by Jenn Bennett
“We have,” my mother said in her heavy French accent.
“May I come in?”
“Of course, of course. Come on in.” That was my father and his used-car-salesman voice. The one that made you feel as if you were the most important thing in the world, until you heard him use it on someone else and realized he was only playing you.
I held my breath, listening to them stroll into the great room. From where I was crouched, I could see the grandfather clock and Little Me in the playpen. The girl didn’t see me. I didn’t know if this was because I couldn’t be seen or because she was too busy watching the adults across the room. Was I reliving a memory? I certainly couldn’t recall this house at all, so that seemed impossible.
“Can I take your coat?” my dad asked. “I’d offer you a drink, but we haven’t had a chance to refill the pantry yet.”
“No, that’s fine. I can’t stay long. Just wanted to check in. Make sure we were still on for Monday.”
“We are here, no?” my mother said, not bothering to hide her irritation. “Have we given you any reason to think we would not be?”
“My wife’s tired. The flight was a little rough.”
“No need to explain,” the voice said. “I just . . . ah, there she is.”
Footsteps approached. Little Me’s head tilted upward as she quietly watched the visitor walking up to the playpen. She wasn’t frightened, I didn’t think, but she wasn’t speaking, either. She just stared up at him, mouth drawn in a tight line, assessing him. Was I this cold and calculating as a child? Was this really me?
“Hello, Sélène,” he said to her.
I let out a shaky breath, waiting to hear her voice, but she didn’t reply.
“Are you shy, pretty girl?” he asked. “Do you remember me? I met you last winter, when you were just a year old, but you’ve grown so much since then. I barely recognize you now, but I see you are looking more like your beautiful maman.”
“We’ve taught her not to speak to strangers,” my mother’s voice said bluntly.
“Ah,” he replied. “Probably wise. The world is full of crazies, and she’s . . . quite the prize, your little Moonchild.”
My mother made a sharp, unhappy noise.
“As we’ve told you before, we prefer that people don’t know we’re here,” my father said, as if he were her interpreter. I immediately remembered Karlan Rooke calling him my mother’s apologist. “So please don’t use that title around your own people or anyone in town. I’m afraid we must insist on that, or the deal is off.”
“Strong words, Alexander. But I understand, and you have my word.” A man’s hand came into my view as he reached over the playpen’s gate and pointed at the scattered puzzle pieces. “What are you playing with there? Astrological symbols? My. Already the great magician, I see. Following in your parents’ famous footsteps.”
“Naturally. She is a Duval.”
“And your first child, so I’m sure you’ll spoil her rotten.”
Not the first. If this man only knew . . .
“Don’t worry, I will not tell anyone about her,” the man said, standing so that I could only see the toes of his polished shoes. “But I would advise you not to parade her around La Sirena. Back home in Florida, the chances of her encountering one of us are slim, but here? The locals call this area Earthbound Paradise. If the wrong demon got a glimpse of her, he might decide she’s rare enough to warrant his interest.”
“What do you mean by that?” my mother snapped.
“I mean that I’d advise you to find a babysitter in Florida for your little moon muffin when you come to work for me next year. Bring her here at your own risk.”
“Is that a threat?”
“I’m sure it’s not a threat, darling,” my father said.
“I’m paying you for your magical skills, and quite handsomely. If you want me to continue funding your publishing career and paying for all those first-class plane tickets to France, then you’ll keep family and work separate.”
“If I were you, I would watch myself, devil. I can do things to you that you never knew were possible. And if anyone touches my property, I will punish you.”
“Is that a threat, Mrs. Duval?”
“We will continue to honor our working agreement only as long as it is beneficial to us. Incur my wrath, and you can kiss your Succubus-summoning circles and your magical potions good-bye.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I foresee a long, prosperous working relationship between us. As long as you perform your work to my satisfaction, I will not tell your order that you’re moonlighting for a demon. And if you ever believe I’m not compensating you fairly, we can renegotiate our terms. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way home. I’ll see you at the Hellfire caves at nine a.m. sharp on Monday. You have a lot of work to do before the solstice.”
Shock was a knife through my gut. And as his footsteps trailed away and the front door shut, my world closed in on itself, pieces of shattered memories collapsing under the weight of too many seemingly random paths converging.
My parents worked for Dare. They were Dare’s paid magicians.
They constructed the summoning circles in the Hellfire caves.
That’s why they were in La Sirena.
No such thing as coincidence.
The engine of a car roared to life outside the house, and soon after, Dare was gone.
“He saw something!” my mother said excitedly, her mood jumping from anger to glee. “Did you hear him? The filthy Earthbounds will steal the child because they will see something rare about her. She must have the marker. He saw a nimbus of light around her head.”
I heard a muffled noise. My father was kissing her. Then he gave a little shout and said, “We did it, my love! I knew it was right this time. I felt it.”
“Let us call my guardian to confirm that the halo has appeared,” she said in a controlled voice. “The day I trust demon swine is the day I roll over and die.”
“Cady!”
