If Lon intended to give me another chance to see him naked, I missed it. He called Jupe and the Holidays to report in, and I fell asleep before he’d even finished his phone call. When I woke to the sound of our dueling cell-phone alarms, he was in the other bed, and it was half an hour before sunset. We quickly packed up and began the five-hour drive to Pasadena, trading barren wild coast for the sprawl of Southern California.
And the landscape wasn’t the only thing changing: my unexplained strength had abandoned me. Whether it was time or sleep that erased it, I didn’t know. But when I tested it on a metal letter opener I found in the motel desk drawer, all I got was a hand cramp.
“Had to be a side effect of your transmutation that first night,” Lon said as night settled across the Pacific Coast Highway.
“Almost makes me want to try shifting again if that’s the freebie I get for the effort.”
“Nothing’s ever free.”
True. And my eyes were still a little silvery. Not noticeable enough to have to wear sunglasses, so that was something. But deep down, I was still worried the whole thing was a bad omen.
I spent the first couple of hours of our trip chasing broadband signals as I searched for any information I could find on Karlan Rooke. He was in his early seventies, a wealthy man who’d traveled around the world collecting plants for a twelve-acre private estate, which he opened up to the public in the 1980s. It was one of several botanical gardens in the City of Roses, and although it was not as vast as the gardens at the Huntington Library, it was successful because of its niche collection of unusual plants and had earned a quirky nickname.
The Witches’ Garden.
Seemed Rooke displayed plants prized for their medicinal value to occultists and magick workers. Some of them were run-of-the-mill herbs. Sage, pennyroyal, mandrake root, and belladonna. But there were also unusual things, such as bloodvine and valrivia—prized by Earthbounds but not typically featured in a botanical garden.
Magus Rooke had been busy.
And although I was able to find the occasional reference to both his time spent in the E∴E∴ and his alleged Crowley lineage, it was only speculation; one of the articles pointed out that although these salacious tidbits often popped up in his Wikipedia entry, they were almost immediately removed.
For all appearances, he was just an eccentric old rich guy, one who was inaccessible to the general public. He was said to live in a private house on the estate and only occasionally spoke at fund-raisers or lectured at local universities on the history of magical herbs. But I didn’t have time to contact the Rooke Foundation and formally request a meeting with the man. And after Lon and I discussed the pros and cons, I decided to do something I hadn’t done in years. I decided to use my magical pedigree.
As I’ve said, only a few people in the E∴E∴ knew I was still alive. It was risky to expose myself outside of that circle, especially to someone who’d publicly declared himself an enemy of my parents. But because it was starting to look as if it might be easier to contact the spirit of Howard Hughes than to get an appointment with Karlan Rooke, I figured a spectacle might get his attention.
Lon was still adamant that it wasn’t wise to open up a direct channel to the Æthyr with my Heka signature all over it—my mother might pick up on it—so instead of calling Priya directly, I had Jupe send my guardian out to greet Rooke.
Hermeneus spirits had been used as messengers for centuries. In fact, it was the preferred method of long-distance communication between magicians before there were telegrams or telephones or e-mails or texts. Not every magician had a Hermeneus at his or her beck and call, and the ones who did merely heard their Æthyric carrier pigeon, because they couldn’t see supernatural things such as halos and Heka lines and guardian-spirit projections.
But Priya was no projection; he was solid flesh.
And his appearance in Rooke’s bedroom proved to be the attention grabber I’d hoped. Priya reported back that the man was, indeed, shocked to see my guardian, but when Priya pointed out that he hadn’t set off the man’s house wards and therefore was not hostile, the elderly magician listened to Priya’s message and agreed to meet with me.
We arrived at the entrance to Rooke Gardens just before midnight. Down a gated road to our right, lights shone in the windows of a grand mansion that overlooked the grounds from a sloping hill separating the private part of the property from the public gardens. It probably said something about Rooke’s trust in our intentions that he didn’t welcome us into his home with open arms, but I didn’t care.
An old Victorian carriage house served as the public gateway to the gardens. Its Green Man drinking fountain and gargoyle-tipped gutters were pretty charming. Seemed silly to knock, so I ignored both the OPEN EVERY DAY 8 AM TO DUSK sign and the white Heka glow of the low-key protective ward and pushed open the main door into the lobby.
A large mosaic pentagram sparkled over the granite floor. To one side of it sat a quaint ticket booth. On the other was a gift shop, where whimsical esoteric souvenirs filled the windows: kitchen witches, gnomes, and wooden garden signs that encouraged visitors to relax for a “spell” and have a “magical” day.
