Kindling the Moon (6 page)

I leaned forward while Lon flicked a sleek, engraved metal lighter for me. His hands were tan and muscular. From that and the golden strands of hair at his crown, I assumed he spent a lot of time outside. Maybe for his job. I scrutinized him while he exchanged a few pleasantries with Father Carrow. He had a reserved, proud look about him. Long, hollow cheeks sat between deep-set eyes and an angular jaw. Good bones.

“So,” Father Carrow said, getting to the point, “as I explained on the phone, Arcadia is looking for information on a rare Æthyric demon. Tell him what it looks like, dear.”

I repeated what the Caliph had told me. “It's an albino demon—white skin and hair, light pink eyes. Four arms, each with long talons. Twice the height of an average human. Long tongue that rolls up like a party favor and hangs outside its mouth, and a large set of spiraling horns.”

I took another drag from my cigarette.

“Do you know the class of demon?” His small eyes were narrowed. Distrustful. “I've run across drawings and descriptions of many albinos. It's a congenital pigmentation disorder that could occur in any class. Just like humans.”

His flippant attitude irritated me.
Famous photographer
, I thought.
Arrogant bastard.
Even though he was dressed casually in an ink-stained T-shirt and a denim jacket with a tear in the pocket, he was also wearing a wide silver watch on his left wrist that looked expensive.
Snotty, too
, I added to my mental list of his probable sins.

“I don't know the class of demon,” I replied with forced patience, “but I do have a little information about the seal.” I
perched my cigarette on the edge of the wrought-iron table and dug around in my purse until I found a pen and an old envelope that I tore up for paper. After sketching a few characters and letters, I slid the paper over to him and put the cap back on my pen. “I'm not sure how familiar you are with summoning seals, but I know them pretty well, and this symbol here”—I pointed—“narrows it down to about fifty or so classes of demon.”

He studied it for a few seconds, then gave it back to me.

“You can keep it,” I said.

“No need. I've already memorized it.”

Show-off. “Then the only other thing I know is that the demon uses his talons to gut his victims from breastbone to pelvis—rips the torsos open in one, clean swipe.”

He gave me a blank look. No emotion whatsoever.

“Can you help her?” Father Carrow asked as he cradled his paper cup filled with hot tea.

“Don't know.”

“She's a good gal, Lon. I wouldn't get you involved in this if I didn't trust her.”

Lon tilted his head to the side and slowly rolled his cigarette between thumb and index finger. “Why do you need to locate this demon?”

Because my parents' lives depend on it, and maybe mine too.
I couldn't say that, though. I ran through several excuses in my head and answered, “I just do. It's important.”

“You planning some sort of revenge against someone?”

“Just the opposite.”

“What does that mean?”

For God's sake.

“The demon … has some information that I need.”

Lon stared at me for several moments until I became
uncomfortable and had to struggle not to look away. Then he pushed back his chair and got up. “I'll think about it.”

“Think about it?” I repeated in disbelief. “I'm asking for your help, Mr. Butler. I'll pay you, if that's what you want.”

“It's Lon, like I already told you, and I don't want your money.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I just need to think about it.”

“Why do you need to think about it?” I asked, thoroughly exasperated by his blasé manner.

“You sound like a parrot, repeating everything I say, Miss Bell.” A strange, rather unkind smile attempted to hoist the corners of his mouth, but didn't quite succeed.

Attractive or not, he was pissing me off. I definitely felt insulted at that point, and probably looked it as well.

“It's
Arcadia
, not Miss Bell,” I mocked. “And if you want me to beg, you can fucking forget it. I can find someone else to help me.” Aware that Father Carrow was displeased by my nasty outburst, I grabbed my purse off the back of my chair and ground out my cigarette on the side of a nearby metal trash can before tossing it inside.

“Can you, now?” Lon's smile was getting bigger. I was furious, but he had a point. My back was against the wall, and I couldn't afford to let my pride get in the way.

I blew out a frustrated breath and attempted to calm down. “No, not really,” I admitted. “Will you help me?” I tried to say please, but I just couldn't.

