CHAPTER THREE
DAVID
In the all-encompassing whirlwind of twelve-hour days in the courtroom, the attorney’s office, and in private clients’ living rooms, David almost forgot about the text entirely. It had only been a little indiscretion, a way to test the waters. If Rhys wasn’t biting, fine. It wasn’t as if they could keep avoiding each other outside of Society meetings and pretending they didn’t know each other during conclave ritual circle forever. Rhys would cave eventually.
But on Thursday a week later, as David shouldered open the door to his condo, his phone buzzed in his briefcase. He tossed the briefcase on the marble-topped kitchen island and let the call ring through while he rummaged through the sparse refrigerator for a pre-portioned dinner. It was probably one of the interns calling with a fire that wasn’t his to put out. Or Leda, holding up her end of their unending game of sibling phone-tag. The voicemail notification, however, took him by surprise.
While the plate rotated in the whirring microwave, he flicked his phone on to speaker mode. Rhys’s voice filled the airy emptiness of the pristine condominium as the sun set over the skyline out of the window.
“David. We talked about this. I asked for space. I’ll reach out when I’m ready.”
That was it. No timeline about when they could start talking normally again, no indication of how Rhys might be feeling about any of it. Just a curt message to enforce the embargo.
David stabbed a fork into his chicken breast and steamed broccoli. He shouldn’t be surprised. Rhys knew him better than anyone. He knew when David was goading him.
Nudging aside a Barney’s shopping bag he had picked up on his last mindless trip to Copley but never unpacked, David sank into his leather sofa, laptop in one hand, dinner in the other.
This high above the city, the noise of Fenway couldn’t reach him, so he was left in peace to sort through the dozens of tabs he had left open. They were etymological, mostly, researching the transmission of that name which had been burned into his brain at the séance last week. He hadn’t had an episode like it since then, but he hadn’t felt quite like himself, either. There was a fuzzy sort of film over his psychic intuition that made him second-guess the messages he channeled for clients, and he suspected his abilities still hadn’t recalibrated themselves since he accidentally picked up on something he wasn’t supposed to.
Or alternately, he’d picked up on a message that someone very badly wanted to get across to him. He wasn’t sure which possibility was more concerning.
David had been sifting through references to spontaneous possession for days to no avail. Any resources he found were distinctly Catholic in nature, which were of less use to him than any of the rambling conspiracy theories he might find on a garden-variety occultism Discord. He had also made a few wire transfers to leading occult scholars in Berlin, Shanghai, and Prague in the hope to fast track an answer, to no avail. It always irritated him when throwing money at a problem didn’t make it go away. Lorena might know something, but she was sure to be slammed this time of year with spring equinox orders. He was on his own with this one.
This was not David’s wheelhouse. He specialized in contacting the dead and was serviceable with home blessings and hauntings. Possession was another matter entirely. And David was sure it was possession, or as sure as he could be about that sort of thing. It felt so similar to the times he had allowed himself to become ritually possessed before, either at a Society ritual or during one of his father’s séances; only this time, he hadn’t invited the spirit inside him. Nothing had ever overtaken him like that in the past.
He was so engrossed in thought that his dinner went cold on the table beside him. When he finally glanced down at his watch, he hissed through his teeth.
He had lost track of time. There would be no gym for him tonight, not if he wanted to make it to the Society meeting.
David devoured the rest of his dinner in three bites, then snatched up his coat. He promised himself, not for the first time, that he would play nice with Rhys tonight, no matter how satisfying it was to get a rise out of him. If David wanted any sort of answer to the possession question, he shouldn’t press his luck.
The Society hall was in Cambridge, within a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard. Unlike the lineaged Freemasons or undergraduate social clubs that met in stone buildings guarded by wrought-iron fences, the Society favored discretion. The main entrance was beneath a Cantonese restaurant, down a grimy flight of stairs that seemed more likely to lead into a college dive bar than anywhere else.
David rapped crisply on the door. It slid open two miserly inches. A pair of rheumy eyes peered at him behind the chain pulled taut across the opening.
