My father had embedded the blade with nine enchantments designed to unlock as my abilities grew and I could handle their power. I had recently unlocked numero uno: a banishing enchantment. No more recitation of Latin texts required.
“Stop!” the demon screamed as his fissures opened over his body. “I beg you!”
I backed off a little. “Are you going to play nice?”
He answered with another evil Word. Fire flashed around my shield as the entire room exploded in infernal flames. I winced against the heat, uncapped a vial of ice crystals in my pocket, and swung it in an arc, shouting, “Ghiaccio!”
As the frost invocation reduced the flames to smoke, I pushed more power through the rune. Inside the burst of holy light, the demon screamed. “Yes, yes, all right, I’ll tell you what you want! I’ll tell you!”
“A year ago, a vampire was cast into the Pits,” I said. “He had a shadow fiend with him. Do you know what became of the vampire?” The demon continued to shriek and writhe as I held him over the brink of banishment.
“Yes, yes, I know!” he cried. “I know!”
You couldn’t trust anything out of a demon’s mouth, especially one under duress. “First, tell me the vampire’s name,” I said.
“Samael! It was Samael!”
“Wrong.”
“Lestat?”
“Enjoy your return trip to Hell.”
The power I’d been holding back stormed through me. Holy light exploded from the rune, eviscerating the demon and his final cries. When the light receded back into the blade, the demon was gone.
Disappointed at the lack of info, I resheathed the sword into my staff. It had been a long shot—demons numbered in the millions, and they swam in different infernal soups—but this demon hadn’t known shit. It was going to be up to me and the vampire hunters to determine what, if anything, had become of Arnaud.
“Is it gone?” came a muffled voice.
With a Word, I released the locking spell on the bathroom door. The door cracked open, and the conjurer peered out. He’d drawn his hood over his head and pulled the strings tight, as though for extra protection.
“Yeah, it’s all clear.”
He shuffled over in a pair of jeans whose cuffs flopped around his dirty socks. He was a little younger than I’d first thought, the cheeks cinched by his drawn hood featuring patches of acne. “I—I didn’t think it would work,” he stammered. Fingering the burn holes in his sweatshirt, he stared around his singed apartment.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He blinked over at me. “Nathan.”
I picked up the spell book and flipped through it. The black cover was made of fake leather, and the spells inside had been typed in modern English. By the layout and host of errors, it looked like a shoddy self-publishing job.
I examined the spells more closely. Most read like recipes and recitations that someone had thought up on a whim. Eye of newt, toe of frog, that sort of thing. But the one Nathan had used was real enough. Not only that, it had been sufficient to summon a demon. A low-level one, granted, but that shouldn’t have happened. I’d already given Nathan a thorough scanning, and he didn’t possess an ounce of magic-user blood.
The conjuring spell was in a small section in the very back that was different from the rest of the book. The spells weren’t typed, but handwritten in a smoky script. The intro to the section instructed the user to “hold the pages over fire to reveal their power.” I looked more closely at the spells. They’d been rendered in some sort of enchanted ink—invisible until burned.
“Where did you get this?” I asked Nathan.
“I, uh, I ordered it.”
“From where?”
He stumbled over to a gaming table heaped with manuals, modules, painted statuettes, and piles of notes. Some of the loose pages were still smoldering from the demon fire, but Nathan didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy digging for something. I glanced around the unit. Hand drawings of fantasy subjects—mages with glowing hands, dwarfs hefting giant axes, and a lot of muscled men in war skirts sporting broadswords—were tacked to the walls. Drawings that no doubt explained his interest in the spell book. A moment later, Nathan emerged from the gaming table with a magazine.
“In here,” he said.
I caught the magazine’s title before he flipped to the back: Dragon Master: A Guide to All Things Gaming and Magic.
“See?” He thrust the magazine toward me, an ink-stained finger indicating a box in the classified section advertising a “Real Spell Book!”—for $25 plus shipping and handling. The only identifying info was a P.O. box in New Jersey to which the money order was to be sent. There wasn’t even a phone number.
