Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(59)

“You’re bleeding.” Lon bent to inspect my leg, pushing back my torn jeans. Blood and mud swirled over pale skin. The cut was a couple of inches long and it throbbed. “We need to clean this.”

We could both be dead right now, trapped underground. What would Jupe do without his dad? My heart clenched painfully at the thought of him being left alone if something happened to Lon. Things were simpler when I had only myself to think about.

Cold wind bit through my damp clothes while the distant sound of a solitary car chugged along on the deserted highway. “Can we please go home now?”

I limped to the SUV. Lon cranked it up and turned on the seat warmers. While the engine idled, he retrieved hand wipes from the glove compartment and helped me gently clean the mud from my cut. It stung something crazy, and it was sore. A bruise was already blooming on my shin.

Lon took the silver tube out of his pocket and turned it in his hands.

“Huh.”

“What is it?” I leaned over the armrest for a closer look.

The tube was beautiful, engraved with a floral pattern that wound around hidden sigils. In the center was a single word constructed from the same foreign alphabet used on the mandalas in the cannery. Apparently Bishop’s Polaroid really had been a threat to somebody.

“Look,” he said, pointing to one end of the tube.

A small keyhole.

Lon opened the armrest compartment and dug through it, retrieving the box that held Bishop’s key, which looked to be the right size.

“Is your leg okay? Can you make a few more minutes? I want to open it here,” Lon said. “If it’s got some weird spell attached to it, I’d rather it not destroy my house and kill my kid.”

Outside the SUV on the rough parking lot I drew an antimagick spell, then kindled Heka with electricity that I pulled from the power lines above us. I couldn’t feel any residual magick inside it, so Lon inserted Bishop’s key. The lock snicked open. We backed up and waited for a few seconds. Nothing happened. No magical crack in the parking lot. No giant magical cockroaches.

Lon lifted the unlocked cap and cautiously peeked inside the tube. Inside was a scroll of parchment paper. Old paper, old ink. Lon’s obsessions. He carefully withdrew it for inspection.

I whistled. “Look at that.”

He blew out a long breath. “Vellum.” He took one glove off to feel the paper, then sniffed it. “Iron gall ink, probably. See where it has caused the paper to disintegrate?” He unrolled the top of it with delicate precision, wincing as it crackled. We studied the handwritten text together.

It was a spell, written in a strange language, but not the same as in the mandalas and on the tube, and peppered with crude drawings of sigils and seals.

“Well, well . . . what do we have here?” Lon murmured.

My heart raced. “What is this? Do you know this language?”

“Looks like Old Nubian or Coptic. Maybe I can translate it at home.”

“Most of this looks foreign to me, but this symbol here is a key,” I said, pointing. “It’s used with other symbols in spells to unlock doors.”

Lon peered at it and tried to make sense of the surrounding symbols.

“I wonder if this is part of Merrin’s bargain with his demon.”

“I don’t know, but the alphabet engraved on the tube isn’t earthly,” he said, “it’s Æthyric. And we need to translate it.”

“How?”

“Don’t know. But if it means we’ve got to ask for help, then we ask.”

“If I still had my guardian spirit, I’d just summon it and find out,” I lamented, scraping my shoe across the asphalt to rub out my chalk marks.

“What about your caliph?” He carefully rolled the top of the vellum back in place and inserted it in the tube. “Could you call him and ask to borrow his guardian?”

“Maybe, but he’s been having some issues with it since San Diego. When he sent me the check, he mentioned in a letter that he thought the spirit might be going senile. It might not be reliable.”

Lon scratched his eyebrow and pursed his lips. “All this talk about bargains . . . what if we summon something ourselves and bargain for a translation?”

Summon a demon and barter for information? Great. That’s the last thing I wanted to do.

Then a thought struck me. We might not have to barter at all. A demon owed me a favor. I’d saved his ass from the Hellfire caves. His ass, and other serviceable parts of his Æthyric body.

“Ha!” I cried out.

“What?”

“Mr. Butler,” I said, suddenly energized, “how would you feel about summoning an incubus with me tonight?”

Lon watched me prepare the summoning circle. My aching leg was bandaged, and I’d changed into clean clothes, but it was nearly dark outside and getting colder every minute. I wanted to get this done pronto so we could head back to his warm house and watch monster movies with Jupe. It was also taco night. Lon’s grilled carne asada would make everything better.

“If you really want to be impregnated by demon seed, I’d be happy to comply,” he joked. “There’s no need to call up an incubus for that.”

I glanced up from a photocopy of the incubus seal. “Lord knows you’re good at impregnating, but I’m gonna have to pass, thanks.”