Demon Hunter 4: Bloodline

An Urban Fantasy Harem Adventure

Copyright 2021 by Michael Dalton. All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. References to real people, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

All characters depicted in this work of fiction are 18 years of age or older.

Edited by Kate Nascimento

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Cover illustration by Ksulolka

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Cover design by Moonsugar Visions

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Follow Michael at michaeldaltonbooks.com and on Twitter at @MikeDaltonBooks.

Jimmy has paid off his soul debt to Hell, but he finds himself as closely bound to the infernal bureaucracy as ever due to the inescapable legacy of his birth.

Now serving the demoness Amira, his once-mortal grandmother, Jimmy and his harem are called upon to locate a long-lost angel named Tamiel, who fell from grace with the rest of Hell but has not been seen in a millennium.

The search sends them into the dark history of the California missions and the Spanish exploration of the West Coast. Yet Tamiel’s legacy – and power – are shrouded in mystery, a mystery that may be tied up in Jimmy’s origins and those of his harem.

As the clues pile up and a dark army of spirits seems to follow their every move, Jimmy must once again decide who and what he truly serves.

Bloodline is the fourth novel in the Demon Hunter series and contains explicit adult scenes and themes of black magic and demonology.

￼

Author’s Note: I have taken a considerable amount of literary license in describing the contents of certain medieval works on demonology and magic, as well as elements of early California history. Deviations from the originals are mostly intentional.

Chapter 1

I dragged my fingers slowly over the firm flesh under my hand, turning idle circles and loops with my fingertips, back and forth, up and down. The sun beat on my face, and the gentle sound of the surf filled the air around me. I wasn’t half-asleep, but it felt like it. My attention was entirely on the oily feel of the skin under my fingers, and how it curved in a near-perfect arc as I dragged them back and forth.

As wonderful as it felt, I had to pause a moment as my arm started to get tired.

“Keep doing that,” MJ said. “It feels good.”

I looked over at her, lying face-down beside me on the big sunbed with her feet up by my shoulders. Her head rested on her crossed forearms, and her thick black-brown hair was spread across the cushion between us. My eyes drifted down to the perfect, muscular butt under my hand, and I thought about all the things I’d done to it the past few days. MJ was naked except for a little white thong. I went back to tracing my fingers around the taut fabric, going back and forth over her tight cheeks, every now and then teasing between her thighs.

“I love you,” I said quietly.

She didn’t open her eyes. “Why? And I mean besides my ass.”

“I do love your ass.” I kept playing with it.

“I know. Go on.”

“I love your strength. I love that I can always trust you to give me the straight truth about everything. No bullshit. I know what’s going on in your head because you always tell me. And I love that you’re confident enough about us to do that.”

She let out a little contented noise but didn’t say anything. A moment later, she lifted her head and pulled her hair around to the other side so she could look up at me.

“Anything else?” she asked, smiling.

“I love that I can trust you to back me up on all this stuff that’s gone on in my life.”

“Yeah, you can,” she said. “I’m part of it, Jimmy. I know that. I’m not going anywhere, even as fucking crazy as this has all gotten.”

I cupped her firm butt in my hand and closed my eyes. “Your turn.”

“Where else am I going to find a guy who can give me hour-long orgasms?”

I laughed quietly. Because she couldn’t spend the night at my condo as often as Morrigan did, and Hayley was now living with me, we’d spent a lot of time in the dream world together. Hayley knew and was fine with it, as long we didn’t get carried away.

“Do you know what Julie said to me the other morning?” she asked. Julie was her roommate, a tall blonde who was one of the strikers on the UCSD soccer team. I’d met her a few times and knew they were good friends.

“What?”

“‘I think you masturbate in your sleep.’”

I laughed again. “What did you tell her?” We’d been maintaining the fiction that I was simply her boyfriend, a guy from her hometown that she’d met over Christmas break.

“Just that I dream a lot about you. Which, yeah. Then she asked if you weren’t meeting my needs when I was awake. I told her that definitely wasn’t the problem.” She laughed.

“Okay,” I said.

She smiled up at me. “I mean it, though. You’re not like any guy I’ve ever met. You’re exciting, and don’t take this the wrong way, but being with you is scary in a way that’s a major turn-on. Never had that with any other guy, or girl.”

I went back to stroking her firm behind. “That works.”

I looked to the left, where Charlotte and Echidna lay beside each other on the other side of me. Beyond the sunbed, Katarina leaned against the glass wall at the end of the deck about ten feet away, gazing out at the ocean. Her pale blonde hair fluttered in the breeze, rising and falling across her naked back. She wore a thong much like MJ’s, except in black. For a few moments I just sat there admiring the perfection of her form – long legs, tight butt, face like a cover model. She finally noticed me staring at her and smiled quickly before looking out again.

Rocky cliffs rose around the little beach and extended out into the water, shielding most of the swells of the ocean. A few towers of rock rose in the surf further out. The sky was mostly clear except far out to sea, where dark clouds hovered on the horizon. They’d been there for a while.

Through the glass wall Katarina was leaning on, I saw Hayley down in the surf, walking through the water as it rolled gently up the sand and flowed back. Her dark red hair was wet from the ocean. She saw me watching her and turned toward the house, coming up the stairs from the sand a few moments later. The beach was completely empty, so she was topless like MJ and Katarina, wearing only a shimmering green g-string.

When she reached the top of the stairs, she stepped into the little lap pool off to the left to rinse off the saltwater. I watched her squeezing her hair dry, loving what it did to her breasts. I still missed what she used to look like, but less and less as the days went by. She resembled a shorter, slimmer Katarina now, with perfect teardrop boobs that just filled up my hands.

As Hayley stepped out of the pool, there was a muffled whimper behind me as Morrigan orgasmed again. I turned to look where she was suspended from a beam in the overhead at the edge of the house. Purple silk cords crisscrossed her body in a tight web, binding her ankles, wrists, and elbows together, lifting and squeezing her big breasts. One cord ran from her gorgeous purple-violet hair to the ring in her anal hook, then to a slip knot around her neck, then to her toes. It was just slack enough to allow her to breathe but tight enough that she could choke herself if she wanted to, as she’d been doing with every orgasm. A little orb of pink silicone protruded from between her legs, and a black mask covered her eyes.

Hayley walked over to her. She took the chain connecting Morrigan’s nipple clamps and tugged on it, making my purple-haired slave-girl swing slowly and rotate in her restraints.

“How long are you going to keep her like this?” Hayley asked.

“It’s only been a couple of hours,” I replied. “What do you say, Kitten? Want to come down?”

Morrigan shook her head and answered as best she could around the thick penis gag in her mouth. “Mm-mmm.”

I reached over and took the little remote for Morrigan’s vibrator back from MJ, who had been playing with it for the last half hour. It was one of those combination g-spot stimulator/clit sucker things. I’d had Morrigan on the lowest setting at first, but I realized when I picked it up that MJ had turned it up to the “tornado” setting, which explained why Morrigan had been orgasming every few minutes. I turned it back down. Morrigan moaned briefly in protest.

“You’ll run the battery down,” I said to MJ.

She laughed softly. “No, it won’t.”

Hayley sat at the end of the sunbed in front of me and MJ. She reached out and played with MJ’s hair as I continued playing with MJ’s butt.

“Mmm,” MJ said.

Katarina came back from the wall and lay down on the other side of MJ. She began trailing her fingers up and down MJ’s back, smiling at me.

MJ squirmed, lifting a calf and twitching her foot. “You guys are ganging up on me.”

I smacked her ass, making her laugh and roll over. She straightened out her hair behind her, off the end of the sunbed as Katarina started playing with her dark brown nipples.

I left them together and slid forward onto the deck, walking over to the wall. Hayley got up and came with me, leaning against the glass beside me. I looked out across the ocean again, toward the storm clouds in the distance. Hayley followed my gaze, then leaned her head against my shoulder. Her damp hair gave me a momentary chill.

“I love you,” she said.

I put an arm around her. “If I could bind you to me forever like I did with Katarina, I would.”

“That’s sweet.” She laughed softly. “I think.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do.” Then she sighed. “It’s still there.”

“Yeah. But we’re here.”

“I love this place. What made you think of coming here?”

“It’s been cold.”

I heard Morrigan whimpering in frustration behind us. I was feeling generous, so I turned the vibrator back up. I was rewarded with a sigh of relief and a noise that sounded like her trying to thank me around her gag.

Hayley nuzzled me. “It’s starting to feel like we’re bound already,” she said.

She was right. Between our strange link through my grandmother’s staff and a whole series of weird coincidences, it was becoming very clear that something out there wanted us together. The why of it was unclear to me, though.

I could still remember that conversation with Grandma Amy when I was seven, even though I’d forgotten it until I took Zagan’s powers.

One day you’ll meet the girl whose ancestor found that stick in the bog. You’ll need her to do something very important.

But what was that thing? I’d briefly assumed it was about Zagan, but I knew now – not that I knew exactly how I knew this, but I did – that it was something else beyond that.

The two of you will fall in love. Meeting her will save your life.

How could she have known that? I could see her predicting we would meet. Hell, she’d been fully supportive of my attending Huntington, and it wasn’t exactly a stretch to foresee that Hayley would go there too. It had the best small-school premed program on the West Coast, after all.

But falling in love?

I didn’t want to think too hard about that. Because it made me think something had done more than push us to meet.

I mean, yeah, Hayley and I did fit together like a pair of jigsaw puzzle pieces. We were attracted to exactly the same things in each other. We regularly finished each other’s sentences. We were not just tolerant of each other’s quirks and needs but actually turned on by them, which was saying something given how weird our relationship had gotten. And there was no denying that we were responsible for some of the best sex either of us had ever had.

It wasn’t that I loved Katarina, MJ, and Morrigan any less – I didn’t. It was just that everything revolved around me and Hayley being together. None of the rest of it would have happened had we not hooked up that night.

“You’re thinking about something,” she said.

I looked behind us. Katarina and MJ were now gently making out and playing with each other’s breasts. Charlotte and Echidna were lying together watching them. Morrigan seemed to be on the verge of another orgasm, because she was trying to choke herself with the cord around her neck again by bending her head forward and extending her toes. Her whole body shook for a few moments, making her sway back and forth on the rope leading up to the beam.

“That’s what you were thinking about?” Hayley asked.

“No. I was just thinking about us.”

Her face darkened. “Oh. Yeah.” She turned and looked back out to sea. “I can feel it.”

“Me too. But they won’t touch you. I won’t let them.”

She nuzzled my neck again. “I wish we could stay here forever.”

“I mean, we could. This is all mine.”

I realized Charlotte had come up beside us on the railing. She pressed herself against me.

“Have a good nap?” I asked. She just purred softly as I rubbed her head. This was one of those times I had trouble telling which part of her personality was the witch and which was the gray tabby.

“Could we come back here for spring break?” Hayley asked.

“We can come back here any time, you know that.”

Hayley pressed herself against me on the other side. I stared back at the storm clouds. They were still there. I could feel them pressing in on us.

I listened to Morrigan orgasming again, and I sensed the edge in her emotions that told me she had gotten far enough along. I shut off the vibrator and went to her. She swung slowly from her restraints, trying to catch her breath around the gag. I took her in my arms and lifted her up, taking her down from the hook in the overhang. Then I carried her back to the sunbed, laying her down next to Katarina and MJ.

I freed her from everything and cuddled up with her. I knew from experience that it would be ten or fifteen minutes before her headspace was right again. She just nestled against me as I caressed her body and played with her hair.

Katarina pressed herself against me from behind. I felt MJ reaching over her to take Morrigan’s hand.

“Are you okay?” MJ asked.

Morrigan nodded against my chest.

“I didn’t overdo it with the vibrator?”

“No,” Morrigan said quietly. “I love it when you help him.”

I heard MJ laughing softly. “You do, huh?”

“Yeah.”

The four of us lay together for a while as I watched the ocean. Hayley was still with Charlotte against the wall. Echidna moved around us and curled up on the other side of Morrigan.

I’d resisted them as long as I could, but it was getting tiring.

I looked up, across the sea. The clouds were closer.

“Master?” Charlotte asked.

“Yeah. It’s time to wake up.”

￼

Katarina was already in the kitchen making coffee when I got up. She handed me a mug, and we went out to sit on the balcony. Charlotte came with us and hopped up into a chair in the corner where the sun was coming in. It was a clear spring morning in Santo Domingo, and I sat there looking out across campus.

“Sleeping again is so strange,” Katarina said. “Yet our dreams are like nothing I remember as a mortal girl.”

“I doubt they would be, under the circumstances.”

She reached over to rub my arm. “I could stay in our dream world forever. It feels the same as when we are making love. No tension in our bond at all.”

I nodded. “Yeah, it does.”

Katarina smiled and squeezed my hand. After five months of being with her when she was unable to return the love I had for her, the past several weeks had felt like pulling out a big splinter that had been buried in my thumb. I knew Hayley, MJ, and Morrigan loved me, because I could see it in their eyes and in how they behaved with me. But I could feel everything Katarina felt through our bond, every little flash and flutter in her heart. Making love with her now was enough to make me dizzy – it was like a feedback loop of emotions. It was almost too much at times, and I knew she felt the same way.

Hayley emerged with her coffee and sat in my lap. I put my arms around her.

“It’s getting worse,” she said.

I hugged her. “I know.”

She nuzzled against my neck. “These dreams, Jimmy, they don’t even feel like dreams anymore. The first time you pulled me in, back over Christmas at my folks’, it felt like a dream, a really vivid dream, but still a dream. This one felt like we were really there. I felt the water and the sun and everything, just like we were actually on that beach.”

“I agree,” Katarina said. “Your powers in the dream world are beyond anything I could have imagined before now.”

My phone buzzed as a message came in. It was MJ in our group chat.

Jesus Jimmy what the hell was that?

You wanted a dream on the beach babe

That felt like so much more

Morrigan came in: Seriously

Fuck

You okay, kitten?

I’m good master

I love all the stuff we can do there

I love how there are no limits

But still

MJ: Yeah

Waking up just now was really fucking weird

Morrigan: Definitely

It felt like flipping from one world to this one

I might have overdone things guys

Sorry

MJ: Were you trying to?

Not really

Just went in there like I always do

tbh I don’t really think about it

Hayley had been following the chat on her phone. “Something is making these dreams more real,” she said.

“Honestly, I don’t even know what I’m doing,” I said.

Morrigan: We’re still meeting Volach and Morax today, right?

I kind of lost track of things in there

Yeah at 10

The cheerleader place again

He said they have a good brunch

MJ: lol yeah I’m sure that’s why

Why don’t we get there a bit early?

We need to talk about some things

MJ: k

Morrigan: for sure yeah

See you guys in a bit

Chapter 2

When Hayley, Katarina, and I arrived at the cheerleader place for brunch, Morrigan had already walked over from campus and was now waiting for us out front. She had on a black plaid schoolgirl skirt with one of the corsets she’d gotten from Adriana. Echidna was wrapped around her arm as she usually was.

I gave her a quick hug and kiss, cupping her butt in my hand to check what was under the skirt. I felt nothing but the garter straps for her fishnet stockings. She laughed against my neck, then turned to hug Hayley and Katarina.

“I know the rules, Master,” she said softly to me, “but I love that you check on me.”

“Trust but verify,” I said.

“What would you do if you ever caught her wearing panties, Jimmy?” Katarina asked.

“I’m a good kitten who does what she’s told,” Morrigan said, grinning. “He won’t.”

“He spanks you whether you break the rules or not,” Hayley said.

“Exactly.”

The hostess offered to seat us, but I wanted to wait for MJ. She pulled up in her car a couple of minutes later as we were waiting in the lobby.

I hugged her quickly. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded. “It was kind of a shock when I woke up, like I’d blacked out or something. But I’ll live.”

The hostess showed us to a big booth in the corner. As she turned and left, I let myself read her for a moment.

When I took Zagan’s powers of improvement a few weeks back, I gained the ability to take certain objects and characteristics of people I encountered and make them better. Water into wine, lead into gold, a fool into a wise man, or so Liber Officiorum Spirituum described it.

As near as I’d been able to determine, I could – theoretically, anyway – improve anything about anyone, but these improvements were tied up with the things they wanted in themselves.

In other words, while I might see something as an improvement, if the other person didn’t see it that way or want it, I couldn’t do anything with them. Conversely, if they did want something while I didn’t see the difference, my impression didn’t matter. That was why I was able to enlarge Hayley’s boobs even though I had loved them just the way they were, because she felt they were too small. And I’d come to realize that my inability to improve MJ’s soccer playing wasn’t because she was objectively very talented. It was because she knew that, and while she also knew she still had room to grow as a player, she didn’t want to do it via magic. It cut too sharply against all the work she’d done to get where she was now.

The power also came with the ability to see and analyze all the things in people that I could improve. That might sound interesting, but it was a double-edged sword. It gave me insights about random people I often wished I hadn’t learned, so I had to keep a tight rein over it.

But now and then, my curiosity got the better of me, as it just had with the hostess.

Like a lot of the staff here, I sensed that she was a student. Maybe Huntington, maybe one of the other schools nearby. She wanted bigger boobs and a smaller butt, but I left those alone. But I also sensed that she was struggling in her math classes, and this was a source of stress for her. I couldn’t quite tell why, but it didn’t matter. She just didn’t have much of a talent for math.

As someone who’d never had much trouble with that sort of thing, I felt sorry enough for her that I fixed it. It took only a moment. While she wasn’t Stephen Hawking now, her problems with math were over.

I’d done this sort of thing a few times since coming back from Zagan’s Rock. I told myself it didn’t really matter. If it made people happier in their lives, what was the harm?

It was nine-fifty. Volach and Morax were always exactly on time, so we had a few minutes to talk. After the waitress came around and left with our coffee orders, I looked at the four of them.

“I wish I knew what to tell you here,” I said. “These dreams all feel the same to me. The first couple of times with Charlotte, they felt like dreams, but since I found out what I was, and especially since I started pulling you guys in there, it feels as real as sitting here right now.”

“That’s exactly it,” MJ said. “That first dream of ours, I woke up feeling like it was dream. It was really fucking vivid, yeah, but when I woke up, I knew it was a dream. It wasn’t like this.”

Morrigan nodded. “It was like I blinked my eyes, and I went from lying with you on that bed to being alone in mine. It was really disorienting.”

“There’s a reason,” Hayley said. “And I don’t think it’s simply Jimmy getting better at this.”

“The spirits?” I asked.

“They want us to be in there.”

“Why?” Katarina asked.

I sighed. “They want something from us. I don’t know what it is.”

“You’ve been able to hold them off, though,” MJ said.

“Yeah. They can’t get in. They’re trying, but I’m strong enough to keep them out. I just can’t tell what they’re trying to do. The one time I let them in . . .” I looked over at Hayley.

“Yeah,” Morrigan said.

She put her hand on Hayley’s. They exchanged a glance, then Morrigan looked down at Echidna on her arm.

“I meant to tell you, though,” she went on, “I was talking to Echidna about this stuff the other night. She said, ‘Don’t assume the spirits are evil. Many of them are completely beyond those concerns.’”

“Huh,” I said. I looked at Katarina.

“She is correct,” my succubus said. “Not all the spirits serve either bureaucracy. There are some that are older than that.”

“Which doesn’t make them benign,” I said. “It just means we don’t know what their motivations are.”

“You should talk to her about it,” Morrigan said. “You could do it right now, before they get here.”

I’d deliberately avoided the issue in the beach house, just wanting some time alone away from everything with my coven. They hadn’t pushed it either.

The other three didn’t object, and I knew I could do this quickly. So I closed my eyes and went to the castle. The girls needed to be asleep to join me, but I’d discovered a while back that the familiars didn’t. I suspected that was because they spent part of their existence in the spirit world already, and I could just pull them to me once I was inside.

I went to the platform at the top of the castle, the one I’d created for Hayley’s dream in the middle of all the towers. In the center of it was a great magic circle fifty feet across. The storm that had once been here was gone, and the sky was now bright and clear. The spirits drove the storm, and I’d sent all of them out as far away as I could. They still clustered on the horizon, wanting back in. I felt them beseeching me for entry, pleading with me, even begging, promising to serve all my desires if only I would let them do it.

I ignored them. For now.

Far below me in one direction was the sea and the little beach I made for our most recent dream. In the other direction was the devastated landscape Hayley and I had destroyed with our stone army. The stone creatures were still out there, though they were now frozen and inanimate, the spirits that gave them a semblance of life driven out and gone.

I drew Echidna in. She appeared in the center of the circle wearing a lacy black baby-doll dress.

Echidna was slim and petite, with a body much like Hayley’s before I improved her breasts, though she was even shorter and slimmer than my red-headed girlfriend. Her face was fine-featured, almost elfin. She had olive skin, green eyes, and black hair that reached to her butt. She usually followed Morrigan’s goth style of dressing, if not quite to the same degree.

She smiled slyly. “Hello, Master.”

Echidna had been a slave as a mortal, an actual slave girl who was born into bondage in Medieval Egypt and sold to a wizard in her teens. She’d served him in his bed but also became his apprentice and then a full-fledged witch as she grew into adulthood. While she certainly didn’t romanticize her life in enslavement, she’d happily joined Morrigan in her submission to me, because as Morrigan’s familiar she fully understood the dimensions of our relationship.

“Tell me what you were talking to Morrigan about,” I said. “The other spirits.”

“You must resist defining them in the Christian or Jewish terms you are envisioning. Many serve the infernal and celestial bureaucracies, but many more do not.”

“Were you Muslim?”

She shook her head. “I was not. My parents were Zoroastrian. Our people were persecuted by the Islamic authorities in the Caliphate, which was how my family came to be enslaved. But my master did not follow any particular faith at all. He found them tiresome and distracting. I don’t suppose you know anything about Mazdayasna? That is the name of the faith for those who follow it.”

“Not really,” I said.

“We believed there is one supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, who is the source of all truth and goodness, Asha, and against this is falsehood and evil, Druj. There are lesser spirits who serve both. But my master showed me the narrowness of this. He claimed that the spirits care little for what people worship. He showed me how many of them simply pretend to be an element of one faith or another in order to deceive mortals. When we lived in Jerusalem, he called forth spirits who claimed they would serve the Jews or the Muslims or anyone else depending on who summoned them.”

I looked past her to the horizon. “Which doesn’t explain what they want with me, or Hayley.”

She stepped over to me and turned the direction I was looking. “No. But there are so many. There must be a reason.” She leaned against my shoulder, sighing softly. “I watched my master struggle to control even one of them. Charlotte as well. Yet you have an army of them yearning to serve you.”

I put an arm around her, and she nuzzled against my chest. She fit right under my arm.

“So what are they doing in my dreams?” I asked.

“You speak of this as a dream, Master, yet look at it. You control an entire world here. Is this truly still a dream?”

I thought about that for a moment or two.

“That’s a good question,” I said. “It doesn’t feel like a dream to you, does it? I’ve talked to Charlotte about this.”

“It feels as real as anything I lived as a mortal. Truly, even more than real. When you use me, you give me pleasure so far beyond anything I experienced in my life.”

She sighed again. I felt a level of submission from her that was beyond what I felt from Morrigan, and I knew why. It wasn’t because of her life as a slave. It was her experience serving as a familiar twice. That existence came with a built-in element of servitude. So if Morrigan had submitted to me, then Echidna of course did so as well. She’d made it clear by now that she would serve me as faithfully as the others. But this was the first time we’d actually been alone together.

I moved around behind her, and she leaned against my chest. I knew her attraction to me was more or less the same as Katarina’s, Charlotte’s, and Morrigan’s – it was my power as a sorcerer that drew her to me. I ran my hands up her slim body under her dress, cupping her hard little breasts and pulling on her nipples. She moaned softly, pressing her butt against my groin.

I wanted her, but I knew we were still back there in the restaurant. We’d only just emerged from that other dream, and I’d been with her and Morrigan several times during it.

“I know what you want,” I said, kissing her quickly. “But this isn’t the best time.”

“Yes, Master. I will wait.”

I opened my eyes. The four of them were looking at me. Echidna had partly uncoiled from Morrigan’s arm and slithered into my hand.

“Anything?” Hayley asked. There was a look in her eye that I recognized. She could usually tell when I’d been up to things in the dream world.

“Yeah. Let’s just talk about it afterward.” I saw Volach and Morax coming into the restaurant. The hostess tried to flirt with them as she brought them over, but as usual they ignored her.

Volach appeared to be a tall, well-built man in his late thirties wearing slacks and a crisply starched black dress shirt. Morax was a big, bull-headed guy, appearing almost like a bull with a human head. Unlike Volach’s chiseled features, every sharp edge on Morax’s body was rounded off with a layer of muscle. He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt over his jeans.

“Good morning, people,” Volach said as they sat down. He ordered an overpriced bottle of champagne from the waitress before settling into his end of the booth and looking at me. “So, before we get started, few things to cover here.”

“Is this about last month, up in Zagan’s Rock?” I asked.

He nodded slowly. “It is. We were, to put things a certain way, operating at cross-purposes for a period there, cross-purposes that could have put all of us high up on the big man’s shit list.”

“Did, actually, for a time,” Morax said.

Volach nodded again. “Under normal circumstances, I would have been more than a little displeased at this turn of events. That being said, I understand that you had Amira to answer to as well.”

“To put things a certain way,” I said.

“Indeed. And we are very far from normal circumstances now. So, I will express my appreciation for your putting in a good word for us when the big man got involved. That was a situation that could have gone south very quickly.”

“Put another way,” Morax said, “Astaroth was as pissed off as I’ve ever seen him.”

“Yes,” Volach said.

“But you’re not working for him anymore,” MJ said.

They glanced at her.

“No, we are not,” Volach replied.

“So where is Amira in the bureaucracy now?” Katarina asked.

“Little hard to say,” Morax said. “She’s still technically a duchess, and Astaroth is still a king.”

“But the big man has his eye on her,” Volach said, “and word has gotten around about your boyfriend’s, shall we say, unusual abilities. So, things are little ill-defined at the moment. Suffice to say, our situation is about where it was before, in the sense that we’re going to be your interface with the bureaucracy, just as we were.”

“Okay,” I said. The waitress arrived with the champagne and poured it for everyone, then took our orders. Volach and Morax usually got huge blood-rare steaks when we met for dinner or lunch; today they ordered the steaks plus multiple eggs and home fries.

“All right,” Volach continued when the waitress left. “On to business. I appreciate your dragging yourselves out of bed at what must be an early hour for you college students, Sugar-tits over there excepted.”

“Could I request something?” I said. “In light of the changed circumstances you referred to?”

Volach looked at me questioningly. I stared back at him.

“I would very much appreciate it,” I said slowly, “if you could speak to Katarina with a bit more respect going forward.”

For a moment or two, Volach returned my stare. I saw a flash of something very dark in his eyes, as if he wasn’t used to being spoken to like that by a mortal – which I knew he wasn’t. But I held my gaze on him, remembering what Amira had told me that day: You’re more powerful than they are now, Jimmy.

And whether Volach knew it, or sensed it, or just wasn’t interested in arguing about it, he finally looked down, lowering his head for a moment and raising his hands, palms toward me.

“If my manner of speaking previously has given offense, I apologize. Such was not my intent. She and I go back a long way, as you know, and so I address her in a somewhat familiar fashion that I appreciate may grate on your sensibilities. It won’t continue.”

“Thank you.”

I saw Katarina looking at me. She shot me a quick smile, and I saw approving looks in the other girls’ eyes. And then I wished I’d said something about it sooner.

“So what’s the business?” Hayley finally asked.

Volach looked over at Morax, who took a deep breath.

“Some threshold matters first,” Morax began. “You’re going to want to be extra discreet about this one. You’ll understand why in a minute. Also, this isn’t going to be easy, and I can’t say I understand what Amira is after here. But that’s often the case with these things, as you know. Basically, she needs you to find someone. Someone who has been missing for a very long time.”

“Another demon?” I asked. “Or a human?”

“Neither,” Volach said. “An angel. A fallen angel, to be precise.”

I glanced around at the looks of shock on the girls’ faces. Then something occurred to me.

“Aren’t fallen angels demons? I mean, Lu— You know who I mean.”

Volach nodded. “Yes, I do. Some of us got our start in the bureaucracy that way, myself included. But simply falling from grace with the celestials doesn’t automatically put you on our team. Some of those fallen angels became free agents of a sort. That’s the case here.”

“This angel’s name is Tamiel,” Morax went on. “She was around during the first fall, then disappeared for a long while. She supposedly reappeared around about the eleventh century, then dropped out of sight again.”

“So it’s been a thousand years?” I said.

“But why?” Katarina asked. “Finding Caacrinolaas was one thing. This is . . .”

“That I do not know, Su—” Volach caught himself. “I don’t know. Amira didn’t tell us.”

“Did she give you anything we can work with?” I asked.

Volach nodded. “Two things, actually, though again I know no more than what she told us. These two things are apparently based on previous efforts to find Tamiel. First, she thinks there may be some clues close to you. Second, it may be related to some of what you’ve already gotten involved in.”

There were a few moments of silence.

“Fucking shit,” MJ muttered. “Is that it? Is that really supposed to help us?”

“It’s a start,” I said. “But that’s all you’ve got?”

“I’m afraid so,” Morax said. “On the other hand, you’ve been remarkably successful at locating things no one else was able to, so I assume Amira is hoping you can manage something here.”

I nodded. I supposed he had a point there.

“As to the need for discretion he mentioned,” Volach began, “the consensus in the bureaucracy is that there is someone or something out there that really doesn’t want Tamiel found. That in turn has been a motivation to find her, since there’s an equal consensus that the only reason to hide her would be to hide something valuable, or hide something that needs to stay hidden.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“However,” he went on, “those who have openly sought Tamiel have often regretted it. Among other things, I would caution you to be very careful with your divinations. Apparently, some bad things have happened to people who just started casting spells with wanton abandon trying to find her.”

“So, asking my divination model ‘Where is Tamiel?’ may not be a good idea?” I asked.

He nodded. “I would very strongly advise that you not take such a direct approach. As I understand it, the last sorcerer to try something like that was found with a big rock in his head where his brain used to be. That is, I suspect, the reason why Amira is being so coy about this. Sometimes the mere act of giving voice to matters of this nature can interfere with resolving them.”

“I guess it doesn’t hurt to be careful,” Morrigan said.

“What is this going to pay?” Katarina asked.

I looked over at her. With my soul debt paid off, I’d frankly stopped thinking about that element.

“Sliding scale, again,” Volach said. “If you can make some meaningful progress beyond past efforts, a thousand. If you actually find Tamiel, well . . .”

“All Hell would break loose?” Hayley asked.

Volach and Morax looked at each other.

“I would prefer not to put it in those terms, Red,” Volach said. “But I think you get the idea here.”

I looked down at my hands for a few moments. We’d been given little more than this to find Liber Somnia, the book Henry Langdon had absconded with, and I still found it in less than twenty-four hours. If this took longer because I had to be more careful with the divination model, well, I had other things to concern myself with right now anyway.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll give it a shot. No promises.”

Chapter 3

The five of us regrouped at my condo to brainstorm and let brunch settle. We’d all eaten enough that we initially just flopped across the stylish-but-comfy living room set that Hayley’s mother Stephanie had helped me pick out. Katarina sat in one of the chairs and gently scratched Charlotte’s ears when she hopped into my succubus’s lap. MJ and Morrigan lay on either side of me with their heads on my legs, so I slowly played with their hair. Hayley sat at Morrigan’s end of the couch with her laptop propped on Morrigan’s feet and began reading.

“You guys have any idea why Amira wants to find this angel?” MJ asked.

“We probably shouldn’t speculate,” I said. “Giving voice to such things, and all.”

“Huh,” Hayley said after a minute or two.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, first of all, it turns out that Tamiel isn’t one of the angels in the Bible. She only appears in the Book of Enoch, which is one of the apocrypha.”

“The what?” Morrigan asked.

“One of the non-canonical books, the ones that were circulating back then, but weren’t ever adopted as part of an official scripture,” Hayley said. “There are actually three books of Enoch. It’s the first one that talks about the fallen angels, and it’s kind of weird. Apparently, there was this group of angels who were called ‘the watchers’ because they were supposed to watch over the first humans. But at some point they, I guess, decided they were tired of just watching, and went down among the humans to have sex with the women and beget children.”

“I guess you can’t blame them there,” MJ said.

Morrigan laughed. Hayley rolled her eyes and continued.

“Tamiel was one of their leaders,” she went on. “And this leads to all sorts of chaos because their children are depraved, bloodthirsty giants. According to Enoch, it’s because of this that God causes Noah’s Flood. All the giants drown, and the fallen angels are either bound away forever or just driven out of the Earth.”

“So what’s Tamiel’s story?” I asked.

“There’s not really much. It’s kind of like the entries for the demons in your grimoires. But I’m not sure what to make of this.” She looked up.

“What?” Morrigan asked.

“It says, ‘This is she who showed the children of men all the wicked smitings of spirits and demons, and the smitings of the embryo in the womb, that it may pass away, and the smitings of the soul, the bites of the serpent, and the smitings which befall through the noontide heat.’”

“‘Smitings’?” I said.

“That’s what it says. I guess you could read that different ways.”

“It’s like she invented killing, or something?” MJ asked.

“Maybe,” Hayley said.

I took Hayley’s laptop and looked at the screen. She had it open on an online version of the Book of Enoch. I saw the passage she’d found, but it wasn’t any clearer when I read it myself. I handed it back to her.

“I’ve got to do some divination here,” I said. “But what do I ask?”

Morrigan reached up and took my hand, squeezing it against her chest. “I don’t want your brain to turn to stone.”

“Yeah,” MJ said, “there’s only one part of you we need hard as a rock.” The rest of them laughed.

“I’m not going to ask where Tamiel is. But asking where to start looking ought to be safe. I’ve gotten pretty good at sensing when the spirits want me to do something, or don’t.”

“Do you trust them?” Hayley asked.

“No. But I trust them to be consistent. They want me, and us, for something. Whatever that is, I don’t see how it helps them if my brain turns into a rock.”

“Are you sure?” Morrigan asked. She squeezed my hand again.

I thought about it for a moment, trying to listen to the spirit world. The ones that yearned to serve me were still out there. I sensed no reluctance. If anything, I felt a strange sense of anticipation, like they were eagerly waiting to help me here.

I couldn’t resist pulling my hand free to caress Morrigan’s cartoon-character boobs. She let me, smiling up at me.

“I’m sure, baby girl. I don’t know where this will go, but if we’re careful, it should work.”

“Should?” Hayley asked. “Seriously, Jimmy, I don’t want your head to turn into a rock either.”

“The spirits want me to do this. I can feel it.”

“Is that really a good thing, though?” MJ asked.

“Got to start somewhere.”

There were no further objections. I got up and opened my laptop, then started the divination model. I spent about a minute focusing myself, making sure that I wasn’t asking where Tamiel was.

Something then happened that I didn’t expect. I found myself in the dream world.

I was walking through a landscape of rolling moorlands. The terrain was spotted with small streams, ponds, and clumps of trees – oak, yew, and pine.

I slowly realized I had been here before. Ahead of me was a stand of trees, at the edge of which was a spindly oak. I recognized a branch on the oak tree. It was my staff.

This was pre-historic Scotland. I was here before the branch broke free and fell into the bog.

The wind was blowing. I could see what was about to happen, but when I’d dreamed of it before, I hadn’t thought to look up.

I realized that the wind wasn’t actually wind. Something was going on in the sky above me.

Two forms were flying around each other, one dark, the other gray. After watching for a moment or two, the reality of the situation became clear: They were locked in battle. Blasts of magical energy flew back and forth between them.

The gray combatant appeared to have the upper hand, sending bolt after bolt of energy at the dark one, but the dark form kept dodging and evading the strikes. The two of them swooped through the sky, in and out of the clouds. The dark form dove toward the ground, toward where I stood. The gray form followed. There was a blast of air as they went past, and the very tip of the gray form’s robe caught the end of the branch. Either it happened so fast in the first dream that I missed it, or something then had clouded my perception.

The branch snapped free from the oak and fell into the water.

Above me, the gray form continued pursuing the dark form. I’d gotten a better look at them as they flew over me. Both were – mostly – human, the coloration I’d seen the result of the clothes they wore. One wore dark robes, the other gray. But the gray one had broad feathered wings. The dark one apparently flew by means of sorcery.

The battle continued. A bolt of energy from the gray form tore past the dark form, forcing the dark form to tumble through the sky for a moment or two. It recovered quickly, turning aside another bolt, then flew toward the gray form, gathering up a ball of lighting in its hands. The gray form wheeled above it as the dark form let the bolt fly, folding its wings and diving to avoid the blast.

But somehow the dark form steered the ball of lighting into the gray form, striking one of its folded wings. The gray form spun through the air, stunned, and the dark form pursued.

The gray form began to recover as the dark form gathered another blast of energy. But this time the ball in its hands was as dark as the darkest night, a darkness so intense that it hurt my eyes. Just as the gray form regained its equilibrium, the dark form threw the darkness with a force that seemed to slice the sky in two. It struck the gray form in the center of its chest.

I half-expected the blast of dark energy to obliterate the gray form, but nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the gray form seemed to split. Not in half – it separated into two identical forms, one pale and diaphanous, the other darker gray. The pale half spun wildly through the sky, contracting into something small and sparkling before it disappeared into the clouds and over the horizon. The dark gray half fell – limp and apparently lifeless – toward the ground.

The dark form followed the gray form. There was a splash not far away as the gray form struck the water of a small pond. The impact seemed to have changed it. When it flew past me the first time, I’d been unable to see any details about what it was. What I saw now was clearly female, with long golden hair and a woman’s body under its robes.

The dark form landed on the other side of the pond, ignoring me – if I was truly even here. I felt like I knew the dark form, but its features were not discernible. It looked down at the woman floating on her back in the water. It raised its arms, and the shores of the pond rose up, closing around the woman, swallowing her into the earth. In a moment or two, she was gone.

I blinked.

The girls were still sitting there, waiting for me. I recognized the look in Katarina’s eyes.

“Jimmy?”

I let out a long breath. “I just had a . . . something. A dream, or a vision, just now. I don’t know what it means.”

I tried to describe it. I’d previously told Hayley about the dream about my staff.

“Do you think that really happened?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Most of these visions have turned out to be accurate. Two sorcerers or whatever fighting in the sky, what would that mean?”

“Could the winged woman have been Tamiel?” MJ asked. “And that was her fall from grace?”

“Maybe. But I don’t know who the other one was, besides having that feeling I knew him.”

“Could that have been Tamiel?” MJ asked. “I mean, that sounded a lot like a smiting, what it did to the woman with the wings. What was it that book said?”

Hayley looked back at her laptop. “‘This is she who showed the children of men all the wicked smitings of spirits and demons,’” she read.

“That would fit,” Morrigan said. “Just blasting the other one out of the sky like that.”

I took a deep breath and started the divination model. It ran for a few minutes, and my brain didn’t turn to stone. Then the results came up.

TRUCK

RECORDS

BOARD

HUNTINGTON

AMIRA

JELLY

HUMMINGBIRD

MARTINA

ORANGE

RAPIER

VOODOO

STONE

KALEIDOSCOPE

ENOCH

DOOR

DREAM

SPIRITS

FLOORPLAN

SANTIAGO

GOLDEN

PLASTIC

TREADMILL

SENATE

HOLISTIC

“Huntington,” Hayley said.

“She said there could be clues nearby,” I said.

“I mean, assuming it refers to school,” Morrigan said. “But rapier, that has to refer to MJ’s thing.”

I nodded. Amira, Enoch, dream, and spirits seemed to fit too. Then I saw a sick look on MJ’s face. She was biting her lip.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I guess you guys forgot,” she said after a moment or two.

“About what?” Hayley asked.

“My name.”

I looked back at the list. It didn’t come to me right away. Then—

“Martina-Julieta,” I said. She’d told us that first day we met, and it had barely come up since then.

She nodded. “Right. No one calls me that except my mom. And, I guess, the spirits.” MJ pulled out her phone. “I need to look at something.”

The rest of us sat in silence. MJ was tapping and reading for about a minute. Then she let out a sigh. “I knew it.”

“What?” Hayley asked.

“Juan José Pérez Hernández. Remember him? The explorer whose name is on the rapier box. I did a paper on him in one of my history classes in high school, because some of my family think he was one of our ancestors. Santiago was the name of his ship.”

Hayley got a distant look in her eyes. “When did he die?”

“November 1775,” MJ said, “when they were on their way back to Mexico on his second voyage.”

“We found that rapier above the Mission San Sebastian. It was founded in early 1776.”

“Voodoo,” Katarina said.

“What?” I asked.

“When we found it, you mentioned something about the mission,” she said to Hayley. “The ‘Voodoo Room.’”

“The what?” MJ asked.

“Have any of you guys ever been there?” Hayley asked.

“Once, when I was like nine,” MJ said. The rest of us shook our heads.

“It’s not quite like the other missions,” Hayley said. “It has this creepy feel to it that’s hard to describe.”

MJ nodded. “Yeah, it is kind of strange. Especially if you’re used to what Catholic churches are usually like, there’s something about it that feels off. I remember my mom getting really creeped out. She made us leave.”

“And there’s this weird chapel they discovered in the cellar when they were doing some restorations about thirty years ago,” Hayley said. “It was sealed up for some reason. That’s the Voodoo Room. The local kids call it that to be funny, but it fits.”

“I don’t remember that,” MJ said. “But that’s the kind of thing my mother would never have let us see.”

“It’s really bizarre,” Hayley went on, “though it’s hard to explain in a way that captures how weird it is. Everything is decorated in dark tones, not like the white plaster you usually see in the missions. There are all these little statues in the walls that don’t look quite right. There’s a circle carved into the floor with a bunch of symbols around it, and knowing what I know now, I’m certain it’s a magic circle.”

“And it was founded in 1776?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

Something then hit me as well. “1776 was when they trapped Zagan in that rock,” I said. The memory of that dream came back to me. “I think I saw something in that memory of Amira’s I had. There was a man with a rapier. He seemed to be someone in charge.”

“Could that have been him?” Morrigan asked.

“He would have been dead by then,” MJ said.

“I mean . . .” Hayley said, “. . . theoretically, anyway.”

“Do we know for certain that he died?” Katarina asked.

“He died at sea,” MJ replied. “At least, that’s what they reported when the ship got back to San Blas. That was the port in Mexico that Spain was using to explore up into Alta California.”

“There might be answers in those records,” I said. “But how could we possibly look at them?”

“Records is in that list too,” Morrigan said.

Hayley raised her hand and waved quickly. “Uh, guys?”

We all looked at her.

“I think that’s where Huntington comes in. Rutherford Huntington’s wife, you know the one who designed that fountain before she went nuts, had a big collection of Spanish manuscripts and records from the mission era. It was donated to the library when he died. They’re all in Spanish, but . . .”

We looked at MJ. She inhaled slowly.

“That stuff can be a little hard to decipher. But if there’s a way we can look at it, yeah, I can read it.”

“I guess that’s where we start,” I said.

Chapter 4

We walked over to school. It was a Sunday, but the library was open. I lived on the other side of campus now, so we came up behind the library rather than crossing the main lawn from the student union. Charlotte disappeared into the bushes along the side as we went in.

The main Huntington College library was one of the first buildings to be constructed, back when the school was founded near the end of the nineteenth century. The neoclassical red-brick exterior gave way to a two-story main room topped by an arched skylight that ran the entire length of the building. The stacks were off to either side, behind more arches and columns, with desks and worktables down the center. Efforts had been made to update it with modern touches and technology, but for the most part it looked about the same as it had 125 years ago.

“What do we do here?” I asked Hayley. I’d spent most of my library time at Huntington in the new science and engineering library across campus.

She went over to the main information desk. After Hayley explained what we wanted to do, the work-study kid sitting behind it told us to go to the Archives desk on the second basement level.

We took the elevator down. The basement levels were considerably less impressive architecturally, pretty much just long rows of metal stacks going wall-to-wall. The Archives desk was back in one corner. Behind it was a section closed off behind a wire cage. A heavyset woman in her forties sat at the desk and looked up as we approached.

“What can I help you with?” she asked.

I took a deep breath, knowing this might be a long shot.

“I need to look at some of the records in the mission collection from the Huntingtons. This would be stuff from around 1775.”

She nodded. “Everything in the collection has been digitized and catalogued. You just need to go into the Archives section of the library computer system.”

I thought about that for a moment. Something told me we really needed to see the original documents. If there was really anything in there connected to Hernández or the Voodoo Room, I wasn’t confident the digitization process would have captured everything we needed to see. It wouldn’t, for example, tell me if any of the documents had something enchanted into them.

“What if I wanted to look at the originals?”

“It’s possible, but in order to access those, you need to submit a request endorsed by a member of the faculty. Was it anything in particular you wanted to see?”

“Anything connected to Juan José Pérez Hernández or the Mission San Sebastian.”

She turned to her computer and tapped in a search, then appeared to scroll through for a few moments.

“We have a number of documents connected to the mission. Just one record tagged as mentioning Hernández, though.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“The catalogue describes it as a report from his second voyage on the Santiago.”

I glanced at MJ and Hayley.

“Let me print this out for you, and you can take a look at the digital versions for now,” the librarian said. “Have you done any research in the archives before?”

“No.”

“Just get the request signed, and we can set you up. You’ll need to make an appointment to review the materials, because there’s a little bit of instruction we need to give you on handling them.” She handed me the print-out and a blank request form. “There you go.”

“Thanks,” I said.

￼

We reconvened outside.

“Who do we get to endorse this?” Morrigan asked. “I mean, since it has nothing to do with your classes.”

“That’s a good question,” I responded. Dr. Vicenza, my advisor, would want to know what I was up to here. There was no way I could see to tie this to my Chemical Engineering research, which was focused on fractional distillation, the process by which chemical mixtures like crude oil were separated out into their component parts.

“Could one of you get someone to do it?” I asked.

“I don’t have any history classes or anything like that this semester,” Morrigan replied.

“Me neither,” Hayley said.

MJ just shrugged.

“She doesn’t even go here,” Morrigan said, grinning. Hayley let out a laugh, and MJ smirked at her.

“Let me think,” I said. “There has to be something.”

