Banishing the Dark (The Arcadia Bell series) (2 page)

Jupe opened his mouth to ask what the hell a fortnight was, but Priya flashed a mouthful of crooked silver teeth. Kind of creepy. And Jupe could already see the static erupting over the creature’s skin; Priya seemed to have less and less power to keep himself solid every time Jupe summoned him.

“Arcadia must seek protection,” the creature said.
“She must find the spell her mother used during Arcadia’s conception and uncover a way to reverse it, or her mother will cross the planes to claim her.”

“I’ve told you a million times, Cady will fight her mom,” Jupe said confidently. “Besides, nothing that crosses the Æthyr can live on this plane permanently. You said so yourself. I mean, look at you. You can’t even stay here five minutes.”

Priya’s eyes narrowed as he leaned closer. “Enola Duval wants to cross the planes permanently. She seeks old, irreversible magick that will bond her soul to Arcadia’s so that Enola will occupy her body.”

Jupe stilled. “Earthbound,” he whispered in shock. “Cady’s mom wants to be one of us?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. And do you know what happens to souls when a new one possesses their physical body?” Priya struck a fist against his palm, causing Jupe to jump. “If Enola takes Arcadia’s body, Arcadia will become nothing but a sack of energy existing to keep her mother alive. She may as well be dead.”

Blurry memories of my hospital room rearranged themselves like frames of film spliced out of order. Nurses. Doctors. A painful catheter being removed. Being walked to the bathroom, my legs too weak to support my weight. Everything smelled funny. I wanted a real bath. I wanted my ribs to stop hurting.

And I wanted my brain to work better.

Pain meds slowed everything down. Made me dream crazy things. But I wasn’t dreaming now. I was awake.

I gazed up at an enormous circle of sigils painted on the ceiling. A circle inside a circle. Two spells. One that prevented magick from being used. The other was magick to hide something. The same ward we’d seen on the boat Lon chartered last fall.

“It’s to keep your mother out,” a kindly female voice said.

I craned my neck to see the haloed head of one of Lon’s housekeepers, knitting in a chair by the fireplace. This wasn’t the hospital. I was home.

“Mrs. Holiday.”

“Hello, Cady, darling,” she said, tucking her needles and yarn into the chair cushion. “You with us this time?”

“Yes, I think I am.”

“Good. Lon gave you something to clear out the medicine. He said it would take you an hour or so to wake. He’ll be back from the store any minute. How does a bath sound?”

“Heavenly.”

What I really wanted was half an hour in Lon’s luxury steam shower, but I was too weak to stand by myself. Still, the tub was nice. Once I’d sloughed off a few layers of dead skin cells and brushed my teeth until my gums bled, the Holidays got me back into bed and left the room, and when they returned, Lon was with them.

His expectant face brightened when he walked into the bedroom, dressed in a thin brown leather jacket and jeans. Green eyes squinting, he strode through a patch of sunlight to pull a chair over to the side of the bed while Mrs. Holiday set down a tray of food. The Holidays left us alone, pulling the door shut behind them.

He sat down and leaned close. He had a full beard, a darker shade of his honey-brown hair, with two streaks of silvery gray at the chin—gray I’d never seen when he had it trimmed down to the pirate mustache. Had it always been there, or did my time in the hospital cause it?

Gray or not, beard or not, he was divine to look upon, painfully handsome and oh-so-serious. At that moment, I felt as if I hadn’t seen him for months.

“Oh, Lon.”

“Thank God,” he mumbled, dropping kisses over my eyes. “I couldn’t sense anything through the morphine. Damn, it feels good to hear you again.” It took me a second to realize what he meant: he could “hear” my feelings with his demonic knack. “You scared”—he kissed one cheek—“the living shit”—he kissed the other cheek—“out of me.”

When his lips pressed against mine, I threw my arms around his neck and pulled him close, crying a little. Drowning a little.

He pulled back and wiped my face with trembling fingers as I wiped his. We both laughed at ourselves. Then he sat back down and slid one warm hand around mine. “Christ, I’ve missed you.”

