Prospero Lost: Prospero's Daughter, Book I (17 page)

Over by the stone wall, Theo drew a handful of rock salt from his pocket and loaded it into his gun as if it were buckshot. Kneeling, he aimed directly over the top of the burning twig.

Mab stood indecisively. The flame of the apple twig burned brighter.

The inhuman voice spoke, “Speak, little spirit. Time grows short.”

Mab looked toward me, a helpless plea in his eyes. I stared back at him, unable to offer him any advice. Silently, I prayed to my Lady.

Mab’s eyes suddenly focused on something beyond me. As if galvanized, he faced the west circle and called:

“In the name of Theophrastus the Demonslayer, whose fire is hotter than hell itself, I bid thee go.”

At that same moment, Theo fired.

The thunder of his report shook the countryside. An unearthly scream rent the air. A dozen small fountains of golden ichor sprayed onto the cold earth, the ichor gleaming and burning like liquid fire. Not a drop of it, however, fell outside the charmed wards of the western circle.

There was a rustle, then a silence. The apple twig sputtered and burned low.

“Thou hast mastered us, we concede.” The inhuman voice was almost inaudible.

Mab grinned and sprang forward to the edge of the center circle. With sweat running down his brow, he brought the tips of all five fingers together and pointed the beak his hand made toward the western triangle. Speaking rapidly, before the fire of the burning twig could die entirely away, Mab called:

“Thou has questioned when I commanded. Now, I exact your punishment as I please. I banish thee, I banish thee, I banish thee. Go to the ends of the earth and do not come back until you have counted every grain on every beach on every world that flies about a sun.”

When the fire had entirely died away, and Mab had performed the Sigil of Ultimate Closing in the four directions, he added, “That should keep the surly sucker busy for a while!”

“Huzzah!” I shouted, giddy with relief. I leapt up and threw my white fedora into the air. Theo lowered his gun and stared down at Mab, an unreadable expression on his face. Mab, for his part, leaned over and looked at the chameleon cloak. It was gray now, and of ordinary cloth. He wiped his brow and waved at us.

“All done,” he called.

“Good work,” Theo growled back. “Let’s get back to the barn and check on Mephisto. I’ll send my men out here later to take up the salt and bury the dark angel’s blood.”

Mab picked up his hat, along with the leftover road salt. He walked to the edge of his circle of salt and stopped, scowling down at his spirit-stopping ward.

“Hey,” he called to us. “Could one of you come down and let me out of here?”

The three of us trudged back though the falling snow, the soft powder underfoot muffling the crunch of our footsteps. Theo shrugged off with a grunt every attempt I made to speak to him, so we continued in silence, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts, as if they could cloak us against the cold and the deepening twilight. Mab was right. We should be hurrying on to warn the others, and yet I could not abandon Theo without attempting to get through to him, to urge him to embrace life again.

“We should never have broken with the Catholic Church,” my brother growled, glancing behind us as we put more ground between us and the fallen-angel blood.

“Excuse me?” I asked, taken aback. This was a very old argument in our family, but I seldom took part in it. “Why bring this up now?”

“Exorcists.” He grunted. “Goodness and love are all very well, but these modern churches have no teeth. No way to drive back demons.”

“You don’t need a church to drive back demons. You’re Theo the Demon-slayer,” I reminded him. “Besides, I can’t see how you can still defend the Church. Think of the thousands of heretics and witches they killed.”

Theo shrugged. “Many of those people were witches.”

“But historical documents show that many innocent people . . . oh.” I faltered.

“They would, wouldn’t they?” Theo snorted. “The
Orbis Suleimani
would never leave evidence of real witches for laymen to find. Historical documents only tell us what the Circle of Solomon wants us to think. But I do agree the church erred when they let laymen get involved with witch hunting. They should have left the matter to experts, such as Gregor and me.”

“Begging your pardon, Mr. Theophrastus, but I don’t think you and
Mr. Gregor were born yet during that period,” Mab interjected from where he tramped along beside us, hauling the remaining rock salt.

“Exactly!” I agreed. “I’ll remind you, I myself was nearly burned as a witch.”

Theo shrugged again, his rifle bouncing on his shoulder. “Gregor saved you.”

“Not every practitioner of the White Arts is so lucky as to have a brother who happens to be Pope,” I countered.

Theo glowered. “There are no White Arts.”

I stopped in the snow and drew myself up to my full height. “And Eurynome?”

“She serves the Almighty, does she not?” he responded quickly. I was relieved to see that he was not so far gone as to show disrespect to my Lady. Then, he frowned. “But even that would be easier were I still a Catholic. Then, I could have thought of her as a saint or an angel or something. As Protestants, aren’t we supposed to look askance at that kind of thing?”

“Theo, this is getting us nowhere!” I objected.

“True,” he sighed. “It’s not really an argument meant for you, anyhow.”

“I wish you would come back,” I blurted out with less grace than I had hoped. “You’ve upset Father. He relies on you. Prospero, Inc. relies on you! I rely on you! How can you desert us?”

Theo’s features took on that pained, weary look that often accompanied the dredging up of past arguments. “I don’t enjoy arguing with Father, but I served him for nearly five hundred years. The time came for me to make my own decisions.”

“Have you spoken to Father? What does he say?” I asked.

“Last time we spoke, Father declared if he could not convince me with words, he would have to demonstrate the foolishness of my position. But that was decades ago.”

