Summoning the Night (23 page)

Epic, dark opera boomed over speakers near the altar. From Wagner's
Ring
cycle. I was pretty sure that was the equivalent of playing
Eye of the Tiger
at a wrestling match. The altar girls finished with their task and stood sentinel at the bottom of each set of stairs, their handheld torches held above their heads.

Two figures descended, one from either staircase. The first was a wiry boy, maybe early twenties. He wore a black T-shirt and matching pants, and had one too many pointy facial piercings. His booming voice didn't match his thin body as he announced the second figure descending the second set of stairs—

Frater Merrin.

“I'll be damned,” Lon mumbled, tensing up as the man
greeted the congregation. Guess Frater Merrin really
was
his old Frater Karras. Ten points for Jupe's not so useless horror movie trivia.

The magician looked to be in his sixties. He was extremely short, balding like a monk, and dressed in standard gray ritual robes, with a hood lying against his back and zipper at his throat. Bare toes peeked out below the hem. Dark, pouchy circles gathered under mismatched eyes that swept across the congregation. He nodded occasionally at those who waved or called out to him.

“Welcome, Sisters and Brothers, to the Morella Silent Temple,” he announced, holding out his arms while ambling by the front row. “For those of you who are first-timers, I hope you are enlightened by what you'll witness today. For those of you returning, I hope your faith will be renewed.

“Other churches,” he continued, “talk a lot about miracles. But talk is cheap. I'm not saying that the beliefs that fuel other religions are wrong, I'm only saying that I can prove that our faith has substance. Our beliefs are grounded in what we can see and hear, not just what we're told.”

The magician walked to a short table and picked up a small brass container with an elongated, skinny spout—somewhere between an Arabian oil lamp and a watering can. He carried the object to both sides of the altar and held it up for each of the girls in the red dresses to kiss in blessing.

A red circular carpet lay in the center of the altar. While the magician moved behind it, the girls rolled up the carpet and carried it off between them. And what do you know—where that carpet once lay was now an exposed summoning circle, though not as fancy as the glass tubes in the floor of the Hellfire caves. This one looked to have been constructed of a cement disk that had been recessed a couple of inches into
a hollowed-out portion of the wood flooring. The edge was ringed with a dark stained channel, into which the magician poured oil from the spout of the brass watering can.

“From fire they are born, and to fire we all go. Let the sacred oil flow,” Frater Merrin said. The congregation repeated these words in an off-key drone. After he made it all the way around, the prairie girls took their places at either side of the circle. The magician chanted something in Latin. His back to the congregation, he kneeled—with no small effort—in front of the sculpture of the lion-headed deity, and prayed.

“This is ridiculous,” Lon complained in my ear.

“You think?” I hissed back. Pomp and show. A bloated ritual to impress the crowd.

The magician gave a signal to the girls. They held their dresses tightly around their legs and knelt by the oil-filled channel, touching their torches to it. A foot-high flame leapt up and spread, filling the entire circle in a flash. A ring of fire.

Yes, quite a production.

The humans who came to see it weren't savages. They believed in demons. They couldn't see the halos on the Earthbounds who sat alongside them, but they had proof, nonetheless: their church conjured up a living specimen every Saturday.

I crossed my arms, listening as the magician recited the
real
words to set the summoning circle.

If the occult organizations got wind of this place, they'd fan the flames licking around this circle and burn the whole temple to the ground. Especially my order—this was
so
against E∴E∴ policy. I mean, come on. A rogue magician conjuring demons in front of nonmagicians—conjuring demons to be worshipped, to boot. Such a big no-no.

Like most esoteric orders, the E∴E∴ believed Æthyric demons were to be summoned only for two reasons:
information and tasks. They should be tightly controlled at all times, and there should always be another magician present in case something goes wrong with the binding.

Of course, I never followed these rules myself. And in the big picture, what the Hellfire Club did every month—summoning Æthyric demons for heaping helpings of sex and violence—was far worse than what this guy was doing.

But I didn't really care about that either. All I wanted to know was whether the magician in front of us had kidnapped, and likely killed, seven human children in the early '80s, and if he was the one who'd been recently abducting Hellfire kids.

Merrin brought out a caduceus from under his robe. The wood was blackened at the bottom. He stuck it through the wall of flames and hit the inner ring of the summoning circle. The low lights in the room crackled and dimmed for a brief moment, throwing the room into near-dark, the only light coming from the torches on the wall and the ring of fire.

The summoning circle was set. Under the fire, it glowed with blue-white Heka, strong and stable.

Merrin whispered an incantation. An indistinct form solidified inside the circle. The temple was dark, and it was hard to see clearly, but what appeared in the circle was mostly human-looking. Male. Definitely male. His body was divine—perfectly sculpted, ropy muscle over long, pale limbs. A sleeveless white tunic clung to every hard curve. Long auburn hair was pulled back into a tight knot on the crown of his head, backlit by a dancing halo that took on a reddish hue in the firelight. At the front of his head were two gently curving horns, and from a slit in the back of the tunic, a long tail whipped back and forth, striking against the invisible circle walls.

He was startled . . . and
very
pissed off about being summoned.

A low buzz floated around the room as the congregation recited some ridiculous poetic nonsense at the trapped demon in the fire circle. Between their practiced lines, Frater Merrin was reading the summoned demon his Miranda rights, commanding it to obey. The demon didn't respond. He just scanned the congregation, searching the faces in the dark. He stopped when his gaze connected with mine.

Uh-oh.
The last few Æthyric demons with whom I'd chatted seem to recognize whatever it was that my parents had bred into me. And pretty-boy demon in the fire circle was now eyeballing me with his head tilted in curiosity. Not good. I slouched lower in my seat and shielded my face with my hand.

