Mother pauses her educational monologue about the deficits of men in general and me in particular when we reach her overgrown house, the cottage frame completely hidden by wild black vines with small dark blooms. This is one of the few spots in Hell where things grow.
Lilith herds Callie through the open door. Once inside, we’re crowded into the common room stuffed full of herbs and random objects amassed over the centuries. Mother is a bit of a pack rat.
I see Callie hesitate, wanting to examine everything, starting with the stuffed alligator extended from the ceiling. But she’s hustled into the nearest bath chamber.
“I’ve set out everything you need, my dear girl,” Lilith says, more warmly than I will ever merit. “I watched your approach.”
Mother shuts the door to the bathing room before Callie gets in a word. She has yet to greet Porsoth.
She watched me carrying Callie. I’ve no doubt when she turns to catch my eye. My mother’s smile is eager. She doesn’t get many visitors out here, and she’s long since ceased being entertained by expeditions onto Earth. I asked her once if she ever got lonely and she laughed and said, “How can I be lonely when I have the best of company at all times?”
Mother and I have some personality traits in common. We both wear our confidence like armor, confident in the magnetism of our charisma. I’m not nearly as judgmental as she is, though.
“Your father paid me a visit. He was in rare form,” she says. “Did he meet her?”
“I imagine he told you all about the deadline he gave me when he loaned you the World Watcher. Where is it, by the way? And why did you ask for it?”
Mother extends a hand and tweaks my chin. “Not yet. Tell me what you mean for that girl.” She pauses. “I like her. You should leave her be.”
“We’re a little past that.”
Mother’s cool eyes do what she’s best at: judging me. She finds me lacking too, but in a different way than Father. All she sees when she looks at me is him, and her own mistakes in that particular arena. He lured her here with the promise of immortality, a family, power. Bonus that her creator would not be a fan of the address. And here she is, her son (when she’d prefer a daughter) raised half a kingdom away by her enemy/paramour, who she must still attend state occasions beside, her domain this cottage queendom with a smaller border than she wants.
“I didn’t think you’d turn out to be so much like him,” she says.
I shrug as if it doesn’t bother me. He’d disagree; I don’t get to. Given how many stings I’ve suffered lately I tell myself that I barely feel this one.
I get back to the point. “We need to use the device without further delay.”
“He is correct,” Porsoth puts in. Then adds, “And you could be kinder to him.”
Mother rolls her eyes in cartoonish fashion. “Did I ask for your advice? Men are used to the entire world being kind to them. Anything else is a corrective.”
“Be that as it may,” Porsoth says.
The bath chamber door opens and Callie emerges. She’s cleaned up a little more and tidied her hair, but her shoes are still gray with ash and her T-shirt smudged with a long day and evening. She looks wonderful.
And concerned.
“Where’s this magic spyglass?” she asks.
“Spy-globe,” Mother and I say at the same time.
Mother’s lips quirk on one side with amusement. I do think she loves me, somewhere, way down in the darkest deeps inside her.
“I’ll show you when I’m ready,” she says. “Food?”
Callie looks at me like she’s ready to murder my mother. I cough to hide a laugh. “Sure, we could eat,” I say.
When Callie stalks over to me with her murder-eyes, I say as softly as I can, “Trust me, we’re not leaving without food.”
“Right,” Callie says with a frown. “She’s a mom. I am starving.”
“Me too.”
Callie’s frown deepens. “Is it safe for me to eat afterlife food?”
What a curious question. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“You know, in the old stories about Faeryland and other realms, sometimes if you eat the food, then you have to stay there.”
“Luke rather skipped those tales,” Porsoth says.
Mother appears close beside us. “Do I look like a faery?”
Why I assumed these two busybodies would give us a second’s privacy, I don’t know.
“Don’t answer that.” I put my hand on Callie’s arm. “I didn’t skip all the reading. No pomegranate, okay? She’s not staying…” Yet. I don’t add the yet, but I can hear its echo.
Callie’s muscles stiffen slightly under my fingers. She hears it too.
“I know your father told you to get her soul.” Mother glances between us and what she sees must tell her everything. She puts a hand dramatically to her heart. “No. You wouldn’t. No son of mine would do such a thing…”
“She volunteered it.” Porsoth uses his full demonic voice, something I’ve only heard once or twice. There’s a sonic boom quality to it. We all tremble like leaves in its wake.
Mother recovers first and prepares to argue. “But—”
Callie holds up a hand to stop her. “It’s true. I’m on a mission. I needed Luke’s help, and now I have it.”
Mother shakes her head. “I have failed. And I do like her.”
So do I. I want to say the words, flirty and light to disperse the darkness in the horrified way my mother is staring at me. But I doubt that’s a magic trick I’m capable of pulling off.
“Some people would be glad to hear their son won’t be ended inside twenty-four hours,” I say instead.
“Not everything is about you.” Mother rakes a hand down my cheek, then Callie’s, almost tender, and crosses the jam-packed room to a small kitchen. There’s a soup pot on, and when she removes the lid the entire house fills with a rich, spicy, delicious smell.
“Porsoth, if you’re done showing off, set out the bowls.” She gestures to the open-faced cabinets above the counter.
Porsoth says nothing, and I wonder if he regrets speaking as he did to her. I liked it. It reminds me that his legend is based on fact.
