underneath. The shroud covered my head and fell to the ground, weighted down at the bottom by a series of metal beads sewn into the hem.
I was standing inside a strange metal object. Several feet in diameter, it looked like a giant communion bowl with a flat lip around the outside that was etched with symbols. I tried to read them. Rebirth, sacred, transference … sacrifice. It was an oracular bowl.
It was used to catch sacrificial blood.
Panicking, I tried to move, but my arms were bound. I was tied to a metal pole affixed to the bowl below me.
“You’re going to kill me?” I demanded in a shaky voice.
My father looked over at me, breaking away from the kiss, taking my mother’s hand in his. “We’re going to transfer your power to us through a short ritual. I’m sorry, but there is no other way. You are too weak to wield that kind of power. We have no choice but to take it from you.”
“It would be irresponsible to let it decay,” my mother agreed. “This is bigger than all of us.”
“And the only way we can siphon your ability is to harvest it when it’s captured in the blood, right as the soul lifts from the body.”
“There is no shame in sacrifice,” my mother added. “Just because you couldn’t fulfill your destiny as our messiah doesn’t mean your life is wasted. Don’t you see? Once we realized that you weren’t suited to keep the Moonchild power, and once we realized that the siphoning spell could harvest more than Heka, it all fit together neatly. We are all redeemed. Your power will live on in us, giving back to us … just as we lived on in your body, like we gave you life. It’s a fair exchange, and please know it’s done in love.”
“Love?” I repeated.
I began shaking uncontrollably, sobbing, screaming. My life, my family, it was all a sham. They thought of me as a possession right from the beginning? Something they created that failed? And now they were nothing but pathological killers, and I’d wasted my adult life in hiding, believing that they were innocent … that they loved me.
How could I have been so blind? My head felt like it was splitting open as dark recollections began surfacing, piling on top of one another, spinning. The memories that Lon saw in his visions solidified in my head.
The caliph hadn’t been the enemy. Half-remembrances tangled in my brain, quiet moments of him talking to me when I was a teenager, after my parents were wallowing in self-created shame, thinking that their reputation was ruined because they’d failed to bring a real Moonchild into the world. The caliph told me many times that it didn’t matter, and that he loved me anyway. The dream Lon had … My mother had been arguing with the caliph because he must have suspected something was wrong. Maybe he knew they were hiding something. Maybe he suspected that they were sick in the head.
“Did the caliph know you killed the other leaders of the orders?” I asked.
My mother smiled. “He was suspicious, so we did a little spellwork on him. Something to confuse the mind.”
“You performed that spell on me, too, didn’t you?”
“On you?” She shook her head. “No need. Your loyalty to us kept you blind. The caliph, however, we had to control by force.”
My mother then explained that they didn’t know what to do with me after they were accused of the murders. They knew that they had to run, and I was baggage, weighing them down. Useless baggage, because they hadn’t yet come across the twelfth-century Moonchild journal. It was easiest for the caliph to watch over me. He always doted on me, they said, so it was simple to persuade him to accept the responsibility once they’d cast the confusion spell on him to eliminate any lingering suspicion or doubts he might have had concerning their motives.
“Unfortunately,” my mom lamented, “that particular spell was not permanent. It fades with time. We are not sure whether the caliph’s spell began waning, or if he underwent a counterspell to remove it, but something changed recently. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.”
Whatever happened must have occurred before they were spotted in Dallas, because now it struck me that the caliph hadn’t sent me after the albino demon to prove their innocence—he wanted me to find it to prove they were guilty. “The albino demon. Nivella,” I whispered.
“Oh, oui. We found the talon and seal in your clothes,” my mother said. “How did you find out about Nivella? We didn’t tell anyone about her.”
“You lied to Caliph Superior—gave him a bad description of the demon,” I realized.
“Of course,” my father replied. “We couldn’t have him snooping around and digging her up. She helped us with all the siphonings.”
“Siphonings? You mean murders.”
“Well, that’s why we removed the talon, so no one else could conjure her and find out what we were doing. It also served as a beautiful ritual dagger. When it was confiscated, we had to search for another demon with the same power. It took us years, but we found one, and were prepared to summon her tonight, but now that you’ve brought us Nivella’s talon, we can just use her. Better the devil you know, yes?”
“How did you piece together that we’d originally used Nivella?” my mother asked.
