Summoning Trouble, page 9
“Well, you are bespelled,” Jerome said. “I can remove it, or you can continue to make them feel good about their plans for world domination.”
“I definitely want it gone.” Helia nodded.
“It’s going to feel weird, just to warn you,” Jerome told her, and I could tell he was pulling his magic together by the look on his face. As he broke the spell on my sister, my doorbell rang again. I opened it to find Raphael and Gabriel at the door.
We went through a less dramatic explanation to them about the spell. They were both like me; they thought it was life-altering. Helia wasn’t connected to a book via the spell, but Raphael and Gabriel were, so after Jerome checked Helia out, she left. However, Raphael and Gabriel wanted to discuss the implications of all of us being connected to books by magic, and their thoughts being written down. Not just with Jerome and I having Stygian magic at our fingertips, but for them. They were well and truly ancient and had a lot of accumulated knowledge about all sorts of things. As we discussed it, Haniel and Azrael showed up. They too had been bespelled. As the five archangels talked, they suddenly all turned to look at Jerome and me.
“So, is it possible they got the possession potion from one of you?” Remiel asked.
“I don’t think in potions, ever. I certainly don’t know any recipes,” I said.
“I think in potions, unlike Soleil, but I don’t think about potions that cause possession. I think someone would have to bluntly ask me about a possession potion for me to think about one, let alone one from ancient history,” Jerome replied.
“Fuck...” Haniel said slowly. “Fuck,” he repeated. “I might be the source. We were discussing the Possession War of 470 BCE in class one day, and the kids got around to asking how so many people could have become possessed so quickly and easily without other people realizing it was happening.”
“Ashtaroth said it was Xerxes’ potion,” I said quietly.
“I don’t remember thinking of the potion recipe, but I did talk about the potion Xerxes used for the possession war,” Haniel said. “But I didn’t give the list of ingredients or even think about them.”
“I’m not sure you have to consciously think about it. I think if you knew the recipe it probably got recorded.” Jerome pursed his lips together tightly. “Twice, as we were looking at the book Soleil’s thoughts were showing up in, she grimaced at the words as they appeared. I wasn’t sure why at first, and then it dawned on me, some were not the words at the forefront of her mind, I could see those. I think it was her subconscious on both those occasions and she didn’t recognize them.”
“The two lines of swearing that sounded like me but didn’t,” I said to him.
“Yes, your favorite swear word is fuck, you don’t use the words that were showing up,” Jerome said.
“Huh, you’re right, I’ve never heard her us those three, let alone the way they were used.” Magda grinned. “Especially the C word. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but while Soleil could make a sailor blush, she is selective about which words she uses and how.”
“She doesn’t even consciously think of the C word or P word,” Jerome said. “I suspect that was a subconscious thought. She was angry and they came out onto the page. Which means there’s a good chance they now have a recipe for a potion of mass summoning.”
“I don’t know any potion recipes,” I said.
“No, but I do. If it works the way I think, our Q&A session last night about potions and mass possessions or mass summonings triggered my subconscious to think about them the way the class discussion triggered Haniel to think of Xerxes’ potion.”
“Well, fuck.” I sighed. “This is extremely bad. It also means that we don’t know the true focus of the spell. It could have been meant for any of us. The archangels have so much knowledge from history floating around, plus you and I have Stygian magic, and Magda is working with imp messengers to communicate with demons for the AESPCA. Plus, whatever the AESPCA agents think about. Anyone could have been a target.”
“Yes and no,” Magda said. “Yes, they got us six, but they couldn’t have just sent out a mass recording spell without some kind of focus, or they would have gotten the thoughts of everyone there, including the crowd of two or three hundred people. I was standing close to you and Jerome, as was Remiel and Raphael. But I don’t remember where Gabriel and Haniel were.”
“You think it has something to do with proximity,” Jerome said, nodding slightly. “It could be. You and Remiel were worried about Soleil’s safety because she was pissed off, which is why you were standing close to us.” Jerome closed his eyes and the scene with the dragon materialized in my living room in a smaller than life-size scale. Haniel and Gabriel were standing within twenty feet of us. Azrael was standing maybe six feet in front of us with Uriel and an unknown AESPCA agent, who was carrying a flamethrower, of all things. There were four more anonymous AESPCA agents standing near Magda and Remiel. A line of police officers was corralling the crowd behind us, and I gasped.
“We were all standing in a clear area in front of the crowd,” I said, pointing to all of us. The clearing was at an intersection with buildings on every corner. My uncles, myself, Jerome, Magda, and the AESPCA agents were all standing somewhat clustered together in front of the spot where the dragon had perched on the roof of a four-story building. The crowd had been pushed back onto the main square of the WashU campus and was approximately 500 feet or so behind us.
“Is this accurate?” Magda asked.
“As accurate as I can remember,” Jerome replied.
“Well then, we were just sitting ducks and there’s no way to tell who the targets were,” she said. We were all quietly staring at the arrangement of people. Chances were great that this was our configuration, as Jerome had impeccable memory recall skills, possibly because of the Akashic Record thing. “That’s fucking annoying,” Magda said, after several minutes. “Jerome, can you play the scene for us from the beginning? Maybe we can see who or when we were bespelled.”
