Banishing the Dark (The Arcadia Bell series) (14 page)

This astounded me. Growing up, I never saw her angry. Not really.

Rooke stooped to pick up a slender broken bough and, after snapping off a few dead branches, wielded it like a walking stick, tapping its tip against the path. “People were frightened of her anger, but it was the coolness that bothered me.”

As I kept an eye on Lon and Evie, Rooke went on to relate a story about my mother unemotionally slapping a teenage boy in the middle of a ritual for flubbing his Latin and another about a time she calmly stabbed a waitress’s arm with a fork after the girl accidentally knocked a glass off the table. When Rooke started a third story, I cut him off.

“You don’t have to convince me that she was damaged,” I said. “I know it firsthand. I’m more interested in the circumstances of my origins, my conception. What can you tell me about the Moonchild spell?”

He lightly tapped the end of his walking stick against an open-mouthed gargoyle molded into the arm of a cement bench. “Ah, yes. Call down a great spirit into the womb, and give birth to a goddess. A classic ritual. I’m assuming you’ve researched my grandfather’s version.”

“We both know she didn’t use Crowley’s version or the older standard ritual.”

“She claimed to have perfected it. Altered it somehow. The order toasted her success when she gave birth to Victor, but after years of watching him catch every virus known to mankind and be shuffled in and out of the hospital, people began to wonder. And when he showed no magical aptitude whatsoever? Well . . .”

“What changed between my brother’s ritual and mine?”

“It was modified—no doubt about that. Enola told the caliph she came across the solution during one of her trips home to France. One of her secret magical partners oversaw your conception. Someone from another order—”

“Frater Blue. He showed up with my parents to oversee me being sacrificed last year. I sent him to the Æthyr with my parents.”

Rooke raised a brow. “My, someone’s been busy. I suppose there’s no point in suggesting you track him down and ask him for a copy of the ritual.”

“Dead end,” I quipped with a tight smile.

We passed an unusual tree from India known as the sleeping almond. A small metal sign identified the bark as having properties “similar to milk of the poppy” during certain years of its growth. I blinked at it for a moment; the geeky magician in me was awed. Powdered and charged with Heka, the bark of this tree was a valuable ingredient in a couple of the
medicinals I made. On a few occasions, I’d ordered it from shady overseas vendors, shelling out several hundred dollars a pop for a sliver of bark the size of a fingernail. Crazy that Rooke had it here. And at the tree’s base grew a thick shrub of a rare variety of silver jasmine. No wonder this man was rich.

“You know nothing else about the modified ritual?” I said, breathing in the scent of the jasmine as we continued strolling. “How the Moonchild is supposed to manifest? What my mother hoped to accomplish?”

“Oh, she promised to give birth to the greatest magician known to the world. My grandfather would be a mere footnote, she bragged, forgotten under the Moonchild’s superior abilities. Magick would become respected across the globe, and we’d no longer be pushed to the fringes of society.”

“Yes, I heard that on a regular basis,” I said sourly.

“We all did. I’m sure it was humiliating when she realized we all knew you weren’t a messiah. Skilled with Heka, yes. But you didn’t bring about the ‘New Aeon’ that Enola promised.”

“Which is probably why she eventually snapped and went on a killing spree. Were there no rumors about her documenting the Moonchild ritual somewhere? I can’t believe she wrote all those books about magick theory but didn’t want to publish her greatest achievement.”

“That is a puzzle, isn’t it? From my perspective at the time, their Moonchild rituals were a lot of talk
without substance, like everything else your parents embarked upon. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“But it wasn’t them alone. One day, I looked up and realized that I was sitting around with a group of men and women, supposedly the most talented magicians in the world, yet half of them were
déclassé
trash with boring middle-class lives. They got cancer, suffered through divorce and depression, lost their savings after making poor investment decisions.”

“They were only human.”

“Precisely. If they were so prestigious and talented, why couldn’t they use magick to better their lives? They should all be successful politicians or great actors, wealthy and healthy. Magical talent was a gift, and they were squandering it. I was surrounded by fools, murderers, and some of the dullest people I’d ever known in my life. So I left before their bad karma brushed off on me and my family.”

I couldn’t really argue. I hadn’t been active in the order since I left home at seventeen. Lon always joked that he wasn’t a “joiner,” and maybe I wasn’t, either.

“So my advice to you would be to stop seeking the Moonchild ritual. Whatever evil intent Enola had when she conceived you doesn’t need to define your life. My grandfather was a great magician, but he was also a loathsome human being who didn’t give two goddamns about the people in his life unless they helped him reach magical nirvana. So when it comes to my bloodline and his legacy, I try to discard the
bad and keep the good. Maybe you should do the same.”

If only it were that easy.

We stopped in front of a hedgerow labyrinth. Rooke held out his hand, offering to take me through the maze. He had to be freaking kidding. No way was I going inside something like that at night. A memory surfaced of watching the snowy labyrinth scene in
The Shining
at Lon’s house. I remembered holding Jupe’s feet hostage and tickling him during the scary bits. I think Lon was tickling me, too, but that seemed . . . odd for him.

At that point, the memory went a little fuzzy. My temples started throbbing, so I stopped trying to force it and turned around to track Lon and Evie. Watching her flirt with him in that low-cut red top of hers made me feel like a snorting bull, ready to charge. But I still needed one last piece of information from her father.

“What is Naos Ophis?”

Rooke didn’t respond right away. He watched his daughter step off the path to pick a stem of the jasmine we’d passed and hold it up for Lon to smell. After a time, he finally said, “Temple of the Serpent.”

“What is it, and what does it have to do with my parents?”

“Are you familiar with Ophites?”

I shook my head.