“Password?” a man asked.
“Gerald, I helped get your daughter out of her DUI; I think we’re well beyond this now.”
The guardian huffed and slammed the door shut, but a moment later, metal clunked, and the door was opened.
“Welcome back, Mr Aristarkhov,” the Society’s ancient footman said, his wispy white hair stirring in the breeze of the AC. Gerald had been there before David had been initiated and would probably be there after David retired. He was an artifact of grander times, when secret societies would employ staff at their séances to refill the glasses of enraptured onlookers. Currently, one staff member to answer the door, run the coat check, and serve drinks with the utmost discretion was all the Society could afford. But the High Priest liked to think that with time, new members and new money would find their way into the brotherhood’s ranks, and the staff would grow. Gerald was, in this way, aspirational.
David slipped off his blazer and held it out on two fingers. Gerald made it disappear into the coat closet.
“Shall I hold your keys?”
“That won’t be necessary. How is she, anyway? Sherry?”
“Oh, better now, but you know how it is. Hard to keep someone off the bottle once they have a taste for it.”
David made a disgruntled sound in his throat, then brushed past Gerald and slipped beneath the draped curtain that separated the foyer from the clubhouse.
Despite relatively small square footage and a lack of natural light, the clubhouse had an antiquated grandeur that even David, with his taste for the modern, could appreciate. Overstuffed armchairs sat atop oriental rugs, and the bulbous sconce lighting along the wall evoked the Victorian without going full set piece. The paintings on the wall showed off autumnal pastorals and hunting scenes. A long wooden table along one wall offered light bites of meat and a spread of miniature pastries that looked stolen from a megachurch coffee hour.
It was a love letter to the idea of a gentleman’s club, of what they were supposed to have been like before wing night at sports bars and neon-lit strip clubs had taken over.
Most of the men – retired bankers and middle managers and professors – mingled freely throughout the room. There were twenty on a good day, closer to ten on most. At the turn of the twentieth century, occult orders had been the height of fashion for any young man of means. In the past, the Society had been a center of political might, a place for power brokers to discuss the future of cities and even nations. But now, they tended to attract eccentrics and social climbers, people who were either all-in on the promise of attaining universal secrets or simply there to hob-nob. David, who had been raised in and around occult societies, didn’t fall into either camp. He was totally disillusioned with the concept of supernatural enlightenment, knowing damn well that most people used magic to secure mundane boons, and there were very few people in any given room that he ever felt the need to impress.
Put simply, the Society was a demon-summoning social club, and while everyone had their own reasons for bending spirits to their will, they were all united by self-interest and a desire for comradery. In this way, an occult fraternity wasn’t much different from a Greek one. David had never been in a college frat, but he had been in a men’s acapella group at Williams, and that was basically the same thing.
David’s crowd was already congregated in their usual spot: a conspiratorial semicircle of chairs in a far corner. In the winter, the fireplace would cast a cheery glow on the corner. But now, three men talked in the dim light cast by a standing lamp.
David caught the flash of dark eyes and the curl of mussed black hair as one of the men glanced briefly over his shoulder. He sighed. Rhys had beat him there.
David noted the cluster of men having an animated discussion amid a low-lying fog of tobacco. Cameron Casillas, a theology professor at a nearby divinity school, was nodding gravely while the older men went on about the rising price of oil. Cameron was generally grave. All the older men were smoking acrid cigars. Cameron puffed away at his meticulously packed wooden pipe, his Princeton haircut slicked back against his skull.
David snagged a bottle of Perrier from the refreshment table and crossed the room to their usual corner. Cameron followed, sweeping into an ancient loveseat while David stood, doing his best to look blasé.
Rhys glanced up at him from his seat in his favorite red velvet armchair. He looked as he always did: slightly underfed, terminally scholastic, and two weeks overdue for a haircut. But his eyes were just as ferociously intelligent as ever, the set of his mouth just as doggedly determined. Rhys was a man who would not be moved about many things: his punctual arrival to Catholic Mass no less or more than eight times a year; his conviction that one ought not be seen out of doors in a t-shirt and jeans after the age of twenty; and last year’s decision that David Aristarkhov was in his black books, with all non-Society socializing privileges revoked.