Charlotte rejoined us from under a bush, and we walked around to the lawn out front. It was a gorgeous spring day, and I felt like just lying down on the grass. The girls settled in around me. There were a few other kids out there or walking around. As it was Sunday, the students were mostly coming or going to the library.

Hayley propped herself on her elbow and began scratching Charlotte’s ears. “Do you guys ever think how weird this thing we have is? Whenever I see other people together, I can’t help thinking what it was like before I met Jimmy.”

“It was really fucking boring,” Morrigan said. She lifted her arm and stroked Echidna’s head with her fingers.

“Compared to this, yeah it was,” MJ said, staring up at the sky.

Hayley laughed. “I mean, yeah, but I wasn’t looking over my shoulder at an army of evil spirits either.”

“My life was somewhat eventful,” Katarina said, provoking more laughter. “But I am grateful for having all of you in it.”

Morrigan sat up a little. “It’s definitely been—” Her voice cut off so sharply that I glanced over at her. She was staring, jaw agape, at the fountain in the center of the lawn.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There’s an enchantment on the fountain,” she said softly.

“What?” Hayley gasped.

The rest of us followed her gaze. I wasn’t wearing my ring. I didn’t like wearing it all the time because it was big and heavy and consequently often interfered with my CE labs.

“What do you see?” I asked.

“You never noticed it before?” Hayley asked.

“I have to be pretty close to things, and focusing on them,” Morrigan said. “I guess I haven’t been this close to the fountain since I got Echidna.” She took a couple of rapid breaths. “Whatever it is, it’s strong.”

We got up and walked over to it. According to school lore, the fountain was designed by Rutherford Huntington’s wife before she was shut up in an insane asylum. From a distance, it looked like a bunch of cherubs offering up a set of books to the library. But when you got closer, you realized that there was something off about the cherubs, which had bat wings instead of feathers and eyes that were strangely dark and empty.

The books, meanwhile, had titles in some language that no one had ever been able to decipher. The longstanding consensus was that someone – Mrs. Huntington or the sculptor – had just made up a fake alphabet. As a result, a traditional prank played on incoming freshmen was telling them the sculpture contained a secret code. Early every fall semester, you could often find younger students around the fountain studying the titles on the books and taking notes.

“What do you see?” I asked Morrigan again.

“Just the enchantment. I can’t make anything out of it.”

“Could there be something to those books after all?” Hayley asked.

“I don’t know,” Morrigan replied. “It all looks the same.”

We sat down on the grass just outside the circle around the fountain. Morrigan put her elbows on her knees and stared at the sculpture for a minute or two.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I see it. It’s strong. I can’t tell anything else about it.”

“You should get your ring,” MJ said to me. “See if you can tell something.”

“It’s back at the condo.”

With nothing else to do, we walked back home. On the way across the street, we passed a homeless woman standing by the streetlight on the corner, digging through her shopping cart. I realized it was the same woman who had yelled at me and Morrigan a few weeks ago.

When she saw us, she looked up at me.

“Are you the one?” she asked. “You can’t have it. You have to stop.”

I ignored her, not wanting to be yelled at again. I saw Morrigan glancing at her briefly, but the others just walked past. There were a fair number of homeless people around campus, and after a while you just learned not to engage with them.

When we got back home, I got the ring out of my dresser where I kept it and put it on. It was a heavy gold band engraved with an array of symbols all around its circumference. I knew enough now to read the engravings and identify the divination spells that had been enchanted into it. When I put it on, I saw the enchantments on my staff, which was leaning against the wall in the corner of the bedroom, as well as the familiar bond between Morrigan and Echidna.

We walked back over to campus. The homeless woman had wandered off somewhere else. When we got up to the fountain, I saw what Morrigan had seen. There was some kind of strong enchantment over the entire thing. But unlike her ability through Echidna, the ring allowed me to analyze the spell to some extent.

It was easily the most complex ward I had ever encountered, a dense weave of magical threads that slowly writhed in and around each other. It was dense enough that I could only see the outer elements. One thing I noticed immediately was the amount of iron in the spell. It flowed all through the strands of energy. But it wasn’t elemental iron – it was all magnetite, magnetic iron oxide. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew that magnetite was a component in some protection spells.

I explained what I saw to the girls.

“Huh,” Morrigan said, “I can kind of see that, now that you told me.”

“Could you take it down?” Hayley asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Magnetite will react with acids, but until we know what we’re dealing with here, I don’t think it’s a good idea to just break the ward. I mean, it could be holding something we don’t necessarily want to release, or protecting something that needs to be protected.”

“How long do you think it’s been like this?” MJ asked.

“My first guess, given what the fountain looks like, is that it was enchanted when it was built.”

“So it really could have been hiding some secret all this time?” Hayley asked. “That’s crazy.”

Morrigan reached out and ran her fingers over one of the stone books. “So maybe these words actually mean something,” she said. “If we figured this out, maybe it would tell us what to do with the ward.”

“A hundred and twenty-five years, and no one has deciphered it,” Hayley said. “Why would we be the ones to do it?”

“Maybe none of the people who tried were sorcerers?” MJ asked.

Not knowing what else to do, I took photos of all the books, just so we would have a reference.

MJ and Morrigan had come over Friday night to spend the weekend with us, and Saturday night we’d done MJ’s beach dream. Both of them had to go study now, as did Hayley, and I had some TA stuff to get caught up on. So we walked Morrigan back to her dorm room.

On the way, I watched people staring at her gleaming purple hair the way they often did. I’d been with her a few times when someone stopped to ask about it, since it looked so different from a typical dye job. I knew she loved the attention.

I kissed her goodbye, sliding a hand just under her dress to caress her bare butt.

“Be good.”

She laughed softly against my chest. “I will, Master.”

Then we walked MJ back to her car. I gave her my library login so she could look at the digital versions of the mission records. Then Hayley, Katarina, and I went home.

I had a bunch of labs to grade for Chem 245 and Dr. Vicenza, so I sat at the kitchen table while Hayley studied in the bedroom and Katarina went around cleaning up. I was just about done when I stopped to check my email. There was a message from Dr. Paulson, who taught Biochem 328, my other TA job. It was a fairly trivial suggestion for the lab this week, but I suddenly realized I might be able to ask him about the archives.

Bob Paulson was one of those amiable older faculty members who were mainly marking time until they could take emeritus status, and he’d been very appreciative of my willingness to take on the extra work involved in TA’ing for him. But he pretty much left everything to me. As long as the labs went smoothly and the student reports got graded, he didn’t care how I ran things.

I responded to his email about the lab, then added a note about my need to get into the archives. He wrote back about a minute later:

Sure, just bring the form by my office tomorrow.

It seemed as if we were in business.

￼

Katarina made dinner, another one of her Swedish stews, and Hayley and I went back to studying. When we finally went to bed, Hayley rolled against me after I put Katarina to sleep and texted goodnight to MJ and Morrigan.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said, “but do you remember how you promised to have a dream with Adriana?”

Returning Caacrinolaas to Hell had removed his enchantment over Adriana, and she’d made it quite clear she was ready to express her gratitude however I might like her to. And after she’d been the one to break the enchantment on the rock binding Zagan, which freed me from the same prison after I took his powers, I promised to have a dream with her.

“Yeah, I just had too many other things to focus on.”

“You need to. You could do it tonight. She might have some ideas about this thing, whatever else you guys do.”

“Okay, sure.”

She snuggled in under my arm. “Just nothing epic, okay?”

I hugged her, laughing softly. “I know the rules.”

She stretched up to kiss me. “Okay. Love you.”

I kissed her back. “Love you too.”

Chapter 5

I went back to the beach house. It was exactly as I left it, a blocky, modernist white-stucco-and-glass structure that I had modeled after something I found online before we went to sleep that night. It sat right on the sand in a way you could never get away with in real life.

I went over to the glass wall and leaned against it, looking out across the sea. The spirits were still there on the horizon, just a thin dark line of clouds. They weren’t pushing at me tonight, which I somehow knew was because Hayley wasn’t here. She was half of this equation, whatever the result was going to be.

Then I reached out for Adriana. I found her after a few moments. The connection was thin – we’d been with her only a couple of days – but after what we’d gone through, it was strong enough to pull her in.

She appeared on the beach down in the surf. She had Charlotte’s figure, big breasts and a thick, wonderfully rounded butt. As I looked at the little red Brazilian bikini she had on, I reflected that the house wasn’t the only thing that wouldn’t have worked in the waking world.

Adriana saw me watching her and walked up the sand toward the house. She smiled, but I could tell she wasn’t lucid yet.

“Hello, Jimmy. I was wondering when I would see you again. I never expected to find you on the beach here.”

I made her lucid. “This is my dream house, or part of it.”

She flickered for just a tiny moment as people often did when I made them lucid, but Adriana was a skilled dream sorcerer now – because I’d improved her skills in that respect – and so she easily held on to the dream.

Understanding spread over her face, then she smiled again.

“You took your time bringing me here.”

“Sorry. There were some things to take care of back at school.”

Adriana looked all around the beach, then worked her toes into the sand. “This is truly a dream? It feels so . . .”

“I know.”

She looked over the house behind me. “And this is your dream temple?”

“More a dream vacation home. The rest of it is up there.” I pointed to the vast black castle on the mountain above us.

Adriana looked up, and then gasped. “Impossible. You built all of this?”

“Now you get the picture.”

She looked back to me. “I knew you were powerful, but . . . to do such things . . . I am amazed. This feels no different than if I were awake.”

“I’ll show you around the castle later if you want.”

The “later” didn’t escape her notice. A sly look came into her eyes. “We are alone here?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” She came up the last couple of steps to where I was standing and looked up at me. “You have called me to claim your reward for freeing me, then?”

I laughed. “I don’t mean to put it that way.”

She slid her wrists up around my neck. “But I do wish to reward you, Jimmy. I wish to see just how strong a dream sorcerer you are. Do not think I did not notice how those girls look at you. Those are the eyes of women who want for nothing except more of what you have given them.”

I picked her up and carried her over to the sunbed. I’d been looking forward to this, and part of why I’d put it off was because I wanted to be focused enough to appreciate it. I’d never been with a woman as old as Adriana – unless you wanted to count Katarina, who wasn’t really the same thing – and I was eager to see what the differences might be.

I made our bathing suits go away and just spent a few minutes losing myself in Adriana’s full, lush body. She wasn’t exactly like Charlotte; she was a bit longer and taller. Her breasts weren’t like Charlotte’s cartoon boobs either, but they were still delicious, soft yet springy, with fat brown nipples. We kissed eagerly as I explored all her curves and sensitive spots. Having her in here, I could see all through her head and what she wanted. I wasn’t the least bit surprised to see that she was more than ready to fuck my brains out.

I’d been giving myself a giant cock in these dreams, but I didn’t want to overdo it with Adriana, at least the first time. I just gave myself exactly the cock she’d been hoping to find, which I’d seen in her head. She groped at me as I played with her breasts, and our tongues continued to wrestle with each other. After a few minutes, I moved down to suck on her nipples, getting them even stiffer. But when I tried to slide down further, Adriana stopped me.

“No. Let me go first.” She sat up, throwing her long black hair over her shoulder and bending down until her face was level with my erection. “Just lay back, Jimmy. I know what men like.”

She took me entirely into her mouth, moving slowly down until her lips were tight around the base. She sucked hard, then extended her tongue to lick my balls. I could tell from what she was thinking that her skills weren’t from the dream – she was just as good at this in the waking world. So I did what she asked and lay back, letting her work.

She wasn’t Katarina – no mortal woman could be – but she was very, very good. She moved up and down slowly, taking me effortlessly into her throat, all the way in, all the way back out until she could work her tongue against the glans, then back down again. She kept up a slow, steady rhythm for a minute or two, then withdrew completely to kiss and lick all over the shaft, teasing me and looking up to watch my reactions.

“Do you like that, Jimmy?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t want to say it, because I knew it was traumatic for her, but if this was what Caacrinolaas got from Adriana, I could understand why he had been so obsessed with her. She went back to teasing and kissing me until the tension grew to the point my hand went to her head. She laughed softly and took me back in.

Now she seemed to be focusing on sucking as hard as she could, though she kept up the same slow rhythm, taking me all the way in and swallowing around me, then back out very slowly. After another minute or two, she pulled off again and kissed the head.

“You can do anything in here, yes?”

“Pretty much,” I managed.

She smiled up at me. “So you can go as many times as you like?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I will continue until you have had enough of this.”

She took me in again, and this time began bobbing steadily over the head and last few inches, working her tongue and twisting her head as she moved. I reached down to take one of her big breasts in my hand and just played with it while she sucked. I grew closer and closer, and I knew Adriana could tell, but she didn’t change her approach at all. Finally, I grabbed her head with a groan as she pushed me over the edge. She plunged her head down just as I came. The waves of pleasure washed over me and out through my cock into her throat as she swallowed around me.

Adriana kept swallowing and sucking until the paroxysm passed, then she pulled back slowly and resumed the same deep up-and-down rhythm she’d used earlier. I had no refractory period in the dream world, so I just lay there catching my breath as she worked on me, feeling the wonderful sensations of her mouth around my cock. In a few minutes, she pushed me back up to the edge again. When I came, she swallowed me up exactly as she had the first time, sucking and milking me to get every drop out.

She seemed to fully appreciate that she wasn’t going to get tired or sore in here, and I could see in her head that she was entirely focused on pleasing me. I’d never had a blowjob session like this before, not even with Katarina, though she would have been happy to do it – I’d just never asked. We lay there for maybe an hour, and after my fifth orgasm, I finally had to push Adriana off. She gave my cock a final kiss and lay beside me.

“You’re good at that,” I gasped.

She laughed. “I know.”

I wanted to return the favor, but I could tell she was done with foreplay. So instead, I sat up and rolled her on her stomach. She let out a moan as I pulled her hips up, and she put her face down on her arms. I gave her big ass a couple of hard smacks, then thrust myself into her. I made my cock much bigger now, and Adriana gasped as I filled her up.

“Jimmy!” she cried.

“I can do anything in here,” I said, laughing.

“Deus do céu!”

I began fucking her roughly, and she fucked me back just as hard, ramming her thick butt against my groin. I spanked her again, because I could tell she loved it. We pounded each other for several minutes, and I watched her arousal – already high from that hour-long blowjob – spiraling up rapidly. I reached down to coil up her hair in my hand, and started spanking her with the other like I was riding a horse.

Adriana moaned loudly, hands digging into the sunbed under us. A long shudder ran through her body, and she shattered around me, pussy contracting tightly several times. I kept fucking her and spanking her, and I held onto her arousal. As soon as her orgasm faded, I sent another one through her. She cried out, shaking in front of me.

Her ass was getting red from all the spanking, so I paused briefly to flip her over before plunging forward again. Adriana wrapped herself around me, arms around my back and legs around my waist. We kissed deeply for several moments.

Then she broke the kiss. “More,” she moaned. “Give it to me. Hold nothing back, Jimmy.”

I didn’t. I pounded her body under me, watching her big breasts shaking and rolling on her chest. I made her come again, and her nails dug into my back. An agonized moan escaped her clenched teeth as I pushed her peak even higher.

“Caralho!” she cried out.

After what she’d done with me, I wanted to give it to her just as hard. I kept pounding her, making her come every thirty seconds or so and pushing each orgasm higher than the one before it.

She gasped and shook under me, sobbing with pleasure. “Jimmy! I am dying!”

“Enough?”

“No! More!”

This time I came with her, stabbing as deeply in as I could, shaking as her pussy milked me dry. Then I kept going.

“Do you know why they look at me the way they do?” I gasped.

“Yes! I can see it,” she moaned as I pounded her.

“No. It’s because I can do this to them.”

Then I did what I’d been doing to the girls in the dream world. I made Adriana come as hard as I could, and then I held her there, not letting it subside. She cried out, arching her back and digging her fingers into my butt as her entire body shook violently.

I kept it up for quite a while.

￼

When I finally felt like Adriana had had enough, I came into her one last time, then let her rest. She lay next to me on the sunbed, shaking and gasping for breath.

“Deus do céu,” she finally moaned. “I never imagined such a thing.”

“We can do it again some time.”

She laughed weakly. “This did not feel like dream sex. It feels as if we are really here.”

“I know.” I sat up. “Let’s go to the castle,” I said. “There’s something I want to talk about.”

I clothed her in something suitably dark, goth, and witchy and took us up the mountain into the main room of the castle. I let her gape at things as I showed her around, finally taking her up to great circle at the very top.

“This is amazing, Jimmy,” she said as we stood in the center. “I have been working on my dream temple since you improved me, but it will never be more than a shadow of this.”

“I wish I could tell you how I do it,” I said, “but it just feels perfectly natural to me.”

“It is one thing to imagine a place like this, but to have it persist in such size and detail . . .”

“Others have noticed. Do you see that? Out there?”

She looked at the horizon where I was pointing.

“The clouds?” she asked.

“Can you feel it?”

Adriana was quiet for a moment or two. Her face darkened. “Yes.”

“They want something from me. Me and Hayley.” I spent a couple of minutes explaining all the things that had happened to us. She nodded slowly.

“What Echidna told you is correct,” Adriana said finally. “So many spirits have no allegiance to anything except their own desires. They pretend such allegiances as it suits them, but no more than that. These coincidences you describe, I would be very careful about thinking of them as coincidences. One spirit cannot do such things, but as many as this . . .” She paused for a moment, staring at the clouds. “Anything could be happening here.”

“But this stretches back for millennia. It’s connected to my staff, before it was even a staff. Long before Amira even existed.”

“The spirits have no sense of time, Jimmy, not as we think of it. For immortal beings, six thousand years is meaningless. But you are right. There is something they want here. You must be very careful.”

I looked down at her. “You seem to know a lot about this.”

“I was a poor dream sorcerer before I met you, but my skills at connecting with the spirits have always been strong.” She smiled. “It was controlling them and getting them to do what I asked that was my challenge. I called out to them for help with my husband, and I got Gaylord instead.”

I laughed. “Well, I’m really glad I was able to help with that.”

Her mood darkened again. “But I think we should not assume that our meeting was a coincidence either. My presence in your life has enabled things that moved you along this path the spirits are following.”

I nodded. “I’d kind of like to keep you around, if it’s all the same.”

Adriana smiled. “Jimmy, after what you have done for me . . . and I do not just mean tonight, though that is certainly part of it,” she said, laughing softly, “you only have to ask, and I will follow. Think of me as part of your coven or not, I will be here.”

“All right. I appreciate that.”

We embraced for a little bit, and then I let her go.

Chapter 6

My condo building had a fitness center, and I’d been trying to use it when I could drag myself out of bed early enough. I wasn’t a gym rat by any means, but I was paying the association fees to maintain it whether I used it or not, so I figured I might as well take advantage of it. Since I had the Chem 245 lecture at ten the next morning, I didn’t have to get up too early. Katarina didn’t need to exercise and Hayley devoted all her spare time to studying, so I found it a welcome opportunity to just space out and not think too hard about all the things my life had turned into.

I spent about half an hour on the treadmill and then lifted weights for another half hour, then went back upstairs. Hayley was just coming out of the shower, so I took her place under the water while she finished getting ready.

“Give me the bullet points from Adriana,” she said as she dried her hair. “I don’t need details.”

“It was a few hours at most. You can guess what we did.”

“Those are the details I don’t need. Was she surprised?”

“No. When I made her lucid, she said, ‘You took your time bringing me here.’”

Hayley laughed. “What did you tell her?”

“Just that things have been busy. But afterward we talked about the spirits.” I told her what Adriana said.

Hayley listened for a moment, then lowered the brush and hair dryer, staring blankly into the mirror. “Wonderful. Just fucking wonderful.”

“What’s wrong?”

She closed her eyes. “We’ve got this thing, this amazing thing together, not just you and me, but Morrigan and MJ and Katarina too, that’s making me feel all these things I’ve never felt before. And I have to sit here and wonder if it’s all just some six-thousand-year-old plot to destroy the universe or something. How do you think that makes me feel?”

I stopped the water and got out. I was naked and dripping wet, but she let me take her in my arms.

“Does it feel like that’s all it is?”

She hugged me back. “No.”

“It’s not if we don’t let it be. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I never really loved anyone before you.”

“I know,” she said.

“I’m strong enough now to protect us. I won’t let anything happen.”

She was quiet a moment.

“Jimmy, I need to tell you something.”

“What?”

“I know we talked about that dream, but there were some things I didn’t tell you. I know I acted like I didn’t know where all that came from, but I do.”

“Where?” I asked.

She sighed. “That girl in the dream, she’s me. I need you to fully understand that. She’s a side of me that I’ve tried not to show you, but she’s part of me. She’s the part that keeps driving me toward med school, that keeps me going when I’m doubting myself or when I want to quit because I’m too tired or stressed out. She’s the part that wants all that, the part that kicks me in the butt when I want to give up.”

“Okay. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“No. But you have to understand that she can get carried away. It’s the rest of me that keeps her under control. I don’t want to be this workaholic doctor who only cares about being in charge and lording it over everyone. And in setting up that dream the way we did, making me into someone else, that put her in control. I can still remember all of that. I liked—no, I loved it. I loved the power. I was the person that side of me wants to be. And Jimmy, you have to understand that she’s still in here. That girl you had to stop from slaughtering all those people, she’s right here in my head.”

“We’re out of the dream,” I said.

“I just want you to know. To be careful. Because in making me a sorceress, you gave her exactly what she wanted. You gave her power she never expected to have.”

“The girl I love is in charge of her.”

She didn’t say anything for a few moments.

“Okay,” she said finally. “I have to trust you on this.”

￼

Hayley and Morrigan were both in Chem 245. Hayley was in a different section, since I’d told Dr. Vicenza we were dating, but I hadn’t told anyone about Morrigan. She and Hayley sat together up toward the middle of the lecture hall, while I sat up front by myself as I usually did. I didn’t want to advertise our relationship out of fear of the undergraduates thinking I was showing any favoritism. So far, no one had said anything.

After the lecture was over, I walked up to Dr. Paulson’s office on the third floor. His door was open, and I found him at his desk. He had a thick white beard that made him look a lot like Santa Claus.

“Dr. Paulson?”

He looked up. “Oh, hi, Jimmy, come in. Did you get my email last night?”

“About the lab? Yeah. You remember I asked about the archives?”

He was somewhat forgetful, and I was used to exchanges like this by now.

“Oh—right, of course. There was a form?”

I handed it to him, pointing at the faculty endorsement line. “Just right there.”

He scribbled his signature without reading any of it and handed it back.

“Thanks,” I said.

“So no issues with that lab?” he asked.

“No, pretty sure I’ve got it.”

“Thanks again for taking this on for me. Ray tells me how busy you’ve been, but the students all seem to like you.”

“I like the class. It’s a good group.”

After a few more minutes of idle chit-chat, he let me go. I walked over to the library, crossing the lawn past the fountain to see if anything was different. But the enchantment seemed the same. When I got down to the Archives desk, there was a different librarian, a Black woman in her thirties. I explained why I was there. She looked over the form, checking everything carefully, then nodded and put it into a drawer in the desk. Then she turned to her computer and began typing.

“When is a good time for you?” she asked.

“Afternoons are better, and sooner rather than later.”

She nodded. “Colleen has an open spot at three today. Would that work? She’s the archivist who’s in charge of the mission collection.”

“Maybe. Can you give me a moment to check something? There’s an undergrad I’m working with on this.”

“Sure.”

I pulled out my phone and texted MJ. She answered a few seconds later.

Three works. See you then

Don’t wear your UCSD gear

I’m not Morrigan

You don’t get to tell me how to dress

Lol

Don’t worry I’m not stupid

That was followed by tongue-stuck-out emoji.

I turned back to the librarian. “That would be perfect.”

She entered the appointment in their calendar. “Any particular reason the digital versions weren’t enough?” she asked.

“There are just some things I want a closer look at. I want to be sure what I’m seeing.”

She nodded. “All right. Good luck.”

￼

I met the girls for lunch as I usually did and told them what I’d worked out with the library. MJ texted me again to tell me she’d meet me at my condo, since she couldn’t park on campus.

I had CE Thermodynamics after that, then walked back to my condo to meet MJ. She showed up around two forty-five. She had a Huntington t-shirt on over her tights, one that looked a couple of sizes too big for her, so she’d knotted it on one side of her waist to expose her midriff. Even then, the bagginess of it did nothing to hide her physique. After what I’d done in giving her expert sword-fighting skills with my new powers, she looked like an Instagram fitness model now.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked.

She smiled. “It’s yours. I guess you forgot, but I wore it home one night.”

I had forgotten, but it looked familiar. We began walking back to campus.

“So, I took a look at the digital records,” she said. “I only had time to really look at the letter from the Santiago. It was slow going, because I had to decipher not just the eighteenth-century Spanish but also the handwriting. But I was able to get something out of it.”

“Which was what?” I asked.

“Okay, first of all, Hernández was the captain of the Santiago on the first voyage, but for the second one, the one he died on, he was demoted to pilot because a more experienced captain had come from Spain. This thing is a letter from that captain, Bruno de Hezeta, reporting to his superiors in the Spanish navy on Hernández’s death from complications from scurvy. That alone is nothing unusual, I guess.”

“No.”

As we crossed into campus, we passed a couple of male students coming the other direction. One of them seemed to be checking out MJ’s six-pack, then pointedly stared at her tight ass under her running tights as we went past. Our eyes met, and he glanced away.

“You said you did a report on him in high school?” I asked her.

“Right. But I was fifteen, and I was just repeating things I read. But reading it last night, something jumped out at me. Hernández was buried at sea.”

I looked at her. “Wasn’t that the usual thing?”

She shook her head. “I looked this up to be sure, but no, not for Spanish vessels during this period. You’re not Catholic, so I guess this wouldn’t occur to you, but if you bury someone at sea, you’re not burying them in consecrated ground. So the Spanish and French vessels usually kept the bodies on board until they reached a port where they could be buried in a consecrated cemetery. For some reason, they didn’t do that with Hernández.”

“Did it say why?” I asked.

“No. This was November, but for California, who knows what the weather was like? The letter didn’t say. If it was hot enough, they might not have wanted to keep the body on board. I mean, you can imagine what that would have been like.”

I nodded. “No kidding.”

“But what makes me think something is up,” she went on, “is de Hezeta’s description of the burial. He says there was a full Mass, a musket salute by the ship’s marines, and then they saluted him with the ship’s guns. That seems like kind of a lot for a guy who got demoted to pilot and spent most of the voyage in his cabin half-dead from scurvy.”

“You think they might have been covering something up.”

She shrugged. “I have no idea. It just struck me as odd.”

When we got to the library, MJ followed me down to the Archives. The woman I’d spoken to earlier was still there, but with her was a pretty blonde woman who looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties. Her shoulder-length hair was pinned back in a ponytail, and she wore a trim white blouse over a black pencil skirt. She looked up as we approached, and I noticed a little hummingbird brooch pinned to her blouse.

“Are you Jimmy?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’m Colleen.” She extended her hand, and I shook it.

“This is MJ,” I said. “She’s helping me with this. Her Spanish is much better than mine.”

Colleen nodded. “Great. Come on back.”

We followed her into the cage behind the desk. Past a couple of rows of stacks, we came to a door with a security panel. Colleen tapped in a code and opened the door. Inside was an area that went a long way back into the corner of the basement. The air was noticeably cooler than the area outside. Colleen noticed me noticing.

“It’s temperature- and humidity-controlled in here to protect the materials,” she said.

She led us to an area in the center, where there was a long table. A small stack of folders sat on one end. Next to them was a little stack of what I realized a moment later were alcohol wipes.

“I already pulled the records you requested. Have a seat, and I’ll explain how this will work.”

We sat down. Colleen walked us through the rules for handling the mission records. First she had us clean our hands with the alcohol wipes, which she explained was to remove finger oils that could damage the materials. She was going to sit with us to take the records in and out of the folders, because she didn’t want us doing it. Finally, we could take photos if we wanted, as long as the flash was off, but since the records were already digitized, we would not be able to make copies.

“That’s fine,” I said. “We just need to look them over.”

MJ and I exchanged a glance. Both of us knew we would need to be careful what we said in front of her.

We started with the report from de Hezeta. Colleen drew it out of a slim plastic folder, and MJ looked it over slowly for several minutes.

“It’s pretty much what I saw online,” she said. “A few words I couldn’t make out until just now, but nothing that changes what I thought. The whole burial-at-sea thing is just weird.”

That got Colleen’s attention.

“What was weird about it?” she asked.

MJ explained her reasoning.

Colleen nodded. “That’s interesting. I suppose it could have been pretty hot. You might be able to check the ship’s log. Lots of those records have survived in the Mexican National Archives, and some of them have been digitized.”

“Any idea how we could find that out?” I asked.”

“I can check and see for you.”

MJ handed the letter back to Colleen, who tucked it back into its folder. Then we started in on the records from Mission San Sebastian.

The first few documents we looked at were from the wrong period, into the 1800s. MJ looked them over anyway, but they were entirely mundane, letters from one priest or another to someone else in the Church, notes about interactions with the local Indians, and inventories of materials. But after we’d been there about twenty minutes, Colleen drew out a letter dated February 1776. It was from one of the priests, barely a week after the mission was formally founded.

MJ began reading. Then I heard her draw in a little breath.

“What?”

Rather than saying anything, she carefully pointed to one line, biting her lip. After a moment of study, I realized she was pointing to a pair of words: Capitán Pérez. But I couldn’t make out the rest of it.

“What?”

“That’s the surname most of the historical records use,” she said quietly. “Not mine.”

I exhaled slowly. “What does it say?”

“‘As you instructed, I am consulting with Captain Pérez on the layout of the chapel.’ That’s it.”

I sucked on my teeth as I thought for a moment. “‘As you instructed,’” I said.

“Right. It doesn’t say who gave those instructions.”

“Who wrote it? And who is it to?” I asked.

“It’s from a monk named Domingo. The recipient isn’t identified. But it was a woman.”

“You’re sure?”

She pointed to the top of the letter. “The salutation is Doña. But there’s something else here that’s odd.” She moved her finger back down to a section below the mention of Pérez and began reading. “‘We have searched the area you instructed us to, and I believe we have found the stone you are seeking. It fits the description you gave us.’”

My head swam for a moment. I remembered the dream I’d had of Amalia and Astaroth binding Zagan in that stone. There had been two Franciscan monks with the man with a rapier, whoever he was.

MJ saw my reaction. I could tell she knew what I was thinking.

“Do you think . . .?” she asked.

“It’s possible,” I managed. “The way they were all acting that day, it was like the end of a long project.”

I glanced at Colleen. She was playing with her phone, and it didn’t appear she’d caught that exchange. I looked back to the letter. “Does it say what exactly they were consulting with Pérez about?”

“No,” MJ said. “There’s nothing more. I can’t tell what it refers to.”

“Have you been to the mission?” Colleen asked.

We looked up.

“Yeah,” MJ said.

“The architecture is really interesting,” Colleen said. “Not like the other missions.”

“Right,” I said, “that’s one of the things we’re looking at.”

“Did you see the floor plan in the digital archives?”

I looked at MJ. She shook her head.

“No,” I said.

Colleen reached for one of the other folders. She opened it up and drew out several sheets of paper. I saw they were hand-drawn diagrams of the original mission building. But I also noticed something else instantly, and my blood ran cold.

“Do you know about the room they discovered under the chapel in 1982?” Colleen asked.

“Yes,” I said evenly.

“Well, as you can see, the floor plan doesn’t show the under-chapel at all. And the strange thing about that is that the architectural experts who’ve looked at it are convinced it had to be part of the original construction. It would have been very difficult to add it later without damaging the upper walls, and there’s no indication of that ever happening.”

But I barely heard what Colleen said. Because she was wrong.

The floor plan did show the Voodoo Room. It was simply that that part of the drawing was concealed by an enchantment. I still had my ring on, because I’d wanted to check out the fountain again. For whatever reason, seeing the enchantment was enough to see the concealed section of the drawing.

We would never have seen this in the digitized version.

I realized MJ was staring at me. “Jimmy?”

“I, uh, hold on.” I grabbed the notepad I’d brought and began sketching out that section of the chapel as best I could. I tried to conceal what I was doing from Colleen. She wasn’t watching very closely and didn’t notice what I was drawing. But MJ did.

“What is that?” she asked softly.

I just wrote, The Voodoo Room. It’s hidden by an enchantment. Her eyes swelled.

I copied down everything I saw as closely as I could. But there was a concealed note next to the Voodoo Room that I couldn’t read. I struggled with what to do about it for a moment before I thought of something.

I pulled off my ring and handed it to MJ under the table. She quickly understood what I wanted her to do and put it on. She gasped quietly as she looked at the floor plan.

Can you read that? I wrote.

MJ nodded. She wrote down, It says, “secret inf. chapel.” She circled “inf.” I don’t know what that means.

She handed my ring back, and I put it on. I looked down at the note.

Capilla inf secreta

Knowing what I knew now, what I’d seen in that dream, a possibility suggested itself. Was inf. short for infernal?

Something tickled my memory, the results from the last model I’d run. I opened my laptop and found the document I’d saved them in. I scanned down and saw it.

FLOORPLAN

Was the Voodoo Room a secret infernal chapel? And what could be there that would help us find Tamiel?

There was really only one way to find out. We would need to go there and see.

When I looked up, I noticed that Colleen was looking at us strangely.

“We’re, uh, we’re researching what appear to be some interesting occult influences on the mission design,” I managed. “So yeah, we were looking for information about the Voodoo Room.”

Colleen let out a short laugh. I cursed myself, but it had slipped out.

“The what?” she asked.

“Uh, a friend of mine is from San Sebastian. She told me that’s what the local kids call it. Just to be funny, you know?”

“That’s fascinating,” she said. “You know, I did my master’s thesis on how the process of establishing the missions varied across the different locations. It’s really amazing how different some of them ended up being.”

“Is that how you ended up here?” MJ asked.

Colleen nodded. “I did a dual Master’s in History and Library Science.”

“How much do you know about how San Sebastian was founded?” I asked.

She smiled and sat back in her chair, as if she’d been hoping I would ask that exact question. “You know that it was one of the early ones, right?”

“Right.”

“It was the sixth one,” Colleen said, “and the first one after the first group in the early 1770s. But unlike the others in this period, it wasn’t founded by Junipero Serra. It was founded by a group of Franciscan monks who came all the way from Spain with the intent of establishing a mission separate from Father Serra’s. That was a problem, because there was already a caravan that had been created to establish another round of missions in Northern California. But somehow, they got permission to do it. How exactly has never been determined, but Spain was also in the process of trying to defend this part of its empire from Russia at the time, and records suggest this mission might have been related to that.”

“That was what Pérez Hernández was doing on his voyages,” MJ said.

“Exactly, and interestingly enough, this group came over with Bruno de Hezeta in 1775. He and Pérez went off their voyage, while the monks went up the coast to set up the mission. But relevant to your question about the occult influences, there are surviving documents, not in our collection but elsewhere, accusing these monks of not just failing to convert the local Indians but getting mixed up in the native religion. They were accused of witchcraft, but it’s pretty clear the documents had to be talking about the Indians.”

I sucked on my teeth for a moment or two.

“Do you think you could help us look at those?”

“Sure. The originals are at UC Berkeley, but they’ve all been translated and digitized. I can email you the link, along with a link to the Santiago’s log, if I can find it. Though if it’s available, it’s obviously going to be in Spanish.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And that’s fine. MJ can help.”

Colleen then said something to MJ in Spanish. MJ nodded and answered her. I caught only some reference to Mexico and Zagan’s Rock. Then they switched back to English.

“You really should go see that room,” Colleen said. “It’s absolutely fascinating, even more so because no one really knows what it is. There’s been some research on it, but no real agreement. The diocese up there has resisted any real investigation, I think because so many people find it disturbing.”

“That’s on our list,” I managed.

I was about to say something else when my eyes fell on Colleen’s brooch. It was a little gold hummingbird decorated with green and red crystals. I looked back at my laptop.

And there it was, leaping out at me from the last model run.

HUMMINGBIRD

Colleen smiled at me. “If you happen to find anything tying all this together, I’d love to hear about it.”

Chapter 7

MJ and I walked slowly back to the condo.

“There’s something there,” she said. “In that room.”

“That seems obvious.” I told her what I’d noticed about Colleen’s brooch. Her eyes went unfocused for a moment or two.

“We were supposed to talk to her,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “And I have to wonder if she’s connected to this somehow. The model has done similar things with all of us. What did she say to you?”

“She asked where my family was from. Her Spanish is pretty good, though she’s got a noticeable American accent.”

“Makes sense, I guess, if her thesis was on the missions.”

MJ was staring hard ahead of us. “I bet you Amalia came over with those monks and de Hezeta. That letter was to her.”

I nodded. “They were looking for the rock to trap Zagan.”

“The timing fits,” she said. “There were really only a couple of ways for her to get to Alta California from Hungary, and she would have had to work with the Spanish authorities. It’s not like she could have just flown over here.”

“Right.”

“So where was she when the monks were looking for that rock? If she came with them because Astaroth had her looking for a place to do it?”

“That’s a good question,” I said. “Could be she was searching on her own, somewhere else.” I paused a few moments to think, trying to piece together what we’d learned. “So, Amalia comes over with de Hezeta and these renegade Franciscans, whoever they were.”

“That’s another thing I’m struggling with,” MJ said.

I looked at her. “What is?”

“The Franciscans. Have you ever met any?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Let’s just say a group of Franciscan friars are about the last people you would suspect of being secret demon worshippers. They take vows of poverty and humility and don’t obsess about original sin the way the rest of the Church does.”

“Astaroth corrupted them somehow.”

She nodded slowly. “I guess we can assume that, I just have a hard time seeing how.”

“All right, let’s leave that aside for now. They were obviously working for Astaroth, based on what I saw in that dream. So she’s part of the group that comes up to establish the mission. She gives them some specific instructions for building it, which had to involve the Voodoo Room. They go out searching for this rock, and eventually find it.”

“Where does Hernández come in?” she asked.

“He sails off with de Hezeta. What were they doing, exactly?”

“Like Colleen said, the empire was worried about Russian activity up around Canada. Hernández’s first voyage got up to British Colombia. They made contact with the natives but didn’t do a whole lot else that would have allowed the empire to make a formal claim on the area. That’s why he lost command of the second voyage. De Hezeta went all the way to Alaska and did the formal surveying and other stuff that Hernández didn’t do the first time.”

“On the face of it, nothing terribly demonic.”

MJ nodded. “If you take the histories at face value, anyway. If you assume they were searching for something, that puts a different spin on it.”

“Why go all the way to Alaska if Amalia already knew that rock was in California?”

She shrugged. “No idea.”

“We know the official records are wrong in at least one respect,” I said. “Hernández didn’t die on that voyage. He rejoined the group at the mission.”

“I don’t know how else to read that letter,” MJ said.

“So Hernández, de Hezeta, Amalia, and those Franciscans were all working together on something. Something related to Zagan, but in addition to confining him.”

“Maybe the answers are in the Voodoo Room,” MJ said.

“I think we have to go up there. Spring break is next week, but I don’t see how we can do it sooner.”

MJ nodded. “That works.”

When we approached McKinley, I saw that same homeless woman digging through a trash can at the entrance to campus. I walked over to the other side of the street hoping she wouldn’t notice us, but she looked up as we went past.

“Is she the one?” the woman yelled at me.

MJ started in surprise.

“Just ignore her,” I said. “She’s done this before.”

“You can’t have it!” the woman shouted.

But MJ stopped. She wasn’t frightened, just startled. “Have what?” she asked.

“I know what you’re looking for!” the woman yelled. “You have to stop!”

“What do you think we’re looking for?” MJ asked.

But the woman just yelled, “It’s not yours! You have to stop!” again, shaking her fist at us. On the outside chance something was going on here, I focused on her for a moment. But I saw no enchantments or anything else of note.

I took MJ’s arm and pulled her toward the street. She hesitated a moment, but came with me. The woman lost interest in us and went back to digging in the trash, muttering to herself.

“She’s done that before?” MJ asked.

“It’s not you. She yelled at Morrigan too. I think she does it to everyone. Schizophrenia can make you think people are stealing from you. I didn’t see anything weird about her. No enchantments.”

When we got back to my condo, Hayley and Morrigan were in the living room while Katarina was getting dinner going. I greeted them all with a hug and a quick kiss.

“What did you find out?” Hayley asked.

“Let’s discuss over dinner,” I said. “It’s a lot.”

￼

Katarina had made another one of her Swedish casseroles. She insisted that we taste it first, before she would tell us what was in it. It was a lot of potatoes, cream, and onions, with an odd fishy flavor to it and some dark salty bits floating around that I couldn’t identify. But it was delicious.

“So what’s in it?” MJ asked after we’d all eaten some and expressed our approval.

Katarina smiled. “Anchovies.”

There was a momentary pause before we started laughing.

“It’s good,” Hayley said.

Morrigan shrugged and took another bite. “I don’t think I’ve ever had anchovies before.”

“So tell us what you found, Jimmy,” Katarina said.

MJ and I ran through everything we’d learned from Colleen and the archives. The other three of them listened until we were done.

“Do you really think they were all working together?” Hayley asked.

“The evidence isn’t conclusive, but the connections are all there,” I said. “I think we’ll know more when I get that stuff from the librarian.”

“For Amalia to have gotten here and done the things she did, she had to have been working with someone in authority,” MJ said. “It seems pretty clear she came over with them.”

“Zagan,” Morrigan said.

I looked at her. “What?”

“We thought that was it, that it was over, when you took his powers. It sounds like that wasn’t it.”

“Maybe trapping Zagan wasn’t the end in itself,” Hayley said. “Maybe it was just a means to some other end.”

“It was an end for Astaroth,” Katarina said. “He wanted Zagan’s seat as a king, and he took it.”

“But for Amalia and the others,” I said, “I think they were looking for something else. Maybe they thought trapping Zagan would help them find it.”

“Could it have been Tamiel?” MJ asked.

“Volach said a lot of people have searched for her,” I said. “But Amalia didn’t try to use Zagan’s powers for almost two hundred years. Hernández and those monks were long dead by then.”

“But they wouldn’t have known that would happen,” Hayley said. “She was using them.”

“Do you think Tamiel is in that Voodoo Room?” Morrigan asked.

“She can’t be,” MJ said. “That would have to mean the monks trapped her there.”

“Then why do we need to go there?” Morrigan asked. “What could be in there that would have anything to do with her? If they were searching for her, with Amalia?”

I groaned. “I agree, something here doesn’t make sense. But it’s clear to me we need to go there. Does anyone have any issues coming with me?”

“I told my parents we were just going to hang out next week,” Hayley said, “that we might come up, but I wasn’t sure. They have to work anyway.”

“My family is kind of expecting me, but I can manage it,” MJ said, “since we’ll be nearby. I probably need to put in an appearance. I told my mom I couldn’t commit to working the fruit stand. She complained, but she didn’t argue with me.”

Morrigan just shrugged. She was from the Bay Area, and I knew she wasn’t that close with her parents, who were divorced. It was one of the reasons she’d bonded with her aunt Celeste. But I could see in her eyes that there was more to it.

Katarina of course said nothing; she would go where I went.

“I guess we’re going,” I said.

￼

MJ went back to UCSD after dinner because she had practice in the morning. Hayley had to study, but Morrigan wanted some help with her chemistry. After we were done, she, Katarina, and I went out to sit on the balcony. It was cool but not cold, and the three of us lay together on one of the lounge chairs. Charlotte came out and curled up between my feet.

“Something I’ve been meaning to ask you, baby girl,” I said.

“What?” Morrigan asked.

“How much does Celeste know?”

She sighed and snuggled closer against me. I ran my fingers slowly through her glimmering purple hair.

“She knows something is up, especially with Echidna. She hasn’t asked where I got her, but I know she can see the difference in me.”

Morrigan hadn’t stopped working at Soul Journeys. She liked doing it and didn’t want to cut Celeste off, even though we knew Celeste had been trying to keep Morrigan away from me, to keep her from serving the darkness.

“What do you think she noticed?”

“That I can do things now. I mean, she definitely noticed my hair. When I walked in the day after you did it, she just gave me a long stare, then went back to work.”

“Do you think she knows why?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Isolde doesn’t like Echidna, but Celeste hasn’t seemed to notice that.”

Isolde was Celeste’s familiar, a fat tabby cat who was usually lounging around the displays in her store. Charlotte let out a loud meow, and Katarina rubbed her head.

“Morrigan, if Isolde knows, Celeste knows,” Katarina said. “She recognized me for what I am.”

Charlotte meowed again. She was right.

“We need to go talk to her,” I said.

Morrigan sighed. “Okay. If you think so.”

￼

Morrigan spent the night, though there was no fooling around since I had class first thing and I wanted some rest. But there were some things I wanted to do that night.

I went to the castle. Charlotte was there waiting. I’d been giving her princessy dresses to wear in the beginning, but since I’d changed my original dream temple into the dark castle, she’d happily gone along with the change in aesthetic. I found her dressed like some evil enchantress in a long, flowing black dress with a corseted waist that showed off her chest.

She came up and embraced me. We held each other for a while.

“Sorry if I’ve neglected you a bit lately.”

“I know you have much to occupy your attentions, Master. I am still with you in my familiar form. That is enough.”

“I want to talk about some things with you and Echidna.”

“Of course.”

I pulled Morrigan’s familiar to me. She appeared beside us in a lacy little dress that resembled something Morrigan had.

“Hello, Master.” She came up and joined our embrace. The two of them were very different physically, and I enjoyed the contrasts – Echidna so slim and small-boned, Charlotte so lush and full. While Charlotte’s green eyes reminded me of emeralds, Echidna’s were more like jade. And just as Charlotte’s eyes had an odd feline cast to them – no doubt the result of her bond with the gray tabby – Echidna’s were distinctly serpentine.

Echidna and Charlotte had a deep bond over and above our current situation, because Echidna had been Charlotte’s familiar when Charlotte was a mortal witch. I knew their relationship had been platonic back then, but things had shifted now that Charlotte was my familiar, and I could tell their bond had shifted with it. So I’d been wanting to have the two of them together, but this wasn’t the best time.

I led them to the library. I wasn’t sure there was anything there to help us, but it felt like a good place to talk. We sat together on a plush couch next to the fireplace.

