by Sara DeHaven
Scanlon was impressed. Franchesca had just put together a seeing spell in less than a minute, with less than ideal ritual objects. A thread from the priest’s cassock was precious little to work with to connect her to him. Blood was always good, of course, especially with copper wiring as a connector, but using the feather, and the yellow scarf as air symbols, presumably to convey what the priest was seeing to her eyes through the medium of air, that was inspired. She’d clearly just watched the priest dial the number through the connection she’d cast. Scanlon was already thinking of ways he might use the spell, if he could come up with an incantation and some kind of internal focus. He figured it was no accident she hadn’t done the incantation aloud. She probably wanted to keep it to herself.
Father Steuban came back into the church just as Franchesca was tidying away the last of the items from her purse. “I’m afraid she wasn’t in,” he said apologetically. “I’ll try her again later. If I could just get your number?”
Franchesca went back into her purse and came up with another scrap of paper and wrote down a number that Scanlon knew had to be a false one. “Thank you so much, Father. You can call me at this number any time, day or night.”
Justice had already made his way out of the church, and Scanlon and Franchesca were left to make their goodbyes to the priest. Justice joined them again as they left the church and headed for Scanlon’s car. “Now we just have to do a reverse look up and get this Bree’s address,” Franchesca said briskly. “I think it’s a good lead. She has to be powered, and an Exorcist.”
“If it’s a cell phone, reverse look up won’t work,” Scanlon replied. “I’m sure we can still locate her, but it may take a little longer.”
“Bree,” Justice said slowly, in his own voice this time. “I just remembered. I think that’s what Thorvaldson called her, after the battle. I think he said, “Bree, get me out of here.”
Franchesca turned on Justice, and raised her hand. A look of cold anger crossed her face. “Tirakku! Why didn't you tell me this before?”
Justice put both hands over his face in a protective motion, and a whining sound emerged between his fingers. “I didn’t remember, Master!”
“Ms. Gambrini, I’m not sure this is the place,” Scanlon said quietly.
Franchesca dropped her hand, whirled around, and walked rapidly toward the car. Scanlon followed, and gave in to the impulse to roll his eyes, now that she wasn’t looking at him. He was relieved they had a solid lead. He’d had just about enough of this servility bullshit.
Chapter 10
“You were supposed to talk me out of this, you know," Bree told Sophie as she brushed out Bree's hair with long, slow strokes. "I expected Bruce’s curiosity to get the better of him, but I was counting on you to tell me I’d lost my mind.”
Bree could hear the tension in Sophie's voice as she replied, “Maybe we’ve all lost our minds. But he’s very convincing, your Daniel.”
“Hah! That’s why you and Bruce are here, to make sure he’s not ‘my Daniel’ in any way. If I’m monitoring him while he interacts with the demon, I need someone monitoring me, then someone monitoring the monitor. And, for the record, I’m not interested in him that way.”
Sophie snorted. “That’s not what I saw when you were both over here last night. And don’t take my word for it. Bruce read it.”
Bree colored. “Okay, okay. So I find him attractive, in a weird, confused kind of way. But that doesn’t mean I’m interested in pursuing a relationship with him. Certainly not while we’re trying this experiment, and probably not ever. How could I ever trust him?”
“You’re trusting him tonight. Possibly with your life. With mine and Bruce’s and Kevin’s too, for that matter.” She gave Bree's hair a final stroke, patted her on the shoulder and got up to put the brush back on the dresser. She leaned up against it, facing Bree.
“I trust him for now, for this," Bree replied, looking up at Sophie. "I trust him when he says he’s called a demon safely before, and that our protections are adequate. I trust that his intentions are good. But I don’t really trust that it will stay safe, for any of us, and especially for him. I think it would be like letting yourself fall for someone with a terminal illness. How long will he stay uncorrupted? How long will he stay sane?” She shook her head and regarded her friend wistfully. “Daniel the retired Keeper, him I’d like to get to know. Daniel the Demon Master, well, even if all this succeeds, I’m afraid his sanity is likely to be a lost cause in the end.”
