Chapter Eleven
Kathy figured they had one shot at getting the door-closing ritual right. What they did have on their side was the delicacy of the opening ritual, and its tendency to collapse if anything deviated from the very precise order of things. However, it had been noted in all the books that made reference to this particular ritual that the side effects of simply disrupting the opening ritual varied from the tragic to the outright ghastly. To achieve low-risk results in their favor, she and Teagan would have to perform their ritual with a minimum of error, and even then, with her unfamiliarity and inexperience being what it was, things could still go terribly wrong.
No pressure, she told herself, and added, Yeah, right. Your life is pressure.
She gathered some pure beeswax candles—silver, in this case, to channel astral energy, and magenta for its intense energizing properties in difficult rites such as the one she was attempting. She gathered the printed-out copy of the words Teagan needed to read, the miniature dollhouse door, and a straight pin, as well as the lighter she had used to torch the monster whose remains were melting in her den. She rummaged through a small trunk she kept in the secret compartment behind her headboard in her bedroom for a bottle of dark, iridescent liquid, and some sticks of yerba santa leaf and desert sage incense and their holders, plus some more salt and chalk. All these things she piled on the hallway floor, since the coffee table in the den was now in charred splinters.
All the while, Teagan watched her, hovering nearby in case she instructed him to do something. She felt a little sorry for him in a way. His helpless pacing and the occasional quizzical expression told her he was clearly out of his element, and the way he puffed on his unlit cigarette and ran a hand through his hair told her he was nervous.
“You’ll be fine,” she said to him over her shoulder as she went into the little foyer area of the apartment. She’d decided that space between the kitchen, den, and hallway to the bed- and bathrooms was the only area large enough for their purposes.
She crouched on her haunches and began drawing a very large circle, about six and a half feet across, on the hardwood floor with the chalk. She left a small opening, then drew an inner ring about three inches smaller around than the first, leaving an opening in the same place. Next, she began copying with great care the symbols from one of the printed-out pages in the space between the inner ring and the outer ring.
Teagan had followed her out of the kitchen, and stood with his lips clamped around his cigarette and his hands in his jeans pockets as he watched her. “I hope you’re right, love,” he muttered. “All of this is . . .” He gestured around him, dropping the smoke back in his front pocket. The frost around the apartment was starting to melt, dampening the couch cushions in uneven patches and making slippery wet spots on the floor. From time to time, though, a sourceless gust of cold wind would blow across their skin, making them shiver. The winter had relinquished its grip on the apartment for now, but it was never too far away.
“I know. It’s a lot to digest. But we’re going to be okay.” Referring to the printed pages again, she drew the appropriate greater sigils in the four directional corners surrounding the circle, and some lesser sigils in between those. On the greater sigils, she placed the magenta candles, and on the lesser sigils, the silver ones. She poured one of the dark-colored oils just outside the outer chalk border, and another of the oils just inside the inner one, leaving the same small opening. The heavy, musky scents of them mingled in her nose. It reminded her, for reasons she couldn’t quite place, of her brother’s old room.
She stuck the straight pin horizontally through the soft wood of the dollhouse door frame and into the center of the wood of the little door, effectively jamming it closed. Then she poured a little of the oils onto her fingertips and rubbed them around the outline of the door where it met the frame, as well as underneath it.
“What’s that for, the opening there?” Teagan asked, pointing.
“For us to enter. If I seal the circle up now and then we step inside, we’re not really inside it, so we’re not protected by it. We have to finish the circle once we’re both in the center of it.”
“Ahh. Okay. And the oils?”
“Like the chalk, they strengthen the wall around the safety zone we’re creating.”
Teagan clapped his hands together. “Aye, okay. Now what?”
Kathy let out a long breath as she stood. It had been getting colder since they’d been talking, and her exhalation condensed in wispy plumes of white. “Well, first, I need you to come into the circle through that opening, with those papers you’re going to read.” Teagan did so, joining her in the center. With the chalk and the oils, she sealed the circle. “Now we light each of the candles.” She lit the magenta ones in order of the directions where they were placed—north, south, west, and then east—and then lit the silver ones in a counterclockwise direction from the one to the right of the northern candle. The little flames danced in unfelt breezes.
Teagan gave her a nervous look, the papers with the closing ritual fluttering in his hand as he shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “Do I . . . ?”
“Not yet,” she told him. She set eight incense holders out, one between each of the candles, and alternated types of incense sticks. She lit them with the kitchen lighter and once the sweet smoke began floating through the circle, she rose.
“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Now you read. Go slow—read each word correctly, and with as much belief in the words as you are capable of feeling. When you get to the end, start over and read it again. I’ll tell you when to stop. You can do this, Reece.” She gave him a quick, reassuring squeeze on his forearm. “I’m right here with you.”
Teagan regarded her with a tender look that warmed every part of her. Then his gaze dropped to the pages as he scanned the words in his head. Finally he nodded, ran a hand through his hair, popped the unlit cigarette in his mouth, considered that, then took it out and dropped it back in his pocket. He looked up at her. “I’m ready.”
She nodded. In a soft voice, she said, “Let’s do this.”
Teagan began to read:
Coimeádaí na geataí, Máistir na Doirse agus Eochracha
Iarraimid ort a dhúnadh ar a bhfuil d’oscail
Sliocht a barra agus faoi ghlas suas ar an mbealach rúnda
Le do thoil a chosaint i ár gcuid ama an ghátair . . .
As Teagan spoke the words—which, he’d told her, were mostly pleas to the Master of Doors and Keys to banish these creatures and close the door behind them—Kathy felt the room get both darker and colder. A thin sheen of ice began knitting a fractal pattern of tiny sparkling crystals from the far corners of the room right up to the chalk-and-oil boundary of the circle.
Kathy thought the physical evidence around her, despite its eeriness, was probably a good sign. They were getting the attention of the winter creatures, which were recognizing their limits, the boundaries to their power in the presence of whoever or whatever the being known as the Master of Doors and Keys actually was. Personally, Kathy found the concept of any entity that could bend the wills of lesser gods to its demands to be just beyond the outer edge of a sane and comfortable zone of beliefs, but she did her best to squash such thoughts. Evidently, the oldest elements from multiple universes believed this Master was a just and reasonable creature who could be called upon to assist in ridding a world of chaotic, hostile, negative forces, and that had to be of some comfort.
Teagan continued reciting the spell.
The dimness in the room had begun to take on a faint, blue-tinted glow, and the temperature dropped enough that Kathy could see her breath again. If Teagan noticed any of it, he didn’t let on. He was focused on the words, on the power behind the words, and on the unspoken notion hanging as heavy as the cold in the air that the unimaginable could happen if he screwed up.
He started the invocation over as Kathy had instructed. She had told him that it gained power, a kind of magical momentum, each time he recited it, and he figured they needed all the momentum they could get.
It was then that part of the gloom resolved itself into shapes suggestive of humanoid entities. Kathy’s eyes grew wide, and speech failed her. They gave off a bluish light that filled the room, pushing the darkness toward the outermost corners. The cold, though, became an almost living, breathing thing, pacing and panting all around them. As the details of those humanoid entities became more defined, Kathy touched Teagan’s arm and he looked up, the rest of his words trailing off.
Kathy couldn’t say for sure, but she thought the five beings standing before them just outside their circle of protection were the Blue People.