Banishing the Dark (The Arcadia Bell series) (25 page)

Part of Jupe wanted to tell the crazy old woman that Leticia’s boobs were awesome already, but mostly he was just freaking out. His Gramma would go Godzilla on him if he so much as made a joke about chicken breast. “My dad’s a photographer, so I’ve seen a lot of plastic surgery. Natural’s better.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” the old woman said very seriously, raising her juice can in confirmation.

Now Leticia looked freaked out. She quickly changed the subject. “Grandma, I told Jupe that you used to know the Duvals back in the day.”

“The who?”

“Duvals,” Leticia repeated in a louder voice. “You know, the serial killers.”

Her grandmother’s face brightened. “Oh, the Duvals. They weren’t killers.” They were, but Jupe didn’t argue. “That was just talk from savages, trying to destroy our order. The Duvals were celebrities. But I don’t talk about people in the order with outsiders.”

“But this is important.”

“I said no. And you promised me you wouldn’t tell your mama I knew the Duvals, but here you are, telling a—”

“A what?” Jupe said, sudden anger flaring inside his chest.

“Outsider,” she finished sourly.

Leticia and her grandmother immediately began conversing in angry Spanish, the speed of which was way too fast for Jupe’s junior-high Español skills to follow. And the more they fought, the worse he felt for Leticia. She was really trying, but every point she made was quickly Whac-A-Moled down by the old lady.

After weeks of fending off the temptation to use his knack, he made a split-second decision to make an exception. This was important, after all. He was doing this for Cady. And for his future brother or sister. And for Leticia.

Triple hero.

He took a deep breath and interrupted the grandmother-granddaughter throwdown. “Mrs. Vega,” he said in a loud voice, his persuasion turned up as high as he could crank it. “You can trust me, and you want to help us by answering all our questions about the Duvals.” When he opened his eyes, both females were gaping at him, so he added in a knack-free voice, “Right?”

Grandma Vega’s shoulders relaxed. She looked a little dazed as she said, “You don’t look untrustworthy.”

“I can keep a secret like nobody’s business,” he assured her.

“I suppose there’s no sense in holding on to secrets about the dead, is there? What do you want to know?”

Cha-ching! Pride and victory zinged through him. Well, until he noticed Leticia staring a hole into the side of his face. Crap. Dealing with humans was rough. Not for the first time, he wondered how open Leticia was to the concept of Earthbounds. Cady once told him that some of the people in her order were believers, so maybe she was cool about it. You never could tell. Jupe had the Nox symbol all over his social media, but if Leticia knew what it meant, she hadn’t said anything.

Her grandmother was waiting for an answer, so Jupe put the Earthbound dilemma out of his mind for the moment and said, “So, yeah, umm, how did you meet the Duvals?”

“I first met them when I visited the main lodge down in Florida, back in 1979 for the annual summer solstice ritual. Everyone loved them. They were practically superstars of the occult world. And I met their first child, the boy. I can’t remember his name.”

They had another kid? Cady had a brother? This was brand-new information to Jupe.

“Anyway, he died in the mid-1980s—”

Oh.

“—so he must’ve been around two then. Strange child. I babysat him one afternoon, and he bit me so hard I had to have three stitches on my hand.” She pointed it out, but Jupe couldn’t see any scars.

“Is that the only time you saw them?” he asked.

“Oh, no. It was after the boy died that I saw them next,” she said, leaning back in her chair with her juice can. “Imagine my surprise when I bumped into them at Gifts of the Magi.”

Jupe glanced between Grandma Vega and Leticia.

“A magical supply shop on the highway between Morella and La Sirena,” Leticia explained. “It closed down a few years ago when the owner died.”

“Got it,” Jupe said. “So, wait, they were here in the area? Were they visiting the lodge in Morella?”

