Summoning Trouble, page 24
Janet collapsed after the wendigo left. She had crawled a few feet away and was now vomiting into the grass. I didn’t know if she’d swallowed the chunk of Kabal’s arm or not, it seemed probable since wendigos caused their victims to consume human flesh after being possessed for a while. I walked over and knelt down next to her, rubbing her back.
“I have to go fix my cousin’s soul if I can, and I need to do a mass exorcism at the possession ward. I’m going to have Gabriel and Raphael take you back to my house. I’ll make sure Penelope is there, somehow, and when I get home, we’re going to talk,” I said softly to her. “However, we don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want. I don’t want you to feel obligated to tell us every detail about what has happened to you this last year, but an overview would be helpful. I know my neighbor mostly helps traumatized children, but she might be willing to come talk to you for a while tonight anyway.”
“Thanks,” she gasped out between retches. I patted her back again and told her that’s what friends are for, then I assured her I’d be back as soon as I could and stood. I went to Gabriel, Raphael, and my mom, who were all standing together near one of the houses.
“I’m sorry, can someone make sure Janet gets back to my house and call her sister? I don’t want her to leave. She can stay with me for a few days while she recovers from her possession. It might also be a good idea to have Camilla provide me with a list of things to avoid, because I think she’s been severally traumatized, and I don’t want to make it worse,” I said to them.
“We’re on it. You do what you need to do, leave the rest of it to us,” Raphael said. Gabriel was holding Geneva and Geneva was crying again.
“You just need to stop, if you didn’t cry when the big bad demons were holding you, you can at least pretend you like us by not crying when we hold you,” I said to her in a sing song voice. She stopped crying.
“One I can’t believe you said that and two, I can’t believe it worked,” Gabriel said.
“Me either. I’ll be home as soon as I can. Oh, can you guys take Angel too?” I asked, looked around for the hellhound and found her curled up on the ground being petted by a little girl I didn’t know. Angel loved children; I wondered if it was something to do with Leviathan.
“Yes,” Mom said. “Do you want us to take Jerome?”
“I don’t think he’ll go, so no.” I gathered Jerome and Kabal and started toward the barn. “Hey where are the girls?” I asked Helia suddenly. She stopped whatever she was doing, which to me looked like standing in place, to look me in the eyes.
“We’ll discuss it later,” she said cryptically. Well, what the fuck? I didn’t like to not know things I considered important, like where the hell my nieces currently were if my sister was here with me battling wendigos and crazies. I didn’t say anything, I stared toward the barn. One problem at a time. You do not need to compound your issues; you can worry about Aurora and Ariel after you figure out if there’s a wendigo in the fucking barn and possibly after you’ve helped your dickhead uncle to try and repair his son’s soul. Oh, shit, there was also the possession ward to deal with. Shit. I checked the time on my phone again. I occasionally thought I needed to buy a watch, but I didn’t want a smart watch that would allow me to make phone calls from my wrist. I wasn’t even sure if they made and sold regular watches anymore. Everyone I knew had smart houses and smart watches. I loved technology, but I had reservations about it at the same time. Demons and wendigos seemed like enough problems without worrying about hackers turning my stove on while I was out of the house or shutting down my fridge. Besides, knowing my luck, they’d hack something and hold it hostage until I summoned Belial or something else dreadful.
We stepped into the barn, where there were multiple cages. What the fuck. Inside one was a tall, pale figure that didn’t really look human, but didn’t look not human either. Wendigos are not pretty, not even in a ‘nature is beautiful’ sort of way. They looked more like what people imagined demons looked like than demons actually did. They didn’t have lips around their lamprey-like teeth and mouth, they didn’t have ears, they didn’t have fur, and their skin was corpse grey. They did walk upright, for the most part, on two legs, but their backs were permanently hunched, and they walked bent over. Their legs and arms were long and thin, ending in something resembling three fingered hands and feet that were sharp talons .
“We can’t just let it out,” I said.
“No, we’ll call the AESPCA, and they can come transport it,” Kabal said as I began walking around to the other cages. They all appeared empty, which was good. I couldn’t imagine what had been inside them or what they were intended for. Reading my mind, Jerome went out and got one of the people who seemed to be in the know.
“What?” the woman snarled as she came into the barn.
“What were the cages for?” Kabal asked, turning to look at her.
“Daniel didn’t tell us.” I considered that and looked at Jerome, who nodded.
“They were never filled?” I changed tactic.
“No. I think one of them was meant for you. He said once we had you, we could unleash the demons onto the population, you would keep them away from us, and The Reckoning could begin.”
“Oh,” I said. “I will probably regret this, but what is The Reckoning?”
“The great king Uther the Wise talked of a time when demons would roam the Earth again, and only the angels would be able to save the worthy. He called it The Time of The Reckoning.” I tried not to frown at her. Uther sounded like a serious nutjob. I never heard of him, which wasn’t really surprising. I never heard of a lot of historical figures, because I hadn’t cared.
“Where is the great king Uther the Wise now?” I asked. I mean realistically, if he was a supernatural, he might still be alive and maybe we could convince him to talk to these people and end their madness.
