Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(81)

I crept to the window and peeked through the curtains. Not much light left outside. The line of trees that created a privacy screen at the front of my lawn cast long shadows. I couldn’t see any movement below. My street was quiet. No one walking, no cars passing by. No trick-or-treaters, thanks to the countywide ban.

Jupe whispered in my ear, “I can’t hear the noise anymore.”

Foxglove snarled.

A dark shape bobbed outside the edge of the window. Jupe jumped back. Foreboding chills slithered down my back as the shape glided fully into view. It was a face. Grace Forsythe’s face. She was floating in the air like a ballon.

Her gentle blue halo was now fireball-red. It rippled around her head and shoulders like a wind-whipped cape. A fragment of Duke Chora’s goetia entry popped into my mind: He appeareth from above as a Goodly Knight with a Cloak of Red Velvet.

Not a cloak, but a halo, from above: Chora could fly without wings. That’s how he was snatching the children unnoticed.

Ms. Forsythe dipped and rose, peering into the window with a foreign intelligence behind her eyes—the hippie teacher who encouraged Jupe’s wild imagination was no longer home. Her gaze flicked around my bedroom until it lit on Jupe. Then something changed. Her face twisted unnaturally like she was in pain. The red halo pulsed and disappeared. I saw a dim circle of her old blue halo shimmer around her bobbed hair as her eyes fluttered shut.

Her shoulders sagged and without further warning, she went limp as a rag doll and plunged downward—no floating or gliding, just a limp weight being dropped from the sky like a bag of discarded garbage. The fleshy thud her body made when it hit the ground was muted and distant.

We all gasped in horror. I pressed my face to the glass to see if she was moving below, but I jerked back when a blinding ball of light exploded next to me and Bob screamed. I crashed into Lon as my eyes focused on what was now, inexplicably, standing in my bedroom—a towering demon dressed like a colonial soldier in a long, trailing gray coat with rows of gold buttons. His face was pale, his horns dark and burnished. He carried the impressive build of a warrior and held himself with a dignified posture that came with power and rank.

Despite the change in attire, it was, without doubt, the same beautiful demon that Merrin summoned into the fiery circle at the Silent Temple.

My memory from that day suddenly overlapped with the engraving of the demon who commanded two legions of Dragoons. . . .

Grand Duke Chora had materialized inside my bedroom.

All my wards went off at once and blared inside my head as a network of fine blue lines bloomed in the air around us. The demon wailed in pain; a scaled tail whipped out from beneath the hem of his military coat. He growled a single foreign word, and the blue lines transformed to pink—the same pink that had lit the Æthyric wards at the cannery and the putt-putt course. The ward shattered into fragments and disappeared.

A clever and sly thinker, this Grand Duke uncovereth Hidden Paths and knoweth High Magics to Trap and Snare Enemies.

Someone who knows how to set traps knows how to get around them. And once he’d disabled the main house ward, Chora didn’t hesitate. His arm swung and slammed into Jupe’s head with terrifying force. Jupe cried out as his body snapped sideways and crumpled to the floor at an awkward angle. He didn’t move. I shrieked and dropped to my knees beside him. A groan slipped from his mouth when I touched his face. But only for a moment. He flew out from beneath my fingertips when Chora seized him by the leg. With one violent tug, the demon dragged Jupe across the floor and effortlessly slung him over his shoulder.

Lon bellowed and lunged at the demon. His arms grabbed air. Chora had already disappeared with Jupe’s limp body in his arms.

Shocked silence fell as we stared at the spot where Chora had just stood. Having summoned and banished Æthyic demons for years, I mistakenly thought for half a second that the demon was taking Jupe back to the Æthyr. Then my brain unknotted and I ran to the window, just in time to see Ms. Forsythe’s body reanimate and float up from my lawn.

In one arm, she grasped Jupe’s doubled-over body by the waist. Her other arm dangled strangely and was covered in blood that had seeped down from a large wound in her head. Her body was half broken from the fall but Chora was using it anyway. She rose higher, clearing the trees lining the front of my lawn.

Why was he back inside an injured body? He had just been solid in his own body inside my house—surely that was preferable. I recalled Merrin telling us in the restroom of the Vietnamese restaurant that Chora had gathered enough strength to become temporarily corporeal after the ritual. Clearly he had done just that, right here in my house . . . in order to slip inside my wards. He must not be able to remain in that state, or he wouldn’t be using Ms. Forsythe’s damaged body again—Chora needed it to move around.

We all watched in horror as the silhouetted shapes of Jupe and his teacher glided over the rooftops of the houses across the street and disappeared with the last slice of daylight.

Lon’s anguished cry echoed around my bedroom, shattering my heart into a million pieces. I didn’t know what to do. My mind didn’t want to accept it—utter disbelief. It took every ounce of willpower I had to shut down my out-of-control emotions and focus.

“He’s still alive,” I blurted, knowing this was little consolation. “Chora needs a vessel for the ritual, not a dead body. Hajo will find Jupe’s trail. It’ll be even easier for him than the kid from the parade float, because I just touched Jupe, and we have lots of Jupe’s things here for Hajo to use as dowsing objects. Strong energy. Fresh.”