“David,” he said coolly. “How was the deposition?”
“No worse than expected,” David said, and knew better than to go in for the light air kiss he had picked up during summer break in Italy and sometimes used to greet intimates. Currently, that number had dwindled to, well… his sister.
Nathan Vo, he thumped amicably on the shoulder, and Antoni Bresciani, who stood at Rhys’s side with a glass of bourbon in hand, got a firm handshake.
“We’re talking Bardon,” Antoni said. A Harvard business grad from a large Italian family, Antoni was also an amateur weightlifter who could probably bench press David, despite being barely 5’5”. He had been initiated less than a year ago but had quickly found his place in the quintet of younger men. They were a subculture within a subculture, and it was unlikely any of them would have been friends if they hadn’t been introduced through the inscrutable inner workings of the brotherhood. But age gave the five a bond that monthly brunches and gossip-swapping strengthened.
“Didn’t he write Initiation into Hermetics?” David asked, bringing his cigarette smoothly to his lips. “He’s a bit woo-woo for me. Very into awareness of the higher light, or whatever.”
“Theurgy is so much more than that!” Antoni said. “I only got my hands on the book a few weeks ago, but if you’re patient with it, it’ll blow your mind. Autosuggestion, astral projection, clairaudience, it’s all there.”
“Theurgy,” David said, barely managing to get the word out without a bit of a sneer. Self-perfection through union with the divine had never been very appealing to him. He had always been able to get in touch with much more interesting entities with the snap of his fingers. That was, of course, what made him such a valuable asset to the Society. His keen second sight was essential in the ritual workings that helped the ambitious men of the order cajole spirits into helping them through divorces, or securing political office, or getting out of parking tickets. As an adept scryer, David could talk any sorcerer through any ritual, because he could actually see the spirits being summoned, even when they didn’t choose to manifest on the corporeal plane.
“Isn’t that more Cameron’s ballpark?”
“I’ve worked through Initiation into Hermetics,” the professor replied casually.
“All of it?” Antoni exclaimed.
“Doing inner work is just as important as knowing how to stage a ritual,” Rhys cut in. “A truly great sorcerer has to be able to master both.”
“How about you focus on all that self-knowledge, and I’ll summon the dead and we’ll see who gets the farthest?” David said.
Rhys leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. He didn’t agree with David’s no-frills methods, and David chalked that squeamishness up to early exposure to Catholicism. Antoni and Rhys were formalists, though Rhys had the obsessive focus of a scholar while Antoni had the gluttonous, cherry-picking appetite common in new occultists. Cameron followed a psychological model, insisting he was more interested in building moral fiber than in causing magical shifts in the world. And Nathan… Nathan was in it for the camaraderie.
The venture capitalist leaned forward in his seat, a forgotten martini going lukewarm in his hand. The second-youngest member of the society at twenty-four – Antoni was twenty-two and Rhys held the lifetime record for being inducted when he was only nineteen – Nathan had a relentlessly upbeat air that would have been annoying if it wasn’t so goddamn genuine.
“How’s the necromancy business?” he asked David. His broad, Californian accent made everything he said sound particularly laid-back.
“Booming, as always. How was the honeymoon?”
“China was China, but that was just visiting family. Cyprus was phenomenal.”
“And married life?”
“I love it. Kitty keeps me on my toes.”
“I’ll bet she does,” Antoni said into his glass, and David shot him a wicked smirk.
Rhys was not amused by the banter, and glanced down at his watch. “When are we going to start?”
“God knows, with Wayne running things,” Cameron said. Their High Priest was not known for his punctuality. “He’s probably gearing up to give us another lecture on recruiting new blood.”
“Ugh,” Nathan groaned. “Evangelism.”
