“What other kind of tasks could it have? I’ve never worked with servitors. Sigils are more my bag.”
Legis drank, then swirled the glass in one big hand. “Good question. I’m not one-hundred percent convinced he’s using the little guy to funnel energy. Or, that may just a by-product. There has to be something else going on. But I’m going to need to meditate on it for a few days.”
“Do you think we have a few days?” Selene asked.
“You’d know that more than I would,” Legis replied. “All I know is we don’t currently have answers, but they feel close. I suggest we sit here and enjoy this wine, and stop trying so hard.”
Selene nodded.
Legis sipped some more, then spoke again.
“Every magical working requires both effort and integration. To Know. To Will. To Dare. To Keep Silence. They need to cycle. If we let this rest in silence for a while, we should cycle back to the power To Know.”
Selene rattled the melting ice in their glass. “I think I’m ready for some wine now.” Brenda shot them a look.
“Just half a glass,” Selene protested. Moss was already pouring.
Moss handed them the wine, exchanging it for the now empty tumbler.
“Hey Legis,” Moss asked. “Didn’t Crowley add a fifth power to that formula?”
Legis smiled. “He did indeed. He said when all of Éliphas Lévi’s four powers were activated, they formed a fifth. He called it the power To Go.”
22
Joshua
Joshua felt so beaten up, he had taken a car service to work. He felt grateful he had enough money to text a Lyft instead of having to navigate the jostling of the bus.
“Thank you,” he said to the woman who’d been kind enough to drive him to the shop in exchange for money.
“Have a great day, now!” Her bright accent was distinctly not from the Pacific Northwest.
Climbing out of the car with a groan, Joshua was also grateful he’d had the presence of mind to get dropped in front of the coffee shop attached to the Hawthorne bookshop instead of The Road Home. He sighed, and hoisted his black leather purse more firmly on his shoulder. The shop would wait another ten minutes.
Thank the Gods Quanice was feeling better. Joshua had called him and asked if he could open the shop, which meant coming in half an hour before it was set to open. Quanice readily agreed, which meant Joshua had been able to soak in an epsom salt bath, get slowly dressed, and have a cup of coffee before heading out the door.
At least Joshua’s brain was a little more clear, despite the lingering headache. He had been too out of it the night before to remember that chaos magicians used servitors all the time. They used them to help buy a little extra time when needed. They used them to help them study—though why they couldn’t just design a simple sigil for that, Joshua wasn’t sure. There was way too much he didn’t know about this stuff.
Another reason he needed to get serious again. A, his shop needed serious magical help along with a physical plane revamp, if it was going to survive. And B, if he kept getting dragged into messed-up situations like this, he might as well be of better use. If he reached the edges of his slapdash training and innate power, he was rapidly going to become a liability.
He pushed open the glass door, which felt heavy as lead, and wound his way past the bookstore portion, back toward the café.
Point being, Quanice was a Gods-blessed chaos magician. If Joshua’s head wasn’t still pounding, he would have slapped his forehead at the stupidity of it. He should have brought Quanice into this days ago. If he didn’t have the chops himself, he’d know someone who did.
If the shop wasn’t busy, he’d be able to talk to Quanice in between customers.
Joshua wanted one of the bookstore’s breakfast sandwiches. A load of protein and carbs was just what he needed right now. English muffin surrounding egg, cheddar, and bacon, all baked together in one flat round.
Louise, a gray-haired white woman with purple cat-eye glasses, smiled at him as he walked to the counter. He was certain he was hobbling.
“What can I get you today, Joshua?”
“Two large coffees, one with extra cream. And two breakfast sandwiches, please.”
Louise placed his order and rang him up.
“It’ll be up in a jiff.”
As he waited, he perused the corkboard bristling with business cards, glossy club cards, and a few old fashioned 8x11 fliers. One enterprising local author had left club cards with book covers on the fronts. He smiled. Good advertising.
Maybe The Road Home needed to paper the other neighborhoods with fliers. He wondered what the rate of return was on those. There had to be some way to get the word out they were here.
Maybe he needed a night class in marketing or something. Gah. Being a shop owner was complicated enough, without having to study all this other stuff. But if he was going to stay afloat, and keep both the store and his home, he had to do something.
These were the perils of trying to be a responsible early thirties adult. Most days he didn’t envy his age cohort. He knew it was a struggle for everyone. But days like today? He sometimes wished he just worked for someone else and lived in a house with four other people.
But that only seemed simpler and appealing for about thirty seconds.
Joshua sighed. He had to step up his spiritual practice. He had to step up his business game. What else?
You know the answer to that, his snarky inner self replied.
Yeah. Eventually he was going to need to step up his relationship game. Stop hiding from the stuff he’d buried after Jessie was killed.
What the…?
There on the corkboard was another one of those fliers Moss had found. The mash-up of “shamanism” and “alchemy.” As if it was either. It was made to sound all spooky and sexy, designed to draw people in. It made him feel a little sick.
He looked more closely.
