Banishing the Dark (Arcadia Bell #4)(74)

9 years: Magical health of S. far exceeds first Moonchild experiment. Becoming rebellious, studying magick in secret, stealing books from lodge’s library. May need another major memory wipe.

10 years: No Moonchild powers demonstrated during ceremony. Rumors circulating within order. Third memory wipe on caliph. Hiring private nanny for winter months.

11 years: Alex found documentation of previous Moonchild abilities remaining dormant until puberty.

13 years: First menses. No Moonchild powers.

14 years: Incident at school required another memory wipe.

15 years: Alex fired from day job. Have tried Moonchild ritual six times this year. Doctor says I may be unable to conceive again. Beginning secondary plan to siphon power. Unsure what to do about S.

16 years: Magical ability markedly increasing. Dare still asking about her, so still have hope that all of this was not in vain. Alex says we should consider selling S. to Dare, but I am not ready to give up on her quite yet.

“Selling me to Dare?” I murmured, surprised I could even be shocked by the depth of their depravity anymore. “What else?”

“That’s where it stops.”

I tore the book out of his hands and flipped to the next page. Blank, just as he said. “Sixteen years old,” I murmured. “That’s when the Black Lodge slayings started, so that last entry must’ve been the last winter they worked for Dare.”

“And after they faked their deaths and sent you packing with a new alias, they found out you were worth hiding from Dare after all when they uncovered the old grimoires in France.”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “Must have been a joyous day in the Duval household when they discovered that the so-called age of magical maturity brought out the Moonchild attributes, not puberty. All they had to do was wait until I hit twenty-five and slit my belly open.”

“But we stopped them.”

Or delayed the inevitable, but I didn’t voice my negative thoughts.

Lon picked up the second book, a journal. This one had a black leather cover embossed with a sigil on the front. “My mother’s personal sigil,” I said, running my finger over it. “Huh. A variation, actually. This star shape at the base is new.”

“Or maybe it’s an older version,” he said, and opened the journal between us on the console. “More spells. Christ, it might take hours to go through, but this might be what you need. I think these could be the Moonchild rituals. The dates range from 1978 to 1988.”

“I don’t need all of them. What’s the last one? The one that applies to me.”

He flipped toward the end of the notebook and stopped at a drawing marked with a date nine months before I was born.

The Moonchild ritual.

“It’s a diagram for the ceremony,” I said, running my finger over the precisely drawn layout. “Here’s the main circle, the altar, the cardinals . . . Jesus, Lon. Doesn’t this look familiar?”

He let out a slow breath through his nostrils. “It’s the same ritual setup as San Diego.”

“Exact configuration. And look, a directional compass. A house and a road.”

We stared at it until Lon turned the diagram and pointed toward the road we had used to get here. “This house, Cady. The road we drove in on.”

He was right. “They conceived me here,” I murmured. “Behind the house.”

He flipped the page and began reading to himself.

“What? Is that the ritual?”

“Looks like more of a statement of intent. Almost as if she was writing it for one of her books, like maybe she thought of publishing it one day.”

“What does it say?”

“Give me a second, and I’ll tell you,” he murmured.

While Lon read to himself, I anxiously thumbed through the rest of the paperwork. More loose pages in French that I couldn’t read. A photocopy of a Moonchild ritual from the 1800s with red lines crossing out entire chunks of the text. A page containing a woodcut print of a pregnant woman with the head of a sun and a pictorial map of the world below her. It was labeled GEHEIME FIGUREN DER ROSENKREUZER, 1785. Gothic script above the woman’s sun-disk head said: SOPHIA.

I opened my mouth to tell Lon, but when I picked up the paper, I saw what was on the bottom of the box.

The torn fragment of parchment stolen from the snake temple.

Invocation of the Great Serpent.

It was in English, and the calligraphy and old spellings were mostly readable. It wasn’t a ritual, really. No instructions about laying out this or that protection circle, no binding or ward.

It was a prayer of sorts, a set of sacred words to call down a powerful, godlike being from the Æthyr. A strange summoning seal was crudely drawn in the center of the parchment, like no demonic seal I’d ever seen. And as I read to the end, skipping over the mumbo-jumbo, I realized something important.

This was not for summoning an Æthyric being into a circle for a chat. Nor was it a spell to draw down the creature’s essence into a womb to create a Moonchild.

It had nothing to do with a conception ritual.

It was a set of instructions to call down this creature into a living human body.

A male body.

Not my mother but my father.

Dazed and disbelieving, I let go of the parchment and watched it drift back down into the box, then glanced up to see Lon’s gaze lift from the fallen page. He cupped my cheek with his hand, and I heard his emotions echoing mine.