“Do you know who the author is?” I asked, taking the magazine from him. That information wasn’t in the spell book.
Nathan wiped his nose with the back of a hand. “Nuh-uh.”
“Does anyone else in your circle of friends own these books?”
Nathan’s head shook again, but his gaze had wandered down to my cane.
“You—you’re the real thing, aren’t you?” he said. “I mean, a real wizard?”
“Don’t worry about what I am.” I added the magazine to the spell book I’d already slipped into my satchel. “You’re just lucky to be alive. That was an honest-to-God demon you called up. If I had gotten here a second later, you’d be extra well done, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Dude…” he said in wonderment.
I pushed power into my wizard’s voice until it shook. “You’re not to attempt another spell ever again. Do you understand me?”
Nathan’s eyes snapped to mine and he nodded vigorously. “Yes, Mr. Wizard.”
That’s where I usually left things, but I handed him a card with my number on it.
“If you encounter any more of these books, I want you to call me right away.”
The Order would get to the bottom of whoever was distributing the powerful conjuring spells and why, but it was my job to contain the fallout in the meantime. At least in the greater New York area. When Nathan realized I was walking out, he shuffled after me.
“Hey, wait! You’re leaving?”
“Yeah, I’m late for something.”
“Can’t you stay for another few minutes? You know, just in case it comes back?”
I paused in the doorway and turned. Nathan looked at me expectantly, fingers tugging on the crispy strings of his sweatshirt.
“You wouldn’t happen to know of any flower shops nearby?” I asked.
3
I swore under my breath as I knocked on the door. Of all the damned nights to be late. After informing the Order of the demon conjuring, I hadn’t even had time to shower or put on fresh clothes, and I smelled like a burnt piece of toast.
I peered down at the bouquet of flowers I’d bought from the street-corner vendor Nathan had recommended. The arrangement had looked pretty sad on the cart, and in the light of the front porch, it looked even more pathetic. I was about to chuck the flowers into the bushes when the front door shot open.
Vega’s son appeared, his round eyes shining with excitement. “Mr. Croft!”
“Hey, Tony,” I said, ruffling his hair. Sweat plastered his curly bangs to his forehead, and my hand came back damp. A group of kids grunted and shouted inside, but I couldn’t see beyond the foyer from my angle.
“Is your mom here?”
I craned my neck in search of an adult. This was my first time meeting Vega’s four brothers, and though Vega had given me every assurance they were cool, I was wary of what I was walking into. If she were my younger sister, I’d want to know who she was getting serious with, and there were four of them.
“C’mon,” Tony said, grabbing my cane hand and pulling me inside.
The modest house in the Bronx had been their father’s. Following his shooting death, Ricki’s older brothers had pooled their resources and taken over the subsidized mortgage. Thanks to the Crash, the three oldest
still lived here, along with their families. I had time to glance over a pile of kicked-off sneakers—how many of them did live here?—before Tony yanked me from the foyer and past a room where his cousins were engaged in what looked like a rugby match with a foam football.
At the end of a short hallway, I missed a step down to the living room and stumbled into the midst of Ricki’s family. Their spirited conversation ended abruptly and faces turned toward me.
“Mr. Croft’s here!” Tony announced, then abandoned me at a sprint to rejoin his cousins.
Gee, thanks, kid. With an uncomfortable chuckle, I got my footing and looked around the room. The half dozen or so adults were seated on couches and chairs in the casual manner of a family get-together, drinks and bowls of chips scattered around them. A smoky fire crackled in a small hearth.
When I didn’t spot Vega, I gave a lame wave.
“Hi there,” I said. “I’m, ah, Ricki’s friend.” Which I was convinced they heard as, I’m the guy sleeping with your sister.
