Summoning Trouble, page 3
“Ah, are there lots of magical artifacts?” I asked.
“Yes.” Magda frowned. “The vault at the AESPCA has been enlarged multiple times, and Remiel has his own vault. I know a few others that have them, too.”
“Okay, so if my father and uncle steal this statue, will we get into trouble?” I asked.
“It is unlikely anyone not at this kitchen table right this second will know about it...” Magda pursed her lips and frowned. “I take that back, if Remiel and Raphael decide to steal that statue, I don’t think they’ll let you know. I’ll only know if they decide to turn it over to the AESPCA and that is equally unlikely.”
“Why wouldn’t they turn it over to the AESPCA?” I asked.
“Because as secure as the vault is, we’ve had a few things go missing and re-enter circulation among the general population,” Magda said. “Whereas, if it goes into Remiel’s vault, it will never come out again.”
“Why not just break into Remiel’s and steal them?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s been tried once. The culprit turned into a pig with green skin. No one at the AESPCA could undo the magic and it took more than a century for the spell to wear off, during which time everyone knew why he’d been turned into a green pig and even once he was returned to regular form, everyone still knew. The pig part wore off before the green skin.”
“How did my uncle pull that off?” I asked.
“No one really knows. But you once asked why Balthazar Leopold hated you and your family, and there’s your answer. Remiel turned him into a green pig for a hundred years and then just green for another hundred.”
“Holy fuck,” I whispered, as the door opened, and Jerome came into the house.
“Walter and Megan told me to tell you hello and said if we needed help cleaning the office to let them know,” Jerome said, coming into the kitchen. “They also excused Tara for being about twenty minutes past curfew, since she was at the office with all of us.”
“Good, I figured they would if you told them about the break-in.” I nodded. “Do you want a cup of coffee?” I asked, motioning toward the demon, who was now cleaning my kitchen while eating the leftover pizza out of my fridge.
“Are you and Magda discussing the real reason for the break-in?” Jerome asked, as he walked toward the coffee maker.
“The real reason?” I questioned, and Magda turned in her seat to look at him.
“Come on, you can’t honestly believe they broke in to steal our files?” Jerome said, his voice giving a little crack on the last word. He was well into puberty, and sometimes his voice broke, which was terribly funny, because otherwise it tended to be deep.
“What do you think they broke in to take?” Magda asked.
“It has to be the grimoires. The angels have thousands of years of spells in theirs and while they are in ancient angelic script, there are ways to translate it,” Jerome said. “Also, I don’t think the people that broke in had a lot of their own magic. All the traces in the office were potion-based, even the hellfire.” Jerome could see the traces of energy left by the magic.
“There isn’t a potion to make hellfire,” Magda said.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Jerome said. “It would require a great deal of magical research, but there is nothing, on the planet or off, that can’t be mastered with a potion. Granted, it might not be as strong as regular hellfire, but I’m sure there’s a way to make a potion that will create hellfire.”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly.
“I think it’s possible. I’ve not tried to make a potion myself for it, but I can’t imagine it couldn’t be done,” Jerome said as he sat down with a cup of coffee and a plate with two chocolate donuts on it.
“Where did the donuts come from?” I asked. Jerome gestured toward the kitchen with one of them. I turned in my seat, and sure enough there was a bag of small chocolate donuts on the counter.
“They’ve been in the cabinet all day, I grabbed them last night on my way home from school.” Glees, the accidentally-summoned demon, had a donut in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other. After a moment, Glees tossed the remainder of the donut into his mouth and got out a plate. He arranged the small donuts on it and brought it over to the table.
“Do you have anything you want me to do?” Glees asked.
“Could you take Angel for a walk?” I asked it.
“There’s a few more slices of pizza. If I take Angel for a walk, can I have the rest of the pizza?”
“Yes,” I told it. Honestly, I would have given it the pizza even if it hadn’t taken Angel for a walk, but I might as well get something out of it being here and eating my food.
“Have you actually enslaved the Demonation?” Magda asked.
“No,” Glees answered for me. “But when she accidentally summons us, she’ll let us hang around for a while and feed us, so it only seems proper to give her something in return, even if it’s just doing a few chores.”
“That’s weird,” Magda said. I nodded in agreement.
“Speaking of weird, someone attempted a mass summoning recently,” Glees said. “It didn’t work, they didn’t pull through any demons, but they tried.”
“Huh” I frowned and took a donut from the plate. None of us asked for a more specific time frame than recently, it would have been an exercise in futility. Time didn’t work the same in the Stygian as it did on Earth, and demons really didn’t keep track of it anyway. Recently could mean in the last year or the last two hours to a demon.
“Huh, indeed.” Magda also took a donut and frowned. “You don’t have any mass summoning spells in your grimoire, do you?” Magda asked me.
“No. I mostly summon by accident and don’t have a single summoning spell in it, it’s mostly spells of exorcism or everyday magic stuff,” I told her.
“What about yours?” Magda asked Jerome.