“Dead. He was too good for this world, so Asmodeus the Demon King had him killed.” I had just been told demons had evolved to become what they were now, but Asmodeus hadn’t been lying about his power relying on love, so this picture of Asmodeus killing another supernatural didn’t mesh. Although I supposed it could have been an accident or... Hm, I had considered killing the nuttier members of BEDR over the years while they were protesting my work. Perhaps it was a similar situation, and Asmodeus had just decided to go with it because he was so angry. I couldn’t imagine actually being driven to murder, but that was just because it hadn’t happened yet, not because it was impossible.
“You follow the teachings of Uther the Wise?” Kabal said, with raised eyebrows.
“Of course. You should as well.”
“I grew up with him, I’m good,” Kabal said, frowning. Okay, now I had questions for Kabal. Possibly starting with how fucking old he was, because the era of the great crazy person coming into massive amounts of power seemed to have passed long ago. “You realize he wasn’t pure angel like he claimed, right?” Kabal asked.
“He transcended his fey heritage,” the woman replied seriously. Kabal made a hmphing noise and turned to me.
“We should go just in case that,” he made a motion with his hands toward the woman. “Is contagious.”
“I concur. I don’t feel the need to catch that from anyone not related to me by blood,“ I said, making the same gesture with my hands toward the woman. This made Kabal throw back his head and laugh loudly. His entire body shook with it.
“I managed to avoid that from my family, so yeah, I don’t want to catch it from someone not blood related to me,” Kabal said as he wiped a tear away from his eye.
“I feel like you and I should have a long talk after all this is over,” I said to him.
“I agree,” Kabal said and the three of us, Kabal, Jerome, and I, walked out of the barn, leaving the woman with the caged wendigo. It would be a while before the wendigo could take possession of another person, so I wasn’t worried about that.
“Uriel, do you know where your son is right now?” I asked, enjoying the warm night air. The moon was already close to setting, and while I knew the time, it seemed to be setting earlier than normal tonight. Of course, I wasn’t a shifter, so I didn’t actually track the moon phases or its rising and setting. I did look up at it; it was the week of the full moon. I wondered if Camilla would even be home tonight. Having two teenaged werewolves, the moon might be close enough to full that she and Bill had to take the kids out. Most people think shifters only change the one night of the month when the moon is full but living next to a shifter family has taught me differently. Bill and Camilla are old enough that during the waxing and waning of the moon they don’t have to shift unless they just want to, but their kids shifted every night for approximately seven days.
“He’s probably at work,” Uriel said. “I was so proud of him when he got the job.”
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“He’s an archivist with the AESPCA.”
“Ah, so do you know anything about Uther the Wise and his theory of The Reckoning?” I asked my uncle, and everyone turned to stare at me. Kabal put his hand on my shoulder. “Well, okay, so everyone but me knows about it.”
“They might be staring at you because you said that in front of me,” Kabal said, and to my shock he leaned in and gave me a hug. “However, your naivete and lack of knowing is one of the things I love about you. Also, you don’t judge even when you’re given the wisdom you are lacking.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll discuss my brother when we can sit down with a bottle of good alcohol and maybe some strong coffee after you have wrapped up all of this mess,” Kabal said.
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
“You’re Kabal the Twin?” one of the men asked.
“Well, that’s not awkward. Go away. There’s no such thing as The Reckoning,” I said.
“There nearly was,” Kabal whispered to me. “Thankfully, I didn’t lose my mind like the rest of my family.”
“Yep, definitely sounds like a conversation that will go better with alcohol,” I whispered back. That earned me a huge grin from Kabal. “Uriel, let’s go find your son.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
As predicted, Jerome refused to leave my side while I went with Uriel to find my cousin. So did Remiel, which was perhaps also not unexpected—he had seemed really upset with me for getting my throat cut. Magda was nice enough to go with us as well, and she opened a portal directly into the AESPCA, predictably setting off a ton of alarms. She told us to just go, and she’d deal with security and the alarms. Uriel, Remiel, Jerome, and I set off for the archives. Working in the archives gave my cousin access to a lot of information that he perhaps shouldn’t have had.
“How long has he been working here?” I asked.
“About four years,” Uriel said. “I helped him get the job. I was hoping it would give him a sense of accomplishment, especially the part where he was making his own money.”
“I think that has to be done when they are children, or it doesn’t take,” I said.
“Yeah...” Uriel said and sounded sad. “After our first child, Iago, decided to die, we vowed to do everything we could to prevent another child from losing the will to live,” he told me, sounding even sadder.
“I didn’t know you had a child that died,” I admitted. “I am sorry. If something happened to Jerome or one of my nieces...” I shook my head.
“Iago was a very gifted seer, and the things he saw weighed on him.”
“Even as a child I can remember him telling me some things were unavoidable. He’d seen all the ways in which changes could be made, but they all ended the same way,” Remiel said softly.