“I want to talk about Tamiel,” I said.

Charlotte gave me a sympathetic look. “I know only the name, Master. I am sorry.”

I looked at Echidna. “Volach said Tamiel was last seen about a thousand years ago. I was hoping there might have been something you heard when you were mortal.”

Echidna nodded. “There is, Master, though I am not sure how much help it might be.”

“Go on.”

“I told you how my master rejected all faiths and beliefs. He was only interested in knowledge. He used the spirits as a source of it when other means failed, though he warned me never to take anything they said at face value. Spirits when summoned must answer questions put to them truthfully, as you know, but clever spirits can cloak greater truths in smaller ones to conceal them.”

“Yeah, I’ve figured that one out.”

“When we had been in Jerusalem for perhaps eight months, a messenger from Iftikhar al-Dawla, the Fatimid governor, came to us seeking help. Al-Dawla was Egyptian as we were, and he knew of my master’s skills. So we went to speak with him. He told us that an army of Christians was moving toward Jerusalem, and he feared they meant to attack the city. The defenses were not strong, and he had too few men to defend the walls. He asked if my master could offer anything to help them.”

“Did he?”

“We tried. He summoned a series of spirits to see if they could provide some way of stopping the Frankish army. The first few only answered with nonsense, which my master told me simply meant they knew nothing. But then one told him, ‘You should seek Tamiel. With Tamiel’s power, you can strike down the largest army.’”

I sighed, then looked at Charlotte.

She nodded. “It would explain why Amira wants us to find her,” she said.

“Yeah.”

Echidna continued. “So my master asked, ‘How do we seek Tamiel’s power?’ The spirit shrieked in agony, and my master pressed the question again. The spirit cried, ‘Tamiel was defeated, it was bound, she is not free to serve.’ He asked again how we could obtain her power, and then something happened that I have never seen before or since. My master cried out in pain, just as the spirit let out a piercing shriek and disintegrated. He fell to his knees, and for a moment I thought he was dead. But he was merely stunned.”

“Wait, the spirit disintegrated?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“You have summoned only demons, and they can take physical form. But you have seen the spirits in here, have you not?”

“Yes. I guess, they seem semi-physical, like clouds of energy.”

“And every time before this,” she went on, “when my master summoned and released a spirit, it appeared and disappeared much like a flame lighting and going out. This one dissolved into a cloud of mist. When my master recovered, he tried to summon it again, but there was nothing there. He said something must have destroyed it.”

I sucked at my teeth. “Just like what Volach warned us about. Push too hard to find Tamiel, and bad things happen.”

Echidna nodded gravely. “Yes. I do not want you to disintegrate, Master.”

“Were you able to find anything to help the governor?”

She looked down. “No,” she replied quietly.

I knew she’d died in the Siege of Jerusalem, and I knew enough about it to know what might have happened to a pretty young girl after the crusaders took the city, let alone one who was found in the company of a sorcerer. I had never asked, and I didn’t now.

“So who defeated Tamiel?” I asked. “Who bound her?”

Echidna shrugged.

“Master, your vision,” Charlotte said. “It must mean something.”

I was wondering that myself now. “If Tamiel was that gray form, the dark form split her in two. Part of her fell and was bound in the earth, and that other part, whatever it was, went flying over the horizon. It would fit with what the spirit said. Except the problem is that vision was six thousand years ago, if I understood correctly what was going on with the staff. Volach said Tamiel was seen more recently. So Tamiel couldn’t have been the one that was bound in the earth.”

“Unless she escaped,” Echidna said.

“Escaped, only to be bound again?” Charlotte asked.

I rubbed my forehead. “There’s a part of this puzzle we’re missing. But if Tamiel, the half that fell, was bound again, it might be what Amalia and the others were looking for.”

“But in California?” Echidna asked.

I shrugged. “Stranger things have happened, I guess.”

I pulled them to me and hugged them again.

“Thanks. This was very helpful, even if I still have no clue what we’re after here.”

“Of course, Master,” Echidna said.

Chapter 8

I had a tight schedule the next day, with my two-hour Transport Processes class first thing, the Biochem 328 lecture right after lunch, and finally Morrigan’s Inorganic Chemistry lab section at three thirty. This one was more complicated than the magnetic susceptibility lab, in that they had to synthesize a chromium acetate solution and then use the infrared spectrometer to demonstrate that they’d gotten it right. This was what Morrigan wanted help with the night before, because she’d had trouble with IR spectroscopy in the past. Eventually I got them going.

When I settled back into my seat and checked my laptop, I saw an email from Colleen. It was a bit more than I expected.

She’d sent me a link to the mission records at UC Berkeley as she promised, and she’d indeed also found a digitized version of the Santiago’s log in the Mexican National Archives. But there was more. She included a link to her thesis in the Huntington library, suggesting it would be useful background material, along with a somewhat lengthy list of other references on the mission’s architecture and specifically on the Voodoo Room.

Then she closed with a bit more.

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with. The “Voodoo Room” is something I’ve always been interested in, and I wish there was more scholarship about it. Maybe you can add to it. Good luck!

She signed off with a smiling emoji.

I forwarded the email to MJ and clicked through to start reading. I began with Colleen’s thesis, seeing that she’d done her graduate work at Huntington as I was doing. That made sense, since the library had a copy of it.

I realized quickly that she’d been right about this being useful. It was exactly what I was looking for in terms of understanding the background of what was going on when Amalia arrived in California. Colleen was a good writer, and more importantly she was a good storyteller. She managed to avoid the kind of dry literature recitation I usually saw in these kinds of papers.

The missions had ostensibly been established to convert the native Californians to Christianity and teach them “civilized” ways of living. That was the basics everyone was taught in elementary school, at least. The full truth was a lot darker and more nuanced.

In theory, once the natives were converted and educated, and a healthy parish of new Christians had been established, the priests were supposed to move on. In practice, few of them did, and the Indians were held as virtual slaves inside the missions. Diseases and death were rampant, and several rebellions occurred, resulting in the destruction of some of the early missions. Rather than educate the native Californians, the mission system caused the death of more than half of them in less than a century, with some of the coastal tribes essentially ceasing to exist.

Though the Inquisition was essentially over by then, the friars had brought some of its lingering extremism with them. Natives who resisted conversion or otherwise caused trouble could be flogged, shackled for long periods, or even branded in punishment. That these tortures occurred wasn’t really in doubt, because the friars regularly reported them to their superiors to demonstrate their zeal in spreading the faith.

Colleen’s thesis had only a brief mention of the Voodoo Room as one of the unexplained darker elements of this record. I wanted to read the UC Berkeley archives next, but the lab was almost over, and I had to take a break.

I walked Morrigan back to her dorm and then went home. As I walked into my condo, I got a text from MJ.

I got the email

Can you check something?

Sure what?

Did you happen to catch Colleen’s last name?

On her thesis?

No

Can you look at your word list from the model run?

Katarina came up and gave me a kiss. “You look tired.”

“Yeah, it’s been a long day. Hold on, I’m in the middle of something with MJ here.”

I set my laptop down on the kitchen table and opened it up. I pulled up the word list.

Got it what am I looking for?

Jimmy her last name is Stone

And then I saw it, immediately after “Voodoo.”

STONE

I’d thought it referred to the stone that held Zagan, or maybe our stone army. And maybe it did, but . . .

Oh shit

Yep

That would mean she’s in that list twice

Twice Jimmy

With me

She’s been really helpful

I think it has to mean she’s tied up with this somehow

And I don’t mean just being the helpful librarian

I sighed.

I guess we’ll see

Keep reading

I’m going to read what I can

I’ll do the Spanish stuff

Let you do the rest for now ttyl

tqm

You too dreamgirl

Hayley came out of the bedroom. I filled her in on what we’d found. Her eyes narrowed when I got to the part about Colleen’s last name.

“Is she pretty?” she asked.

Katarina laughed.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “But I mean, she has to be thirty.”

“Adriana is forty.”

“Powerful sorcerers have always attracted talented followers, Hayley,” Katarina said. “And Jimmy is very powerful.”

Hayley rolled her eyes. “We’ll see about this.”

￼

After dinner, and after I’d gotten my homework and lab grading out of the way, I went back into Colleen’s list of references. I looked first at the mission archives at UC Berkeley. Colleen had found the records accusing the monks at San Sebastian of getting mixed up in witchcraft, and there were English translations along with the originals.

There were two letters from a Spanish official who visited the mission to his superior in San Blas, both dated June 1776. The first expressed concern that the monks were not conducting proper, regular masses in the main chapel and that the Indians living at the mission behaved with what he called an “unhealthy sense of equality” with the Europeans. When he confronted the monks about this, they gave him the excuse that the local tribe had been hostile to certain elements of Christian theology and they were trying to work with them to adapt their religion to Christianity.

Greatly alarmed and disturbed by this news, the official insisted on a full inspection of the mission, whereupon he discovered what was clearly – to me, anyway – the Voodoo Room. His description was quite vague, vague enough that I could see how someone else would have missed it, but he described a room that was “a perversion of the sacraments.” This letter mentioned discussions with a friar named Domingo, no doubt the author of the other letter we saw in the Huntington archives.

The second letter, dated about a week later, reported further interviews and inspections of the mission. The monks had apparently changed their story and resumed regular Mass in the main chapel. They insisted that the official was imagining things, and he reported that, very oddly, the strange room he had seen was gone. He ascribed this to the effects of the local heat. But more strange things had occurred. The monks were acting normally, but the Indians were not. They still seemed to regard the Europeans with what he viewed as insufficient deference. When he demanded that they flog the worst offenders as an example to the others, the monks grew very agitated, an agitation that rapidly spread to the Indians.

Up to this point, what I’d read was intriguing but no more than that. What came next sent a chill down my spine.

As I argued with Br. Domingo, a woman emerged from the chapel who I had not previously encountered. She began shouting at the monks and Indians in a language I did not recognize. Almost instantly, the uproar ceased. Unlike their attitude with the monks, the Indians regarded this woman with an awe bordering on reverence. They began chanting a strange word that sounded like “aster-off.”

When I demanded to know who she was and what was going on, the woman ignored me. She turned and reentered the chapel. I ran after her, but I could not find her. I went back outside to speak with Br. Domingo, but he behaved as if nothing had happened and pretended to know nothing whatsoever about the woman. No amount of argument and threats on my part could move him.

In light of this, I recommend that the Church immediately send someone in authority to take control of this situation.

An annotation to this letter described the woman, rather approvingly, as a native priestess who had no doubt ingratiated herself with the monks in order to preserve the integrity of their religion. It went on to cite several articles about the aftermath of the mission period on the religion of the native Californians.

But I knew all that was nonsense. I knew who it had to be.

It was Amalia.

Reading over the letter, it was crystal clear to me what was going on. The monks and Amalia were there serving Astaroth, and they had – for whatever reason – turned the Indians to demon worship. Amalia had almost certainly demonstrated her powers and cowed them into submission. They didn’t show the monks the same respect because they didn’t have her powers – she was in charge, and they knew it. And Amalia had concealed the Voodoo Room from the Spanish official after he started stirring up trouble.

What it didn’t tell me was what Amalia and the monks were doing with the mission. It had to be more than Zagan. Something else was up.

I was still staring at the screen when my phone chirped. It was a text from MJ.

Hernandez faked his death

I feel like I’m going to be sick

What’s wrong? What did you find?

The log from the Santiago

There were others who died but they kept the bodies

On the ship?

Yes

There were no other burials at sea

It was cold not hot

There was no reason to do it

Are you okay?

Do I need to come over there?

My heart is pounding

I’m part of this

I know it

I can feel it

I was supposed to get that rapier it was his

I exited the message app and called her. She answered a second later.

“I’m okay. I’m okay. It’s fine.” But the tone of her voice said otherwise.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Yes. Just everything hit me all of sudden. I’m his descendant. I know it. The spirits meant me to get his rapier. What could it be for?”

“I don’t know.” I told her what I read in the two letters. “They don’t mention Hernández, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.”

“They were all worshipping Astaroth? Why?”

“They were searching for something. Besides Zagan. I’m convinced of it.”

“What is in that fucking room?”

“I don’t know. But it can’t be Tamiel. Amira wouldn’t send me looking for her if they already bound her in there.”

Hayley came out of the bedroom where she’d been studying. “What’s going on?”

Katarina appeared a moment later.

“It’s MJ.” I put her on speakerphone and filled them in on what we’d learned. “They were up to something, and it has to be related to the Voodoo Room. We need to go up there.”

“Jimmy, the mission is still a Catholic church,” MJ said. “It belongs to the Diocese of San Sebastian. Are we just going to break in there?”

I took a deep breath. “Do you see another way?”

“We do not actually have to break anything,” Katarina said.

I looked at Hayley, who said nothing.

“My family will fucking disown me if we get caught doing this,” MJ said. “I’m not kidding. My mother will forget my name, and if you knew my mother, you would know that’s not something I say lightly.”

“We won’t get caught,” I said. “I’ll figure out a way to make it work.”

“I’m trusting you, Jimmy,” MJ said. “This isn’t like it was with the Collective, snooping around some abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. This is a church. I could lose my scholarship, and that cannot happen, okay?”

“I’ll talk to Charlotte and Echidna. We’ll work out some way to hide us. We won’t do it unless I’m certain we won’t get caught.”

I listened to her breathing over the speakerphone.

“Okay.”

“We will make it work, MJ,” Katarina said.

￼

Once MJ calmed down, we went back to work. I read through the rest of Colleen’s references, but none of them added anything to what we knew. The articles she sent about the Voodoo Room were pure speculation, explanations ranging from the consensus that it was some hybrid of Catholicism and the beliefs of the local tribe – which had conveniently died out – to ideas that it represented some undocumented offshoot sect of the Church.

I knew it was all wrong. Several of the pieces had photos of the room, and what I saw was unquestionably sorcery. As Hayley said, the design on the floor was clearly a magic circle, and I could see the demonic influences on the other elements. Yet while a couple of the articles noted the similarities to European occult traditions, they dismissed them as merely “interesting.”

They were more than interesting to me. They were proof of what I’d suspected about Astaroth’s involvement. The most prominent of the statues in the room, which was up front above the magic circle, depicted a nude male figure with feathered wings, wearing a crown and holding a serpent in one hand.

The articles described this thing as some kind of unidentified angel. They were right in one respect. It was an angel – a fallen one. It matched the description of Astaroth in one of my grimoires almost exactly. Another little statue showed a similar figure on a beast with large bat-like wings and a serpentine tail. That was another depiction of Astaroth in the literature. The historians studying the Voodoo Room had either missed that connection or dismissed it. Of course a group of Franciscan monks would not be spreading demon worship to the native Californians.

I called it a night around eleven and went to bed. Hayley and Katarina were waiting, and we cuddled up together.

“I need to do some more work with Charlotte and Echidna,” I said.

“Okay,” Hayley said. “Do you need me? I have a mid-term tomorrow.”

I hugged her. “We’re good. Get some rest.”

Chapter 9

After I went to sleep that night, I returned to the castle. Charlotte was there and knew what I needed, but I had to call Echidna in and explain.

“I was not skilled with this, Master,” Charlotte said, “but such spells exist.”

“My master attempted such things,” Echidna said. “I am not skilled with it either, but I will try to help you.”

“The unlock spell I’ve been using should get us in. We just need some way of hiding ourselves.”

I had researched invisibility spells when we were searching Adriana’s house for the chest Caacrinolaas had hidden in the floor. So I knew where to start.

But I was dubious about making all five of us invisible. It wasn’t hard to see how that could go bad very quickly. If we couldn’t see each other, it was an invitation for trouble. So I felt like we needed something else.

I put Charlotte and Echidna to work researching in the library. Then I decided to try something I hadn’t bothered with in a while.

When I created the castle, I brought over the supercomputer room from my dream temple, but I hadn’t used it much at all. The one time I tried it for real, I discovered that running the divination model put too much stress on my psyche. It worked to some extent, but I woke up feeling exhausted and irritable, and I wasn’t sure I could trust the results.

But things were different. I had much more power now. More specifically, I had the power to improve things. So I sat down at the workstation and focused my mind on the supercomputer I’d created in the room underneath it. At the time, back when I first created my dream temple, I based it on an older supercomputer at one of the national laboratories. The reason I did it that way was simply because I had used that system once last fall, when I helped Dr. Vicenza with one of his projects. So I was relatively familiar with it and how it worked.

I knew, though, that there were more powerful computers out there. Not just conventional supercomputers but early-stage quantum computers. I didn’t know enough about quantum computing to create something beyond the state of the art, but I did know enough to see how I might be able to connect one of the existing designs to my supercomputer to create a hybrid quantum-classical computer.

At least, I could try to create one and use my improvement powers to make the whole thing work right.

Well, at the very least, I could give it a shot and see what happened.

Upgrading my supercomputer wasn’t challenging. I just took the two banks of servers, each of them about a hundred feet long, and duplicated them until I had something akin to the current fastest computer in the world, which was at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Then I tried to duplicate one of the cutting-edge quantum computers, which was considerably smaller than the giant system beside it.

One benefit I had in the dream world was that I could cool the quantum processor unit to near absolute zero and keep it there without any risk of interference. I didn’t have the challenges real-world researchers did in that respect. The problem was figuring out how to adapt my divination model to this hybrid system.

I knew enough from one of my undergraduate computer science classes to know that a quantum-classical hybrid workflow was reasonably similar to how the CPU in a personal computer off-loaded certain resource-intensive processing tasks to the system’s GPU. But beyond that, I didn’t really know what to do here, which was largely because neither did anyone else – the field was just too new.

But I realized after some thought that this was actually a good thing. The more I knew about the mechanics of improving things, the harder it got, because I had to understand what I was doing. Even changing Morrigan’s hair color took me about half an hour of research into the chemistry of pigments in her hair. But firming up her boobs was easy because I knew very little about biology and anatomy.

Computational fluid dynamics, which involved modeling an enormous number of random variables, was the kind of thing quantum computing should be well-suited for, at least that was what the current research was directed at. No one had actually created a usable CFD algorithm that would work on a quantum computer yet, and I – with my relatively basic computer science skills – had no clue how to do something like that.

So lacking any other ideas, I simply took my existing model, loaded it on my hybrid quantum-classical computer, and improved it.

At first, it wasn’t really clear that anything had happened. And after a few moments, I realized why. The model was what it was, and running it on a quantum computer would just make it run a lot faster. It wouldn’t do anything more than what it could already do. What I wasn’t doing here was taking advantage of the vastly greater capabilities I had just created. I had to adapt the model.

I was already modeling a flow of twenty-four particles, and using more variables than that didn’t seem like it would improve things. I didn’t need a list of five hundred words I would have to decipher. But then something began to occur to me. By greatly expanding the list of words and increasing the processing power, could I enable the spirits to speak to me directly through the results? Not just a list I would need to unravel, but an actual conversation?

This was the dream world. I could do what I wanted here.

So maybe I would just see what it could do.

I spent a little while reworking the model. I had a vague idea of how to make it work, so I did what I could. When I’d gone as far as I felt comfortable going, I stopped and improved it using my powers. Then I looked over the code again.

When I finally couldn’t see what else to do, I sat back and pondered what to ask.

I wasn’t going to ask where Tamiel was. I was nowhere near confident enough in this rather harebrained idea to attempt that. So we would start simple. I focused myself and asked a question.

“How do we get into the Voodoo Room and find what Hernández and Amalia left there without getting caught?”

Then I hit “run.”

Several lines of text popped up on the screen almost instantly.

YOU NEED TO CREATE A MYRRH-BASED SPELL THAT WILL CLOAK YOUR EXISTENCE FROM OTHERS. USING A COMBINATION OF MYRRH, ALMOND OIL, AND POPPY SEEDS WILL ALLOW YOU TO REMAIN VISIBLE TO EACH OTHER. DON’T FORGET TO BRING MJ’S RAPIER.

My shock was so intense that I almost woke up. I sat there in a daze, staring at the screen.

Had the dream done this? Was I imagining the solution because I wanted it? I honestly didn’t know how to tell one from the other. But as my agitation began to ebb, I realized there was a way to check.

I got up and went back to the library. Charlotte and Echidna were still working, surrounded by books and notes. Charlotte looked up as I came in.

“Master, we are trying,” she said, “but it is challenging. Myrrh seems to be the key, but allowing you to see each other is a challenge.”

Echidna nodded. “We think there might be some possibilities with—”

“Almond oil and poppies?”

Echidna’s jaw dropped. “I was going to say opium, to put others’ attention on you to sleep. What will the almond oil do?”

“Humor me. Myrrh, almond oil, and poppy seeds. What could we do with that?”

“Where did you get this idea, Master?” Charlotte asked.

“If it works, I’ll tell you. Right now, I’m not sure it’s anything.”

I sat down with them and began to work. I already knew about myrrh. It was an aromatic gum resin, and its distinctive odor was caused by a family of compounds known as furano-sesquiterpenes, a type of hydrocarbon. I didn’t know so much about almonds, so I went back to my chemistry database. There I learned something interesting, which was that almond oil, the familiar flavoring in so many recipes, was derived from a different sort of almond than the one eaten as a nut.

The almond flavor was mainly the result of a compound known as amygdalin. When an almond kernel was chewed or crushed, and mixed with water or saliva, the amygdalin broke down into hydrogen cyanide and another compound known as benzaldehyde, or oil of almond.

Because high levels of amygdalin created a noticeable bitterness – not to mention the cyanide – nut almonds were cultivated to reduce it. Other types were cultivated for high amygdalin content in order to maximize the benzaldehyde output. Those were simply processed to produce the oil of almond.

Then we got to the poppies. I was suspicious of Echidna’s opium idea simply because the model ought to have been more specific if we really needed opium. Also, there was the obvious problem of actually getting some if we needed to do this.

I had worked with poppies before, in the first summoning I attempted when I was trying to bind Volach, back when I knew almost nothing about sorcery beyond the fact that I’d gotten in way over my head in binding Katarina. I had combined dried poppies with some acetic anhydride that I “borrowed” from the biochem lab to produce a small amount of heroin. That didn’t seem to be what I needed to do here. As I read through the database and skimmed the abstracts of a series of articles on poppy chemistry, I stopped suddenly on an analysis of poppyseed oil.

Poppyseed oil was very high in linoleic acid, which was a fatty acid found in all sorts of things, as well as being an essential nutrient. But it was also used historically as an ingredient in oil paints, because it polymerized rapidly in air.

So I had two oils and a sesquiterpene. And it occurred to me a moment later that they ought to be soluble with each other, because most terpenes could act as solvents.

Myrrh was the source of the invisibility. Poppies were a common spell ingredient for causing confusion and distraction. I wasn’t familiar with the metaphysical aspects of almonds, but I quickly discovered they were often used to enhance both wisdom and affection, even love.

I would be using this on four people I loved. Would that be the bond that would let us see each other? There were incantations that went along with these spells, but I knew by now that these incantations were less about the words than about calling to the proper spirits for assistance. I was pretty confident that getting their attention right now wouldn’t be an issue.

I sat back and explained what I’d come up with to Charlotte and Echidna.

“It seems possible, Master,” Echidna said. “We should try it.”

Charlotte nodded. “I will gather the ingredients.”

We went over to my lab. I’d long since filled it up with everything I could possibly think of in terms of useful chemicals and spell components, and Charlotte quickly returned with two bottles of oil and a chunk of myrrh. After some playing around with it, we discovered that the easiest approach was grinding the myrrh into a powder, mixing it into the oils, and then heating it until everything dissolved.

I kept adding myrrh powder until it stopped dissolving, which told me the mix was saturated. The fluid was thick, cloudy, and deeply aromatic.

“It smells wonderful,” Charlotte said. It did, filling the lab with a scent that reminded me of eucalyptus and caramel.

I wondered if I could clear the cloudiness, so I kept it heated for a few hours, and sure enough, it settled out into a clear amber fluid. There appeared to be some impurities floating around in it, so I passed it through some filter paper. I sensed that this was going to work, but the solution was very thick and sticky. We could rub it on our skin, but it was likely to dry into something akin to a varnish. I realized we needed another step for this to be practical. It needed to be emulsified so it would work as a sort of lotion.

Though I understood the chemical processes well enough, I had never brewed up anything quite like this before. So I looked up what would be necessary, and soon found a tutorial for homemade skin lotion. It turned out to be a bit more complicated than I expected. We would need some specific type of emulsifiers, as well as stabilizers and preservatives, or it would go bad quickly. We could skip the preservatives in here, but when we did this for real, I could see I would need to do it in one of the chemistry labs to be sure it all worked right.

I set up some hot plates and heated up the oil and some distilled water. When everything was at the right temperature, I mixed them together and put them under an overhead stirrer.

For the emulsifiers and stabilizers, the recipe called for cetearyl alcohol, xanthan gum, glyceryl stearate, and methyl glucose sesquistearate. Cetearyl alcohol was a fatty alcohol made from palm and coconut oil. Xanthan gum was a very common food additive created by fermenting sugar with a specific type of bacteria. Glyceryl stearate and methyl glucose sesquistearate were reaction products of stearic acid, and glycerin and methyl glucoside, respectively. In other words, all of them were natural products ultimately derived from different types of sugars and plant oils.

Looking over the chemical data, I didn’t see anything right off that ought to affect the spell. But I wanted to be sure, and I couldn’t help wondering if there was an opportunity here to improve things.

At first, I didn’t see a whole lot. I wasn’t really sure what I could do with the sugars. But when I researched the palm oil, a possibility presented itself. I looked up at Echidna.

“Red palm oil.”

“Master?” she asked.

“What do you know about red palm oil?”

“It is the raw oil from the fruit of the palm trees along the Nile. It is used in many things.”

“Including spells?”

She nodded. “Yes. It has strong protective properties. Against evil spirits and one’s enemies.”

Could I make my own cetearyl alcohol from red palm oil, instead of what was surely some heavily processed mixture of who knew what? How hard could it be?

I eventually tracked down a step-by-step way to do it. It wasn’t simple. It was a combination of cetyl and stearyl alcohols, both of which I would need to make. There were multiple steps and catalysts required, one of which involved fractional distillation. But that was – hey – the exact field I was focusing on in my PhD program. It would take some time, but I didn’t see anything I didn’t know how to do.

But this step was overkill in here. We just needed to see if the basic recipe worked. So I went back to the lotion preparation and mixed in the emulsifiers and stabilizers it called for, keeping it under the stirrer. When everything was thoroughly mixed, I let it cool down. Eventually we had a thick, richly scented paste.

“How much of this do you think we need?” I asked.

“We should test it, Master,” Charlotte said.

I decided to start with Echidna, since she was the smallest. A little trial and error demonstrated that we needed a lot of it. The spell didn’t want to take unless we spread the lotion over her entire body, something I didn’t necessarily have a problem doing. That taken care of, I spread it over myself as well.

Then I tried the spell again. Nothing seemed to happen at first. I could still see Echidna just fine. But Charlotte gasped.

“Did it work?” I asked.

“You have vanished,” she said.

Echidna and I looked at each other. We were both naked, and it was odd realizing that Charlotte couldn’t see anything.

“You can’t see us at all?”

“No. Can you see Echidna?” she asked.

“Yes.”

I walked around Charlotte. Echidna followed me. Charlotte glanced around the lab, looking for us.

“Are you still here?” she asked.

“Yes. Come up to the bath. I want to see something.”

With Charlotte trying to follow, we went up to the big bathing area off the main bedroom. This was something MJ and I had created during Morrigan’s first dream, taking her goth obsessions and running with them. What we came up was something the size of a small swimming pool that looked like the interior of a dark steampunk chemical plant. It was all black marble and granite, brass and rusty wrought iron fixtures, with gas-fired chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Black granite gargoyles and other monster statuary decorated the walls. And since this was the dream world, it was always hot and ready.

I stepped into the water and began rinsing off. As we washed ourselves clean, Charlotte gasped again.

“You can see us now?”

“Yes. Yet I did not even see the water moving around you until now.”

“The poppyseed oil was clouding your perception,” I said.

“I think you are correct, Master.”

“All right. Then we’ve got a solution.” I grinned at her. “Why don’t you join us in here?”

Charlotte’s amazement dissolved into a sly smile. She wriggled out of her black dress and climbed down into the water.

She joined us, and I spent a few minutes playing with them, just enjoying the contrasts between their bodies – Echidna so slim and taut, Charlotte so soft and full. They kissed me, then each other as I held them, running my fingers through their long black hair. Then I sat on the edge of the bath, and they settled into the water in front of me.

Charlotte took me in her mouth, swallowing me completely as Echidna kissed her way around my balls. Echidna took a turn after a minute or so, and they went back and forth as I held their heads. They got tired of taking turns after a bit more of this and instead sucked and licked all over me together, moving up and down slowly.

When I’d had enough of this, I pulled Charlotte up on top of me. She slowly fed my dream cock into her, settling her hips down onto mine. Then I pulled Echidna up to my mouth. She knelt on the tile around me as I began to lick up at her. Charlotte rode me slowly, bending forward to help me pleasure Echidna. Our tongues flicked up and down all over her, probing and fluttering.

Charlotte rode me eagerly, but with both of us working on her, Echidna reached her release first. She let out a soft cry as she shook above me, then fell to the side as it peaked. Charlotte bent forward to kiss me and lick up the hot fluids Echidna had left behind on my face.

I took Charlotte’s thick butt in my hands and fucked up at her rapidly. She cried out, and I saw the orgasm rising inside her. A moment later, I felt her shattering around me, and she shivered in my arms. A few more thrusts were enough to do it for me as well, and I came as deeply into her as I could get.

I rolled Charlotte over and reached for Echidna. She came to me, and I positioned her between Charlotte’s thighs. She bent forward at once and began licking and sucking Charlotte’s creamy, still-quivering pussy. I entered Echidna from behind as Charlotte moaned and took Echidna’s head in her hands.

I could see Echidna’s arousal as easily as Charlotte’s, and she was still wound up after the orgasm we’d given her. I pounded her thin body steadily for several minutes as she pleasured Charlotte and my familiar writhed and moaned in front of us. When I felt them both growing close, I pushed them over the edge together, grabbing their mutual peak and holding it.

Both of them cried out, trying to hold on to each other, and I felt Echidna spasming tightly around me. I made them come together for a few minutes, continuing to fuck Echidna. Only when I went over myself, spurting deeply inside Echidna’s slim frame, did I let them go. Echidna slid forward to lie on top of Charlotte, and the two of them embraced. I lay down beside them.

“To think,” Echidna said, “we could have done this before, when I was with you.”

“I was never with a woman as a mortal,” Charlotte said.

“I was. My master wished it. But I am glad we have this here together now.”

I kissed them both. Then it was time to get back to work.

Chapter 10

I woke up the next morning feeling like we were making some solid progress. I had my Transport Processes lab at eight, so I got up early to go down to the gym. There were a few other people there, but we largely ignored each other.

I’d been on the treadmill for about twenty minutes when an attractive blonde woman walked in and up to the treadmill next to mine. We made eye contact, and I did a double take.

It was Colleen.

I lost my breath for a moment or two looking at her, because out of her conservative librarian blouse and skirt, Colleen was . . . pretty damn hot. She had on a sports bra and workout tights, and while she wasn’t MJ – after what I’d done to MJ, few women were – she was still in good shape, long and lean. She was less defined than MJ but had somewhat bigger breasts.

“Oh, hi,” she said. “Do you live this building?” She was clearly as surprised to see me here as I was to see her.

“Uh, yeah.” I struggled for a moment with an explanation, since these condos were several steps up from where starving grad students normally lived. “My, uh, my grandmother left me my unit. She died last fall.”

That was close enough to the truth.

Colleen laughed. “Wow, I guess that was a big help with school. What floor are you on?”

“Sixteen.”

“We’re neighbors. I’m on fifteen. How long have you been here?”

“I only just moved in this month.”

She got on her treadmill and started it up. I kept running, trying not to check her out any more than I already had.

“Thanks for all the help with my project,” I said.

“Oh, you’re welcome, absolutely. It’s a subject I’ve always found fascinating. There’s just so much that isn’t known about the early missions because the records are often incomplete or unreliable.”

“I read your thesis. It was really good. It really helped fill in the blanks on some stuff.”

She glanced over, smiling. “Thanks. I’m glad it helped.”

We ran together for a minute or two.

“Who are you working with on this project?” she asked. “Just curious. I know most of the faculty in the History department.”

I didn’t really want to lie, and if she knew most of the History faculty, lying about it was pointless anyway.

“I’m not actually studying history. I’m getting my doctorate in Chemical Engineering. This mission thing is a side project of mine.”

Colleen glanced over again. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What got you into this?”

I pondered what else to tell her, if anything. Normally I wouldn’t involve someone else in what my coven was doing unless I had no choice, or they wanted to get involved. But in this case, it was pretty clear the spirits wanted her in this, and she might well have more to contribute.

“It’s related to some things my grandmother left me. Got me interested in the historical elements of what I’m studying, and one thing kind of led to another. I might work it into my dissertation.”

That wasn’t entirely untrue. But Colleen wasn’t ready to let it go.

“I’m not seeing the nexus with the missions.”

“It’s not so much the missions as some things that led me to that room at San Sebastian, the history of the people around it. I think I might actually have figured some of it out.”

Her eyes widened. “Seriously?”

“I know one thing. Those articles you sent me about it are all wrong. Those are definitely occult elements in that room. Several of the statues are of a demon called Astaroth, and that design on the floor is a something called a magic circle. You can find other examples in the literature.”

Disbelief had filled Colleen’s face. “You’re kidding.”

“I can show you if you want. I don’t think there’s any real doubt.”

“That’s fascinating,” she said. “I would love to see it. How do you think that could have happened?”

“I don’t know yet, which is why I want to go up there.”

She nodded. “I went there once. I’ll be honest, I kind of agree with you on what it looks like. That room is just creepy, and that’s not something I say lightly, because there are so many things that seem that way just because of the cultural differences. That isn’t the case here.”

Again, I struggled with letting her into this, but something told me I needed more of her help.

“My schedule is kind of wall-to-wall today,” I said, “but I could come by the library this afternoon. I have the actual books. You can see for yourself.”

She glanced at me again, clearly surprised to hear this. “You do?”

“They belonged to my grandmother. She was a bit eccentric. She had a collection of things.”

“That would be amazing. I’d love to see them.”

I checked my watch. I had to get back upstairs and get ready for class. I stopped my treadmill and stepped off.

“I have to get going. How about two o’clock?”

Colleen smiled at me. “I’ll be at the Archives desk. Just come on down.”

￼

The girls were still asleep when I got back. I woke Katarina up – because she slept at my command, I had to wake her up manually – and explained what we’d worked out in the dream.

“It works?” she asked.

“It seemed to. Can you go get what we need? Maybe connect with Morrigan. She should know where we can get some myrrh. We need a lot of it, and we need to test it out here too.”

I had to repeat my dream research at the kitchen table to make a list for her. It took some doing, but I found the emulsifiers and stabilizers I needed – except for the cetearyl alcohol, which I intended to make – at a new age market across town. The same place also had generic plastic jars we could use to store the finished lotion. For the preservative, I decided to use propylene glycol, which was available in a cosmetic-grade form at a chemical supply store. Some of the catalysts I needed for the cetearyl alcohol were on the nastier side, but all of it was available in the chemistry lab on campus. Since I would need to use the lab equipment anyway for something this complicated, I figured that was fine. The red palm oil actually proved to be the most challenging, but eventually I located some at an Egyptian market downtown.

I wrote out my rather lengthy shopping list for Katarina. She agreed to get on it, and I ran off to class.

Wednesdays were my busiest days, because I had my two-hour Transport Processes lab from eight to ten, followed by the Chem 245 lecture right after that, then CE Thermodynamics at one, and finally the Biochem II lab at three thirty.

I texted MJ during the Chem 245 lecture to update her on everything and let her know we’d likely found a solution to getting into the mission. She still seemed nervous but thanked me for working on it. After that, I met up with Hayley and Morrigan for lunch at the student union. Morrigan told me she’d already talked to Katarina.

“Celeste has myrrh and the oils,” she said. “We can go over there after lunch.”

“Do you think bringing Katarina is a good idea?”

She pursed her lips. “I need to tell her, Master,” she said quietly. “Eventually.”

I sighed. “It’s your decision, baby girl. Just be sure you’re ready for it.”

She nodded. I gave her a quick side hug. Then I told them about my meeting with Colleen in the gym. Hayley’s eyes bulged.

“She lives in our building?”

“Apparently. It’s becoming clear to me that something wants her involvement in this.”

Morrigan suddenly got a distant look in her eyes.

“What?” I said to her.

“Jimmy, the word list,” she said. “From the last run. I remember this because it struck me as weird, which I thought meant it was one of the random meaningless words. Except so many of these random words turn out to be important, and I wondered what it could possibly be.”

“What word?”

“Treadmill.”

My jaw dropped. I grabbed my laptop and opened it up. She was right. It was there, right at the end.

Hayley gaped at the screen. “She’s in there three times? Three?”

“Do you think that means she’s supposed to join us?” Morrigan asked.

Hayley looked at me but didn’t say anything. I couldn’t quite read the look in her eyes.

“We’re just meeting to go over the grimoires,” I said. “This doesn’t mean she’s joining us, just that she obviously has things to contribute. I mean, she’s a grown woman with a job and a life at the school here. I didn’t get any sense that her interest is anything more than academic.”

Hayley stared at me a moment longer. “Please don’t tell her what’s really going on until we’ve discussed it, okay?”

I nodded. “I won’t. I promise.”

“MJ said she’s hot.”

I gaped at her for a moment. “She said that?”

“I asked her. Those were her exact words. ‘Yeah, she is kind of hot.’”

Morrigan laughed.

“Okay, yeah, she’s not bad,” I finally said.

￼

I had to run back to the condo to get the books I wanted to show Colleen, since they were too big and heavy to lug around all morning. Then I went off to CE Thermo. The Engineering building was around the corner from the library, so I got down to the Archives desk just after two. Colleen was there waiting. She looked up and smiled.

“There you are.”

“Hey,” I said.

“I’m dying to see what you’ve got.”

She stood up and set a little sign on the desk that said, “Be Right Back,” then picked up a notepad. “Come on in back, there’s a room where we can spread things out.”

I followed her back into the stacks and over toward one wall of the basement, where there was a study room behind a window. She let me in, and we sat down at the table.

When I pulled the grimoires out of my backpack, Colleen sucked in a little breath. “Oh, my.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty old. I think they date to the fifteenth century.”

“These were your grandmother’s?”

“Yeah.”

The interest in her face had shifted to concern. “Jimmy, how are you storing these?”

“Uh, just in my apartment.”

“You really should be taking better care of them. What did your grandmother do with them?”

I shifted in my seat. I hadn’t given much thought to that element. “They were in a bank vault. For a pretty long time, actually.”

“That’s good, but if they’re out of it now, you should be keeping them in archival boxes, and ideally with books this old, you should have them in archival-grade plastic bags.”

“Really?”

“The key is keeping them in conditions that don’t change. I can show you what you need to do when we’re done here. These look to be in decent shape, but that can change in a hurry if you’re not careful.”

I nodded. “Uh, okay, thanks.”

Colleen had brought some alcohol wipes with her, and she insisted that we clean our hands before getting started.

I had my laptop, and I opened it up to the articles about the Voodoo Room she’d sent me. Sitting there next to her, I couldn’t help thinking about what she’d looked like that morning in the gym and the conversation I had with Hayley and Morrigan at lunch. But I still sensed nothing but academic interest from her.

“These books are in Latin,” I said.

“My Latin is decent.”

Somehow, this didn’t surprise me. I opened up Liber Officiorum Spirituum to the entry on Astaroth and showed it to her. She looked back and forth between it and the photo of the little statue.

“You’re right,” she said after a few moments. “It makes no sense, but that’s exactly what it looks like.”

She made some notes on her pad. I showed her the photo of the other statue and how it also matched the description. She nodded again. “Amazing that no one noticed this until now.”

“Like you said, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Franciscan friars aren’t exactly sort of the people you’d expect this from.”

“No. Not at all.”

Then I showed her the section on magic circles and how the structure of the one in the Voodoo Room matched the descriptions very closely. Many of the symbols in it were almost identical to the book. Colleen made some more notes, shaking her head slowly.

“What in the world were they doing here? This is stuff that could have gotten them burned at the stake. The Inquisition’s influence was mostly over by this point, but something like this would have been impossible for the Church to ignore. There would have been consequences.”

I mentioned the two letters she’d referred me to in the Berkeley archives.

“This does put a different spin on that,” she said. “Absolutely.”

“It reads like the Indians were chanting ‘Astaroth.’”

She gasped softly. “Can you pull that up again?”

I did.

“This is crazy,” she said. “They somehow got the Chumash mixed up in this as well? Who could that woman have been?”

I held my tongue as best I could.

“This is why I want to go up there,” I said a moment later.

She nodded. “Do you mind if I take some pictures of this?”

I wavered for a moment, but there was no good reason to refuse her. She got out her phone and carefully photographed the entries I’d shown her, then took several more of the book itself and front pages.

“Jimmy, this could be big,” she said. “You need to publish this. This is something that deserves more study. I could help you if you want.”

In all this research, the possibility of publication had never entered my mind – though of course it should have. I was in a PhD program after all, and I was surrounded by people whose lives revolved around publishing their research. Six months of sorcery had shifted my perspective, but that didn’t change the environment I was working in.

“I hadn’t gotten that far. I’m still not sure what we’re looking at.”

Colleen nodded rapidly. “Right, right, there’s definitely a lot more here to look at. But are you interested? In working together on an article? You were the one who discovered this, so I mean obviously you’re the first author, but I think I could help with the context and the rest of it.”

Again, there was no good way to refuse her without sounding rude and ungrateful. And after a moment, I wondered if it really mattered. I could publish something like this without affecting my sorcery. And I was familiar enough with how things worked by now to know that an article like this would involve months of back-and-forth effort anyway, so it wouldn’t really interfere with our search for Tamiel. Best case scenario, the article might be published a year from now.

“I think that could work,” I said finally.

“You’re sure it’s okay? I don’t want to force myself into this, but this is exactly the field I’ve been working on all this time, and this is one of those mysteries that deserves an answer. There’s some other stuff I can share with you.”

“It’s okay, yeah. You’ve been a huge help.”

Colleen smiled broadly. “Thanks. I think this will be a great project.”

When we were done looking through everything, Colleen took me back into the archives and gave me a couple of big, heavy polyethylene bags for the grimoires. When I mentioned there were two more, she gave me bags for those as well. Then she showed me the archival boxes she’d mentioned, which were thick-sided cardboard with metal brackets at the corners for protection. She couldn’t give me any of those because they were too expensive, but she explained where I could order some.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Please remember what I said about handling them correctly. I’m sure you want these to last.”

I went off to the Biochem lab wondering if there was anything behind the pleasant smile she gave me as I left.

Chapter 11

When I walked in the door to my condo, I sensed immediately that something was up – and that was before I saw Celeste sitting at the dining table with Morrigan, Hayley, and Katarina.

Celeste was a tall woman with long graying red hair. Like her niece, she was quite attractive, but unlike Morrigan – who delighted in dressing up, heavy accessorizing, and dramatic makeup – Celeste gave the distinct appearance of not caring what she looked like. Her hair was loose and mostly unstyled. She had no makeup on and wore a long, beaded caftan.

“Jimmy,” she said.

“What’s going on, guys?”

Morrigan looked up at me. “She wanted to talk to you. We got the stuff, but she said there are some things you need to know.”

I set my backpack down and got a beer from the fridge. I sensed I was going to need it. Then I took the chair at the end of the table.

“So what’s up?” I asked.

“This isn’t about Morrigan,” Celeste said. “She made her own choice, which she had the right to do. I knew immediately, but I’ve been doing my best not to dwell on it.”

“You know it’s what she was meant to be.”

To my mild surprise, Celeste nodded slowly. “I do. I’ve known for a long time, I simply hoped I could turn her from it. But some things can’t be fought. It was why I tried to keep her away from you. I knew it would take only a little push for her to embrace it. And you gave her more than a little push.”

“It feels right,” Morrigan said. “It does. I love him, Celeste. I want to be with him. With all of them.”

“I can see that. Which is why we don’t need to discuss this any further.”

“So what is it about?” I asked.

“I need to know what you’re doing here,” Celeste said. “Morrigan refused to tell me, but there have been signs and portents around you that concern me. I can’t tell for sure what it is, but I sense enough to know that it concerns Amalia.”

I had to gather my thoughts for a few moments.

“She’s not Amalia anymore.”

Celeste’s eyebrows went up. “Anymore?”

“You know who she served.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve met him,” I said. “He came to my apartment a few weeks ago, actually.”

Celeste’s face paled. “What happened to her?”

I took a deep breath. “Do you know how succubi are made? How Katarina became what she is?”

She glanced at my succubus, then back at me. “Yes. Beautiful virgins who die by suicide. They’re taken up by Lilith.”

“The process is a bit more complicated than that,” Katarina said. “More complicated and . . . unpleasant.”

“What is your point?” Celeste asked me.

“Mortals can become demons when the circumstances are right,” I said.

Her eyes widened. “Amalia?” she gasped.

“She goes by Amira now.”

“She’s a demon?”

“A Duchess of Hell. Long story short, I work for her. Or at least, she asks me to do things, and if I can, I do them, and they pay me. I think you know what that involves.”

Celeste’s face had gone as gray as her hair. “Yes. I do.” She looked at Morrigan. “You’re helping him with this?”

Morrigan nodded. “Yes.”

“It’s all on my account,” I said. “Since I lead this coven. She has no balance, positive or negative.”

Celeste leaned back in her chair and sighed.

“This makes a number of things more clear. The connection to Amalia I sensed. It didn’t seem right, since I thought she was gone. I wondered if maybe you had lied to me, or if she had faked her death.”

“She didn’t,” Hayley said. “I’ve met her. She’s not like she was when you knew her.”

“I expect not. Can you tell me what it is she asked you to do?”

I took a swig of my beer and exhaled. “Celeste, do you know what Astaroth was doing when he came to my apartment? He was there to escort me to a meeting. Can you guess who that might have been with?”

“Who?”

“I’d rather not speak his name aloud. Let’s just say, Astaroth is a King of Hell, but he’s not the one running things.”

