Kindling the Moon (3 page)

After I made my way back behind the bar, I picked up the remote and started to hit rewind when I noticed what was on the screen and froze. A special news report had interrupted the program. I took it off mute and ignored the murmured complaints about another delay in the evening's festivities. A petite Latina reporter spoke into a microphone beneath a red umbrella.

“I repeat, local authorities here in Dallas are trying to confirm whether the couple in the parking garage are indeed the notorious serial killers, Enola and Alexander Duval, who made international headlines when they were charged with the deaths of three rival occultists seven years ago, known collectively as the Black Lodge slayings. The footage we're about to show you was just released to us, taken this morning from a gas station near the airport.”

A clip from the surveillance video played. Clear as day, there were my parents getting into an SUV. What the hell were they thinking? They weren't supposed to be in the States; they hadn't been here in years.

Right after we faked our deaths and went into hiding, I saw them every few months. Then a few months turned into a year, and a year into three. I didn't think about them much, unless I heard their names mentioned in some true-crime-exposé rerun on basic cable.

The reporter continued. “The fact that the killers are still
alive and in Texas after all these years is astonishing. There's speculation that their daughter, also a member of their former occult order, could still be alive too. Now, back to the studio for Tom's commentary. Tom?”

I stood stiff as a soldier and stared at the screen. I was dimly aware that my hands were trembling. My vision tunneled, then everything went black.

When I came to, I lay on the floor inside the Tambuku office looking at two pairs of feet; one was wearing purple sneakers … Amanda. The other feet were bare and belonged to my business partner, Kar Yee. She never wore shoes at work. She would begrudgingly put them on if forced to meander past the bar, but that was her limit. No threat of broken glass and spills or health department requirements would sway her; she even drove her car without shoes.

The two women were arguing. Amanda was trying to convince Kar Yee that she could stand in for me at the bar, begging her not to call in a replacement bartender.

“I won't screw anything up,” Amanda promised.

“You're too slow mixing drinks,” Kar Yee said. “
Too
.
Slow
. Do you know why? You talk too much.” A petite Chinese Earthbound, Kar Yee had perfect skin, catlike eyes, and a chin-length bob with severe, straight bangs. Two long, thin locks of hair framed her face, several inches longer than the rest of her bob, and she sculpted these into sharp points that dangled to her shoulders. All of this was surrounded by a stunning aqua-blue halo.

I cracked my neck and pushed myself up off the floor as
the two of them continued to squabble. “Give me a few minutes, then I can finish my shift.”

“Oh, you're awake,” Kar Yee noted without emotion.

Amanda groped my clammy forehead. “Are you okay? What happened? Are you sick?”

“I'm fine,” I said, pushing her hand away. Then I remembered what caused the blackout. A pang of worry tightened my chest. “I mean, uh, yeah. Probably getting sick, that's all.”

“You want me to mix drinks for a few minutes?” Amanda asked me. “Mika can handle my tables.”

Kar Yee made a perturbed noise and folded her arms across her slender chest. Amanda often played us like a mom and dad. If one said no, she'd corner the other to get the answer that she wanted. Still, running the back office was Kar Yee's responsibility; managing the bar and our small staff was mine. My call, not hers, and I didn't feel like wrangling someone else to come in and sub for me on their night off.

“Who's watching the bar?” I asked.

“Mika, and Bob's helping her guard the cash register. Can I mix drinks? Please? I won't touch your potions this time, I swear.”

“They aren't potions …” Well, technically that's exactly what they were, but whatever. “Ugh. Fine. Go. Don't let people talk you into adding extra shots without paying. Buzz if you need help.”

“Thanks, Cady!”

Amanda sprang away as Kar Yee handed me a glass of water and leaned against her desk.

“What's really wrong?” she asked after Amanda was gone. “You look like shit. Your halo is all … bleh.” She made a sour face and wiggled her fingers. “In trouble, maybe? It better not interfere with business. There are two big concerts down the
street at the Cypress Club this weekend that are going to keep us slammed.”