Leticia’s grandmother slurped the last of her juice and shook her head. “That was the surprise. If they were on official business, they’d be staying in Morella at the lodge. It has guest rooms for traveling dignitaries. Makes it easier when other members come down from San Francisco or if the caliph visited, may the
gods rest his soul.” She kissed her hexagram pendant in tribute.

“So if they weren’t visiting the lodge on official business, why were they here?”

“They had a winter home in La Sirena.”

Jupe frowned. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same Duvals? They’re from Florida.”

“Enola and Alexander,” she said, grunting as she pushed herself out of the recliner. She shuffled across the room to a bookshelf and removed a worn photo album before plunking it down on the coffee table. “Where is it . . . ?” She paged through thick black sheets of old photographs affixed with paper corners. “Here we are. Mrs. Pendleton took this of us—she was the Gifts of the Magi owner who died a few years back. That’s me, in the middle.”

Jupe squinted at a three-by-five photograph taken inside the magical supply shop. He recognized the Duvals instantly from pictures in the true-crime books he’d read about the Black Lodge murders. They looked uncomfortable and were flanking a much younger Grandma Vega, who was smiling from ear to ear.

She tapped the photo with a long fingernail. “They made me promise to keep their winter home hush-hush because they were busy writing a book and didn’t want people from the order popping over and interrupting them. Understandable, of course. And I kept my word.”

Jupe leaned closer to read the squiggly handwriting
on the bottom of the photo: “The Duvals, January 1989.” Crap! That was the year Cady was born . . . only, she was born October 1. He knew, because her driver’s license had her fake birthday, but she’d told him her real birthday back when she first started dating his dad. Jupe counted backward from October 1. Nine months would be January, the same time her parents were here in La Sirena. What did this all mean?

“Hold on,” he said. “They spent January 1989 here in La Sirena. That’s what you’re saying?”

“Yes, but that was only the first year, right after they’d bought the winter home. They came back the very next winter solstice with their new daughter, the Moonchild. She was only three months old, I believe. I was the first person outside the main lodge to see her in person,” she said proudly.

Cady! She’d seen Cady as a baby. This was crazy. Jupe’s mind was speeding off in ten different directions at once. He’d come here expecting to get some information on summoning a demon and ended up uncovering something Cady herself didn’t even know. “So you saw them twice? In 1989 and 1990?”

“And every winter after that. They wrote their books here because it was peaceful,” the old woman said. “They usually came by themselves, especially after their daughter got older. But every year around the holidays, I’d have breakfast with them at that vegetarian diner near the farmer’s market. Well, that is, until they died in that terrible car accident with their daughter seven years ago.”

She chuckled to herself and closed the photograph album. “You know, I could’ve sworn I’d seen them last year at a gas station on the north end of Ocean Avenue, but Leticia’s mama said that was impossible. And she was right, of course. Can’t see dead people, can you? My eyes aren’t what they once were.”

Santo mierda.

I was dreaming about shrimp again. This time, Lon was showing me how to catch them with a fishing pole in a stream. But while he was struggling to reel one in, I walked away and found myself in a strangely familiar field. Tall grass. Wildflowers. And standing in the middle of it with her back to me was a tall, leggy woman with graying hair.

A terrible anxiety came over my dream body.

The woman turned around and smiled triumphantly. “
Ma petite lune.
You are awake.”

Snapping out of sleep, I tumbled off the bed in a cold sweat. Several panicked moments ticked by as I jerked my head around, looking for my mother in the shadows, unsure of where I was. Or
when
it was . . .

Twentynine Palms. The cheap motel. Two in the afternoon.

Daytime. The safe time to sleep. So that was only a dream. Right? I pushed off the floor and looked at Lon. He was stretched out on the bed, softly snoring.
His halo was still healthy. But when my gaze slipped over the rumpled sheet, I found the problem.

I’d forgotten to charge the ward.

No protection. I had slept without any protection, and now my mother knew I was no longer in a coma. Worse, she’d managed to tap into my dreams
during the daytime.