“No need. Like Soleil, summoning is easy for me, I don’t require a spell,” he answered, taking another donut. “What exactly would be the point of a mass summoning anyway?”
“I’ve only seen it happen once and it was done as a distraction,” I said thinking of the demonically possessed zombies in the mall a handful of years ago.
“In the 1950s, a mass summoning was done by some crackpots who believed aliens were being held at Roswell Army Airfield. They summoned a dozen or more demons to take over the base so they could free the aliens,” Magda said.
“Did they succeed?” I asked.
“They succeeded in overrunning the army base, but they failed to find any aliens.” Magda grinned. “There was another one in 1864; the point of that summoning was to rob a train carrying gold.”
“The one I was called in to deal with was covering for a bank robbery,” I said.
“I’ll put the investigators on alert that a mass summoning was attempted but failed,” Magda said.
“Probably a good idea,” I agreed. It was nearly two in the morning, so I told Magda she was welcome to stay in the spare room, but I needed to go to bed. The offer was real, but I knew she wouldn’t take it. Magda travelled via portal everywhere, and it would take her less than thirty seconds to get back to her house. It took Magda about a minute to make her decision, a portal opened in my living room, and she stepped through it into her house. Jerome frowned at me.
“What?” I asked him after he spent two solid minutes staring at me with the frown plastered on his face.
“Someone attempted a mass demonic summoning that failed, our offices were broken into, and their target seemed to be either our files or our grimoires. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
“I don’t disagree,” I said, rubbing a hand down my face as if I could wipe the day away.
“I’m just a little unsure about why they took all the files.”
“Because if they had only stolen the files of people I’ve done exorcisms on, it would be obvious what the target is,” I answered.
“Hell,” Jerome said quietly.
“My sentiments exactly,” I said. “I’m going to bed; it’s been a very long day.” It was easier to cause possession in people who had already been possessed before. With this new piece of information supplied by Glees, I felt the stolen grimoires were a red herring and the files were the real and only target. Now all we needed to do was figure out why they needed a distraction. Also, given their first attempt at a mass summoning had failed, I wondered if they would do a test run, now that they had my grimoire. It was true that I didn’t have any summoning spells in the book, but I did have notes on summoning in it. I wasn’t sure how much help my notes would be, but I suspected they were more valuable than I realized. “One last question, could a mass summoning potion be created?”
“Probably but getting it into people all at once could be a problem. I suspect administration is the bigger obstacle.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I think you’d have to individually dose everyone to prevent a mass summoning in a single person.”
“So, if it was put in the air, you don’t think it would work as planned?” I asked.
“No, because some people would breathe in more potion than others. Shallow breathers may not get enough to summon even one demon, while deep breathers would inhale enough to allow multiple demons to enter a solitary person. I believe there would be a fine line between inhaling too much and too little. Also, the speed would differ based on how much they breathed in, so it might not immediately cause possession, but three hours later instead. If it’s a distraction for something like a prison break or bank robbery, they’d need as much impact as possible in a small window of time.”
“I lied, I just thought of another question,” I said, stopping again and turning to look at him. “Could a regular demon summoning potion work? I mean put a few drops in person A’s coffee and a few drops in person B’s coffee, etc.?”
“No, potions don’t work like that. One demon summoning potion, drank in its entirety, would get you one demon. If person A doesn’t drink all of it, then person A doesn’t become possessed. If person A and person B split the potion, neither becomes possessed. Potions are like medication, the amount you have to consume is based on several factors, including body weight and magical abilities, and splitting a potion weakens it, making it ineffective. That goes for any potion, like if Raphael had drunk half of the invisibility potion and Remiel drank the other half, neither of them would have consumed enough to make either of them invisible. Have you never bought a potion?”
“No, I haven’t. The few potions I’ve used have been made for me specifically by either you or Janet when she was around. How do they sell potions if they are weight and magic specific?” I asked.
“I think tomorrow, I will take you potion shopping, since you don’t know,” Jerome said. “Now, do you have another question?”
“How common are demon summoning potions?” I asked.
“Rare, I’ve never seen one myself and I’ve never seen a recipe for one, even on the internet,” Jerome replied. “I know they exist, but they aren’t part of the everyday.”
“If a demon summoning potion does exist and I know it does, then it seems like a mass summoning potion should also exist.”
“Summoning a single demon, even a weak one, is complicated and difficult for the average person. A mass summoning potion would be dangerous, finicky, and even more complicated to create.”
“It’s easy to cause possession with a charm,” I pointed out.
“No, it’s easier to cause possession with a charm, but charm magic is different than potion magic. Creating a charm or cursed object is easier because it’s based on contact magic and uses the magic of the person who is wearing it to boost the magic in the charm. That is why people without magic have trouble with charms. There’s no magic to fuel the spell in the charm. If a charm is meant to protect the wearer and the wearer is without magic, the charm may not work well or for very long. Potion magic doesn’t rely on anything from the consumer, it is based solely on what’s in the potion.” I nodded at this and went to bed.