It took him several seconds to answer. “I'll consider it. Whom should I contact?” His eyes flicked between the two of us.

“Cady,” Father Carrow said gently, “why don't you give him your number, dear?”

I grumbled and dug the pen back out of my purse, then scribbled my cell number on the back of the torn envelope paper that I'd tried to give him earlier. We locked gazes as I stiffly offered it to him again; he took it without looking at it—just stuck the paper under the flap of the torn breast pocket of his jacket, valrivia cigarette dangling between his lips.

“I'll be in touch either way. After the weekend,” he said, then turned to leave.

“Wait! I need the information sooner than that.”

He stopped and stood in place, but didn't turn around.

“Please,” I finally said, caving in and gritting my teeth.

With a brief nod, he slowly walked away, rounded the corner of the building, and was out of sight without a proper answer.

Lon's nonexistent sense of urgency ate away at me for the remainder of the day. I spent the early evening scouring my own private library for the albino demon. I called my guardian to ask if it could find any information in the Æthyr about the classification (a bust). I even strengthened the protective wards over the doors and the windows on the first floor of my house. After I ate dinner, my neighbor— Mrs. Marsh, an elderly Earthbound with an ongoing imp infestation—asked me to get rid of an imp, which I chased around her kitchen for several minutes, only to have it escape at the last moment.

But none of that could curb the rising resentment I was feeling toward Lon. And my sour mood nosedived when three quick raps at my side door told me that my pesky neighbor had returned. I cursed under my breath and briefly entertained the ideal of physically harming her on the way to answer her knock; in my defense, it just hadn't been a good day.

Mrs. Marsh's frail frame stood in my doorway. “I'm so sorry, but it's back. The same one—I can tell because its left ear is torn.” Dressed in a pale blue quilted housecoat that
zipped up the front, Mrs. Marsh gave me a pleading look behind thick glasses.

“Hold on, let me put on some shoes.”

Flip-flops it was. I grabbed a rolled-up piece of canvas and a small caduceus, then followed Mrs. Marsh across my dark driveway and through a narrow hole in the shrubbery to get into her side yard.

“Where is it now?”

Before she could answer, one of her two large cats sprang from the hood of a rusted barbecue grill at the side of her house. Mrs. Marsh groaned as she bent low to scoop the cat into her arms; it nestled against her neck with its arms lazily dangling over her shoulder.

I hate cats. I try to tell myself that it's because of their contemptuous attitude, or their sneaky manner, but in reality it's probably just that I can't control them. Demons I can bind, humans I can outrun with spells, dogs I can call and they come, but cats …

The tinny sound of something metal crashing on Mrs. Marsh's patio startled both of us. Our heads whipped around in unison toward her backyard.

“It's outside on my patio,” she whispered loudly.

We walked past the rusted grill and slowed at the corner of her house. I held my hand up to tell her to halt while I peeked around the corner. My eyes scanned the night shadows made by the oak trees; they cast a black, lacy pattern on her lawn until they ended abruptly at the small, yellow circle of light that radiated out from the bug light at her back door. Her green city-issued garbage can stood inside the yellow circle.

An empty can of cat food came to a slow, rolling stop on the cement patio nearby.

The sooner this imp was gone, the sooner I could get some sleep. I unrolled the worn canvas square, revealing a small circle bordered by runes and symbols that had been stained into the cloth with a mixture of red ochre and pig's blood. No, I did not kill the pig, thankyouverymuch. I bought a small jar of blood from a local occult shop that gets their supply from a slaughterhouse across town. Working with animal blood isn't something I savor—I'm sure there are plenty of things about
your
job that you don't enjoy—but that particular kind of circle requires it.

Triangles are commonly used to bind, but the circle on my canvas has a little something extra. Once charged, it creates a generic gateway leading into the Æthyr. A quick, one-way portal back home, otherwise known as a banishment.

