Binding the Shadows (Arcadia Bell #3)(27)

I made my way to a sheltered area behind a line of air conditioning units. Tenants often used the cement-topped roof for parties. A low brick wall kept drunken guests from falling to their death onto the busy city street below. And even now, when most people back in sleepy La Sirena were in bed, I could hear a steady, speeding rumble of traffic all around me. Somehow this was comforting.

When I first met Lon, I had a link to the Æythr. A witch’s familiar, of sorts—or perhaps a better description would be a magical lookout, a being that could be called upon for information or help. Priya.

After being my eyes and ears on the Æthyric plane for most of my adult life, Priya died a horrible death trying to defend me against demonic attack.

Priya was what magicians call a Hermeneus spirit, an asexual messenger entity that looks sort of like a humanoid bird-person. They are highly coveted, hard to wrangle, and not every magician successfully manages to snare one. To petition their help, you have to lure them in a special ritual. If one of them likes the cut of your jib, it might offer up a lifetime of service. They form a link to your Heka signature—something as unique to each magician as a fingerprint.

Like other Hermeneus spirits, Priya didn’t physically cross over from the Æthyr to my plane when I called. Instead, it used my Heka to transmit a kind of hologram of itself. All they could really do here was relay information, so they weren’t much use for earthly tasks, but they were invaluable Æthyric spies.

And they also had the unique ability to reincarnate.

The last thing Priya relayed to me before dying was a plea to wait for its return. That it would find me. I had no idea how long that would take. Years, maybe? But it had been months, and maybe that was long enough. I didn’t really want to try to bond with another Hermeneus. Sure, Priya and I never had a friendship kind of relationship—these creatures were notoriously aloof. But it was hard to imagine linking up with someone new.

Still, I wasn’t sure if I could afford to wait much longer. I needed an ally who could confirm or deny my parents’ deaths in the Æthyr. I needed someone to tell me exactly what this Moonchild power was, and find out what the hell my parents had called down into me when I was conceived.

A cool night breeze fluttered my hair as I set down the things I’d scrounged from Lon’s for the calling ritual: a zip-top bag of salt, a paring knife, the folded sheets of sketch paper from his photography studio, my pocket-sized caduceus staff, and a nub of my trusty red ochre chalk.

I set to work with the chalk, sketching out a generic beacon sigil for Hermeneus spirits on the paper Lon gave me. A companion symbol was tattooed on my inner arm in white ink, along with several others inside an ancient Egyptian style cartouche that could be activated with a smear of Heka-rich body fluids like spit or blood. When Priya and I were linked, I used the tattoo to call it. But Priya’s death severed this link, and to reestablish it, I was going to have to do some creative spellwork.

In my magical order, calling a Hermeneus spirit would be a big to-do, a temple ritual that would be witnessed by the congregation. Sort of like a Bar Mitzvah. The magician calling the spirit would be in ritual robes. There’d be an energy-raising ceremony beforehand, a lot of chanting. The whole shebang would be presided over by the leader of the order, the Caliph—my godfather. And afterward, depending on the success of the ritual, which had a fifty-fifty chance of working, depending on the magician, there would be a celebratory round of wine or consolatory round of “it just wasn’t in the stars” and “maybe next time” speeches.

I would no sooner don a ritual robe than stick a knitting needle in my ear, and I didn’t need a crowd of chanting occultists to cheer me on. It felt good just to be doing magick the old-fashioned way, chalk in hand, caduceus by my side, whistling “Breaking the Law” while I worked.

Once finished with the beacon, I used the second piece of paper to write Priya’s name inside a cartouche with my personal sigil as a magician—a moon cradling a flat three-tiered rose—and connected the two sketches with a series of linking symbols. I didn’t really know for sure that this would work. I hadn’t actually known any magicians who’d tried to re-link themselves to reincarnated guardians. On the rare occasion that a guardian died, most magicians would just try to call a new one.

But I didn’t want a new guardian. I wanted Priya.

In the center of the calling sigil, I poured a small pile of the salt I’d stolen from Lon’s kitchen—some sort of fancy gourmet sea salt I liked to tease him about, because Morton’s table salt was too crude for his superstar palate. For a brief moment, I idly wondered if better ingredients, as in cooking, made for better magick.

His hundred-dollar paring knife was certainly sharper than the dime-store utility knife in my kitchen drawer. And it damn sure made a sizable nick on the pad of my pinkie finger. Kneeling on the cement, I pressed the edges of the cut together and watched as dark drops of my gourmet Heka-rich blood plopped onto the white salt pile.

A soft gust of wind sifted through my hair and caused a few grains of salt to scatter. Better get this done before the whole pile blew away.

One good thing about living in a big city was that there was such a wealth of electrical current. I barely had to reach out for it. A bright stream of electricity jumped into my body, latching onto my Heka, mixing with it, charging it. My nerve endings fizzled with raw energy. The roots of my hair swelled and lifted. Cells bounced around, dancing deliriously.