“How long was I—”

“You’ve been home a day.”

“What about the hospital?”

He ran his fingers over the damp hair near my ear, sending pleasant shivers racing across my skin. “Three days since that first night you woke up. Do you remember that now?”

Barely. It was all so . . . confusing. “I remember dreaming you were some crazy mountain man coming to kill me. What’s all this?” I raked my fingers through his beard.

“Laziness.”

“Hides the tic in your jaw,” I teased. “How will I know when you’re mad now?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll shave it.”

“It’s sort of sexy.”

“You won’t say that when it’s scraping sensitive skin.”

“Don’t tease me when I’m feeble and debilitated. What’s the date?”

“February fifth.”

February . . . I’d been in the hospital an entire month?

“Are you in pain?” he asked.

“Everything aches. My ribs hurt when I bend a certain way.”

“Then don’t bend that way.”

I smiled. “What did you give me?”

“Ginkgo biloba and the detox medicinal you gave Bob when he quit drinking. They had you on morphine after you woke, because Mick wasn’t there to tell them no. You were pretty out of it.”

“Mick. Your Earthbound doctor friend?” One of the best surgeons in La Sirena, Lon had bragged, thanks to a crazy-strong healing knack.

“He did most of your work. Do you remember?”

The faces of several doctors and nurses blurred in my mind.

“Do you remember Mick telling you anything before he put you under for healing?”

“Like what?”

“Something very important. Think, Cady.”

Whatever he wanted me to remember, he was super-intense about it, so I tried harder. Something finally came into focus inside my head. Yes, that’s right. I remembered Mick in the hospital. Remembered his bright blue halo and his handsome smile. But he wasn’t smiling when I was hurt, was he? No. I was remembering meeting him before I got hurt. The night before—

“I killed Dare,” I said, suddenly sobering. Not just Dare but also his thugs, the ones who beat and punched and kicked my body until I nearly died myself. “They trapped me, Lon. Dare knew I could be trapped in a binding triangle. He knew, and he . . .” I inhaled a shaky breath.

Lon’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. “Don’t you even think about being sorry.”

Never. I steadied my emotions and concentrated on the here and now. “Do the police know?”

He reached over to the tray and uncovered a bowl of soup. An intoxicating scent wafted from the steam. “Chicken stock. Ginger. Seaweed. Vegetables.”

“You made it?”

“Same thing I make when Jupe’s sick. Plus a few other things.” When I began to ask what those “things” were, he cut me off with a stern look. “Just eat it.”

“Yes, sir.” Thank God for Lon’s cooking skills. It tasted a thousand times better than the hospital’s canned soup. Between spoonfuls, I said, “See, I’m eating. Now, tell me. Am I going to jail?”

He shook his head. “I paid someone to collect
the ash and bone from Tambuku before anyone else showed up.”

“Who?”

His eye twitched. “Someone Hajo works with when he’s death dowsing.”

“Oh, God.”

“No one knows what happened but you and me.” He squinted one eye closed. “And Jupe. And Priya—your guardian appeared to Jupe to tell us what happened. That’s how we found you.”

“I sent him to get help,” I said, remembering. “But what about Tambuku? The bodies?”

“I took the bones to Dare’s wife, Sarah. Told her a version of the truth, that he was looking for the person who’d leaked his bionic knack drug. Do you remember all that?”

“The red liquid that amped up demonic knacks. Tambuku was robbed . . .”

“And Dare used a magician to manufacture the drug until he realized someone had stolen it and leaked it to the general public. So I told Sarah that Dare had traced the leak to the magician, and some Earthbound’s juiced-up knack went haywire and burned them all. It wasn’t that far from the truth, and it kept the whole thing out of the papers. She announced that he’d had a heart attack; their money and influence prevented any further investigation. The funeral was two weeks ago.”