“He did nothing wrong,” Callie says with a wink to Porsoth. Before anyone can stop her, she’s plucking down the bowls.
Callie plainly agrees with me that it’s nice to see Porsoth asserting himself.
Mother ladles soup into the first of the bowls. “He has tormented more souls than you’ve met in your life, or will,” she says to Callie. “Do not sleep in the room with a wolf just because he is old and tired.”
“Is it okay if I eat in the room with one?” Callie asks. “I promise I’m as hungry as the wolf.”
I start singing the chorus for “Hungry Like the Wolf,” that old ’80s song, and when Callie laughs in surprise I soak it in.
Mother notices me noticing Callie.
But, “Simon Le Bon, now there’s someone who owes me a visit,” is all Mother says.
Porsoth sets the soup in front of me, and I tuck in like a good son. At this point, I only hope we get out of this cottage before my deadline passes. I’d at least like to do something nice for Callie—like help her save the world—before I betray her forever for my own ill-gotten gain.
Now I know just how rotten I am for agreeing to take her soul, based on Mother’s reaction. I have that to thank her for, I guess.
I don’t bother.
“Mother, the World Watcher. Please.”
She hesitates, but rises from the table. “I suppose you must. You’ll visit me again?” The question is for Callie, not me.
Callie nods, but doesn’t commit out loud. Good thinking. My mother’s house might bring her a measure of freedom in the future. But it will come at a cost.
“Why did you borrow it?” I ask Mother.
“He told me to,” she said. “I agreed, because I wanted to see you, son.”
I bask in the crumb, not quite able to speak. This confirms my thinking that Father knew far more than I assumed about my activities, or lack thereof.
“Can we see it?” Callie asks, and lays a gentle hand on my arm. Comforting me.
I am a terrible person for accepting it.
“Outside,” Mother says, intent on Callie’s hand.
Then she leads us through the cramped common room and another door to her bed chamber. I carefully do not look around once I take in the giant bed with carved details painted black with sheets to match. I’ve never been in this room before. I do not want to think about what’s gone on in here. No, thank you.
A wide set of doors is open to her back garden, inset with stones. Here, more things bloom. Strange blooms, stranger plants. They’re alive, truly alive. They wave as if to greet my mother and she lifts a hand, soothing.
The World Watcher sits among this odd tableau, almost as if the garden was designed to create a space for it. Or maybe the Watcher is one of those things that makes every space seemed designed to house it.
Callie gapes. The globe stands two storeys tall with a million other colors shining beneath a golden sheen. It’s much larger than all of us, and a set of spiral steps curls around it to allow the viewer to climb up to any vantage point and spin it to view the desired place.
“Show me what to do,” Callie says.
I slide her hand into mine and she allows it without a hint of protest. I feel more than I have before. More than a heart beating in my chest, more than the air in my lungs. So much more that I don’t want to examine it. We change that which we observe—isn’t that something I’m supposed to have read about?
“Solomon Elerion,” I say, “you black-souled heathen, here we come.”
Mother and Porsoth watch, silent for once, as I lead Callie to the stairs and up and up around them. I navigate by feeling. I send out the question where where where as we continue up the steps, picturing Solomon, and finally a signal faint but discernible to my gut tells me when to stop.
We’re past the middle point of the globe. I have to drop Callie’s fingers to pinpoint the spot and I feel the loss.
I place my hands flat against the curving slope of the globe and I give it a turn.
As places and faces rush past in a mad whirl on the spinning globe, Callie gapes and says, “Oh my go—”
“Not here,” I remind her, barely in time to prevent whatever saying that word here would’ve caused.
“Goodness,” she finishes on a breath, correcting course.
I can understand why she forgot herself and why she thought of the Above. The globe is magnificent because it’s the world. It shows the brutal beauty of Earth. Every living thing in war and in peace, in sickness and in health, in flesh and in bone. It’s a touch overwhelming to focus on. I do it anyway, because it’s the only way to locate our quarry.
I place my hands back on the surface to stop its movement at the moment that feels right and squint beneath the glossy surface layer.
“There,” I say. “There they are.”
Callie cranes her neck to confirm.
Solomon is in a circle of his followers, another pentagram drawn beneath him. He’s stalking back and forth across it, clearly upset and in the middle of a tirade.
“Looks like he’s figured out it doesn’t work,” I say.
“Yup.” There’s a note of satisfaction in Callie’s tone. “Are they back at the house?”
“I don’t think so—it would probably reject them now that Michael’s been there.”
She squints harder and then gasps. “Widen the angle.”
“What is it?”
“Please,” Callie says roughly.
I mentally command the globe to do as she says, giving us a wider view of the room.
The space has every appearance of an occult lair. I’m about to use my powers to find out where it is, but Callie speaks first, strangled. “I know where they are.”
She doesn’t sound like herself.
“Where?” I gaze at Callie, concerned.
Callie peers back at the globe, and then sinks to sit on the step. “They’re at the Great Escape.”
I look harder. I see what she sees. Along one wall of that spooky room—which I now see has a flair of arrangement and design that is more perfect than a real occult lair would be, like the theme park version—stand her brother, Jared, and best friend, Mag. Both of them have their hands bound behind them.
I state the obvious. “They have your family.”
Callie climbs to her feet. “We have to get back there. Now.”