Kar Yee's no-nonsense way of thinking made her a great business partner, but not a warm-and-fuzzy friend. Most of the time this worked out well for me because she didn't pry into my background too much. Sentimental friends were a liability for someone in my situation.

“It's probably not a big deal. Just something that I need to sort out. Tomorrow's my night off, so hopefully I can take care of it before Saturday.”

“Hmph.”

Her usual response. It meant, I know you're lying to me, but I'm not asking.

I met Kar Yee at college in Seattle, a year after going into hiding, and right after I had assumed my current identity. Before that, I'd been traveling around the country under several other aliases in an attempt to elude our rival magical organization and any stray FBI investigators with nagging suspicions about my parents' faked deaths.

Kar Yee's parents lived in Hong Kong. She came to the States to study international law, but ditched the law program for a degree in business. During her second year in school, she decided that she didn't want to go back home, so she married an American boy to get her U.S. citizenship, then divorced him after INS lost interest in them. Even though they'd never consummated the sham marriage, her fake husband seemed genuinely upset to see her go.

After college, it was her idea to move to California. Most Earthbounds prefer a Mediterranean climate near a large body of water, which is why there are so many living in our area. (If you want to avoid demons, try the Midwest—virtually demon free, at least from what I've heard.)

Once we got to California, it was my idea to start up the tiki bar. We traveled up and down the northern coast for almost a month before we settled on the city of Morella. Bordering the Big Sur region, Morella is the fourth largest city in the state, half an hour from the ocean, and a couple hours south of San Francisco, if you drive fast. And there were Earthbounds aplenty here; you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one. The blocks surrounding Tambuku are lined with demon-friendly businesses. So when we found this location for lease—half underground, the entrance at the foot of a short flight of cement steps down from the sidewalk—we knew it was perfect. We'd been in business for almost two years, a success from day one.

Amanda's voice came through the speakerphone on Kar Yee's desk. “Uh, Arcadia? Is there more white rum out here somewhere? I kinda tipped over the bottle you were using and I can't find—oh wait. Never mind. Crap. A big group of people just came in the door.” A loud chorus from the bar rattled the speaker before she hung up.
Paranormal Patrol
was still going strong.

“Can you help her?” I gave Kar Yee a pleading look. “I need a few minutes alone to make a phone call.”

She shot me a suspicious look, then nodded silently and complied, closing the door behind her. I locked it before pushing up the sleeve of my T-shirt to reveal a raised design on the inside of my arm, between my wrist and elbow.

Inked in white with a thick needle, the tattoo isn't noticeable unless you're looking hard—a long, oval Egyptian
cartouche
that contains seven hidden sigils, which I can identify like Braille from the scarring. Most of them are protective wards: instant, ACME-style spells for protection and stealth. Having them permanently affixed to my skin allows me to
avoid hand-drawing the symbols in a pinch and could mean the difference between life or death … or between staying hidden and being caught.

One of the symbols, though, contains a homing sigil for my personal guardian, an Æthyric messenger spirit that can be called for information or help. Known as Hermeneus entities, these beings are coveted by magicians. To petition their aid, you have to woo them in a special ritual. If one of them takes a liking to you, it might offer up its services—either a onetime deal or a more permanent situation, in which they form a link to your Heka signature, something as unique to each person as a fingerprint.

Once linked to you, a guardian will be your loyal eyes and ears on the Æthyric plane, able to glean bits of hidden knowledge, warn about Æthyric disturbances, and monitor spirits who are linked to other magicians. The magician's equivalent of the witch's familiar.

These Hermeneus spirits don't physically cross over from the Æthyr to our plane. Instead, they use Heka to transmit a kind of noncorporeal hologram of themselves. Because of this, they aren't much use for earthly tasks. All they can really do here is relay information from one magician to another. Before the phone was invented, this was probably helpful, but now? Not so much.