“I can.” The magical projection disappeared, replaced by Remiel, Helia, Jerome, and I running into the park at the base of the Arch. There were three AESPCA agents there, with magical weapons as well as conventional ones. The dragon was napping in the sun on the park grass. We stood there for a few minutes, discussing what we were going to do with the agents, and then I started gathering magic and the dragon awoke and took off. It crushed a car and knocked over a tree as it took off for a building a couple of blocks away. We ran after it. As we ran, I was suddenly lifted off my feet by a flying Remiel; Raphael did the same with Jerome. We cornered the dragon on the building. Archangels circled overhead, while Jerome and I took up positions on opposite sides of the building. The dragon fought back; it swatted Raphael out of the air, and then grabbed at him, but missed. I remembered being worried about accidentally sending Remiel to the Stygian with the dragon. Raphael hit the ground with a thud, which is when I called the rest of my family to come assist. They could provide distraction while Jerome and I prepared to send the dragon back to the Stygian. I was on the phone with Michael when the dragon bathed me in fire. My cell phone melted, and I was a little singed but other than needing a haircut and new phone, the fire didn’t do much to me. Dragons expel hellfire.
Magda arrived with a whole bunch of people coming in via portal. The portal seemed to annoy the dragon, and he turned his attention to them for a moment, then started to tear apart the building it was standing on. After tearing off one corner of the roof and dropping it down on us, it took off again. Most of us began running again. Even Raphael, bleeding and battered, got up and came with us, although his wing was obviously broken and hung at a strange angle. That was when the dragon began casting spells at us. It landed a second time, taking up position on the four-story building near Washington University in St. Louis city, and ate one of the bystanders. Now came the original scene, all of us standing in a small area, as I prepared everyone to fan out and surround the building to give it multiple targets while I got a portal to the Stygian open under the dragon to ensure it had to go through. The building the dragon stood on was an older building and had stone buttresses; the dragon smashed one of these to pieces and began hurling chunks of it at us. No one stood out as doing anything weird. It took another three minutes to get everyone into position, and then I opened the portal. The portal swirled in the air next to the building. Remiel, Azrael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Haniel were flying circles over the dragon’s head, and as they did, they hit it with spells, forcing it backwards. Finally, one of them hit something critical and the dragon stumbled backwards over the edge of the building, falling into the portal. It took thirty minutes from the moment we arrived at the park to find the dragon sunning itself to get it back to the Stygian. It did a lot of damage in thirty minutes, though, and it had all been recorded on cell phones by spectators. Animal rights activists had tried to sue me and the AESPCA for harming the dragon, but the case was thrown out because dragons are not part of our regular existence.
“Nothing jumped out at me,” Remiel said.
“Me either,” Haniel added. “But I suspect Jerome’s first projection of all of us standing in the empty street is when it happened. I remember feeling magic hit me, but I thought it was from the dragon.”
“Ditto,” I agreed. “So, was the dragon summoning part of it or did it just provide opportunity for the actual bad guys?”
“The summoners were three kids, aged 12-15,” Magda said. “They found a summoning spell in an ancestor’s grimoire. It was investigated and the grimoire confiscated. I did some of the interviews, since dragons fall under my department these days, and I don’t think they meant for it to get loose or run amok. They thought it would be small and cute and green.”
“Yeah, I can’t imagine kids are the masterminds of these robberies,” Remiel said, as my doorbell rang. It was Raphael. Behind him was Uriel. We got them inside, and Jerome went looking for the spell. He didn’t find it on either of them. We began reviewing the memory again and sure enough, there was a space of a few minutes when Uriel, Michael, and an injured Raphael were not near any of us. Uriel was on his phone, standing next to Raphael as Michael worked on healing my father. They were closer to the crowd than us. As we watched, Helia walked toward them. She had been with the metro police trying to calm the crowd and reduce their fear level. However, it wasn’t a straight line from where she’d been standing to our father and for a few seconds she was closer to us than to the crowd or where Raphael and the other two were standing.
“That’s the moment,” Jerome said.
“I think so,” Magda said. Jerome had stopped the memory and we all stood frozen in time. There was a cop on crowd control who had turned and was looking at us.
“If I had been tracking magic at that moment, we might know where it came from. I think we should check that cop though, because he turned at the same moment all of us look a little startled,” Jerome said, zooming in on our faces.
“Can we assume the spell dispersed over the area evenly in a spherical shape?” I asked.
“No,” several people said simultaneously.
“It’s more like what happens if you throw powdered sugar or flour into the air. It will disperse over the area unevenly and will float with the wind, if there is any,” Magda explained.
“Well, that’s complicated,” I said. “I was hoping we might be able to use the radius to determine who the target really was, because I feel like that could provide us with valuable information.”
“We might be able to narrow down the target based on where everyone was standing and who was affected. Plus, it was March, we can take it as a given there was wind. We know Raph and Uri weren’t affected. Does anyone know what direction most of us are facing?” Remiel asked.