More hive-speak from the crowd. More commands from the magician to the silent demon, who prowled the summoning circle, looking for a way out and occasionally pinning me with an angry stare that made my skin clammy.

“Now, for the querent,” Merrin said to the crowd. “Brother Paolo won the query lottery this week. Where is Brother Paolo?”

A short Earthbound man raised his hand and stood.
The congregation applauded. Brother Paolo walked to the fiery summoning circle and stood next to Merrin, who laid his hand on Paolo's shoulder. “What is your question for the demon before us?”

The man cleared his throat. “I'd like to know if my brother will survive open-heart surgery next week.”

You've got to be kidding me. The demon standing in front of him didn't have that kind of information. He wasn't an oracle, for the love of Pete. I expected Merrin to tell poor, misguided Brother Paolo this. Instead, he was rephrasing the question in Latin. Did the demon even speak Latin? He seemed to be listening to Merrin. His tail flicked lazily, but he remained silent. Merrin pressed him for an answer.

“
Pedicabo te,
” came the demon's reply in deep voice.

Merrin's face tightened. Lon quietly snorted in amusement beside me.

“Yes,” Merrin said hurriedly. “He says your brother will survive.”

The congregation applauded.

“I don't recognize that verb,” I whispered to Lon as Brother Paolo returned to his seat. He didn't look all that happy about the news. Maybe he was hoping to inherit his brother's bank account. “What did the demon say?”

“He threatened to sodomize the magician.”

Frater Merrin's voice bellowed over the opera epic crackling from the speakers as he called out the banishing words to release the imprisoned demon, who immediately disappeared. A shame. I was starting to enjoy this ridiculous farce.

The altar girls poured black sand over the summoning circle, extinguishing the dwindling ring of fire. More applause erupted throughout the temple. A creepy hosanna-filled hymn followed. These people were one big, collective mess.

A potluck dinner, of all things, was announced. The congregation exited the temple into a room off the foyer. Lon and I stood up and hung to the side, nodding politely as people passed us. The last couple headed out of the beaded curtains. Lon tapped my arm. We strode to the front of the room, ignoring the weak protests of the altar girls, and marched up the set of stairs after the retreating figure of Frater Merrin, who climbed to a small loft room.

Stormy daylight filtered in through a window of glass bricks and cast a hazy light over a mussed up bed and a rack of clothes. An old theater makeup dresser stood against the wall, its mirror bordered with round light bulbs.

The magician turned around. “You're not allowed up here,” he warned. Mismatched eyes—one blue, one brown. We were standing in front of the man who'd taken a big bite out of Cindy Brolin's arm. I felt a little sick.

“Don't remember me, Frater
Karras
?” Lon asked.

The elderly magician squinted, then picked up a pair of wire-rim glasses off the dresser, hooking the curved ends over his ears. “My goodness, is that Butler's kid? Well, I'll be damned . . . it's been a long time since I've set eyes on you.”

“Since your ‘accident,'” Lon confirmed. “The one that caused you to hurt your back so badly, you couldn't work for the Hellfire Club anymore. What year was that, again?”

“Oh, a long time ago, to be sure.”

“Around the time of the Sandpiper Park Snatcher,” Lon said, hand sliding inside his jacket.

I searched the magician's face for some spark of guilt, but he simply nodded and smiled tightly. “Yes, sometime after that. How's your father?”

“Dead.”

“Oh? I'm sorry to hear that.” The regret in his voice almost sounded genuine.

Lon unholstered the Lupara from inside his jacket.

The magician took a step back in alarm and held up his hands. “What is this?”

“Let's talk,” Lon demanded.

“Talk? About what?”

“For starters, why don't you tell us about Jesse Bishop? We found your handiwork in the cannery. Was he your assistant? Did he help you snatch those kids, or did he catch you with your pants down?”

The magician's eyes remained steady, but his fingers curled up under the edges of his robe sleeves like snails retreating into their shells. It took him several moments to answer. When he finally did, he sounded exhausted. Demoralized, almost. “You don't have any idea what you're talking about.”

“Why don't you explain,” Lon suggested. “We've got time. Why don't you also tell us why you were biting the kids you kidnapped thirty years ago?”

That got the man's attention. A wave of surprise shadowed his face. “It's no use, because you won't believe me.” He backed up another step and hit the dresser, steadying his fingers on the edge of it. “There's something far bigger going on that you can't comprehend. The best thing you can do right now is forget you ever saw me and leave it alone.” His hand inched further back along the dresser top as he spoke. “Because it won't end. If he's not successful this time, he'll just keep trying. Thirty years are nothing to him.”

“Who will keep trying?” Lon asked. “We saw Bishop's bones. We know he's dead.”

Merrin sighed. “Bishop was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Then who are you talking about? Why are the children being taken?”

Did Lon see Merrin's hand moving? I stuck my own hand in my pocket, ready to retrieve my small caduceus.

The magician shook his head and looked away.

“We're not leaving until you answer me,” Lon snarled, gesturing with the Lupara. He was too angry, not paying attention.

“Hey!” I shouted, my eyes on the magician's roaming fingers. I tried to yank my caduceus out of my pocket but it got stuck sideways, like a bone wedged inside a throat. That cost me. The magician's hand grabbed what he'd been seeking, some sort of engraved disk that fit into the palm of his hand.

The lights around the theater mirror flashed off and on as Merrin quickly pulled electricity and released kindled Heka through the disk, pushing it right into us. My hair blew back as charged Heka punched me in the chest so hard that it knocked me off my feet. I didn't even have time draw a breath before I was thrown backward into the wall.