“Joshua, your order’s up!”
Ignoring the summons, he peered more closely at the flier. This version had a symbol chasing itself around the edges. He ripped the flier off the board, grabbed the coffees and sandwiches, thanked Louise, and somehow managed to open the heavy door.
A skateboarder narrowly avoided him. “Sorry, man!”
Joshua vaguely recognized the guy. Maybe he studied with Brenda? Balancing his load, he turned the corner and managed to make it the one block to the shop, whose orange door and leafy window displays beckoned.
Everything felt as if it was taking too long this morning. And he just realized that the shop door had a knob to open, and he had no hands, and was afraid to juggle everything into one arm in his current condition. He could just see everything crashing to the sidewalk, coffee staining his brand new tan linen trousers and matching waistcoat.
So he kicked the door and waited. Then kicked again.
The door swung open, and Quanice peeked out, clearly wondering what the hell was going on.
“Oh my Gods, man! You okay? You look like shit!” Quanice, never tactful, was at least kind and perceptive, and immediately unburdened Joshua of the cardboard coffee holder and the bag of breakfast.
“Thanks for the compliment, Quanice.”
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean…”
“No. It’s fine. Let’s just get this in.”
They walked into the cool, serene aura of the store. Quanice had put some ambient electronica with an interesting beat onto the store system. It married nicely with the fountain that burbled quietly by the door.
“Any customers?” Joshua asked, as he followed Quanice toward the long counter at the end of the shop. He saw that Quanice had been pricing pendulums. Good.
“Not right now. Had a few in earlier. One lady bought a stack of books, a pendulum, and the Urban Tarot deck.”
“Nice.”
That was good to hear. Big sales like that made all the difference to the bottom line.
“I need to talk to you about some magic. Why don’t we talk while we
eat?”
“Sounds good to me,” Quanice said, setting the food on the counter and clearing the pendulums away.
Joshua spread the flier out. “First question. Do you recognize this sigil?” He pointed to the running pattern around the edge of the paper.
Quanice sipped at his coffee as he examined the shapes. “It isn’t a symbol in common use, if that’s what you’re asking. At least not that I’ve encountered. But…”
The young man traced the shapes, mouth half-forming words as he did.
He stopped, lifted his finger from the paper and said, “Well, fuck me.”
“What?”
Quanice slid the paper closer to Joshua and pointed. “Look here. It’s words. Two words. See the interlocking letters?”
Joshua brought the paper closer to his face. Was he going to have to start wearing glasses?
He saw what Quanice meant, though. The shapes were letter-like. But he still couldn’t make out the words.
“You see the words in here? What are they?”
Quanice swallowed his coffee. “The classics,” he said. “Sex.” He pointed. “Will.”
Joshua looked again. “I still don’t see it.”
Quanice leaned against the counter for a moment, sipping his coffee and thinking.
“Are you familiar with Arabic at all?”
“Some.”
“There’s a calligraphic form called ‘square kufic’ that turns Arabic words into interlocking patterns. It’s really beautiful, and used a lot for prayers, or to illustrate the ninety-nine names of God.”
He set his coffee down and grabbed a scrap of paper and pen from one of the counter drawers. “Look what he’s done here. He’s squaring off the letters, combining them, and reversing some directions so they fit into a tight pattern. It’s not nearly as elegant as kufic, but it works for his purposes.”
Quanice drew a square S, and then, in the bottom half, he drew a leftward facing line. “See? That’s the reverse E embedded in the original S.”
“What’s the thing that looks like a rune in the middle?”
A huge grin on his face, Quanice smacked one hand on the wooden counter. Joshua winced. Still a bit too loud for his head.
“That’s the thing that had me fooled for a minute. He repeated that X shape in order to draw the line down the center, forming both the W and an I. That forms a T bar at the bottom that stands in for mirrored Ls. And the S begins again. Pretty well done, actually.”
Joshua stared at the pattern. Sex and Will. Life force and intention harnessed toward action. Two concepts that acted as building blocks for almost every magical operation in the Western world.
“Okay. So I get that. But what are they doing here?”
Quanice rustled in the bag and drew out their sandwiches.
He gave Joshua one of those “you’re my boss so I’m too polite to say what I really think looks.”
Setting his sandwich down with a sigh, Quanice said, “Look. If you were a charlatan, or a megalomaniac, or psychopath…”
“Or all three.”
“Or all three,” Quanice nodded. “You would want to draw unsuspecting people into your working by promising their subconscious minds the very thing you want to use them for.”
He picked up a sandwich, took a bite, and chewed.
Joshua took a drink of his coffee with extra cream, waiting for Quanice to stop stalling for effect.
“So if you want to prey on people, using them as batteries or psychic cannon fodder or whatever, you slide in subliminal messages. Trap set.”
“Well, isn’t that unscrupulous.”
Quanice swallowed a second bite.