“No, but we can look up the building and figure it out,” Jerome said, already digging out his phone. We spent an hour looking at the scene from every angle after Jerome got the building’s geographical layout sorted. We also broke the spell for everyone in my family who was bespelled. After another hour, using the available information, we had an idea, albeit a weird one, that the spell might have been meant for the dragon and not one of us. It was the only thing that accounted for Helia, Jerome, myself, and most of my uncles, plus Magda getting hit. We’d also gotten the name of the crowd control St. Louis metro police officer that might have gotten hit. Magda was using the AESPCA to try to get in touch with him. He was our lynchpin; the only way he could be bespelled is if the person casting the spell had been aiming up at the dragon.
If we were correct, the potions and crimes related to it were accidental discoveries on the part of the caster. Of course, the theory wasn’t yet perfect because Dantalian said the person committing the robberies wanted power because they had little, and the person that cast the spell would have needed power. Jerome thought “power” might be a vague concept for a demon in the sense that they might not understand how power among the living worked since it, like time, was different in the Stygian. In the Stygian, those with power were physically massive, but among the living that wasn’t necessarily the case. Magda expounded on the idea, pointing out that someone like Jerome’s former potions teacher, whose name was Hannah German, was a fantastic potions maker, but her spells were lacking. Magda thought this was similar to my lack of magical skill and laziness but didn’t know Miss German well enough to be positive about that.
Chapter Nine
The problem with our theory was that there was no conceivable reason to record the thoughts of a dragon. The evidence pointed to the theory being correct, which was a stumbling block, because the motive didn’t make sense. Even with eight of us brainstorming the issue, we could think of no reason to bespell a dragon or whether a dragon could even be bespelled. And how did that tie into us? We were only there because there was a dragon on the loose, and we were called to handle it. So, had the caster gone out and bought books to record all our thoughts after the spell had been cast? That seemed improbable; Jerome was pretty sure we would need to be connected to the book at the time the spell was cast, meaning the books had to exist before the dragon got loose and we went after it. However, there was nothing in the space between the ground and the dragon that the castor could have been aiming at to hit all of us and the spell direction would have had to be correct. Unless it was the dragon that cast the spell, somehow tied us to the books and then gave them to humans to plan robberies, which seemed even more improbable.
“I think there’s only one conclusion we can draw from this,” I said, my stomach growling. A moment later, I heard Jerome’s growl, too. He had been doing a lot of magic this afternoon; breaking spells, giving us different views from his memory of the dragon incident and even zooming in and out for us. “Whoever did this is a crackpot, and their motivation and the “why” will never fully make sense to us.”
“Do you think it was someone within the DDF?” Magda asked.
“I know I’m going to regret this, but what is the DDF?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at her.
“The Dragons Deserve Freedom advocacy group,” Magda replied.
“Yep, I regret asking.” I commented. “There are people that believe dragons should be released from the Stygian to roam the Earth again?”
“Yes.”
“Good grief, there is a group in support of everything.” I shook my head. “I want dinner and I don’t want to think about people who think dragons should be flying among us. Did they watch the video of the dragon snatching up the person from the street and eating them? Dragons and demons cohabitate nicely, because dragons can’t eat demons. Everything else that moves is food in the Stygian, as well as on Earth.”
“Their argument is that we have unbalanced the ecosystem by sending dragons to the Stygian, and that’s why people are overpopulating the Earth.”
“Okay, I sorta agree with the overpopulation part, but they realize dragons are not the only predators that were sent to the Stygian to encourage the growth of the people population, right? Using that argument, we should bring back the phoenixes, also known as bennu birds as well as dragons, and a dozen or so other things.”
“You said it must be a crackpot, I offered a crackpot group that we might want to investigate.” Magda shrugged.
“Holy crap, humans, as an intelligent species, is in doubt. I was pretty sure BEDR was our lowest level of common sense, but the DDF might actually be worse.” I sighed again. “Or maybe I’m not giving them the benefit of the doubt and it’s all perfectly sane and logical when they explain it.”
“It isn’t,” Magda assured me.
“Well, okie dokie then. The teenager is hungry. I’m hungry. I’m getting cranky. I’m going to decide on a place for dinner. Everyone should go away. Magda, we will contact you in the morning, not early; it’s Sunday, and arrange to meet with the AESPCA agents,” I said as I stood up from the floor. To my surprise, no one grumbled about my abrupt ending to the brainstorming session. I really was getting tired and cranky. My first thought about the DDF was maybe I should take them to the Stygian to get up close and personal with a few dragons and see if they felt the same afterward, assuming they survived.
“There’s a chapter of the DDF at my school,” Jerome said, after the last of our crime fighting partners left. “Although that group is more animal rights based, not sure if it’s affiliated with the group Magda was talking about, but it might be.”
“I don’t know that being pro-animal rights means supporting the return of dragons to munch on people.”
“I was thinking I could poke around the club and see what’s up,” he replied.
“I think that is a terrible idea. I don’t want you surrounded by crackpots...well, more crackpots. My family provides all the loonies one person should ever need.”
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