I glanced over my shoulder toward the open doorway and the hall beyond, where my daughter waited. “Mrs. Steinberg, this isn't the time.”
She thumped her cane on the thin, green carpet. “It is exactly the time when someone's used that book. What on earth possessed you to keep it? You told me it was destroyed.”
“No one's used the book,” Jayce said.
She shook a gnarled finger at my sister. “Don't you lie to me, young Jayce.” She whirled on me. “I may be old, but I know what that book feels like.”
“How?” Lenore asked.
Mrs. Steinberg stilled.
“How do you know what that book feels like?” Lenore persisted. “You told us our parents killed Barnabas, the man who'd created that book. But you never explained what happened to the book afterward.”
Realization flooded my brain. “You took it,” I said, wondering. “You must have. But how did it get lost again?”
Her shoulders crumpled, her black gown sagging. “The book tempted me. I didn't trust myself with it, and after my lodge restricted my powers, I didn't have enough magic to destroy it, even if I wanted to. And I didn't want to. So, I sent it to the head of my lodge.”
“Your good lodge, right?” I asked. “You were—are in lodge for good and not a Black Lodge.”
“Of course I was never in a Black Lodge,” she snapped.
“What happened?” Lenore said gently.
“I don't know. Ozmandius died under mysterious circumstances. The police said he was involved in...” Mrs. Steinberg rummaged in her voluminous black purse and didn't meet our eyes.
“In what?” Jayce asked.
“Human trafficking.” She zipped her purse shut. “I thought it was nonsense of course, that he must have been trying to break up a human trafficking ring and something had gone wrong. But then I started hearing rumors, strange stories. And when I asked the new head about the book, he claimed he didn't know what I was talking about. At the time, I assumed he simply thought the book was below my paygrade. Technically, he was right. But then, all those years later, the book resurfaced here, in Doyle.”
“It came to me last New Year’s,” Lenore breathed.
“In my heart, I knew you three hadn't destroyed it. A part of me was glad.”
“It's been calling to you all this time,” I said, “hasn't it?”
She nodded. “I pretended it wasn't happening, that I was imagining things. But I heard it clearly tonight. Now, what's happened?”
“Emmie touched the book,” I said. “It's influencing her somehow. We tried cutting the cords, like we'd normally do, and she seemed to get better. But it still has her.”
“You shouldn’t have had the book!” Mrs. Steinberg cried, her voice quavering. The old lady’s shoulders shook. “They were supposed to take it from you.”
“They?” Lenore asked.
“My Lodge. And when you told me the book was destroyed, I told myself you’d succeeded in figuring it out. I was an old fool.”
“Figured what out?” Jayce asked.
“Azathoth.” The old lady gave a quick shake of her head. “Your poor girl.”
My stomach clenched.
“You know what's in the book?” Jayce asked.
“Lovecraftian magic was popular in the seventies,” Mrs. Steinberg said. “Azathoth, Lovecraft’s mindless entity which rules all time and space, was directly connected to the Necronomicon in Lovecraft’s stories. And that spell book in your possession is as good a Necronomicon as anything.”
“And even though Azathoth is fiction,” Lenore said, “it became real, because people believed.”
Mrs. Steinberg nodded. “Barnabas went to England and studied with the inventor of chaos magic, Austin Osman Spare. I doubt Spare had any idea what Barnabas was really up to. It must have made Barnabas laugh to think he'd developed a system, a magic, so devastating out of a fictional demon.”
“How do we stop it?” I asked, voice strained.
“Cord cutting isn't enough. You'll need to summon Azathoth, master it, and banish it for good, or it will keep coming back.”
“I really thought you were going to tell us not to do that,” Jayce said.
“Someone has to,” Mrs. Steinberg said, “and I can't. You could die, but I don't see what options you've got at this point.”
“Die?” Jayce asked.
I shifted. “How do we get it away from my daughter?” I asked sharply.
