“Keep what, exactly?” Granuaile asked. “What was this all about?”
“Souls. The demon barker wanted to move up in the underworld, and this was his scheme. Make people willingly choose hell and then kill them.”
“But how could they possibly get away with it? I mean, look at all those poor people. Nobody noticed?”
“This was likely the first time they tried it on a large scale. On the heaven side of the tent, they have an imp slapping a memory charm on people as they walk out. Keeps them from searching for their friends when they don’t come out, and when they finally realize they’ve lost their friends, their memories will tell them they couldn’t possibly have lost them here. By the time missing-persons reports actually get filed, the carnival is on its way out of town. The ghouls would have stayed in this chamber and eaten until all the evidence was gone, and you know how it goes—no body, no crime. The mass disappearance would get explained as an alien abduction before somebody suspected a mass murder underground.”
“Well, we’re not just going to leave them all here, are we?”
I surveyed the ruin and shook my head. “No. Their families deserve closure. The elemental can move their bodies to the surface for us when the coast is clear.”
“Okay.” Granuaile returned her attention to the portal. “So if you lifted that cover right now, we could jump into hell?”
“Or something could jump out, yes. And it would drain a lot of power from the earth while it was open. We can destroy it pretty easily, though.”
Binding like to like using the energy of the earth, I fused all the salt crystals so that they lifted from the ground and met above the iron cover, forming a ball. I let it go and it dropped onto the cover. The salt had rested in shallow troughs traced by a finger, so I erased those as well by smoothing out the ground. I checked the circle in the magical spectrum to make sure it was safe before moving the cover. There was no telltale glow of magic anywhere around it, and the cover could be broken down and reabsorbed into the earth.
“Kick the cover a bit for me?” I asked. I doubted I could make it budge in my condition. Binding spells, by comparison, were simple, since they used Amber’s energy, not my own. Granuaile pushed the iron disc a few inches with her foot, and the ground underneath remained satisfyingly solid. The ball of bound salt on top rolled off. Satisfied that the situation couldn’t get any worse, I informed Amber that the portal was destroyed and asked her to create a path to the surface for us. As we watched, the earth itself created a stairway leading up from the base of the nearest wall.
I cast camouflage on all three of us, since appearing dressed in blood in the midst of a carnival might incite some comment. We emerged behind a row of gaming booths, and the stairway closed behind us. We took a moment to reacquaint ourselves with what fresh air smelled like. The voice of the carnie running the milk-bottle booth was taunting new marks.
“Be right back,” I said, and left Granuaile and Oberon to check on the tent, though I couldn’t muster much of a pace. Still, I saw that the hulk at the entrance was gone and that someone had called the police. The exit was manned by officers too, and there was no trace of the little imp girl or the people inside who’d served as the bearded lady, the three-armed man, and so on. The police clearly hadn’t found any bodies yet or they would have been doing more than simply closing the exhibit. Any report the police received would have been for the imp whose neck I’d snapped—a mundane affair as far as they knew. No one who had seen the supernatural had survived except for us. The imps who’d escaped would have to be hunted down as a matter of principle, but they didn’t have the power to reopen a portal by themselves. We could afford time to recuperate and think of how best to proceed.
I returned to Granuaile and Oberon behind the game booths and dissolved our camouflage, since we were alone, and if someone spied us, they wouldn’t see the blood right away in the dark. Granuaile was squatting down and staring at the ground, arms resting on her thighs and hands clasped between her knees. All around us, oblivious carnival goers continued to seek entertainment. The lights and sounds of the midway, bright and alluring before, now grated on my nerves. We couldn’t be amused by those rides anymore. I squatted next to her in the same position.
“I told you once what choosing this life could mean for you personally, but those were just words,” I said. “Now you know.”
Granuaile nodded jerkily. “Yes, I do.” She was trembling all over, coming down from the adrenaline and perhaps entering shock now that the enormity of what had happened was settling in.
“But you did well in there,” I said. “Thanks for the assist.”
“Same to you.” Granuaile’s lip shook and a tear leaked out of her eye. “I didn’t have time to think. My mom could have been in that room.”
“Yes. I’m relieved she wasn’t. Great time to go on a cruise.”
She wiped at her cheek and sniffed. “But somebody’s mom is in there. Probably some people I know too.”
“That’s most likely true. But we couldn’t have saved any more than we did. You do realize that we definitely saved some people tonight by shutting that down? Probably hundreds, or even thousands, if they planned to keep doing this in other places.”
“Yeah. But I can’t feel good about that now. I’m thinking of all those we didn’t save.”
“Understood.” Oberon moved closer to Granuaile, dipped his head under her hand, and flipped it up, inviting her to pet him. She hugged him around the neck and cried on him a little bit, and he bore it in silence—or at least silence as far as my apprentice was concerned.