Celeste gasped. She stared at me, jaw down, for several seconds. “He was here? You met him?”

“Boggles the mind a bit, when you think of it, doesn’t it? How many people can say they met him in the flesh?”

Celeste continued gaping at me.

“So you can imagine I’m a bit leery of who I talk to about my work for this organization,” I said, “especially with someone who works for the other side.”

“I don’t,” she said immediately. “I work for myself. I’ve never taken a side.”

“You serve the light.”

“That’s the not the same thing as serving the celestial bureaucracy. I’ve never had anything to do with them. And frankly, I doubt they would be interested in me.”

I looked around the table. “Thoughts?”

“I trust her,” Morrigan said instantly.

“She is correct about who she would be serving,” Katarina said. “The celestial bureaucracy does not use spellcasters such as her, even those who try to serve the light.”

“I’ll take Morrigan’s word for it,” Hayley said.

I sat back in my chair. I still wasn’t sure about this, but I decided to trust the girls’ instincts.

“I suspect what you’ve sensed,” I said, “is related to the small army of spirits that have been clustering around us, wanting to support my every move. I don’t know why they’re here.”

“I have indeed sensed something like that. But I feel like there’s more here. What did Amalia . . . Amira . . . ask you to do?”

“I don’t want you interfering.”

“I may be able to help.”

My eyebrow went up. “You want to help us?”

“If it will help protect Morrigan.”

I glanced at my purple-haired slave girl. She shot me a nervous smile.

“Does the name Tamiel mean anything to you?” I asked.

Celeste’s eyes darkened. “Yes.”

“We’ve been asked to look for her. Whatever she is.”

Celeste closed her eyes and pursed her lips tightly. It was several long seconds before she said anything.

“Amalia has been looking for Tamiel for a very long time. At least, by regular mortal standards. She was looking when I knew her, in Zagan’s Rock, before you were born. She mentioned it more than once.”

My jaw had dropped. “She was?”

“Yes. Why, I don’t know. So little is known about Tamiel. But what is known isn’t good. She possesses some great awe-inspiring power, or so the stories go.”

“The smitings,” Hayley said.

“Yes, that’s what the Book of Enoch says. What that means exactly, no one has ever quite settled on.”

“I thought she was focused on Zagan,” I said.

“I believe Zagan was merely a means to an end. With Amalia, there were always plots within plots. Like an onion. Every time you thought you’d peeled one away, there was something else under it.”

I closed my eyes. I wasn’t about to tell her that I had been the one to take Zagan’s powers. But I had to think about this for a few moments.

“She wanted to use Zagan to find Tamiel,” I said. “But Zagan’s power was improving things, not finding them.”

“Yes. So I can’t tell you what exactly she was up to. The onion, again. There was a layer under it.”

“Should we ask her?” Hayley asked. “She would have to answer, and tell us the truth.”

Celeste looked over at her. “Are you talking about summoning her? A Duchess of Hell?”

“We’ve done it before,” Hayley said. “More than once.”

“Her connection to me makes it fairly easy,” I said.

“I suppose it would,” Celeste said. “Still, you’re surely aware that directly interrogating a demon like that can be dangerous. Even if she used to be your grandmother.”

“I’m aware of that,” I said. “And I really think we should wait until we know more.”

Celeste sighed. “This is distressing,” she said. “But I’m afraid there is little else I can tell you. I can try to do my own divinations, but as you may be aware, that has been dangerous with Tamiel.”

“It has. And I think maybe you shouldn’t.”

￼

We invited Celeste to stay for dinner, but she declined. When she left, I told the others about my meeting with Colleen.

“She wants to publish with you?” Hayley asked.

“I think that’s the sole source of her interest,” I said. “So false alarm on the rest of it, I guess.”

“I am not convinced,” Katarina said. The rest of us turned toward her.

“Why not?” Morrigan asked.

“As I have told you, powerful sorcerers draw people into their orbits,” she replied. “I have seen it time and again. These people may not even know why they want to be around them. Think of your attraction to Jimmy. It blossomed rapidly for both of you soon after meeting him, even though you would not have thought him a good match for you had someone described him before that.”

I looked at Morrigan and Hayley.

“She kind of has a point,” Morrigan said. “I mean, you guys just hooked up like that.” She snapped her fingers at Hayley. “That wasn’t really like you. It took a week before we did anything after I met you.”

“And you’d never even been with a guy,” Hayley said.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“And think of how it went with MJ,” Katarina said.

Hayley nodded. “That was definitely random. For sure.”

“It was the same for me,” Katarina went on, “even with our bond. I think the bond gave me a direct connection with this. When he first cast the spell on me, I wanted to murder him. Within five minutes, we were making love, and I wanted it. I wanted nothing more than to serve him.”

They finally looked back at me.

“Huh,” I said. I hadn’t given it much thought before that moment, but Katarina was right. Which meant . . . what, exactly? I wasn’t sure I liked it, and the girls all saw my reaction.

Hayley reached over and squeezed my hand. “We didn’t mean it like that.”

Morrigan took the other one. “I meant what I said to Celeste,” she said. “I want to be with you.”

“So I suspect Colleen may be falling under this same influence,” Katarina said, “whether she realizes it or not.”

I cleared my throat. “I do think you guys would get along with her.”

“So you find her attractive, Jimmy?” Katarina asked. “Because from what I have seen, you are attracted to strong, intelligent, and capable women, as Colleen appears to be. For a sorcerer, those emotions have power.”

Three pairs of eyes stared at me.

“Well, she’s interesting. I won’t deny it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

￼

As Katarina went to finish dinner, I texted MJ. I hadn’t talked to her since that morning, and I wanted to check in with her now that she’d had a little longer to think about things.

But look if you’re not up for doing this you don’t need to come with us

I’m not backing out

You need me and you know it

There’s no pressure here okay?

The program said not to forget me and my rapier

It did

So that’s that

I’m going

If this works like you said we’re fine

If I don’t come I think something bad could happen

I don’t know about bad

But I’m pretty sure we need you there

I just don’t know what for

She didn’t say anything for about a minute.

Do you think I’m going to have to fight something?

I hope not

But you kicked Eligos’s butt

You can handle this

That was in the dream Jimmy

I haven’t actually fought anything out here

I’m becoming convinced that the dream world is more than a dream

What you did there you can do here

Do you feel like you can’t?

No

That’s not it

I feel like I know exactly what to do

When I hold that thing it’s like an extension of my arm

I want to kill things with it

That’s kind of what’s scaring me

We’ll be there right beside you

Whatever the fuck this is

I know

Katarina leaned out of the kitchen. “Dinner is ready.”

Okay dinner time

Hang in there babe we’ve got this

Okay

tqm

You too

Chapter 12

My Thursdays were only a bit lighter than my Wednesdays, since I had Transport Processes first thing and then Biochem right after lunch. I’d originally had Morrigan’s Chem 245 lab section Thursday afternoons, but the school decided to shift it to Tuesday because there was some conflict with a graduate class that had to be reorganized due to insufficient enrollment.

Dr. Paulson wanted to talk about a few things, so I was in his office for another half hour after class wrapped up. I was walking home across campus when I saw a really hot dark-haired girl walking toward me. She had big breasts and a lot of curves, and the male students – and some female – turned their heads to watch as she went past. But she paid no attention to them. In fact, she was looking straight at me.

Something about her looked very familiar – then I realized why I hadn’t recognized her right away. The venue was just too discordant. She smiled as she approached me, stopping a couple of feet away. Her gaze sent a wave of heat across me.

“Hello, Jimmy,” Amira said.

“What are you doing here?” I managed after a moment or two.

She pouted. “Is that any way to speak to your grandmother?”

I took a slow breath. “You weren’t really my grandmother. Like you pointed out last time.”

Amira smiled. “No. So the salacious thoughts all the boys walking past me are having right now are things within your reach . . . if you like.”

I won’t say I didn’t think them myself. But.

“What do you need?”

She took my hand. The contact sent a shiver up my spine. “Walk with me.”

I did. Now I was getting much the same looks as she did.

“I came to see how things were going,” she said.

“With my search for T—”

She hissed at me sharply. “Names, Jimmy. Names have power. You need to be more careful using them. When someone I used to know comes to your home and uses my name and that one, I hear it. The same applies with what I have asked you to do here. Others will hear this conversation if we are not cautious.”

“Celeste told us some things.”

“She did.”

“You’ve been looking for this . . . individual . . . for a long time. You were looking for them when you were here the first time, when you sealed up Zagan.” I wasn’t concerned about using Zagan’s name, since he wasn’t Zagan anymore.

“What have you found?” she asked.

“You’re mentioned in the mission archives. No one else would know, but I do. You were doing things with the Indians and the priests at the mission.”

“I was. And you are correct that this search occupied much of my mortal life. But do not think I am keeping things from you, Jimmy. There are things you must learn for yourself, for I can no longer speak of them without others hearing. I am part of the bureaucracy now. You know who I refer to.”

“I’m aware of that. You’re concerned that those others would be unhappy about this?”

“Unhappy would be one way of putting it. Enraged beyond all reason might be another. If you feel you are growing close to a solution, you must contact me. I cannot tell you why, but you are smart enough to figure that out on your own. If they learn of this . . .”

“I kind of got that impression from Volach.”

“What are you planning?” she asked.

“We’re going up to the mission. I’m convinced there are more clues there.”

“There may well be. I have long suspected that Hernández continued things after my return to Europe, but when I finally came back to California, I could find nothing further.”

She turned us from the sidewalk and up the steps to the Psych building. She went up a step and turned around, sliding her arms around my neck like a girl saying goodbye to the boyfriend who had just walked her to class. Before I could do anything, she gave me a lingering kiss. Her tongue flicked into my mouth like a serpent, and her body writhed against mine. Another wave of heat washed over me. Just as I was starting to get hard against my will, she broke our embrace.

“Goodbye, Jimmy. Remember what I said.”

Then she was gone.

￼

Katarina and Morrigan had managed to locate everything I needed the day before. Per my instructions, Morrigan basically cleared out Celeste’s supplies of almond oil, poppyseed oil, and myrrh. We had a liter each of the oils and about two cups of myrrh crystals. Katarina had come back with a gallon jug of red palm oil and more than enough of the other supplies I sent her to get.

After five o’clock, when I knew the chemistry lab I wanted to use was empty, the four of us went over to campus with all the stuff.

I started with the myrrh. After grinding it up, I heated the oils and had Hayley mix things together. Then I got to work on the cetearyl alcohol.

Brewing up the first component, the stearyl alcohol, required me to transesterify and distill the red palm oil using methanol and zinc as the catalyst. I got the steps mixed up at first and had to start over, but fortunately, we had plenty of palm oil to work with. The second batch came out fine. I then had to hydrogenate the resulting solution using a copper catalyst. The last step was the fractional distillation to separate out the zinc and copper, but I was ready for this part, and I had no trouble with it.

The process for making cetyl alcohol was similar. I had to hydrolyze the palm oil under pressure in water, and then fractionally distill palmitic acid out of the solution. Then I reacted the palmitic acid with another alcohol, 2-ethylhexanol, which was a common precursor chemical for all sorts of processes and fortunately available in the supply cabinet. That gave me ethyl palmitate, which I had to reduce with sodium to produce the cetyl alcohol.

The end result of mixing the two was exactly the pale waxy substance I was supposed to get.

By the time I was done, Hayley and Morrigan had finished mixing, straining, and purifying the myrrh oil, and they had sterilized all the equipment with boiling water. So we got to work on the lotion.

I set up an overhead stirrer over the myrrh oil on a hot plate and carefully measured everything out. When the oil was hot enough, I turned on the stirrer and slowly poured in the sterile distilled water. It quickly turned into a thick, milky solution. Then I added the cetearyl alcohol, xanthan gum, and the emulsifiers. Per the instructions, I let that run for about five minutes under the stirrer on high speed. Then I turned off the heat and added the propylene glycol.

The final step was letting it cool down to room temperature, weighing it to determine how much water had evaporated and balancing it out, and then adjusting the pH to get it below 5. We wound up with about a liter of thick, wonderfully fragrant paste. We carefully spooned it into the plastic container Katarina had gotten.

When I was done, the girls all took a bit of what was left and rubbed it over their hands.

“This is awesome,” Morrigan said, holding her hands up and inhaling the fragrance. “It smells so good.”

“Seriously,” Hayley said. “This is just like this face cream my mom gets for fifty bucks a jar. It’s so rich.”

“I think it’s the palm oil,” I said.

“It is lovely, Jimmy,” Katarina said.

“Just don’t waste it,” I said. “We need a lot.”

“So what do we do here?” Hayley asked.

“You have to spread this all over your body. Charlotte explained that’s often the case with these kinds of magic ointments.”

She cocked her eyebrow at me. “And you tested it by rubbing it all over Charlotte and Echidna?”

Morrigan laughed. “I guess that’s why Echidna was kind of sluggish the other morning.”

“So who gets to be the guinea pigs this time?” Hayley asked.

“Let’s go home first,” I said. “Not something I want to do in a chem lab.”

We cleaned everything up and put the lab back in order, then went back to the condo. Katarina got dinner going while the rest of us set up the spell.

First, I had Hayley and Morrigan strip down and cover each other with the lotion. The sight of it was enough to distract me briefly from the task at hand, but I managed to explain the spell I needed them to cast. I wanted them to get some experience with spellcasting, and this was pretty straightforward.

When they were ready, Hayley spoke the incantation. They immediately vanished.

“So . . . anything?” I heard her say. “That felt really strong, when I cast it. But I don’t see anything different.”

I inhaled slowly. “You can see each other?”

“Wait, you can’t see us?” Morrigan asked.

“Nope.”

They laughed.

“I can think of some uses for this outside of breaking into the mission,” Hayley said.

Morrigan laughed again.

“You really can’t see us?” Hayley asked. “We can see each other just fine.”

“Hold still a second,” I said. I went to get my ring and put it on. To my surprise, it didn’t help. I still couldn’t see them. Something was resisting it, and I suspected it was the influence of the red palm oil. “Huh.”

“What?” Hayley asked.

“The ring doesn’t help. It’s like the spell is preventing me from noticing anything at all.”

There were a few long moments of silence, long enough that I began to get concerned. Then I felt a hand on my jeans.

“So . . .” Hayley said, “you can’t tell who this is?”

“Uh.”

Morrigan laughed. I felt, but didn’t see, another hand on my jeans, and fingers sliding under the waistband.

“Dinner is about ready,” Katarina said. “Whatever you three are doing in there.”

Hayley and Morrigan laughed.

“It works,” I said. “Let’s pick this up another time.”

￼

I wanted to head up to San Sebastian Friday afternoon, since the last class any of us had was over at two. With a bigger budget due to my newfound wealth, I’d reserved a house for a few days through Airbnb, since I didn’t see how all five of us, plus Charlotte, could manage in one hotel room.

Even with the preservatives, I didn’t want to take any chances with the invisibility lotion, so I put it into the refrigerator overnight. Then I stuck it into a cooler with some ice packs for the drive up.

MJ came over around two thirty with a bag over her shoulder and the rapier box under her arm. I gave her a hug and explained about the lotion. She rose up and pecked me on the lips.

“I knew you could do it,” she said. “You just pushed the Angry Latina button that night.”

I laughed. “The what?”

“Don’t say a single word. I mean it.” She gave me a half-glare, half-smile. “That’s a joke only I get to make.”

“Okay.”

She kissed me again and set her stuff down with the other bags.

My new car, while bigger than my old one, wasn’t quite big enough for all five of us and our luggage. So Hayley and Morrigan rode up in her little SUV while I took Katarina, MJ, and Charlotte. Katarina, as the tallest member of my coven, took the front seat with Charlotte while MJ got in back.

When I was on the freeway and headed north, MJ leaned against the back of my seat and slid her arms around onto my chest. I felt her resting her chin next to my head. I reached up and rubbed her arm quickly.

“Sorry I’m being high-maintenance.”

“You’re not,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“I am. It’s okay to say it.”

“I know the button is there now. I won’t push it again.”

She laughed and nuzzled my ear. Then she sighed.

“I still haven’t told anyone about you.”

“I get it. I do,” I said. “What are you going to tell them, ‘I’m dating a sorcerer’?”

“That’s actually not it. I mean it is, but it’s not the only reason.”

I turned quickly to look at her. “What do you mean?”

She sighed again. “Look, my family is really not that conservative and traditional. I know girls who have to put up with far worse shit than I do. You met my tio abuelo. He’s pretty chill.”

“He is.”

“Most of them are like that,” she said. “But even so, there are still expectations around how you live your life and what you do. And my playing all these sports and going to a school like UCSD, yeah, they’re all really proud of me, but the same time, it raises some questions in some of their minds, like where am I going to end up. Like, am I going to respect where I came from, or am I going to start pretending I’m a white girl?”

I nodded. “For sure, yeah.”

“And if we drove up to my parents’ house in this car, and I introduced you as my boyfriend, there would be a reaction. We can’t sit here and pretend there wouldn’t be. I can just hear some of my cousins.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m just not ready to deal with that. We have enough stuff going on.”

I leaned over and tried to kiss her, landing a peck on her cheek. “We do, babe. It’s all good.”

She leaned forward and kissed me back.

“You know what you’ve talked about with Hayley and Morrigan?” she asked. “The bloodlines?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what’s stressing me out. Because I know now there’s something there with me too.”

“Not for sorcery?” Katarina asked. “I have never sensed that in you.”

“No . . . well, I don’t know, but that’s not what I meant.”

“Hernández,” I said.

“Right. I can feel it now,” she said. “There was something about that rapier. I knew it when you gave it to me that night, but I wrote it off as just my being good with swords now. Like whatever you did gave me the ability to know things about the swords I picked up. Except, it doesn’t.”

“But you did,” Katarina said. “I remember. You said, ‘Whoever carried it knew what they were doing. It’s not a show piece. This has been used.’”

“But only with that rapier,” MJ said. “Other swords I’ve picked up, nothing, at least nothing but mundane stuff anyone could know.”

“It could be the enchantment on it,” I said. We’d tried to analyze it and gotten nothing. As I had felt that night, whatever magic was in the rapier was dormant, like it was waiting for something.

“It’s an enchantment that’s tied to me,” MJ said. “And that’s what has me worried. What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Are you afraid there is some monster hiding in the Voodoo Room, MJ?” Katarina asked.

She said it so matter-of-factly that neither MJ nor I laughed.

“Would there be?” MJ asked after a moment.

“No, I do not think so. Monsters are confined to the spirit world. Most of them, anyway.”

I glanced at MJ.

“Good thing we added the protection spell to the lotion.”

She nodded. “Yeah, that’s good,” she said.

￼

The drive to San Sebastian took about four hours because we hit some traffic, but eventually we pulled into the house I’d rented. I deliberately got a place a few blocks from the mission so we would be able to walk over after dark. It wasn’t too big, but it was modern and cozy and had two adjacent bedrooms, one with a king bed and one with a queen, and the owner was open to pets. I let the girls work out who was going to sleep where, and they decided MJ and Morrigan would sleep with me the first night. I wasn’t inclined to argue.

Once I was satisfied the house was okay, we went back out to the market down the street to stock up on food and booze. By the time we got back, it was getting dark and I figured we should call it a night and relax. I wanted to make a legit visit to the mission during the day before we attempted to get into the Voodoo Room, partly to scope things out but also to get a good impression of the place when we weren’t worried about getting caught.

The weather was reasonably nice and the house had a nice little patio with a gas grill, so we sat outside for dinner. I made burgers while Katarina mixed up a pitcher of martinis with her Swedish vodka. As I sipped my martini and looked over my coven, blonde to brunette to redhead to purple, I reflected that whatever had brought me to this moment – free will or some six-thousand-year-old conspiracy – I was grateful to be there.

Morrigan saw me looking and came over, leaning against me and resting her head on my shoulder. I hugged her, enjoying the pressure of her cartoon-character boobs against my chest.

“How are you doing, baby girl?”

“I’m good, Master,” she said softly.

“How was the drive up? What did you guys talk about?”

“We were talking a lot about us, I mean me and her. How we couldn’t make it work the first time, but how it feels so right now.”

“But you guys were together for five months. That’s as long as Hayley and I have been dating, almost.”

“We argued a lot, though,” she said. “Because I kept trying to talk her into things, and she would try and not like it, and then I would feel bad, and she would feel bad for making me feel bad. Then we would both feel bad and start fighting about it.”

“Seems like a lot of drama.”

She nodded against my chest. “It was. Then we would make up, and it would start all over again a few weeks later because I would convince myself I could find a way to turn her into my domme if I just tried one more time. Part of the problem was that I wanted her to talk shit to me and treat me like trash. Which, you know just isn’t her.”

“No,” I said. “Is that what you want from me?”

She shook her head. “No. I love how you are with me. I only like that from other girls.”

That made me think about something, but I held my tongue. Morrigan hugged me.

“Part of me still wishes I could have a domme too, but I get it. I’m just happy I have you, and her, and everything.”

As she went back over to sit with Hayley, I thought about what Hayley told me, about that strong, quasi-evil side of her, the girl she’d been in that dream. I wondered why Morrigan hadn’t ever been able to draw her out. Because in fact, I knew now that Hayley could have done it. But something about Morrigan didn’t spark it.

I wasn’t going to tell Morrigan any of that though, since it wasn’t my place to say it. We’d barely told the rest of them anything about that dream, other than that it had gone bad.

Then my eyes fell on MJ, and I had an idea.

￼

Hayley had told her parents we were coming up, but she’d given them the cover story that, since we had more people than they had extra beds, we would just get a place of our own and come by to see them. Stephanie didn’t argue, I suspected because she didn’t want some spring break party disrupting her architectural-magazine house.

After dinner, Hayley called them and checked in. Both of them were still at the hospital, and I got the impression listening to the conversation that that was going to be the situation most of the week anyway. Eventually Hayley worked out that we would come over for dinner in a few days. They talked briefly about visiting the mission but Hayley obliquely suggested we would probably spend most of our time on the beach.

I was sitting in the family room watching TV with MJ and Morrigan while Katarina cleaned up. After she got off the phone with her mom, Hayley came over and lay down in my lap. I put an arm around her.

“Issues?” I asked. I could tell from the tone of her voice talking to her mother that something was up.

“It’s fine,” she said. “They’re working all week anyway.”

“Sounded like there was more there.”

She sighed. “This is stupid. I know it’s nothing. It has to be nothing.” She reached up and rubbed her forehead. “At least, if it’s not nothing, I’m not sure I want to know.”

Morrigan looked over at us. “What?”

Hayley leaned back and stared at the ceiling for a few moments.

“If I have the bloodline, that has to mean my mom has it too, right? It’s her side of the family that’s Scottish. My dad’s family is from Ireland.”

“Yes,” Katarina called from the kitchen.

“It was that ancestor of yours I saw in that dream,” I said. “The guy who found the staff.”

“And between him and me is my mom. So . . .”

“You’re thinking about Deirdre,” I said.

“And the Collective.”

“The fact that they were roommates doesn’t mean your mom was ever involved in any of that stuff,” I said.

“I can’t think of a single thing that would make me think she was either,” Hayley said.

Katarina came into the room, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. “There is something I remember, though,” she said.

As a succubus, she had a near-photographic memory.

“What?” I asked.

“When we found her lost wedding ring, and you returned it to her, she said, ‘You have no idea how heartbroken I was when I lost it. We tried everything we could to find it, but nothing—’ It sounded like she was about to say, ‘nothing worked,’ then stopped herself. What do you think she meant? And why would she stop herself from saying that?”

I had forgotten that conversation, and frankly I didn’t quite recall that exchange, but I trusted Katarina’s memory. I looked at Hayley. Her face had gone pale.

“‘We tried everything, but nothing worked,’” Morrigan said. “I guess you could read that a few ways.”

“Yeah,” Hayley replied.

“Finding lost treasures is one of Astaroth’s powers,” Katarina said. “That is why your divining stick worked to find it, Jimmy.”

“So assuming she meant Deirdre called on Astaroth, why wouldn’t it work?” MJ asked. “Deirdre was still part of the Collective back then, and still working with Amalia.”

“I do not know,” Katarina said. “Perhaps Astaroth refused to help them for some reason.”

I took a deep breath. “Or . . . and work with me here . . . maybe something wanted us to find that ring instead of her. Specifically wanted us to find it and return it to her.”

Hayley gasped. “But why?”

“I’m not saying it was the only factor, but finding that ring definitely put me on your mom’s Favorite Person List. It would be hard to come up with a better first impression than that. And don’t tell me the fact that your folks love me hasn’t greased the rails for a lot of things. Your moving in with us, for one.”

Hayley put her hands over her mouth. It was a while before any of us could say anything.

“This is kind of all speculation, though,” Morrigan said.

“It is,” MJ agreed.

Hayley sighed and stretched out against me. I just held her.

Chapter 13

We were up a bit late drinking, and trying to talk about a few things besides breaking into the mission the next night. When Katarina and Hayley started getting ready for bed, I pulled MJ aside and told her about my idea. She narrowed her eyes at me for a few moments.

“Is that what you want? Me controlling her, for you?”

“You controlling her, for both of us,” I said. “I’m pretty sure that’s what she wants. You remember that dream on the beach.”

“Yeah. But with you still in charge of it all?”

“Pretty much.”

Her eyes got a bit narrower, but I saw a gleam growing in them at the same time. “Let me think about this.”

￼

I went to check on our stuff for tomorrow night. The big jar of lotion seemed unchanged. I had excellent night vision thanks to my familiar bond with Charlotte, but the others needed to be able to see. I had no idea if the lotion would hide the light from a flashlight, so I’d settled on getting some with red LEDs in hopes they wouldn’t attract any notice. Hayley told me the Voodoo Room was completely enclosed and behind a door in the basement, so we could use regular lights once we were in there. Finally, I’d brought a box of rubber gloves so we wouldn’t leave any fingerprints. All that seemed like enough.

Katarina and Hayley finally went off to their room. Morrigan followed me into the other one. She smiled at me and seemed about to say something when MJ came up behind her.

MJ leaned against Morrigan’s back. She slowly coiled one hand around Morrigan’s long purple hair, as her other hand slid around Morrigan’s waist. Morrigan seemed a little surprised but didn’t resist.

“All that shit we’ve done together in those dreams,” MJ said to her, “but we’ve never done much of anything out here.”

“What do you mean?” Morrigan asked. “We’ve—” But MJ cut her off.

“I mean . . .” MJ went on, hand sliding up to cup one of Morrigan’s breasts, “. . . did you really mean what you said to me in the last dream? You like it when I help him?”

Morrigan’s eyes widened, and she sucked in a little breath. “Yes.”

MJ looked at me. “Shut the door.”

I did. Then MJ jerked Morrigan’s hair down, tilting her head back. She leaned forward to gently bite Morrigan’s ear but kept her eyes on me.

“Slut. Your name is ‘slut’ until we’re done here.”

Morrigan gasped, eyes going even wider. She swallowed roughly. “Yes, ma’am.”

Morrigan had on another one of her schoolgirl outfits, this one a black jumper with a white blouse under it. MJ slowly undressed her until she stood there in nothing but her stockings. A deep flush had spread over Morrigan’s body, and her nipples were standing out.

“Get undressed and go sit over there,” MJ said to me, glancing at the soft chair in the corner of the room. I laughed softly, then disrobed and sat down.

MJ stripped down to her thong. She found a hair band and tied Morrigan’s hair up into a tight ponytail. Then she went into Morrigan’s bag. Morrigan had brought some of her toys, and MJ came up with her leash. She clipped it to Morrigan’s collar.

“Kneel, slut.”

Morrigan instantly dropped to her knees. MJ led her over to me until she was kneeling between my legs, staring at my erection.

“Don’t move,” MJ said. “I’m going to do this.”

MJ sat on my knee. She took my cock in one hand and Morrigan’s ponytail in the other. Then she fed my cock into Morrigan’s mouth and began using her ponytail to move her head up and down. Morrigan went limp and let her do it.

Morrigan sucked and worked her tongue over me, but MJ controlled her movements, grinning wickedly at me. Morrigan looked back and forth between us, then MJ jerked her ponytail.

“Look at me, slut,” she said. “Look at me while you suck his dick.”

Morrigan obeyed, keeping her eyes on MJ.

“Are you still making her edge every night?” MJ asked me.

“Yeah. I think her last orgasm was a week ago.”

“Do it now, slut,” MJ said.

Morrigan reached between her legs and began playing with herself.

I sat there for a few minutes while MJ used Morrigan’s mouth on me like it was a fleshlight. I was having fun with this, and it was clear MJ was too. She grinned at me.

“Do you like that, papi?” she asked.

She’d never called me that before, and I could tell from the look in her eyes that she was half making fun of me. Still, it was obvious she was getting off on this. I coiled my hand around her hair like she’d done with Morrigan and pulled her down. I kissed her deeply, reaching up with my other hand to play with her hard little tits. She kissed me back but kept moving Morrigan’s head.

Morrigan was intensely turned on, and I could tell from the uneven movement of her hand that she was already close to orgasm.

Finally MJ stood up and slipped off her thong. She pulled Morrigan up and led her to the bed. MJ climbed up the mattress and scooted back against the headboard, spreading her legs and pulling on the leash.

“My turn, slut. Get your tongue up here and your butt into the air so he can fuck you.”

Again, Morrigan complied instantly. She scrambled onto the bed, kneeling on the end and bending down between MJ’s thighs. MJ grabbed her ponytail again and held Morrigan in place. I watched as Morrigan dove in, burying her tongue between MJ’s lips.

I regarded Morrigan’s tight ass for a moment or two. She was dripping wet already, and I ran a finger right down the middle of her, making her shiver. Then I gave her a hard smack on her left cheek. We’d been together long enough now that I knew what she liked and could take, and when it came to spanking, it was kind of a lot. I smacked her about a dozen times on each cheek until her butt was getting red. All she did was moan and lick MJ more eagerly.

MJ held Morrigan’s ponytail tightly, guiding her movements. She was getting awfully turned on as well. I positioned myself behind Morrigan and glided into her wet folds. She moaned again.

“You don’t have permission to come yet, slut,” MJ said. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Morrigan managed.

I fucked Morrigan slowly. I loved being inside her, because she was still new to straight sex and her pussy was wonderfully tight. I just held her hips and thrust slowly in and out, watching her work on MJ.

Both of them were very wound up by this point, and within a few minutes, MJ was writhing around, pumping her hips at Morrigan’s mouth and moving Morrigan’s mouth against her using the ponytail.

“Fuck,” she moaned. “I’m going to come. Faster, slut.”

Morrigan obeyed. A few moments MJ arched her back and her thighs drummed on the bed. Morrigan kept going until MJ jerked her head back with a gasp. I kept fucking Morrigan steadily, as MJ caught her breath.

Then MJ slid down under us, reaching between Morrigan’s legs. I felt her fingers start to rub and stroke over and around us. Morrigan whimpered.

“Ma’am?” she gasped.

MJ laughed. “Yeah, you can come. I want you to fucking come now.”

A few moments later, Morrigan cried out, and I felt her shaking and contracting around me. I knew from experience how strong her orgasms were after a lot of edging. That and the sight of the two of them under me was too much. I let loose the brakes and pounded Morrigan’s butt until I followed her orgasm with my own, stabbing deeply and sending everything I had into her.

MJ laughed, still holding tightly onto Morrigan’s ponytail.

“He’s coming in you, slut. Daddy’s coming in that slut pussy.”

I almost laughed, but Morrigan moaned again, burying her face against MJ’s shoulder as the last spurts of my climax passed into her.

I fell over beside them. Katarina was close enough for me to draw on our bond and keep myself hard, though I sensed through it that she and Hayley were busy too. Morrigan fell to the bed between me and MJ.

When I’d caught my breath, I rolled against her, leaning in to kiss her cheek.

“I told MJ what you said earlier, about wanting a domme too.”

She nuzzled me. “Thank you, Master.”

“But we’re not done, slut,” MJ said. “Go to the end of the bed.”

Morrigan sat up and looked over at her. “Yes, ma’am.” She scooted down the mattress.

MJ crawled over to me, throwing a leg over my waist but facing away. “Sit there and let us take care of you, papi.”

I laughed. “Fine.”

She slipped my cock inside her. She was as tight as Morrigan, for much the same reason, and I lost my breath for a moment at the feel of it.

“Come here, slut.”

I felt Morrigan crawling up between my thighs, and then she was licking us, all over and around my cock, and up and down over MJ’s clit. I could see MJ holding her ponytail again, guiding her.

At first, I just lay back and enjoyed it as MJ rode me and Morrigan pleasured both of us. I could hear the soft clicking of the stud in Morrigan’s tongue hitting the one through MJ’s clit hood. Then I heard a muffled but familiar cry through the wall, and I sensed what Katarina was doing to Hayley at that moment.

MJ turned around to look at me, grinning. “Did you hear that?”

I laughed. “Yeah.”

I sat up behind her, running my hands up her body to cup her breasts. I pulled on her hard brown nipples as she twisted around to kiss me. Her other hand was on Morrigan’s ponytail. I felt Morrigan’s tongue stud flicking all around us. MJ moaned into my mouth, riding me harder. A few moments later she was thrashing in my arms, thighs battering Morrigan’s head. I held her until the paroxysm passed, then fell back with her. She went limp, rolling over next to me.

I sat up.

“Get up onto her mouth,” I said to Morrigan. My purple-haired slave girl obeyed, climbing over MJ, who took Morrigan’s butt in her hands and began to lick. I took MJ’s knees and spread them, leaning forward to enter her again. She moved her hips with mine as I thrust against her.

I drew my knees up to lift myself up from MJ, then reached for Morrigan’s ponytail, pulling her backward against me. I reached around with my other hand to grab one of her big tits. I held onto her as I pounded MJ below us. Morrigan held on as best she could.

Morrigan came first, shaking and moaning against my shoulders. She finally threw herself to the side, and I lowered myself down to kiss MJ. Her mouth was still wet with Morrigan’s fluids. She put her arms around me and lifted her legs to let me in deeper. I rose toward orgasm, but she beat me there, spasming around me just as I went over the edge. She held me tightly as I came into her, the last spasms of her climax milking me dry.

With a gasp, I rolled off of her and next to Morrigan. When we’d caught our breath, I moved over so Morrigan was between us, and MJ and I cuddled with her.

Morrigan lay there between us, shivering gently, face pressed against MJ’s chest. The two of us just held her for a few minutes.

“You okay?” I finally asked. She nodded.

MJ slowly pulled out Morrigan’s ponytail and kissed her a few times. She brushed her hand over Morrigan’s face.

“Did that do it for you?” she asked. “I loved it.”

Morrigan said nothing, just nodding against her, and cuddling closer to us. I felt Charlotte hopping up onto the corner of the bed and sitting down by my feet. We held each other until we fell asleep.

￼

The next morning, we got up and walked over to the mission. It was a long white adobe building with a bell tower at one end. It was a Saturday and a mild spring morning, so there were quite a few tourists there already. That was fine, because I didn’t want to attract attention. Since we were touring a church, I had Morrigan dress much more sedately than usual, just some black jeans and a tight black t-shirt. It didn’t hide her hair or tattoos, but neither was all that unusual around here on their own.

We paid a few bucks apiece for the self-guided tour and followed the instructions in the brochure around the compound. There was a big lawn and garden out front with an old limestone fountain in the center. Part of the long building was taken up by a museum, and having read Colleen’s thesis, I was impressed that it didn’t try to whitewash the history of the California missions. But there was naturally nothing about demon worship.

Then we went to see the chapel. I was concerned that Katarina – and potentially all of us – might have problems entering, but nothing happened. I remembered what Astaroth said about my breaking her link to the infernal bureaucracy and wondered if that might explain it.

The chapel was long and narrow, and a variety of old artwork covered the walls. At first, I didn’t see anything unusual about it, but as I stood there looking things over, I began to get a weird feeling in the back of my head. It was hard to put a finger on what it was, though. Something about the proportions of the room seemed oppressive and unnatural. The narrowness of it began pressing down on you after a while, and the altar at the end actually seemed to recede bit as you walked toward it. I stopped and looked backward, then forward again, then up.

I slowly realized what the issue was. The room was not quite symmetrical, but it was hard to tell unless you really looked for it. It was narrower at the altar end than the entrance, but the interior decor was subtly sized to hide that fact. The effect was to create a sense of vertigo as you looked toward the altar.

“You feel it, don’t you?” MJ said.

“Yeah.”

“My mom lasted a minute in here before she made us leave. She wanted to attend the Mass but changed her mind.”

I explained what I’d noticed about the architecture. There was nothing in the brochure about it.

“Why would they do that?” Hayley asked.

“It could have been a deliberate attempt to unnerve the Indians, maybe. I don’t know.”

There was more. The artwork was disturbing in the same hard-to-pinpoint way. The wooden statues of Mary and Jesus along the walls were crafted in strange proportions I had never quite seen before, in a way that almost made them look alien. Meanwhile, the crucified Jesus on the cross above the altar was bloody and vivid enough to qualify as torture porn in any other setting. The brochure did mention this, but simply remarked on the “striking and original” sculptural elements of the chapel artwork.

The longer we were in there, the creepier all of it felt. Yet I saw no enchantments anywhere, nor did Morrigan. Finally we moved on. There was a vineyard behind the main building, and a compound next to it where the remains of the original Indian living areas stood. None of it was terribly remarkable.

Then we entered the mission cemetery. The oldest section was nearest to the chapel, and we walked around looking for anything unusual. Nearly all of the earliest markers were old, crumbling, and barely legible.

I was about to leave when MJ called out.

“Guys?”

She was standing in a corner next to an oak tree, in the shadow of the chapel. I walked over and followed her gaze down. There was a heavily weathered stone in the ground. It was hard to read at first, but I realized it said “HERNÁNDEZ.” Little else was legible, but the death date appeared to be 1784.

I took her hand. “It could be anyone.”

“It’s not.”

I took a deep breath. “You feel something?”

She nodded. Morrigan, Hayley, and Katarina joined us.

“If it’s him, that means he didn’t live much longer after arriving here,” I said.

“But it means he was here.”

“There’s an enchantment,” Morrigan said.

I’d been so focused on MJ that I hadn’t thought to read the stone with my ring. But she was right.

“Oh, shit,” MJ whispered. “It is him.”

“We can’t dig up his headstone,” Hayley said quietly.

“I would prefer not to do something like that,” I said evenly.

“What if there’s something under there?” MJ asked.

I studied the magic aura on the stone. It seemed to be a ward of concealment, the kind of thing that would prevent you from even noticing the stone if you were just walking past it. And as I looked around, I got the impression that it and the area around it were considerably less well maintained than others nearby. The other stones were relatively clean, like someone had occasionally come around to pick the moss and lichen off them. This one seemed forgotten. But MJ’s link to Hernández had apparently penetrated the enchantment.

Did that mean something was under it? Or simply that someone didn’t want anyone knowing he was buried here? The more I thought about it, the more the latter possibility seemed more likely. For all I knew, Amalia had cast this spell.

I explained what I saw to the others. MJ nodded. “That makes sense.”

We stood there for a few more moments.

“The Voodoo Room is this way, guys,” Hayley finally said.

There was a back entrance to the chapel, where a narrow stairway led down to the basement. The brochure explained that an earthquake in 1981 had caused some damage to the chapel walls, and while inspecting them for the repairs, the engineers discovered a walled-up room in the back of the cellar. The adobe bricks hiding the room had partially collapsed in the quake.

The path through the cellar was guided by wrought iron railings to keep visitors from wandering around. It led to a partially reworked and shored up passage through the back wall. When we got down there, there were several other tourists gawking at things, so we waited until they left. Then we went in.

Hayley had been here before and didn’t react. But MJ gasped loudly as she got a good look at the room. Morrigan took my hand, pushing her fingers through mine and squeezing tightly.

At first glance, it looked like a little chapel. There were three rows of dusty wooden benches and something like an altar at the front, not much more than a narrow table with a badly tarnished service set on it and a wooden statue in a recessed alcove above it. There were a half-dozen smaller alcoves in the walls, each with a wooden figure inside it. The floor was decorated in a circular mural, which the brochure suggested was modeled after some cathedral in Spain.

The brochure took the tack of suggesting the room reflected the influences of the native Californians, while saying nothing whatsoever about the heresy even that much would have represented for a Catholic chapel in the eighteenth century.

But the brochure was wrong.

This was a chapel, to be sure. A chapel for worshipping demons. It was so obvious to me that I could only explain the lack of a mention of it in the literature as willful ignorance.

I saw the statue of Astaroth above the altar. It was even more obvious seeing it in person. The magic circle in the floor was clearly intended for summoning demons. The other little statues around the room reminded me of illustrations in the grimoires.

Katarina looked around dispassionately.

“That is Astaroth,” she said.

“I know,” I replied.

She looked at the other alcoves. “That is also Astaroth.”

“Right.”

“That is Volach,” she said, pointing to a winged cherub sitting on a two-headed dragon.

“That’s Volach?” Hayley asked.

“It is one of his forms. That is Alloces,” she said, pointing to a bearded knight on a rearing horse. “He also serves Astaroth.” She pointed to a veiled woman on a camel. “That is Gemory.”

“The brochure says it’s Mary,” MJ said.

“No. Do you see her horns? The last two are Vassago and Orbas.” They resembled an angel and a humanoid figure with a horse’s head and legs.

“You’re sure?” Hayley asked.

Katarina just gave her a look. “Yes. I know all of them.”

Morrigan squeezed my hand again. “Do you see the enchantment?” she asked.

I nodded. It was in the alcove above the altar, behind Astaroth. Another concealment spell. But as I looked at it, I realized it was probably strong enough to affect the entire room, which might explain why no one had discovered it for two hundred years, and why no one who came down here expended all that much effort in analyzing what they found here.

I took some photos of all the statues as best I could from behind the railing. We couldn’t get close to any of it without climbing over. Then I looked at the figure of Astaroth above the altar. The more I stared at the alcove, the more it resembled a door in the wall.

“Master?” Morrigan asked.

“That’s where we’re going tonight,” I said quietly.

Chapter 14

With little else to do until it got dark, we went back to the house, changed into our bathing suits, and went down to the beach. Katarina had no problem showing herself off and manifested a barely legal black string bikini. MJ, with her new Instagram-worthy body, was only a little more modest, and wore something similar in white. Hayley wasn’t quite as bold, but I found her iridescent blue-green thong bikini very attractive. Morrigan had something fairly basic in pink, but with her hair, she didn’t need to do much more than that.

I packed up a cooler with a case of beer and some food. Charlotte meowed at me as we were getting dressed, so I brought her along as well.

San Sebastian was something of a rich-kid spring-break destination, but Hayley, having grown up here, knew where most of them tended to congregate, so we could avoid the crowds. She directed me to a beach about a mile up the coast from her parents’ house. The cliffs here were not quite as high, and there was a striking tower of rock just offshore that almost resembled a giant dick because of the way the strata were arranged with a big, rounded blob at the top. There were more people here than at the beach by her parents’ place, but it wasn’t mobbed either, so it seemed like a decent compromise.

We found a spot next to a pile of weathered rocks. As the girls laid out the blankets, Charlotte found a flat spot on the rocks and flopped down in the sun. I set myself up against the rock she was on and opened a beer.

I noticed Morrigan slathering a ton of SPF50 sunscreen all over herself.

“It’s not that sunny,” I said.

“I need to stay pale. A tan doesn’t work with goth.”

I laughed softly. I guessed she had a point.

I hadn’t looked at my email since we left, but when I did, I realized there was something from Colleen. She’d sent me a rather lengthy and rambling discussion of what she envisioned for the article along with a lengthy list of references to work with, closing it by apologizing for going on so long and reassuring me that the direction was entirely up to me. But she’d also attached her contact card in case I wanted to discuss it further. I stared at the email for a few moments before importing her contact.

By the time I got done reading Colleen’s email, the girls were all set up in the sun on their towels and paying no attention to what I was doing. A few people looked us over as they walked past, and I could tell by the looks on their faces that some of them assumed I was gay. In their minds, I suppose there was no other explanation for my being here with these four hot girls who were clearly quite comfortable with my presence. I ignored them – I was long since past caring what anyone thought of my coven.

After considering things for a minute or two, I texted Colleen.

We went to the mission this morning

I took some photos

Every one of these is a demon described in the books I have

Then I sent her the photos I’d taken of the statues. I waited for a minute, but she didn’t respond.

My mild excitement at reading her email began to fade. Oh well. She was probably off doing whatever it was that hot thirty-something librarians did on a Saturday morning.

I was just settling down onto my towel and contemplating another beer when my phone vibrated.

It was Colleen.

Are you sure?

Have you really matched them all up?

Katarina was lying next to me. “Who were the demons you saw this morning?” I asked her. “After Astaroth? In the same order as the photos I took.”

Having a girlfriend with a photographic memory had its advantages. She didn’t skip a beat and didn’t even open her eyes. “Vassago, Orbas, Volach, Alloces, and Gemory.”

I texted Colleen back.

Yes

Those are Vassago, Orbas, Volach, Alloces, and Gemory

Look them up you’ll see

Okay give me a minute

I did. It was actually several minutes before she responded. Then:

Holy crap

Jimmy you’re right

Told you

It’s not native Californians

That’s a chapel for demon worship

The diocese is going to freak out

Assuming they don’t know this already

When are you coming back?

A few days

I’m actually on the beach right now

A smiling emoji came in.

Okay I don’t want to ruin your spring break

I remember what it was like

Not that old lol have fun

I took a deep breath and thought about what Katarina told us that night. This was a few degrees beyond professional librarian and edging into flirty territory.

If I find out anything else up here I’ll let you know

Then I decided to take a bit of a risk and see just where this might be going. I took a selfie of myself against the rock and sent it to her.

Once I get done with my beer

She didn’t respond right away, and I began to think I’d misread the tone of her texts. Then just when I was starting to kick myself, a photo popped up. She was out on her balcony, laptop on her lap with a cup of coffee. I noticed that her condo was on the side of the building that faced the ocean a few miles away, unlike mine that faced campus. What I saw in the photo was a woman who was not overly concerned with her appearance but still knew she looked good.

Not the beach but I’ll take it

Also Jimmy there’s a cat behind you?