“Azathoth is more than a thought form now,” Mrs. Steinberg said, “or it would have died with its creator. It’s real, and existing on its own terms.”
“Wait,” Jayce said. “Back up to the dying part. How could we die?”
“Dismemberment, most likely,” Mrs. Steinberg said. “Azathoth is a bad one.”
“Last October, we discovered Azathoth was using a ghost attached to the book to empower it,” Lenore said. “The ghost of a man Barnabas murdered. It was his blood Barnabas used as ink. That must be how Azathoth survived Barnabas’s death. But the ghost has moved on. Why is Azathoth still so strong?”
“If you detached the ghost Azathoth was feeding on from the book, then it has been weakened.”
This was the weak version of Azathoth? “And we can get rid of it,” I said, desperate, “right?”
“Maybe. It depends on how strong you three are.”
Lenore returned carrying Jayce’s bag. She pulled out the two rolled canvas sheets. “We're thinking a demon trap.” She unfurled the fabrics, displaying my Solomonic circle and triangle.
“Do you have a magic disk of Solomon?” Mrs. Steinberg asked.
“We're waiting on the disk,” Jayce said. “But once the demon thing is trapped in the triangle, then what?”
“You don't trap this type of entity in the triangle,” she said. “You trap it in the black mirror that's reflecting the triangle.”
“Black mirror?” I asked, aghast. We didn't have a black mirror.
“A triangular black mirror. Normally, when you banish a demon from an object, it’s banished to its natural realm, its original home. But Azathoth was created on this plane. This is its natural realm.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. Dropping it in the stream. All those times we’d tried to banish it from the book. If we’d succeeded, we would have loosed it on the world.
“A black mirror will send it where it can't hurt anyone,” Mrs. Steinberg continued.
We stared at each other.
“Oh, for Pete's sake.” The old woman rummaged in her purse and pulled out a shimmering black triangle, less than a foot high. “Take mine.”
I took the mirror. It hummed with energy.
“You keep a black mirror in your purse?” Jayce arched a brow.
“I made it before... you know,” Mrs. Steinberg said.
I grimaced. Before her powers had been bound.
“What else have you got in there?” Jayce asked.
The elevator doors swooshed open. A woman in a blue mechanic's jumpsuit, her head wrapped in a polka-dot scarf, strode from the elevator. Hermia carried something the size of a dinner plate wrapped in brown paper beneath one arm.
She saw Jayce and stopped short, then moved toward us more slowly.
“Hello, Jayce,” she said cautiously.
“Hermia.” Uncertainty sketched across my sister's face. “Thanks for coming.”
“Of course I came.” She turned to me. “How's Emmie?”
A knot hardened beneath my ribs. “She’s still not well.”
She handed me the package. “Here's what you asked for. I followed the ritual to the letter. I hope it helps.”
“Thank you.”
She turned to Jayce and hesitated, bit her bottom lip. “It wasn't your fault.” She strode to the elevator and pushed the button.
“Does she still have hard feelings after her sister's death?” Mrs. Steinberg asked.
“She wasn't involved,” Jayce said sharply.
Hermia stepped into the elevator, and the doors grumbled shut.
“But she played a part, if only unwittingly,” Mrs. Steinberg said.
Jayce sighed. “Yes.”
I grabbed one of the canvases from Lenore. “We need to take care of this now.” I wasn’t going to let an extra minute go by with my daughter in the grip of that thing.
“You're not going to do it here?” Mrs. Steinberg said.
“Why not?” I asked. “I can’t leave Emmie, not in this state.”
She huffed. “I can't imagine a more unstable spot for this sort of magic.”
“She's right,” Lenore said. “This hospital is filled with ghosts and pain—physical and emotional. We need to work in a controlled environment, where we won't be interrupted.”
“Your garden,” Jayce said to Lenore. “It's still warded and clear?”
Lenore nodded cautiously. “I've been doing daily walk-throughs and clearings.”
