Kindling the Moon (Arcadia Bell #1)(13)

“I’ll be in touch either way. After the weekend,” he said, then turned to leave.

“Wait! I need the information sooner than that.”

He stopped and stood in place, but didn’t turn around.

“Please,” I finally said, caving in and gritting my teeth.

With a brief nod, he slowly walked away, rounded the corner of the building, and was out of sight without a proper answer.

5

Lon’s nonexistent sense of urgency ate away at me for the remainder of the day. I spent the early evening scouring my own private library for the albino demon. I called my guardian to ask if it could find any information in the Æthyr about the classification (a bust). I even strengthened the protective wards over the doors and the windows on the first floor of my house. After I ate dinner, my neighbor— Mrs. Marsh, an elderly Earthbound with an ongoing imp infestation—asked me to get rid of an imp, which I chased around her kitchen for several minutes, only to have it escape at the last moment.

But none of that could curb the rising resentment I was feeling toward Lon. And my sour mood nosedived when three quick raps at my side door told me that my pesky neighbor had returned. I cursed under my breath and briefly entertained the ideal of physically harming her on the way to answer her knock; in my defense, it just hadn’t been a good day.

Mrs. Marsh’s frail frame stood in my doorway. “I’m so sorry, but it’s back. The same one—I can tell because its left ear is torn.” Dressed in a pale blue quilted housecoat that zipped up the front, Mrs. Marsh gave me a pleading look behind thick glasses.

“Hold on, let me put on some shoes.”

Flip-flops it was. I grabbed a rolled-up piece of canvas and a small caduceus, then followed Mrs. Marsh across my dark driveway and through a narrow hole in the shrubbery to get into her side yard.

“Where is it now?”

Before she could answer, one of her two large cats sprang from the hood of a rusted barbecue grill at the side of her house. Mrs. Marsh groaned as she bent low to scoop the cat into her arms; it nestled against her neck with its arms lazily dangling over her shoulder.

I hate cats. I try to tell myself that it’s because of their contemptuous attitude, or their sneaky manner, but in reality it’s probably just that I can’t control them. Demons I can bind, humans I can outrun with spells, dogs I can call and they come, but cats …

The tinny sound of something metal crashing on Mrs. Marsh’s patio startled both of us. Our heads whipped around in unison toward her backyard.

“It’s outside on my patio,” she whispered loudly.

We walked past the rusted grill and slowed at the corner of her house. I held my hand up to tell her to halt while I peeked around the corner. My eyes scanned the night shadows made by the oak trees; they cast a black, lacy pattern on her lawn until they ended abruptly at the small, yellow circle of light that radiated out from the bug light at her back door. Her green city-issued garbage can stood inside the yellow circle.

An empty can of cat food came to a slow, rolling stop on the cement patio nearby.

The sooner this imp was gone, the sooner I could get some sleep. I unrolled the worn canvas square, revealing a small circle bordered by runes and symbols that had been stained into the cloth with a mixture of red ochre and pig’s blood. No, I did not kill the pig, thankyouverymuch. I bought a small jar of blood from a local occult shop that gets their supply from a slaughterhouse across town. Working with animal blood isn’t something I savor—I’m sure there are plenty of things about your job that you don’t enjoy—but that particular kind of circle requires it.

Triangles are commonly used to bind, but the circle on my canvas has a little something extra. Once charged, it creates a generic gateway leading into the Æthyr. A quick, one-way portal back home, otherwise known as a banishment.

She who summons must banish. That’s the unchangeable cosmic law that applies to most anything summoned from the Æthyr. If a magician summons any demon from one of the hundreds of Æthyric classes, that very same magician must send it back. No one else can step up and do the job for you. That’s why there are so many Earthbounds running around the States these days. Some idiot magician working for Queen Elizabeth summoned a group of lower-echelon Æthyric demons and trapped them in human bodies, thinking they’d make pliable subjects when America was being colonized. However, the newly invoked Earthbounds lost their ticket home when the magician died of smallpox before he could send them back. A few hundred years of breeding, and here we are. At least, that’s how the story goes.

Imps, though, are different.

The cockroaches of the supernatural world, imps slip in and out of the Æthyr at will. Since no one summons them, anyone could banish them; they’re fair game, and my spiffy canvas portal worked like a charm. Sure, the imps that I trapped could still come back to earth on their own, but not for several days—or weeks, depending on the strength of the charge that I gave the circle—because my portal left an imbedded blocking spell on the imps. It took me several years of experimentation to find the right combination of sigils that would accomplish this, and I was damn proud of my ingenuity.

I tiptoed around the corner, staying in the shadows as I approached the patio, then laid the entrapment canvas on the cement in front of me. A single scratching noise emerged from the garbage can several feet away. Maybe this would be easy.