“Yeah, sure. But we do it, too. We just say we mean well. You turn the fountain on every morning. We’ve got nice faeries flying overhead. We’re telegraphing to people that we have what they want, and maybe even what they need. It’s basic marketing. And basic psychology.”
“Quanice, if I could afford it, I’d offer you a raise.”
Quanice just smiled and shrugged.
“So what’s your second question?” Quanice asked.
“Oh! Right! Well, now there’s a third. First, can you brainstorm some marketing ideas for the shop, since you’re so savvy? And meanwhile, can you tell me everything you know about servitors?”
23
Selene
Selene was so far behind on work, it wasn’t funny. But they couldn’t get Tabitha out of their head, so here they were, back at the hospital again, despite the fact that the smells and lighting made their skin crawl.
Tabitha’s parents had been in the room when Selene arrived. A white couple in their mid-fifties, they looked exhausted, and seemed slightly relieved to have an excuse to take a break and get some food.
Staring at your grown child, inert on a bed, when there wasn’t a damn thing you could do to help them must be horrible. Selene had assured the couple that they’d stay put for at least an hour. To take a break. Get out the hospital if they could.
So here Selene sat, in the gray padded chair, listening to the hissing and beeping machines, staring down at Tabitha’s face.
She looked even worse than the day before. More sunken. Less present.
“You bastard,” Selene muttered.
They still couldn’t imagine how anyone could bear to do magic that sucked other people’s life away. The coven had done some tracking, and saw how he was doing it, but they still didn’t know some major things. And not knowing major things meant that any magic Arrow and Crescent might try to do to counter this mess would most likely fail.
They couldn’t just fire at random. Nor could they simply trace the threads back to the source and blast the guy. Not without knowing whether or not that would harm who knew how many other people were keyed into him. Not only the people he had poisoned, but his so-called “students” who were most likely just more cannon fodder, along with being his bankroll.
They also didn’t know why he was doing this, and frankly, they didn’t know how. Setting magical tags inside people’s auras was a pretty simple operation if you actually knew what you were doing, and knew how to avoid getting messed up in the process.
But tagging the flying ointment? And including poison? The two things seemed counterintuitive. It seemed like you were either just an asshole who got off on poisoning people, or you wanted to syphon juice from them.
And it was just a numbers game? Or something else besides?
Maybe the Alchemist didn’t care how many casualties there were, as long as some people were strong enough to survive and do whatever nasty working he had planned.
Selene texted Brenda. The coven had to make sure that Lucy hadn’t gotten tagged when they touched the goop.
Then they sighed. There was no way to protect anyone in the labs, was there? Hopefully whatever magical nasties he’d hidden along with the poison couldn’t pass through nitrile gloves.
“Tabitha, I wish you could tell me what’s happening to you….”
Selene just didn’t have the juice to go into their friend’s aura again. Not today.
Body trumps spirit, Raquel always said. And both Selene’s body and spirit needed some rest and repair. But what Selene could do was brainstorm.
They couldn’t stop thinking about what Legis had said the night before. About the Power To Go. This magic felt so convoluted. Complicated. The bad guy had entangled all of these innocent people, not just in his actions, but in his magic.
How in Goddess’s name was the coven supposed to help?
Legis’s comment was as good a starting place as any. They needed to go back through all of the Four Powers, it seemed, in order to find the right action. To Go would only follow after the rest of the work was done.
Clicking open a fresh page on their tablet, Selene decided to make a list.
To Know, they headed the first section.
What did they know?
The Alchemist was poisoning flying ointment.
The same person was also tea
ching classes in “shamanism” and “alchemy.”
Random people were seizing. Some had died. How many, the coven didn’t know yet. They also didn’t know how many others were in Tabitha’s state, or had come through somehow and were being used regardless.
They also didn’t know what exactly this man was doing with his students.
Most importantly? They didn’t know his endgame or how the flying ointment was tagging people. Maybe Tobias or Brenda could figure that out. They couldn’t ask Lucy right now…which was a drag. Their best psychometrist was compromised. They’d have to rely strictly on the herbs or would need to find an energy signature some other way.
Good thing Joshua still had a box of the stuff in his storeroom.
Okay. Moving on.
To Will.
So far, their intention was to find out what the Alchemist was doing, and to protect whomever they could. But how to set that into action? And could they even plan an action with so little information?
Selene looked at Tabitha, who seemed to be hanging on to her spirit by the slimmest silver thread.
They were going to have to plan an action, and fill in the information as they went.
So. First steps? Use the ties they did have to do more reconnaissance. Maybe the coven needed to track down some of this guy’s students, see if there were any inroads from that direction.
The power to Dare. Selene didn’t like this one at all. Not in this situation. Usually, Selene was all for leaping off the cliff in the name of righteous action. But this time? That worry about casualties was strong.
They sighed again and looked at the machines that seemed to fill the room. Bringing the stylus up against their lips, they tried to think. Selene closed their eyes and took in a deep breath.
Despite saying they weren’t going to, they sent a tendril of awareness toward Tabitha. Reaching out. Seeking.
By Moon Page 11