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Raphael, Remiel, and I stood and spoke with Magda and Miguel for another half hour and then we were told we could go home. Unsurprisingly, when I opened a portal onto my front lawn there was another portal closing, and Magda the Red stood on my lawn waiting for us. I’d get my car tomorrow. Magda told my father and uncle she wanted to talk to me privately, so they started toward their homes, just down the street from me.
“You were glaring at me, what’s up?” I asked her as we walked toward the house.
“I’m worried about you,” Magda said.
“Why?”
“You canceled your portal travel lesson with me yesterday and then again today. I talked to Shamus, and you canceled your magic tutoring with him today as well,” Magda said. “It’s not like you to cancel, so I am worried.”
“Shamus is an empath,” I said, opening the door to my house. Angel was standing there, waiting on us. Magda and I walked in, pushing past the giant hellhound, each of us giving him a pat as we did so.
“And?” Magda asked.
“I was doing something that was sort of illegal today, so I decided it would be a bad idea to meet with him.”
“And me?” Magda asked, as we walked toward my kitchen.
“You work for the AESPCA,” I said. “If I admitted to it, you’d want the details and I’d end up telling you and that would be bad for everyone. But it’s done, so now I can tell you, because you can’t stop me.”
“It was illegal in a way that you think I would have tried to stop you,” Magda said slowly. “Then your office is broken into, what is going on?”
“The two are not related,” I said, getting prepared to make coffee with magic.
“Are you sure?” Magda asked as a demon popped into my kitchen.
“Shit,” I said looking at it. Sometimes when I tried to do normal magic, I ended up summoning demons by accident. The demon smiled and began preparing the coffee for me. “Yes. Do you remember the news article about the super expensive statue of Aphrodite going missing from a private collection?” I asked her, as I considered whether to send the demon back before the coffee was made. Thankfully, Magda was used to the accidental summonings and didn’t blink an eye as the demon made coffee.
“Yes,” Magda said as she got the creamer out of the refrigerator.
“The insurance company doesn’t believe it’s been stolen. My colleagues at Angel Investigations agree. The couple won an all-expenses paid dinner to La Petit Chateau tonight in a contest; apparently the wife is contest mad and enters all of them she can find. So, while they were enjoying their seven-course French meal with wine tasting, Raphael searched their house while I played lookout from my car and Remiel observed them at dinner.”
“How did Raphael get into the house unnoticed?” Magda asked, narrowing her eyes.
“There may have been a forbidden potion used to make him less noticeable,” I admitted.
“The statue was imbued with power, wasn’t it? And did you find it?”
“The statue was imbued with power when it was created and we did not find it, exactly. Raphael found a magic shielding vault, which wasn’t listed on the police reports, but he couldn’t get into it. We suspect the statue is hidden in the vault, which is hidden by magic, and we’ll have to come up with a plan to get into it.”
“Remiel is going to steal the statue, isn’t he?” Magda asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He has a plan, but he said he couldn’t tell me it, because I need plausible deniability.”
“Ah, well that makes sense, and I agree with you, the two incidents are unlikely to be related,” Magda said, after a moment. “The owner of the statue is a mortal, isn’t he?”
“Yes, and the statue was imbued with a love spell. Our pre-breaking and entering research showed that the husband has five mistresses. We think he’s using the statue to seduce women.”
“Yeah, there’s no way it’s been stolen and all he’s done is file a police report and insurance claim,” Magda replied coolly. “Is it small enough he can carry it around with him?”
“Yes, it’s only about five inches tall. It would be too big for a pocket, but he carries a man bag.”
“I see. Knowing Remiel, he’ll steal it and lock it in his own vault, so it can’t be used anymore.”
“I didn’t know he had a vault,” I admitted.
“Yes, those sorts of artifacts are why he became an investigator with the AESPCA. I don’t remember the exact when, but I think it was about three hundred years ago or so, we had an issue with people spontaneously combusting, both mortal and immortal. I wasn’t running the investigative division at the time, I was just an agent like everyone else and after the sixth or seventh incident Remiel came to my boss and told him it had to be some kind of magical artifact, but my boss ignored him until the twentieth incident. After that my boss called him in to ask him why he thought it was a physical object and not a spell. Remiel went through his reasoning and my boss decided he was a crackpot. Remiel, realizing the AESPCA wasn’t going to listen to him, went looking for the object and the possessor himself. It turned out to be a ring that had been imbued not with a spell but with hellfire. After a person wore it for a while, it would cause them to burst into flames. Remiel continued tracking the ownership of it and discovered it had been forged by Azazael in the Stygian and intentionally released on the planet. After that, Remiel built himself a vault, had one built at the AESPCA, and applied to become an investigator.”
“Wow,” I said quietly.
“Sometimes items are intentionally imbued with magic, and it’s meant to be a good thing. Sometimes it happens accidentally. Regardless of the intent of the creator, it can have negative consequences.”
“Then why are charms exempt?” I asked.