“The Tamlins.”
My parents looked at each other in disbelief. “The confusion spell—”
“They had it removed,” I said. “Mostly.”
My father nodded in understanding. “Not a particularly bright couple. We thought about killing the Tamlins when they caught us in Portland during the third siphoning, but they weren’t worth the effort. Not enough Heka to even consider harvesting.”
“They still think you’re innocent.”
“Regardless, we might need to pay them a little visit soon to keep them quiet.” My father shrugged. “Almost time now.” He smiled and turned to Frater Blue and gave him a silent signal. The man stepped inside the circle and lifted the hood of his robe.
Panic sobered me. I screamed at the top of my lungs.
“Calm down, don’t wear yourself out,” my father said. “We’re deep inside Balboa Park, off a private hiking trail. There’s no one for miles. The ritual will go smoother if you remain calm and centered.”
“How could you do this?” I sobbed, tears blinding me, stinging my eyes. “I’m your daughter. You loved me—I know you did. Why did you stop?”
“Darling,” my mother said, moving her hand near my cheek but not touching me, “how many times have we told you that strong emotions are weakness? That’s not to say we don’t care. We planned your conception. Meticulous, careful planning. You weren’t just an accident or a result of some unplanned erotic passion, like most savages are.”
“I was the result of some stupid, loveless ritual—that’s worse!”
“No, you are very mistaken, it was not loveless, and we were so happy when you were born. We treated you like a goddess. Gave you every tool you could need to be successful and enjoy the life that you were given. We were good parents.”
“Good parents don’t kill their children after raising them!”
“It’s an honorable death,” my father argued. “Not a wasted one. People die honorably for their country in war every day. How could dying for this be any less?”
He said this like it was the most reasonable thing in the world. And instead of being repulsed by the motive behind the words, all I could think about was trying to get back what I’d lost. Raw, painful sobbing hobbled my reasoning. And I snapped, racked by memories of better times.
“I can change,” I pleaded. “I can be what you need me to be. Whatever you envisioned, you can teach me. I can learn.” A shadow crossed my mother’s eyes. Emotion. I know I saw it. “You can take me overseas with you. I can stay hidden. I’ve never been caught, not in seven years. I’m smart. I can …” What? What would I do? “I can help you start your new Aeon. I’ll summon whatever you want. Please. Give me a chance to show you.”
>
For a moment, just a moment, I thought I might have reached her. Thought I spotted some spark of motherly instinct inside her that would override her insanity. But then my father touched her shoulder, whispering something low in French that I couldn’t hear. And her face hardened along with her will.
“There is no shame in this,” my father said gently. “It is a beautiful gift, what you are giving us today, and we are grateful for it.”
My head spun as madness overtook me, and I screamed again. It reverberated off the rocky hill and echoed around the dark trees, the only witnesses to the my last breaths.
“Shh, now.
Calm and centered,” my father repeated. Calm and centered? Ironically, it was good advice. Begging them to spare me had been weak and pathetic. A mistake made in desperation. I had to pull myself together. Focus. This was no time to fall apart. If I could survive, I’d have time for that later.
I compartmentalized my panic and surveyed my escape options.
The bonds around my hands and ankles were too tight to break. Maybe my wards? I tried to spit on my arm to activate one of them—any of them—but my mouth was dry from the drugs they gave me; what little saliva I could muster just stuck to the red shroud or trickled down my upper arm, stopping far above my elbow.
There was no electricity nearby. I reached out, straining to pull anything at all, but came up empty; we were too deep in the woods. And Priya was dead, so I had no guardian to call for help. My mind flashed back to the incubus in the caves. He gave me his name, Voxhele of Amon. I could summon him. But why? How could he help? Offer to have sex with my parents to distract them? Useless.
Think, think. What else?
The caliph was trailing my parents, they’d said. Could he have been one of the people running out of the Luxe temple? It probably didn’t matter; we were hidden and warded.
Then there was Lon … He’d begged me to let him come with me that morning, and I’d foolishly told him no. Stubborn, he’d called me. He was frustrated and angry; but I insisted, and he didn’t argue. This memory kick-started another round of tears. Everything he’d done for me, the time and work, the money he’d spent. It was all for nothing. Apart from that, I was losing him, and Jupe, and I’d only just found them. My aching heart shriveled.