Chapter Four
Bright and terribly early the next day, I found myself in a magic store looking at potions. Jerome was with me explaining things as I looked. There were a lot of different potions legally available. Some grew hair, some colored hair permanently, and I was currently looking at one called “Bottled Lust”. The instructions said to drink it to become irresistible. I had doubts. More importantly than what the bottle was for, was that there were different sizes. The 10-milliliter bottle said for people under 125 pounds of weak magical abilities, there was an 11 ml bottle in a cubby next to it that said for people under 125 pounds of average magical abilities. The sizes went up from 10-40 ml. The 40 ml bottle was labeled for consumption by people over 300 pounds with strong magical powers. I asked Jerome about several of them, trying to map it out in my brain. My father was not over 300 pounds, but Jerome insisted my father would have to buy the 40 ml bottle to get any sort of results. The weight side was mostly for humans, the magical abilities thing was more for supernaturals. I found that confusing. To make matters worse, Jerome informed me, I would probably need the same size bottle as my father to get the desired results. Thankfully, all the bottles were marked “for single use only.” That I understood.
Nearly all the potions were about changing a person’s appearance or sex appeal level. Jerome took me to the back of the store and showed me a selection of potions that were not cosmetically based. I found these more interesting. There was a potion for temporarily understanding animal noises, a potion for levitating, another for creating a magical shadow that would move independently of the consumer, and all sorts of things. Most of them seemed fun based, like there was no practical purpose for an independently moving shadow. I picked up one that was labelled “Party in a Bottle.” The label announced that when it was consumed, the taker would become more interesting for a short time. I bought a hair color changing potion and we left.
“Most of the potions seemed glamour based,” I commented once in the car.
“Those were. This store is independently owned and has its own potion maker who is part fairy. The point is a lot of potions are forbidden magic. Some stores sell things like love potions, but they have to be very mild. Anything that removes free will from an individual, such as a love potion, is carefully regulated and not sold in legitimate stores. You’d have to find someone in need of money or without scruples to get a potion that will do more than make you appear prettier for a while. Of course, there are potions like the imagination potion, which is designed for use by children. It’s fun and doesn’t really do much except give them something from their imagination to play with for a short time. Those are readily available, but you aren’t going to walk into a store and buy a demon-summoning potion, and now you know. The other part was to show you how much effort has to go into a single potion to make it viable.”
“Why did I need to see these at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning?” I asked.
“I was hoping to introduce you to the potion maker that works here, and she normally works the wee hours of the morning and leaves shortly after the store opens.”
“I’m going to be nosy and ask how you know her.”
“She was one of my teachers at wizard school. She never once missed a day due to illness, not even when Magic Pox was going around. I’m shocked she called in sick today,” Jerome informed me. I was shocked she hadn’t caught Magic Pox. There had been an outbreak of it when Jerome was in eighth grade, and it had been bad. Jerome ended up with it twice, as did I. It had been so extreme they’d had to close the school for four days to allow staff and students time to recover as well as hire a professional cleaning team to come in and sterilize everything. Magic Pox is similar to chicken pox, but only supernaturals can get it. Also, Magic Pox has a 90 percent infection rate, no one has ever died from it, and there’s nothing available to prevent it.
“Maybe we should check on her, make sure she’s all right,” I suggested.
“Maybe,” Jerome said skeptically. I wondered if this mystery teacher would be strong enough to make a summoning potion. Teachers weren’t paid nearly enough for what they did, and frankly, neither were potion makers. Jerome had experimented with making and selling potions through a physical store as well as online. It was rare when a customer was willing to pay enough to cover the cost of the potion ingredients, let alone the time and personal magic put into it. However, Jerome was determined to pay his way in the world and didn’t like to rely on money from me or my parents. I could understand that. I’d only started accepting monetary donations from my parents after I adopted Jerome. Even as a twelve-year-old, we knew he was going to be exceptionally tall; he was already wearing a size fourteen shoe. Four years later and he was in a size 23 shoe; there had been years when he’d gone up two or three shoe sizes within months of each other. The extra-large shoe sizes adversely impacted my wallet, and I’d needed my parents to cover the cost of his shoes more than once. Not that my parents minded, they actively searched for reasons they needed to spend money on their children and grandchildren. Plus, my father wears a size 20 shoe. He understands the cost associated with Jerome’s shoes, particularly the special shoes. Jerome played baseball, soccer, and basketball. Each sport required its own shoe, on top of his everyday shoes. At any rate, potion making had not been particularly lucrative, and he exclusively made potions for Angel Investigations now. The key was illegal potions were the money makers. He’d been paid close to $200 for each invisibility potion he’d provided us, and my father had insisted on buying the ingredients as well. He’d whipped up three invisibility potions for us as a batch, which was impressive in its own right, since by the sounds of it, batch potions were not the norm.
“Okay, so, I just had a thought, when you made the invisibility potions for us, you made three of them in a batch. But based on what you’ve said the last twelve hours, that’s unusual,” I said.
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