We didn’t get a chance to do either.
A buxom beauty with black hair and a golden tan appeared from a dark hallway. She might have been Lon’s age, perhaps a little younger, and she gave off a soft-focus centerfold vibe.
“Hello,” she said coolly, heels clicking on the pentagram as she swayed toward us in black slacks and a tomato-red top that showed enough cleavage to make me stare. “I’m Karlan’s daughter, Evie Rooke. You are Sélène Duval?”
Always weird to hear my real name on a stranger’s lips. And she was just that, a stranger. I couldn’t remember ever meeting her or her boobs when I knew her father.
But I extended my hand and said, “Thank you for meeting me on such short notice.”
She nodded curtly and eyed Lon. If she was reserved with me, she thawed for him, projecting a little extra warmth in her smile. This made the muscles in my neck tighten uncomfortably. “I apologize for the urgency of my request,” I said when she’d finished looking him over. “But I’m hoping your father can help me.”
“I suppose that depends on what you need . . . and why. Forgive me, but how do we even know you’re who you claim to be?”
“It’s all right, Evie,” a deep voice said from across the room. “It’s her.”
A tall, thin man with silver hair and black-rimmed glasses stepped into the lobby. His quilted smoking jacket made him look a little like Hugh Hefner’s less decrepit brother. And as he padded toward me in black leather slippers and silk pajama bottoms, I recognized the square jaw and the dark eyes behind the glasses.
“Hello, Magus Rooke.”
“No one calls me Magus anymore. Or Grandmaster, thank the gods. I’m just plain old Mister.” He squinted at me. “Heavens, you’re all grown up. It’s like looking at a living ghost.”
“Real girl, I promise.”
“I had a feeling you weren’t dead when I saw your parents on the news last year. Do I need to worry about them showing up here, too?”
“I banished both of them to the Æthyr months ago,” I said. Not a lie. Not the whole truth, either. “They tried to ritually sacrifice me, so I can assure you that any loyalty I once had for them has vanished.”
He looked mildly shocked for a moment but recovered quickly. “Enola was always one for high dramatics.” He flicked curious eyes toward Lon. “And who might this be?”
“Someone who watches over her,” Lon said, slipping his hand around the back of my neck. “We need your word that you’ll keep this meeting quiet.”
Mr. Rooke gave Lon an amused smile. “I’m not sure who you think I’d tell. I haven’t had contact with another E∴E∴ member in years, and I don’t plan to change that. Although I must admit, I’m rather interested to hear why you think I can help you.”
I lifted my chin. “Perhaps you could start by telling me if a private detective came to see you about me?”
“Ah.” Rooke stared at me for a moment before gesturing toward the inner door leading into the gardens. “I knew this would come back to haunt me. Why don’t we take a walk outside and discuss it privately?” When I protested, he cut me off and gestured to Lon, saying, “Your watcher here can follow along with Evie, but I can’t talk about other Ekklesia Eleusia members with an outsider. I’m still under magical oath.”
“You discussed it with Robert Wildeye,” Lon said, slanting Rooke a cold look.
Rooke tugged the lapels of his smoking jacket together and shuffled toward the garden door. “And I hope you are smart enough to realize what this tells you about that man.”
Wildeye was one of us.
“Come, Miss Duval. I’m an old man with limited stores of energy.”
I didn’t want to be separated from Lon. And I definitely didn’t want to leave him alone with Tits Ahoy, but the magical oath was a real thing—all the lodge leaders had to undergo it. And I needed information he had, so I tamped down my uneasiness and followed him out the door.
The night air was warmer here than on the coast, and the wide cement path that snaked through the lush grounds was lit by tiny white lights and the occasional gas lamp that stood over benches or the warm spotlights artfully installed at the trunks of trees. I walked side-by-side with Rooke, who didn’t speak until we were several paces ahead of Lon and Evie.
“Quite a showstopper, that guardian of yours,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of odd things in my life, but that was new.”
“Puts other Hermeneus projections to shame,” I agreed. But I didn’t come to swap magical pointers with him, so before he asked how I’d managed to end up with a guardian like Priya, I said, “Wildeye was E∴E∴?”
“Vancouver lodge in the 1980s. His family’s there. He apparently never broke with the order officially—”
“Unlike you,” I said.
He shrugged casually, a smug smile on his lips. “No, he never caused a stir. I asked an old friend to look into him when he first contacted me last fall. His family had been in the order since the 1930s, but they were quiet and forgettable.”
But memorable enough for Dare to want to use him. “Did he tell you who he was working for?”