It was overwhelming, how much I’d missed. And my foggy memories made everything feel surreal. My
brain felt broken. “I hate that you had to lie for me.” He never lied. Loathed lying, in fact. I was the professional liar; he was a walking lie detector.

“I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” he said very seriously.

“What about Kar Yee?”

“What about her?”

Good question. Why was I so worried about her? “We had a fight,” I said, reaching for the details. “I told her who I really was. Who my parents were. She got angry with me for keeping it from her all these years. I tried to go after her . . . that’s why I went to the bar. To find her. She hates me.”

“She had Bob drive her to the hospital several times a week to see you, and that doesn’t seem much like hate to me.”

No, it really didn’t.

Before I could get too sentimental about it, he added, “But the two of you will have plenty of time to sort things out later. Right now, you eat. Need to get your strength back.”

I continued to feed myself spoonfuls of soup, starving but impatient to finish and ask Lon more questions. After I’d finished most of the bowl, he set it back down on the bedside table as I glanced at the painted sigils on the ceiling. “You did that?”

He nodded and picked up my hand again, rubbing circles into the pad of my palm with his thumb. “It’s why I wanted you home. You’re safer sleeping here. Your mother . . . do you remember?”

That I did remember, unfortunately. My mother, Enola Duval, infamous occultist and former member of the highly esteemed Ekklesia Eleusia esoteric society (or E∴E∴, as it’s known in occult circles), one of the Black Lodge Slayers, number 37 in a set of American Serial Killer trading cards, on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

After finding out the truth—that they weren’t framed for the Black Lodge murders, as they’d always claimed—last year, I’d commanded a primordial demon to take her into the Æthyric demon plane with my father as payment for crimes they committed, assuming they’d been killed.

Never assume.

My mother not only survived, but she’d found a way to tap into me when I was sleeping and use me like a puppet. Under her control, I’d nearly stabbed Lon with a knife. She swore she’d take over my consciousness and kill everyone I loved. And she was demented enough to try.

“Priya told me I wasn’t safe,” I said to Lon. “He said I needed to find the spell she’d used to conceive me and try to reverse it. That I should seek refuge at the E∴E∴ temple in Florida.” I put down the soup spoon. “Go to my godfather.”

“I’m sorry, Cady. The caliph passed.”

I stilled. “The caliph . . . died?”

Lon nodded. “Two days after you went into the hospital. Jupe sent Priya to tell him what had happened to you. But when he tried to find him, he
couldn’t. I e-mailed around until I got in contact with his assistant. Heart failure.”

Fresh tears welled. “He was only in his seventies. He was in decent shape last time I saw him.” In San Diego, when he’d come with Lon to help me escape from my parents’ attempt to sacrifice me.

“They’d already had the funeral by the time I found out. I guess that was about three weeks ago. His oldest son, Adrien, will take over as the new caliph.”

“Jesus.” After the initial shock passed, I pulled myself together and focused on the reality that lay before me. The caliph was my advocate. A few people in the order knew I was still alive: the caliph’s assistant, one of the other magi at the main lodge, and the grandmaster of the local lodge and her assistant. But the caliph was the only one with the power to rally all of them. He was the one they respected.

“What am I supposed to do now?” I said. “I have to find asylum somewhere. Priya said you weren’t safe around me.”

“Cady, I don’t think I’ve been safe around you since the moment we met. That never stopped me before, and it’s damn sure not stopping me now. You’re not going anywhere without me, and that’s all there is to it.”

I hadn’t realized how tense I was, but when he said that, it felt as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Maybe it was because I felt physically frail and secretly wanted help. Or maybe because I’d
learned that asking for help didn’t equate to weakness.

I slumped against the pillows, mulling over everything he’d just told me. Wondering if I should try to contact the E∴E∴. It seemed pointless, now that the caliph was gone. My troubled thoughts turned to my new abilities, and I began to remember more about that last night before I ended up in the hospital.

“What is it?” Lon said.

“Dare. Before I . . . incinerated him. He told me things he found out through an investigator.”

“What kinds of things?”