Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(17)

Four gas-burning lamps bordered the crumbling sidewalk, and another hung near the painted front door. The fence locked behind us with a weary squeak as we headed inside.

“I keep the utilities on,” Lon said as my eyes scanned the pale light glowing through the covered first-story window. “Most of the residents in this neighborhood know it’s empty, but I don’t want it to look abandoned and vulnerable to prowlers.”

“You grew up in this house?”

“Yeah.”

Kind of spooky, if you asked me. Like an overgrown gingerbread cottage with lacy decorative trim around the eaves, spindly banisters, and crescent moons punched out of the black shutters—the complete opposite of Lon’s modern house. Like other Victorians on the block, his childhood home fit right in with the fairy-tale vibe of the Village, but the fact that it was empty gave me the creeps. When we stepped inside, the dry, dusty smell that permeated the walls didn’t help, nor did the creaking wood floorboards.

Most of the furniture had been donated to charity, and what little that remained was covered in sheets. I sneezed several times as we headed up three flights of stairs to a locked attic door.

He clicked on a bare bulb that hung from the rafters. I looked around. It wasn’t a finished attic. A ten-by-twenty strip of plywood had been hammered down over ceiling joists and exposed pink insulation, creating a runway of sorts leading away from the stairs. Boxes and wooden crates lined both sides.

“Over here,” Lon instructed, leading me to a separate stack of boxes. We sat on the plywood walkway and sifted though several boxes of paperwork, mostly photos and old Hellfire bulletins. The esoteric organization I grew up in, Ekklesia Eleusia, more commonly known in the occult community as E∴E∴, printed up bulletins that were passed out during classes and meet-and-greets. They mostly advertised things like equinox energy raisings, rituals for members moving up a grade in the order, and the monthly performance of something called the Sophic Mass: think Catholic mass with a naked priestess on the alter while a quasisexual magical play is being reenacted. It’s more pompous and less interesting than it sounds. Drinking wine and gagging on a dry homemade wafer while staring at untrimmed pubic hair and sagging breasts isn’t exactly my idea of holy—and you don’t even want to know what’s in the wafer.

The Hellfire bulletins, however, were a thousand times more amusing. I thumbed through a colorful stack of them from the 1970s and ’80s. They featured inventive Masonic-like symbols, weird drug-fueled poetry, interpretive cartoons of demons in silly Kama Sutra positions, and local restaurant reviews based on the sexual attractiveness of their servers. I noted that the chain fondue restaurant in the Village rated only two smiling penises, but the Alps Fondue Chalet inside Brentano Gardens got an enthusiastic five. That was an awful lot of proverbial dick—we were so going to eat there.

While leafing through one of the old bulletins, a small picture slipped from the pages. It was a group photo of three men and four children. Three smudged names were written on the back: Dare, Merrimoth, Butler. I flipped it over and recognized Dare and a teenager who clearly was his son, Mark. Standing beside him was Lon’s dad, Jonathan Butler. Lon definitely favored his father in the broad build of his shoulders and the way his eyes were eternally creased into slits. And speak of the devil . . . Jonathan had his arm around a wickedly attractive teenager whose light brown hair fell halfway down his back. He was skinny and long, his arms tight with sinewy, lean muscle. No trace of facial hair. A Black Sabbath Heaven and Hell T-shirt clung to his torso. He scowled at the camera like he was trying to break it. A total badass.

“Lo-o-on,” I purred, biting my bottom lip as I flipped the photo around in my fingers to show him.

He tried to take it away from me, but I wouldn’t let him have it.

“You were all kinds of adorable,” I said.

He grunted.

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen, I think.”

“Fifteen?” I repeated in disbelief, turning the photo back around to inspect it. “Were you still a virgin at that point?”

“Mostly.” A playful smile tugged up one side his mouth.

“Man oh man, my fifteen-year-old self would have been all over that.”

He snorted. “When I was fifteen, you weren’t even born.”

I stuck my tongue out, then fought him off while pressing the photo to my breast as he tried to pry it out of my hands again. “Stop! This picture makes my heart flutter. Can we take it with us, please?”

“There’s several photo albums’ worth of the same thing at home,” he said.

“You promise?”

He nodded and gave up the fight, returning his attention to the pile of papers in front of him. “I can’t believe Jupe hasn’t forced them on you already.”

“Any from the time you were in the seminary?” I asked.

“That sexy Jesus thing again?” he teased without looking up. “You’re a filthy girl, you know that?”

“I’m being serious.”

He grunted, then answered after a time. “Maybe. My hair was short in the seminary.”

I tried to imagine a devious nineteen-year-old Lon with short hair, playing at being pious. What a shock it must have been for his instructors to realize what Lon really was.

I slipped the photo into the stack of bulletins as he stared at a photocopy he’d found inside a file folder. A strange look bloomed on his face. “Read this list and tell me what’s wrong,” he said as he handed the piece of paper to me.