“He wouldn’t give me a name, but he indicated that it was a client with more cash than sense and someone powerful enough to make his life miserable. I felt a little sorry for the man. He was warded to the hilt with charms when I met with him in September.”
Rooke’s words came easily, and it felt as if he was being honest, but I wished Lon could verify it for me. I briefly glanced over my shoulder to spy him talking with Evie, who was smiling and using sweeping hand gestures to point out things along the path. I supposed if Lon heard something in her emotions to raise his hackles, he’d let me know.
“What exactly did the detective want to know about me?” I asked Rooke.
“If I knew whether you were alive and, if so, where you’d been hiding. As I said, I suspected you might be alive when I saw the Duvals on the news. But it was just a passing curiosity, and I didn’t care one way or another, to be perfectly honest. No offense.”
“None taken. What else did he want to know?”
“Mostly about your parents. How well I knew them, for how long, whether I believed they were capable of all those killings.”
“Believe me, they were.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, my dear. Enola was one of the reasons I left the order.”
“I remember you fighting with my parents. And with the caliph.”
Rooke sniffled and glanced at me. “You heard he passed away last month?”
I nodded stiffly.
“Made me sad to hear it, frankly. I don’t know how he’s fared over the last decade, but when I knew him, the caliph was a decent man.”
“Not decent enough to keep you in the order?”
“He wasn’t the reason I left, but I’ll admit that his lack of action frustrated me. He was blinded by his loyalty to Enola and her New Occult Order malarkey. Anyone could see she had no interest in uniting all the orders. She was a power-hungry manipulator who’d use anything at her disposal to get her way—sex, medicinals, dark magick. Nothing was sacred. The E∴E∴ was her playground, and she used every resource it had for her own personal agendas.”
That I could believe.
“Even your father was her dupe. I apologize for being frank, but he worshipped the ground she walked on and would’ve done anything she asked, no matter how immoral or dangerous. Enola was a tornado ripping through the order, and Alexander was her one-man cleanup crew, sweeping all the evidence beneath the rug.”
“Even bodies?”
“Takes a special kind of evil to murder your own child.”
“My brother,” I murmured, studying Rooke’s face. “You’re the one who told Wildeye.”
He nodded. “I hadn’t thought about little Victor Duval in years. When I was grandmaster of the Pasadena lodge, I traveled to Florida twice a year, so I saw Victor a handful of times. Your parents proclaimed him the first Moonchild, but he was a sickly child, physically and mentally. I think they knew fairly early on that their conception ritual was a failure.”
The garden path split in front of us. A wrought-iron signpost held two hand-lettered signs, one pointing to a succulent garden, and the other to “Sacred Trees.” Rooke headed toward the trees. “I don’t know for certain, but a rumor circulated among some of the officers. One of the caliph’s magi, Magus Frances—did you ever hear about her?”
“Vaguely. I think she died when I was a toddler.”
He nodded. “Back before you were born, she had a vision during a psychotropic ritual and claimed to have seen your father drowning Victor in a bathtub.”
“Dear God . . .”
“The caliph dismissed it, was furious at Frances for making accusations. Frances wasn’t exactly the most stable of magicians, so the rest of us dismissed it, too. And your parents appeared to be grieving. I didn’t know your mother very well at the time, so I just chalked it up to Frances partaking of one-too-many magic mushrooms.”
“When did you discover her vision was real?”
He pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. “No one did, to my knowledge. It was only the word of one crazy old magician against your parents’. But as I came to know your mother, I began to wonder.”
“Why? What else did she do?”
“Nothing concrete, really. Just the way she treated people. She was beautiful, and she had this way about her that made you feel as though she were royalty—aloof and bored one moment, ripping you to shreds the next. You never knew what to expect. People secretly called her Queen, comparing her split personality to one of two Lewis Carroll characters. Was she the calculating Red Queen today or the furious Queen of Hearts? We never knew.”
This astounded me. Growing up, I never saw her angry. Not really.
Rooke stooped to pick up a slender broken bough and, after snapping off a few dead branches, wielded it like a walking stick, tapping its tip against the path. “People were frightened of her anger, but it was the coolness that bothered me.”
As I kept an eye on Lon and Evie, Rooke went on to relate a story about my mother unemotionally slapping a teenage boy in the middle of a ritual for flubbing his Latin and another about a time she calmly stabbed a waitress’s arm with a fork after the girl accidentally knocked a glass off the table. When Rooke started a third story, I cut him off.
“You don’t have to convince me that she was damaged,” I said. “I know it firsthand. I’m more interested in the circumstances of my origins, my conception. What can you tell me about the Moonchild spell?”