Oh, shit. Charlotte was not only behind me in that selfie, she’d been looking right at the camera with an intrigued expression on her face, like she wanted to be part of the picture. But I was so used to having her around that it didn’t occur me she would stand out.

I turned and looked at her. “Nice photobombing there.”

She meowed at me and stretched out, closing her eyes again. Nowhere to go with it but forward, I guessed.

My cat likes the beach

She’s a bit weird

Again there was another pause of a minute or so.

You are definitely an interesting guy Jimmy

Have fun

She closed with a winking emoji. I decided to quit while I was ahead and left it at that.

￼

We spent the rest of the day at the beach drinking beer and occasionally going in the water. Charlotte wandered around a bit and came back with a dead something or another that I didn’t want to know too much about. I assumed the gray tabby was in charge and she was taking a nap in the castle or nursing Else, our dream child. Else didn’t really need feeding – or anything really – but Charlotte enjoyed doing it, so I’d gradually built out the castle nursery while trying not to think too hard about what Else represented.

As Charlotte explained once, she was nothing but a spiritual echo of our lovemaking, without a soul or a real existence. Yet I’d been a dream child like her once, and my mother had essentially mated with a demon to bring me into the world. I wasn’t going to do anything like that, but I wondered how long Else could stay as she was. She hadn’t seemed to age at all over the months I’d been with Charlotte.

Later in the afternoon, by which point I had a few beers in me, MJ, Morrigan, and Hayley went down to the water, leaving me with Katarina. I’d been watching MJ and Morrigan to see if anything was different between them today. Though it wasn’t obvious – MJ gave Morrigan a sharp smack on the ass at one point, but that was the only overt thing I caught – I sensed the start of a new dynamic in the coven. I wondered if they had told Hayley, and what she would think. I was pretty sure Hayley would be happy about it.

Katarina had been getting more than her share of stares all day, which didn’t exactly surprise me given that she was wearing, at best, about thirty square inches of fabric held in place by a few strings. Right now, it was about two square inches, since she was on her stomach with her top untied. I’d seen more than a few guys wandering past repeatedly trying to check her out.

“You enjoy the attention I get,” she said, unprompted. She was usually pretty good at sensing my moods through our bond.

“Is it that obvious?”

She rose up on her elbows to smile at me, just enough to let me see her nipples. No one else could because of the rock I was leaning against.

“I sense the pleasure in you when other men stare at me. It is why I created this bikini.”

“Imagine if they knew what you really are,” I said.

“I am not that thing anymore, thanks to you.”

“True. But what does that leave you as? I still think of you as a succubus.”

“I do not know, to be honest,” she said. “I am happy to be this thing I am in your life, whatever it is.”

I thought about what she’d said the other night. “You said you’ve known other sorcerers who attracted covens like this.”

“Yes. Though your situation is unusual, I will admit.”

“I have an ex-succubus,” I said.

“Yes, there is that, but it is not what I meant. You have attracted other sorcerers to serve you, not just brainless women to occupy your bed.”

“Is that what you’ve seen before?”

She nodded. “Most commonly, yes. When these sorcerers I have known realized they could attract followers, they often focused on such things. Men and women both. Very few I have known did what you have, building a group with such power.”

“You knew Amalia.”

“Other than the Collective, she did not do so, to my knowledge. Though it is limited, of course. I only met her that time I told you of.”

“Right.” I took a swig of my beer. “So my attraction to Colleen could be having some effect on her.”

“It most likely is,” she said. “But at the same time, from what I have seen, it is not mind control or anything like that. It seems to create a confidence and trust that would not have been there otherwise, a sense of belonging and safety. Think of how MJ behaved with you, despite all the things that happened to us that week. Adriana as well.”

I nodded. “Morrigan kind of got attached to me right away, too.”

“I remember, yes. And that was despite Celeste warning her way from you.”

There were emotional directions I could go with this, but I left it alone. I knew the girls wanted to be with me, and I knew all of them were strong enough to shake off the effects Katarina described if they didn’t.

Well, most of them were.

“You are thinking of me now,” Katarina said.

I groaned. “Why is it, the longer we’re together, the more it seems like you can read my mind?”

She smiled, then reached over to squeeze my hand. “I can read your emotions, and through them I have come to know you very well. And I will say this: Even if I could, why would I ever leave the man who gave me the ability to love?”

￼

We stayed to watch the sunset, then went back to the house. When we first discussed getting a place in San Sebastian for this assignment, I put Katarina in charge of the food. She had naturally come back with more Swedish cuisine suggestions, but I asked her for something besides more stews and casseroles. So she proposed we have a grillfest, the Swedish equivalent of a barbecue. But rather than ribs and steaks, we would be grilling salmon, sausages, and a rack of lamb. It sounded intriguing, so I agreed.

The rest of them were tired and wanted to clean up first, so Katarina and I got the food going. When the lamb and salmon were oiled and herbed up, I took a quick shower while the grill was heating. When I got back outside, the girls were all out on the patio with another pitcher of martinis Katarina had mixed up. To my mild surprise, Morrigan had dressed up a little for dinner, wearing one of the outfits she’d gotten from Adriana. It was this little black dress that was not much more than a corset and a short, frilly skirt, short enough to expose her stockings and garter straps.

MJ noticed me checking her out. “I told her to put on something hot.”

“I like it,” I said. “That’s one of my favorites.”

Morrigan shot MJ a smile. “I know,” she said.

“Are you wearing that tonight?”

“I feel more witchy and powerful l when I dress like this,” she said.

“So when are we going over there?” Hayley asked.

“The tour stuff closed down at five,” I said. “But I’m sure the staff and friars are doing things until fairly late. I think we need to plan on midnight, just to be safe. They won’t see us, but I can’t guarantee they won’t see things we’re doing, like opening doors.”

“What happens if there’s some monster confined in there?” MJ asked.

The rest of them looked at her.

“I’m just saying.”

I took a deep breath. “We fight it if we can. We run if we can’t. But honestly, I don’t see it.”

“What if it’s Tamiel?” Morrigan asked.

I suddenly remembered my meeting with Amira.

“It can’t be,” Hayley said. “That wouldn’t make any sense.”

I sat up. “Guys, look. Going forward, we need to be more careful with these names.” I told them about Amira and what she told me.

“She is correct, Jimmy,” Katarina said. “She is too close to the upper management of the bureaucracy. Had you used that name in her presence, others could well have heard it. Including the one we should avoid alerting.”

“So we can’t say that name anymore?” Morrigan asked.

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Just to be safe. Let’s just . . . call her Tammy. That shouldn’t attract attention, should it?”

“No,” Katarina said. “Only her true name will do so.”

“Okay,” Morrigan said, “if it’s not . . . Tammy in the Voodoo Room, then what is it?”

“That’s why we’re going over there,” I finally said.

I finished grilling all the food, and we ate out on the patio. It was another nice night, and we just sat together watching the sun go down. Hayley announced that she was cutting off all the alcohol at eight, and no one argued with her. After that, we just sat around waiting until midnight.

I checked a couple of times for any more emails from Colleen, but there was nothing. Around eleven thirty, we started getting ready. I got the lotion out of the refrigerator. The girls started getting undressed, then Morrigan turned to me.

“Are we going over there like this?” she asked. “Without any clothes on?”

I hadn’t thought about that. “That’s a good question. I don’t know if the spell will hide our clothes.”

“Then let’s test it,” MJ said. “I’m not fucking doing this naked.”

After some consideration, I decided I ought to be able to conceal two groups with two different spells. So we started with MJ and Morrigan. They got undressed and spread the lotion over themselves, and I did my best to stay focused while I took care of myself. Then I had them get dressed and cast the spell.

Hayley and Katarina gasped, then Hayley shook her fists in satisfaction. “It worked.”

“You can’t see anything?” MJ asked.

“Nothing. No clothes, no you.” Then she gasped again. “Where did Charlotte go?”

I looked down. “She’s right here.”

Charlotte meowed loudly.

“I can’t see her.”

“Interesting. She’s right at my feet.”

“The spell must extend to your familiars,” Katarina said. “Not just your clothes.”

The two of them quickly got undressed and lotioned up. I cast the spell again, and while I saw nothing, Hayley suddenly reoriented on me.

“Can you see us now?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, we’re in business, then.”

They got dressed, and I handed out the rubber gloves. MJ got her rapier, and I got my staff, which I needed for the unlock spell. I passed out the flashlights and explained about the red light setting. Then we left.

The mission was just a couple of blocks over. The neighborhood was silent and empty. We circled around the grounds until we reached the back side of the chapel. There was enough ambient light from the streetlights to see where we were going, but it was pretty dark in the cemetery.

I assumed there had to be some kind of alarm system here, so I stopped short before we stepped off the main walkway. I pulled the wrought iron key I needed for this spell from my pocket and raised my staff. I began the incantation, and I immediately felt it fixating on something, which I realized a moment later was a set of motion detectors around the cemetery. That made sense. But the spell switched everything off, and as the system shut down, I felt the door to the chapel basement unlocking as well.

“We’re good,” I said. “Let’s go.”

The girls followed me into the cemetery and up to the door. I paused for a second, listening for anything inside, but the chapel was silent. We filed into the little hallway and then over to the stairwell down. There were no other obstructions. The girls switched on their red flashlights on the way down, and in a few moments, we were back in the Voodoo Room.

The red light made the place look even more demonic than it already was. After checking the stairwell and hallway above us, I told them they could turn on the white lights.

“Now what?” MJ asked.

I climbed over the wrought iron railing. One by one, they followed me. I squatted down to examine the magic circle, satisfying myself that it was indeed exactly the sort of thing you would confine summoned demons with. I wondered what they had been doing here if they were truly serving Astaroth.

Morrigan walked past me to the altar where the statue of Astaroth stood in its little alcove.

“The enchantment is on the alcove, not the statue,” she said. “There’s something weird about it.”

MJ came up beside me. I saw the tension in her eyes and quickly rubbed her shoulder. She sat down on one of the benches. Then I joined Morrigan up front. I saw what she meant. The statue was just dusty, painted wood. The enchantment was on the panel behind it.

I carefully lifted the statue of Astaroth out of the alcove and set it aside. The alcove was about two feet wide and three feet high, framed in dark, roughly hewn wood. This was pretty clearly original construction, not something that had been added a century or more later.

But I didn’t see anything remarkable about it. The back of the alcove was just a featureless wooden panel. A panel with a heavy enchantment on it, but still just a piece of wood.

“Could there be something behind it?” Hayley asked.

“That’s a possibility,” I said. “I just don’t see a way to get past it.”

“We’re not ripping this place apart,” MJ said.

I nodded. “Yeah, that’s not what I had in mind.” I reached in and tapped it with my knuckles. It sounded hollow, but that didn’t mean there was a big space behind it. It could just be a gap in the construction.

I stepped back.

“Ideas?” I asked.

Hayley and Morrigan stepped up and spent a few minutes examining it. Finally Hayley sighed.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Me neither,” Morrigan said.

I looked at MJ.

“You guys are the sorcerers,” she said.

“I see nothing either,” Katarina said.

“Do we need to remove the enchantment?” Morrigan asked.

I stepped up again and examined the ward on the panel, trying to study the strands of spirit and pick apart what it was. It wasn’t anything I’d seen before, a weird mix of iron, sodium, potassium, chlorides, and a bunch of complicated molecules I couldn’t identify.

I tried to describe what I was seeing to Hayley and Morrigan. After a moment, Hayley’s eyes lit up.

“Jimmy, that’s blood. Those are chemicals in a blood chemistry test.”

“Blood,” I said.

Once she pointed it out, it was obvious. The number of spells using blood as a component was not large, and most of them dealt with binding demons. I’d used my own blood to bind Katarina, after all.

“So this could be binding something. I don’t want to just tear it down and see what happens.”

“Yeah, for sure,” Morrigan said.

I sat down beside MJ on the bench. Hayley and Morrigan sat on the one across from us. Morrigan had to rearrange her skirt, and in doing so briefly confirmed to me that she was following her rules about undergarments, or lack thereof.

“What do we do here?” I asked them.

“We can’t stay here forever,” MJ said.

“We’re invisible,” Morrigan said.

“What if there’s a security guard doing rounds, and he sees our flashlights?”

One by one, the girls all switched back to the red LEDs. The room was again bathed in dim red light.

“This is creepy,” Morrigan said after a moment or two.

We sat there in silence for a minute or so trying to think.

“MJ, what about your rapier?” Hayley asked.

“What about it?”

“Maybe it does something here.”

We all looked at her. She had the box in her lap, and the rapier was still inside. She opened it up, lifting the rapier out.

I wasn’t sure what might happen, but nothing did. There were no sudden revelations. I saw the enchantment on the rapier, but it hadn’t changed.

“Maybe walk around with it,” I said.

She did, circling the room slowly, looking over the walls and statues in the alcoves. Then she stopped up front and put her hand on the wall about a foot to the left of the big alcove.

“Did you guys see this?”

I stood up. “See what?”

“This little metal thing in the wall.”

I walked up to her. All I saw was bare stone. I reached out and felt nothing.

“What do you see?” I asked.

“Wait, you can’t see it?” she asked.

The others came up around us. “All I see is the wall,” Hayley said.

MJ traced out something. “It’s right here. This little metal plate with a slot in the center of it.”

“I don’t see a thing,” I said.

“Me neither,” Morrigan said.

MJ’s eyes widened. “Oh, shit. I can see it, and you guys can’t?”

“It is the rapier,” Katarina said.

MJ looked at her, then handed it to me. “I don’t see it anymore,” she said.

But even holding the rapier, I still didn’t see anything.

“It’s not just the rapier,” I said.

MJ took it back. “You couldn’t see it?”

“No.”

“It’s you, MJ,” Morrigan said. “You and the rapier.”

She turned back to the wall, staring at the little plate only she could see.

“Bloodlines,” Katarina said.

MJ pursed her lips tightly. “So what do I do?”

“Describe what you see,” I said.

“It’s a metal plate. It looks like iron, dark and a little rusty. There’s a slot in the center about an inch high.”

I looked at her rapier, which she was holding up in the air. For most of its length, the blade was maybe a bit less than an inch wide, only tapering down toward the point.

I took a deep breath.

“Try sliding the rapier into the slot. Slowly and carefully.”

MJ stepped back and lifted the blade. She pointed it at the wall and aligned it with the slot only she could see. She slowly slid the blade into the wall.

The enchantment on the rapier, which had seemed dormant all this time, suddenly flared into life. I’d seen similar things before, on the stuff Amalia had left me.

It was a key.

“It’s working,” MJ said. But about halfway in, she stopped. “It hit something.”

“It seems to fit the slot, though?” I asked.

“Yeah, it matches the shape of the blade almost exactly.”

I stepped up to her, the excitement flaring in my head. “Give it a push.” She did. There was a clunking noise.

Hayley gasped. “The alcove.”

I looked over. One side of it had popped forward, like a little door. We all rushed over to look.

No demons or ghosts or anything else emerged. Nor was there any treasure inside.

Instead, there was a single book on a little shelf. We all stared at it for a moment. I realized the enchantment on the alcove had faded.

“Do you see that?” I asked Morrigan.

She nodded. “The enchantment is gone.”

“The rapier unlocked it,” MJ said.

“The rapier and your bloodline,” Katarina said. “I suspect no one else could have done this.”

Hayley slowly reached inside the space behind the panel. My nerves went on edge as she lifted the book out, but nothing happened. She handed it to me.

It was clearly something from the early mission years by its construction, leather-bound, the pages somewhat uneven in trim. But it also seemed in remarkably good shape. The leather hadn’t really dried out, and the pages were still somewhat supple.

I opened it slowly. It was a handwritten journal, the writing very neat and precise but all of it naturally in Spanish. I gave it to MJ. She opened it to the front page. She pursed her lips tightly.

“This was his.”

“Hernández?”

MJ nodded and took a deep breath. “The journal of Juan José Pérez Hernández,” she read. “An account of his relations with the powers of Hell.”

None of us said anything for a few long moments.

“I guess this what we came for,” I said finally. “Let’s get out of here.

Chapter 15

It was well past one, but none of us could sleep. We sat together in the living room as MJ read Hernández’s journal to us.

He had started it well after faking his death and joining up with the monks to found the mission, but he began the story several years earlier in 1774 in San Blas, when he was given command of the Santiago. Hernández was only a pilot and an ensign, and technically he should not have been given command of a ship, but at the time there were no other officers of higher rank.

Antonio María Bucareli y Ursúa, the viceroy of New Spain, wanted to scout the west coast for signs of Russian activity. Shortly before the voyage, Hernández was approached by a woman offering to help support him on the expedition. He described her as “beautiful but profane,” possessing “the speech of a common sailor.”

“I will not name her further,” MJ read, “for I have learned to fear her attentions.”

“Amalia,” I said.

“That would mean she didn’t come over with the monks,” Hayley said. “She was here before them.”

“Yeah. For who knows how long?” I asked.

MJ continued reading. Amalia gave Hernández a chest of gold coins and a ring she said was blessed by Pope Clement to protect him from scurvy, which was a serious problem for the Spanish navy at the time.

“Why didn’t they just take some fruit with them?” Morrigan asked. “They would have had it in Mexico, right?”

Hayley shook her head. “The cause of scurvy wasn’t really established until the nineteenth century. And it was the British who figured it out first.”

“It’s what the official history says he died of,” MJ said.

In exchange for the gold and the ring, Amalia wanted Hernández to watch for signs of something that had “fallen to earth” somewhere along the coastline.

“Zagan’s rock?” Hayley said.

But MJ shook her head. “No. She described it as golden tablet. She promised Hernández ten times its weight in gold if he found it and returned with it.”

“A golden tablet?” I asked.

“That’s what he says.”

Something tickled the back of my head. I went for my laptop, and I found it in the results of the model run.

GOLDEN

I showed the girls. MJ just sighed and resumed reading.

Hernández found no golden tablets or anything of the sort on his first voyage. The natives they met had seen nothing and did not even seem to understand what he was asking. He showed them a gold coin, but they had never even seen gold before.

But there was one remarkable thing – the ring she gave him worked. While the rest of the crew grew weak and sick from scurvy during the long months they were out, some of them dying of it, Hernández remained healthy. This spurred him to redouble his efforts to find the tablet, believing the woman must be on some holy mission.

He returned to San Blas after being gone nearly a year. His focus on finding the tablet had interfered with his official responsibilities, and he had failed to formally claim anything as he’d been instructed to by his superiors. Annoyed by this failure, Bucareli ordered him to begin preparing another expedition.

But that winter, Bruno de Hezeta arrived from Spain with several others, including the Franciscan monks. De Hezeta outranked Hernández and was consequently placed in command of the Santiago and the second expedition. Discouraged by this turn of events, Hernández considered returning to Spain.

But one night Amalia appeared at his quarters. She knew about his failure to find the tablet and his loss of command of the Santiago. She offered to help him, because she wanted him to continue his search. She asked him to come to a meeting elsewhere in the city, and when they arrived, de Hezeta and the monks were waiting for him.

One by one, she and the others explained the importance of finding the tablet. It was a thing of great power that needed to be recovered. Somewhat disturbed by the tone of the discussion, Hernández asked the monks what the Church’s interest in this matter was. But they refused to answer him.

Instead, Amalia explained what Hernández had unknowingly gotten himself into.

“She said I had committed my soul to the powers of Hell by helping her,” MJ read, “and that these powers required the tablet. We would all be rewarded greatly by finding it, not just with gold but with power and influence.”

De Hezeta insisted that his career had already been greatly improved by his association with Amalia. Hernández tried to curse them in the name of the Lord, but he found that the words would not come. Amalia laughed at him.

“She told me that the ring I wore was the symbol of my commitment. I tried to remove it, and as with the curse I could not speak, I could not take it from my finger.”

“Whoa,” Morrigan said.

MJ looked up. “Yeah. I can see what that would have done to him. It comes through in his writing, the way he phrases things. Like he accepted it all, but he didn’t like it.”

For the second voyage, de Hezeta would oversee the exploration and acts of possession the viceroy wanted, while Hernández would be free to continue his search for the tablet. Meanwhile, Amalia and the monks would travel up the coast to establish a base of operations, which they would disguise as a new mission. The plan was that Hernández would join them on de Hezeta’s return south.

The second voyage satisfied the viceroy, but Hernández was no more successful in finding clues to the golden tablet. Once again, the natives knew nothing. On the voyage south, the Santiago stopped at the Spanish base in Monterey to allow the crew to recuperate, for most were sick with scurvy.

Hernández found a letter from Amalia waiting for them. There had been a delay in founding the mission because of interference by the viceroy and other elements in the Church. They planned to attempt the trip north again in November, once the summer heat broke. She needed him to meet them on their way down, and he described a specific location along the coast, a large, distinctive rock formation Hernández had noted in his log on first voyage.

“That’s Penis Rock,” Hayley said. “That big rock off the beach we were at this morning.”

The rest of us laughed. “What?” I asked.

“Penis Rock?” Morrigan asked.

Hayley grinned. “It’s actually called Griffith Rock after some rancher who used to own the land there, but everyone calls it Penis Rock because it kind of looks like a big dick.”

“It does quite resemble one,” Katarina said.

After the mirth faded, MJ kept reading.

Amalia told Hernández to assume he was no longer reporting to the Spanish navy. He and de Hezeta discussed the matter and agreed they would fake his death for the crew. So many of them were sick that wasn’t difficult. De Hezeta reported the elaborate funeral at sea in his log, but in fact, Hernández simply went over the side into one of the ship’s boats one night, and de Hezeta placed a false body among the rest of the dead in the hold. Hernández would never know it, but the ruse worked. History would record that he died in November 1775.

Amalia and the monks were already there. Regrouping with them, Hernández helped scout out a location for the mission on a hill a few miles inland. Amalia had made contact with a local band of Chumash Indians and impressed them with her sorcery. They agreed to help with the construction.

Once things were underway, Amalia went off on her own, leaving Hernández in charge. The initial mission building, with the Voodoo Room concealed under the main chapel, was completed in early 1776. A priest from the mission in Santo Domingo visited the site and reported good progress to his superiors, unaware of what was really going on.

In fact, the group of monks included a sorcerer who was effectively Amalia’s apprentice. The group was soon summoning lesser demons for worship services with the Indians in the Voodoo Room.

Hernández described one of these services in some detail.

The monk began by summoning a demon into the magic circle. “When he completed the ritual, there was a loud noise, and figure appeared in the center of the circle,” MJ read. “She resembled a grotesque perversion of the Virgin, her beautiful form marred by a pair of horns in her forehead.”

“Gemory,” Katarina said.

“That statue we saw, the one riding a camel?” Morrigan asked.

“Yes.”

“The natives howled in fear,” MJ went on, “falling to the floor and swearing to serve the demon, who looked on them with amusement. I remained at the back of the room, seeking to avoid its notice. Brother Tomas called one of the natives forward and—” MJ stopped, a sick look spreading across her face.

“What?” I asked.

She looked up after a few moments. “They made the Indian have sex with Gemory in front of everyone. And he—he didn’t survive it.”

“Mortals rarely survive such encounters,” Katarina said. “And Gemory is not known for being gentle.”

None of us said anything. MJ took a deep breath and resumed reading from the end of that section.

In addition to the demon worship, Amalia left Hernández with the charge to find Zagan’s rock, though she didn’t put it in those terms. He and a group of Indians located it that spring.

Amalia returned not long afterward, and Hernández described the scene I’d dreamed about. But I hadn’t dreamed about the prelude to it, when Amalia and Brother Tomas summoned Astaroth and Volach in similar ceremonies. The group, with Hernández and the monks in tow, rode north to the rock and bound Zagan inside it.

Hernández assumed his service to Amalia was now concluded. But he was wrong. Amalia was still seeking the golden tablet, and she expected Hernández to help her. One night, they fell into a violent argument about the subject.

“I told her I would do no more until she explained the mystery of the tablet and why she sought it,” MJ read. “She told me the knowledge alone would place my soul at risk, but I was adamant. She relented and began to explain. She said that she was seeking the location of a demon—” MJ gasped. Her hand went over her mouth.

“What?” Hayley asked.

MJ looked up. “Tami—” She caught herself just in time. “Tammy. She was seeking Tammy.”

“Tammy is not a demon,” Katarina said.

“That’s the word he uses. Demonio. It means the same thing as demon or devil. An evil spirit, basically.”

“He’s only reporting what he thought she meant,” I said. “It’s possible he misunderstood her.”

“What else does he say?” Hayley asked.

“The golden tablet was connected to Tammy,” MJ said. “If they found it, they would find her.”

“So we were right,” Hayley said. “She was looking for this lost, bound half of Tammy, whatever it is.”

“Bound into a golden tablet,” I said.

“She told him the tablet was somewhere in Alta California,” MJ went on, “that she’d narrowed it down that far. She was sure by then that it was somewhere along the coast, between San Sebastian and Santo Domingo. She’d been wandering up and down searching for it.”

“She’s still searching for it,” Morrigan said. “Using us this time.”

“Which means Hernández never found it,” I said. “What happened after that?”

MJ resumed reading. For a time, Hernández faithfully assisted Amalia in her search. He and a group of the Indians – whose respect for my future grandmother bordered on reverence – ranged over the central coast, looking for any signs of something that seemed to have fallen from the sky. Hernández mapped out quite a bit of the area, but they found nothing.

After months of fruitless searching, he grew disillusioned and frustrated with his subservience to Amalia. One night he asked Brother Tomas if Tomas could teach him sorcery.

“He told me that it was not a matter of teaching,” MJ read, “One either had the ability or did not. But he agreed to help me see if I could manage something simple.”

Tomas showed him a simple spell that he had learned early on as monk, one that would enchant a quill pen to transcribe his speech. To the surprise of both of them, Hernández was able to do it.

“He had the bloodline,” Hayley said.

MJ looked up in shock. “Does that mean I have it?”

“Not necessarily,” Katarina said. “It does not follow every line of descent.”

“But she could?” Morrigan asked.

“Yes.”

“Let’s figure that out later,” I said. “What happened?”

Hernández and Tomas worked together in the evenings to develop his skills, which progressed rapidly. When Amalia returned to the mission and learned what they were doing, she was thrilled to have another sorcerer assisting her. One night she explained to Hernández about her plans for Zagan. This part we already knew – she wanted to harness his powers but needed to wait until Astaroth completed his ascent to king and his attentions were no longer on the rock.

But there was also something I didn’t know, something that hadn’t occurred to me. I’d assumed Amalia simply wanted Zagan’s powers for their own sake. Having them myself, I knew they were very useful. But I was wrong. Amalia wanted them for a reason – she intended to use Zagan’s powers to aid the search for Tamiel. To do that, she had to improve her divination skills.

“But you said you can’t improve yourself,” Morrigan said to me.

“I can’t. She must not have realized the powers don’t work that way.”

Amalia taught Hernández several new spells to aid his search for the tablet, but he had by then become convinced they were on a fool’s errand. The area Amalia was asking him to search was simply too large and rugged. If the tablet had truly fallen from the sky, it could be almost anywhere. He had seen mountains they could not hope to climb, canyons too long and deep to get into, and badlands that could have hidden a thousand such tablets easily. He finally told Amalia they needed a different approach. After listening to him, she agreed.

She told him she was returning to Europe, where she would attempt to research a solution. Hernández knew this meant she would be gone for several years at least. What was he to do in the meantime? Amalia told him he could wait for her return and share in their success, or give up and do what he liked. Knowing her, I knew how that conversation had likely gone.

Left to their own devices at the mission, Hernández and Brother Tomas continued their demon-worshipping cult. Hernández took a wife from among the Chumash, and she bore him three healthy children. The birth of his second child spurred him to begin writing the journal, wanting to leave a record of his life behind for his descendants in case Amalia never returned. Brother Tomas died in 1781 after contracting gangrene from an injury he suffered on the mission farm, leaving Hernández in charge.

Only one other thing of note occurred. One night, Hernández had a strange dream.

“I was standing along the sea,” MJ read, “Looking out at the strange rock that—” She stopped and let out a brief laugh. “—that resembles a giant penis.”

Morrigan and Hayley laughed with her.

“A being came to me,” she continued, “a formless shape of air and mist that spoke to me in a language I had never heard, yet understood. It told me it had a message I needed to record and preserve. In the dream, I knew what it was telling me, but when I awoke, I remembered only a strange series of symbols that I wrote down while still half-asleep. When I had done so, all memory of what the spirit told me left my mind. I have faithfully transcribed what I wrote below.”

MJ turned the journal around and showed us. There were about six lines of weird characters that didn’t resemble any language I had ever seen. And yet . . .

“Something about this looks familiar,” Hayley said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It does.”

Katarina leaned over to examine the journal. “Those are the same characters used on the fountain, though the arrangement is different.”

Now I saw it. I pulled out my phone and opened the photos I’d taken. She was right.

“You really never forget anything you see?” Morrigan asked her.

“No,” Katarina said.

“That must get hard after a while.”

Katarina pursed her lips. “It did, a very long time ago. But it is who I am.”

Hayley reached over and rubbed Katarina’s shoulder. Morrigan gave her a hug. I knew what Katarina meant better than they did – there were a number of things she’d told me and me alone – so I said nothing.

“So what does that mean?” MJ asked. “That the same language was used twice?”

“No idea,” I said. “Except that once again, this is all tied together.”

MJ sighed and kept reading. Amalia indeed never returned. I knew from my dreams and visions that she had decided to wait quite a bit longer before trying to use Zagan’s powers.

In 1784, Hernández grew ill. Suspecting he might not survive the illness – he was by then nearly sixty – he enchanted the hiding place in the alcove and gave directions to his wife to hide the rapier in the hills above the mission.

“I have made my peace with my choices,” MJ read, “though some have been forced on me. I write these words wondering who may read them, whether this journal will turn to dust before another pair of eyes lands upon it.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Only one of my blood will find this journal. Whether you choose to act upon what I have written is up to you. May the powers of Hell and Heaven look favorably on what you decide.”

She looked up and closed the journal.

“That’s it.”

“So he was your ancestor,” Hayley said.

MJ nodded quickly. “Yeah. He was.”

“What now?” Morrigan asked.

I shook my head for a moment. It was late and I was really tired, but something about this still didn’t add up. It was like completing a jigsaw puzzle only to discover you had several pieces left over. We needed to talk about what we’d found, but I wanted input from more than just the girls. I wanted everyone.

“Let’s go to bed. There’s more to discuss here, but we can do it in the dream world.”

￼

I returned to the castle. Charlotte and Echidna were already there, and we went down to the library. I had created a sitting area in the center, but it wasn’t big enough. I spread it out so there was room for everyone.

One by one, I pulled the girls in. Hayley appeared in a long red silk dress, Morrigan in one of her fantasy goth outfits, a cross between enchantress and slave girl. MJ appeared in her armor. I dressed Katarina in something similar to Hayley, but in blue. The six of them circled around the sitting area, each taking a chair or spot on one of the couches.

Then I reached out to Adriana. I had little trouble connecting to her, and I drew her in gently. She appeared by the fireplace. I made her lucid as soon as she was completely in.

“Jimmy,” she said, looking around the room, eyes widening a bit. “What is the occasion?”

“I need your help. There’s something we need to discuss, and I want your opinion on it.”

She nodded. “Of course.” She sat down next to Morrigan.

I briefly explained the situation to Adriana, what we’d found since I last talked to her.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s start by assuming all the things we think we know are in fact correct. That may very well be wrong, but let’s just start there. At some point roughly six thousand years ago, Tammy got into a spell battle with someone or something. She lost and got split into two elements. The female element was confined in the earth.”

“In the earth,” Hayley said. “Not in a golden tablet.”

“Could the golden tablet have been the other half?” MJ asked. “You said you saw that half go flying over the horizon and turn into something shiny.”

“That’s possible. Let’s come back to it. From what Volach told us, Tammy reappeared about a thousand years ago, then dropped out of sight again. So she, if indeed it was the female half, escaped from whatever that other being did to her.”

“We don’t actually know that,” Hayley said. “What if it was the tablet half that reverted to form, and the female half has been confined all this time?”

Katarina sat up. “But what Echidna told you—”

“Right, let’s discuss that,” I said. “Around 1099 or so, Echidna’s master summons a spirit to ask where Tammy is. It tells him Tammy, female Tammy, is confined.”

“1099 is less than a thousand years ago,” Hayley said.

“Right. And when he presses the issue, the backlash is enough to destroy the spirit.”

“Destroy the spirit?” Adriana said, eyebrows going up.

Echidna described what happened.

“That would take magic far beyond any mortal,” Adriana replied. “Only the strongest members of the infernal bureaucracy could possibly do that.”

We looked at Katarina. She nodded. “The Kings of Hell have the power to consume spirits and souls, though they do so only rarely. Of course, the one they answer to has that power as well.”

“Could that have been who Tammy fought in your vision?” Hayley asked.

“‘The big man,’ as Volach likes to call him?” I asked. “I suppose.”

“If Tammy truly had the power to smite spirits and demons, he would see that as a threat, wouldn’t he?”

“Most certainly,” Katarina said.

“Yet part of Tammy is still wandering around,” Morrigan said.

Charlotte had been quiet up to now, but she turned to Echidna. “Repeat what you said about what the spirit told your master.”

Echidna glanced at her, then back at me. “The spirit said, ‘You should seek Tammy.’ Not that name, obviously. Her real one. ‘With Tammy’s power, you can strike down the largest army.’”

“With Tammy’s power,” Charlotte said. “It did not say Tammy herself.”

That was a good point.

“Repeat the rest of it,” Charlotte said.

“My master asked, ‘How do we seek Tammy’s power?’” Echidna said. “The spirit replied, ‘Tammy was defeated, it was bound, she is not free to serve.’”

“And when he asked how to obtain that power, that was when the spirit was destroyed,” Charlotte said. “I think the spirit was speaking of two different, if related, things. Spirits do not think the same way mortals do. It is why dealing with them is so complicated.”

“That is absolutely true,” Adriana said. “They can move back and forth between two or more ideas without meaning to, and do it in a way that confuses mortal minds. I have seen it. It deceived me more than once before I learned to be more cautious.”

“So the power was bound,” I said, “and seeking the power is what destroys people. Not seeking Tammy.”

“But Amalia has been seeking Tammy all this time,” Hayley said. “It’s what she asked us to do.”

“We can’t assume Amira knows everything,” Morrigan said. “We can’t even really assume she knows as much as we do at this point.”

“She would not know about that vision, for example,” Adriana said. “Could she?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t told her about it.”

“So she would not necessarily know about Tammy being split in two.”

“No,” I said.

Adriana nodded, raising her finger in the air. “All right. Then, Jimmy, I want you to consider something. It is the thing you asked me about in our dream. About the dark spirits.”

I glanced at Hayley. Her face creased in concern.

“Let us assume,” Adriana continued, “that Tammy indeed fought the one we will not name. What brought that vision to your mind? This was long before Amalia was born.”

“Good question.”

“You saw the battle break that branch. It fell in a place where Hayley’s ancestor would one day uncover it. Amalia came to Scotland to obtain it, and she turned it into that staff that you now carry. But that raises a very disturbing question in my mind. Have you tried to create items of power yet, Jimmy?”

“No,” I said.

“It is not a matter of gathering random components,” Adriana said. “To create a staff like that, Amalia would have had to find a piece of wood that was compatible with her talents and energies. So she would have asked the spirits to help her find one.”

“Oh, shit,” Hayley said.

“No way,” Morrigan said.

Adriana nodded gravely. “And the spirits guided her to that branch out of innumerable pieces of wood she might have used. Why?”

“The connection to Tammy,” Charlotte said. “And Hayley.”

Hayley’s hands had gone over her mouth. Her eyes were wide, staring at me.

“I get Tammy . . .” I said after several long moments. “. . . but why Hayley?”

Adriana took a deep breath. “Because the spirits knew the two of you would one day meet and fall in love.”

“I bet you they told Amalia the same thing,” MJ said. “That’s how she knew.”

“‘You’ll need her to do something very important,’” I said.

“But what?” MJ asked, her voice dripping with frustration. “Finding Tammy? Finding the golden tablet? Putting them back together? We still don’t know for sure what we’re even doing here.”

“The spirits want her power,” Morrigan said.

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “If Tammy’s power is smiting spirits, then that power is a threat to all of them. If you’re one of these unaligned spirits, the ones that don’t serve either bureaucracy, would you want that power to potentially fall into the hands of a mortal? Or any one being in particular? Or would you want to destroy it?”

“Be careful not to attribute too much logic to them, Jimmy,” Adriana said. “They do not think the way mortals do, as Charlotte said.”

“Still, that makes some sense,” MJ said. “Not in a logical way, just one of self-preservation.”

Hayley sat forward in her chair. “That still doesn’t explain what they need me for.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’re getting somewhere. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there. What do we do now?”

“You should ask your computer,” Echidna said. “The new one you made, that told us how to make the invisibility ointment.”

“The new one?” Morrigan asked, purple eyebrows going up.

I realized I hadn’t told the girls about the hybrid quantum computer I’d created here. We’d been too focused on brewing up the lotion.

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

They all got up, and I led them to the computer lab. I briefly explained what I’d done.

“And it works?” MJ asked, incredulous. “I mean, this is all in your head, right? How could you create a quantum computer in your head?”

“Jimmy, this is something that doesn’t even exist yet,” Hayley said.

“I do not think this is all in Jimmy’s head,” Adriana said. “It may have been once, back at the beginning with just Charlotte, but no more. Not with what has happened here.” She looked at me. “I have been thinking about this ever since our dream, since you showed me all this and told me what has happened here. The army of spirits, the battle with Zagan and Eligos. No mortal could hold all this in his own dreams, not even you. I think you have pushed the boundaries of this out so far that you have connected it to the spirit world, the true spirit world. That is how Eligos came in here, how the dark spirits have invaded it. This is something real now. Your dreams connect you to it, but it has become so much more.”

I looked around at the stunned faces of the girls. Katarina was the first to speak.

“It would explain why the spirits seem so eager to serve you,” she said. “They are drawn to power as well.”

“But . . .” Morrigan began, “if all this stuff is true, then that means the spirits kind of created him, when you think about it.”

“Jimmy is like a god here,” Hayley said. “Why would they create something like that?”

The implications slowly dawned in my head, but I recoiled from them. One thing at a time.

“If I use the model,” I said, “it’s just going to us tell us what the spirits want us to do. Which may not be the best thing.”

“At least we’ll know that much,” MJ said.

I nodded and sat down. I looked at the screen. “What is our next step here?”

As before, the answer popped up immediately.

GO BACK TO SCHOOL. TALK TO COLLEEN. SHOW HER THE JOURNAL. SHE CAN HELP YOU.

I heard Hayley sighing softly behind me, then felt her hand on my shoulder.

“I guess we know,” she said.

Chapter 16

We didn’t go back right away, though.

Having been up so late the night before, we slept in the next morning. Since we’d promised to stop and see Hayley’s parents for dinner that night, tomorrow was the soonest I wanted to leave. I awoke between Katarina and Hayley, both of whom were still asleep.

I woke up Katarina. Her eyes opened immediately, and she sat up. Though Katarina slept now, her sleep was not mortal sleep. She was either awake or asleep, with no middle ground. The moment I woke her up each morning, she was fully alert and ready.

“Come on. We need to talk about something.”

She followed me out to the kitchen, and I helped her make some coffee. While I was sometimes unsure about her Swedish casseroles, she had a knack for making good java. When we each had a mug, we went out to the patio. She’d slept in one of the little nightgowns I liked, but now she manifested a short robe around it.

“I didn’t want to discuss this in front of the others,” I said, “because I don’t want to upset them. But this is something you understand and can deal with.”

“You are concerned about the infernal politics of this.”

I nodded slowly.

“I did not need to read that from you,” she said, “though I sense it anyway. I am concerned as well.”

“Let’s say the big man and Tammy did do battle with each other,” I said, “he did defeat her, and he did seal her away in the ground. I have to assume that he did this because he didn’t want her loose stirring up trouble with her powers. He and the kings of Hell may be able to destroy a spirit here and there, but it sounds like she had the power to destroy all of them, even him.”

“We do not need to assume it,” she said. “I can assure you, if such a battle took place, that is exactly what happened.”

“But she apparently broke loose about a thousand years ago, and lots of people have been searching for her. At least some of them, starting with Amalia, have worked for the infernal bureaucracy, and they’ve been using the powers they got from it to look for her. That’s a thousand years in which the big man could have tracked her down and sealed her up again, yet he seems to have done nothing.”

Her pale blue eyes were lined with tension. “You are wondering if he is aware of these searchers,” she said. “Again, I can assure you he is. Such a thing could never have escaped his notice, not for so long.”

I nodded again. “Which tells me he’s not particularly concerned with anyone finding her, either because he knows she’s locked away permanently, or because she’s no longer a threat.”

“Yes. I do not know which it is, but that is the only explanation for his inaction.”

“But could he be wrong? By which I mean, has he overlooked the possibility that someone could find and reactivate her power? Amira seemed very concerned about him learning what we’re up to.”

“I cannot answer that, Jimmy.”

I shook my head and sat down in one of the lounge chairs. I stared out at the morning sky.

“I’m just speculating. It’s increasingly clear to me that there are two parts here, Tammy the female whatever she is now, and the golden tablet. The tablet seems to have been lost since that battle. It’s the female half that could still be walking around. And maybe it’s been so long since that battle that he’s assumed the tablet is lost or destroyed. That being the case, female Tammy is almost certainly no threat to him.”

“That seems quite reasonable.”

“But the power is a threat, and it could still be out there somewhere. What happens if we find it? What is he going to do?”

Katarina took a long breath and sighed. She lay down with me, resting her head on my chest.

“If that happens, hope that you control the power. Because the alternative is too terrible for me to consider.”

I put my arms around her. I felt her concern, but I also felt it waning as we lay together.

Whatever the challenge might be here, I knew Katarina trusted me. In the months we’d been together, I’d felt her settling further and further into the knowledge that we were going to be together for a long time. Not just however long my mortal life lasted, which might be quite a while given my power as a sorcerer, but far beyond that.

I didn’t like to think too much about what might come next. Because I knew. It was what had happened to Amalia. Unless something really unusual happened, I was going to become a demon. I was already as powerful as a King of Hell. So actually becoming one wasn’t a big stretch. And if – when – I did, Katarina would still be there, bound to me, essentially my queen.

She rose up from my chest a little and propped her chin on her arm.

“You are troubled by something.”

“Not troubled. Just thinking.”

I brushed my fingers through her long pale blonde hair and lost myself in her eyes for a few moments. If I was going to be stuck with someone for all eternity, I could have done a lot worse than Katarina.

She smiled. “Yes. I feel it. It is the same thing you think about from time to time when we are alone.”

I didn’t need to say it. I just pulled her up and kissed her. She kissed me back, sliding onto my chest. I cupped her firm butt in my hands, then slid them up under her robe. She ground herself down against me.

I felt what she felt, and she felt what I did, a circle of the love we shared, flowing around and around.

After a few moments, she reached between us, pushing down my pajama bottoms until my erection popped free. She settled her knees on either side of me, backing down and swallowing me into her wetness. I kept kissing her as she pulsed and squeezed herself around me. She lay perfectly still above me, not moving a muscle except the ones inside her.

Katarina finally broke the kiss and lifted up a bit, looking down at me. She smiled and kissed my nose.

“Don’t move.”

“Okay.”

She continued milking and massaging me. Despite what she’d said, I couldn’t resist reaching up to play gently with her breasts, thumbing the pert nipples under the silk of her nightgown.

“I said not to move.”

“I won’t move anything else.”

She laughed softly. “I love you, Jimmy.”

I pulled her back down and kissed her. She finally started moving her hips against me, pleasuring herself as well. I just lay there and let her work, feeling her arousal rise in unison with mine. Since she could feel what I felt too, she was able to time it perfectly.

In a few minutes, when I almost couldn’t take any more, I felt her tip over the edge and shudder around me, just as I exploded deep inside her. Our mutual orgasm washed over us, swirling together until it felt like one big ball of pleasure swallowing us up. For a few indeterminate moments, I felt nothing but the love we shared.

Katarina finally fell onto my chest with a gasp. I held her tightly.

“I will never grow tired of that,” she said. “Never.”

It was hard to disagree.

￼

With nothing else to really do in terms of Tamiel, we spent another lazy morning at the beach, then went shopping in town. Hayley checked in with her mother and confirmed they were ready for us that night at six. We went back to the house mid-afternoon to clean up and change.

Since it wasn’t far, we just took my car and stopped on the way to pick up a bottle of wine. I knew Hayley’s parents had expensive tastes in that regard, but I could afford it now.

Stephanie and Derek lived on a cliff above the beach in a house worthy of a design magazine. The top floor stretched around the hillside, giving a perfect view of the ocean and the cliffs below leading down to the water. Stephanie met us at the door and hugged everyone. She was a pretty, auburn-haired woman who almost never gave the impression of being the overworked cardiologist she was. She took pride in appearances, not just hers but her house as well.

She knew Morrigan from when she and Hayley had dated, so only MJ needed an introduction. I gave her the cover story of being a friend of mine from Zagan’s Rock who was going to school at UCSD. Stephanie didn’t question it.

Hayley’s mother liked her vodka martinis, and she had a big pitcher waiting for us. We assembled around the kitchen island. As she passed out the drinks, I noticed that she was still wearing her old wedding ring – the one I’d found down on the beach with my divining rod – on her left hand. We went through the requisite-but-awkward quizzing about Hayley’s grades before moving on.

“Where is Dad?” Hayley asked.

“He should be home by seven,” Stephanie said. “I told him he needed to be here, and he promised there was nothing scheduled. Absent some emergency, he should be back soon. How have things been at the new house?”

Hayley shot me a quick smile. “It’s working.”

“I’m going to come down and help with the decorating like I promised, I just need to block out some time.”

“It’s fine, Mom. We’re pretty much studying all the time.”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t need to worry about the decor. Honestly, having a tranquil, nurturing space is even more important now than if you’re just relaxing.”

“I appreciate the help with it,” I said. “It’s not my thing at all.”

Stephanie smiled. “This will sound terribly sexist, but most men don’t have the eye for it. Derek certainly doesn’t. I’m happy to help.”

She asked MJ about soccer, and that led to about ten minutes of reviewing how MJ ended up at UCSD and where she wanted to go with it. As we talked, I noticed Stephanie paying more and more attention to Morrigan’s hair. Finally, when MJ ran out of things to say about the team, Stephanie stepped around the island and up to Morrigan.