She who summons must banish. That's the unchangeable cosmic law that applies to most anything summoned from the Æthyr. If a magician summons any demon from one of the hundreds of Æthyric classes, that very same magician must send it back. No one else can step up and do the job for you. That's why there are so many Earthbounds running around the States these days. Some idiot magician working for Queen Elizabeth summoned a group of lower-echelon Æthyric demons and trapped them in human bodies, thinking they'd make pliable subjects when America was being colonized. However, the newly invoked Earthbounds lost their ticket home when the magician died of smallpox before he could send them back. A few hundred years of breeding, and here we are. At least, that's how the story goes.

Imps, though, are different.

The cockroaches of the supernatural world, imps slip in and out of the Æthyr at will. Since no one summons them, anyone could banish them; they're fair game, and my spiffy canvas
portal worked like a charm. Sure, the imps that I trapped could still come back to earth on their own, but not for several days—or weeks, depending on the strength of the charge that I gave the circle—because my portal left an imbedded blocking spell on the imps. It took me several years of experimentation to find the right combination of sigils that would accomplish this, and I was damn proud of my ingenuity.

I tiptoed around the corner, staying in the shadows as I approached the patio, then laid the entrapment canvas on the cement in front of me. A single scratching noise emerged from the garbage can several feet away. Maybe this would be easy.

I retreated back to Mrs. Marsh again and reached for her cat.

“No!” she whispered. “Not Tiddlywinks!”

“I need bait, Mrs. Marsh. He won't be hurt, promise.” Well … hopefully.

She reluctantly handed over the cat, which I held at arm's length in front of me like a baby with a dirty diaper. Tiddlywinks began growling at me, so I rushed to put him down near the canvas portal before he tore my eyeballs out. After sniffing the canvas and retreating a few steps, he settled down and began licking his butt without a care in the world. Plumped with cheap cat food and content to live his life in a near-coma state, Tiddlywinks barely had a pulse; with any luck, he'd stay put.

Mrs. Marsh and I stood together behind a bush and waited, our eyes fixed on the garbage can.
Come out, little imp. Get the nice kitty cat.
After a few seconds, I thought I spied some movement behind the garbage can, then a clammy chill ran up my arms. I looked down as Mrs. Marsh yelped, only to see the wispy trail of an imp dart out from between my legs.

“Motherfucker!” I yelled. Tricked again. For a brief
moment, I pitied the people on
Paranormal Patrol
. I ran after the imp, rounding the corner of the house with as much speed as I could manage wearing flip-flops. Tiddlywinks was in a compromising position, with one leg up in the air, paused midlick. His ears were cocked in my direction as I ran toward him at top speed. Then I realized the imp was stopping in front of the cat. He wasn't going to bail; he took the bait.

I slid across the damp grass. To avoid running into the imp and the cat, I half fell, half lunged near them in an awkward dive. I tried to pull an action-movie stunt roll. Big mistake. My upper arm hit the edge of the cement patio. As I cried out in pain, the caduceus flew from my hand and landed somewhere in the shadows. Smooth move.

I curled up into a ball on my side. When I glanced toward my feet, I was surprised to find Tiddlywinks still there, ears flattened and the hair on his back standing on end. The imp was circling the cat like prey. Only a couple of feet tall and mostly transparent, he was tubby, with rolls on his arms and legs like a pudgy baby. He had a bulbous nose and floppy ears, one of them torn, as Mrs. Marsh had noted.

Ignoring the pain in my arm, I reached for the canvas entrapment portal, grabbed the edge of it, and slung it over the imp. And the cat. I couldn't help it; he was in the way.

Without time to find the caduceus, I'd have to release the kindled Heka without a filter. The danger of electrical shock wasn't in the pull as much as the release. As long as I had the caduceus to even things out, the release was relatively painless. Without it, I risked burning myself up from the inside out.

I quickly tapped into the current from Mrs. Marsh's house. Too fast. The raw surge of electricity mixed erratically with my inner Heka; my body stiffened and began shaking.

Ever been shocked with electrical current? I mean,
really
shocked, as in a jolt up the arm, can't let go, can't breathe, life flashing before your eyes kind of shock? Not something most people would want to willingly do. You have to be a little crazy to practice hard-core magick: It's not for the weak. The only thing in my favor was the high electric resistance that Heka-rich bodies tend to possess. Current flows differently in me.