Banishing the Dark
Page 73
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He let out a slow breath through his nostrils. “It’s the same ritual setup as San Diego.”
“Exact configuration. And look, a directional compass. A house and a road.”
We stared at it until Lon turned the diagram and pointed toward the road we had used to get here. “This house, Cady. The road we drove in on.”
He was right. “They conceived me here,” I murmured. “Behind the house.”
He flipped the page and began reading to himself.
“What? Is that the ritual?”
“Looks like more of a statement of intent. Almost as if she was writing it for one of her books, like maybe she thought of publishing it one day.”
“What does it say?”
“Give me a second, and I’ll tell you,” he murmured.
While Lon read to himself, I anxiously thumbed through the rest of the paperwork. More loose pages in French that I couldn’t read. A photocopy of a Moonchild ritual from the 1800s with red lines crossing out entire chunks of the text. A page containing a woodcut print of a pregnant woman with the head of a sun and a pictorial map of the world below her. It was labeled GEHEIME FIGUREN DER ROSENKREUZER, 1785. Gothic script above the woman’s sun-disk head said: SOPHIA.
I opened my mouth to tell Lon, but when I picked up the paper, I saw what was on the bottom of the box.
The torn fragment of parchment stolen from the snake temple.
Invocation of the Great Serpent.
It was in English, and the calligraphy and old spellings were mostly readable. It wasn’t a ritual, really. No instructions about laying out this or that protection circle, no binding or ward.
It was a prayer of sorts, a set of sacred words to call down a powerful, godlike being from the Æthyr. A strange summoning seal was crudely drawn in the center of the parchment, like no demonic seal I’d ever seen. And as I read to the end, skipping over the mumbo-jumbo, I realized something important.
This was not for summoning an Æthyric being into a circle for a chat. Nor was it a spell to draw down the creature’s essence into a womb to create a Moonchild.
It had nothing to do with a conception ritual.
It was a set of instructions to call down this creature into a living human body.
A male body.
Not my mother but my father.
Dazed and disbelieving, I let go of the parchment and watched it drift back down into the box, then glanced up to see Lon’s gaze lift from the fallen page. He cupped my cheek with his hand, and I heard his emotions echoing mine.
“The Moonchild ritual was just meaningless ceremonial bullshit,” I said. “All they did was invoke this serpentine being into my father. Any magician with half my skills could do it. All my mom did was have sex with my dad while he was possessed by some kind of nocturnal proto-demon creature.”
“Cady . . .”
“Don’t you get it? Priya said all I had to do was figure out what kind of magick my parents used and remove it, but he was wrong. How can I reverse this? I’m a stew of psychotic human and demon DNA.”
Lon didn’t deny it.
Tears burned my eyes. I backhanded the metal box off the console, sending my parents’ cache of money flying, and roared at the pain that shot through my knuckles. When Lon tried to reach for me, I stormed away and headed to the hallway I’d seen in my vision, where my parents first appeared. It branched off to two bedrooms with nothing in them but stripped mattresses. Empty closets. Another empty room with traces of red ochre chalk on the wooden floor. An avocado-green kitchen that looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the 1960s. I strode through it, opening cabinets and drawers, flinging silverware across the peeling countertops. Nothing and more nothing. Not a damn thing but old grease splatters and a door that led to the backyard. I unlocked it and marched outside.
Remembering the diagram my mother had drawn, I strode through dead grass and made my way through scraggly underbrush to a clearing ringed with winter-bare trees.
Here it was. A February moon shone down on the place where they’d made me. I stared up at the dark sky. No magical hot spot or carefully designed ritual space. Just a plain old clearing on some property they’d bought out of convenience, where rich old men hunted wild boars for sport.
I heard Lon’s boots crunching through the brittle grass and sighed as he stopped by my side and stared up at the sky with me.
After a few moments of silence, cold night air sent a shiver through me. I stuck my hands into my pockets. “All of this was for nothing. I spent my entire adult life on the run to protect them, and they didn’t need protecting. And when I finally decide to start living my own life, what do I do? I come here. Of all the places in the country I could choose, I come right back where it all started. How sick is that?”
“Cady—”
“I’ve been running in circles, and I just can’t get away. I send them to the goddamn Æthyr, and she’s still got her nasty claws in me. I feel like a puppet that can’t shake the puppet master. Was I drawn here because she’s still puppeting me? Am I still Sélène?”
Lon was silent for several moments. “You may not feel it now, but you love me. You’re fucking crazy about me, and you’re crazy about Jupe. So maybe you were drawn here because I needed you and because my boy needed a mother.”
I swiped away tears, unable to respond.
“Or that could just be coincidence,” he said, looking back up at the sky. “Maybe you were drawn here because you’re the only person strong enough to stop Enola.”