I don’t think so. Probably best not to bring it up. You can see that she loves you. And so do I.
You know it is. But to erase any doubts, I’m going to see if we can arrange a liaison. An amorous rendezvous.
Oberon’s tail began to wag.
We will call her Noche. There will be sausage and occasion to frolic.
Oberon got so excited about this news that he barked, startling Granuaile. She reared back and he turned his head, licking her face.
“What! Oberon!” She toppled backward and hit her head on the back of the gaming booth. “Ow!” Then she laughed as Oberon swooped in and slobbered on her some more. The laughing, however, proved a gateway to sobs as some of the shock wore off, and the restrained tears she had shed earlier gave way to a more cathartic release.
Oberon folded his legs and laid his giant head in Granuaile’s lap. She petted him with her left hand and bent her head down over him, dropping tears into his fur as I sat back from my squat to rest against the booth wall beside her, taking her right hand. She gripped it tightly.
“I’m sorry,” she said between sobs. “There were just so many of them.”
“No, it’s fine. It really is. I understand. And I would understand if you’d rather rethink this and do something else.”
“No,” she said quickly, and looked up at me, shaking her head. “No. This is what I want to do. I want to save people and save the earth too. More than ever.”
“Okay.”
She nodded at me. “Okay.” She let go of my hand and returned to petting and crying on Oberon, and we both waited patiently for that storm to run its course, knowing that there would be calm and recovery soon enough and, with it, burgeoning growth.
One way or another, dogs make everything better.
Except my fear of Kansas. I still have that.
This story, narrated by Atticus, takes place during Granuaile’s training period, after the events of “The Demon Barker of Wheat Street.”
Anyone who’s had more than one child—or more than one pet, for that matter—knows all about the grief and stress that comes with having multiple demands on their time. Imagine being the only Druid that the world’s elementals can call
on for the better part of two millennia. There would, admittedly, be long stretches where everything was just fine, followed by intense periods where everything happened at once. Training a new Druid in secret was like that—long stretches of peaceful routine interrupted by days of time-consuming errands. When our normal errands were compounded by requests from elementals in New Zealand and Zimbabwe and a sly, half-drawled demand from Coyote—all on the same day—Granuaile overheard me mutter that it was as bad as the Gold Rush and asked me about it later, when we had returned to our routine of mental and physical training followed by relaxed evenings in front of the fire pit.
“What happened during the Gold Rush, Atticus?” she asked, as the logs popped and sent orange sparks into brief arcs of glory. We were having barbecue, smoked brisket and baked beans washed down with some cold beers. I told Oberon to stay away from the beans, to save my nose later.
“A bunch of idiots were into summoning demons at the time, and I had to pop around the world to deal with them when I was supposed to be hiding.”
“You mean like covens summoning hordes of hellions, or what?”
“No, individuals in different places. And if they’re summoning them, trading their souls or whatever for a favor, and then banishing them, that’s usually fine and none of my business. Elementals inform me that something’s being pulled through the planes just in case it gets out of hand, and sometimes it does.”
“Out of hand how?”
“Well, you remember what happened in Kansas not so long ago?”
“I could hardly forget those ghouls and all those poor people. The smell of it still haunts me.”
Oberon, my Irish wolfhound, with whom I have a mental bond, paused briefly from devouring his barbecue to chime in.
“The danger to the earth wasn’t so much the ghouls—I mean, they were certainly a danger to the people they were killing, but not a danger to Gaia. The danger was the demon who’d opened that portal to hell and was draining the earth to keep it open. When the demons get loose, they almost always want to bring as many of their buddies along as they can to party with them, and that is without exception at Gaia’s expense.”
“So demons got loose in the mid-nineteenth century?”
“Just one. But a really old and powerful one.”
“Yes, Oberon, much worse than Gozer the Gozerian.”
“Excellent. Do we get a story for dessert, then?” Granuaile asked. “It sounds like this will be most instructive.”
“All right. After we do the dishes and wrap up the leftovers.”
—
The trouble began in Palermo, Sicily, in the middle of January 1848, when a Qabbalist summoned a demon to aid him in fomenting revolution against the Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies—
—
“No, Oberon. It means he was just one of several different kings from the House of Bourbon that ruled some European countries at the time. Monarchies were dying out and facing plenty of opposition in 1848—lots of people wanted constitutions and an end to feudal systems—but they weren’t entirely gone.”
“Bourbon was his name, not his game.”
“What? You didn’t even let me finish my first sentence!”
“What if there are poodles in this story, Oberon? You will have given one star to frolicsome, poufy poodles from another age.”
“Let me continue without interruption and you’ll find out.”