“Charms are not imbued with magic at the time of creation. By definition the magic is put into the charm after it’s been made, and that makes the magic weaker. If you don’t have it redone once in a while, the magic will wear off completely with time.”
“Ah, are there lots of magical artifacts?” I asked.
“Yes.” Magda frowned. “The vault at the AESPCA has been enlarged multiple times, and Remiel has his own vault. I know a few others that have them, too.”
“Okay, so if my father and uncle steal this statue, will we get into trouble?” I asked.
“It is unlikely anyone not at this kitchen table right this second will know about it...” Magda pursed her lips and frowned. “I take that back, if Remiel and Raphael decide to steal that statue, I don’t think they’ll let you know. I’ll only know if they decide to turn it over to the AESPCA and that is equally unlikely.”
“Why wouldn’t they turn it over to the AESPCA?” I asked.
“Because as secure as the vault is, we’ve had a few things go missing and re-enter circulation among the general population,” Magda said. “Whereas, if it goes into Remiel’s vault, it will never come out again.”
“Why not just break into Remiel’s and steal them?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s been tried once. The culprit turned into a pig with green skin. No one at the AESPCA could undo the magic and it took more than a century for the spell to wear off, during which time everyone knew why he’d been turned into a green pig and even once he was returned to regular form, everyone still knew. The pig part wore off before the green skin.”
“How did my uncle pull that off?” I asked.
“No one really knows. But you once asked why Balthazar Leopold hated you and your family, and there’s your answer. Remiel turned him into a green pig for a hundred years and then just green for another hundred.”
“Holy fuck,” I whispered, as the door opened, and Jerome came into the house.
“Walter and Megan told me to tell you hello and said if we needed help cleaning the office to let them know,” Jerome said, coming into the kitchen. “They also excused Tara for being about twenty minutes past curfew, since she was at the office with all of us.”
“Good, I figured they would if you told them about the break-in.” I nodded. “Do you want a cup of coffee?” I asked, motioning toward the demon, who was now cleaning my kitchen while eating the leftover pizza out of my fridge.
“Are you and Magda discussing the real reason for the break-in?” Jerome asked, as he walked toward the coffee maker.
“The real reason?” I questioned, and Magda turned in her seat to look at him.
“Come on, you can’t honestly believe they broke in to steal our files?” Jerome said, his voice giving a little crack on the last word. He was well into puberty, and sometimes his voice broke, which was terribly funny, because otherwise it tended to be deep.
“What do you think they broke in to take?” Magda asked.
“It has to be the grimoires. The angels have thousands of years of spells in theirs and while they are in ancient angelic script, there are ways to translate it,” Jerome said. “Also, I don’t think the people that broke in had a lot of their own magic. All the traces in the office were potion-based, even the hellfire.” Jerome could see the traces of energy left by the magic.
“There isn’t a potion to make hellfire,” Magda said.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Jerome said. “It would require a great deal of magical research, but there is nothing, on the planet or off, that can’t be mastered with a potion. Granted, it might not be as strong as regular hellfire, but I’m sure there’s a way to make a potion that will create hellfire.”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly.
“I think it’s possible. I’ve not tried to make a potion myself for it, but I can’t imagine it couldn’t be done,” Jerome said as he sat down with a cup of coffee and a plate with two chocolate donuts on it.
“Where did the donuts come from?” I asked. Jerome gestured toward the kitchen with one of them. I turned in my seat, and sure enough there was a bag of small chocolate donuts on the counter.
“They’ve been in the cabinet all day, I grabbed them last night on my way home from school.” Glees, the accidentally-summoned demon, had a donut in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other. After a moment, Glees tossed the remainder of the donut into his mouth and got out a plate. He arranged the small donuts on it and brought it over to the table.
“Do you have anything you want me to do?” Glees asked.
“Could you take Angel for a walk?” I asked it.
“There’s a few more slices of pizza. If I take Angel for a walk, can I have the rest of the pizza?”
“Yes,” I told it. Honestly, I would have given it the pizza even if it hadn’t taken Angel for a walk, but I might as well get something out of it being here and eating my food.
“Have you actually enslaved the Demonation?” Magda asked.
“No,” Glees answered for me. “But when she accidentally summons us, she’ll let us hang around for a while and feed us, so it only seems proper to give her something in return, even if it’s just doing a few chores.”
“That’s weird,” Magda said. I nodded in agreement.
“Speaking of weird, someone attempted a mass summoning recently,” Glees said. “It didn’t work, they didn’t pull through any demons, but they tried.”
“Huh” I frowned and took a donut from the plate. None of us asked for a more specific time frame than recently, it would have been an exercise in futility. Time didn’t work the same in the Stygian as it did on Earth, and demons really didn’t keep track of it anyway. Recently could mean in the last year or the last two hours to a demon.
“Huh, indeed.” Magda also took a donut and frowned. “You don’t have any mass summoning spells in your grimoire, do you?” Magda asked me.
“No. I mostly summon by accident and don’t have a single summoning spell in it, it’s mostly spells of exorcism or everyday magic stuff,” I told her.
“What about yours?” Magda asked Jerome.