“Everson,” a man said from the couch nearest me. He was big and bald with a sweet smile that pushed his cheeks up to a pair of sleepy eyes. It was the kind of face you appreciated immediately in situations as these. I recognized him from the photos in Vega’s apartment as her oldest brother.
“You must be Diego,” I said, extending my hand.
He clasped it warmly in both of his. “Yeah, but everyone calls me Teddy.”
“Short for Theodore?” I asked, wondering if Diego was a middle name.
“No,” a lean man in white athletic warmups sitting beside him said. “Short for Teddy Bear. I mean, just look at that mug. Don’t it make you wanna do this?” He reached over and grabbed a wad of Teddy’s cheek.
That got the room laughing. Teddy pushed his hand away with a mellow chuckle.
“Alejandro?” I asked the lean man, which would make him Ricki’s second oldest brother. Before he could answer, though, another character, whose muscular build had left him neckless, spoke up.
“Naw, that’s Weaks, short for weakling.”
Weaks chucked a couch pillow at him. “Yeah, and Gabe over there is ‘the Rock,’ but only ’cause he calls himself that.”
“Man, I earned that name at the gym,” the Rock protested.
“Just do what the rest of us do, Everson,” Weaks said. “Call him ‘Dumb as a Rock.’ He’ll answer to that too.”
The Rock, who was third oldest, sprang past the coffee table and put Weaks in a headlock. Weaks countered with a series of soft shots to the Rock’s stomach. While they went at it, Teddy introduced me to the three women in the room, their wives. They greeted me with strong hugs and forbearing smiles, telling me to pay no attention to “the boys.” Teddy’s wife accepted the flowers—which suddenly didn’t seem so lame—and invited me to sit down as she headed to the kitchen to put my gift in water.
I sidled over to where the Rock had been sitting, leaning back as he took Weaks to the floor. Teddy chuckled and shook his head. Those two, he was saying.
I couldn’t help but smile. This was nothing like the grilling I’d been dreading. Everyone was carrying on as if I were just another member of the household. I knew right then that we were all going to get along just—
“I’m Carlos.”
“Jesus!” I cried, wheeling in surprise. He had been sitting silently in my blind spot.
It took me a moment to place him. Carlos was the youngest of the brothers, just a year older than Vega. A practicing attorney, he was the only brother who could afford to live alone. The other brothers alternated between whatever work they could find and unemployment. Vega often referred to Carlos as the “smart one,” and it was clear she looked up to him.
Carlos stood from a wooden chair, coming almost to my height, and gripped my hand solidly. Unlike his brothers, he was dressed formally: white button-down shirt and brown vest. A neat beard accented his jaw. Though there were hints of Vega in the others, his resemblance to her was the most striking. From behind a pair of glasses, his critical eyes were a dead ringer for Vega’s during our early, adversarial days.
“So, no nickname?” I asked.
“No,” he answered without humor.
“We tried to give him one,” Weaks said from the floor, “but nothing took.”
“Yeah,” the Rock put in. “Pencil Neck. Poindexter. Dweeb. He passed on all of them.”
“I wonder why,” I said, sliding Carlos a smile.
But Vega’s brother only seemed to stiffen at my attempted friendliness.
“What about Ricki?” I asked to get the subject off him, which was making me uncomfortable. “What do you guys call her?”
“Don’t you dare get them started.”
Vega entered from the kitchen, drying her hands with a towel. She was wearing her midnight hair down over a gray turtleneck sweater and looked incredible as always. A host of simmering smells wafted in after her. She gave me a kiss and slipped an arm around my waist. I could feel Carlos watching us.
“So, I see you’ve met the Zoo Crew,” she said.
“Oh, c’mon,” I said with a wave. “They’re nice.”
“See there,” the Rock called from the floor. “Even your boyfriend has our backs.”
Vega shook her head in exasperation. “And you wondered why it took me a year to bring him over here. Get off the floor and let Alejandro up,” she snapped. “And wash your hands while you’re at it. We’re eating in five.”
The two brothers complied with playful mutters and hung heads.