He lightly tapped the end of his walking stick against an open-mouthed gargoyle molded into the arm of a cement bench. “Ah, yes. Call down a great spirit into the womb, and give birth to a goddess. A classic ritual. I’m assuming you’ve researched my grandfather’s version.”
“We both know she didn’t use Crowley’s version or the older standard ritual.”
“She claimed to have perfected it. Altered it somehow. The order toasted her success when she gave birth to Victor, but after years of watching him catch every virus known to mankind and be shuffled in and out of the hospital, people began to wonder. And when he showed no magical aptitude whatsoever? Well . . .”
“What changed between my brother’s ritual and mine?”
“It was modified—no doubt about that. Enola told the caliph she came across the solution during one of her trips home to France. One of her secret magical partners oversaw your conception. Someone from another order—”
“Frater Blue. He showed up with my parents to oversee me being sacrificed last year. I sent him to the Æthyr with my parents.”
Rooke raised a brow. “My, someone’s been busy. I suppose there’s no point in suggesting you track him down and ask him for a copy of the ritual.”
“Dead end,” I quipped with a tight smile.
We passed an unusual tree from India known as the sleeping almond. A small metal sign identified the bark as having properties “similar to milk of the poppy” during certain years of its growth. I blinked at it for a moment; the geeky magician in me was awed. Powdered and charged with Heka, the bark of this tree was a valuable ingredient in a couple of the medicinals I made. On a few occasions, I’d ordered it from shady overseas vendors, shelling out several hundred dollars a pop for a sliver of bark the size of a fingernail. Crazy that Rooke had it here. And at the tree’s base grew a thick shrub of a rare variety of silver jasmine. No wonder this man was rich.
“You know nothing else about the modified ritual?” I said, breathing in the scent of the jasmine as we continued strolling. “How the Moonchild is supposed to manifest? What my mother hoped to accomplish?”
“Oh, she promised to give birth to the greatest magician known to the world. My grandfather would be a mere footnote, she bragged, forgotten under the Moonchild’s superior abilities. Magick would become respected across the globe, and we’d no longer be pushed to the fringes of society.”
“Yes, I heard that on a regular basis,” I said sourly.
“We all did. I’m sure it was humiliating when she realized we all knew you weren’t a messiah. Skilled with Heka, yes. But you didn’t bring about the ‘New Aeon’ that Enola promised.”
“Which is probably why she eventually snapped and went on a killing spree. Were there no rumors about her documenting the Moonchild ritual somewhere? I can’t believe she wrote all those books about magick theory but didn’t want to publish her greatest achievement.”
“That is a puzzle, isn’t it? From my perspective at the time, their Moonchild rituals were a lot of talk without substance, like everything else your parents embarked upon. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“But it wasn’t them alone. One day, I looked up and realized that I was sitting around with a group of men and women, supposedly the most talented magicians in the world, yet half of them were déclassé trash with boring middle-class lives. They got cancer, suffered through divorce and depression, lost their savings after making poor investment decisions.”
“They were only human.”
“Precisely. If they were so prestigious and talented, why couldn’t they use magick to better their lives? They should all be successful politicians or great actors, wealthy and healthy. Magical talent was a gift, and they were squandering it. I was surrounded by fools, murderers, and some of the dullest people I’d ever known in my life. So I left before their bad karma brushed off on me and my family.”
I couldn’t really argue. I hadn’t been active in the order since I left home at seventeen. Lon always joked that he wasn’t a “joiner,” and maybe I wasn’t, either.
“So my advice to you would be to stop seeking the Moonchild ritual. Whatever evil intent Enola had when she conceived you doesn’t need to define your life. My grandfather was a great magician, but he was also a loathsome human being who didn’t give two goddamns about the people in his life unless they helped him reach magical nirvana. So when it comes to my bloodline and his legacy, I try to discard the bad and keep the good. Maybe you should do the same.”
If only it were that easy.
We stopped in front of a hedgerow labyrinth. Rooke held out his hand, offering to take me through the maze. He had to be freaking kidding. No way was I going inside something like that at night. A memory surfaced of watching the snowy labyrinth scene in The Shining at Lon’s house. I remembered holding Jupe’s feet hostage and tickling him during the scary bits. I think Lon was tickling me, too, but that seemed . . . odd for him.
At that point, the memory went a little fuzzy. My temples started throbbing, so I stopped trying to force it and turned around to track Lon and Evie. Watching her flirt with him in that low-cut red top of hers made me feel like a snorting bull, ready to charge. But I still needed one last piece of information from her father.
“What is Naos Ophis?”