Sophie put her hands on her ample hips. “Don’t you Catholics have a patron saint of lost causes? St. John, or St. Joe or something?”
“St. Jude,” Bree replied with a reluctant smile.
“Well, get some prayers going to St. Jude then!”
“You know, that might be appropriate for tonight at the least. We are attempting something here that’s considered impossible.”
“Oh, we had impossible for breakfast. This is just improbable.”
They shared a strained laugh, and finished dressing in silence. Sophie had insisted that both she and Bree wear dresses as part of calling up feminine energy to balance the energy of the greater number of men who were to be present. Bree realized that Sophie’s attention to detail on this was a measure of her nervousness, so she agreed in spite of the chilly weather. Bree had chosen the warmest dress she owned, a blue and green floral print with fitted three quarter length sleeves, topped with a soft green cashmere cardigan. Sophie was in a flowing blue dress shot through with silver thread, and she'd arranged a filmy silver scarf loosely around her neck.
Just as they completed their preparations, Daniel and Kevin arrived. Kevin had picked Daniel up at Bree’s, where he’d been resting in anticipation of tonight’s working. He'd stayed the last three days with her on the theory that he'd be hard to trace there, and so far, there’d been no sign of the people who had attacked him at his place.
Daniel stood by awkwardly as the friends exchanged warm greetings. Sophie quickly got down to business. "All right folks, if we're going to try calling a demon, let's do it quick before I have a chance to think too hard about it." She turned and led the way upstairs.
"Okay, everyone," Bree began as they all gathered in Sophie and Bruce's worship room. "Thanks for all your input on the ritual for tonight. I think we've got good precautions planned out, now we just have to do this thing. Kevin, if you would do the honors?"
As a Warder, Kevin didn't need to form and cast a spell, or do a ritual to create a ward around the house and the room. He simply closed his eyes for a brief moment, raised his arms, and the energetic background hum of strong wards rose in a comforting wall at their backs. He was there to prevent interruptions from outside and to help keep the demon inside. Everyone there had the ability for some basic personal wards, and Kevin went around and reinforced them all, placing his palm on the warding symbols each had marked on their hands.
Sophie took over at that point. As exorcisms were best performed either outside or in a location considered sacred space, Bree had reasoned that performing the working in Bruce and Sophie’s worship room was the best location they had that would still be private. Sophie began with the ritual of creating a sacred circle.
She took Bree by the hand and positioned her, placing her in the east of the circle she was forming. Bree dug into her bag of exorcism gear, although she devoutly hoped she wouldn’t have to use any of it. She wore her grandmother’s gold crucifix, along with Daniel’s protection amulet, and as she sat down, she arranged a glass bottle full of holy water, her bible, and a small jar of salt within reach at her side.
Sophie put a solemn looking Kevin in the south, Bruce in the north, which he occupied with a wide-legged stance, and Daniel in the center, leaving the west for herself. She did her usual consecration of the circle ritual, then began the invocations she’d devised.
“Spirits of the East, powers of Air,” she began, facing east, palms up, “be with us all and especially with our sister Bree. Grant h
er your powers of objectivity and clarity and your openness to what is new and possible."
She turned to the south. "Spirits of the South, powers of Fire, be with us all, and especially with our brother Kevin. Grant him your powers of energy and will so that he may hold the wards to protect those within and outside of our circle."
"Spirits of the West, powers of Water, be with us all, and especially with me. Grant me your powers of healing and regeneration that I might be ready to assist any here who need me."
She turned to face Bruce in the north, and the two exchanged nervous smiles. "Spirits of the North, powers of Earth, be with us all and especially with our brother Bruce. Grant him your centeredness and calm that he may ground us all when we are in fear and doubt."
Sophie turned to face Daniel, who was standing straight backed, with his shoulders squared, and her face settled into a more serious expression. "Lady of the Moon, Lady of Earth, Mother of us all, please guide and protect us all and especially our brother Daniel. Grant him your wisdom and light as he goes into the dark.”
