Banishing the Dark
Page 72

The clock materialized right in front of our faces.
“Ha!” I shouted.
“Fucking brilliant,” Lon agreed before peering inside a dark cavity at the base of the clock’s back. He reached inside and retrieved a metal container about the size of a safe-deposit box. “This must be it. Here.”
I took it from him and set it on a console table. Lon cocked the Lupara and aimed at the box while I took a deep breath and opened the hinged top.
Nothing jumped out. No magick sigils or Heka anywhere in sight. Only a pile of papers, a couple of notebooks, a box of red ochre chalk, and an envelope with a stack of bills, both American and old French francs.
“These haven’t been in circulation since the 1990s,” Lon said, removing his paint-stained gloves.
“Maybe that means this stuff hasn’t been touched since I was a kid.”
“They probably hid it all when Dare started poking around in their business. What’s that?”
I cracked open one of the notebooks—just a plain old composition notebook with a cardboard cover. My mother’s perfect penmanship covered the pages. French words, variations of magical sigils.
“Experiments,” Lon said, able to read some of the French. “Mostly failures. Look at the dates. This is before you were born.”
“And after they’d killed my brother. Were there . . . other children?”
“No, but not for lack of trying. Here’s a home pregnancy test result, negative. And here again, the next month.” He flipped through pages and stopped on one, turning the notebook to read the page horizontally.
A chart. It started on my date of birth. Lon read it aloud, interpreting the French for me as he went.
Sélène Aysul Duval: Notes and Observations
3 months: No reaction to 100 V, perceptible distress at 5000 V.
6 months: No reaction to 1000 V, perceptible distress at 7500 V.
9 months: 10,000 V burned skin; taken to hospital for treatment; no internal damage.
“Jesus,” I whispered. They were experimenting on me?
15 months: Shocked Alex with kindled current when he reached for her. Continues to defend herself when prodded. We are extremely hopeful now.
18 months: Charged first spell successfully.
27 months: Scivina confirms halo.
5 years: Caliph’s nanny called police about suspected abuse. Adapting standardized parenting techniques in attempt to make S. more socially acceptable. Induced brain hemorrhage in nanny. Wiped caliph’s wife and children’s memories.
7 years: Able to charge adept 6 level spells. Shows interest in summoning.
8 years: Kerub demon summoned for Walpurgis identified S. as “Mother of Ahriman.”
9 years: Magical health of S. far exceeds first Moonchild experiment. Becoming rebellious, studying magick in secret, stealing books from lodge’s library. May need another major memory wipe.
10 years: No Moonchild powers demonstrated during ceremony. Rumors circulating within order. Third memory wipe on caliph. Hiring private nanny for winter months.
11 years: Alex found documentation of previous Moonchild abilities remaining dormant until puberty.
13 years: First menses. No Moonchild powers.
14 years: Incident at school required another memory wipe.
15 years: Alex fired from day job. Have tried Moonchild ritual six times this year. Doctor says I may be unable to conceive again. Beginning secondary plan to siphon power. Unsure what to do about S.
16 years: Magical ability markedly increasing. Dare still asking about her, so still have hope that all of this was not in vain. Alex says we should consider selling S. to Dare, but I am not ready to give up on her quite yet.
“Selling me to Dare?” I murmured, surprised I could even be shocked by the depth of their depravity anymore. “What else?”
“That’s where it stops.”
I tore the book out of his hands and flipped to the next page. Blank, just as he said. “Sixteen years old,” I murmured. “That’s when the Black Lodge slayings started, so that last entry must’ve been the last winter they worked for Dare.”
“And after they faked their deaths and sent you packing with a new alias, they found out you were worth hiding from Dare after all when they uncovered the old grimoires in France.”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “Must have been a joyous day in the Duval household when they discovered that the so-called age of magical maturity brought out the Moonchild attributes, not puberty. All they had to do was wait until I hit twenty-five and slit my belly open.”
“But we stopped them.”
Or delayed the inevitable, but I didn’t voice my negative thoughts.
Lon picked up the second book, a journal. This one had a black leather cover embossed with a sigil on the front. “My mother’s personal sigil,” I said, running my finger over it. “Huh. A variation, actually. This star shape at the base is new.”
“Or maybe it’s an older version,” he said, and opened the journal between us on the console. “More spells. Christ, it might take hours to go through, but this might be what you need. I think these could be the Moonchild rituals. The dates range from 1978 to 1988.”
“I don’t need all of them. What’s the last one? The one that applies to me.”
He flipped toward the end of the notebook and stopped at a drawing marked with a date nine months before I was born.
The Moonchild ritual.
“It’s a diagram for the ceremony,” I said, running my finger over the precisely drawn layout. “Here’s the main circle, the altar, the cardinals . . . Jesus, Lon. Doesn’t this look familiar?”