Summoning the Night (8 page)

Sure, things in their original Æthyric bodies, like imps. Not humans or Earthbound demons in human bodies. Then again, my human parents had been sent into the Æthyr . . . but I hadn't banished them outright—an Æthyric demon named Nivella took them. I just gave Nivella permission. It occurred to me, of course, that I might bargain with another Æthyric into taking Bishop if we were able to find him, but I didn't say it out loud.

“Earthbounds can't be separated,” I argued stubbornly. “Your demon nature has integrated with your human DNA. It would be like asking me to separate soul from body. Unless I could piece together some sort of antispell for the original Roanoke Invocation—which has been lost for hundreds of years—it's a no-go. I've got skills, but I'm not God.”

“All I'm saying is that you don't really know the extent of the Moonchild ability. You haven't even used it since San Diego.”

I mumbled a noncommittal response. Call me a chicken, I don't give a damn. My ability was unnaturally created by two homicidal maniacs masquerading as parents. What good could come of using it? Too much magick could make even the gentlest of magicians go nutso, and I had crazy genes working against me. If I started experimenting with the Moonchild ability, I was worried some sort of insanity clock would start ticking inside me. How long would it be before it went off? A month? A year? A decade? My parents weren't
even fifty when they started to go banana-boat. For all I knew, I might not even make it to thirty.

“I can do magick the old-fashioned way just fine,” I finally said.

He grunted—something I interpreted to mean “We'll see about that.” He dropped the subject. “We need to find Bishop first.”

“Maybe there's someone in La Sirena who knew him back then,” I suggested. “That might be a good place to start.”

“I just want to get Jupe home first.” Lon swerved out of a bicyclist's path while trying to manipulate his cell phone.

“Stop,” I complained. “I'll do it.”

I got out my phone and sent Jupe a message:
WE ARE PICKING YOU UP TODAY OUT FRONT.
It was 2:30; Lon's housekeepers wouldn't have left the house to get Jupe from school yet. I'd call them and tell them not to bother today.

Jupe's reply came almost instantly:
SWEET!!!! TONIGHT IS MOVIE NIGHT #3, DONT FORGET.

Groan. A few days ago, he'd emailed Lon and me a list of twenty “must-see” movies to watch before Halloween and pressured me to plan my work schedule around the monster marathon.

“He's okay?” Lon asked, trying to hide his anxiety as he strained for a peek at my phone.

“Yep. I hope you're ready for
Gore-met: Zombie Chef from Hell
.”

Lon didn't laugh. Horror isn't as appealing when it's happening in your own life.

Though it was somewhat comforting to listen to Jupe's account of his day as we drove from La Sirena Junior High to their place, it wasn't enough to stop my mind from wandering
to Dare's request. Lon's either, I guess, because he kept glancing at me while Jupe spiritedly yammered away from the backseat.

It took us fifteen minutes to reach the ocean cliffs at the edge of La Sirena where they lived, another five to climb the winding road up the mountain. Towering redwoods, pines, and cypress trees blocked out the October sun until we ascended to the very top. Lon owned ten acres of prime Big Sur coastal land: part hilly forest, part clifftop beauty, and a short stretch of rocky beach about a quarter of a mile drop below it all. Amanda, in full-blown gossip mode, once told me that it was some of the most expensive real estate in the country. All I knew was that it was lush and beautiful and private, and that I'd spent so much time there recently, it was starting to feel like home.

The house stood in a cleared section of land overlooking the blue Pacific, a blocky modern home with long horizontal lines, stackstone walls, and enormous plate-glass windows. Expensive and stylish, but not showy. I liked the way the stone and wood made it seem as if it was an organic part of the land.

I also liked the acre-sized ring of stones that we crossed to get there—Lon's house ward, the same one that he'd helped me build around my house, strengthened with strong protective magick. It kept out imps, potential robbers, and any other miscellaneous intruders. Most people intending harm wouldn't be able to cross the ward. Anyone strong enough to manage it would be dropped to their knees by a debilitating, high-pitched noise, and we'd be alerted.

