Banishing the Dark (Arcadia Bell #4)(9)

I’d asked him to drive me to Tambuku so I could see Kar Yee. She didn’t know. Lon had called her the day before to tell her I was home but requested she hold off visiting until I was better recovered. “If we’re flying out tonight, maybe we should stop by on our way to the airport. Would save us—”

A very distinct familiar feeling stole my attention.

“Cady?” Lon said.

But someone else was talking inside my head. May I show myself?

I glanced up and down the alley. No cars. No people. The whole area was fairly dead, and it was dark. “Yes,” I told him. “Come, Priya.”

“Jesus f*cking Christ,” Lon mumbled as a ball of white light shimmered in midair. The light flickered violently, and a gray-skinned boy with black wings exploded into view.

We backed up in tandem to give him room to land. A smoky black halo trailed over his haystack black hair as his bare feet touched the pavement. His face lit up when he saw me. “Mistress!” he called out, snapping his wings shut behind his back. “I am so relieved to see you!”

“You, too, Priya.” And I was. Despite his physical and personality changes, he was still the same spirit who had watched my back since I was a teenager.

He grinned with a mouthful of pointy silver teeth and started to reach for me until he spotted Lon and drew back. “Kerub,” he said in greeting, inclining his head politely, if not begrudgingly, before speaking to me again. “The demon boy has told me of your progress. You look well.”

“Getting there. Has Jupe been summoning you a lot?”

His eyes narrowed before darting toward Lon. Yeah. He still didn’t like Lon. And whatever he’d wanted to say, he’d definitely thought better of it. Instead, he made a funny sort of shrug as he gestured awkwardly. “We have been getting to know each other.”

Yeah, I’ll bet. I was going to have to have a talk with Jupe about using Priya like his own personal chat buddy. “Why are you here?”

“I have urgent news about your mother.”

“Let’s have it.”

“She has killed the demon Lord Chora and fled his fortress with a group of slaves.”

“Dear God.” Lord Chora, grand duke and commander of two legions of Æthyric warriors. That demon had torn down my house wards, flown away with Jupe, and nearly killed Lon. He was highly skilled with Æthyric magick—not a demon to screw around with. But my mother had killed him? “I thought he was helping her. Jupe said—”

“He was,” Priya insisted. “I do not know what went wrong, nor do I know whether she’s discovered the magick she needs to cross the planes. But you should assume the worst and be on guard. She could take possession of your body at any time.”

“Like right now?” I said, glancing up at the night sky as if she might tumble down.

“Today. Tomorrow. A few days. I do not know. But the sooner you can reverse the Moonchild spell and sever the bond with her, the better. Perhaps it’s best you seek the protection of your order until you do that.”

I shook my head. It was natural for Priya to assume that a group of magicians could protect me; Hermeneus spirits and magicians had been allies, if you could call it that, for centuries. In Priya’s mind, magick was power—and that was true. But magick wasn’t infallible, and I couldn’t sit around twiddling my thumbs while my order kept me from the inevitable.

“I’m not going to Florida right now,” I told Priya. “Lon and I just uncovered a trail we need to follow. Someone who might have information about my past.”

“We don’t even know if it’s safe in Florida, now that the caliph is dead,” Lon added.

Priya’s brow furrowed. “You should not gamble with her life, Kerub. Your associations got her injured. Put your faith in her own people now.”

Oh, boy. I didn’t have to look at Lon to know that the horns were coming out. I could feel the transmutation in my bones like an esoteric platoon of soldiers marching to war. But when I lifted my hand to hold Lon back, something caught my eye: threads of pale light.

I’d seen threads emerging from my hand before but not quite like this. And when Priya leaned closer to have a look himself, the gossamer strings brightened like fluorescence exposed by ultraviolet light. Priya’s Æthyric halo was making them visible.

When Jupe had secretly, and stupidly, tattooed my sigil on his body, it created an invisible thread connecting us. One that lit up bright gold when he was in danger, much brighter than it was now. And when I first summoned Priya in his new body, my guardian reestablished our link and created a second thread, a black cobweb that anchored him to my Heka signature, even across the planes.

Two threads. But now there were four.

Four wispy filaments of light growing out of my palm, waving in the wind like dandelion tufts. My gaze followed the black thread to Priya. And a second pale gold thread that trailed off beyond the alley: Jupe’s.

The third thread was pale green. I followed that . . . right next to me.

To Lon.

I grabbed Lon’s hand and saw its endpoint, right in the middle of his palm. Just like Priya’s. “What did you do?” I said, confused. Lon hated tattoos. And I hadn’t seen every inch of his skin since I’d come home from the hospital, but he had no reason to want my sigil on him.

His mouth fell open, but no sound came out. I looked back at my palm to the fourth thread: a white line that on first glance seemed to be sprouting from my palm like the others but on closer examination was a little bit different. It splintered from the green thread connected to Lon, and it headed . . .