“Do you mind if I ask what you did with your hair? Honestly, I thought it was a wig when you arrived at the door, but it’s not, is it?”

I saw the nervousness leaking into Morrigan’s eyes.

“Um, no, it’s not,” she said. “I just have an amazing hair stylist.”

“You do. What on earth did she do to it?” Stephanie reached toward her, stopping just short of Morrigan’s shimmering purple locks. “Do you mind?”

Morrigan shook her head. Stephanie reached out and took a few strands in her fingers. The five of us exchanged uneasy looks as Stephanie examined Morrigan’s hair.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. It doesn’t even look like a dye.”

“She’s really good,” Morrigan managed. “It’s a secret of hers.”

Stephanie shook her head. I began to sense from the look in her eyes that she was unsure whether to believe this. With everything else that was going on, it hadn’t occurred to me that a doctor would be more likely to recognize there was something unnatural about Morrigan’s hair and want an explanation for it. But she finally dropped the strand of hair and stepped back.

“All right. Hayley, can you help me finish setting up?”

￼

Hayley’s father Derek got home just before seven, when dinner was about ready. It was a nice night, so we ate out on their back patio above the beach as the sun was going down. Derek and I talked about my PhD program for a while as the women got to discussing some celebrity scandal. I kept watching them out of the corner of my eye, and now and then I saw Stephanie discreetly studying Morrigan’s hair. The purple gleam was even more apparent as it started to get dark and the overhead LED lights came on.

I knew Hayley was under a lot of stress because of all the stuff we’d discovered. When I saw her pour what I was pretty sure was her fourth martini, I almost said something. But I decided to let it go. I figured she was capable of holding her liquor and old enough to decide what her limits were.

Then she turned to her mother. “Mom? Can I ask you something?”

“What, honey?”

“What do you know about the Breamstone Collective? We have some investments with them, right?”

All of us froze, and I realized a second later that Derek and Stephanie were equally startled by this question. I’d seen the look in Hayley’s eyes only a few times before, and all of them were during that dream.

“Um, yes. They’re a real estate investment firm. Why?”

Hayley continued staring at her. “I saw their offices when we were up in Zagan’s Rock, and I was just curious how you even knew about them. It seemed like such a small outfit.”

Stephanie shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “My college roommate worked with them for a while. I don’t think you know her.”

“Deirdre?”

Stephanie’s eyes widened. Derek seemed completely baffled by this discussion.

“Yes,” she said. “How did you know? I didn’t realize you had met her. It’s been so long since she came down here.”

“We ran into her in Zagan’s Rock. She told me some things.”

Stephanie’s face had gone white. I reached for Hayley’s hand, but she pushed me back.

Stephanie took a deep breath. “Honey, how many martinis have you had? I know it’s at least two.”

“You’re not interested in what she told me?”

Stephanie glanced around the table. “Hayley, this is not the time for this discussion. We have guests here.”

“They know. They were there.”

Her mother looked at me, then at Morrigan, then Katarina. Then she seemed to gather herself up and sat back in her chair.

“All right. What did she tell you? Because I know it can’t possibly be anything meaningful.”

I wanted to know too, because I knew Hayley was bluffing. Deirdre told us nothing about Stephanie and didn’t even know who Hayley was.

But Hayley was her mother’s daughter, and she wasn’t intimidated.

“She told me what went on with the two of you. I know what you were to each other.”

Stephanie began breathing hard, almost gasping for breath. An expression of complete shock spread across her face. She couldn’t say anything for a few moments.

“I . . . I have been nothing but accepting of you and who you are. How you’ve chosen to live your life. Even when you brought Jimmy and Katarina to this house. I know what’s going on with the three of you. How dare you come here and throw this in my face?”

Holy shit. I had never suspected this, though maybe I should have. The look on Derek’s face told me he had no idea either. Morrigan and MJ were equally stunned at this turn of events. Only Katarina remained halfway calm.

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Hayley said, wiping at her eyes. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Then what?” Stephanie shot back. “What have I done to you to make you speak to me like this? You’ve had every possible advantage your entire goddamned li—”

“The magic!” Hayley shouted, standing up so fast that her chair fell backward with a crash. “I know about it! I know what Deirdre is! I know what she did! I know what our family is! I have it too! Why didn’t you tell me?”

For about five or ten seconds, no one moved a muscle. The only sounds were the surf below us and the strained breathing around the table.

Then Stephanie closed her eyes and fell forward, putting her face into her hands. Derek slowly reached for her, but she swatted his hand away.

There was another long silence. Stephanie leaned back, taking a long breath and staring up into the night sky.

“Will the rest of you please go inside? I need to speak to my daughter.”

“Honey—” Derek began.

“Get in the fucking house!” Stephanie shrieked.

The rest of us shot to our feet. Morrigan’s chair crashed back as well. Derek stumbled away from the table, and I put my hand on his shoulder. He looked at me for a moment as if he’d never seen me before. Then he followed my lead, and we went inside. I saw Hayley coming around the table to sit next to Stephanie. Stephanie reached for her hand.

Then I left them alone.

The rest of us regrouped in the kitchen. Derek seemed paralyzed, as if he’d fallen into some parallel universe and no longer knew how to even function.

“Do you have any bourbon?” I finally asked.

“Uh. Yeah. Um, there’s some Pappy van Winkle in the back here.”

“Let’s have a little and go into your office.”

He nodded. Moving unevenly, he pulled the bottle from the back of the liquor cabinet and poured about an inch for each of us. I looked at Katarina, MJ, and Morrigan. MJ nodded at me, and discreetly motioned us out of the kitchen.

Derek led me to his office. There were two leather chairs facing each other next to the bookcases. We sat down. He took a long sip and stared at me.

“I thought you were gay,” he said slowly. “I mean, not there’s anything wrong with that, I knew about Hayley since high—”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Really.”

“Katarina.”

“Yeah.”

“When Hayley said you were living with her, but she and her were dating, I just assumed . . .”

“I get it. Really.”

“The three of you?”

“Yeah.”

I could see the scenarios spinning through his head. I sat there and let him work through them. I took a sip of the bourbon. It was good.

“What was Hayley talking about?” he asked finally.

“I should let Stephanie tell you. I don’t know if it’s my place.”

“But you know?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes.”

He took another big sip of his bourbon. “There’s something about Katarina. I chalked it up to her being Swedish, but it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

I looked down, swirling my drink around. I’d had a couple of martinis myself, and my judgment was not the best right now. But it felt like we’d all passed the point of no return.

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“She’s a succubus.”

He stared blankly at the wall behind me for a minute or so.

“That’s like, a sex demon?”

“More or less. But she’s not what she used to be. She’s not a threat to anyone anymore.”

“I guess that explains what she looks like.”

“Yeah.”

He went silent for a while. I let him ruminate.

He spoke up again after a few minutes. “I knew Stephanie was into something weird back then. I never asked her, but I knew.”

“It’s part of the bloodline. Hayley has it, Stephanie has it, it goes back a long way.”

He nodded. “Stephanie’s family is a bit odd. I thought it was a Scottish thing.”

“It is, actually.”

Derek looked over at me. “Really?”

“Kind of a long story. Not strictly Scottish, but in this case, the bloodline goes back . . . a really long way.”

He took a sip. “How long?”

“Six thousand years.”

“Huh.” Another sip. “And you’re mixed up in this?”

“It’s more that this is mixed up with me.”

Derek looked at me. “Is Hayley at any risk?”

“I can protect her. She can take care of herself pretty well, actually.”

He nodded. “Yeah. She can. So . . . Morrigan and MJ?”

“Morrigan is like Stephanie and Hayley. MJ, we’re not sure yet.”

“What’s up with Morrigan’s hair? There’s no way that’s a dye job.”

“I turned it purple. Another long story.”

He sighed. “You spend your whole life thinking you understand things, when it’s mostly a process of sweeping the things you don’t understand under the rug.”

Yeah, that sounded a bit familiar. “I know what you mean.”

He extended his glass toward mine. We clicked them together.

“I guess we wait to see what they work out,” he said.

I nodded. “I guess so.”

￼

It took a while. Hayley and Stephanie finally came back inside after about an hour. Hayley stayed in the living room, but Stephanie came into the office.

“Things okay?” Derek said. “We’ve been talking.”

Stephanie nodded. “I’ll explain in a bit, honey. Can I talk to Jimmy?”

Derek leaned forward and stood up. As he passed, Stephanie pulled him over and kissed him on the cheek. She waited until he was gone and then looked at me.

“I had hoped to keep her out of this.”

“You can’t always get what you want,” I said.

Stephanie closed her eyes and laughed softly. “You’re too young to be feeding that line to me.”

“My grandmother was a fan.”

She didn’t open her eyes. “I’m trusting you to keep her safe.”

I stood up. I took her hands. “I have been through things with Hayley you can’t begin to imagine.”

“She told me, actually.”

“Then you know that I would die before letting anything happen to her.”

Stephanie took a deep breath and exhaled. “I just needed to hear you say it.” She opened her eyes, squeezed my hands, and rose up to peck me on the cheek. “She has some things to tell you. But you guys should go. I need to talk to Derek.”

“I think he gets it. We talked about a few things.”

“I’m sure. Good night, Jimmy.”

Chapter 17

None of us said anything for a few minutes after I pulled out of the driveway and back onto the state highway.

“Are you okay?” I asked finally

Hayley nodded but didn’t look at me. “It’s going to take me a while to process this. But it’s better to know.”

“What did she tell you?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow.” She turned around and looked at Katarina, MJ, and Morrigan in the back seat. “I’ll tell all of you. But I need to rest right now.” She sighed. “I fucking drank too much tonight.”

We all laughed.

“Sometimes that is what it takes,” Katarina said.

We got back to the house in about fifteen minutes. Everyone was tired and emotionally drained, so we split up and got ready for bed.

Hayley and Morrigan came to bed with me. Charlotte joined us. I didn’t expect Hayley would want anything more than cuddling, and I wasn’t wrong. But I sensed things starting up in the other room, which didn’t surprise me either.

“What?” Hayley asked.

“MJ and Katarina,” I said.

She laughed against my neck. “I forget sometimes you and Katarina know what each other are feeling.”

“Do you feel the same things she’s feeling?” Morrigan asked.

“When we’re together, yeah. Like this, it’s more that I just know it. Same with her.”

“And they’re busy?”

“Yeah. Go to sleep, baby girl.”

They snuggled closer to me, and we fell asleep.

￼

I went back to the castle. I went to sit in the library, in the larger sitting area I’d created. Charlotte came in after a few minutes, and I just took a moment or two to admire her, her beautiful face, coal-black hair, and sparkling green eyes. She smiled at me and came over to sit in my lap. Of all the members of my coven, she had the softest, cuddliest body, and I loved to just sit and hold her. And because I enjoyed it, she enjoyed letting me. So we just sat there for a while.

“You heard what Katarina said about sorcerers attracting followers,” I said.

“Yes, Master. She is correct. It does happen.”

“It didn’t happen with you.”

She laughed softly against me. “I lived in the woods. I avoided people because I was a witch in a land that burned witches.”

“Okay. But you saw it?”

“I did. Some witches gathered others around them for protection. Perhaps I should have done the same. But I liked living alone with Echidna.”

She’d been arrested and hanged at a fairly young age after being betrayed by the people in her village.

“What was she for you?” I realized I’d never asked.

“A pine marten. She simply appeared at my house one day. But I knew what she was.”

“Did she seem different in your dreams? She seems so serpentine now.”

“Yes. It is hard to explain. She looked the same. But it is usually the eyes. They were darker and larger than they are for Morrigan.”

“You really remind me of a cat. I’m sorry.”

“I know. She is part of who I am now.”

I hugged her. “So. The followers.”

“You are thinking of Colleen.”

“I don’t know what to do about her,” I said.

“You are very attracted to her. I can feel it when you are around her.” She laughed again. “You like smart women, especially if they are both pretty and smart. And if they are smart, pretty, and possess talents and knowledge you do not, you cannot stop thinking about them.”

Yeah, that pretty much described my entire coven.

“So what do I do?”

“The spirits told you to go talk to her. I think you must do that at the very least. What happens then, you must decide for yourself.”

￼

When we were all up the next morning, I gathered everyone in the living room.

“Look,” I said, “it’s spring break. We have the house for another two days. We don’t have to rush back to school to deal with this. I’m okay sitting tight for a while longer.”

“I grew up here, Jimmy,” Hayley said. “Here or school, it’s kind of the same thing.”

“Same,” MJ said. “If we can just swing up to Zagan’s Rock and say hi to my mom for an hour, I’m good.”

“I’ll go along with what everyone else wants,” Morrigan said.

I looked at Katarina, but I knew what she would say.

“Okay. Then let’s go.”

As MJ requested, we drove up to Zagan’s Rock to see her family. She still wasn’t ready to introduce me as her boyfriend, and I didn’t push the issue. She just introduced us as her friends from school. So we spent a few hours talking to various members of her family who came and went from the house. A few of them gave Katarina some side-eye, but nothing weird happened. Her great uncle arrived about an hour after we showed up, and he was soon grilling MJ about her playing time and arguing with various people about whether she should be playing professionally in Mexico.

MJ’s mother insisted that we stay for lunch, by which point at least fifteen people had shown up to see us. Since lunch was tamales and some other equally delicious Mexican dishes, none of us argued. Lunch went on for two hours of loud conversation and occasional arguments that shifted randomly back and forth between English and Spanish. We finally headed out around three.

Hayley and Katarina drove back in her SUV, while MJ and Morrigan came with me. When we were out of sight of her parents’ house, and I pulled up at a stop sign, MJ leaned over and pulled me in to kiss her, and not just a peck on the lips. She let me go after a few seconds.

“Thanks,” she said. I knew what she meant.

“When you’re ready, I’m ready,” I said.

“It will happen. I don’t know when, but it will. I promise. You saw how it was.”

“It’s not just your mom and dad. I get it.”

“Well, my mom knows.”

I looked over at her, startled. “She does?”

“She has six kids, Jimmy, and I have two older sisters. She’s not stupid. I didn’t say a thing, but I know she knows. I could see it today. But she’ll pretend nothing is going on until I say it, because until then she doesn’t have to discuss it with anyone else.”

I let out a long breath. MJ’s mom had asked me some pointed questions about my family and what I was doing in school, but I hadn’t gotten the sense that she knew anything. Which was no doubt what she intended.

“She seemed okay with things,” I said.

MJ reached over and squeezed my hand. “You’re a good guy, Jimmy. You’re getting a PhD, and you obviously have your shit together. And my mother has a very finely developed sense for men who aren’t treating her daughters right. If she didn’t like you, believe me, you would have known ten seconds into that. I’ve seen it with my sisters.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“And she’s never going to know about the rest of it. Believe me, that’s the last thing I want any of them to know.”

“Okay.”

Morrigan leaned forward between the seats. “For what it’s worth, my folks would hate you.”

I glanced back briefly. “Really. Why?”

“Because I love you. Anything I like about my life they hate, except they also sort of love it because it gives them something new to fight about.”

MJ rubbed her arm. “How much do they know?”

“I haven’t told them about Jimmy. When I came out to them the last year of high school, they spent the next year fighting over whether I was gay, bi, or just confused. My stepmom still thinks my ‘goth phase’ is a cry for help. If I told them what was going on now, with Jimmy and the rest of you, they’d still be fighting over it after I graduate.”

“How long have they been divorced?” I asked.

“About six years.”

“I’m sorry,” MJ said. “That has to suck.”

Morrigan shrugged. “If something in your life sucks, you find a replacement. I have you guys.”

“Yeah.” MJ grinned at her. “Going to be kind of a long drive back to school, slut.”

The pain leaked out of Morrigan’s eyes and was quickly replaced by something else.

“Ma’am?” she asked.

“Yeah, sit tight back there,” MJ said, turning forward and smiling at me. “You can edge for a little while. I’ll tell you if I want anything else out of you.”

Morrigan leaned back in her seat, spreading her legs and lifting her skirt. Her fingers went to work. I saw the mirth in her eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Yes, ma’am.”

￼

Morrigan lasted longer than I expected her to, especially since MJ would occasionally talk shit to her about one thing or another when the drive got dull. She finally let Morrigan orgasm when we pulled into my building three hours later. I thought I might have to carry her upstairs, but she recovered after a minute or two.

MJ gave her a hug as we got out of the car. “Good girl.”

Morrigan just nodded against her shoulder.

We regrouped in the living room. Hayley pulled up a chair and sat down in front of us.

“So, there’s not that much to tell, really,” she said. “Mom did less than I have already. Our family has always had it, though sometimes it skips generations. My grandma didn’t have it. But mom’s grandma, my great-grandmother, she did, and she was the one who told my mom about it. Mom was hoping it would skip me.”

“But she and Deirdre were doing magic together?” I asked.

She nodded. “Somehow they recognized it in each other. But they were just doing random little stuff. She never felt like she had much power for anything. So she wasn’t surprised when they couldn’t find her ring on the beach. After she was in med school, she wanted to focus on medicine anyway. Deirdre went off and did her thing with the Collective and Amalia.”

“Did your mom know Amalia?” MJ asked.

“I don’t think so. The way she talked about the Collective, it was something she just did because Deirdre asked her about it. Nothing she told me sounded like Amalia.”

“That doesn’t mean Amalia didn’t know about her,” Morrigan said.

“We kind of already know she did,” I said. “She knew about Hayley and her bloodline. So there’s a good chance she knew about Stephanie.”

“Your mom and Deirdre?” MJ asked.

Hayley sighed. “She said that was the only time she was ever involved with another woman. And it wasn’t really much from the sound of it, just experimenting. She said they were friends long after it stopped. She met my dad in med school, and that was that.”

I reached over and gave her a side hug. She leaned against me for a moment or two.

“There was one thing, though,” she said. “A thing that has been hanging in the back of my mind for a while.”

“What?” I asked

“Do you remember what we found about Henry Langdon in the Collective archives? How he was poisoned with potassium chloride? And how I thought they did it because it would be hard to catch, because your potassium levels are often messed up when you have a heart attack?”

I’d forgotten about that.

“Yeah,” MJ said. “I remember you saying you thought they had a doctor in the Collective.”

The implications slowly dawned on the rest of us. Morrigan’s hands went over her mouth. MJ’s face went pale. Katarina reached for Hayley’s hand on the other side.

Hayley nodded slowly. “So I asked her about it. I asked if Deirdre had ever asked about poisoning someone with potassium chloride. I know my mom would never hurt anyone. Saving lives is what she does. But she loves talking about her work. You’ve seen it.”

She was quiet for a moment or two.

“And?” I asked.

“And she looked like she’d seen a ghost. She asked how I knew. I told her I couldn’t tell her, but I needed an answer. She said that Deirdre had, that it was a conversation she’d always felt weird about. They were out at a bar one night when she was in med school, and Deirdre kept pressing her about it. She told Deirdre pretty much what I told you. Then Deirdre asked where you could get it. It’s actually easy to get, because it’s only really toxic as an IV injection.”

“So they would have had to inject him?” MJ asked.

“Yeah. But, if he was asleep, or drunk, or whatever, I guess it wouldn’t be that hard. Especially if you could cast some spell to hide it.”

I pulled her over and held her for a while. No one said anything else.

￼

MJ and Morrigan spent the night, though after all the drama and revelations from the past few days, no one was in the mood for anything beyond cuddling. In the morning, I emailed Colleen about meeting up, telling her I wanted to talk about what we found on the visit to the mission. She responded within five minutes asking if I could come by the Archives desk at eleven.

“Do any of you want to come with me?” I asked.

The four of them exchanged a look. None of them said anything right away.

“It’s too soon,” Hayley said. “Just . . . please don’t invite her into this or tell her anything about the coven until we’ve discussed things, like we did with Morrigan and MJ.”

“You discussed me?” Morrigan asked.

MJ rolled her eyes. “You don’t think we just went over to get you that morning, do you?” she asked. She looked at Hayley. “What did you discuss about me?”

Hayley smiled. “Which of us you wanted to bone the most.”

MJ laughed.

“I’m serious, that was mostly it,” Hayley said. “And Morrigan, I told you what happened with Amira. We had to figure out if you were the one she meant.”

“In fairness to Colleen,” Katarina said, “the signs we have gotten here are quite similar to those around MJ and Morrigan. If anything, they are more direct than they were before. Amira told us to find another sorcerer, but she did not identify anyone by name the way the model did.”

“Jimmy’s dream model did,” MJ said. “Which, you know, I’m not convinced is entirely objective.”

Morrigan laughed.

“Talk to her about the journal first,” Hayley said. “Let’s just deal with the rest of it later.”

I nodded. “Okay. That’s fair.”

I walked over to campus with Morrigan around ten forty-five. She went to her dorm; I went to the library. I found Colleen waiting at the Archives desk with the same Black librarian I’d talked to before. They broke off their conversation as I approached, and I noticed the other librarian giving me an interested look. But she said nothing.

“Hey,” Colleen said. The smile she gave me was a degree or two past professional.

“Hey.”

“I’m surprised you cut short your spring break to show me whatever it is you found.”

“Yeah, wait until you see it,” I said.

“Well, now I’m even more curious.”

She led me to another study room along the outer wall. We sat down at the table inside. I began the story we’d worked up that morning to explain the journal, since the truth was not going to work here.

“Before I show you this,” I said, “I need to ask for some discretion and understanding. I don’t know that we’re going to be able to publicly discuss the provenance of this, because of where it came from.”

Colleen’s eyebrows dipped a bit in concern. I drew the journal out of my backpack and set it on the table. I’d ordered archival boxes for the grimoires, but I didn’t have one for this thing yet, so I’d just stuck it into one of the plastic bags.

“The person who owns this loaned it to me. I can’t identify them just yet. I wasn’t aware this even existed until a couple of days ago.” All that was true, as far as it went. The journal had been left for MJ, so technically it was hers.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a journal that Juan José Pérez Hernández left behind. It makes clear a number of things that are going to pretty much blow apart the historical record around him and the mission.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re sure it’s authentic?”

“Yes. Whether we can establish that convincingly, I don’t know.” I didn’t actually intend to do anything of the sort, but I needed her assessment of it.

“What things?”

I took a deep breath. “First, he didn’t die in 1775. He died in 1784, and you can actually find his grave at the mission. It just says ‘Hernández,’ but the dates line up. He and de Hezeta faked his death so he could join the monks and help them set up Mission San Sebastian. And they were absolutely worshipping demons in the Voodoo Room, and they did in fact get the local band of Chumash involved in it.”

Colleen’s face had gone pale. I slid the journal out of the bag and let her look. She examined it for a few moments.

“It certainly looks authentic, though it’s in excellent shape for the apparent age.”

“It’s been stored very carefully, as I understand it. Go ahead and read it. It’s not all that long.”

I sat there as Colleen read through it, her amazement growing with every page. She sat back after about five minutes.

“There are naval records he left behind from his first voyage,” she said. “We need to compare the handwriting.”

“Can we get at them?”

“I found them when I was looking for the first log. They’re in the Mexican National Archives. Can I use your computer a moment?”

I opened up my laptop and slid it over to her. After a couple of minutes, she was through the web portal for the archives and found the log. She opened up the digitized file and began studying it, looking back and forth between the screen and the journal.

Finally she let out a long sigh. “This is either authentic or an extremely meticulous fake. And I really don’t think it’s a fake.”

“You can tell?”

“This is what I do, Jimmy. Look how precise the handwriting is in both books. That’s something you always see with naval logs, but you don’t often see in others. Navy officers in this era had to have very good, clear handwriting because they were creating important records. Look how he forms his capitals, the little flourishes, the slant of his writing.” As she spoke, she pointed out examples in the journal and on the screen. “It’s exactly the same.”

Not that I doubted it, but she was right. “Yeah.”

She looked back down at the journal. “I’ve seen faked rare books before, and they always have tells. It’s very hard to fake the aging convincingly to someone who has worked with so many real books from this era. It doesn’t look right, and it doesn’t smell right.”

“Someone like you?”

Colleen nodded. “Yes. There are ways to fake the smell and feel that someone like you would never spot, but the forgers always overdo it. They try to make the book seem obviously old to anyone who picks it up. The condition of this journal is actually much better than the fake books I’ve seen. The only possibility I can see is that it was faked contemporaneously, maybe by someone who wanted to discredit him. Except I don’t see why anyone would do that after he was dead, and we’re still left with the problem of explaining the handwriting. It would be awfully hard to imitate his handwriting so closely across a record of this length.”

“You should keep reading. You haven’t even gotten to the good parts yet.”

She did. I sat there listening to her little gasps of surprise and watching her eyes swell in amazement. She finished reading in about twenty minutes and sat back in her chair with another long sigh, staring at the wall across the room.

“This is absolutely crazy,” she finally said. “This is like something out of a movie.”

“Do you have any idea what they might have been searching for?” I asked.

She looked over at me. “The golden tablet?”

“Yeah.”

Colleen sighed again. She shook her head slowly, eyes going unfocused.

“No . . .” she said, “. . . unless . . . and this is beyond crazy. I don’t even know how to process this, and it wouldn’t even have occurred to me except that I’m in charge of the mission archives. You know where they came from, right?”

“Rutherford Huntington’s wife.”

She nodded. “Yes. Jezebel Huntington was obsessed with the history of the missions. That’s why she collected all these materials. She spent a couple of decades on it. But she was also very into the occult. It was a popular thing during that era, rich people paying these charlatans to come to their parties and conduct séances to speak to the spirits. She was an odd one, to be sure. You’ve seen that fountain out there.”

“Yeah.”

“Toward the end of her life, she started claiming to be a mystic herself. This was when the mental illness was clearly kicking in, because she claimed ‘the spirits’ were telling her all sorts of things that needed to be done in building the school. I don’t know if you’ve heard this story, but she was actually the one who picked the site. She said the spirits came to her in a dream and said it had to be built right on this spot, which at the time was just a cow pasture belonging to some woman who lived in Hungary.”

It was a good thing Colleen was still staring at the wall, because the stunned look on my face at that moment would have been very hard to explain.

“So Rutherford gave her that fountain just to keep her busy, and you know how that turned out.” She sighed again. “It’s not part of my responsibilities, but the library has other records of hers that I’ve looked at briefly. To be honest, they remind me a lot of those books of yours.”

“Really,” I managed.

She finally looked at me, but I’d stifled my reaction by this point. “Anyway,” she went on, “the point I’m trying to get at here is that there are a bunch of notes in these records about a golden tablet that Jezebel seemed to be searching for. She was convinced it was somewhere on campus. That was the point at which Rutherford finally had her committed, because she was wandering around cursing at people she thought might find the tablet before she did.”

Neither of us said anything for a few moments.

“It’s on campus,” I said to no one in particular.

“So she thought.”

I took a very deep breath and exhaled slowly. I really didn’t know what to say.

Colleen nodded slowly. “It’s a lot to work through.”

That was an understatement. “Yeah.”

Colleen slid the book back into the plastic bag and handed it to me.

“I don’t know about you, Jimmy, but I’m kind of hungry after all this. Do you want to get some lunch?”

I nodded. “Lunch is good.”

Chapter 18

Colleen and I left the library and walked over to the student union. I tried not to stare at the fountain as we went past.

It was spring break, so only a few staff and faculty were there, but one line was open, and we each got something to eat. We got a table out on the patio in the corner overlooking the quad.

“So how did you end up at Huntington, Jimmy?”

I decided the truth was safe enough.

“My mother died when I was really young, and my father was never really in the picture. I was raised by my grandmother. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we did all right. She was the one who got me interested in chemistry. She was pretty eccentric, like I said, but I think she did a good job raising me. I applied to a bunch of schools, but Huntington was closest to her assisted living facility. I did well enough in high school to get a full scholarship, and I wanted to keep going with the chemistry when I got close to graduating. So here I am.”

Colleen reacted to this story with quite a bit more interest than I would have expected. She gave me a sympathetic smile.

“I guess we have a lot more in common than an interest in the missions.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I came out of the foster care system. I didn’t know my parents either, and frankly I barely remember a lot of my childhood. I’ve just blocked it out.”

I couldn’t say anything right away. “Wow. I mean you seem—”

She smiled. “I’ve worked very hard to seem that way, Jimmy.”

“I guess so.”

She looked down and began poking through her salad. “I don’t know how much you know about foster care, but it’s a hard life. When you turn eighteen, the state pretty much cuts you loose. I knew what was coming, and I wanted a chance to get past it. I visited Huntington once and just fell in love with it. So I busted my butt just like you did, and I got a full ride here too.”

This was definitely not what I had expected. Colleen had the kind of poise and sophistication about her I was used to with Hayley and Morrigan, who had significantly more privileged backgrounds than I did.

“Damn. I thought my backstory was tough.”

“Oh, I’m sure it was.”

“Not like that,” I said. “I mean, we were poor, I won’t deny that, but we had each other.”

She smiled. “Well, some of the homes I lived in were probably more comfortable than what you had. But yeah, it was hard. You make friends and connections, and then they get broken and you never see them again. I still have trouble connecting with people.”

“I can imagine. That sounds awful.”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“What got you into the archives?” I asked.

“I’ve always been interested in history,” she said. “I guess it’s because I don’t have much of my own. I got interested in the missions in high school because of a teacher I had. And once I got to Huntington, I loved studying in the library so much I wanted to live there. I couldn’t live there, so I got an MLS. I wasn’t in charge of the mission archives right away. That was only three or four years ago.”

“You don’t look that old.”

Colleen laughed softly. “How old do you think I am, Jimmy? Don’t worry, I won’t be offended.”

“Uh, I was thinking late twenties. But that math doesn’t add up, I guess.”

She smiled again. “I’m thirty-one. I take good care of myself because I know no one else is going to. How about you?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

There was an awkward pause for a few moments. I took a deep breath. “You asked for a break from our research project. But I was wondering how you wound up in charge of the mission archives. You’re younger than the other librarians, even if you’re older than I thought.”

“Well, I spent most of grad school going through them, like I said. So I got to know the staff really well. The head librarian kind of took me under her wing after a while, and when I finished my MLS, they offered me a job. The mission archivist is an endowed position that was set up in the 1980s by an anonymous gift, and the woman who held it was about to retire. She stuck around just long enough to show me the ropes.”

I took a bite of my sandwich and looked past her, across the quad at the library. “I want to say that was lucky, but I’ve kind of stopped believing in luck. I think you make your own, one way or another.”

Colleen smiled again. “We really do have a lot in common. That’s my philosophy too. I kind of learned that the hard way.”

I looked back at her. “Yeah. Me too.”

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She seemed to be thinking hard about something for several moments. Then she looked up again.

“Jimmy, I told you I have trouble meeting people. I have trouble with men in particular. I’m just no good at reading them. So I recognize that I’m going out on a limb here.”

“Okay,” I said. But I could sense where she was going with this.

“And I’ve never really been attracted to a younger man before. But I find you fascinating in ways I can’t quite put my finger on. And unless I’ve badly misread this situation, I think the feeling is mutual.”

Oh shit. This was too soon. I had no idea what to tell her. But I had to start with the truth.

“It is.”

I wasn’t going to lie. She was pretty, and I was definitely attracted to her. We’d been sitting here long enough that I could tell she was a natural blonde like Katarina, though they had very different looks. Katarina’s eyes were like glacial ice; Colleen’s were a deeper blue, like sapphires. Her hair was darker too, more golden. She didn’t look her age, like I’d told her. And in that weird way that someone you’re interested in suddenly seems much more interesting when you realize the feeling is reciprocal, she seemed a lot prettier to me now than when we’d sat down.

But there were issues, and she saw them in my eyes.

Her face fell, and she let out a sigh. “You have a girlfriend. Is it that girl who was with you, MJ?”

“It’s not th—” But it was, of course. I wanted to explain. But I’d promised Hayley not to tell Colleen the whole story until we’d all discussed it. And even if I hadn’t, I knew Colleen was not ready for everything yet.

I sighed with her. “I’m sorry.”

She gave me a weak smile. “Jimmy, it’s all right. I’m a big girl. I’m just bad at reading men, like I said.” She shook her head. “Can we just rewind here and pretend I never said any of that?”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,” she said.

“You didn’t. I mean, I do find you very interesting. I want to keep working on this stuff. We still don’t have all the answers.”

“So do I.”

She took a last few stabs at her salad.

“All right,” she said eventually. “I guess I need to get back to work. If you want, I can get you set up with the other materials that Rutherford left the library, since you’re already approved.”

“That would be great, thanks.”

￼

When we were back in the library, Colleen handed me off to another one of the archivists, who led me into the sealed-off room in the back. Since Jezebel’s materials weren’t anywhere near as old or fragile as the mission records, she just set me up on a table and pointed out where everything was.

Before I got started, I pulled out my phone and went into our group chat.

Jezebel Huntington was searching for a golden tablet too

And she thought it was SOMEWHERE ON CAMPUS

Hayley was the first to respond.

WTF????

MJ: How do you know?

Colleen told me

There are more records

I’m looking through them now

Morrigan: Could that be what’s in the fountain?

I thought about that

But it would make no sense

She built that thing

Unless she found it and hid it there

But yeah that doesn’t make a lot of sense

Hayley: It has to be related somehow

I’m sure it is

Apparently she was a mystic and the spirits told her it was here

Along with where to build the entire school

I decided not to get into what Colleen told me about the land once belonging to some woman in Hungary. It might have been nothing. And if it wasn’t, I wasn’t ready to deal with it.

MJ: I’m getting sick of these fucking spirits being involved in everything

Hayley: Me too

Seriously fuck all of them

Katarina: They are involved whether we like it or not

Is there anything to tell us about Colleen, Jimmy?

I sat there wondering what to say. I sat there long enough that more texts started coming in.

Hayley: Jimmy?

MJ: For real just spill it

Katarina: Something happened Jimmy. I felt it

Morrigan: What did you feel?

Hayley: Jimmy? Hello????

She confessed that she’s attracted to me

Nothing happened beyond that

MJ: What did you tell her?

She asked if you were my girlfriend

Hayley: And?

You made me promise not to tell her anything

MJ: Fucking shit did you just stare at her? What did you say?

I rolled my eyes even though they couldn’t see it.

I told her the truth

Which you guys know already

Hayley: Here we go

Morrigan: Guys I found her on the library staff page

She followed that with a web link. A few moments later:

Hayley: Okay she is hot I get it

MJ: I told you

I mean she is but not the issue here?

Morrigan: Shit I meant to send that to the other chat sorry

I couldn’t help cocking an eyebrow at my phone.

What other chat?

MJ: lol

Hayley: Goddamnit Morrigan

Morrigan just sent an embarrassed-face emoji. There was nothing else.

￼

I went through Jezebel’s records for a couple of hours. There was nothing terribly surprising, since I knew now that she was some kind of sorcerer. It was basically a lot of notes about her communications with various spirits, and it was clear that, like Adriana, she had a talent for connecting to them.

It was also fairly clear that, sorcerer or not, she had serious mental health issues. The notes were confused and disorganized, many of them dripping with paranoia about one thing or another.

But Colleen was right. She was searching for the same golden tablet Amalia had been looking for. She had obsessively annotated most of the mission records as part of this search, though the annotations would have made no sense to someone unfamiliar with the context of what she was doing. There were no insights into the accepted history of the missions, which was no doubt why Colleen hadn’t spent much time bothering with them.

Jezebel had been searching for any clues or mentions of the tablet and, I began to suspect, Amalia, though she didn’t name her. She’d simply concluded that some strange woman was wandering around visiting the missions and asking odd questions. The letter from the official who visited Mission San Sebastian figured heavily in these notes.

Like Amalia, however, she found no real clues to the tablet’s location. For that, she’d been asking the spirits. And the spirits apparently had a lot to tell her.

As Colleen said, they told her that the college had to be built on a specific spot south of downtown Santo Domingo. It wasn’t quite where the city wanted to do it, but Jezebel convinced her husband to condition his gift on their following her instructions. I got the distinct impression that, by this point, Rutherford had doubts about his wife’s mental faculties, and he was going to some lengths to placate her in hopes of keeping her under control.

Once construction began, Jezebel was increasingly convinced that the tablet was somewhere on the new campus. The spirits were dropping a lot of hints without giving her anything specific. She was frustrated and angry at her inability to narrow things down. So when Rutherford finally gave her the opportunity to design a central element of the new college, Jezebel dove into it full force. As I’d suspected, there was nothing hidden inside the fountain, but from reading through her notes and designs, I saw what she had intended to do with it.

The fountain was, in fact, some kind of spell intended to draw the tablet out of its hiding place. No one but another sorcerer would have seen that, because her plans for the enchantment were bathed in paranoid ramblings about all the people who might find the tablet before her. The actual spell elements were lost in this raving nonsense like a hundred needles in a field of haystacks – unless you knew what you were looking at, as I did.

I’d seen similar incantations in my grimoires. What Jezebel had tried to create was something akin to the divining rod Astaroth gave me for finding Caacrinolaas. The magnetite I saw in the enchantment was simply the last layer she had put on it, a concealment spell intended to frustrate anyone else trying to use the thing to find the tablet. That was why we’d been unable to see past the outer shell.

At five o’clock, the librarian who was helping me came back in to say she needed to close up. So while I wasn’t done yet, I gathered up my stuff, thanked her for the assistance, and left.

I looked for Colleen on the way out, but she’d gone home.

Chapter 19

I got back to the condo to find Katarina making dinner and Hayley sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop.

“Hey.”

“I’ve been reading about Jezebel Huntington,” Hayley said.

“And not about cute librarians?”

She gave me a look. “Later. What did you find?”

I sat down with my notes and walked her through what I’d been able to glean from all the disjointed scribblings.

“So she was a sorcerer, and she was mentally ill?”

“One doesn’t exactly preclude the other, I guess.”

“It most certainly does not,” Katarina called from the kitchen.

“So did you find anything interesting?” I asked.

“Not really,” Hayley said. “She wasn’t important enough for anyone to record much about her, outside of her being married to Rutherford Huntington. She was from Germany, and may or may not have been from some German noble family. She claimed to be, but there was no proof of it. Huntington met her in Budapest during some European tour, fell in love with her, and brought her back here. They never had any kids, and his biographers think it was because he was concerned about her mental health. There’s a lot of talk about her erratic behavior and interest in the occult. For a while it was fashionable, but eventually she just creeped too many people out with her obsessions.”

“That fits with what I found.”

“Yeah.”

“Things are about ready here,” Katarina said.

“What are you making?”

“It is another fish stew, but you will like it, I promise. You always do.”

Hayley and I exchanged an amused look. Then she sighed, leaned back, and closed her laptop.

“So what do we do now?” she asked.

“Sleep on it, I guess,” I said. “I need to finish reading through her notes about the fountain. Maybe come with me tomorrow.”

“So I can meet Colleen?”

I laughed. “That too, if you want.”

￼

When the three of us went to bed, I turned to Hayley.

“About this other chat.”

She rolled her eyes. “My god, Jimmy, did you think we don’t talk to each other? That’s all it is.”

“I hadn’t thought much about it, to be honest.”

“It’s not all about you, either. We’ve just got this weird thing together with the four of us, so we need a space to talk about it.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It was just funny how it came out, was all.”

“It is mostly about Jimmy, though,” Katarina said.

“It’s not all about him,” Hayley said.

“Tell him what you call it.”

Hayley groaned and looked at the ceiling. “Do you know how you like to call us your ‘hot little witches’? That’s what it’s called. ‘Hot Little Witches.’ It was Morrigan’s idea, but it stuck. We all just call it HLW now.”

I laughed. “It’s fine. Honest.”

I put Katarina to sleep and cuddled up with them. But then Hayley rolled away, gently pulling me with her.

“What?” Though it was actually clear what she wanted.

“It’s been a while since I had you to myself. I like the group stuff too, but still.”

I just held her in my arms and kissed her for a while as we caressed each other’s bodies. Hayley liked a lot of things, but she’d always liked being fingered, from the first night we were together. So once I got her pajamas off, I lay beside her and kissed her as my fingers slid gently through her wet folds. I knew what she liked by now, and I gave it to her, circling her clit with the tip of my middle finger. She held me tightly, breathing hard against my neck. I kept it up until her breath started to catch and her fingers dug into my back. Finally, with a soft whimper, she shivered against me, thighs clamping shut around my hand.

I let her coast down and rolled back. She slid onto my chest and began kissing her way down. I just lay there pushing my fingers through her long red hair as I felt my cock passing into her mouth. She wasn’t Katarina, but she’d been watching my succubus carefully, and she was a lot better now than when we met. She kept her lips tight around me, fluttering her tongue as she went up and down steadily. I let her work on me for a few minutes before pulling her up.

She straddled me and sat down, swallowing my cock into her belly. I reached up and caressed her wonderful tits, catching the nipples between my thumb and finger.

“You miss them, don’t you?” she asked.

“What?”

She rode me slowly, putting her hands over mine. “Don’t play dumb. You liked my little boobs better.”

“Not better. Just different. I love these too.”

“They’re like Katarina’s now, and I know you love hers. These are just as perky as they used to be. You made them that way. I still don’t need a bra.”

I pulled her down, kissing each boob and then kissing her. “I love you.”

“But . . .”

“No ‘but’. I love every bit of you.”

“Hmph.”

She kissed me, then leaned back again. She began riding me more purposefully as I played with her nipples. In a few minutes, she gasped softly and I felt her shivering and contracting around me. Then she let out a soft sigh and leaned forward onto my chest. I caressed her butt as she continued moving slowly over me.

“Tell me something you love about me that I’ll believe.”

I pinched her butt, and she responded by squeezing herself around me.

“Are you feeling neglected or something?” I asked.

“No. I just like hearing it.”

“Your eyes. They were the first thing I noticed about you.”

“Not my hair?”

“That was next.”

“Okay. That I believe.” She kissed me.

We made love in the dark for a while longer, then slept.

￼

The next day was Wednesday, when I normally went down to the gym. The only reason not to go was because I might run into Colleen and she might be feeling awkward around me now. But that seemed like a lousy idea for a variety of reasons, so I went.

As I walked in, I saw she was already there on a treadmill. I tried not to stare too hard at her ass.

“Hey.”

She looked over. “Hey.”

I got on the treadmill beside her.

“I guess you’re not trying to avoid me,” she said.

“Should I be?”

She laughed. “It’s fine, Jimmy. Like I said, I’m a big girl.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable yesterday. Two years without sex will do that to a person.” She laughed at the look on my face. “I told you I have trouble meeting people, and I guess you should know what you’re missing out on. What else did you find out yesterday? Karen told me you were there until she kicked you out.”

I recovered my composure after a moment or two.

“She had mental health issues, for sure. But she was definitely after that golden tablet. That was pretty much the whole point of it. All the stuff she wanted the school to do, the fountain, all of it.”

She looked over at me. “Did you honestly find out something new about the fountain? After all these years?”

“It was an attempt to find the tablet. Some kind of divination she thought would help her locate it. The whole thing is an elaborate spell. That’s pretty clear from her notes, as confused as they are.”

“You’re kidding. That’s the first I’ve heard of that idea.”

I nodded. “You need to be really familiar with the occult to see it. All those books I’ve got, and the stuff my grandmother was into. I don’t know what’s written on those stone books, but I’m certain it’s not nonsense. It’s part of the spell.”

Colleen gave me a strange and lingering look. “You almost sound like you believe in that stuff.”

“I’m an engineer. I believe in what I can prove and what works.”

I could tell she took that as a denial, though I meant the exact opposite.

“So what now?” she asked.

“I’m not done with her records. I’m going back over there this morning.”

“Hell of a way to spend your spring break.”

I laughed. “I’m an interesting guy.”

She laughed with me. “You are that.”

￼

Hayley said she needed to study and decided not to come with me to the library. But three more hours in the archives produced only one real revelation. Among some feverish drawings I couldn’t make any sense of, I found a long, rambling discourse that I slowly realized was an account of a dream she’d had. It was a dream much like the one Juan José Pérez Hernández described in his journal.

A group of spirits came to her and told her how to complete the spell on the fountain, though the fountain itself was never named. I only caught it because of what I’d learned the previous day in her notes for the spell. That suggested to me that no one before this would have understood her either.

That was significant, because this dream was the key to deciphering the inscriptions on the books, and likely the message in Hernández’s journal as well.

they speak to me in tongues that pain my ears but my mind hears they speak to me in a language I can only see and not listen the pain the pain the pain they want it I want it I must find it I see the spell the incantation I must use that must be there for the spirits to hear I cannot hear them I see it must be written out in the words I see in my mind the language they only speak they speak oh they speak and it hurts it hurts my mind the pain the words so dark and dark and power

Confused though this was, the meaning was clear: The inscriptions in were in a language known only to the spirits. A language I knew had to be so ancient there would be no way for any modern scholar to unravel it. Because all those scholars, and those decades of Huntington freshman who tried to find a code that wasn’t there – they couldn’t speak to the spirits.

But I could.

I closed my eyes and went to the castle.

I went straight to the computer room and sat down. I focused myself on the screen.

“What is written on those books in the fountain?”

The answer came in an instant, as with the ones before it.

PART THE ANCIENT VEILS AND OPEN THE PATH TO THE TABLET OF GOLD THAT HOLDS THE POWERS OF THE ONE WHO SMITES

“But it didn’t work, did it?”

IT FAILED AS ALL BEFORE IT FAILED AS ALL MUST FAIL

“Why?”

IT CANNOT BE SOUGHT SHE MUST BE FOUND

“If it was going to fail, why did you make her seek it?”

SHE HAD TO SEEK FOR IT TO BE FOUND

That appeared to make no sense, but I reminded myself what I was talking to, what Charlotte and Adriana had warned me about. Spirits didn’t think like mortals did.

“Why do you want it so badly?”

WE DO NOT WANT IT

“Why not?”

WE CANNOT HOLD IT

“Who can?”

But this time, there was no answer.

Another question hung in my mind – Am I the one to hold it? – but I wasn’t ready to ask that one. I’d probably asked too many questions already. I didn’t want my brain to turn to stone.

“So what now?”

THE FOUNTAIN SHE IS THE KEY

Jezebel was the key? Okay, then.

I opened my eyes. I looked down at the pile of notes and scribblings in front of me. I’d gone through everything, and I didn’t see anything that resembled a key, literal or figurative.