Bree offered her own prayer as soon as Sophie had settled into her spot in the west. “Lord God, please help and guide us. Know that we call up evil tonight not to consort with it but only to know it that we may better protect others and ourselves from it. Have mercy on our imperfections and weakness, as these are what the demon will target. Help us hold to the good, to the light, and to your will. Amen.” Then silently, she added, Saint Jude, hope of the hopeless, pray for Daniel.
Daniel had been facing Sophie as she made her invocations. Now he turned to face Bree. He still looked tired and drawn, and she had to remind herself yet again that he didn’t need his full base energy to do the working, as the Demon Master talent was almost all about will energy. Dion had done a healing on him four times in the last three days, but she could tell by the way he moved that Daniel still was far from recovered from the knife wound.
He raised his hands so his palms faced out at chest level, and said simply, “I dedicate this working to the benefit of all beings.” Then he began unbuttoning his shirt as Bree approached him. They had agreed she would do a full deep read before he called the demon to get a baseline. He had promised to drop the spell that hid his Demon Master and Binder powers for the reading. She found herself looking at Kevin for courage. He smiled slightly and nodded.
Bree took a deep breath and stepped closer to Daniel, and put her right hand on his bare chest. She met his eyes briefly, and felt the frisson of excitement that eye contact with him gave her. If she’d had to rely only on his facial tells to read him, she wouldn’t have gotten far. He was clearly very focused for the working, and not much else was visible on the outside. He put a hand on a bracelet he wore around his wrist, a polished green stone on a leather cord. He'd told her it was the focus for his hiding spell, and she felt a surge of some kind of magical energy as he undid the spell. She closed her eyes and tuned her Reader sense to the energy level.
She sucked in a hard breath as the intensity of his energy rolled over her. There was just so much of it that it was hard at first to distinguish anything more specific about it. And to think that this was Daniel without his full base energy. Her first reading of him had felt incredibly high power to her, but with the Demon Master and Binder energy unmasked, he was completely off the charts. As she began to sift through what she thought of as the different flavors of energy, she realized that the only other of his powers that surpassed his Demon Master and Binder talents was his Caster ability.
She searched for and found the darker feel that wove through his base energy like a ribbon of smoke. It was less than before, when she'd read him before clearing his taint. She stretched out her Demonsense to be certain, but there was no sense of remaining taint at all. She really needed to get a better feel for that darker energy, and to do it, she had to do something akin to what she did with taint clearings and exorcisms. She began attuning her energy to Daniel’s.
The attunement allowed her to go to a deeper level, one where she could discern not just energy, but feelings. This was as close as Reader sense got to psychic ability. It required a lot of concentration, the openness and cooperation of the person being read, and extended skin-to-skin physical touch, so it wasn’t something even a good Reader could do casually or easily. And it required a near painful openness of the Reader, a level of openness Bree had to push herself to.
She followed that sense of darkness down, down and in and found a well of grief and loss. She was so focused, so strongly attuned that she started to get images, something she had only very rarely experienced before. Several disturbing pictures flashed across her awareness; blood pumping past hands pressed to a thigh wound; the still, waxy face of a dead blonde woman with a gaping slice across her neck; a man clutching a raw, burned shoulder and screaming; a funeral in the snow. Fellow Keepers, she thought, or perhaps victims of demons Daniel had seen in his work as a Keeper.
A number of other images went by too fast for her to register, then finally, she saw a montage of memories of one person at many different ages. A curly headed little girl; a pretty, flirtatious teenager in a bathing suit; a beautiful dark haired young woman with deep brown eyes, a look of contempt twisting her features. They pictures were accompanied by a welter of conflicting, despairing feelings of love, fear, fury and self-doubt.
