The Unseen (42 page)

“You’re one of them,” Cassidy said. “You let them put a demon in your body, didn’t you, Peyton?”

“
Listen to yourself, Cassidy.” Peyton moved faster up the stairs.  His
s
sounds seemed to drag out into little hisses. “You sound insane.  Let me help you.”

“
Get back!” Cassidy shouted, but he was on the landing in an eyeblink, moving impossibly fast.

Cassidy dashed into Barb’s room, where she could still see the light, pale circles of protection in midair.  She didn’t know how recently Barb had cast them, or how strong they were, but it was more magical defense than she would find in her own room.

Peyton slowed as he reached the door.  He snarled and pushed with one clawed hand, and one of the pale circles bent and frayed like fragile string.  It snapped, and the entire circle dissolved and vanished. 

He smiled as he clawed at the next of the thin overlapping circles, and long fangs grew from his upper jaw.  Cassidy realized, with a lurching stomach, exactly why there were a pair of big holes in the top of Chet’s head.

“You killed them,” Cassidy said. “My roommates.”

“
I had help.” His narrow forked tongue licked across his chin, and the second circle snapped and dissolved.  Only two more remained.

“
Where’s Barb?” Cassidy demanded.

“
With Reese.  Come with me if you want to see her.” He snapped the third circle. “We won’t hurt you.  I promise.”

Cassidy thought fast.  She knew she could express her power through drawing—Ibis had said the symbols that healed her leg were powerful because
she
had drawn them.  And she’d accidentally infused her recent tattoos with magical power.  And once she’d made a Ouija board with her own hands, and it had been powerful enough to reach an archdemon and draw it into Reese’s body.

Nibhaz
.  Ibis had given that as the name of the entity at the center of the cult. 

Cassidy poured her purse out onto the floor.  She dropped to her knees, grabbed a lipstick and drew a circle on the warped hardwood floor around her, willing it to protect her.  She embellished it with squarish shapes and outward-pointing arrows, imagining she was constructing a medieval fortress.

Peyton snapped the final circle and rushed toward her, stopping just short of the new, much smaller circle she’d just drawn.  He squatted, his face inches from her ears, his frosty breath reeking of rotten meat.

“
Stay back,” Cassidy said. “Get away from me.”

“
After we’ve gone to all this trouble to reach you?” Peyton hissed, but there was nothing of Peyton in that voice.  It was a voice echoing from a cold abyss, a voice of ancient evil. “No...you are ours, Cassidy.  If you do not know it yet, you will understand very soon.  Your brother is ours.  We have taken your only true friend as well.  If you want them back, you will do as I say.”

“
Leave me alone!” Cassidy’s lipstick had worn down to a nub.  She took a bottle of blue nail polish, lifted out the brush, and hesitated.  What could kill a demon?

He watched, amused, as she sketched on the floor inside her circle. “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you, Cassssidy?  The circle you’ve cast is even weaker than your friend’s sad attempt.”

“Then why can’t you reach me?” Cassidy asked, drawing faster and not looking up.

“
I can kill you if I wish, but your struggle amuses me.”

Cassidy frowned at her drawing.  She’d tried to draw a winged angel armed with bow and arrows, something to fight off a demon, but in her haste had come up with something closer to a cutesy cherub.

“Sending me a Valentine?” Peyton hissed.

“
Shoot him!” Cassidy ordered the little angel.  She waved her hand forward over the drawing several times, each time ending by pointing her index finger at Peyton’s chest.  She was willing the angelic arrows to fly.

Peyton snapped to his feet, then staggered back toward the door, lurching and twisting each time she brought her hand forward and pointed at him.  She did it faster, imagining golden arrows piercing him again and again.

Then Peyton laughed and strolled back to leer at her.

“
No one ever taught you a thing, did they?” He laughed, flicking out his tongue between his fangs. “Your mind is like a jar filled with nothing but trash.”

He reached out a claw and pressed it against the air in front of her face.  She saw a feeble, transparent red circle in the air around her, but only had a glimpse of it before it snapped and dissolved.

“Look at me, demon!” a voice commanded.

Ibis stood in the doorway, slipping his old leather pack off his shoulder.  Cassidy felt a rush of hope at the sight of him.  Peyton turned and sneered at Ibis.

“Who are you?” Peyton stalked toward the tall, handsome man who called himself a librarian and a magician.

“
I am a priest of Thoth the Timeless, of the ancient order,” Ibis said, a reply that raised Cassidy’s eyebrows as high as they would go.  He drew from his pack a cylindrical length of dark wood, inscribed with small hieroglyphs like eyes and birds.  He waved it in the air.

With her senses open to the unseen world, Cassidy watched him draw glowing white hieroglyphs in midair, and he spoke in a rapid, clicking language she could not hope to recognize.

Peyton shrieked, and the unseen serpent heads coiled in tight, as if each head were trying to hide behind the other two.

Ibis chanted louder and drew faster, advancing on Peyton.  Peyton howled and clamped his hands over his ears.  Blood leaked out between his fingers.

Peyton ran to Cassidy’s window and leaped through it, smashing right through the pane.  Cassidy and Ibis ran to it in time to see him streaking away down the street, heedless of the honking cars.

“Are you hurt?” Ibis asked, touching her arm.

“
What did you just do?” Cassidy whispered.

“
A quick and dirty banishing.  If I’d known and had time to prepare, I would have performed a forced exorcism instead.”

“
What’s this?  Your magic wand?” Cassidy reached to touch the carvings on the ebony rod.  He flicked his hand, and the wand was gone.

“
I told you I was a magician.  Who was that man?”

“
My ex-boyfriend.  He’s turned into a real monster.”