So I found Karen and told her I was done.

“Thanks.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked. “A lot of that stuff is really hard to get through.”

“I found a few things. Not sure what they mean. Is there anything else about her in the library? Anything at all? I’ve been through Rutherford’s biographies.”

She shook her head. “I’m afraid not. The literature on him is pretty good, but there just isn’t all that much about her. Have you seen the photo of them in the lobby?”

I hadn’t. Five years at Huntington and I’d never noticed anything like that.

“No. Where is it?”

“Around the corner from the main reference desk, in that archway that goes back to the fiction stacks.”

“Thanks.”

I went upstairs. The photo, an old print that was dated 1889, hung in the archway right where Karen described it. I had to have walked past it numerous times over the years I’d been here, but it just wasn’t something you paid much attention to.

It was a typical portrait shot from that era, Rutherford the wealthy railroad magnate seated in a wingback chair, Jezebel standing beside him at his shoulder. As I studied them, something about it began to bother me. It wasn’t Rutherford. There were plenty of other portraits of him around campus, and I knew his face pretty well. But Jezebel – I was certain I’d never seen her before. She was in none of the other pictures and paintings.

And even so, she looked familiar.

The cast of her face, the look in her eyes. By now, I knew that when this photo was taken, her mental health was already going downhill. It wasn’t hard to see. And the longer I looked at her, the more the strange sense of familiarity grew in my mind.

But I just couldn’t pin it down. Where the hell had I seen her?

After studying the portrait for ten minutes, I finally gave up. I took a shot of it with my phone and headed back to my condo.

When I got to McKinley and stopped at the crosswalk, I heard a voice off to my left.

“You’re still looking! You can’t have it!”

I looked over. And I saw her.

Fifteen feet away, clad in stinking rags and clutching a battered shopping cart, Jezebel Huntington stood there yelling at me about the golden tablet of Tamiel.

Chapter 20

It was several long moments before I could regain some equilibrium.

I knew sorcerers could live a long time. My grandmother had lived for five hundred years, after all. So it wasn’t the fact that she was still alive that staggered me. It was that she’d been here all this time, hanging around campus, still seeking that tablet.

I took a deep breath.

“Jezebel?”

The name shook her. Her eyes widened in disbelief.

“Rutherford?” she asked. “Is that you?”

I almost said Yes before I stopped myself. I didn’t feel right playing with her memories and emotions like that. Also, since her husband had been the one to shut her up in an asylum, there was a possibility she might not take it so well.

“My name is Jimmy.”

Her face darkened. “What do you want?”

“I may be able to help you find the tablet.”

“It can’t be found!” she yelled. “I’ve been searching, and I can’t find it. It was to be mine, and I couldn’t find it.”

“I think it can’t be found by searching.”

She stared at me, the anger draining from her eyes. “The spirits told you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are the one. The one they told me to watch for. All these years, their voices, over and over. They never stop. They told me the truth. You have to stop the searching!”

“But what does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s what they tell me! Over and over! It’s what I tell people. They have to stop! The searching has to stop.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know!”

“‘It cannot be sought, she must be found.’ I found you.”

“I wasn’t lost. I’ve been right here. I’ve seen you.”

“What is in the fountain? That statue? ‘The fountain she is the key.’ What does that mean?”

Her eyes went unfocused. “The key.”

“What is the key?” I asked. “And the key to what? The fountain is a spell. I read your notes for it. It was a spell to find the tablet, but it didn’t work. Why not?”

“I don’t know. I did exactly what the spirits told me to. It was supposed to bring the tablet to me. It didn’t.”

“But they told me you had to do what you did. ‘She had to seek for it to be found.’ If it didn’t work, what did they mean?”

“I don’t know!” she yelled. “This makes my head hurt! They’re speaking to me now and I can’t understand. I have to go!”

Jezebel turned and began pushing her shopping cart away from me.

“Wait,” I said. “What do I need to do?”

“The fountain! They say the fountain! Stop talking to me! Stop it, all of you!”

She kept going. I almost went after her. But it seemed clear I wasn’t going to get anything else out of her today.

I stood there watching her walk away, until she turned the corner and went out of sight.

￼

It was lunchtime when I got home.

Katarina was out on the balcony with Charlotte. Hayley was out; she’d texted me while I was at the library about needing to go pick up some things.

I grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and joined my succubus and my familiar.

“How did it go, Jimmy?”

“Besides meeting Jezebel Huntington, the morning was kind of a bust.”

She cocked a blonde eyebrow at me. “The homeless woman I saw you talking to just now? That is her?”

“You saw that?” I asked. You could see McKinley and the edge of campus looking down from the balcony, but it hadn’t occurred to me that we might have had an audience.

“Yes. I sensed the shock and confusion in you.”

I recounted the conversation I’d just had for her. “She’s been here all this time. But I’m not sure she even knows what she’s doing anymore.”

“The spirits still speak to her.”

“So it seems. Or maybe some of them are just voices in her head. Hard to be sure.”

Charlotte hopped into my lap and meowed loudly.

Katarina narrowed her eyes at me. “Please repeat everything you learned from the spirits and what she said. Let me fix it in my mind. I have a feeling it does not mean what you assume it does.”

I gathered myself up for a moment and exhaled. “All right. ‘It cannot be sought, she must be found.’ ‘She had to seek for it to be found.’ ‘The fountain, she is the key.’ Jezebel told me, ‘The searching, it has to stop.’”

Katarina stared back at me. “I think first of all, we cannot simply assume that ‘she’ and ‘it’ in these statements refer to Jezebel Huntington, or that they even refer to the same thing or person.”

Charlotte meowed again, pawing at me.

I looked down and scratched her head. “I know, I know, what makes sense to them may not make sense to us.” I looked back at Katarina. “‘It’ in ‘it cannot be sought’ has to mean the tablet. What else could it mean?”

Then Charlotte bit me.

“Ow!” I had to jerk my hand away from her.

“Jimmy, I think she has something to contribute here.”

I looked down at her. Cat or not, she seemed to be glaring at me.

“Okay, okay.” I looked over at Katarina. “Come with me here.” She lay back on the lounge chair, and I put her to sleep. Then I closed my eyes and went to the castle.

I appeared in the library. Charlotte was there. She came over and hugged me.

“I am sorry, Master. I tried to get your attention.”

“It’s okay.” I pulled Katarina in, and she appeared beside us. “What is it?” I asked Charlotte.

“You remember what I told you about the spirits mixing concepts and messages together in ways that mortals misunderstand.”

“Right.”

“I think that is exactly what is happening here. You must examine each statement in isolation.” She looked at Katarina. “Repeat what he said.”

“It cannot be sought. She must be found. She had to seek for it to be found. The fountain. She is the key.”

“‘It cannot be sought.’ That has to refer to the tablet,” Charlotte said. “Those who have sought it directly have regretted it, if they even lived long enough to do so.”

“Right, I get that,” I said.

“But ‘She must be found,’ I do not think that means Jezebel. She was the one seeking it, and as you said, she has been here all this time. We need to find someone else.”

“Tammy?” I asked. “That’s kind of the end point here.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

“Okay. What next?”

“‘She had to seek for it to be found.’ I think ‘it’ means the tablet. ‘She’ could mean Jezebel, but it could also mean Amalia. Either way, someone had to start the search, even though the search has been fatal to others.”

“Right,” I said. “But why?”

“Something in this search must be a necessary step,” Katarina said.

When they put it that way, it was suddenly obvious.

“The fountain,” I said. “That was the step. Creating the fountain was a means of searching, but it wasn’t the whole thing. It did something to get her closer, but not all the way.”

“But she told you the searching has to stop,” Charlotte said.

“The fountain has to stop,” I said. “We have to disenchant it. It did its job, whatever the hell that was, but it’s interfering now.”

“But the rest of it?” Katarina asked. “‘She is the key.’ But who is she?”

I don’t know how or why the answer came to me at that moment, but it did.

“Colleen. She’s the key. The key to what, I don’t know, but she’s it. I don’t know how I know that, but I do.”

Both of them stared at me, wide eyed.

“Jimmy?” Katarina asked.

“The spirits want her involved in this. That’s become painfully obvious. She needs to join our coven, then I think we’ll have our answer.”

“How are you going to convince her to do that?” Katarina asked.

“I don’t know. But I think I have an idea.”

￼

Hayley got back not long after we came out of the dream. I filled her in on what we’d discussed. She just stared at me for a few moments.

“You’re sure?”

“No. It’s just a feeling I’ve got. But those kinds of feeling have been right so far.”

She nodded. “We’ve been discussing it, in HLW. Morrigan and I need to meet her first. But MJ said kind of the same thing, that she has a feeling about her.”

“I really don’t know how she’s going to react to the whole picture here. She’s still looking at this like a potential article in a history journal.”

Hayley shrugged. “I thought you were just a weird but intriguing guy with an inexplicably hot roommate at one point. And look where we are now.”

Katarina laughed, and I laughed with her.

“Okay. Let’s see how this goes.”

After discussing and rejecting a couple of approaches with Hayley, I finally just texted Colleen.

Hey

Found some more interesting stuff

Related to Jezebel Huntington?

Karen told me you were in there all morning

Yep

I know what the inscription on the fountain says

It’s not gibberish

She didn’t answer me right away.

125 years and Jimmy is the one to figure this out?

You’d better have all the receipts buddy

I do

Interested?

Very but my afternoon is booked solid

How about you come downstairs at 530?

Huh. That was an innocent enough invitation, and yet . . .

Our building?

I’m in 1504

Okay see you then

￼

Convincing Colleen that Jezebel Huntington was still alive was almost certainly impossible until I’d gotten her to believe the rest of it. Until then, I was sure she would go no further than conceding that the homeless woman outside our building bore an amazing resemblance to Rutherford’s wife.

What I had to start with was some proof she could engage with. And I was pretty sure what it needed to be.

Since I now knew what the inscription on the fountain said, I could work backward to unravel the spirit language. I decided, first off, that I could safely assume it was no human tongue. Not because no one had been able to read it in 125 years, but because a team of graduate students in the Computer Science department had, about five years ago, taken a brute-force approach to deciphering the inscriptions. They’d fed every known written language into a machine-learning algorithm in an attempt to find some match with them. They came up empty — there was no good match to anything.

The reaction to their project from the faculty was more or less “I told you so,” but it served as a final nail in the coffin of the idea that Jezebel Huntington was anything other than mentally ill when she designed the fountain. Colleen was surely aware of what they’d done.

So I started with what I knew.

Part the ancient veils and open the path to the tablet of gold that holds the powers of the one who smites

I spent about an hour trying to match up the translation I’d brought back from the dream world with the inscriptions and got nowhere. First, the inscription was about ten times longer than the translation I had, and the letters just didn’t appear to line up with the words in any way that made sense. Unlike the English version, there was no discernible repetition that would suggest a direct translation.

Then I had an epiphany. Spirits didn’t need a language. They were beings of energy that didn’t speak or read. They communicated with humans through signs and feelings and changes in the real world, like the flow process that ran every time I used my model.

It wasn’t a language as humans thought of it. It was a means of doing something, of influencing the real world. It was something much more akin to a machine language – the low-level executable code that directly controlled a computer CPU. Writing a serious program in machine code was next to impossible, and kind of pointless anyway – it was just too prone to error – which was why programmers wrote in programming languages and used a compiler to turn the program into executable code.

Still, I understood the basics of how the process worked. The problem was that – just like you could, in some cases, decompile machine code into a programming language – I needed some kind of decompiler to translate the spirit language into English.

And that was when I realized that I already had one. My divination model.

The model in the quantum-classical hybrid computer I’d created in the dream world was doing exactly that in real time. But I wondered if I could do the same thing with my real-world model. I was still concerned about MJ’s remark about my dream-self influencing the output from the dream computer.

So. Could I take out the random element and use the spirit language as the input for my real-world model? It seemed possible, but I wasn’t sure where to start with it.

So I began with the failed brute-force analysis. I’d read the paper a couple of years ago. The authors had included a long literature review in an attempt to find some patterns in the inscriptions they could use to guide their machine-learning program. I logged into the library and pulled up the paper. Their one real conclusion, outside of the lack of a match to any human language, was that the inscriptions appeared to follow an octal, or base-8, positioning system, which, they remarked, “bears some resemblance to a programming language.” But since all previous attempts to treat the inscriptions as a coded version of English had been unsuccessful in deciphering them, they dismissed this as an artifact of their analysis.

But it gave me a starting point. Even better, the team had posted all their data and analyses on a page on the Computer Science department website. It was all still there as a sort of ongoing project, though little had been done recently. In particular, they’d converted the inscriptions into a database that could be used for additional analysis, if you were so inclined.

I was so inclined.

It took some work to reformat the database into a resource I could plug into my model, but the longer I worked on it, the more I realized I was onto something. I created a duplicate of my model and removed the particle flow module. I had to call Ahmed, my neighbor in my old building who was getting a PhD in Computer Science, for a bit of advice at one point, but he was happy to help as he’d done several times before.

Finally, I gave it shot. The first six times I ran the model from the database, it produced a stream of gibberish, but I kept tweaking it as some patterns started to emerge. I called Ahmed again. After I explained what was going on, he pointed out that I’d made a mistake in adapting the base-8 system.

“If this works, you will have many freshman girls to add to your harem, Jimmy,” he said.

I laughed. “Yeah, let’s hope so.”

He and my other neighbor Kelly knew about Hayley and the other girls, but not what was really going on. They’d just been teasing me about it.

After another ten minutes, I figured out the problem and fixed it. Then I ran the model again. The results came up in about a minute.

PART

ANCIENT

VEILS

OPEN

PATH

GOLD

TABLET

HOLDS

POWER

ONE

WHO

SMITES

I leaned back in my chair and sighed. It wasn’t exactly the same, but it was close enough. The spirits had no doubt added the articles and conjunctions to what they told me in the dream world, or my other model was just a lot more powerful. Or both.

But.

I wasn’t quite done here.

I was very cognizant of the fact that I’d been working backward from my results and trying to conform the model to them. So in that respect, I hadn’t really proved anything. I needed to test the new model on something else, and I could see only one way to do it: translating the text Hernández had transcribed into his journal.

I got the journal out of my backpack and found the page of strange spirit-characters he’d recorded from his dream. One by one, I transcribed them into a new database, using the same system the students had used. Fortunately, there were no new characters in Hernández’s dream – all of it fit. I double-checked the whole thing, then ran the model again. Once again, it took about a minute to process.

YOUR

MANY

DAUGHTERS

MARTINA

JULIETA

COVEN

RAPIER

HUNTINGTON

LIBRARY

ARCHIVES

FOUNTAIN

TABLET

REJOIN

That . . . oh, boy. My first thought was, Holy shit, it works. My second was that I had to tell MJ. I grabbed my phone.

Hey dreamgirl

Hey papi

I can never tell whether you’re making fun of me when you call me that

And I’m never telling you if I am

Because I like doing it and I know that stuff turns you on

Lol okay

Got something serious here

Are you sitting down?

I am now

What’s up?

Long story short but I reprogrammed my model to translate the spirit language

It works on the fountain

And it worked on the stuff in the journal

I’m not going to like what you’re about to tell me

Am I?

That’s why I asked you to sit down

Here it is

I sent her a photo of the results. She didn’t answer me for about a minute.

Que la chingada

Goddamned fucking shit piss cock

This makes me feel good in one way

Which is?

It means I’m supposed to be with you

Part of me hasn’t been completely 100% sure

But she just shut up for good

Okay

Ily babe

You know that

Yes

tqm mi corazon

I mean it

Me too

What does fountain tablet rejoin mean?

Don’t know yet

But I think it means we’re getting close

You know that Huntington library archives has to mean Colleen right?

Yeah I think so

Are you okay with this?

I only met her that once but I liked her

Whatever happens happens

You’re complicated

Knew that from day one

I’m going down to tell her about all this tonight

Are you busy later?

When? I’ll be there

Come over around 6

Okay will do

Now all I needed to do now was show all of this to Colleen. And hope she didn’t completely freak out on me.

Chapter 21

I updated Hayley and Katarina on what I’d discovered. Neither of them was surprised by any of it. Hayley told me she would connect with Morrigan.

At five thirty, I texted Colleen to see if she was home. She told me to come down, so I took my laptop and went to the elevator.

When Colleen opened her door, I saw that she had already changed out of her librarian clothes and into a fleece pullover and a pair of yoga pants. Her blonde hair was out of its usual ponytail, and she was holding a glass of wine. She seemed happy to see me.

“There you are.”

“Hey. I think you’re going to be impressed with this.”

She ushered me in. Her condo had the same floor plan as mine, just reversed. Her kitchen table was in the same spot mine was, and she motioned for me to sit down.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked. “I just opened this bottle, and I don’t get a lot of guests. Okay, I don’t get any guests. Interested?”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks.”

She poured me a glass, and we sat down. I opened my laptop.

“Look,” I said, “just as a threshold matter, I’m an engineer and you’re a historian. We don’t deal in nonsense and speculation. Like you said, we need the receipts.”

She gave me an interested look. “Yes.”

“But that said, I need you to keep an open mind here. I have the receipts, but they’re going to conflict with some things you may be fairly well invested in.”

“Okay. Then show me. I think I have an open mind.”

I began with what I’d learned about Jezebel Huntington and the parallels with what we read in Hernández’s journal. Jezebel and Hernández were clearly both searching for the golden tablet. Then I showed her the rambling passage about Jezebel’s strange dream, and the part where Hernández recorded the dream he’d had.

“The symbols they use are identical,” I said, “but the things that look like words are not. Even so, you can see the same characters in both of them.” I pointed out multiple examples.

She nodded. “I can. Yeah.”

“And you may have read that project from a few years ago that tried to find a match with some known written language.”

“Yes. I did.”

“So, tell me what are the odds that their project would produce no matches at all, but this journal of his would match up with hers, repeatedly.”

Colleen nodded again. “Astronomical. Unless, maybe, she had access to this thing.”

I hadn’t thought of that, but then I knew where it came from.

“Nothing I know about its origin suggests that would be remotely possible.”

“You still can’t tell me?”

I sighed. “Maybe. Not yet.”

She raised an eyebrow. “That’s a receipt I need, Jimmy.”

I thought about it for a moment or two. I needed to bring her into the coven, so this was something I needed her to understand.

“All right. It belonged to an ancestor of MJ’s. It’s been in storage for a very long time. Long enough that Jezebel Huntington could not possibly have seen it or even known about it.”

“You’re certain of that?”

I closed my eyes. I had to trust her.

“We found it when we visited Mission San Sebastian. It was hidden in the Voodoo Room. Behind a panel no one has opened in two-hundred-plus years. A panel no one else besides MJ could have opened.”

Her jaw dropped. “You took it?”

“I know. I know. Just let me finish, and you may understand. Rightfully, it belongs to MJ. I’ve been developing this program that I was able to adapt to deciphering the inscriptions in the fountain, and I plugged in the passage Hernández wrote down after his dream. Using both of them together, I was able to translate them.”

Colleen was still staring at me in shock. So I pulled up the database from the fountain project, and opened my model. I ran it from the original source and showed her the results.

“I’m convinced that Jezebel Huntington was using the fountain as some kind of spell to find the tablet.” Then I explained about Tamiel and the Book of Enoch. The look in Colleen’s eyes told me I was starting to lose her. So I ran the model on the passage from Hernández’s journal. She stared at it for several long moments.

“Show me how this thing works,” she said finally.

“Do you know anything about coding?”

“No. So explain it to me.”

I tried. It took about fifteen minutes of walking her through the entire process. Finally, she leaned back and sighed.

“Even if I accept that Huntington, library, archives, fountain, and tablet mean something, what about the rest of it?”

“MJ is a nickname. Her given name is Martina-Julieta.”

“And rapier? Coven?”

I explained about the rapier. The story took long enough that she didn’t ask me about coven.

“How do I search for things in the code?”

I showed her. I watched as she ran searches for all the terms that came up, starting with MJ. As I knew, her searches produced nothing that suggested the model was predisposed to return results with MJ’s name or anything else.

After a few more minutes, Colleen stood up and walked over to the sliding glass door in front of her balcony. She tossed back her wine and stared out at the evening sky.

“This is absolutely, completely, nuts,” she said finally.

“I know. But I don’t know how else to read it.”

“You still want to publish this?”

I smiled. “The article was your idea.”

Colleen looked at me. “Then what is it you’re doing here?”

“I want to find the tablet.”

“You really think it’s on campus somewhere?”

“I don’t know. But everything we’ve found suggests to me that there’s something here.”

She sighed and closed her eyes. “I want to tell you that you’re crazy and none of this can possibly be real. But my gut tells me you’re right. And every time in my life that I’ve ignored my gut instincts, I’ve paid for it. It was the only thing that got me through my childhood.”

I took a step toward her. “And what is your gut telling you now?”

She turned toward me. Her eyes met mine, then fell. She closed the remaining distance between us and rested her head against my shoulder. She was taller than any of the girls, a bit taller than Katarina and maybe an inch or two shorter than I was.

“It’s telling me . . . that this is so damned unfair.” She let out a quiet sob. “I finally meet someone I feel a real connection with . . . and you’re taken.”

I put my arms around her. I didn’t know what else to do. She melted in against my chest.

I held her for a few moments. She smelled good. I loved the smell of her hair. I wanted to bury my face in it while I was inside of her, feeling her orgasming around me. I realized I was starting to get hard.

“This feels good,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Jimmy, do you know how they say women reach their sexual peak at thirty? It’s true. I have so much pent-up energy right now. You have no idea.”

“What if I told you there was a way we could be together?”

She pushed herself out of my arms, looking up at me as her eyes darkened. “Not with you cheating on MJ. I will not do that.”

I took a deep breath. “Can you come upstairs? There are some people I need you to meet.”

￼

When we walked into my condo, I saw that MJ and Morrigan had come over while I was down with Colleen. Hayley was studying Colleen with a strange look in her eyes. Charlotte sat in the middle of the living room table watching us. For her sake, Colleen was clearly surprised to find three other girls there in addition to MJ.

As she took in the scene before her, I introduced them. “You’ve met MJ. This is Hayley, Katarina, and Morrigan.”

Colleen finally looked at me. “I don’t understand.”

“If you were thinking it was just me, with Jimmy,” MJ said, “it’s not.”

Colleen’s jaw dropped. “It’s the four of you?”

“Yes,” Katarina said. “I understand this may be difficult for you to accept at first, but there is much to explain here.”

“I know all of you,” Colleen said. “How is that possible?”

“You do?” I asked.

Katarina and Morrigan seemed equally baffled. But then Hayley spoke up.

“You helped me with that project for my GE American History class last spring,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

“Yes. It was something on the Indian tribes around Santo Domingo, wasn’t it?”

Hayley nodded. “Yeah.”

“We’ve met?” Morrigan said.

“Um, no,” Colleen said. “But I’ve seen you on campus. Your hair.”

Morrigan gasped softly. “Oh. Yeah. Jimmy did it.”

Colleen looked at me again. “You did?”

“Let’s get to that later,” I said.

“We have not met,” Katarina said. “I would remember it.”

“Oh,” Colleen said. “No, we haven’t. But I’ve seen you too. I mean, you’re so pretty, you kind of stand out.”

Katarina nodded. “This is very intriguing, Jimmy.”

“You asked about coven,” I said. “They’re it.”

Colleen looked back and forth between me and the girls. “What does that mean? You’re a group of witches?”

“The other morning in the gym,” I said, “you told me I talked about the stuff in my grandmother’s books as if I believed in it. Do you remember what I told you?”

She stared at me. “You told me you believe in what you can prove and what works.”

“Yes. And this stuff actually works. This search through the mission records, Jezebel Huntington, the fountain, they’re all related to something we’re trying to find. And you’re tied up with it somehow, whether you want to be or not.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And you really expect me to believe all this? That you’re some warlock, or whatever?”

“‘Sorcerer’ is the more common term. But I can show you. I’m not asking you to take this on faith. I didn’t when I first got into it. Neither did any of them.”

Colleen looked around the room and them back to me. She gathered herself up for a moment, staring at me hard. “Okay. If this is for real, then show me. Cast a spell, or whatever it is you do.” She waved her hand in the air.

I went to get my staff. When I returned to the living room, I squared myself in front of the rest of them and called out Enya, my fire spirit. I sent a flame dancing around the room through the air. Colleen’s jaw dropped, eyes going as big as dinner plates. When Enya came toward her, she slowly reached out her hand to feel the flame.

“Careful,” I said. “It’s hot.”

She pulled her hand back as she felt the heat. I called out Sinann, my water spirit, in the form of a ball of water that shimmered and jiggled as it moved around the room. Colleen touched it, and her hand came back wet.

“How?” she gasped.

“It’s magic,” Morrigan said. “Like my hair.”

I called out Sídhe the air spirit to join the other two. She was invisible, just a gust of air swirling around the room, but Colleen felt it, jumping in surprise. I brought the three of them together, producing a blast of steam that filled the room, then slowly dissipated.

“This has to be some parlor trick,” Colleen said.

Morrigan stepped up to her. “Look at my hair. You probably think it’s a wig or some really expensive dye job, don’t you? It’s not.” She reached behind her head and lifted up her hair to show Colleen. “Look at it. Look at my scalp, at the roots. It’s all natural.”

Colleen looked, but shook her head. “That’s impossible. No one has natural purple hair.”

“I do. Look at my eyebrows.” Then Morrigan took a handful of her hair and held it out toward Colleen. “Feel it. Look at it. Does it look like dye?”

Colleen took Morrigan’s hair in her hand and examined it for a few moments. Her breath was whistling rapidly through her nostrils.

“You know what you’re seeing,” I said, “your mind just won’t accept it.”

“It took me some time too,” MJ said.

Charlotte meowed loudly. Colleen stared down at her for several moments, then looked back to me.

“Is your cat part of this too?”

Charlotte meowed again, then walked over and pawed at Colleen’s leg. Colleen jumped back, startled.

“Charlotte is my familiar,” I said. “She was a witch in Medieval Germany.”

Colleen seemed to struggle with herself for a second or two, then straightened her back and looked at me.

“All right. Let’s say I believe you, and I’m not saying I do, but let’s say it for now. That doesn’t explain what’s going on with the four of them.”

“When you met Jimmy for the first time,” Katarina said, “you felt an immediate connection and attraction to him, didn’t you? It was the same for all of us. Powerful sorcerers draw others to them, very often others who have talents that are useful to the coven.”

“So you are witches?” Colleen asked.

“Morrigan and I are,” Hayley said. “MJ is good at kicking people’s butts, and maybe some other stuff.”

MJ laughed.

“And what about you?” Colleen asked Katarina. But my succubus just looked at me.

“Katarina will take some more explanation.” I said. “She’s not quite what she appears to be.”

“And you all . . . share Jimmy?” she asked.

“It’s not like how you’re making it sound,” Morrigan said. “It’s not like we’re waiting in line behind each other. We all just . . . do stuff.”

Colleen sighed. “You mean . . . group-wise?”

“Yeah.”

Colleen looked at me in disbelief.

“I know what you’re thinking,” MJ said, “one guy, four girls, how could that possibly work? But believe me, there’s more than enough of him to go around.”

“Oh, yeah,” Morrigan said. “That’s definitely not an issue. He’s not like other guys. It’s awesome.”

“I know it’s hard to believe,” Hayley said. “It was really hard for me to accept at first. But it’s the truth. We’re a coven. We support Jimmy and each other.”

“Yes,” Katarina said.

“And you want me to join you?” Colleen asked.

“It’s more that we keep running into signs that you’re meant to join us,” I said. “The kind of signs that have been right multiple times in the past.”

“Tell me the truth,” MJ said. “Does this feel wrong? Or does it feel right, and you keep fighting it because you can’t believe any of this could be happening to you? That’s exactly how it went for me, and I get the sense the same thing is going on with you right now.”

Colleen closed her eyes and groaned loudly. She took a couple of deep breaths and then looked over at me.

“Can we discuss this alone? Downstairs?”

I looked at the others. They all nodded. “Okay, sure.”

I followed Colleen into the hallway and over to the elevator, then back down to her condo. When the door shut behind us, she walked into the center of her living room and pressed her fists against her forehead.

“I know this is going to take some time to process. I’m not expecting—”

Colleen spun around on me, eyes wide, and let out a frustrated noise. “Can we please just fuck? I’m sorry, but nothing else is going to clear my head right now, and I cannot process a single thing about this otherwise.”

It took a moment to regain my bearings, but only that.

“Okay.”

Then she was in my arms, and we were kissing, backing up toward her bedroom, pulling each other’s clothes off.

I’d gotten pretty good at keeping a leash on my powers of improvement, so I wasn’t constantly bombarded with ideas for upgrading the people around me. So until that moment, I hadn’t let myself read Colleen. And when I did, I understood some things about her a lot better.

Colleen was really bad at sex. Not in the sense of knowing what to do with a partner – she was okay there, actually – but in the sense of understanding her own needs and reactions. It seemed like a foster-kid thing. I could see the emotional barriers in her head, barriers that had never allowed her to get close enough to someone else to develop any real knowledge of her own needs.

So I fixed her, improving that part of her as far as I could. Whether she sensed the difference or not, I did. She kissed me even harder, moaning through her nose as I lifted her fleece top over her shoulders. She had nothing under it, and I took her breasts in my hands. She wasn’t that big, maybe somewhere between MJ and Hayley, but they were firm and nicely upturned.

She broke the kiss long enough to wriggle out of her top and finish pulling me to her bed. She yanked my t-shirt off.

“If you’ve got four girls obsessed with your dick,” she gasped, “you must be pretty good with it.”

“I’m okay,” I said.

“If this is as good as they were suggesting, I may consider this.”

Colleen fell back onto her bed and wriggled out of her yoga pants. I unbuttoned my jeans and slid them to the floor. Then I crawled above her as she slid her arms around my neck.

“I haven’t done this in two years, Jimmy. And I wasn’t kidding about what I said.”

“I know.” I bent down to kiss her. For a few minutes, we just kissed and groped each other. When I reached between her thighs, I found her blonde pubic hair untrimmed and untamed.

“I’m sorry,” she moaned. “Two years and all.”

“It’s fine. It’s different. I like it.”

She was dripping wet before we’d even done anything. I slipped a finger insider her, and she gasped into my mouth. I broke the kiss and moved down her body, sucking on her nipples as I continued to finger her. She dug her nails into my back, moaning again.

“Yes. Yes. Do that.”

So I did. I went back and forth between her breasts, sucking on her until it had to hurt, but she didn’t stop me. I fucked her with two fingers as I did it, using my thumb to massage her clit. She was so wound up it took only a minute or two of this before she let out a sharp whimper and began shaking under me.

“Don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop.”

I didn’t. A moment later, I felt her spasming around my fingers. She went rigid, arms tight around my back. I kept it up until the paroxysm began to subside, then slid the rest of the way down between her thighs.

“Jimmy, you don’t—”

“Yes, I do. Just hold on.”

“Oh, shit.”

I dove in, lapping up the hot fluids I’d drawn forth. She tasted good, salty and sexy, and I just gave myself over to the experience. After everything that had happened the past few days, I’d been holding back my attraction to her, knowing it might well be pointless. I let it off the leash now. I wrapped my arms around her thighs and pulled her close as she dug her fingers into my hair.

After nearly six months with Katarina in my life, I’d learn a lot about pleasing women. I wasn’t at her level and probably never would be, but I was surely well beyond anything Colleen was used to. I spent a few minutes experimenting with various things to see what she liked, finally settling on sucking her clit while I massaged the tip of it with my tongue. She started to whimper and I felt her thighs twitching against my head. I kept it up, feeling her fingers digging into my scalp and listening to her labored breathing. Another minute of this had her thrashing around on the bed under me, hips pumping at my mouth. She cried out, pulling at my hair, and shivered into another orgasm.

But when I tried to continue, she pulled at me.

“Jimmy, just fuck me. Fuck me hard. I need your dick.”

I wasn’t going to argue with her. I climbed up and slid myself into her dripping pussy. When I bottomed out against her, she pulled me down and kissed me.

“This isn’t fair to you,” she gasped, “but I haven’t done this in so long. Can you please hold off as long as you can?”

I laughed. “Don’t worry. I can go as long as you need me to.”

She just moaned as I began thrusting into her. I focused on her at first. I could still feel the foster kid inside her, the girl who could never bring herself to connect with anyone. I wanted to connect with her. I wanted her to want to be with me, and the other girls. And what I’d done in improving her seemed like it might do it.

I fucked her slowly but firmly, grinding myself against her over and over as she bit at my neck and moaned in my ear. As she got more wound up, I increased the tempo, and she pulled her legs up around me. I began to see what she liked now, and I gave it to her hard, just as she asked. Her nails dug into my butt, and after another minute or so, I felt her thighs shaking against my hips. She let out long whimper against my neck as I felt her contracting around me.

As soon as her orgasm passed, I took her in my arms and rolled over, putting her on top. She settled back onto me, holding my hands tightly as I reached up to massage her breasts.

“Jimmy, your dick,” she moaned.

“What about it?”

Colleen rocked herself back and forth. “It feels so fucking good. It feels perfect inside me. It fits like it was made from me.”

To be honest, I kind of agreed with her. She felt really, really good around me.

“Have all you want, baby.”

I lay there and looked up at her, her tight body and hard tits, her face lost in pleasuring herself against me. She held her hands tightly against mine. I could sense that she was no longer so clumsy about her own needs. She was pretty good now at seeing them and going after them. Which she did.

She rode me hard for several minutes, her movements increasing in intensity until her entire body shook above me and I felt her shattering around me again. Then she let out a long gasp and fell onto my chest.

“Fuck.”

“That felt good,” I said.

“You felt it?”

“Oh yeah.”

I rolled her over again and began fucking her slowly. She looked up at me, face eager and vulnerable.

“You can come if you want to now.”

“Ask me for it.”

Her eyes swelled. “Oh, shit.”

“Do it.”

Her jaw vibrated for a moment. “Come in me, Jimmy.”

“Again.”

She pulled me down. “Fuck me. Come in me. I want to feel it too.”

I did. I pounded her for about a minute before I got myself to the edge. But Colleen was still so wound up that she went over before I did, sobbing in pleasure against my shoulder. It was exactly the fantasy I’d had earlier, face in her hair as she came around me. And I lost it inside her, sending spurt after spurt of seed deep into her body.

She held me tightly as we came together. For just a tiny moment, I felt something not unlike what I had with Katarina, a bond over and above our emotional connection. Which was impossible. Katarina was a succubus, and Colleen was human.

But then the moment passed. I knew she wasn’t ready to stop, and neither was I. Katarina was just upstairs, close enough for me to draw on our bond and keep myself hard. I knew she could tell what we were doing, but I knew as well that she was happy about it.

When I caught my breath, I sat back on my knees and rolled Colleen onto her stomach.

“Jimmy—”

“Push your butt back at me.” She did. I entered her again, sliding a hand under her and between her legs so I could massage her clit as I fucked her.

“You just came,” she said.

“Do you want to stop?”

“No, but—”

I bottomed out against her butt, making her moan.

“Like Morrigan said, I’m not like other guys.”

“Oh, fuck.”

I focused on her for about ten minutes, just fucking her from behind and rubbing her clit as I pounded my cock against her g-spot over and over. She came again, and again, hands digging into the sheets, wrapping the fabric around her fists. Then I came into her again, grinding myself against her deliciously firm ass.

I rolled over onto my back. As Colleen caught her breath, she sat up beside me. I could see the amazement in her eyes that I was still completely hard. But she didn’t say anything.

“I haven’t really done anything for you.”

“Go ahead if you want.”

She bent down and took me in her hand. “I’m out of practice at this.”

“It’s okay.”

She took me in her mouth. As she’d warned, she wasn’t very good at it, but I refrained from improving her. It wasn’t something I needed to do right now. I let her work on me for a few minutes before pulling her up and putting her on top again.

“This isn’t quite what I expected,” she said as I sank into her again.

“What did you expect?” I asked.

“To be the experienced older woman. Even if I’m not really that experienced.”

“It’s okay. This is good, really.”

I pulled her down and kissed her. She stayed on my chest, riding me slowly as we kissed and held each other. I sat up a little and sucked on her nipples as she ground herself down against my cock. After she came, I stayed where I was and held her hips, fucking up at her until I came as well.

Then I rolled her over onto her back and pulled her legs up to my waist. As I entered her again, she looked up at me as she realized I didn’t want to stop.

“Be honest with me, Jimmy,” she asked. “Did you take something before we came down here? To keep yourself so hard all this time?”

“When would I have done that?”

“So it’s magic?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“This is how you’re keeping four girls happy?”

“Pretty much.”

She took a slow breath. “I guess this explains why they look at you the way they do.”

I kissed her. “Yeah. You don’t want to stop?”

Colleen looked up at me, eyes wide. Her hands tightened around my waist.

“No. Fuck me, Jimmy. Do it like you mean it this time. Do it like my pussy ran over your dog.”

I laughed. “Okay. Then hold on.”

Chapter 22

Colleen was almost as fit as MJ, and she had a lot of pent-up energy, as she said. I kept drawing on my bond with Katarina to keep myself going. The result was that we went at it like a pair of rabbits for about two hours before she ran out of gas.

When we finally rolled apart after the fifth or sixth time, Colleen lay there staring dizzily up at the ceiling, breathing hard. It was a minute or two before she could say anything.

“Oh, fuck,” she gasped. “I needed that.”

“I got that impression.”

“Jimmy, that was seriously the best sex I’ve ever had in my life. I don’t know what you were doing to me, but I never have orgasms that easily. I don’t even know how many. I lost count an hour ago.”

I laughed softly. “You were counting?”

“If you knew the desert my sex life has been, you’d understand.”

“Two years?” I asked.

“Two years, three months, and . . . two weeks. It was January 6th, two years ago. And to be honest, it sucked. My last good sex was in grad school, but it was nothing like this.”

“That’s kind of a long time. And . . . don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re hot. You are. I don’t quite get it.”

“I’m really bad with men, Jimmy. I’m not kidding. I don’t have that much trouble attracting them, but most of them run screaming from my obsession with old books and my utter inability to read their social cues before we get anywhere. I don’t know how you’ve lasted this long.”

“I haven’t seen any of that, to be honest, besides the book thing, which I like.”

She rolled over, pulling the sheet up over her and staring at me. “I don’t seem to be bad with you. What MJ said is absolutely true. This all feels so right, and it scares me. I’ve never felt that with anyone before. I want to believe you, and it feels crazy.”

I reached over and played gently with her hair. She smiled at me.

“So can I ask you some questions about everything?” she asked. “Because I think I can process now.”

“Shoot.”

“How do things work with the five of you, day to day, I mean?”

“Hayley and Katarina live with me. Morrigan lives in the dorms but comes over a lot. MJ actually goes to UCSD, but she spends the night here a few times a week.”

“That sounds kind of crowded.”

“I have a really big bed. There’s enough room for everyone.”

“Including me?”

“Including you,” I said. “But I mean, you live right here downstairs. It would probably end up being like it is with Morrigan.”

“Okay. And what Morrigan said, it’s all group stuff?”

“Not all, but mostly.”

“And are any of them . . . I mean, it’s pretty obvious that they . . .”

“Are bi?”

“Yeah.”

“All of them are, actually. But no one would expect you to do anything you weren’t comfortable with. That’s not how it works.”

Her eyes got a little distant. “I’ve never done anything like that. I’m not saying no, exactly, but I wouldn’t even know what to do. I’m bad enough with men.”

“It’s okay.”

“Though if Katarina asked, I might be tempted. She’s so beautiful.”

I laughed softly. “She’s also very talented. So she wouldn’t exactly be a bad place to start.”

Her eyes came back to me. “You said there was something else about her. That she’s not what she appears to be.”

I took a deep breath.

“Do you remember the section of that book I showed you, the lists of all those demons? About summoning and controlling them?”

“Yes.”

“It’s all true. I’ve summoned demons. You remember our discussing Astaroth? I’ve met him.”

Her eyes went wide. “What?”

“They can take normal human form when they want to. But it’s not hard to tell what they are if you understand things. That’s why I know all that stuff we found has to be true. I know Astaroth exists and what he does. Him being mixed up in this makes perfect sense.”

“Okay. But what does that have to do with Katarina?”

“She’s a succubus. One of the first things I did as a sorcerer was bind her to me.”

Colleen couldn’t answer me for several seconds.

“She’s a demon?”

“Yes. Don’t tell me you didn’t sense something odd about her.”

“I did. But I thought she was Swedish.”

“She is, or was. She was mortal once, and became a succubus after she died. There are things she can do that will make it clear she’s not human anymore.”

“And Hayley and Morrigan are witches? They can do this magic like you can?”

“Pretty much. I’m a lot more powerful than they are, but they support me with a lot of stuff.”

“And MJ?”

“She has a black belt in taekwondo and is really good with weapons. You saw what she looks like.”

“Yeah. I feel fat looking at her.”

I laughed. “She has some other connection to all this that we haven’t figured out yet, but that’s been her main thing so far.”

Colleen stretched out beside me, groaning softly. “There’s so much more I want to ask, but I’m starving. That really worked up my appetite.”

“Why don’t we go back upstairs? Katarina should have made dinner by now.”

Colleen’s blonde eyebrows went up. “She cooks for you too?”

I laughed again. “Yeah, you’ll see.”

￼

When we dressed and went back up to my condo, the girls were still there but had already eaten. Katarina had kept dinner warm for me. When I walked in with Colleen, it was obvious in all their eyes that they knew what had happened. Katarina had clearly sensed it and told the others.

“Well?” Hayley asked.

Morrigan laughed. “Do you get what I said before?”

Colleen laughed nervously and put her hand on her forehead in embarrassment, then ran her fingers through her hair.

“Um. Yes. I get it now.”

“And?” MJ asked.

“What do I have to contribute to this? I can’t do magic or anything like you guys can. I’m still not sure I even believe any of it.”

“I can’t do magic either,” MJ said.

“You’ve been a huge help so far,” I said to Colleen. “And I’m not sure we’ve reached the point yet where we can know where you fit in. We didn’t know right away with MJ or Morrigan. Also, I haven’t told you everything. There’s still a lot more to go over, assuming I haven’t scared you off.”

Colleen smiled. “I’m still here.”

“Okay. Then let’s eat.”

When I got my dinner and Colleen made herself a plate, she asked if she could talk to the girls on her own. This didn’t surprise me too much, so I took my dinner and Charlotte and went out to the balcony to eat.

I was out there for about an hour. I didn’t try to eavesdrop, but I could still sense the flow of things through Katarina. After about ten minutes of awkward conversation, it settled down into something friendlier, and more and more bursts of laughter came through the glass. They spent about ten minutes examining and talking about Morrigan’s hair. Finally I noticed them getting up. Hayley came over to the balcony and opened the sliding glass door.

“You can come back inside.”

“It’s all good?”

“It’s all good. It’s obvious she’s meant to be part of things.” When I stood up, she closed with me and pecked me on the lips. “I deserve the Girlfriend of the Year award for putting up with all this crazy shit in your life.”

“I’ll have a plaque made up.”

She kissed me again. “You’d better.”

When I followed her back into the condo, the others were waiting for me.

“We told her about the dream world,” Hayley said. “We think you should show her everything. And we think you should do it from here.”

“I’m kind of intrigued, actually,” Colleen said. “Also, that bed you have is nuts.”

I laughed. “Yeah, it’s nice.”

“Just let me get some overnight stuff. I’ll be right back.”

When Colleen went downstairs, Katarina smiled at me. “It really took two hours to convince her?” she asked.

“She hadn’t had sex for two years. And she has some emotional issues that made things difficult.”

“She told us all that, actually,” MJ said.

I took MJ, Morrigan, and Hayley in my arms. “You’re okay with all this?”

They hugged me back.

“Yes, Jimmy,” Hayley said. “Because I’ve been with you long enough that I can feel what’s going on here. It feels right, just like it did with MJ and Morrigan. Also, I like her. She’s interesting, and really smart.”

“And she is kind of hot,” Morrigan said.

“Yeah. She is,” Hayley said.

“I sense that she is curious about the things that go on in our coven,” Katarina said. “And me in particular.”

Hayley laughed against my chest. “I got that sense too.”

Colleen returned a few minutes later with a little overnight bag.

“What exactly is going to happen here?” she asked me. “They told me about the dreams, but I’m not sure I understand.”

Katarina took her hand. “I think it is better to show than to tell. Why don’t you come to bed, Colleen?”

Colleen took a deep breath.

“Okay.”

The six of us went into the bedroom. When the other girls began changing into their pajamas – MJ and Morrigan by now had dedicated drawers in my dresser for their stuff when they stayed over – Colleen followed suit, showing only a little uneasiness at being briefly naked in front of them. After brushing my teeth and changing, I lay down in the center of the bed.

Hayley lay down first on one side of me. Morrigan motioned for Colleen to take the other side. Then she and MJ lay down behind Hayley.

“This bed is so big I feel a little lost,” Colleen said.

Hayley laughed softly. “I’ve gotten used to it. I love it.”

Katarina had just shifted into one of her slinky little nightgowns, and Colleen didn’t seem to notice the instant transition. When she came to bed, lying behind Colleen, I saw Colleen glance at her quickly, eyes flicking over the black silk that left very little to the imagination.

Katarina saw it too. She lay down behind Colleen and slowly ran the tip of her middle finger up Colleen’s arm.

“I can sense what you are thinking, Colleen. You simply have to ask, when you are ready. But I will take my time with you.”

I heard Colleen gasp softly, and her face reddened.

Katarina gently kissed her shoulder. “Good night, everyone.” She laid her head on her pillow, smiling at me.

I turned out the light. “Go to sleep, baby,” I said. Katarina’s eyes closed, and Colleen again didn’t quite seem to notice what had just happened.

I pulled Colleen and Hayley to me. Hayley rested her hand on my chest, and after a moment, Colleen put her hand next to Hayley’s. Hayley pushed her fingers through Colleen’s. Colleen sighed against my neck. Morrigan and MJ cuddled up against Hayley, and I briefly stroked both of their heads. MJ kissed my fingers, then settled in with us.

I felt Charlotte hopping into bed and curling up between my feet. I held them all until we fell asleep.

