Embers (28 page)

Anya tried to shout out to stop him, but her words were as ephemeral as her presence. She was forced to watch, helpless, as the priest cut his wrists with the scissors. Only then was he able to hold his hands in prayer over his desk, red spiraling down his sleeves like a red rosary. A dark giggle rattled through the priest’s chest, expelled into the air like condensation.

It was then that she realized that the dream wasn’t her own imagination, idly filling in the blanks of the history of St. Florian’s ghost.

It was one of Mimi’s memories, one of her most treasured ones: the time she drove a priest to suicide.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

WHEN ANYA AWOKE, THE SUNSHINE had drained away, though she could still feel its heat on her face. The sun had set behind the buildings to the west, leaving a violet sky speckled with the tatters of clouds. Anya stretched in the half darkness. The motion disturbed Sparky, who put his feet over his eyes. Anya rubbed his belly vigorously, until he squirmed fully awake and stretched out on her lap.

As promised, Renee remained in the window seat, her arms wrapped around her knees.

“You were talking in your sleep,” she said.

Anya rubbed her eyes, and the memory of the dream of the priest flooded back to her.

“What did I say?”

“It sounded like a Catholic Mass. . . in Latin.”

A knock echoed on the bedroom door, which then squeaked open. Katie thrust her head into the room. “Anya, we’re ready for you.”

Anya swung her legs over the bed. “Can I go pee first?”

Katie nodded. “I’ll wait for you on the stairs.”

Anya crossed the hall to the tiny bathroom. She washed her hands and splashed water on her face, while Sparky circled underfoot. She could feel Mimi tightly coiled in her stomach, like a snake in a basket, waiting to strike when the lid was removed. The demon knew that the game was up and was biding her time.

Anya pulled her hair back in a ponytail with an elastic band, staring at her face in the mirror. She had the look of a drug addict: Her eyes were darkly circled and bloodshot, and her face was too pale. No wonder Marsh had ordered her off the case. She chewed her bottom lip, vowing not to think about that now. She needed to focus on helping herself, to help DAGR in whatever way she could to get Mimi untangled from her aura and kicked to the curb.

Anya took off her shoes and set them neatly beside the bathtub. She removed her belt, earrings, and watch. She emptied her pockets of loose change and hung her garlicsmelling suit jacket on the back doorknob. This was standard procedure for an exorcism: never leave anything on the victim that could be used as a weapon. She deliberately left the salamander torque around her neck. She hadn’t taken it off since she was a child, and wasn’t going to start, now.

She took a deep breath, then opened the bathroom door. Katie took her arm, and Sparky flowed down the steps behind them into the bar.

Anya stood at the bottom of the stairs as she emitted a low whistle. “Fancy.”

The bar was decked out for a serious party. A chalk circle wrapped around the bar, with candles placed in the cardinal directions. When Anya looked more closely, the circle was drawn in the likeness of Ouroboros, the world-eating serpent. A gap had been left open in the eastern edge for Anya, Sparky, and Katie to enter. The bar had been covered in multicolored chalk marks: runes, pentagrams, and angelic script for the archangels corresponding to each of the elemental directions. At the center, she thought she recognized the Kabbalistic tree of life. It was as if a mystical sidewalk artist had been on the loose, and had been doodling for hours. The mirrors behind the bar were covered in black trash bags. The air hung thick with incense; Anya could smell eucalyptus and cedar most strongly. The overall effect was one of cough-and-congestion-clearing cold medicine. Jules and Max stood near a strange assortment of equipment at the foot of the bar. Anya thought she spied an ice bucket with an egg beater in the collection.

These were the big guns, not the simple, natural magick blessings they used in DAGR’s usual procedures to drive out simple spirits. That magick was born mostly of intention—

spontaneous and effective in most situations. It was the kind of magick Anya used unconsciously when she drove out spirits and the kind of power that animated Sparky. It was derived from the environment, from the basic elements, operating without formulae or complex recipes.

Heavy ceremonial magick was for special occasions; it had to be designed carefully and followed to the syllable. Its power derived from hidden things, from the caster’s innate skill and fortitude. Where natural magick could be considered an art, ceremonial magick was a science. Rules had to be followed, prescriptions memorized. Ritual magick was for real magicians, people like Katie and Ciro, who understood the history and implications of each utterance and gesture.