“No need. Like Soleil, summoning is easy for me, I don’t require a spell,” he answered, taking another donut. “What exactly would be the point of a mass summoning anyway?”
“I’ve only seen it happen once and it was done as a distraction,” I said thinking of the demonically possessed zombies in the mall a handful of years ago.
“In the 1950s, a mass summoning was done by some crackpots who believed aliens were being held at Roswell Army Airfield. They summoned a dozen or more demons to take over the base so they could free the aliens,” Magda said.
“Did they succeed?” I asked.
“They succeeded in overrunning the army base, but they failed to find any aliens.” Magda grinned. “There was another one in 1864; the point of that summoning was to rob a train carrying gold.”
“The one I was called in to deal with was covering for a bank robbery,” I said.
“I’ll put the investigators on alert that a mass summoning was attempted but failed,” Magda said.
“Probably a good idea,” I agreed. It was nearly two in the morning, so I told Magda she was welcome to stay in the spare room, but I needed to go to bed. The offer was real, but I knew she wouldn’t take it. Magda travelled via portal everywhere, and it would take her less than thirty seconds to get back to her house. It took Magda about a minute to make her decision, a portal opened in my living room, and she stepped through it into her house. Jerome frowned at me.
“What?” I asked him after he spent two solid minutes staring at me with the frown plastered on his face.
“Someone attempted a mass demonic summoning that failed, our offices were broken into, and their target seemed to be either our files or our grimoires. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
“I don’t disagree,” I said, rubbing a hand down my face as if I could wipe the day away.
“I’m just a little unsure about why they took all the files.”
“Because if they had only stolen the files of people I’ve done exorcisms on, it would be obvious what the target is,” I answered.
“Hell,” Jerome said quietly.
“My sentiments exactly,” I said. “I’m going to bed; it’s been a very long day.” It was easier to cause possession in people who had already been possessed before. With this new piece of information supplied by Glees, I felt the stolen grimoires were a red herring and the files were the real and only target. Now all we needed to do was figure out why they needed a distraction. Also, given their first attempt at a mass summoning had failed, I wondered if they would do a test run, now that they had my grimoire. It was true that I didn’t have any summoning spells in the book, but I did have notes on summoning in it. I wasn’t sure how much help my notes would be, but I suspected they were more valuable than I realized. “One last question, could a mass summoning potion be created?”
“Probably but getting it into people all at once could be a problem. I suspect administration is the bigger obstacle.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I think you’d have to individually dose everyone to prevent a mass summoning in a single person.”
“So, if it was put in the air, you don’t think it would work as planned?” I asked.
“No, because some people would breathe in more potion than others. Shallow breathers may not get enough to summon even one demon, while deep breathers would inhale enough to allow multiple demons to enter a solitary person. I believe there would be a fine line between inhaling too much and too little. Also, the speed would differ based on how much they breathed in, so it might not immediately cause possession, but three hours later instead. If it’s a distraction for something like a prison break or bank robbery, they’d need as much impact as possible in a small window of time.”
“I lied, I just thought of another question,” I said, stopping again and turning to look at him. “Could a regular demon summoning potion work? I mean put a few drops in person A’s coffee and a few drops in person B’s coffee, etc.?”
“No, potions don’t work like that. One demon summoning potion, drank in its entirety, would get you one demon. If person A doesn’t drink all of it, then person A doesn’t become possessed. If person A and person B split the potion, neither becomes possessed. Potions are like medication, the amount you have to consume is based on several factors, including body weight and magical abilities, and splitting a potion weakens it, making it ineffective. That goes for any potion, like if Raphael had drunk half of the invisibility potion and Remiel drank the other half, neither of them would have consumed enough to make either of them invisible. Have you never bought a potion?”
“No, I haven’t. The few potions I’ve used have been made for me specifically by either you or Janet when she was around. How do they sell potions if they are weight and magic specific?” I asked.
“I think tomorrow, I will take you potion shopping, since you don’t know,” Jerome said. “Now, do you have another question?”
“How common are demon summoning potions?” I asked.
“Rare, I’ve never seen one myself and I’ve never seen a recipe for one, even on the internet,” Jerome replied. “I know they exist, but they aren’t part of the everyday.”
“If a demon summoning potion does exist and I know it does, then it seems like a mass summoning potion should also exist.”
“Summoning a single demon, even a weak one, is complicated and difficult for the average person. A mass summoning potion would be dangerous, finicky, and even more complicated to create.”
“It’s easy to cause possession with a charm,” I pointed out.
“No, it’s easier to cause possession with a charm, but charm magic is different than potion magic. Creating a charm or cursed object is easier because it’s based on contact magic and uses the magic of the person who is wearing it to boost the magic in the charm. That is why people without magic have trouble with charms. There’s no magic to fuel the spell in the charm. If a charm is meant to protect the wearer and the wearer is without magic, the charm may not work well or for very long. Potion magic doesn’t rely on anything from the consumer, it is based solely on what’s in the potion.” I nodded at this and went to bed.