Mad at myself and scared, I sat on the floor next to the bed and wilted into a shaking mess. My breathing quickened. It didn’t take long before I was hyperventilating and nauseated. I stuck my head between my knees and tried to count myself into a calmer state. The mattress creaked. A warm hand smoothed across my shoulders as Lon settled on the floor beside me.

“What’s wrong?”

“What
isn’t
wrong?” I said before telling him what had just happened.

He listened, rubbing circles on my back, while I talked into my knees. When I finished, he exhaled a long breath, and said, “Cady—”

“What am I going to do, Lon? I’m out of ideas. I don’t know what to do next.”

“
Cady.
”

I looked up at him. He pointed in front of us. A ball of cotton-candy-pink light hovered in the air above my overnight bag. My servitor! That was fast. Too fast? We both watched the pink light disappear inside the bag, heading back into my soap doll.

“I need your pocketknife again.”

I both dreaded and couldn’t wait to see what it had found. I pulled out the soap doll and wasted no time drawing the series of symbols that would trigger the servitor to spill its contents. I only needed a tiny bit of Heka to charge the retrieval spell, so I stuck my finger in my mouth and rubbed saliva over the scribbled sigil while stabbing the carved bar of soap.

Cool energy surrounded me as the servitor’s collected images unfolded. Like a psychic film, it replayed the spell’s journey: leaving the hotel room last night, floating into darkness. Then it sped up in a flash of blurry light, the shift making me dizzy until it settled on its final destination.

A forest, heavily wooded. A dirt road. A dark green house sat at the end of it, the roof covered in leaves and pine needles. Dozens of white antlers hung around the door. A hunting lodge? No identifying house number. No mailbox. No signs. The image moved through the door like a ghost to show the inside of the house. A spacious great room with a rustic fireplace. Sparsely furnished. Dark. Blinds drawn.

I strained to see anything that might indicate location: mail, calendar, family photos, letterhead. But no. Nothing and more nothing. It was the blandest, least personal house I’d ever seen.

“Come on, give me something,” I murmured, as if that would help. It wasn’t sentient; the images were already prerecorded, so to speak. What I saw was what it had retrieved. I hoped it would move into another room where I might see something
more—magnets on the refrigerator or a takeout menu on the counter. But the servitor’s metaphysical lens only moved to the far end of the room, where an oversized grandfather clock sat near the fireplace.

Deer and trees and wood nymphs were carved into the massive wooden base. A stag’s antlered head jutted above the gold clock dial. A terrible familiarity washed over me at the sight of it. Some dusty, long-forgotten memory cowered in the corned of my mind.

I’d seen this clock before.

The servitor’s gaze bobbed and floated down to the bottom of the clock. In a swift movement, it pushed forward and ghosted through the base, but there was nothing but darkness. Darkness, and more darkness, then—

Pop!

The servitor’s transmission ended, leaving me sitting on the hotel floor with Lon’s pocketknife stuck into the bar of soap.

“What did you see?” Lon asked, squatting next to me.

“A house in the woods, no cars. I couldn’t even tell where the woods were—Oregon? Maryland? Florida? I don’t know. There was nothing identifiable, Lon. Just a grandfather clock. But maybe that was the clue the servitor was trying to show me. And it’s weird, but I think I remember it from when I was a kid.”

“Your parents’ house in Florida?”

“No, that’s long gone. And we didn’t have a grandfather clock. Maybe I saw it somewhere we went. Another house.”

“Family vacation?”

“We never went on vacation.” Like, never. And strange, but the word
vacation
triggered a whole other nagging feeling inside my brain, that déjà vu sensation. Plane tickets. Skiing. Mountains. Christmas. Where the hell was this all coming from? Someplace more recent? I couldn’t piece it together.

“Did you ever visit anyone?” Lon pressed, unaware of my warring memories. “Friends of your parents? Another lodge, maybe?”

“They never took me anywhere. They were gone half the time, traveling.”