Teddy turned to me, a twinkle in his sleepy eyes. “Miss Bossy Pants.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what we called her.”
Vega chucked her towel at him, a perfect throw that bloomed over Teddy’s face and covered it completely. The towel shook with muffled laughter, and soon everyone joined in.
Everyone except for Carlos.
Dinner was served in the family dining room, where tables of various lengths and heights had been pushed together and covered with a pair of mismatched tablecloths. We took our seats on an equally motley arrangement of chairs, the kids squeezing in between us with plates of hotdogs and potato chips.
I caught Vega eyeing me for my reaction as she sat beside me. I winked and rubbed the curve of her low back. The idea of introducing me to her family had no doubt been as anxiety-producing for her as it had been for me, but save for the odd vibe from Carlos, I couldn’t have felt more at home among them.
Vega smiled back.
“Yo, Carlos!” she called past me. Her older brother by a year was entering the dining room behind the last of the kids. “Over here.” She waved and pointed to the empty setting directly opposite me.
Wonderful.
“I’ve been wanting you two to talk,” Vega said as Carlos lowered himself down in front of me. Above her smile, Vega’s eyes shone with pride. I felt my own lips locking into something between a grin and a grimace. “Carlos practices full time, but he’s in academics too. He teaches a course at Guffin Law School.”
“Yeah?” I said. “What do you teach?”
“Contracts.”
“Wow, that’s…” I had nothing. “That’s really interesting.”
“I’ve told you about Everson,” Vega said. “He’s a professor in the history department at Midtown College. Ten years?”
“Yeah, just about.” My normal MO was to tack on a self-deprecating joke, but I couldn’t come up with squat. Carlos’s presence seemed to sap even the potential for humor from the atmosphere.
“How about you?” I asked. “Been in the classroom long?”
Instead of answering, he said, “Mythology and lore, huh?”
I nodded, surprised he had known or remembered. “That’s right.”
I waited for some sort of follow up, but Carlos only took a large bowl of yellow rice and roasted pork from the center of the table and began spooning the traditional Puerto Rican dish onto his plate.
Vega shook my knee as if her
brother and I were getting along famously and turned to a sister-in-law on her other side. Crap. I slid my gaze to the right, hoping to pull someone else onto Carlos’s and my shrinking island of conversation. A little girl at the end of the table stared back at me, her mouth ringed in ketchup.
“Good hotdog?” I asked.
“Ricki told me about your other work,” Carlos said.
I looked back at him. Vega had never mentioned sharing my wizarding life with her family. “Oh, yeah?” I said, accepting the dish he extended toward me. This line of conversation could go several ways, and none felt promising. Carlos didn’t strike me as a believer in the arcane. I busied myself with loading my plate.
“How’s that going?” he asked.
“Oh, you know. It’s going.”
“Working on anything currently?”
This wasn’t idle chit-chat. Carlos was steering toward something.
“There’s always a job of some kind or another,” I replied vaguely. “You know how it goes.”
“I don’t, actually. Not when it comes to exactly what it is you do.”
He was regarding me with those critical eyes. I glanced over at the little girl with the ketchup mouth. She was still staring up at me, chewing methodically. “Well, it—it’s complicated,” I stammered. “Maybe I can explain it some other time.”
“I understand Ricki nearly walked into an ambush this summer.”
And there it was. He was referring to the trap Damien—or Arnaud, possibly—had set to draw attention from Yankee Stadium, where he’d tried to claim 50,000 souls. Had he succeeded, there was no telling the size and strength of demon we’d be facing. Certainly nothing like the riffraff I’d banished an hour earlier.
“One that killed your partner,” Carlos added.
“Yeah, Pierce Dalton,” I said. “Ricki was well back when it happened,” I added to reassure him, but my words came out sounding defensive, maybe because of the critical way he was staring me down now.
“Her job is dangerous enough.”
“I won’t let anything happen to her,” I replied a little too quickly.
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