“And you've got that new stone circle Connor built?” Jayce asked.
“Circle?” I hadn't heard about a stone circle. “When did that happen?”
“I thought I could use it for ritual,” Lenore said to me. “It's been consecrated.”
“You three go,” Mrs. Steinberg said. “I'll keep an eye on your daughter here.”
“Hold on.” I hurried to Emmie's room.
She sat glowering in the hospital bed, her arms crossed in a very un-Emmie-like way.
The doctor had vanished. Connor stood by the window and stared warily at the toddler. Nick sat at the end of her bed.
“Has she said anything?” I asked.
“She cursed me,” Nick said mildly, but I could hear the thread of panic in his voice. “But she's awake and talking, and that's a good thing.”
“Yes,” my voice cracked. “We've got everything we need to finish what we started, but we're going to have to do it at Lenore's.”
“I'm staying with Emmie,” Nick said.
“I know.” I grasped his hand, and he squeezed it.
“This wasn't your fault,” he said, his stormy eyes bright.
“Of course it was.” And I'd deal with that later. But right now, I had to save our daughter.
Nick stood and pulled me into his arms. “I was right there with you,” he said in a low voice. “I wanted this to be your fault, I wanted to blame you, but I can't. We made this mistake together. And we're going to get Emmie back.”
“Yes.” It was all I could manage to say, though I didn’t quite believe it. I ran my hand along his muscular back and stepped away. “I've got to go.”
“Good luck.”
I walked toward the door, where Mrs. Steinberg lurked.
“Fear is a powerful motivator,” she said as I passed, “but it's not an effective one. Azathoth may use it against you.”
I nodded. Azathoth already had. But fear wasn't an easy emotion to banish, especially when you feared for people you loved. “Thanks for the advice.” I walked down the hall and slowed.
Fear. And suddenly I knew who'd committed the murders.
And that knowledge would keep.
∞
Lenore stood inside the western edge of the stones and gripped a paper sigil in one hand. The sigil spelled Azathoth’s name.
A breeze waved down the dried grass on the nearby hillside. The herbs and flowers in Lenore’s garden had gone dormant, brown and faded. A patch of snow rested on the shady hillside, beneath the skeleton branches of oaks.
We stood inside a circle of small, granite rocks. The canvas with my Solomonic circle lay beneath our feet. Beside it, on bare earth, lay the canvas with the triangle, the demon trap.
Mrs. Steinberg's black mirror sat propped at an angle against the stones. It reflected book and canvas triangle.
The book lay open inside the demon trap. I’d arranged it that way because it seemed more vulnerable open to the sky.
I shifted inside the stone circle, and my heel wobbled on the uneven ground. Connor had built the low pile of stones around the depression where a tree had fallen two years ago, and the canvasses sagged in the middle.
This will work. It has to. Please—
Jayce raised her thumb, smeared with magical oil, to my forehead. “We’ve got this,” she said and drew a cross with it on my forehead.
She moved to Lenore.
The skin prickled between my shoulder blades. Tensing, I scanned the yard.
“Something wrong?” Jayce paused in front of Lenore, her hand raised, thumb extended.
“No,” I said. “I just felt like we were being watched.”
“Oh, we are.” Lenore nodded to the book. “It knows what we're up to, and it doesn't like it.”
Jayce corked the oil. “Let's finish this.” She sprayed us both with one of her clearing sprays. The scent of frankincense and cinnamon mingled with the crisp, winter morning air.
“Wait,” I said. “If things do go wrong... I need to call the sheriff first.”
“And let her know a demon killed us?” Jayce set the blue bottle down outside the stone circle. “Good thinking. I wouldn't want your neighbors blamed for our dismemberment.”
“We're not going to be dismembered,” Lenore said, but her expression was worried.
Stepping from the circle, I dug my phone from my purse on a nearby bench, damp with frost. I called the sheriff.
“Karin. You have information?”
“Yes. It's about Greg's car.” I told her everything I'd learned and suspected.