“
I hope you don’t mind me just walking inside, but the front door was open,” Ibis said.

“
No, I needed you, obviously.” Cassidy hugged him.  Trustworthy or not, he was the only person left who could help, and he was here for her. “Thank you.  We need to save my brother.”

“
First, you’ll have to tell me what’s going on.  It’s not wise to charge into these things recklessly.”

Cassidy nodded, thinking of how she might have endangered her brother with her impulsive trip to the mission and the things she’d said.  She began to tell Ibis everything she’d been through, as quickly as she could.

Kieran’s eyes fluttered open when the phone rang.  Deena’s voice murmured beside him in the dim room.

She’d taken his virginity in what he considered a spectacular fashion, though in his youthful eagerness it had actually lasted less than a minute.  The world seemed a warmer, more exciting place to him now.

He must have dozed off soon after.  Kieran turned in the bed and traced his hand down Deena’s bare back, and he was instantly aroused again and pressed himself against her.  She was turned away from him, whispering into the phone.  He kissed her shoulder.

She ended her phone call and rolled over to look at him, and he kissed her.

“We have to go,” Deena said.

“
Can’t we do it again?” he asked.

“
Maybe later.  I told Matt everything, and he wants us to come to the church right away.”

“
You told him everything?” Kieran sat up. “You said it was a secret.”

“
Not about us, Kier-bear.” Deena touched his chest. “About how you stood up to your sister and showed loyalty to the church.  He thinks you’re ready for initiation.  The prophet is going to do it personally.”

“
That’s great!  Let’s celebrate.” Kieran kissed her again and tried to climb between her legs, but she pushed him off.

“
Tonight, Kieran.  Right away.”

“
Can’t it wait a minute?”

“
No, the prophet has spoken.  We have to get dressed and get to the church.  The prophet says there’s a very powerful patron spirit for you, the most powerful of all.  You might truly be our messiah, Kieran.”

“
When can we hook up again?”

“
After your initiation,” Deena said. “If you’re the messiah, we can do this all you want afterward.  Even Matt would allow that.”

“
Wow.” Kieran imagined what it would be like to sleep with her every day, anytime he wanted. “Let’s go.”

“
The messiah’s consort,” Deena smiled, then climbed out of bed and pulled on her plain white panties. “Won’t all the other girls be jealous of me?”

Kieran reluctantly left the bed and got dressed, wishing they could stay just a little longer.

A flash of lightning filled the room, followed by deep, rattling thunder that knocked the lamp onto the floor.  The storm had arrived.

“
The archdemon Nibhaz wants to capture the power of your line for himself,” Ibis said. “This is why the cult invested heavily in this city.  He has likely been watching you and your brother for your entire lives.  The power of your blood, combined with your lack of training and knowledge of what you are, makes Kieran a vulnerable and tempting target.”

Ibis and Cassidy sat on the edge of Cassidy’s bed.  Stray’s band pounded on in the basement, drowned out by thunderclaps every few seconds.

“Then why did Nibhaz try to kill me when I was sixteen?” Cassidy asked.

“
If he wished to kill you, he would have.  He was playing with you, or perhaps testing you.”

“
And my father?  He died the same way as Tamila and Zoe.”

“
The demon may have wished him dead to weaken your family.  Those who feel alone and weak are far easier to control.  Your brother may have been vulnerable to the cult because he sought a kind of surrogate family.”

Cassidy felt furious. “And now Nibhaz wants my brother as his host.”

“Precisely.  I was investigating why the cult was here, and that investigation brought me to your family.”

“
And why are
you
here?  What was all that ‘priesthood of Thoth’ stuff?”

Ibis smiled. “I was an orphan in Timbuktu when the priests adopted me.  Timbuktu was then a magnificent city, filled with universities, libraries, and mosques, the greatest city in West Africa.  They operated a library, collecting and copying manuscripts of all kinds.  They were just a remnant of a great priesthood.  In 391 A.D., when the ancient Egyptian religion was outlawed, the priesthood of Thoth went underground.  The group in Timbuktu was one last surviving fragment.  Do you know anything of Thoth?”

“Sure, from Barb’s Egyptian phase.  He was the god of...writing, right?  Magic and knowledge, things like that.”

Ibis nodded. “The word ‘of’ can be a barrier to modern understanding of ancient gods.  Instead of the goddess ‘of’ love or the god ‘of’ war, considering saying ‘the goddess love’ or ‘the god war.’ These are forces in human nature with a god-like impact on the life of each individual, you see?  So Thoth, fully understood, is ‘the god knowledge.’ The priesthood’s true work was in collecting and preserving knowledge against the forces of destruction and ignorance.  To that end, they constructed libraries.  They once prevailed upon the Greek conqueror Ptolemy to construct a great library at Alexandria.  In exchange, they taught Ptolemy how to portray himself as a traditional pharaoh rather than a foreigner, and so Ptolemy’s line ruled for centuries.”

“Okay...”

“
So I was taught by them to carry on their ways.  I lived on as they aged and died.  I am now seven centuries old.”

“
You look good for your age,” Cassidy said, unsure how else to respond. “You keep yourself alive by magic?”

“
That would be forbidden—only the wicked seek out such ends.  It is my nature to live on.  The priests believed I was the offspring of a human woman and one of the wild, faceless fire spirits that dwell deep in the Great Desert, the Sahara.  I still do not know the woman’s name—she may have been a traveler with one of the desert caravans, and abandoned her unwanted child on the streets of the first city she reached at the desert’s end.  Timbuktu.”

“
And how does that bring you here?” Cassidy asked, torn between her desire to learn more about Ibis and his strange life and her need to go save her brother.