Ciro sat in his wheelchair, his finger holding a place in a very large, thick book jammed full with dog-eared recipe cards. The title was a tongue-twister:
Sefer Raziel HaMalach
.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked Anya.

“That depends on who you ask,” she responded. “I think I dreamed one of Mimi’s memories.”

Ciro frowned. “Then we should get started.”

Katie kicked off her shoes and pulled an embroidered navy velvet robe over her street clothes. Wielding a silver athame, she looked a bit like a visitor to a Renaissance Faire preparing to peel potatoes, and Anya felt underdressed. She had to hand it to the Catholics and the Wiccans: they had a sense of ceremony.

“Where do you want me?” she asked.

“Up here.” Jules patted the bar top.

Anya hopped up on the bar. “I don’t have to dance on it, do I?”

“Just lie back. Think of it as the magickal examination table.”

Anya fidgeted in nervousness as she leaned back against the bar top. This was weird, even for DAGR. She was conscious that her butt was smudging two of the stations on the Kabbalistic tree of life.

Jules was using the voice he used when explaining hauntings to frightened homeowners.

“We’re going to tie you to the bar rails.”

Anya bit her lip. Her skin crawled at the idea, but she nodded. Jules and Max broke out a package of zip ties and lashed her right hand and both feet to the customer bar rail. Her left hand got tied to the top of a beer keg. She wiggled her fingers in her bonds. They weren’t tight enough to cut off circulation, but she wasn’t going anywhere unless and until someone cut her loose. Sparky clambered to the bar top and sat on her stomach. Good thing she’d emptied her bladder before the procedure, she thought. Jules turned his head away from Sparky’s heat, but he didn’t say anything about the warmth.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Katie preparing to close the circle. Renee paused at the edge. A spirit wouldn’t be able to cross over after it had been sealed. Renee stepped over the circle and let Katie fill in behind. She came to Anya’s side and smiled like a nurse calming a frightened patient before surgery.

“You don’t have to be here, you know,” Anya told her. An exorcism could be hazardous to ordinary house spirits.

Renee shook her head, her bob swinging along her jaw line.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the
world. This is the most excitement this joint has seen since the Jazz Age.”

“Circle’s closed,” Katie announced. Standing at the eastern edge of the circle, she lifted her silver athame and made the sign of the pentacle in the air, uttering the name “Yee-hovah.” She turned to the south, repeating the gesture. “Ah-doh-nae.” Then, west: “Eh-heyah.” Then, north: “Ah-gell-ah.”

She returned to the east, lifting her arms to call the archangels. “Before me, Raphael. Behind me, Gabriel. To my right hand, Michael. To my left hand, Auriel. About me flame the pentagrams and upon me shines the six-rayed star.”

She looked back at the bar, then nodded. The ritual she’d used, the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, had been around in different variations since the Gardnerian era of magick. Anya had only seen it performed a couple of times, but it was still impressive.

“Let’s begin.” Ciro turned the page in his book. “The first step is to call the spirit out of hiding.”

Jules dipped an old-fashioned, crank-style eggbeater in an ice bucket. He lifted it out, turned the handle. Droplets of holy water splashed on Anya, fizzling like hydrogen peroxide on her skin. Max dipped a cocktail whisk into the bucket, then shook it on Anya in his best impression of a Catholic priest.

“Jules,” she hissed. “I thought you guys had a special tool for that, or something.”

Jules hushed her. “My mama always told me to make do with what you’ve got.”

Ciro wheeled over to the bar, reached up, and laid a bread knife on Anya’s shoulder. Anya supposed it had been consecrated: the poor man’s athame. “By the sword of Michael, I command the demon Mimiveh to appear.”

Anya could feel Mimi uncoiling in her gut. In horror, she watched as her belly rolled like a belly dancer’s stage trick, and the acidic burning rushed up her throat. Sparky adjusted his footing to the shifting terrain, turning his head right and left to watch the churning that gurgled behind her sternum.

Mimi’s voice boiled out of her mouth, a full octave higher than Anya’s natural contralto.

“You raaaaang?”

“Tell us all your names, demon.”

Anya felt her mouth twist. Sparky crouched low on her chest, growling at the foreign voice emerging from her mouth.
“I’ve been around the block a few times, old man. Lilitu,
Zepara, Jezebel, Circe, Succubus. . . take your pick.”

