Kindling the Moon (36 page)

As hands pushed my head down into the limo, I tried to call back to people running toward us, but I just couldn't. I had no voice.

It didn't matter. It was too late anyway.

The swirling, black vortex drew me up and away.

A slow bead of sweat trickled down the nape of my neck. When it ran down my back, I realized that my nose was cold. Actually, cold on one side, hot on the other. That was strange. Strange enough to speed my ascent into consciousness. My eyes opened.

I was outdoors. A clearing in the woods that was bare of grass. A rocky hill lay in front of me, several dozen yards in the distance. A single man clothed in ritual robes stood at the base. His head was bowed, as if in prayer or meditation.

My vision was tinted red. Blurry. Obstructed, perhaps?

A ring of luminaries circled the surrounding area, but they weren't projecting as much light as the Æthyric glow that brightened three points around me like compass markings. Small binding triangles were carved into the ground. One was directly in front of me, some distance away—ten yards, maybe. Two on either side of me. When I realized what was inside the triangles, I felt certain one lay behind me as well.

All were pulsing with light and flickered with movement; translucent entities were trapped within each one. Metaphysical holograms, just like my guardian Priya. But these weren't friendly messenger spirits, they were Æthyric demons.

The first, ensnared in the circle straight ahead of me, was built like a rock, twice the size of a human, with massive legs and feet. His skin was the texture of tree bark.

To my left was a human-size woman with round features and long, wavy hair. She wore a loose shift, the hem of which was tattered and dripping with water.

In the circle on my right was a winged, male, sylphlike demon. His wings opened and closed anxiously as he paced the inside of his circle, searching for a way out.

And just behind me, elongated flame-shaped shadows flickered on the ground.

Earth, Water, Air, Fire.

I was inside an enormous circle, the cardinal points of which were stationed by four metaphysical projections of Æthyric demons who represented four elements. The projections were also unstable; they occasionally disappeared altogether, only to remanifest a second later.

“She's awake.”

My vision left a blurry trail as I moved my head toward the voice.

It came from my father, now dressed in an elaborately decorated ritual robe; my mother stood next to him wearing much the same. Handwritten symbols streaked across their necks. They were smiling, and their faces looked red and blurry. I shook my head, attempting to get rid of the obstruction in front of my eyes. It clung to my face like a spiderweb.

“What are you doing?” I asked. My voice echoed weakly, going nowhere and traveling for miles at the same time. “Why did you dose me? Who were those people chasing us?”

“Probably the caliph. He's been tracking us through our guardians for the last week.” My father smiled, then added, “As if we wouldn't notice. Don't worry, though. We warded
you on our way over here and temporarily banished our guardians—no bread crumbs for him to follow now.”

And no deflector charm to protect me, either, thanks to the events at the Hellfire caves. I did my best to sober myself up, but whatever they'd used to drug me was laced with magick. “Why am I here?”

My mother floated in front of me like a dream. “Seléne … you're here to fulfill your destiny. You have returned to us like Malkuth returns to Kether.”

“We didn't realize the role you would eventually play all those years ago when we conceived you,” my dad explained, “but Frater Blue enlightened us.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Who's Frater Blue?”

My father's hand gestured to the praying man outside the circle. “Does he not look familiar to you? He was present when you were conceived.”

The mage who presided over the Moonchild ritual? That name didn't sound right. “I thought that was Frater Oben? Who is Frater Blue? Is that another magical name, or another member of the E∴E∴?”

“A rogue magician,” my mother said. “We met him in Dallas a couple of years before you were born.”

“You lied to the caliph? Why did you tell him it was another mage?”

My dad laughed. “Work with someone outside the order? We'd have been expelled.”

I didn't think that was true; the caliph had been okay with the fact that I'd worked with other magicians over the last few years. Or was that a lie? Confusion clouded my thoughts. I strained to see the robed man, this Frater Blue. He had light-colored hair. Maybe white. I couldn't tell. Wait …
the Tamlins, the crazy couple in San Francisco who told me about the glass talon and the mystery man they saw running from the crime scene in Portland … was Frater Blue the man who committed the murders? The man who conjured the white demon? I laughed out loud. Surely it was the drug talking. I was making connections that weren't there.

“Why is he here, Frater Blue? Why are we all here? What are you doing?”

A soft night breeze fluttered my mother's graying hair. “Magick requires patience and time. Rituals take too long. All the summonings and spells require manual work.” She spoke dramatically, with an intensity behind her eyes. Like she was giving a speech to an audience at some occult gathering. I'd sat through more of those speeches than I could remember when I was a teenager. “Technology improves and science continually advances,” she continued. “But we use the same crude techniques that were used a thousand years ago. We've made no progress. Humans no longer use typewriters, they use computers—magicians use the same crushed minerals. We labor to draw the same old symbols to conjure and control the Æthryic spirits one at a time.”

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 hummingbird'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.