I blinked, and Lon’s face appeared above mine in full color. No silver light. I shoved him away and flicked a look around the room. I was back in the present. The great room was empty. No playpen. No toddler me. No parents.
“Are we alone?” I asked.
“What the hell just happened?”
“I-I don’t know,” I stammered. “A time warp? Or a memory came to life. I was here in this room twenty-some years ago. I saw my parents, and I saw . . .”
He swiveled me back around to face him. “Saw what? Did we set off a magical trap? I don’t see any Heka or spellwork.”
“Did I transmutate?”
“I suddenly couldn’t hear your thoughts. I turned around, and you were standing there like you were in a trance. Your pupils—”
“What?”
“Your pupils disappeared. Just silver. You wouldn’t wake up.”
“How long was I out?”
“A minute?”
“Holy . . . Lon, I relived something that happened in this room. I walked around and watched myself as a two-year-old girl.” I looked around and pointed to the far corner. “There. I hid behind that chair. I watched the whole thing like it was actually happening. I don’t know if it was induced by some sort of knack. What is it when people can see in the past?”
“What did you see?”
“I saw how my parents found out I had a halo. I always thought it was Scivina who told them—”
“Your mother’s guardian?”
“—but Scivina only confirmed it.” I grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled him close. “The person who first saw it was Dare. My parents were working for Dare.”
Lon paled.
“They built the glass summoning circles in the Hellfire caves. They were doing winter solstice work. My God, Lon. They could’ve done some of the transmutation spells.”
“Not mine. I already told you who did mine, remember? Merrin’s brother.”
That’s right. I knew this. A small r
elief lifted me; I really didn’t want my parents to have put their evil hands on Lon. “Dare told them not to bring me here anymore, which must’ve been why I started spending Christmas alone in Florida. They were working for Dare and keeping it secret from the E∴E∴.”
Lon pulled back and paced several feet, swinging the Lupara at his side. “I couldn’t have ever been introduced to them. I would’ve recognized them when the Black Lodge slayings first hit the news. But they were working for Dare, and Jupe told us that Mrs. Vega saw them every winter until they faked their deaths. That means they were working for Dare while I was still active in the Hellfire Club.”
“God, I’m going to be sick.”
“No, you’re not.” He stopped pacing and forced me to look up at him. “We aren’t done here, Cady. Your servitor saw this house. The snake handler’s stolen parchment is here.”
“Right,” I said, taking a deep breath. The grandfather clock. I looked across the room and flinched. To the right of the fireplace, where the servitor had shown me the carved clock—where I just saw it in my vision of the past—there was . . . nothing.
“The clock is gone,” I said. “It was right there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“Maybe it was moved.”
We rushed over to the empty spot and looked for scuff marks on the floor or a secret panel or door in the wood wall there. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.
“How is this possible?” I said, nearly in tears. “The servitor doesn’t show me things that happened in the past. It has specific magical instructions. If it showed the clock to me before we drove home from Twentynine Palms, then that means it was here earlier today.”
“Cady. Put your hand here.”
He was holding his hand near the empty spot. I did the same.
“What is that?” he said. “Something’s there.”
“Holy—You know what that feels like?” I tapped the sleeve of my coat. “Ignore.”
“What?”
“One of my tattooed wards. Ignore.” I left him there for a moment and raced back to the front porch to retrieve the can of blue spray paint. “Fucking genius. How the hell did they turn it into a permanent spell? And where’s the Heka? Move out of the way.”
I shook the can and tried to gauge exactly where the clock had stood. Then I sprayed the wall. Like a shaded pencil mark exposing a pen imprint left behind on a pad of paper, the paint stuck to the air and revealed a hidden form.
The grandfather clock.
“Amazing,” Lon murmured when I’d sprayed enough to give us a rough idea of its shape. He touched his gloved hand to a still-invisible spot uncoated by paint. “I still can’t feel it. Just the strange sensation from before. The spell’s still active.”
“No telltale Heka, no sigils. Oh, of course. It’s not on the front.”
“On the back,” Lon said, setting the Lupara down on the fireplace. He felt around the clock’s invisible side, mumbling as he tried to get a good hold on it. After several tries, he grunted loudly and pulled. The massive clock moved an inch. God only knew how much it weighed, but now that he had some wiggle room, he got a better grip on it and slowly pulled one side away from the wall.
“Anything?” I asked as he peered behind it.
“Invisible, just like the rest of it. No Heka.”
“Has to be. Oh! On the inside, Lon.”
He moved back so I could spray the back side of the clock, and there it was: the outline of an imperfect rectangular panel that had been cut into the bottom half of the backing. Lon pried it off with the crowbar. Soft white Heka glowed on the inside of the panel for a moment before it fizzled and faded away to nothing.
The clock materialized right in front of our faces.
“Ha!” I shouted.
“Fucking brilliant,” Lon agreed before peering inside a dark cavity at the base of the clock’s back. He reached inside and retrieved a metal container about the size of a safe-deposit box. “This must be it. Here.”
I took it from him and set it on a console table. Lon cocked the Lupara and aimed at the box while I took a deep breath and opened the hinged top.