Anya couldn’t see the look that passed between Ciro and Katie, but she felt an extra dash of holy water flung on her face from Jules’s quarter. Sparky climbed off her chest to circle her body. She could hear his claws clacking around the bar top.

“How old are you?”

“A lady never tells her age,”
Mimi answered coyly.
“I’d like to think I’m young at
heart.”

Jules shook more holy water at her, and Anya could feel blisters rising on her lips.

“Again, how old are you?”

“I’m older than Babylon. You can consider me to be a contemporary of your friend,
Sirrush. Of course, back then, creatures like Sirrush were as common as cattle. But don’t
call him common. His ego is rather delicate.”

“Mimiveh, Lilitu, Zepara, Jezebel, Circe, Succubus. . . I order you and all your incarnations to leave this body.”

Laughter bubbled from her lips.
“It will take much more than orders from an old man to
give her up.”

Overhead, the bar lights shattered, one by one. Max shielded his head with his arm as he stepped back.

“Don’t break the circle,” Jules shouted at him. He yanked the young man back before he tripped over the magickal border.

Ciro began reading aloud from a recipe card and writing in Hebrew on her arms with a blue magic marker. The marks itched on her skin like poison ivy. She squirmed, trying to scratch them against her bonds. “‘Jehovah stands in judgment of all above and below. In purity, He destroys and divides every devil and demon, breaks every binding, unravels every enchantment and sorcery. . .’”

Glassware stacked on the bar shattered as if an unseen hand had pulled a cornerstone piece from the bottom. Renee yelped, ducking behind the bathtub full of coins.

Anya felt her head turning toward the ghost of the flapper.
“Come here, little songbird.
Let the Lantern devour you. You would make lovely food for Sirrush.”

Anya forced her head away, trying to quell the darkness expanding in her chest. She wouldn’t allow Mimi to force her to take Renee. She wouldn’t. She could feel her fingernails scraping deep into the bar with the effort to stay present enough to keep the demon from unlocking her dark heart and destroying Renee.

The bathtub in the center of the floor cracked open with the sound of lightning striking a tree. Twenty years’ worth of loose change rolled over the floor in a seething, shimmering mass.

Katie stepped forward. She touched her gleaming athame to Anya’s body, sketching a pentacle on her body: forehead, right breast, left shoulder, right shoulder, right breast, and her forehead. The point of the athame burned into her skin, and she felt herself snarling.

“In the name of the archangels, I cast you out, Mimiveh.” Her voice rang sharp, clear.

And too brittle.

The mirror behind the bar exploded into fragments, as if a hurricane tore through the brick wall. Anya felt Sparky’s body on her chest, trying to shield her from the glittering shards, but the will of Mimiveh was too strong. The blast ripped through the bar, shattering the remaining glass. Liqueur and rum bottles smashed on the floor; a bottle of vodka hit too close to one of Katie’s candles and burst into an exhalation of blue and yellow flame.

Max, acting on impulse, threw the ice bucket of holy water on it. It doused the fire, but washed away the eastern rim of Katie’s chalk circle, breaking the spell.

“No!” Katie fell on her hands in the debris, trying to redraw it with pink sidewalk chalk, but it was too late. The energy had already escaped, and the chalk wouldn’t stick to the wet floor.

Anya felt Mimi’s giggle escape her lips before the demon retracted into the pit of her stomach. Sticky with water, booze, and glass, Anya stared up at the tin ceiling of the bar, blinking back tears. Sparky put his head on her shoulder, sighing, as the mirror shards and coins rattled to a rest.

The remaining silence, the sigh of failure, was deafening.

Anya sat in the bottom of Ciro’s shower, cold water pelting her skin. She shivered—from cold, from dread, from the pain of the water on her burns. Sparky paced in front of her, making small mewling noises. She knew he felt as helpless as she did, powerless. Powerless to do her job, to stop Ferrer and his arson. Powerless to help Brian, who seemed to linger in limbo. Powerless against Mimi, who’d invaded her body. Now Mimi had trashed the Devil’s Bathtub, and she was no closer to any of those goals. It was a small blessing that Ciro’s heart hadn’t given out right there. Poor Renee had been finally coaxed out from beneath the floorboards with promises that Ciro would add to his already formidable Jazz Age record collection, to give her something “new” to dance to.