Banishing the Dark (Arcadia Bell #4)(73)

“The clock is gone,” I said. “It was right there.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“Maybe it was moved.”

We rushed over to the empty spot and looked for scuff marks on the floor or a secret panel or door in the wood wall there. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.

“How is this possible?” I said, nearly in tears. “The servitor doesn’t show me things that happened in the past. It has specific magical instructions. If it showed the clock to me before we drove home from Twentynine Palms, then that means it was here earlier today.”

“Cady. Put your hand here.”

He was holding his hand near the empty spot. I did the same.

“What is that?” he said. “Something’s there.”

“Holy—You know what that feels like?” I tapped the sleeve of my coat. “Ignore.”

“What?”

“One of my tattooed wards. Ignore.” I left him there for a moment and raced back to the front porch to retrieve the can of blue spray paint. “Fucking genius. How the hell did they turn it into a permanent spell? And where’s the Heka? Move out of the way.”

I shook the can and tried to gauge exactly where the clock had stood. Then I sprayed the wall. Like a shaded pencil mark exposing a pen imprint left behind on a pad of paper, the paint stuck to the air and revealed a hidden form.

The grandfather clock.

“Amazing,” Lon murmured when I’d sprayed enough to give us a rough idea of its shape. He touched his gloved hand to a still-invisible spot uncoated by paint. “I still can’t feel it. Just the strange sensation from before. The spell’s still active.”

“No telltale Heka, no sigils. Oh, of course. It’s not on the front.”

“On the back,” Lon said, setting the Lupara down on the fireplace. He felt around the clock’s invisible side, mumbling as he tried to get a good hold on it. After several tries, he grunted loudly and pulled. The massive clock moved an inch. God only knew how much it weighed, but now that he had some wiggle room, he got a better grip on it and slowly pulled one side away from the wall.

“Anything?” I asked as he peered behind it.

“Invisible, just like the rest of it. No Heka.”

“Has to be. Oh! On the inside, Lon.”

He moved back so I could spray the back side of the clock, and there it was: the outline of an imperfect rectangular panel that had been cut into the bottom half of the backing. Lon pried it off with the crowbar. Soft white Heka glowed on the inside of the panel for a moment before it fizzled and faded away to nothing.

The clock materialized right in front of our faces.

“Ha!” I shouted.

“Fucking brilliant,” Lon agreed before peering inside a dark cavity at the base of the clock’s back. He reached inside and retrieved a metal container about the size of a safe-deposit box. “This must be it. Here.”

I took it from him and set it on a console table. Lon cocked the Lupara and aimed at the box while I took a deep breath and opened the hinged top.

Nothing jumped out. No magick sigils or Heka anywhere in sight. Only a pile of papers, a couple of notebooks, a box of red ochre chalk, and an envelope with a stack of bills, both American and old French francs.

“These haven’t been in circulation since the 1990s,” Lon said, removing his paint-stained gloves.

“Maybe that means this stuff hasn’t been touched since I was a kid.”

“They probably hid it all when Dare started poking around in their business. What’s that?”

I cracked open one of the notebooks—just a plain old composition notebook with a cardboard cover. My mother’s perfect penmanship covered the pages. French words, variations of magical sigils.

“Experiments,” Lon said, able to read some of the French. “Mostly failures. Look at the dates. This is before you were born.”

“And after they’d killed my brother. Were there . . . other children?”

“No, but not for lack of trying. Here’s a home pregnancy test result, negative. And here again, the next month.” He flipped through pages and stopped on one, turning the notebook to read the page horizontally.

A chart. It started on my date of birth. Lon read it aloud, interpreting the French for me as he went.

Sélène Aysul Duval: Notes and Observations

3 months: No reaction to 100 V, perceptible distress at 5000 V.

6 months: No reaction to 1000 V, perceptible distress at 7500 V.

9 months: 10,000 V burned skin; taken to hospital for treatment; no internal damage.

“Jesus,” I whispered. They were experimenting on me?

15 months: Shocked Alex with kindled current when he reached for her. Continues to defend herself when prodded. We are extremely hopeful now.

18 months: Charged first spell successfully.

27 months: Scivina confirms halo.

5 years: Caliph’s nanny called police about suspected abuse. Adapting standardized parenting techniques in attempt to make S. more socially acceptable. Induced brain hemorrhage in nanny. Wiped caliph’s wife and children’s memories.

7 years: Able to charge adept 6 level spells. Shows interest in summoning.

8 years: Kerub demon summoned for Walpurgis identified S. as “Mother of Ahriman.”