As the images faded, Bree felt another thread that throbbed with dark energy, and traced it. It led to a place she had trouble finding words for. Focus? Drive? Perhaps obsession? Something Daniel had to know, to prove, something with a desperate feel to it. Bree instinctively felt this was a place a demon could enter. Grief and loss were good entry points as well, but this felt darker. She pulled back another level, widening her focus, feeling for other emotions. Yes, there was the focus she saw on his face, some nervousness, but more determination and confidence. And that, she felt with a little jolt, was sexual energy. And it was building.
Her awareness returned to her body with an uncomfortable snap, and Bree realized that she'd moved closer to Daniel during the reading, probably in response to trying to go deeper. Her cheek was resting against his neck, and the whole right side of her body was pressed up against his. She felt flushed and aroused, and that startled her, though if she were honest with herself, she could hardly claim it was unexpected. Pressing up against Daniel Thorvaldson’s body had come to feature prominently in her fantasies of late in spite of her attempts to banish the thoughts.
She pulled back and dropped her hand, then forced herself to look at his face. His lips twitched into a complicit smile, and she knew without a doubt that he'd perceived both of their sexual responses to standing that close. She said, with an effort at keeping her voice calm, “Just meditate for a bit, and then I’d say you’re good to go.”
Bree gave her libido strict instructions to cease and desist, and went back to her spot in the circle, reflecting on the read. He wasn’t tainted, and although she’d seen some dark energy, it didn’t feel at all like demonic energy. She was, truthfully, no more concerned than she’d already been about proceeding tonight, although considerably more curious to know more about the images she’d seen. But at least now she’d have a good idea if contact with the demon affected him negatively with a deep read as a baseline.
They all settled down on the floor and meditated until Daniel stood again, saying, “I’m ready.” He glanced around the circle to check that everyone else was good to go. At their nods, he raised his arms with a small grimace of discomfort as the gesture pulled on his injury, and spun slowly in a circle, raising a final level of warding between him and the others. Then he called, in a shockingly loud voice, “Gelsenim, I call you! Gelsenim, I command your presence!”
There was a long, electric pause, then Bree felt a rush of heat and her Demonsense erupted into clamoring life as a form started to take shape in the air in front of Daniel. At first, all she could make out was movement and sharp edges appearing, then disappearing. The form elongated, the movement slowed
, and a figure started to emerge. The feet coalesced first, naked, with ruddy, alligator-like skin, long toes, and toenails painted with what looked like red nail polish. Muscular legs came into view next, human shaped, and an appallingly huge phallus appeared, erect, scale covered and mobile, waving about as if looking for something to impale. The torso materialized, more red in tone than the legs, and the demon's chest was adorned with a swirling pattern of small, white chips. The demon moved, and the light struck the pattern at an angle, making it sickeningly clear to Bree that the tiny white squares were teeth, children's teeth. A row of short spikes ran along its spine. The arms and hands came next, with fingers ending in claws rather than fingernails. Finally, the horn topped head came into view, face dominated by a large hooked nose, fiery red mouth, and blazing orange eyes.
“Daniel, how kind,” the demon growled. “You brought me some women!”
Panic washed over Bree. The thing was huge, not just in form, but in energy. Daniel had warned her he was calling an Erekim, the strongest type of demon, but she'd never encountered one before, and the reality was terrifying on a deep, instinctual level. The demon turned to look directly at her, and she had to remind herself that Daniel had a ward between her and that thing. Its eyes held an avid malice. There was blood, and screaming, and a terrible lust in those eyes.
“Hardly, Gelsenim. I just brought a few powered to help out, to keep things civil,” Daniel replied, his tone no longer overtly commanding, but cool and very firm.
“Oh, you’re no fun,” the demon complained, its form wavering around the edges, then dissolving completely to re-form into that of a small blond boy. The boy looked pleadingly up at Daniel. “Can’t I have just a little fun? I really am hungry. Just a little sip? It doesn’t have to be one of the women. How about that one, there?” it said, pointing at Kevin. Kevin clenched his teeth and narrowed his eyes. He looked stern, but Bree saw he was sweating.