He hurled the flames up into Self's face, grabbed him by the throat, and heaved him high over the desk. Self flew backward across the room into the far shelves and landed atop a copy of the grimoire of Pope Honorius. His feet dipped down through the binding as it opened wide on its own and rippled like a black pool. Self grimaced and tried to get free. He bit and tore at the book, his knees drawn into the cover, sinking deeper and deeper until it had swallowed his legs and was sucking him down farther.
Jebediah shrugged off his jacket and I saw the muscles rippling on his wiry frame. I jerked back my arm and launched a Mohammeden hex straight toward the point of his chin, hoping to fry off that pretentious goatee. The tomes around us pulsed with our passions and hatred. Mesopotamian dark spells flowed from my fists and battered aside the Philistine fires and rising cones of incantations burning within him. Welsh Celtic war cries and epithets from the Zohar spilled out between those creased lips. He fused sorceries in fashions never done before, and still I sensed he was holding back.
Self attempted to find leverage by driving his claws into the binding. It ripped and bled like flesh as he was drawn deeper, his chin nearly under the pages. He said,
The strings of the lute twanged out melodies that Jebediah's raped ancestors had been forced to listen to, slower and sweeter than those Bridgett and I had danced to in the restaurant. I didn't have many defenses here in Jebediah's lair and he hammered away at my mind and soul as our wills met and spat and battled savagely.
Gawain entered from the other side of the room through a pair of sliding doors, and I felt the pressure of his presence rushing against me.
Born perfectly normal, Gawain had been brought home by his mother and immediately had his eardrums punctured, corneas seared, and tongue snipped so that it forked. He'd been raised as a feral and pure child and led into the craft. Without those senses he was unhampered by the tactile world and found realities beyond it.
Bridgett stood beside him and struck her pose once more, all those curves doing wondrous things again. Self's mother perched high on her shoulder with talons tangling in her hair. Thurnmim stroked the two sweeping curls away from Bridgett's mouth. Behind them stood the dwarfish corpse of the governor and another dead man painted black and white like a harlequin, sticking his tongue out and making faces. His hat and clownish costume was full of bells that jangled as he pranced closer.
Even demons know some form of love. Thummim screeched and reached for Self but the various tomes about the library glowed brightly and whispered at her proximity, snapping open, reaching for her. Forty-seven years before the birth of Christ she'd ridden the shoulder of Julius Caesar when he'd ordered the library of Alexandria razed, hoping to destroy the
Jebediah hissed, 'Stay back,' and Bridgett lifted her chin and blew me a kiss with those exquisite pink lips. Thummim jerked toward her as if a leash had been yanked but continued to shrilly squawk and stretch out for her child.
'Sorry, lover,' Bridgett said to me, as perfectly unerotic as possible. 'I'll have to make you some other time.'
I was barely holding my own. I reached into the depths of Jebediah and found the silver cord tying his own vicious soul to him: rusted and sharp as razor wire it slid against my psychic reach and cut me deeply. He tried the same thing, hunting for my heart, digging and driving past the ghosts of my life. He sought all the sweet weak spots, and I slashed him worse. I held back a scream and the blood poured into my mouth reminding me of Danielle at the end, so beautiful and broken.
He laughed out the back of his throat. 'Not that easy. You don't even know what to do with your hate.' His soul was at ease with its fury, the cord sheathed in something I could feel but couldn't manage to cut through.
There are times you've got to just duck and run like hell.
I. rushed over and punched him in the face as hard as I could and knocked him on his ass, the dirt from the grave of my love showering over him. I hefted one of Corey's rocks off his desk ready to crush Jebediah's skull but those minor blazing sigils floating in the air spun in front of my nose and erupted like mines.
No time. I whirled and plunged my arm down into the Black Pope Honorius's grimoire just as my drowning second self faded beneath the pages, his mouth stuffed with the mad pope's curses. My mouth and nostrils were suddenly full of scraps of paper too, the script writhing and spilling upward, crawling off the papyrus. I grimaced and shrugged backward, hauling Self up, the writing holding on like nets pulled tautly across his head. Words were written across the whites of his eyes. I planted my feet and dragged him out inch by inch, Pope Honorius's ink slithering loose and finally splashing back into the volume. Self and I tumbled to the floor and lay there gasping.
'We're going to resurrect our coven,' Jebediah said. 'I need them still, and I can't do it alone. The pacts and vows make it far too meticulous and exacting for my talents. You're the Lord Summoner, master of the art. You will help me.'
Gawain, dressed in a lavender cloak, his bleached white hair and pale lost face nearly translucent in the night-my friend for a time back when I believed we could be friends-mouthed my name, that serpent's tongue slithering forth and blindly held out his arms for me.
Behind him the harlequin tittered, and I knew I hadn't quite reached the lowest depth yet. His voice was familiar. A shiver quaked through my spine and I slowly turned to face him.
There the fool stood, lips and tongue black, unimaginable weariness written into the painted and ashen lines of his silly white dead face.
My father.
Chapter Four
We circled the altar beside the covine tree, where the original wiccans had respected nature and been crucified for their integrity, bleeding into its roots.
Like a dozen of those forgotten bodies twisted and knotted together, the limbs of the tree grappled in the snow, some branches gnarled and collapsed backward upon themselves, others hanging like weeping willows. The north side of the trunk had been sheared off that night by lightning, and it spawned new mutant leaves that remained green even now as the freezing wind blew.
Our covine tree stood as an ode to irony-our kind had been hanged from it, burned upon it, nailed to it, and still it lived, and still we lived. My father muttered to himself and continually regarded me as if he retained his mind. He wedged his fingers into his ears or puffed out his cheeks as if he were the entertainment at a children's party.
Bridgett enjoyed touching the dead and moved her hands over his white face, kissing and licking his nose, trailing her fingers over his groin. In life my father would have tried to persuade her from her path, but eventually he would have been beaten down by her nature and given in. He always had.
Thummim swung from Bridgett's left breast, and Self dangled from the right, taking turns suckling the witch's teat.
'Sex majik won't work at this stage,' I told her.
'In resurrecting witches? No, I'm sure, but when it's needed there's no one with as much natural talent as me.'
'So you keep saying.'
