Summoned

SUMMONED

TOR TEEN BOOKS BY ANNE M. PILLSWORTH

The Redemption’s Heir series

Summoned

Deeper
(forthcoming)

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

SUMMONED

Copyright © 2014 by Anne M. Pillsworth

All rights reserved.

A Tor Teen Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-3589-0 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4668-2657-1 (e-book)

CIP DATA—TK

Tor Teen books may be purchased for educational, business, or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or write [email protected].

First Edition: June 2014

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Deb, my wife and first and best beta reader, without whom Sean would still be summoning monsters only in my head. The page is a safer place for him.

Acknowledgments

The people behind this book are many. Way back in time, there was my storytelling Irishman of a father and my more practical mother, who supplied the slate-blue Royal portable I lugged around for so many apprentice years.

My first auditors and the actors in so many dramatizations of my juvenilia were niece Amy and nephews Tom and John and Bob and David. Special thanks to niece Buffy and nephew Sean for badgering me into telling them the whooooole story of
The Lord of the Rings
every time they visited. It was an invaluable exercise in epic structure and characterization!

Gretchen Robinson led a great writing seminar at the Attleboro Public Library, which led to the creation of my writing group, Interstate Writers. Thanks to them all, especially Ken!

Jared Millet, whom I met during a National Novel Writing Month, was one of the first to critique
Summoned,
and thanks must go to his sensibility and eagle eye.

James Frenkel acquired
Summoned
for Tor and did a fantastic edit from the finest points of grammar to the subtlest of big-picture themes. His suggestions have greatly enriched the underlying themes of the series. My editor, Miriam Weinberg, has added many fresh insights, and her contagious enthusiasm is a constant inspiration.

Craig Tenney of Harold Ober Associates is simply my dream agent. He is also a telepath, because every time I needed encouragement and a nudge, he sensed it and was there with a call or e-mail. I think I traded in most of my good-karma stamps when I found him, but it was a trade-in more than worth it!

And thanks far from least to Charles Arouth, my spiritual guide. He kept me going through many a down period with sage advice, such as “If you can think it, you can do it.”

I could always think it. With the help and encouragement of all above, I’ve finally done it.

Breath taken. Let’s do it again!

SUMMONED

1

Every
occult Web site agreed: For weird-ass books, Arkham was the center of the New England universe, and Horrocke’s Bookstore was the black hole at the center’s heart. Dad said that Sean had enough crazy stuff to read, since Uncle Gus had given him his Lovecraft collection. But Uncle Gus had also spilled that Cthulhu (aka Old Squid-Head) wasn’t just a monster Lovecraft had invented, he was a god in a totally legitimate mythology way older than the Egyptian and Greek ones. Since then, Sean had been nuts to go to Horrocke’s and get the real dope on Cthulhu, and so when Dad drove to Arkham to price a window restoration Sean and Eddy hitched a ride. Eddy insisted on sightseeing first, but once they hit the bookstore and found the weird-ass section even she had to admit the place lived up to its reputation. “Little Shoppe of Mysteries” was what TrueTomes.com called it. Hokey but accurate, because as Sean pulled a thick volume off the Cthulhu Mythos shelf a mystery ambushed him. .

Like its neighbors, the book he pulled (
Infinity Unimaginable
) was glossy new. The book that dropped, that he just managed to catch, was old as hell; even at arm’s length, it exuded the smell of an open tomb. Not a nasty mildewy rotting-flesh kind of tomb. More like a tomb in the desert, a Pharaoh’s crib, all cloves and ginger and—what was that other spice thing, the bitter one?—yeah, myrrh.

Sean shifted
Infinity Unimaginable
under his arm so he could inspect the mummy-book. It was in decent shape, the black leather spine intact and the stamped gold title only a little rubbed out.
The Witch Panic in Arkham
by Ezekiel Greene Phillips. Sean and Eddy had probably seen the guy’s grave in the Lich Street Burial Ground, where everyone was an Ezekiel or a Hepzibah or a Zacharias or some other Puritan name with a
z
in it.

He got a better armpit grip on
Infinity
and opened
The Witch Panic.…
Paper fluttered to the floor, but thank you, Jesus, it wasn’t a page from the book. The fallen bit was a newspaper clipping someone had used as a bookmark a hundred years ago, from the look of its brown and brittle edges. Sean parked both books and picked up the clipping. He’d been close on the hundred years. In fact, the clipping was older: At its top, he could make out
ham Advertiser, March 21, 1895
. “Ham” had to be Arkham. The city’s newspaper was still the
Advertiser,
dumb name, made you think the paper was one big classified section. Speaking of which, a couple columns of classified ads was what he lifted closer to his face, squinting at the minuscule type. One ad was circled in faded red:

Wanted, an apprentice in magic and in the service of its Masters. For particulars, apply to the Reverend Orne, [email protected].

That “apprentice in magic” part was freaky enough. It took Sean a second reading before he got the true freakiness of the ad. You were supposed to apply to the Reverend Orne by
e-mail
? In 1895?

“Eddy!” he said. Okay, he kind of yelled.

Her voice came from the back of the store. “What? God, tell the world.”

Sean grabbed his finds and threaded through stacks of new and used books to the locked cases that housed the really old stuff, the
tomes
. Eddy had been drooling over them since they’d arrived. She hadn’t run out of saliva yet, judging from the way she crouched in front of the current case, fingertips to carpet, a sprinter ready to explode out of the starting blocks and right through the protective glass.

“Look,” she said without turning to him. “This is like a wizard’s library.”

