Kindling the Moon (Arcadia Bell #1)(92)

“No, this is much bigger. It stands to reason if you take out the leaders, the order weakens. So in that regard, we succeeded. But we were also experimenting with an old, rare spell. One that Frater Blue helped us find. It enabled us to siphon the Heka from dying magicians and absorb it into ourselves.”

I recalled the white demon’s goetia entry: She can be forced to answer those questions regarding the Harvesting of Æthyric energy. Dear God, they were using her to harvest Heka from the murder victims?

“This increased our Heka reserves and created chaos among the orders at the same time—killed two birds with one stone, so to speak.” My father gave me his used-car-salesman smile; I thought I might be sick. “And it worked beautifully. We are so much stronger from conducting those rituals. We’d be even stronger if the Luxe Order hadn’t meddled. That ruined everything.”

My mother nodded with a pained expression, remembering. “It was a terrible time for your father and me. We felt as if we’d failed twice. Once in conceiving you, and then the Black Lodge scandal …”

“I was a mistake?”

My father shook his head. “That’s what we thought, but we were wrong. You, little butterfly, were not a failure at all, but our greatest success. Once we left you in the States, we found a cache of old grimoires in France. And that’s where we discovered a journal kept by a magician and his wife in the twelfth century. They completed the Moonchild ritual, and like us, thought it failed. But they had expected results too soon. The power wasn’t supposed to manifest at puberty. It came later.”

My mother pressed her hands together. “You are a modified human, able to evoke beings from the Æthyr at will. Able to control them without drawing the messy seals. Inside, you have the ability to summon not one demon, but an entire army! Imagine that—an entire legion of servants ready to do your bidding. A god’s power inside a human body. You, my love, are progress.”

“The new Aeon,” my father announced proudly. “Your power will allow us to usher in a new age. An Aeon ruled not by the laws of earth and man, but by the laws of the cosmos and the strength of the Æthyr! Your birth was engineered to save this world. Transform it. Cleanse it.”

“Oh my God, you’re both out of your f*cking minds!” I said, laughing hysterically. “I’m not progress—your stupid Moonchild ritual didn’t work! I’ve got a halo and can see Earthbounds. Big deal. I still have to do the spells the same old way anyone else does them—by hand. And …” I instantly realized my error. “The incubus in the Hellfire caves. I was using Heka to kindle moon power …”

My mother straightened her robes, smoothing out the lines around her waist. “You’ve had only a taste of it. As we learned from that twelfth-century grimoire, your powers don’t fully manifest until you’re mature. The age of your magical maturity, twenty-five, will occur in … fifteen minutes.”

Twenty-five. Traditionally, there is a public ritual marking a magical adept’s twenty-fifth birthday. The symbolic coming-of-age, like a quinceañera or bar mitzvah.

“We realized a way to bring everything together. Learned from our mistakes.” My mother’s brows darted up in smug excitement. “Siphoning Heka from other mundane magicians wasn’t enough. But we could apply the same technique to siphon something much more important.”

My father lowered his head to look me in the eyes. “We’ve watched you over the years, you know. Through our guardians. You had a chance to make something of yourself. You didn’t have your full powers, but you had an advantage in your gift of preternatural sight. Instead of using this, you wasted it. A bar, Seléne? Really?”

“You’re soft. It’s our fault. We coddled you.”

“We did warn you many times that emotional bonds create weakness,” my father said. “Yet all you’ve done is settle into a normal life, surrounding yourself with people. And then, not even people, but Earthbounds? Demons are tools to be used and controlled. They are not our equals.” He shook his head. “We realized when your mother visited you in Seattle a few years ago that no amount of power would matter if you were that empathetic and soft.”

My mother nodded her head emphatically. “The world doesn’t need another benevolent goddess. It needs a fierce gardener to rip out the weeds. You were no longer our messiah, and we couldn’t play the roles of Mary and Joseph publicly with everyone shouting ‘killers.’ ”

“But it all happened for a reason. We learned from our errors. And that’s why we’re here. Everything will turn out just fine after all. Patience and time were all we needed.” My father grasped my mother’s face in his hands and kissed her.

The drug was wearing off. I could feel my heart squeezing, and it beat faster than a hummingbird’s. My pulse throbbed at my wrists. I tried to blow away the red obstruction again, then looked down. The spiderweb was a thin, red transparent shroud. I was naked underneath. The shroud covered my head and fell to the ground, weighted down at the bottom by a series of metal beads sewn into the hem.

I was standing inside a strange metal object. Several feet in diameter, it looked like a giant communion bowl with a flat lip around the outside that was etched with symbols. I tried to read them. Rebirth, sacred, transference … sacrifice. It was an oracular bowl.