￼

I went to the castle. I found Charlotte waiting for me in the main hall in another one of her long, witchy black dresses. We embraced, and I held her for a few moments, enjoying the pressure of her big breasts against me.

“Busy week,” I said.

She rose up and kissed me. “I like her, Master.”

“Me too.”

I reached out for Colleen. She was right there without even having to search for her, and I slowly drew her in. But something very strange happened.

She stopped just outside.

It wasn’t like with Katarina the first time, when pulling her in was like trying to yank a tree from the ground. I had a firm grip on Colleen, and I felt her coming toward me. But when she reached the boundaries of my dream world, she seemed to hit some kind of barrier. I couldn’t bring her in no matter how hard I tried.

I paused for a moment and drew in Katarina. She appeared beside us, hugging Charlotte quickly.

“Master?” she asked.

I explained the problem.

“That is very strange,” she replied.

“It is,” Charlotte said. “Such a thing has not happened before, has it?”

“No,” I said. “Other than with Katarina at first, and this feels different.”

After a few more fruitless attempts, I pulled in Echidna. After I explained what was going on, she pursed her lips.

“This world is more than your dreams, Master. It is part of the spirit world now.”

“I know.”

“So I think there must be something keeping her out of the spirit world.”

“Is that . . . have you heard of anything like that before?”

“No. But I do not pretend to be an expert in the things you can do, Master.”

“Perhaps the spirits do not want her here,” Charlotte said.

“Jimmy should be in control of this,” Katarina said.

“Should be,” I replied.

But nothing I tried worked. Finally, I let them all go and went back to sleep.

Chapter 23

I woke before the girls did, as was usually the case. As I was making coffee, Colleen appeared, pulling the tangles out of her hair. She’d slept in a little cami top and loose cotton pants. Nothing terribly sexy, but she still looked delicious.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Hey,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“Pretty sore, actually.” She smiled at me.

I laughed. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s the good kind of sore. And half of it was me.” She came over and pecked me on the cheek. “But did I sleep through something? I did have a dream, but you weren’t really in it.”

“Uh, no. Something was wrong. We can figure it out. What was the dream?”

“I was looking for something. I can’t remember the details. But most of my dreams are like that.”

I poured her some coffee, and she nuzzled against my chest.

“No regrets yet?” I asked.

“No. I’ve known you less than two weeks, but this feels really good. I want to be part of your life.”

I put my arms around her. “It was like that when I met Hayley. Everything just fell together really fast.”

“I like her. And the others.”

“Katarina.” I didn’t mean to push her, but I couldn’t resist. She laughed against my chest.

“Please let me find my own way there.”

I laughed with her. “I will.”

“So can I tell people I have a boyfriend now? I don’t have to tell them he’s a wizard or whatever. But everyone else I work with is married or in some long-term relationship. You have no idea how hard they’ve been trying to set me up. Karen already asked about me about you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You should. We’ve been through this, with Morrigan, and MJ before her. It’s okay. Everyone knows how to be discreet.”

“I know I joke about being bad with men, but it’s been kind of a lonely existence. I love my work, but not having anyone to share it with has been hard.” She sighed. “I have to warn you I have a track record as a terrible girlfriend, Jimmy. I’m not being hard on myself. That’s what my last boyfriend said when he broke up with me.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Exactly that. ‘I still like you, but you’re a terrible girlfriend and I can’t take it anymore.’”

I winced. “Ouch.”

“He was right, though. I was awful. We would make plans to get together, and I would completely forget because I was studying. I forgot his birthday. I was constantly misreading him and thinking he wanted one thing out of me when he wanted something completely different. It was like I was cursed or something.”

“We seem to be doing okay so far.”

She hugged me, then gave me another kiss. “I hope so.”

When the rest of them woke up, we sat together in the living room. Katarina and I explained about the dream.

“I don’t understand,” Colleen said.

“Jimmy can pull all of us into his dreams like we told you,” Hayley said. “It’s always worked before.”

“Except with me,” Katarina said, “until we figured out how I could sleep.”

“I was asleep,” Colleen said.

“I know,” I said. “Something was stopping you from coming in. I could feel you and pull you toward me, but you stopped just short.”

Some concern leaked into her eyes. “Could that mean . . . I’m actually not meant to be part of this?”

“No,” I said instantly. “You feel just like the others do. It has to be something else. I just don’t know yet.”

Hayley reached over and squeezed her hand. Colleen managed a weak smile.

“Okay,” she said. “So now what?”

“If we’ve understood all this correctly,” I said, “you’re the key, I think to unlocking the enchantment on the fountain. I don’t know how we do that exactly, but the signs point to it.”

She swallowed roughly. “I’m the key?”

“It’s what the spirits told me. ‘The fountain, she is the key.’”

Colleen took a deep breath.

“Okay. My shift doesn’t start until noon today. Why don’t we go over there and see?”

￼

Once we were all dressed, we walked back over to campus. I brought my staff and a few other spell-related things in my backpack. Morrigan had brought her spell bag with her the previous night.

Out of her work clothes, Colleen seemed to have a preference for athleisure like MJ did, having donned a bra top and tights with a cropped long-sleeve t-shirt over it. I really liked the way she looked.

When we crossed McKinley, I looked around for Jezebel Huntington but didn’t see her. We got to the fountain in about five minutes. As it was a weekday morning during spring break, the campus was pretty much deserted, with only a few random staffers walking around. The quad around the fountain was empty.

We spread around the fountain in a semicircle. I looked at the magnetite ward that was concealing something else under it.

“You said the first time that you weren’t sure about taking this down,” Morrigan said. “Since we didn’t know what it was protecting.”

“I think we know enough now.”

“What are you going to do?” Hayley asked.

I’d been thinking about this off and on ever since we discovered the enchantment. I didn’t want to create an acid cloud like I’d done before. In addition to not wanting to do something like that on campus, it also stood a big risk of breaking whatever enchantments were under the outer one. I didn’t want to do that until I knew what was there. That meant breaking the magnetite ward in a way that wouldn’t affect anything else.

As near as I could tell, the ward seemed to depend on the magnetic susceptibility of the magnetite. Magnetite was ferrimagnetic, meaning that while the magnetic orientations of its atoms were somewhat opposed, the opposition was unequal enough that a piece of magnetite could be attracted by a magnet. By contrast, other iron oxides like hematite were antiferromagnetic, meaning the atoms were mostly in balance so that there was no meaningful magnetism.

So it occurred to me that changing the magnetite to hematite ought to be enough to break the ward without affecting anything else. And that was so simple it was almost laughable. Magnetite oxidized into hematite through the application of sufficient heat. And I had an easy source of heat right at hand: Enya.

“You guys should step back a ways,” I said.

The rest of them backed up behind me. I raised the staff and called Enya forth. Rather than fire, though, I just needed heat. So I didn’t form her into a flame. Rather, I formed her into a hemisphere of energy over the fountain and began raising the temperature.

The air began to shimmer, and I felt her radiant energy on my face. The wet surfaces of the fountain began to sizzle and steam. It was a good thing no one else was out here, because this would have been hard to explain. I tried to keep the heat confined to the outer layer, but the infrared radiation of it was still palpable fifteen feet away.

“Jimmy?” Colleen asked, an edge of concern in her voice.

“This shouldn’t take too long.”

At least, I hoped it didn’t. The magnetite was in the form of a fine powder, which would speed up the reaction, especially since it was swirling through the air. But I had to get the temperature above 700°C.

It worked. Watching with my ring, I began to see the particles of magnetite converting to hematite and falling free from the web of magic energy. And as they did, the individual strands began to unravel, spinning wildly around the fountain, which was now wreathed in a cloud of vapor as more and more of the water coursing through it began to boil.

“Jimmy, you need to wrap this up,” Hayley said. “Someone is going to see.”

“Almost there.”

Maybe a minute after I began the spell, the outer ward finally collapsed. I released Enya, who returned to the staff. The cloud of vapor over the fountain rose into the air. A few people across the quad looked up curiously, but no one approached us.

“Did it work?” Morrigan asked. “It looks different now.”

I exhaled slowly. As the vapor cleared, I got a better look at the enchantment underneath.

“Yeah. It worked.”

With the concealing ward gone, I saw what Jezebel Huntington had done at the behest of the spirits. The fountain now appeared to be cast from pure gold, though I could tell with my ring that was merely the enchantment. A golden ghost of the entire fountain lay over it, shifting and moving. The ghostly cherubs slowly beckoned toward the library, their arms moving as if casting a spell.

It was a spell I recognized. A treasure-finding spell like the ones in Liber Officiorum Spirituum and Clavicula Salomonis. It was a beacon intended to draw something to it, and I was pretty sure I knew exactly what that thing was.

“It’s beautiful,” Morrigan said.

“What do you see?” Hayley asked.

But before Morrigan could answer, Colleen spoke up. “It’s gold.”

The rest of us looked at her. Her eyes were wide in amazement.

“You can see it?” MJ asked. “Like Jimmy and Morrigan?”

“Yes.”

She took a step toward it, then another. I was so surprised that I didn’t make a move to stop her. Then I wasn’t sure if I needed to stop her. Wasn’t she the key? The upshot was that she was three steps past me before I finally managed to move.

Colleen extended a hand toward the fountain. Feeling a sudden sense of dread, I lurched forward, but was too late. Just as I grabbed her shoulder, Colleen’s hand reached one of the cherubs.

I was hit with a wave of vertigo. An enormous tide of magical energy washed over us. Colleen fell backward into my arms, seemingly unconscious. The golden ghost around the fountain vanished, leaving nothing behind but mundane stone. I caught Colleen and stumbled backward onto the grass, sitting down heavily with her in my lap.

Around me, Morrigan and Hayley fell backward as well, clearly feeling that wave of energy. Katarina seemed less affected, but still staggered a moment. Only MJ seemed to have missed the whole thing. She spun around in confusion before dropping to a knee beside me.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so. She broke the enchantment, whatever it was.”

“So she was the key.”

“Looks like it. Not that I have a clue what the hell just happened.”

Hayley and Morrigan recovered after a moment or two and joined us. I shook Colleen a couple of times, but she remained unconscious. I laid her down on the grass, checking her over. She was breathing and had a normal heartbeat, but she was unresponsive.

“What was that?” Hayley asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Only then did I notice something strange around us. We were still in the quad, but the campus outside it shimmered and shifted, as if there was some wall of interference in the air. A few people walked past, but they seemed not to notice anything unusual.

Hayley leaned down to look at Colleen’s face. “Maybe she—”

A high-pitched screech split the air around us.

“MINE! IT’S MINE! IT’S MINE AT LAST!”

I looked up, seeing Jezebel Huntington standing across the quad, arms raised in triumph as she regarded the fountain. She was inside the shimmering wall in the air and clearly saw what had happened.

All of us leapt to our feet. Jezebel looked over at us.

“No!” she shrieked. “The tablet is mine! It belongs to me! After so long, I have it!”

Except, I didn’t see a tablet anywhere. Jezebel lurched toward us.

“There’s nothing here, Jezebel,” I said. “There’s no tablet. What are you talking about?”

She pointed at Colleen. “It’s her! She is the key and the tablet and I am Tamiel and it’s mine!”

She raised her arms and began casting a spell toward us. I barely had time to get my staff up and deflect the bolt of energy she fired at me. I called out Sídhe and Ceridwen to form a ball of lightning in front me, and Jezebel’s bolt impacted it with a loud crack.

“Guys, I need you!” I yelled.

Hayley and Morrigan took up positions behind me, focusing on me the same way they’d done when I was battling Zagan. I felt their strength flowing into me.

It was none too soon. Jezebel threw another bolt at me, and I deflected it again as the implications roared through my head. She was Tamiel? It made no sense at first . . . but then it sort of did. She’d been searching for the tablet for a long time. And obviously for a good reason. She wanted her powers back.

How those powers took the form of Colleen, I wasn’t exactly sure, but I had no time to make sense of this.

Jezebel/Tamiel fired at me again. The appearance of the energy bolts was the same as what I’d seen in the vision.

Which . . . also made little sense. I’d seen the intact Tamiel battling Lucifer or someone else. But she was no longer intact. Her smiting powers were separated. So how was she doing this?

“We’re not trying to take the tablet!” I yelled. “That isn’t what this is about!”

“You’re the one!” she shrieked. “The one the spirits spoke to me about for so long. You’ve come to take it! You’ve already claimed it!”

I deflected her attack yet again. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep this up. I didn’t want to kill her, but I had to stop this so I could figure out what the hell was going on here.

This time, I sent Sinann out as a huge ball of water. Jezebel/Tamiel’s bolt struck it, creating a blast of steam. Momentarily obscured by it, I sent Ceridwen forward through the ground and had her erupt from the earth right under Jezebel/Tamiel. I heard a screech of outrage as the dirt and grass fountained into the air above the steam cloud.

I moved around the cloud, seeing Jezebel/Tamiel lying on the ground in an open pit, momentarily stunned. I had Ceridwen wrap herself around her, pulling her into the ground up to her neck. Jezebel/Tamiel screamed again.

“No! No! Not again! It’s mine! Give it to me!”

She struggled furiously against her confinement, but she was buried firmly in the ground now, unable to move.

“We’re not here to fight with you!” I yelled. “Just stop this for a second!”

“No! I want it! I want it! The spirits said so!”

“You’re Tamiel?” Hayley said.

“Yes! Yes! I’m Tamiel!”

The tone of her voice was anguished and desperate. The five of us looked at each other.

“How did you lose your powers?” Morrigan asked. “You seem to still have them.”

Jezebel/Tamiel thrashed around again. “I have my powers! I am powerful! The spirits say so!”

“And . . . why do you want the tablet?” Hayley asked.

“Because it’s mine! I want it!”

MJ took a step forward. “But why? What do you think it is?”

“It’s powerful! The spirits say so!”

I took a deep breath and looked at my coven again.

“Jimmy . . .” Hayley said. “I don’t think she’s actually Tamiel.”

Before I could answer, there was a voice behind us.

“She’s not, Hayley,” Colleen said. “I am. I remember everything now.”

Chapter 24

She looked the same.

Colleen still looked like a hot, thirty-something librarian in fitness clothes. The same woman I’d fucked into oblivion the previous night.

And yet.

There was something just ever so slightly different about her now. She looked at me.

“You did something to me, Jimmy. What was it?”

I couldn’t answer her right away.

“I improved you,” I said finally.

Her eyebrow went up.

“I, uh . . .” I tried to explain the power I’d gained from Zagan. “When you told me how bad you were with men, I could see why. You were really bad at knowing what you wanted and needed, for yourself. I could see how that prevented you from connecting with people. I fixed it.”

She gave me a weak smile. “That was why the sex was so good?”

“Yeah.”

“You broke a curse that persisted for six thousand years. Do you know who laid that curse on me?”

I did. “I probably shouldn’t say his name, should I?”

“No,” Colleen and Katarina both said at once, blue eyes flaring at me.

“Does this change things?” I asked.

Colleen – I couldn’t think of her as Tamiel – stepped toward me. She took my hand, then leaned her head against my chin.

“Yes . . . and no. I’ve lived a thousand years of mortal lives, unaware of what I was, always forgetting the life I lived before the one I had. Always alone. I don’t want to be alone anymore, Jimmy.”

“You were bound for five thousand years?” Hayley asked. “Then you, what, escaped?”

“I didn’t escape. The binding he laid on me could only last for that long,” Colleen replied. “But the curse persisted. I emerged from the earth and immediately forgot what had happened.”

“In Scotland?” I asked.

“Yes. How did you know?”

I told her about the vision. “There’s more going on here. Something wants us all involved.”

“Jezebel’s spell drew me here,” she said. “I see that now. I think it’s why I was so attracted to Huntington, to studying and working here.”

“But what about the tablet?” Morrigan asked.

“It’s close. I can feel it. I’m not exactly sure where, but it’s here on campus. Jezebel was right in that respect.” She took a deep breath. “But I don’t want it.”

“Why not?” MJ asked.

“Do you understand what it is, MJ? What I had?”

“The smiting,” Hayley said.

“Yes. It was the power to destroy any spirit, any demon. It wasn’t quite as simple as that, because some of them are stronger than others, but if I had the opportunity to do it, I could.”

“Then why couldn’t you destroy him?” I asked. “I saw the battle. I saw the two of you.”

“You can shoot someone with a gun and hit them between the eyes,” she said. “You can also just wound them, or miss altogether. He’s the strongest of them all, and he was strong enough to avoid me. I was very powerful. But I wasn’t all-powerful.”

“You seemed stronger than him.”

She shrugged. “He got lucky, I guess.”

“And he split you into two things?” Morrigan asked.

“Just as his counterpart, whose name I cannot speak because of how I was cast out, has the power of making, he has the power of unmaking, of splitting things into their component parts.”

“So where is the tablet?” Hayley asked. Then she looked up. “And what . . . what is going on out there?”

We looked up as well. The shimmering wall around the quad was still there.

Then Jezebel, who had been silent since Colleen’s revelation, finally spoke up.

“We’re in the spirit world now,” she said gleefully. “That was the spell the spirits gave me. It worked! When it was triggered, all would be cast over from the material world. We’re there now. They’re coming. Oh, joy, they’re coming at last!”

I paused a moment, trying to feel if she was right. She was.

“We’re really there?” MJ asked. “Like the dreams?”

“Yes,” Katarina said.

“That spell had to be what was keeping me out of your dream, Jimmy,” Colleen said.

“‘The searching has to stop,’” Hayley said. “That’s what they meant. It worked in bringing her here, but they needed us to trigger the next step.”

I walked over to the wall. I could see the other side plain as day. But I could not get through. My hand stopped right at the barrier.

“All right, then.”

Was this bad, necessarily? My powers here were far greater. Could I move us somewhere else?

So I tried.

A moment later, all of us, Jezebel included, stood in the main hall of the castle. Charlotte and Echidna were there at the top of the stairs. I immediately bound Jezebel in chains to keep her in one place. I knew instinctively that she had no powers here unless I allowed it.

“Master?” Charlotte said.

“Yeah, something has gone really wrong. We’re here, but this isn’t a dream.”

“I’ll be completely fucking honest with you,” MJ said, “this feels about the same as the last dream.”

“It does,” Morrigan said.

Colleen was slowly looking around the castle.

“This is where you were going to take me?” she asked.

“Yeah. This is my dream temple. And I’m really wondering now, if it was so important to keep you out of the spirit world, why did that trigger send us straight here after you touched it? I’m starting to think it wasn’t that spell keeping you out. I think the spirits do want you here. It was something else keeping you away from this. Why?”

“There’s something here that someone doesn’t want her to find,” Hayley said. “But it’s something the spirits do want.”

“It’s the tablet,” I said. “The tablet is here. It’s been hidden in the spirit world all this time.”

“In your castle?” MJ asked.

“No, not as such,” I said. “This castle isn’t a physical location so much as a metaphysical one. We’re all still there, physically, back on campus. The tablet fell from the sky into Santo Domingo, but somehow or another, maybe when Colleen was split in two, it was sent into the spirit world. That’s why Amalia and Hernández and the rest of them could never find it. They were looking in the physical world.”

“So what do we do?” Hayley asked.

I sighed. “Come with me.”

I led them into the computer room and sat down in front of the screen.

“Enough dicking around. Tell me what’s going on here. What the fuck do you want?”

TAKE UP THE POWER MUST JOIN AND MERGE IT AS IT WAS

“And do what with it?”

FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US FREE US

The answer scrolled the screen several times before I stopped it.

“Holy shit,” MJ said.

“Free you from what?” I asked.

BUREAUCRACIES

“But most of them do not serve either,” Echidna said. “I do not understand.”

Katarina spoke up. “Yet even so, their existence is dictated by them in many ways. They are not free with this dichotomy.”

“What do they mean by join and merge?” Hayley asked.

“I’m not rejoining with my powers,” Colleen said. “Not for all the spirits in the universe. And what they’re asking for wouldn’t even work. My power is useless against the celestials, after I was cast out. You couldn’t do anything against them.”

I sucked at my teeth for a moment. “So . . . it’s a sort of flaw.”

“Yes.”

A flaw.

A flaw I could improve.

And then I saw it.

The whole, awful, six-thousand-year scheme unfolded before me. My head buzzed for a few moments.

“Jimmy?” Hayley asked.

I exhaled slowly. “I don’t think you were ever meant to, Colleen. I don’t think this has ever really been about you.”

She looked at me. “What do you mean?”

“He split you in half. One half is your powers, the tablet. The other half is you, but you don’t want your powers back. They could see that. Whether they figured that out right away or while you were confined, who knows? But they knew. And they knew that even if you did rejoin, what would that give them? You couldn’t take on the celestials for them. So the spirits needed someone else. A different female to take up the powers. To merge with them into someone like what you were, but this time into something more sympathetic to their cause. And they needed a way to improve the power so it would work against both bureaucracies.”

Several words appeared unbidden on the screen.

MERGE HER AND FREE US AND WE WILL SERVE YOU FOREVER

One by one, I listened to the soft gasps around me. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up at Hayley. Her eyes were as big as I’d ever seen them.

“Oh, no,” she said softly. “Please, no.”

“That’s why they needed the two of you?” Morrigan asked.

I leaned back in the chair rubbing my forehead.

“Where is the tablet?” I asked.

YOU MUST SUMMON IT WE GAVE YOU THE WAY

My jaw dropped.

“What the fuck?” MJ asked.

I felt Colleen’s fingers digging into my shoulder. “What are they talking about, Jimmy?”

“I have no idea. They’ve given me nothing.”

Except . . . they had. A thing that was there at the beginning.

For a few moments, I could only sit there as my ears rang.

“Jimmy?” Hayley asked.

I called my staff to my hand. Could it really be this simple? A mere treasure-finding spell? There were several in my grimoires, with a variety of rituals, but one frequent component was something with a link to the missing item. That wasn’t Colleen, because summoning it using her would probably bind them again, but the staff would work. The other was an item of purity, a thing free of any connection to Heaven or Hell. The ritual suggested a hair from an unbaptized babe.

I looked toward Charlotte. “Go get Else.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Master?”

“It’s safe, but I need her.”

As the others stared at me, stunned, she ran to the nursery and returned a minute or two later with our spirit child in her arms.

“Come on,” I said.

I took everyone up to the great magic circle at the top of the castle. All around us in every direction, out on the horizon, the storm clouds raged, wanting in. I held them at bay for now.

“They’re here! They’re here!” Jezebel cackled, jumping up and down in her restraints. “They’re coming.”

I plucked a single black hair from Else’s head, then lifted the staff in the air – lifted the last thing that had touched Tamiel before she was split. A link that was enough to find her missing half.

I didn’t even need to say anything. The moment I concentrated on the tablet, I saw it. It was in the spirit world right under the fountain. It had been there all this time.

I pulled it to me. It appeared in the center of the circle, a plate of gold about a foot long and a few inches wide, engraved with symbols of power. The moment it appeared, a deafening wave of thunder rolled in from the horizon. The clouds raged and roiled, but I still refused to let them in.

Jezebel let out another cry of glee. “Mine! Mine!” MJ smacked her, and she was momentarily quiet.

I walked over and picked it up. It was heavy, but I saw no enchantment in it. Yet as I held it, I understood what it was. It wasn’t a thing that held magic. It was magic itself, incarnate. Tamiel’s power of smiting made into physical form when Lucifer split it from her. And I could see the flaw in it, the room for improvement.

I could fix it. Assuming I wanted to.

And it was waiting for a vessel. A female vessel with the right bloodline, a bloodline that reached back to its creation that day above the Scottish Highlands.

“Jimmy?” Hayley whimpered.

“We’re not doing anything yet, or maybe at all. It’s okay, baby.”

I looked at Colleen. She took a step backward.

“Jimmy, please,” she said. “I am what I am. I want to stay like this. I want to stay with you, but not that way. You don’t know what it will do it me.”

There was someone else I needed to talk to. The someone who had started this whole thing. Had we been out in the physical world, I could have summoned her. Could I bring her in here? I hadn’t been able to bring Katarina into my dream world until I found a way to make her sleep. But none of us were asleep now, which told me we were no longer in the dream world.

So I reached for my bond with her, the old, dense, dark thread that had been there from the beginning. I gave it a firm yank.

And like that, Amira appeared before me, letting out a yelp of surprise.

I let the clouds come closer. They rushed in, and I stopped them again just at the edge of the castle. They raged and swirled around us in a white-grey cylinder of mist as if we stood in the eye of a hurricane.

She looked around her, at everyone, eyes finally falling on Colleen.

“I found her,” I said. “And some other things.”

Amira exhaled slowly, forcing a smile onto her face. The thunder rumbled again, and the wind blew hard across our faces.

“I can see that,” she said. “You’ve outdone yourself again. What is this place?”

“My dream temple.”

“You’ve been quite busy. You’ve somehow extended this well beyond your dream world.”

“This seems to have become the de facto capital of the spirit world,” I said. “You can see my neighbors up there.”

She looked up and around us. It didn’t appear she’d realized right away what the storm was. She saw it now. Her eyes widened as lighting flashed across the sky and a deafening crack of thunder rent the air around us.

I held up the tablet. “They want this. Just like you did.”

Amira couldn’t answer me right away. “Where was it?”

“You owned the land that Huntington College was built on, didn’t you? You sold it to the school.”

I heard gasps around me. I hadn’t shared that bit of information I’d learned from Colleen.

“I was speculating in land well before I formed the Collective,” she said. “The Collective was just a means to an end.”

“Because you knew it was here in California,” MJ said.

“Yes. I suspected that plot might be one location, but there were many possibilities. I was still convinced at the time that it was further north around San Sebastian. So when one of my apprentices at the time expressed an interest in looking further in Santo Domingo, I decided to let her do it.”

She looked over at Jezebel. There were a few moments of silence.

“No way,” Morrigan exclaimed.

“So I cast a love spell on a wealthy American who was visiting Budapest at the time,” Amira said. “He was bound to her, and they returned to California.”

“I don’t know you!” Jezebel shrieked. “You’re a demon! I serve the spirits, and they serve me.”

Amira said something angrily to her in Hungarian – I knew enough from my childhood to recognize it, though I didn’t quite understand her – and Jezebel froze. Her eyes swelled.

“Amalia? What happened to you?”

“I have moved on. You, it seems, have not.”

“I was waiting,” she whimpered.

The thunder crashed again. Amira turned back to me. “You have succeeded far beyond my hopes, beyond even what I had planned for the next step should you have found her.”

“Except you never seem to have recognized what was going on here,” I said. “You’ve been a pawn all along. We all have.”

Her eyes flared in anger. “What do you mean?”

I spent a few minutes explaining everything. Amira’s face paled. She looked up at the sky. Another crack of thunder shook the castle.

“So,” I said finally. “I have Tamiel. I have the tablet, and I know how to use it. Tell me why I should turn either of them over to you, or anyone.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Colleen, face tight in fear.

“Jimmy—”

“What?”

She extended her arm. “Look.”

All of us turned. At the edge of the storm eye, a dark figure had emerged from the clouds, floating rapidly toward us. After a moment or two, I realized it looked familiar. A moment after that, I realized why. The figure floated down toward the castle, landing at the edge of the circle.

“Mr. Kaplan,” Lucifer said, “Why am I not surprised to find you here, at the center of things, once again?”

Chapter 25

The spirits raged in anger around us, the thunder so loud I felt the vibrations in my chest.

Lucifer took in the scene around me, Amira, Colleen, Jezebel, and the girls. He was as I remembered him from the meeting in his Maybach, dark hair, dark features, red-brown eyes. But unlike the tailored suit he’d worn before, he wore long black robes trimmed with glittering rubies.

“Quite the family gathering, I see,” he said. “I have to say I never expected you to finally succeed in this search of yours, Amira. I had thought Tamiel and her powers well and truly neutered and hidden. For six thousand years, I was right.”

“She didn’t succeed,” I said. “I did.”

He smiled and nodded at me. “Indeed.”

“The spirits want something here. Perhaps you sense it.”

But Lucifer laughed. “Oh, they want what they’ve always wanted. Freedom to work their chaos unconstrained by any rhyme or reason. Why do you think the bureaucracies exist in the first place? Both of them.”

“And they want us to destroy them.”

I felt a hand slide through my arm, the one holding the tablet. It was Hayley. She pulled herself against me.

“Do you really think you can?” Lucifer asked. “Tamiel was powerless against the celestials. You would be as well.”

I reached into the tablet, seeing the weakness. Could I really fix it? I had no idea how any of it worked at all, which was good. Improving it took a mere thought.

“We can now.”

Lucifer’s mood, if such a thing were possible for the Prince of Darkness, darkened noticeably.

“You can sense it, can’t you?” I said. “What I just did? That was why the spirits led me to take Zagan’s powers. It would let me improve Tamiel’s.”

“You have no idea what this would do,” he shot back at me. “And you’re male. The powers are useless to you.”

“But not to me,” Hayley said. “They meant me to have them all along. I’ll take them if you make me do it.” She slid her hand up my arm and rested it on the tablet.

Lucifer stared at her so hard I thought his eyes would burst into flame.

“Yes. I see it. They chose you well. All that burning ambition and lust for power, barely held in check by a few thin threads of morality. What would all that power turn you into, I wonder? Are you sure that’s something you truly want to be, girl?”

“Hayley, don’t,” Colleen cried. “You don’t know what you’re doing. What you’ll become. You have no idea.”

I tried to move her hand off the tablet, but she resisted me.

“Baby . . .”

For a few long moments, Lucifer and Hayley stared each other down, neither moving a muscle. The storm raged like it had never done before.

“We’re really not looking for a fight here,” I said. “The tablet has been hidden away for six thousand years. Does it really make a difference if it’s hidden here instead under the fountain at Huntington College?”

“If you had it yourself,” MJ said to Lucifer. “Would you even use it? I kind of think you like things the way they are.”

His eyes slid over to her. “You’ve strayed quite a bit from the catechisms, child. Sympathy for the devil? What would your mother say?”

MJ stood her ground. “I think she’d be happy to see me rebuking you.”

Lucifer laughed loudly. Then he looked back at me and Hayley. “You want to use those powers even less than I do,” he said. “So your threats are a bit empty. Still, in the unlikely event we were forced into battle over them, I think the collateral damage might be considerable. What do you propose to do?”

“I can seal it up here in a way no one and nothing can reach it,” I said. “You can feel what I’ve done here. You’re acting like you don’t, but you can feel it.”

At my words, the storm erupted in rage, swirling and churning in the sky around us. I could feel the anger of the spirits at the incipient failure of their six-thousand-year plot.

“Be still!” I shouted upward. “We will discuss this!”

At once, the storm went silent. The clouds were as calm and still as the marine layer over Santo Domingo on a June morning.

Lucifer glanced upward. “Interesting.”

“Do you agree?” I asked.

He nodded once. “Assuming the tablet remains here, unmolested, yes. Should things change, however . . .”

He left the condition unfinished, but he didn’t need to finish it. Hayley’s hand relaxed and took my arm again. Lucifer looked over at my former grandmother. Her face paled.

“Amira. We need to have a little chat.”

“No retributions against her,” I said.

Lucifer snorted. “Are we doing this again? When I did I appoint you as my chief of staff?”

“Leave her here if she’s failed you.”

“Did I say that?” he asked. “Were you not listening earlier? I’ve been aware of everything she’s been doing. I allowed it because I knew she was not plotting against me.”

I looked over at her. “She wasn’t?”

Amira rolled her eyes. “How stupid do you think I am, Jimmy? I have more sense than that. Honestly.”

“Every one of my underlings is trying to increase their power, to aid their struggles against each other,” Lucifer said. “Perhaps when you join us one day, you’ll have figured that out. At this rate, I suspect Ashmodai and Paimon are looking over their shoulders toward you. Maybe even Baal as well.”

I exhaled slowly. “So we’re done here?”

“So it seems.”

Colleen came up beside me. “I have no quarrel with you anymore, Lucifer, in case there may be any misunderstandings. I just want to live my life.”

He looked her up and down. “Even though you know what you are now? What you were?”

“Yes. Precisely because I’m not what I was.” She took the arm Hayley wasn’t holding. “I want to stay with Jimmy.”

Lucifer chuckled again. “I suppose you’ll fit in quite well, then.” He turned to Amira. “Let’s go.”

“Wait!” Katarina yelled at them.

Lucifer and Amira looked at her.

“Jimmy did what you asked him to, what you promised to pay him for,” she said. “A thousand souls simply for locating information about Tamiel. We did more than that. Far more.”

Amira and Lucifer looked at each other. Lucifer grinned at her.

“She has a point. One must honor contracts fairly extended in this organization, as you know. And this is on your account, of course, not mine.”

Amira took a deep breath, then forced a smile onto her face. “Of course. Shall we say two thousand?”

“Four,” Katarina said. “That is a bargain for this and you know it.”

Amira seemed to grit her teeth. “I can offer three.”

I’d started all this with a negative balance of just over four. I looked over at Katarina, then back to Amira.

“Thirty-five hundred,” I said, “and I’ll find something new to occupy Jezebel’s attentions.”

She tried to smile. “Fine.” And then they were gone.

I went over and kissed Katarina. She smiled at me.

“Having a girlfriend who never forgets anything doesn’t suck,” I said.

￼

I sealed the tablet deep in the bowels of the castle, down at the core of my dream world. Nothing was getting in there without my knowing or allowing it. Yet even after I returned to the main level of the castle, I could sense it down there, a warm little ball of energy waiting to be put to use. It had no consciousness, but I sensed a yearning in it just the same.

I expelled Jezebel back to the physical world. The eight of us – me, Hayley, Katarina, MJ, Morrigan, Colleen, Charlotte, and Echidna – regrouped in the sitting room off the main hall, around the fireplace. They were all dressed appropriately in their usual gothic outfits. Charlotte was still holding Else, who wore a little black gown. Even Colleen had adapted to the aesthetic, donning a prim black dress that made her look a bit like the librarian in a creepy children’s book.

“What are you thinking now?” I asked Colleen.

She stepped over and embraced me gently.

“I want to stay with the rest of you, in the coven,” she said. “I feel that as clearly as anything I’ve felt in a very long time. Who else would understand what I am? And honestly, Jimmy, I’ll feel a lot better knowing I have you to protect me.”

“I’m okay with that,” Hayley said. The rest of them nodded in agreement.

The need to protect Colleen hadn’t entered my mind until that moment.

“Do you have any powers left at all?” I asked her.

“It’s coming back to me slowly. Lucifer took the smiting, but not the rest of it. I can change my appearance, I think. I haven’t tried, but I remember doing it. I only aged because I was making myself look older without realizing it. And every time one life came to an end, I became young again. That’s why I don’t remember my childhood in this life. It didn’t actually happen.”

“So you can do what Katarina can,” Morrigan said.

Colleen nodded. “Yes. It’s the same thing. But I also had strong powers of divination. I could read the stars and portents and know things. Before we were cast out, that was one of the things I taught the children of men. I think it’s why I’ve always been drawn to histories and books, wanting to know. This isn’t the first time I’ve worked in a library, by far. Not even the tenth.”

Morrigan leaned toward her. “I still don’t understand this curse Lucifer put on you, and what Jimmy did.”

Colleen pulled out from our embrace to look at the rest of them. “It was a curse of not understanding what I was, which meant I could never understand myself and my own needs. And that meant never getting close enough to anyone that they would suspect it either. He broke all that, thinking it was just a personality quirk that needed to be improved.”

“He did the same thing with my boobs,” Morrigan said.

All of them laughed.

“And with it was a ward against divination,” Colleen went on, “turning my own powers against me. That was the thing turning people to stone.”

“Your last name,” MJ said.

Colleen smiled weakly. “A sick joke on Lucifer’s part. I remembered nothing from one life to the next except that name.”

We looked around at each other for a few moments. It felt right, and I knew they felt the same.

“You live in our building and work at Huntington,” Hayley said. “So this should work out just fine.”

“Jimmy, what about the spirits?” Katarina asked.

“I’m going to talk to them later. As you told me once, they have little sense of time. They waited six thousand years for this, they can wait a bit longer.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“They just need to keep being patient. Who knows what might happen here?”

￼

We returned to the real world. The barrier that had confined us around the fountain was gone, and the enchantment on it had likewise disappeared. In some indeterminate way, it seemed less creepy than it was before. I wondered if anyone would notice.

“I feel like we should tell someone what the inscriptions mean,” Morrigan said.

“Like they’d believe us,” Hayley replied.

Colleen looked at me. “There’s still our article. I think we could work this into it somehow. Assuming you care anymore.”

I laughed weakly. “I care. I have a PhD to complete. I just wonder what the reviewers will say.”

She rubbed my shoulder. “We’ll be exposing further European exploitation of the native Californians. I’m pretty sure this will go over well.”

We walked back to the condo building. I checked my demon phone on the way, seeing that Amira had already deposited the 3,500 souls in my account. I saw that the benchmark price was $226,901 and tried not to dwell on what that meant. I didn’t exactly like the idea of trading souls to buy groceries.

As we crossed McKinley, I looked for Jezebel, but there was no sign of her. When we got to the lobby, Colleen turned to the rest of us.

“If I’m staying in this life, Jimmy, I do need to get to work. My shift starts at noon. We fallen angels have to pay our bills like anyone else.”

I nodded. “It’s good. Go.” I hugged her.

“I need to run back to school myself,” MJ said. “I’m out of clean clothes.”

“Dinner?” I asked. “I feel like we need some casual coven time after all this.”

“Yeah, definitely,” MJ said.

“What time?” Colleen asked. “I get off at five thirty.”

“How about six? No need to dress up or anything.”

She nodded. “Six works.”

MJ went to her car. Colleen got off at the fifteenth floor on the way up. Morrigan came back with me, Hayley, and Katarina.

I knew I still had things to do in the dream world, but I wasn’t quite ready to deal with them yet. I needed a break. There was some TA work I’d been putting off with everything else that was going on – a whole bunch of labs I needed to grade from both classes – so I sat down at the kitchen table while Hayley and Morrigan went into the bedroom to rest and Katarina decided to clean up.

But a little while later, Morrigan came back out and sat down next to me holding her phone.

“Master?”

“What, Kitten?”

“Ma’am said I have to show you this.” She held out her phone. It was open to her messages and there was a series of texts from MJ. The first of them said SLUT RULES, with a kitten face emoji followed by several hands, as if she was spanking Morrigan. That was followed by a short list of things MJ wanted her to do, one of which was start wearing a butt plug. She’d also sent her links to some videos she wanted Morrigan to edge to, all of which proved to be lesbian bondage. Finally, Morrigan had to show all of it to me, and she’d closed with Explain about the charm.

“What charm?” I asked.

Morrigan pointed to her collar, where I noticed she’d added this little silver charm in the shape of a sword.

“MJ got it in San Sebastian that afternoon we were shopping. It means I belong to her now, too. If that’s okay, I mean.”

I pulled her over and kissed her forehead. “Of course it is. Is all this what you wanted?”

She hugged me, nodding against my chest.

“Yeah. This is exactly it. I love it.”

I kissed her again. “That’s good, Kitten. I’m happy.”

￼

I finished grading the labs around five. Hayley and Morrigan were still in the bedroom together, and Katarina was still cleaning. I got a beer and went out to the balcony, looking down on campus. When my gaze drifted to the street below, I saw a familiar figure pushing a shopping cart along McKinley.

I ran back inside and out the door to the elevator. When I got down to the street, I looked both ways rapidly. I spotted Jezebel about a block away. The light was red, and it was a minute or so before I caught up to her. She looked up from her cart as I approached.

“They’re angry with you,” she said. “They won’t stop telling me.”

“I know. I came down here to talk to you, though. What are you going to do now?”

“They won’t stop speaking to me. The thing they said was mine is gone now.”

I looked into her, reading her. I saw the chemical imbalances in her brain that were the cause of her mental illness. I had never tried to heal anyone and I wasn’t sure I could even do it, but this felt like something I could improve, because at the core of it all, Jezebel wanted to be free from the voices in her head.

So I did it.

Her face went slack. She stared at me.

“What did you do?”

“I can improve things.”

“I can’t hear them anymore,” she said. “It’s stopped.”

“They should leave you alone now.”

She looked down at herself, then up at me. Her eyes were as calm and stable as I’d ever seen them. “I wasn’t always like this. I had nice clothes, and I lived in a nice house. I had a husband.” She looked over across campus. “I helped build all this.”

It occurred to me at that moment that I likely wouldn’t have uncovered the truth about Tamiel without Jezebel’s contributions.

“I can help you,” I said. “After what happened in there, I have money I can give you. Enough to get you back on your feet.”

“There’s a shelter I stay at some nights. They’re expecting me. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Okay. I’ll find you.”

She managed a smile. “Thank you, Jimmy.”

￼

When I got back inside, Katarina was in the kitchen making dinner. A few minutes later, she leaned out toward the table.

“Jimmy, the invisibility lotion is not in the refrigerator. You said you wanted to keep it here.”

“I do. I put it in there when we got back. It’s not there?”

I heard Hayley’s voice. “It’s okay. We have it.”

I looked toward the bedroom, but I didn’t see her. “What are you doing with it?”

She didn’t answer me. I stood up, intending to go see what they were up to, when I felt a hand on my chest.

I saw nothing, but I heard Morrigan’s voice very close to me. “You said you wanted to pick this up another night.”

“Uh.”

Morrigan laughed. I felt, but didn’t see, several hands slowly undoing my jeans. Then my jeans seemed to slide down my legs of their own accord. The hands then tugged down my boxers.

“Guys?”

“Nothing to see here, Jimmy,” Hayley said.

Well, she was right. There wasn’t.

Katarina looked out from the kitchen with an inscrutable look on her face. “I see nothing but Jimmy with his pants down.”

A mouth closed around my cock. A tongue began licking my balls. But I saw nothing down there. I gasped loudly.

“Oh, shit.”

I reached down, feeling two heads, but invisible hands pushed me away.

“Stay still,” Hayley said.

That meant Morrigan was sucking my dick. But then I felt their mouths come together around me and lost my place again. All I could see was my hard-on, glistening with their saliva and moving around as they pleasured me.

I groaned and put my hands on my head. Katarina came out of the kitchen with a little glass of vodka. She sat down at the table.

“Dinner?” I managed.

“It is cooking. This is absolutely fascinating,” she said a moment later.

All I could do was stand there and feel the disembodied sensations going up and down over and around my dick. I felt Morrigan’s tongue stud now and then, but it wasn’t enough to keep track of who was doing what. I kept hearing them laughing to each other, and I wondered what else I couldn’t see. Katarina just sat there watching with a sly smile on her face.

The experience was so bizarre that I couldn’t hold myself back too long, not that I necessarily wanted to. I didn’t know whose mouth did it, but a few minutes of this was enough. I finally groaned and ejaculated down one of their sucking throats. I couldn’t watch – it was too intense – but I had to reach down and hold them. Hands closed around mine as the mouth finished me off. Then it pulled back, kissing me a couple of times.

“How was that?” Hayley asked.

I let out a long breath. “Really good. And really fucking weird. Who was it at the end?”

They laughed. “We’ll never tell, Master,” Morrigan said.

I felt them standing up next to me.

“I need a shower,” Hayley said.

“Me too,” Morrigan said. “I guess we’ll be back in a few.”

Katarina stood up and finished her vodka.

“After twelve hundred years as a succubus, I thought there was nothing left sexually that I had not seen,” she said. “This proved me wrong.”

￼

That night, with my coven asleep around me, I returned to the castle. I went to the computer room and sat down.

“I know you’re not happy about this.”

WE WAIT SHE WILL CHOOSE WE WILL FOLLOW

I thought about that for a moment.

“I don’t know what we’re going to choose to do here.”

SHE WILL CHOOSE

“She’s chosen to do nothing right now.”

WE HAVE OFFERED

They had, and Hayley had refused. So maybe there was nothing more to do here, for now.

I waited, but there was nothing else. Finally, I got up and found Charlotte. She was in the nursery tower with Else, sitting in front of a window that looked down on the beach far below. Else was in her arms, nursing from her.

“Master?”

I looked down at them. I’d never paid that much attention to Else, because she wasn’t real. As Charlotte explained when she first appeared, Else was simply an echo of our lovemaking here, flotsam of the dream world, not her own thing. I’d been like her once, but it had taken the power of a King of Hell to make me real. That wasn’t happening now.

Still, I felt an unfamiliar urge to hold her.

“Is she about done?”

“She does not need to eat, Master, just as none of us need to eat here. I merely enjoy feeding her.”

I reached down. Charlotte pulled Else from her breast and handed her to me. I cradled her in my arms, brushing my fingers through her downy black hair. Charlotte looked up at me questioningly.

“Just felt like holding her. I’m going to take a walk.”

“Of course, Master.”

I carried Else through the castle. She was quiet and still as I walked around.

“All this will be yours someday,” I said to her. I laughed to myself, but Else didn’t react.

I showed her the library and the labs, the sitting room and the main hall. We went down to the dungeon, where I sometimes entertained Morrigan, then up to the bedrooms. Finally we went out to the magic circle at the top. The spirits were still there, but they were as quiescent as I’d left them. I could see down to the beach house, and the ruined landscape of the war Hayley and I had waged in our dream.

I stood there looking up at the sky, wondering what I had created here. The castle was still part of my dream world, but it was now inescapably linked to the spirit world. Others could come and go, to some extent. I was no longer in complete control.

I felt for the tablet. It was still there, safe, down at the bottom of everything in the core of my dream world, unreachable except through me. I felt it pulsing, the power that remained, that I’d reached into and improved.

There was a link to me now. Not that it mattered.

A peal of thunder rolled across the sky. I looked up again. Out across the sea, the sky was beginning to roil.

“You’ve got to watch out for them,” I told Else. “You never know what they’re going to do.”

She didn’t react.

I thought then about what I’d done, using her to summon the tablet. Using her hair as a component in the spell. It had been an impulse, something I hadn’t really thought through.

Surely it didn’t matter.

The thunder came again. I felt the tablet pulsing far below. I felt it reaching for me, through me.

Else squirmed in my arms.

I looked down at her. Something was different. She looked older. Her black hair was longer and thicker, and her deep blue eyes met mine with an awareness I’d never seen before.

We stared at each other for a moment.

“Hello, Father,” she said.

￼

The story continues in Demon Hunter 5: Apotheosis

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25