The case guarded books in Latin and German and French, in Greek and Arabic, in English rendered undecipherable by some kind of curly-swirly Gothic type, and the whole bunch of them were beat up with age. Sean would have been dripping spit, too, except what he had in his hands was even more exciting. “Eddy, check it—”

“Keep it down, will you?”

What, were they in church? He lowered his voice. “Check it out. I found this book.”

“One we can afford?” Eddy tapped a discreet price list posted on the glass, and there was nothing under a thousand dollars. She stood up sighing.

“This one about the Cthulhu Mythos.” He glanced inside
Infinity Unimaginable
. “It’s only twenty bucks.”

“Let’s see.”

“Wait, here’s something cooler.” He had put the newspaper clipping back in
The Witch Panic
for safekeeping. He eased it out. “Read that ad.”

“This is crazy old.” Eddy handled the clipping gingerly. “‘Gentleman recently graduated from Miskatonic University seeks position as tutor.’”

“No, the circled one.”

“‘Wanted, an apprentice in magic—’” Eddy shut up. Sean watched her eyes dart over the rest of the ad, then dart to the top of the clipping. Back to the ad. Then she turned the clipping over, but all it showed was a woman in a dress with sleeves a mile wide and waist about an inch around. Finally Eddy looked up, her forehead corrugated. “Where’d you get this?”

“When I got down the Mythos book, another book fell off the shelf. The ad was inside.”

Eddy relinquished the clipping and took
The Witch Panic in Arkham
. “This old book was with the new stuff?”

“Yeah. Only I didn’t see it until it fell. I guess it was stuck behind the other one.”

“Like someone hid it there?”

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

She leafed through the pages. “This was published the same year as the newspaper. Except the clipping’s got to be fake. Like a hoax. Or not even a hoax, because who’d believe in an e-mail address from 1895? Somebody made it for a joke.”

“It’s a damn good fake. It even smells old.”

“That’s because it’s been sitting in this smelly book.”

Leave it to Eddy to come up with a reasonable explanation. She had to be right, but Sean teased her a little. “I bet a time traveler went back to 1895 and put the ad in the newspaper, except he forgot how there wasn’t any Internet yet.”

Eddy kept leafing. “We better give
Witch Panic
to Mr. Horrocke. It probably belongs with the rare books.”

“And then the time traveler was all, ‘How come nobody’s answering my ad?’”

“Shove it.”

“And so he sends the ad into the future in
Witch Panic,
and it lands on the shelf behind
Infinity,
just as I’m taking it down.”

“No, because if that happened, the book and the ad would be new.” Eddy had reached the index and was trailing her finger down the page. “There,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”

“What?”

“The guy in the ad, redemption@RevOrne? Redemption Orne’s mentioned in this book. He was married to Patience.”

And Patience Orne was a total rock-star witch. Sean had been reading her name on historical markers all day. “Here’s where Patience Orne lived.” “Here’s the courthouse where Patience Orne was tried.” “Here’s the base of the gallows on which Patience Orne swung.” “But if Redemption’s from Puritan times, how come he’s advertising in 1895?”

Sean had walked into it, and Eddy pounced without mercy. “Because he’s a time traveler?” she said.

“Ouch.”

“Got another explanation?”

“No, but you do.”

“Because some crazy Redemption Orne fan boy stuck a fake clipping in the book?” Eddy handed Sean
The Witch Panic
. “It’s almost five. We’ve got to meet your dad. Are you buying
Infinity
?”

“I’m buying them both.”

“You won’t have enough money for the old one.”

Probably not, but he was going to try. When a book jumped at you from a shelf, what else could you do?

In
the front room at Horrocke’s, where a college girl stood behind the counter and the smell of hazelnut coffee filled the air, books wouldn’t have the nerve to jump at customers. The back room was a whole different world. First off, you came in through a door with a brass plaque that read:
QUISCUNQUE QUAERAT, INTRA
. According to Eddy, who’d just aced her sophomore year of Latin, that meant “Whoever seeks, enter” or, in plain English, “Looking for something? Get your butt in here.”

They had gotten their butts in, and they had been rewarded with row after row of enticingly labeled shelves. No
SELF-HELP
,
GENERAL FICTION
, or
COOKBOOKS
here. It was
ALCHEMY
,
ASTROLOGY
,
CABALISM
,
NECROMANCY
,
VOODOO
,
WICCA
, and more. Lots more, including the cases of tomes beyond which Mr. Horrocke sat, dwarfed by his mahogany desk, sipping espresso from a tiny white cup.

Horrocke had been sipping from the cup when they’d first ventured into the back room. For someone who put away so much caffeine, he looked amazingly sleepy. He was a skinny old guy to begin with, in a navy suit with a red silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. The handkerchief looked like the tongue of a smart-ass who’d been sucking a cherry Popsicle. Even creepier, Horrocke’s own tongue was Popsicle red. As Sean and Eddy approached, he touched it to his lower lip and set the tiny cup on a tiny saucer. Under the desk, his jittering feet clicked on the floorboards as if he wore tap shoes. Maybe after they had gone, he would dance it up around the stacks.

The idea of Horrocke getting down almost made Sean lose it. Good thing Eddy started the talking. It sounded like she’d already made friends with the old guy, probably while he was mopping up her drool with the red handkerchief. “Hey, Mr. Horrocke. I think Sean’s found a book he wants.”

On cue, Sean put down
Infinity Unimaginable
.

“Ah,” Horrocke said. “An excellent choice’ Edna. I always recommend Professor Marvell’s books. He’s chief archivist at the Miskatonic University Library, you know. One of the world’s foremost authorities on the Cthulhu cult. Indeed.”