Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(50)

“What do you want me to do? I’m too young to get a job working fast food after school. I can’t just make money materialize.” He lowered his head near mine and added in a hushed voice, “Or can I? There’s not a spell for that, is there?”

“No, but I bet there’s one to seal your mouth shut,” Lon said grumpily. “Besides, I thought you were ‘independently wealthy.’ Use your fancy new savings account.”

“I said small bills, Dad. Those games are ancient. I can’t put an ATM card in them.”

“Life is tough.”

Jupe groaned then looked at me. “Why were you guys talking about The Exorcist?”

Lon’s nose wrinkled. “Huh?”

“You were talking about Father Karras. I heard you when I walked up.”

“That’s it! The Exorcist!” My knees banged on the underside of the table in my excitement. “Father Damien Karras from The Exorcist!”

Jupe squatted down in front of the table and rested his chin on top of his folded arms. “Played by Jason Miller,” he confirmed. “The younger Jesuit priest who threw himself down the steps at the end of the movie to get the demon out of his body.”

“So what?” Lon said tersely. “It’s just a name. Magicians don’t use their given names when practicing.” I knew he was referring to me, but as many promises as I’d made to him regarding Jupe, he’d made some to me too. Jupe would never know my real name. Never, never, never.

“That’s right,” I said, ignoring his accusing glare. “Magicians don’t use their real names when practicing. And there’s a crazy old magician who runs a Silent Temple somewhere in Morella. He goes by Frater Merrin.”

“Oh!” Jupe exclaimed, not having any idea what we were actually discussing. “Father Merrin, played by Max von Sydow. He’s the older priest in the movie who dies during the exorcism.”

Lon sat up in his seat. Now he was paying attention. I pressed my hand over his knee and bit my lip in euphoric glee. I could be wrong—had been before. But this was an awfully big coincidence to ignore.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. Don’t Silent Temples usually celebrate their Sabbath on Saturdays, not Sundays?” Lon asked in a low voice while Jupe continued to chatter with geektastic movie factoids about The Exorcist.

They did, and even if “Frater Merrin” wasn’t working there anymore, maybe someone in the temple could clue us in to his whereabouts.

“What’s a Silent Temple?” Jupe asked, suddenly interested in our discussion.

Mr. and Mrs. Holiday better be up for some Jupe-sitting, because I damn well wasn’t hauling the boy along to a Silent Temple. Magicians in esoteric orders might be loopy, but those people were insane.

I had to make a few calls next morning to find out where it was. Silent Temples don’t advertise, aren’t in the book, and there’s little talk of their locations online. Sure, you could find discussion boards populated with fringe people who post bizarre tales, told to them by a “friend.” Rumors about temples in certain cities, that kind of thing. After surfing for an hour, you were more likely to have picked up some filthy virus from one of the web sites than to have discovered an actual location, which notoriously changes every few months.

That’s when it pays to have friends like Bob. Though he hadn’t quite gotten over the cannery terror, as long as he didn’t have to follow me into dark abandoned buildings, he was willing to help—and did. It took him fifteen minutes to call me back with the current location of the temple in Morella: an old brick high school in the Eastern Foothills district.

The neighborhood was beyond sketchy. A shame, really. It had some killer views of the mountains in the distance. But no view was good enough to make up for the largest number of homicides in the city, or the fact that they made the national news last year because of an infestation of superlice that closed down every local school and motel in a five-mile radius.

The sprawling former high school that now harbored the Silent Temple had been split into thirty-plus separate apartments and dubbed the Mountain Lofts. Some people rented them for homes, others for businesses. And, from the looks of the boarded-up windows pasted with 4:20 stickers and psychedelically colored tribulation posters, I was guessing most of those businesses weren’t exactly legal. Maybe Hajo got his sømna here.

We drove around the block twice looking for the temple’s unit number, then decided to try on foot. After we weren’t able to find a vacant parking space around the building, we parked Lon’s SUV at a nearby gas station.

The rain didn’t help matters. We huddled under an umbrella and hiked around the building, splashing through puddles. Lots of interesting sights at the so-called Mountain Lofts, such as a courtyard filled with brightly painted sculptures made from welded scrap metal . . . an overflowing city Dumpster being rummaged by three homeless people . . . a woman in a red-and-white-striped tube-top holding a soggy piece of cardboard over her head to block the rain, asking passersby if they’d seen her cat—which might’ve been some sort of prostitution code word. The whole place was classy with a K.

A few gutter punks sat lined up against a brick wall under a dripping cement eave that extended from one side of the building. This is where we finally found the unit number, painted sloppily on the brick. No temple sign. No sign at all, other than a ripped piece of brown paper bag taped above the handle. Scribbled on it in black marker was the instruction, Door remains locked. Knock for service until 11 a.m. After that time, doors will not be opened. DO NOT KNOCK after 11! An inverted pentagram served as a signature.