We trudged on in silence, my mind working rapidly. What had Father meant about demonstrating the foolishness of Theo’s position? Whatever it was, his plan must have failed. Unless—a shiver traveled through me that had nothing to do with the cold—unless Father’s disappearance and the release of the Three Shadowed Ones had something to do with saving Theo!

As I walked through the orchards my brother had cultivated over the last half century, I thought about him, comparing the man he was now with the man he had once been. The contrast was marked and disturbing. When
had this change taken place? I tried to recall if this new taciturn Theo had already begun to emerge the last time I had seen him, back in 1965.

We had met that day on the grounds of Father’s estate in Illinois. It was the day our mansion was being demolished to make way for a university. Because Gregor’s death had changed many things, I only lived in this mansion a short while. I would have liked to stay longer—I had a lovely room overlooking the river, with irises growing beneath my window—however, the thought of Father grieving for Gregor all alone out in Oregon had troubled me. When I asked him how he would manage, he had stroked his long gray beard and replied congenially, “If you are so worried, you may come with me.” And so, I had done so.

Theo had come walking up the tree-lined driveway just as the dining room fell before the bulldozers. When he caught sight of me, he waved and quickened his step. Coming up beside me, he gazed without expression as a wall crashed down noisily. Then, turning, he proffered me a bouquet of flowers, his eyes aglow with familiar warmth.

“You look beautiful, Miranda, as always. Like an untouched blossom preserved in crystal.”

“You look older.” I accepted the bouquet graciously. “You’ve been to see Erasmus?”

“No. I’ve stopped taking the Water. That’s why I’m here. I’ve come to give you this.” He thrust into my free hand a tiny oval crystal vial, about the size of a plum.

“Are you serious?” I nearly dropped the priceless container. “Theo! You’ll grow old and weak! You’ll . . . die!”

“Exactly,” he replied.

“But . . . why?”

“Because I want to go to Heaven, or more specifically, I don’t want to make my bed in Hell.”

“Heaven? Theo, what are you talking about?”

“For five centuries, I served as a champion of Heaven, Miranda. At Father’s bidding, I sent back to Hell every man who held a black mass or uncorked, to evil purposes, the jar of a renegade djinn. I’ve seen more of the ravages of Hell than any man should see. I’ve seen families poisoned by each other’s hands; mothers who have burnt their children alive to gain some horrid imitation of youth; towns rotting from a plague let loose by some careless thaumaturge, or worse, by a necromancer wishing to placate his
bloodthirsty deity. I’ve seen men possessed by demons eat their own eyes. . . .” Theo shuddered at some unspoken memory. “You need not hear any more. Sufficient to say, I have more enemies than most in Hell. I have no intention of winding up with Gregor’s fate.”

“Gregor’s fate? Struck down by a stray bullet while running whiskey?”

“The day Father summoned up the Archangel Gabriel before Gregor’s grave and the angel told us he could not deliver our message because Gregor was neither in Purgatory nor in Heaven . . . I knew what that meant, Miranda, where Gregor must be. Gregor was a good man, at least as good as I.”

“Theo, be practical! Gregor had been Pope twice,” I objected. “He hardly had clean hands.”

“They were no dirtier than mine,” growled Theo.

“You think people who run out on their families and their duties go to Heaven?”

“God only asks us to live good lives. Serving Him is good, but not if we have to artificially extend our lives with witchcraft to do it.”

“Water of Life isn’t witchcraft! It comes from the Well at the World’s End.”

“It’s not natural.”

The bulldozers knocked over another wall, the noise of it temporarily ruled out further conversation. As I watched the parlor fall, I saw in my mind’s eye—like a ghostly image superimposed over the present demolitions—the groundbreaking ceremony, half a century earlier. I recalled where each of us had been standing as Erasmus stepped forward and crumbled a handful of earth from our Scottish estate into the first hole, which Titus had just dug with a shiny new shovel. Father was smiling, Logistilla wore an extravagantly enormous hat, and Mephisto splashed us all with champagne, ruining Gregor’s priestly habit. Cornelius sat on a yellow lawn chair, and Theo stood beside him, describing the proceedings for his benefit. Even Ulysses was present, though he disappeared in a flash of white light immediately after the ceremony. I doubted that any of us imagined this would be the last time we would all be together.

“What about your work?” I asked when the rumble of the bulldozer finally paused. A sweet-smelling breeze blew up from the river, causing the willows to sway, and the plaintive call of a whippoorwill could be heard in the lull. “So much is still not done! We’ve hardly even touched the Far East! Do you know how many people are killed each year by monsoons? And who’s
going to put down the Dag Tsog? They’re killing Vietnamese refugees fleeing their civil war. Who is going to stop them?”

Theo looked troubled. I could see the natural hero in him stirring, struggling to act. Then, his eyes dulled.

“Not my problem.” His voice sounded flat and lifeless. “If I could do something without trafficking with magic, I would. As it is . . .”

“What about that Scottish lake monster? The one that magician—the fellow who gave you so much trouble some years back?—drew out of the past into the loch by his house?”

“Crowley? Thank God, that’s over! I’ve never had so much trouble with a mortal in all my years! Cleaning up after him . . .” Theo shivered. “That’s one of the reasons I want out. I never want to deal with that kind of black magic again!”

“And the monster?”

Theo shrugged. “It seems harmless. Let Mephisto take care of it. Really more his kind of thing anyway.”