As the car's tires crunched over the circular gravel driveway in front of Lon's house, I spotted two figures with aqua halos standing together at the front doors. Mr. and Mrs.
Holiday lived in a small house at the edge of Lon's seaside property. When his parents died nine years ago—just before his divorce—he hired them full-time to help take care of Jupe and tend to the house and land.

I was a little shocked the first time I met them. “Mr.” and “Mrs.” were, in actuality, two women in their late sixties. They'd been together for forty years and married in the Netherlands before it was legal in the States. Jupe was the one responsible for nicknaming them Mr. and Mrs. when he was younger. They found it endearing, so it stuck.

“Oh, damn,” Mrs. Holiday called out to Jupe as we exited the SUV. “I was hoping you'd been kidnapped again. Then I could set fire to your room and be done with cleaning it.”

“Dream on, woman.”

“Jupe,” Lon complained crossly.

“Dream on, old lady,” Jupe amended with a teasing smile.

Mrs. Holiday tried to swat at him, but missed when a dog barreled from behind her and lunged for Jupe. Foxglove was a sleek chocolate Lab with a purple collar, and she spent half her time patrolling the clifftop property, the other half trailing Jupe.

“Managed to survive the school day, Jupiter?” Mr. Holiday inspected Jupe's face while her partner reached for his backpack. They sported similar short, silvery hairdos and looked a bit like Martha Stewart circa 1995, dressed in khakis and billowing, long-sleeved shirts with the collars extended.

“Where's Mr. Piggy?” Jupe asked as Foxglove gave him one last lick on the cheek.

“Probably burrowed inside the garbage dump you call a dirty clothes pile,” Mr. Holiday said.

I glared at Jupe. “He's loose?” The last time Jupe let my hedgehog roam free in their house, Lon stepped on a shed quill with his bare feet. He was not happy.

“I closed him up in his crate before school, I swear!” Jupe's eyes darted between me and Mr. Holiday.

“He must've picked the lock with his tiny claws,” Mr. Holiday suggested dryly.

“I don't think he's gone far,” Mrs. Holiday added. “He seems to enjoy the smell of your soiled underwear, and God knows there are plenty of pairs scattered around your bed.”

“God, Mrs. Holiday!” Jupe snatched the backpack out of her hand. “Do you enjoy embarrassing me?”

“I live for it, darling,” she answered, gripping the sides of his face long enough to plant a kiss on his nose before he squirmed away and ran inside.

Mr. Holiday waited until he was out of earshot, then turned to Lon. “Anything we should know about your visit to Mr. Dare?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and kicked a chunk of gravel. “Both of the kids taken were Hellfire.”

Mr. and Mrs. Holiday murmured in surprise. They knew about the Hellfire Club. They weren't members themselves, and I don't think they quite knew everything that went on during their monthly bacchanales inside the Hellfire caves, but they knew about Lon's transmutation ability.

“Do you remember a Hellfire member named Jesse Bishop?” Lon asked. “He disappeared after the kids were taken thirty years ago.”

Mr. Holiday thought for a moment. “Doesn't ring a bell.”

“For me, either,” her partner agreed. “Why?”

“Dare wants Cady and me to find out if he's still alive—wants us to track him down, but didn't give us much to go on.”

Much? Try anything. Dare's box was full of useless paperwork.

“Well,” Mr. Holiday said, “if the man was a Hellfire
member, you might try looking through your father's things. Your mother always complained that he could fill a warehouse with all the garbage he hoarded.”

Lon grunted. “That's not a bad idea.”

Jupe's muffled voice called from within the house. It sounded like he said, “I found him.” I hoped that meant my hedgie hadn't been eaten by the dog.

“Where do you keep your dad's stuff?” I asked.

“In the Village. If we leave now, we'll be back before dinner.” He lifted a brow at Mr. Holiday. “Can you make sure he doesn't leave the house ward?”

“If you'd let me install that padlock on his bedroom door like I wanted, we wouldn't have to worry about the ward.”

The corners of Lon's mouth curled. “Don't tempt me.”