—
As I was saying, the Sicilian rebellion had a bit of help from a demon summoning that allowed Sicily to remain free until May of 1849, when Ferdinand II—the Bourbon king in question—reconquered it. I never bothered to go there, because the demon had been dismissed successfully and I didn’t travel through Tír na nÓg unless I absolutely had to. But I traced the trouble back there later on, to a Qabbalist named Stefano Pastore, who fled Sicily in May and came to California, having heard about the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada. Like so many others, he thought he’d find his fortune there, picking up gold nuggets off the ground as the first few prospectors in the area were able to do.
But by the time he got there in the fall of 1849, the easy grab-’n’-go gold was all gone. You had to dig a shaft or pan for it, and there was plenty of competition. Stefano Pastore didn’t have the patience for such labor. Once the snow fell in the Sierra Nevada, he spent the winter in San Francisco, watching the miners who struck it rich burn away their fortunes in gambling or grow them by investing in large chunks of real estate or business ventures. He didn’t think them particularly brilliant or deserving of their fortunes: They’d just been lucky enough to get there first. That thought festered and convinced him that working hard for his fortune was a sucker’s game. So when spring arrived in 1850 and the miners headed for the hills again with picks and pans, he stayed behind to make his own luck, with the help of a pet demon. He probably thought, What the hell, my last summoning gave Sicilians sixteen months of freedom under the rule of Ruggero Settimo, and I could use sixteen months or more of being ridiculously rich.
So he got his candles and salt and all the other paraphernalia he needed for a major summoning and carefully inscribed his circles and wards on the floor and waited for the proper phase of the moon to spin around on April 26. He completed the summoning just fine—I was chilling out at the southern tip of South America on that date and got the report from Sequoia, the elemental for that stretch of California coast from the Bay Area up to the Klamath Mountains.
But it wasn’t long before the report stating the simple fact of the summoning became an outright request for aid. Sequoia woke me in the dead of night, in fact. //Druid required now// the call came, shuddering up my body and filtering into my consciousness. //Large demon free//
I’d been staying out of North America as much as possible once the Old World discovered the New World, because it quite frankly depressed me. Gripped by the unshakable conviction that they were perfectly justified in doing so—that, in fact, it was all their god’s plan somehow and he’d be pleased by their behavior—Europeans were busy wiping out Native Americans and enslaving Africans and doing whatever they could to exclude all nonwhite people from sharing in the riches to be gained by exploiting the continent’s abundant natural resources. I would have been in a constant rage if I had to deal with that level of stupid cruelty on a daily basis—and there was nothing I could do about it if I didn’t want Aenghus Óg to find me and deprive the earth of its only protector or get myself killed some other way while trying to protect humanity from itself—so my best option for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to chill out where other people were not.
Sequoia’s call forced me to shift into the redwoods near San Francisco and witness the great American Gold Rush. Once I got into town, I noticed immediately that I wasn’t dressed properly, and so did everyone else: It was the rare individual who wore a sword instead of a six-shooter. But I’d worry about blending in later.
I made my way to the boardinghouse where Stefano Pastore had taken a room. Sequoia directed me to where the portal in t
he planes had been opened. She could tell me the equivalent spot on the earth where the drain on her resources had occurred, but I discovered that it was a three-story building and had to search the rooms on each level until I found the gory aftermath on the third floor.
Stefano Pastore’s body lay sprawled in a pool of his own blood, his throat crushed and his blue swollen tongue hanging out of his mouth, eyes staring at the ceiling. The blood originated from a bonus and unnecessary disembowelment, considering his crushed airway. It had congealed and darkened now, the oxygen all gone, and stained the ring of salt he lay in. There was another, smaller ring nearby, into which he had summoned the demon. This was the setup diagrammed in The Greater Key of Solomon, albeit with some minor changes. He was supposed to be protected in one ring of salt while the demon was supposed to be contained in the other, but both rings had been deliberately broken by the toe of someone’s boot. That spurred plenty of questions. Had it been Pastore’s own boot? If so, he’d win an award for one of the most elaborate ritual suicides in history. But if it hadn’t been Pastore, who had broken the rings and gotten away with it? There weren’t any other bodies in the room. So the demon either purposely let the person live or he possessed the person. I was betting on the latter, because so-called “large demons” are rarely up for buddy capers with a random human. Tying up victims with their own intestines is much more their idea of a good time. And besides, demons can’t walk around without people noticing the smell. The only way they can pass undetected is to do what we saw them do in Kansas: possess a human, or animate a person’s corpse, and let the human façade disguise the demon’s true nature. And as long as that possessed human wore boots or walked on a floor separated from the earth, Sequoia wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the demon’s location for me.
I needed more information, but there wasn’t a convenient journal lying around in Pastore’s hand to tell me which demon he’d summoned. Which meant I’d have to wait for the demon to start whipping up some chaos and try to catch up.