“It was a heretical Gnostic sect that popped up in the second century or so. They thought the serpent in the Garden of Eden was a hero, because it gave mankind the gift of wisdom, Sophia.”

“As in the Sophic Mass?”

All E∴E∴ lodges put on this dog-and-pony show one night every week or month, depending on the size of the lodge. I’d attended mass regularly in Florida until I went on the lam.

“Yes. Only this Gnostic sect took things to the extreme, shall we say, and believed Sophia and the
serpent to be as important as Christ himself. For the most part, the sect died out in the third century. But a small group of followers persisted. There’s said to be a group of them in both Greece and France.”

“France? Is this what my mother found there?”

“I don’t know. There’s rumored to be a secret sect of them in the States. Your mother mentioned them on occasion when she was visiting the Pasadena lodge in the 1980s.”

“What did she say about them?”

“Nothing substantial. She was always interested in other magical orders, so any comment she made went in one ear and out the other . . . that is, until Magus Frances had another vision. She said she saw your mother studying in the serpent temple in secret.”

“Studying what?”

“She didn’t know, but she said Enola was hell-bent on it. Whatever it might have been, Frances thought it would tear the order apart. Perhaps it was a coincidence that she and your father attempted the Moonchild ritual again and you were born a year later. I don’t know.” He bent his stick in the middle, snapping it in two, and tossed it into the maze. “But if you’re looking for the key to your origins, I’d seek out the Ophites.”

My pulse pounded. Okay, this was good, something substantial to follow. Worth the whole trip down here. But just when I was about to ask Rooke about the temple’s location, I got a little distracted.

Several yards behind us, Evie sat down on a
bench to scribble something on a business card while Lon remained standing. She handed it up to him, then playfully snatched it back when he reached for it. Laughing, she held it out for him again, and when he took it, she slowly ran her fingers over his.

What the hell did she think she was doing?

Any temporary excitement I’d felt over Rooke’s information vanished under the flare of jealousy that twisted my stomach into a knot and made my face overheat. Violent girl-on-girl thoughts filled my head.

Her fingers fell away from his, only to trail down the front of his shirt and rest on the waistband of his jeans, which she gave a gentle tug.

Nuh-uh. No. Hell, no.

I felt the rush of power ripple over my skin but didn’t recognize what was happening. Hot anger mixed with an oblique energy that swirled around me and shot toward Evie like an arrow. Branches swayed. Leaves scattered. I hadn’t moved an inch, but I felt the bark and leaves and flowers as if I were a stormy wind howling down the garden path, as if I were touching them with my own hands.

I felt the cool metal of the trash can as it lifted off the path and slammed against a nearby tree. The dense weight of the cement bench as it rose—

With Evie still on it.

Her mouth fell open. She gripped the molded gargoyle arm of the bench in terror as her legs dangled a foot above the paved path. Two feet. Three. When I blinked, my vision changed; silver light
blanketed the gardens. Somewhere in the back of my head, I knew this was bad. It was night, and I wasn’t standing in a protective ward. My mother could—

“Cady!”

My gaze snapped to Lon’s. The commanding intensity there was a bucket of cold water over my wayward power. I gritted my teeth and reeled it back in with a growl. The silver light retreated. Half a second later, the cement bench crashed to the ground. Evie cried out as she bounced off and tumbled to her knees.

I struggled for breath as Lon hesitated, then rushed to help Evie up. She didn’t look all that hurt, more shocked than anything. I was a little shocked, too. What the hell was the matter with me? Rooke had just finished telling me about my evil mother’s crazy outbursts of anger, and here I was, following in her footsteps.

I turned to him with an apology on my tongue and saw the evidence of what I’d just done. Not only was unfiltered awe written all over his face, but the silver light lingering in my eyes was reflected in his glasses, two eerily glowing dots.

“My God,” Rooke murmured.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .” I started, glancing back at Evie. Lon was pulling her up, making sure she was okay as she brushed dirt off her knees.

“Damn me to hell,” Rooke swore as we hurried toward them. “What in God’s name did Enola do to you?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

He didn’t say anything else until we were a few yards away. “I truly don’t know the exact location of the serpent temple, but Magus Frances said it was in the desert, and your mother would visit it—back and forth in an afternoon—when your parents came to the Pasadena temple, so it can’t be that far from L.A.”

Maybe not, but we couldn’t just roam around Southern California looking for a hidden temple. “You’ve got to know something else. Mr. Rooke, please.”

He clutched his smoking jacket lapels in one hand and shook his head. Then something changed in his face. He halted long enough to tell me one last thing under his breath. “They are snake handlers, like the Pentecostal churches in the South. But they use exotic snakes—big, colorful ones that don’t belong in the desert.”

* * *

Lon didn’t say anything until we were back inside the SUV. While he started the engine, I pulled down the visor mirror to confirm what I already knew: reptilian pupils ringed with silver and a halo so bright it cast metallic light across the dash. I slammed the visor back into place as he pulled out of the garden parking lot, heading back toward the residential neighborhood we’d passed through to get there.

“Call Jupe,” he finally said in a flat voice. “Get him to summon Priya and find out if he noticed that in the Æthyr.”

“I didn’t—My tail.” I didn’t feel it slithering down the leg of my pants in the garden, so that was something. “My horns didn’t . . . did they?”

Lon shook his head and flicked a glance at my halo. “Just that. And your eyes. Cady—”

“I know, I know,” I mumbled. “I lost control. I don’t know what got into me.”

But that wasn’t really true, was it? I
did
know. I was jealous as hell over a man who wasn’t mine. And that was nearly as terrifying as the Moonchild power, which had flared up as fast as my anger and temporarily overridden my good sense.

I dug out my cell phone and stared at the time on the screen. “It’s past one in the morning,” I told Lon. “Jupe’s asleep.”