“Exact configuration. And look, a directional compass. A house and a road.”
We stared at it until Lon turned the diagram and pointed toward the road we had used to get here. “This house, Cady. The road we drove in on.”
He was right. “They conceived me here,” I murmured. “Behind the house.”
He flipped the page and began reading to himself.
“What? Is that the ritual?”
“Looks like more of a statement of intent. Almost as if she was writing it for one of her books, like maybe she thought of publishing it one day.”
“What does it say?”
“Give me a second, and I’ll tell you,” he murmured.
While Lon read to himself, I anxiously thumbed through the rest of the paperwork. More loose pages in French that I couldn’t read. A photocopy of a Moonchild ritual from the 1800s with red lines crossing out entire chunks of the text. A page containing a woodcut print of a pregnant woman with the head of a sun and a pictorial map of the world below her. It was labeled GEHEIME FIGUREN DER ROSENKREUZER, 1785. Gothic script above the woman’s sun-disk head said: SOPHIA.
I opened my mouth to tell Lon, but when I picked up the paper, I saw what was on the bottom of the box.
The torn fragment of parchment stolen from the snake temple.
Invocation of the Great Serpent.
It was in English, and the calligraphy and old spellings were mostly readable. It wasn’t a ritual, really. No instructions about laying out this or that protection circle, no binding or ward.
It was a prayer of sorts, a set of sacred words to call down a powerful, godlike being from the Æthyr. A strange summoning seal was crudely drawn in the center of the parchment, like no demonic seal I’d ever seen. And as I read to the end, skipping over the mumbo-jumbo, I realized something important.
This was not for summoning an Æthyric being into a circle for a chat. Nor was it a spell to draw down the creature’s essence into a womb to create a Moonchild.
It had nothing to do with a conception ritual.
It was a set of instructions to call down this creature into a living human body.
A male body.
Not my mother but my father.
Dazed and disbelieving, I let go of the parchment and watched it drift back down into the box, then glanced up to see Lon’s gaze lift from the fallen page. He cupped my cheek with his hand, and I heard his emotions echoing mine.
“The Moonchild ritual was just meaningless ceremonial bullshit,” I said. “All they did was invoke this serpentine being into my father. Any magician with half my skills could do it. All my mom did was have sex with my dad while he was possessed by some kind of nocturnal proto-demon creature.”
“Cady . . .”
“Don’t you get it? Priya said all I had to do was figure out what kind of magick my parents used and remove it, but he was wrong. How can I reverse this? I’m a stew of psychotic human and demon DNA.”
Lon didn’t deny it.
Tears burned my eyes. I backhanded the metal box off the console, sending my parents’ cache of money flying, and roared at the pain that shot through my knuckles. When Lon tried to reach for me, I stormed away and headed to the hallway I’d seen in my vision, where my parents first appeared. It branched off to two bedrooms with nothing in them but stripped mattresses. Empty closets. Another empty room with traces of red ochre chalk on the wooden floor. An avocado-green kitchen that looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the 1960s. I strode through it, opening cabinets and drawers, flinging silverware across the peeling countertops. Nothing and more nothing. Not a damn thing but old grease splatters and a door that led to the backyard. I unlocked it and marched outside.
Remembering the diagram my mother had drawn, I strode through dead grass and made my way through scraggly underbrush to a clearing ringed with winter-bare trees.
Here it was. A February moon shone down on the place where they’d made me. I stared up at the dark sky. No magical hot spot or carefully designed ritual space. Just a plain old clearing on some property they’d bought out of convenience, where rich old men hunted wild boars for sport.
I heard Lon’s boots crunching through the brittle grass and sighed as he stopped by my side and stared up at the sky with me.
After a few moments of silence, cold night air sent a shiver through me. I stuck my hands into my pockets. “All of this was for nothing. I spent my entire adult life on the run to protect them, and they didn’t need protecting. And when I finally decide to start living my own life, what do I do? I come here. Of all the places in the country I could choose, I come right back where it all started. How sick is that?”
“Cady—”
“I’ve been running in circles, and I just can’t get away. I send them to the goddamn Æthyr, and she’s still got her nasty claws in me. I feel like a puppet that can’t shake the puppet master. Was I drawn here because she’s still puppeting me? Am I still Sélène?”
Lon was silent for several moments. “You may not feel it now, but you love me. You’re fucking crazy about me, and you’re crazy about Jupe. So maybe you were drawn here because I needed you and because my boy needed a mother.”
I swiped away tears, unable to respond.
“Or that could just be coincidence,” he said, looking back up at the sky. “Maybe you were drawn here because you’re the only person strong enough to stop Enola.”