Unlike the binding triangle I'd just powered up in the bar, my guardian's homing sigil didn't need to be charged with Heka that had been kindled with electrical energy. It required a more passive, personal energy gained from bodily fluids. Might sound a little odd, but magicians have used fluids to charge spells for centuries: blood, saliva, sexual fluids, tears. Inside all of these is raw, unkindled Heka. The amount of raw Heka varies by fluid type—blood has more Heka than saliva,
for example—and it also varies person to person. Not that there's some lab test available to verify this, but I was pretty sure that my blood had a hell of a lot more Heka than the average person's. And this definitely gave me an advantage, magically speaking. Just as anybody can learn how to draw, anybody can learn to do magick; however, someone who lacks natural artistic talent might take twice as long to master the basics. And let's face it: that person might eventually learn to pull off a decent landscape, but they'll probably never be Michelangelo.

Ready to call my guardian, I stuck my finger in my mouth, extracted a small amount of Heka-rich saliva, then wiped it on my guardian's sigil. “Priya,” I whispered. “Come to me.”

A familiar wave of nausea rolled through my stomach. The air in front of me shuddered, and a wispy, glowing figure pulsed into view. Like other Hermeneus spirits, Priya has a birdlike head and a unisex body, too rugged to be female, too soft to be male.

Priya nodded at me, bending at the waist.
Command me
, it said inside my head.

“My parents are in trouble. They've been spotted by authorities in Texas and are no longer hidden. The Luxe Order will soon know that they're still alive, if their wards haven't already alerted them. Contact my parents' guardians in the Æthyr and relay this message. Wait for a response. I need to know what they want me to do to help. Go.”

Priya nodded and disappeared.

My guardian was my solitary link to my parents. Only in an emergency was I supposed to send it out to contact their guardians; I thought this qualified.

When I sent Priya out on these errands, the return time
varied. Sometimes the spirit would come back to me with a report after a few minutes, sometimes several hours later, I could never tell. So I plopped down on Kar Yee's chair and hoped it would be a short trip.

Opening one of the desk drawers, I reached toward the back until my fingers skimmed a stash of hand-rolled valrivia cigarettes. Calming like nicotine, but with a mild euphoric kick, valrivia doesn't trash your lungs the way tobacco does and is about as addictive as caffeine. Half the demon population has a valrivia habit. I picked up mine from Kar Yee in college. I'd already smoked two that day—my self-imposed limit—but under the circumstances, I thought I deserved another. I dug a lighter out of my jeans pocket and lit up.

It was hard for me to believe that it had been seven years since the so-called Black Lodge slayings had thrust my parents into the public spotlight, making them villains in the lead story of every news organization, half a dozen true crime novels, and God only knows how many television investigative reports. They even got their own trading cards, part of a collectible set of serial killer profile cards that included Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy. Classy.

Their sensational story was everything that the American public craved: gory murders, witchy ritual occultism, and a Bonnie and Clyde escape from the law with their daughter that ended tragically in their deaths.

Only, the three of us weren't dead, and my parents weren't guilty.

A repeat of an
American Killers
episode played on the muted television screen on the desk. It had been only a few hours since they'd been spotted, and already the stations were rearranging their programming to capitalize on the news story.

I turned off the television in disgust and took a few drags off my cigarette before my guardian reappeared.

May I show myself?
Priya's voice inquired in my head.

“Yes.” I crushed the remainder of the cig into a chipped ashtray shaped like a monkey head.

Priya's form took shape again in front of me.
Enola's guardian confirms that they are aware of the situation. The Luxe Order will try to hunt you down. She suggests you ward yourself. She will contact us when they are safe, and will give you a place and time to meet them. She also said it would be unwise to pursue any other communication with them at this time. It's too dangerous.

After years of little to no contact with my family, I was finally going to see them again? My heart fluttered, but I was still puzzled. “Why did they come into the States without warning me?”

I do not know. Enola's guardian was closemouthed.