“I'd reached the same conclusion and was on my way for a chat with our suspect,” she said. Of course she had. Sheriff McCourt was one smart cookie.
“There's something else.” I told her about Emmie, the demon, the ritual.
“Yeah.” She drew out the word. “I'm not sure what you expect me to do with that.”
“Me neither.” I looked toward the brittle blue sky. “I just thought you should know.”
“And now I do.” The sheriff hesitated. “Good luck.” She hung up.
I returned my phone to the purse and myself to the circle.
Jayce spritzed me again with her clearing spray. “To get rid of the electronic residue.”
The skin on my upper back tightened again. Irritated, I rolled my shoulders. We weren't being watched. The book was trying to psych us out.
I checked my watch. We were in the hour of Saturn, planet of restriction. And we wanted to restrict Azathoth to that triangle. I swallowed. “It’s time to start.”
We performed a banishing ritual. It cleared the circle of negative influences and invited in our helping spirits and angels.
Jayce pulled the disk her friend had made for us from her backpack and handed it to me. It was the first chance I’d had to study it—a silver disk with Azathoth’s sigil engraved on it. On its other side was a pentagram of Solomon.
In the classical ritual to exorcise a demon—and since we were new at this, we were sticking with the classics—a sigil with the demon’s name is placed inside the triangle. Another sigil with its name worn by the witch. This connects the demon to the magician—or in this case, witches.
The demon is drawn to its name on the sigil. We’d be inside the consecrated magic circle. So, the only sigil it could get to would be the one in our demon trap—the triangle.
Lenore laid the paper sigil with Azathoth’s name inside the triangle. She weighted it with a rock so it wouldn’t fly away. I pulled our aunt’s scissors from my belt with one hand. With the other, I joined my sisters in gripping the silver disk. We raised it toward the triangle.
Fear writhed in my belly. I pointed the scissors at the book. “Azathoth! Come!”
A breeze swept rustled the oaks. A few remaining desiccated leaves fluttered toward us. The pages of the open book rustled and flipped.
I am here, little witch. Its voice whispered in my head, and I shuddered at its mental touch.
“It’s here.” Lenore’s hand trembled on the silver disk. “I can see it.”
“Do you see our mark?” I nodded toward the disk and forced iron into my voice.
I see it, it whispered sullenly.
Awkwardly, we turned the disk, holding its sigil toward the book. “And do you see this? This is your mark, the mark that binds you.”
I see it.
A crow landed on a nearby branch. It cawed, raising the hair on my scalp.
“You are bound to your mark.” I pointed at the paper sigil in the triangle. “Swear to us.”
The book's cover faded to ash gray, as if the life had been drained from it. I frowned. It hadn’t sworn, but it must have left the book. But was it in the triangle? Mrs. Steinberg’s warning echoed through my brain, and my muscles tightened.
“We did it,” Lenore whispered. “I can see it in the triangle.”
I slowly breathed out and relaxed my gaze. A malignant black knot, tentacles of muck rippling from its center, hovered above the canvas triangle.
The scissors trembled in my hand. Today, I'd use them as a wand to cast the thought-form demon into Mrs. Steinberg's black mirror and through that, to whatever dimension it belonged in.
I pointed the wand at the paper sigil, and then toward the black mirror. “We banish you,” I thundered.
Azathoth shot toward us. It struck the invisible wall of our circle and rebounded into a stand of pines on the hillside. They swayed at the impact. Needles browned and shuddered to the ground.
I stared in horror.
My ritual consecration of the triangle. I'd never finished it. Not completely. Good enough wasn't good enough when you were after something this terrible.
Jayce gasped. “What the hex? What was that?”
“It's got loose.” Jamming the scissors between my belt and hip, I leapt from the circle, grabbed the black mirror, and raced up the hillside.
“Karin!” Lenore shouted. “Wait!”
It was loose. The monster was loose, and it was headed toward Doyle.