Nothing jumped out. No magick sigils or Heka anywhere in sight. Only a pile of papers, a couple of notebooks, a box of red ochre chalk, and an envelope with a stack of bills, both American and old French francs.
“These haven’t been in circulation since the 1990s,” Lon said, removing his paint-stained gloves.
“Maybe that means this stuff hasn’t been touched since I was a kid.”
“They probably hid it all when Dare started poking around in their business. What’s that?”
I cracked open one of the notebooks—just a plain old composition notebook with a cardboard cover. My mother’s perfect penmanship covered the pages. French words, variations of magical sigils.
“Experiments,” Lon said, able to read some of the French. “Mostly failures. Look at the dates. This is before you were born.”
“And after they’d killed my brother. Were there . . . other children?”
“No, but not for lack of trying. Here’s a home pregnancy test result, negative. And here again, the next month.” He flipped through pages and stopped on one, turning the notebook to read the page horizontally.
A chart. It started on my date of birth. Lon read it aloud, interpreting the French for me as he went.
Sélène Aysul Duval: Notes and Observations
3 months: No reaction to 100 V, perceptible distress at 5000 V.
6 months: No reaction to 1000 V, perceptible distress at 7500 V.
9 months: 10,000 V burned skin; taken to hospital for treatment; no internal damage.
“Jesus,” I whispered. They were experimenting on me?
15 months: Shocked Alex with kindled current when he reached for her. Continues to defend herself when prodded. We are extremely hopeful now.
18 months: Charged first spell successfully.
27 months: Scivina confirms halo.
5 years: Caliph’s nanny called police about suspected abuse. Adapting standardized parenting techniques in attempt to make S. more socially acceptable. Induced brain hemorrhage in nanny. Wiped caliph’s wife and children’s memories.
7 years: Able to charge adept 6 level spells. Shows interest in summoning.
8 years: Kerub demon summoned for Walpurgis identified S. as “Mother of Ahriman.”
9 years: Magical health of S. far exceeds first Moonchild experiment. Becoming rebellious, studying magick in secret, stealing books from lodge’s library. May need another major memory wipe.
10 years: No Moonchild powers demonstrated during ceremony. Rumors circulating within order. Third memory wipe on caliph. Hiring private nanny for winter months.
11 years: Alex found documentation of previous Moonchild abilities remaining dormant until puberty.
13 years: First menses. No Moonchild powers.
14 years: Incident at school required another memory wipe.
15 years: Alex fired from day job. Have tried Moonchild ritual six times this year. Doctor says I may be unable to conceive again. Beginning secondary plan to siphon power. Unsure what to do about S.
16 years: Magical ability markedly increasing. Dare still asking about her, so still have hope that all of this was not in vain. Alex says we should consider selling S. to Dare, but I am not ready to give up on her quite yet.
“Selling me to Dare?” I murmured, surprised I could even be shocked by the depth of their depravity anymore. “What else?”
“That’s where it stops.”
I tore the book out of his hands and flipped to the next page. Blank, just as he said. “Sixteen years old,” I murmured. “That’s when the Black Lodge slayings started, so that last entry must’ve been the last winter they worked for Dare.”
“And after they faked their deaths and sent you packing with a new alias, they found out you were worth hiding from Dare after all when they uncovered the old grimoires in France.”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “Must have been a joyous day in the Duval household when they discovered that the so-called age of magical maturity brought out the Moonchild attributes, not puberty. All they had to do was wait until I hit twenty-five and slit my belly open.”
“But we stopped them.”
Or delayed the inevitable, but I didn’t voice my negative thoughts.
Lon picked up the second book, a journal. This one had a black leather cover embossed with a sigil on the front. “My mother’s personal sigil,” I said, running my finger over it. “Huh. A variation, actually. This star shape at the base is new.”
“Or maybe it’s an older version,” he said, and opened the journal between us on the console. “More spells. Christ, it might take hours to go through, but this might be what you need. I think these could be the Moonchild rituals. The dates range from 1978 to 1988.”
“I don’t need all of them. What’s the last one? The one that applies to me.”
He flipped toward the end of the notebook and stopped at a drawing marked with a date nine months before I was born.
The Moonchild ritual.
“It’s a diagram for the ceremony,” I said, running my finger over the precisely drawn layout. “Here’s the main circle, the altar, the cardinals . . . Jesus, Lon. Doesn’t this look familiar?”
He let out a slow breath through his nostrils. “It’s the same ritual setup as San Diego.”
“Exact configuration. And look, a directional compass. A house and a road.”
We stared at it until Lon turned the diagram and pointed toward the road we had used to get here. “This house, Cady. The road we drove in on.”
He was right. “They conceived me here,” I murmured. “Behind the house.”
He flipped the page and began reading to himself.
“What? Is that the ritual?”
“Looks like more of a statement of intent. Almost as if she was writing it for one of her books, like maybe she thought of publishing it one day.”
“What does it say?”
“Give me a second, and I’ll tell you,” he murmured.