Drawing a magic circle just isn’t the same when you’re under a blank check and poisoned with aconite.
CeCe had to hold on to me as we walked down the narrow stairwell into my basement. I probably would have fallen down the steps. The edges of my vision were just a little too blurry and I was just a little too unsteady.
CeCe smelled like lake water, floral perfume, wildflowers, and rot. Normally, I wouldn’t have minded, but tonight, she was going to make me lose my lunch. Yet she was the only thing keeping me from falling down and busting my head open. I guess I had to take my help any way I could get it.
I sat on the bottom step and watched like an invalid as Bo fetched birthday candles, string, and chalk from my cabinet and drew a magic circle and pentagram in the middle of my basement floor. Thank God he could cobble together a circle as quickly as I could, but normally, I would have done it.
Bo set a tie-dye blanket in the outer circle and invited me. We sat down and lit the candles. CeCe and Natkaal waited in the stairwell, shrouded by shadows. CeCe cupped a hand around her damaged wrist and rubbed it gingerly.
“Who you gonna call?” Bo asked.
I needed someone I could trust. Family. Someone who knew the supernatural.
I loved my wife and trusted her with many things, but she would be of no help to me tonight.
My mom and dad deserved a rest.
I closed my eyes.
“In the cabinet, there’s a box with mementos. Get out the autographed baseball. I need that for attraction purposes.”
Bo got the ball and returned, marveling at it.
“Sheeeeet, Negro, you got a signed baseball by Ozzie Smith and didn’t tell me? Cardinals legend, baby!”
The ball was just as heavy as I remembered. I ran my fingers along the rawhide and stitches, thinking of the time my son and I waited in a long line after a baseball game at the old Busch Stadium for Marcus’s favorite player to sign it. It was a St. Louis summer day where the air was like soup and you could see it swirling if you stood still long enough. I smelled the popcorn in the air, and heard the big stadium sweepers humming down the concourse as we waited in line outside the clubhouse for all the baseball players to emerge after the game for a quick round of autographs.
I smiled as I imagined my son yelling with victory and staring at the ball as we rode home. He kept it on top of his bookshelf until he died.
I couldn’t think of Marcus without feeling pain either. That too-familiar knot bloomed in my throat when I thought about him practicing necromancy, sitting in a magic circle just like me, and—I had to stop myself.
“Marcus Broussard, I send out a beacon of light to you to ask for your help. Please stop and offer your assistance.”
My furnace cycled on, sending a rush of warmth across the basement as my ducts rattled quietly.
An amorphous, silver outline appeared in the inner circle. A golden core pulsed inside of it, faint at first.
“Dad,” my son said as his core grew brighter.
“Good to see you, son,” I said.
“You’ve been through a lot since we talked last,” he said.
I laughed. “The problems come to me. I’m helping out a friend.”
“The demon that saved Malcolm,” Marcus said. “Yeah, Nana and Grandpa told me about that. I guess that makes sense.”
“Son, I need some help,” I said. “You’re the best one for the job.”
“Just say the word,” Marcus said.
The flames in my furnace swelled, subsided, then switched blue.
My supernatural senses tingled.
Bo wrinkled his face. “What the—”
Marcus’s core dissolved. A demonic scream erupted from the circle, with a force that blew a torrent of wind in my face.
Troxiel, the centipede demon, was rolled into a ball in the inner circle. He barely fit in it, and his ball form looked like a poundcake made from human waste. Bloodshot human eyes blinked open all over his shell. He spoke, but his mouth was somewhere inside his rolled up mass. His voice was chilling and distant.
“How quaint,” the demon said. “A father talking to a son.”
Natkaal was at the outside of the circle in an instant, gnashing his teeth.
“Troxiel, get out of the circle!” he cried.
“Did you forget our threat?” the centipede demon asked, laughing. “Now we have your attention. And there’s nothing you or this lich can do about it now.”
All of the demon’s eyes narrowed.
“No cutting me open this time, lich!”
“Not this time,” CeCe said, “but there will be a next time.”
“Leave the circle so I can speak to my son,” I said sharply. “You won’t like what I do when demons interfere with my family reunions.”
“Idle threats,” Troxiel said. “I have no complaints against you, necromancer. I will release your son to you under a single condition. Break this magic circle and release me into the world of the living so that I may destroy the traitor Natkaal.”
“And the rest of us along with him,” I said. “I know your games.”
Natkaal barked in his harsh demonic tongue, and Troxiel fired back something that sounded like curse words.
“You heard my demand, necromancer,” Troxiel said. “Until then, no spirits for you.”
The centipede demon laughed wildly, his chilling voice shaking my walls.
Then the furnace cycled off, and he was gone.