“Yes,” Uriel said. “He would tell us the same thing. Eventually, he just couldn’t handle it anymore. Of course, Zadkiel and Jophiel were gone by then, so we had some experience with death in our family, but when it’s your own child, nothing prepares you for that. We tried very hard to avoid having more children after that, especially another archangel. I was never angry with you for being an archangel, Soleil, I was afraid for you and your parents. Most of the second generation of archangels have all lost the will to live. I know you’re too young to know them, but you’ve had seven archangel cousins die before now. So, when you were born and you were an archangel and then Leviathan and Lucifer had given you even more power, I became fearful, and the fear made me angry.”
“And you were a little jealous,” Remiel said. “I saw your face when Soleil told you why she’d been chosen to accept the gift.”
“I admit I was a little, because Emmelda, who was born just a few years before Soleil, did not have archangel powers beyond what the others would have given her,” Uriel said. “But after hearing their reasoning, it makes sense. After seeing Hecate talk to you and Leviathan today, and all of you forgiving each other, it didn’t just make logical sense, it felt right.”
“Why do you teach angelic superiority?” I asked. “I have wondered about that my entire life.”
“It was in response to an angel named Dragonislav, or the Dragon’s son. He was a seraph; he and Francesca were a couple for about two centuries. Francesca was just a regular angel, wingless without much power and no special powers. Dragonislav was emotionally abusive and physically abusive toward her. He told her she would be nothing without him; she wasn’t even a seraph, let alone like her powerful daddy and uncles or her dead brother. He battered that thought into her head day after day after damn day. We tried so hard to get her to leave him, but she was an adult and she loved him. Eventually he convinced her the only way she would ever contribute to this world was if she helped him with his science experiments. He told her she was smart enough to be a lab rat, but not smart enough to work in the lab. Dragonislav had an eye for the ladies, possibly not always consensual either. Francesca had a good friend named Meredith; Meredith was descended from a long line of battle fey, and Dragonislav decided he would have Meredith and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Not even poor Meredith. Meredith became pregnant and gave birth to twins, but unfortunately, she had been damaged mentally and physically by Dragonislav and she died within a few months of their birth. Dragonislav insisted Francesca raise his sons, but Meredith’s death had made her realize she couldn’t stay with him anymore. She fled him one night and came back home. However, Francesca was every bit as damaged as Meredith had been. She may have been raped repeatedly like Meredith; I don’t know. She would never talk about her time with him. We worried she too would give up and die, just as Iago had. My wife and I came up with the solution that if we could make Francesca see her own worth, her own value, she might be saved. It worked but required us to denigrate Dragonislav and others like him. When I felt Francesca was finally doing better, Dragonislav came back into her life with his two small sons, just four years old. She immediately went back to him for the sake of those boys, and he immediately began tearing her down again. After a few years of this, we decided the world would be better off without Dragonislav, and three of us made it happen,” Uriel said as we came up to the door of the archive. “Balthazar took over for Dragonislav, which is how he and Francesca ended up together for a time.“
“The world was better off without him,” Remiel said.
For a moment, I wondered who the ‘we’ was in that story. And if the death of Kabal’s father at the hands of my uncles was an impediment to Kabal and Helia’s relationship, or if Kabal even knew. “No, not Kabal, you can’t guess ahead on this. We’ll finish it, once we finish this.” It was a natural assumption twins among supernaturals was incredibly rare, like maybe one in every ten thousand births.
We entered the archives.
My cousin was not at the desk where his supervisor said he should be. We were forced to search the archives to find him. They are massive. It’s probably the world’s largest collection of books in one place. There were millions of ancient texts dealing with everything from history to fiction to forbidden magic. There were giant papyrus scrolls mixed with regular bound books and even stone tablets. The majority of the works dealt with magic, but there were histories written by mortals and about mortals as well as the massive tomes containing magical spells, recipes, and biographies of supernaturals.
The room was round and three stories tall with a walk-around balcony on the upper floor shelves. The hallway slants down the closer you get to the archive, so I was pretty sure most of the room was below ground. The ceiling reflected the weather conditions outside, and right now it was dark and covered with more stars than one could see with the naked eye within the city limits of St. Louis or possibly even the surrounding towns. Even in Red Bud, Illinois and Angelville, Missouri, this many stars couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Light pollution was a terrible thing for star gazing.
We each took a section and began walking up and down the aisles, looking for a place he could have hidden. Remiel suddenly let out a shout and we heard a loud crash. Uriel beat me to them; Remiel had my cousin pinned to the floor, and my cousin has hitting him repeatedly in the head with a large, leatherbound book. It was sort of comical; I pulled my lips in to keep myself from smiling or laughing.
“Francis, let us help you,” Uriel said. I admit, I had only met this cousin once in my entire life and I had forgotten his name until Uriel said it.
“I don’t want your help! You betrayed us!” Francis shouted at Uriel. “You just let Francesca go to prison, you got her a shitty lawyer who did more damage to her case than help, and now you’re just letting her sit there and lose her mind.”
“You believe fracturing your soul is helping her?” Uriel asked, taking a step toward Remiel and Francis.
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