Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(52)

“Other churches,” he continued, “talk a lot about miracles. But talk is cheap. I’m not saying that the beliefs that fuel other religions are wrong, I’m only saying that I can prove that our faith has substance. Our beliefs are grounded in what we can see and hear, not just what we’re told.”

The magician walked to a short table and picked up a small brass container with an elongated, skinny spout—somewhere between an Arabian oil lamp and a watering can. He carried the object to both sides of the altar and held it up for each of the girls in the red dresses to kiss in blessing.

A red circular carpet lay in the center of the altar. While the magician moved behind it, the girls rolled up the carpet and carried it off between them. And what do you know—where that carpet once lay was now an exposed summoning circle, though not as fancy as the glass tubes in the floor of the Hellfire caves. This one looked to have been constructed of a cement disk that had been recessed a couple of inches into a hollowed-out portion of the wood flooring. The edge was ringed with a dark stained channel, into which the magician poured oil from the spout of the brass watering can.

“From fire they are born, and to fire we all go. Let the sacred oil flow,” Frater Merrin said. The congregation repeated these words in an off-key drone. After he made it all the way around, the prairie girls took their places at either side of the circle. The magician chanted something in Latin. His back to the congregation, he kneeled—with no small effort—in front of the sculpture of the lion-headed deity, and prayed.

“This is ridiculous,” Lon complained in my ear.

“You think?” I hissed back. Pomp and show. A bloated ritual to impress the crowd.

The magician gave a signal to the girls. They held their dresses tightly around their legs and knelt by the oil-filled channel, touching their torches to it. A foot-high flame leapt up and spread, filling the entire circle in a flash. A ring of fire.

Yes, quite a production.

The humans who came to see it weren’t savages. They believed in demons. They couldn’t see the halos on the Earthbounds who sat alongside them, but they had proof, nonetheless: their church conjured up a living specimen every Saturday.

I crossed my arms, listening as the magician recited the real words to set the summoning circle.

If the occult organizations got wind of this place, they’d fan the flames licking around this circle and burn the whole temple to the ground. Especially my order—this was so against E∴E∴ policy. I mean, come on. A rogue magician conjuring demons in front of nonmagicians—conjuring demons to be worshipped, to boot. Such a big no-no.

Like most esoteric orders, the E∴E∴ believed Æthyric demons were to be summoned only for two reasons: information and tasks. They should be tightly controlled at all times, and there should always be another magician present in case something goes wrong with the binding.

Of course, I never followed these rules myself. And in the big picture, what the Hellfire Club did every month—summoning Æthyric demons for heaping helpings of sex and violence—was far worse than what this guy was doing.

But I didn’t really care about that either. All I wanted to know was whether the magician in front of us had kidnapped, and likely killed, seven human children in the early ’80s, and if he was the one who’d been recently abducting Hellfire kids.

Merrin brought out a caduceus from under his robe. The wood was blackened at the bottom. He stuck it through the wall of flames and hit the inner ring of the summoning circle. The low lights in the room crackled and dimmed for a brief moment, throwing the room into near-dark, the only light coming from the torches on the wall and the ring of fire.

The summoning circle was set. Under the fire, it glowed with blue-white Heka, strong and stable.

Merrin whispered an incantation. An indistinct form solidified inside the circle. The temple was dark, and it was hard to see clearly, but what appeared in the circle was mostly human-looking. Male. Definitely male. His body was divine—perfectly sculpted, ropy muscle over long, pale limbs. A sleeveless white tunic clung to every hard curve. Long auburn hair was pulled back into a tight knot on the crown of his head, backlit by a dancing halo that took on a reddish hue in the firelight. At the front of his head were two gently curving horns, and from a slit in the back of the tunic, a long tail whipped back and forth, striking against the invisible circle walls.

He was startled . . . and very pissed off about being summoned.

A low buzz floated around the room as the congregation recited some ridiculous poetic nonsense at the trapped demon in the fire circle. Between their practiced lines, Frater Merrin was reading the summoned demon his Miranda rights, commanding it to obey. The demon didn’t respond. He just scanned the congregation, searching the faces in the dark. He stopped when his gaze connected with mine.

Uh-oh. The last few Æthyric demons with whom I’d chatted seem to recognize whatever it was that my parents had bred into me. And pretty-boy demon in the fire circle was now eyeballing me with his head tilted in curiosity. Not good. I slouched lower in my seat and shielded my face with my hand.

More hive-speak from the crowd. More commands from the magician to the silent demon, who prowled the summoning circle, looking for a way out and occasionally pinning me with an angry stare that made my skin clammy.

“Now, for the querent,” Merrin said to the crowd. “Brother Paolo won the query lottery this week. Where is Brother Paolo?”