Lon's mother died of cancer around the time that he and his then-wife, Yvonne, were splitting up. His father died a few months later, of loneliness, Lon thought: cause of death was never determined. His parents weren't rich exactly, but they had a respectable amount of property, including the plot where Lon's house was built. They also owned a couple hundred acres of farmable land outside the city limits, which Lon sold, and his parents' home in the Village, which he didn't. The plum-colored Victorian house sat on a quiet block, snug between two other newer homes that would've dwarfed it if it weren't for the trees standing between the properties. Their extensive canopy enveloped the home, adding to the privacy that a tall iron fence provided.

Four gas-burning lamps bordered the crumbling sidewalk, and another hung near the painted front door. The fence locked behind us with a weary squeak as we headed inside.

“I keep the utilities on,” Lon said as my eyes scanned the pale light glowing through the covered first-story window. “Most of the residents in this neighborhood know it's empty, but I don't want it to look abandoned and vulnerable to prowlers.”

“You grew up in this house?”

“Yeah.”

Kind of spooky, if you asked me. Like an overgrown gingerbread cottage with lacy decorative trim around the eaves, spindly banisters, and crescent moons punched out of the black shutters—the complete opposite of Lon's modern house. Like other Victorians on the block, his childhood home fit right in with the fairy-tale vibe of the Village, but the fact that it was empty gave me the creeps. When we stepped inside, the dry, dusty smell that permeated the walls didn't help, nor did the creaking wood floorboards.

Most of the furniture had been donated to charity, and what little that remained was covered in sheets. I sneezed several times as we headed up three flights of stairs to a locked attic door.

He clicked on a bare bulb that hung from the rafters. I looked around. It wasn't a finished attic. A ten-by-twenty strip of plywood had been hammered down over ceiling joists and exposed pink insulation, creating a runway of sorts leading away from the stairs. Boxes and wooden crates lined both sides.

“Over here,” Lon instructed, leading me to a separate stack of boxes. We sat on the plywood walkway and sifted though several boxes of paperwork, mostly photos and old Hellfire bulletins. The esoteric organization I grew up in, Ekklesia Eleusia, more commonly known in the occult community as E∴E∴, printed up bulletins that were passed out
during classes and meet-and-greets. They mostly advertised things like equinox energy raisings, rituals for members moving up a grade in the order, and the monthly performance of something called the Sophic Mass: think Catholic mass with a naked priestess on the alter while a quasisexual magical play is being reenacted. It's more pompous and less interesting than it sounds. Drinking wine and gagging on a dry homemade wafer while staring at untrimmed pubic hair and sagging breasts isn't exactly my idea of holy—and you don't even want to know what's in the wafer.

The Hellfire bulletins, however, were a thousand times more amusing. I thumbed through a colorful stack of them from the 1970s and '80s. They featured inventive Masonic-like symbols, weird drug-fueled poetry, interpretive cartoons of demons in silly Kama Sutra positions, and local restaurant reviews based on the sexual attractiveness of their servers. I noted that the chain fondue restaurant in the Village rated only two smiling penises, but the Alps Fondue Chalet inside Brentano Gardens got an enthusiastic five. That was an awful lot of proverbial dick—we were
so
going to eat there.

While leafing through one of the old bulletins, a small picture slipped from the pages. It was a group photo of three men and four children. Three smudged names were written on the back: Dare, Merrimoth, Butler. I flipped it over and recognized Dare and a teenager who clearly was his son, Mark. Standing beside him was Lon's dad, Jonathan Butler. Lon definitely favored his father in the broad build of his shoulders and the way his eyes were eternally creased into slits. And speak of the devil . . . Jonathan had his arm around a wickedly attractive teenager whose light brown hair fell halfway down his back. He was skinny and long, his arms tight with sinewy, lean muscle. No trace of facial hair. A Black
Sabbath
Heaven and Hell
T-shirt clung to his torso. He scowled at the camera like he was trying to break it. A total badass.

“
Lo-o-on
,” I purred, biting my bottom lip as I flipped the photo around in my fingers to show him.

He tried to take it away from me, but I wouldn't let him have it.

“You were all kinds of adorable,” I said.

He grunted.

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen, I think.”

“Fifteen?” I repeated in disbelief, turning the photo back around to inspect it. “Were you still a virgin at that point?”

“Mostly.” A playful smile tugged up one side his mouth.

“Man oh man, my fifteen-year-old self would have been all over that.”