“Maybe if he started reading the ten applications a year we get from qualified women we wouldn’t have to rehash this discussion every week,” Rhys said, bringing his drink to his lips. It could have been gin, or water. He always had a knack for temperance.
“Don’t start that again,” David sighed. “I’m too old for another controversy.”
“If you ask me, Wayne’s retirement can’t come fast enough,” Rhys said with a frown.
“You’re saying you could do better?” Nathan asked, scandalized eyebrows shooting up towards his hairline. How he had managed to survive this long in a Society run almost entirely on backroom deals and scheming, David had no idea.
“I’d be sure we start on time, for starters,” Rhys replied.
“You know you have my vote,” Antoni said.
David wasn’t surprised by the show of support. Induction into and advancement through the Society wasn’t just determined by how well a man performed in his evaluations. At least two thirds of the active members had to vote in favor of any candidate, which led to its own rash of controversies. Most recently, there had been an argument over whether or not transgender men could be inducted. Nearly all the brothers had favored amending the bylaws, but a handful of the older men, the kind who liked to brag about having gay friends but still voted Republican, had dug in their heels, resulting in a stalemate. David, Cameron, and Nathan had refused to drop the issue, but Rhys in particular had gone to bat for Antoni, who had demonstrated immense natural talent and ironclad resolve to advance his skills during his evaluations.
In an impassioned speech – sketched out on little notecards, no less– Rhys had managed to sway enough of the fence-sitting members, and the bylaws had been amended. Since then, the two men had become fast friends, bonding over their Southie upbringings and their shared passion for dead languages. Antoni, never one to back down from a challenge, had soundly changed the minds of almost all his detractors, and shamed the most bigoted one into quitting the Society altogether. He would put Rhys’s name down for High Priest without hesitation.
“Don’t encourage him,” David responded. “Think of all the homework he’d give us.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making sure everyone in this Society is actually progressing in their magical practice and not just showing up to brownnose,” Rhys said. “Or do you want it to devolve entirely into an Elks Lodge situation?”
“I just think the High Priesthood should go to someone with the sort of social prowess it takes to command a room like this,” David said. “Someone with a natural magical aptitude who’s been in the occult community for decades.”
“Someone like you?”
“Your words, not mine.”
Rhys was excellent at controlling spirits; that much was true. He could read Latin, German, and Greek, and could pick up new magical techniques so fast it was frightening. But he was still young, and too radical in his views to sit well with the older set. David, at nearly thirty, had mellowed out enough to gain the respect of the senior members. He came from an aristocratic background that bestowed ample social graces and family connections. Rhys, for all his intelligence and politeness, still radiated an ambitious middle-class energy that made old money nervous.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing that,” Cameron said. Something like a smile touched his lips when he met David’s eyes.
“You’re both getting ahead of yourselves,” Nathan reminded them. “Wayne could just name a successor, and then no one would have to vote.”
David let out a derisive laugh. “Wayne won’t.”
“Not in a million years,” Rhys echoed. “There’d be another schism.”
“He can’t afford that. Not with the membership numbers looking so abysmal.”
Wayne’s booming laugh echoed from across the room, and David glanced over his shoulder to see the graying white man thump someone on the back. Wayne wasn’t the worst High Priest the Society ever had. He even managed to keep out of the usual embezzlement accusations and sex scandals that seemed to afflict men his age and certain status. But things had stagnated, and everyone could feel it. The vultures had started to circle. There was talk of absorbing the Society into a larger, more established occult order, or bringing in someone out of Boston to whip them all into shape. Neither improved David’s chances of advancement.
Wayne began to round up the men, ushering them towards the doors that separated the clubhouse from the inner sanctum where the Society did their ritual work. This was their cue to congregate. Nathan and Antoni abandoned their glasses and stood, drifting into the crowd meandering towards the day’s encounter with the ephemeral. Cameron followed, and David had just fallen into step behind him when Rhys caught up, causing David to slow.
“Moira has a client who might be interested in talking to you,” Rhys said. “They want a séance.”
“You could just give her my number, you know,” David said, doing his best to extend the olive branch. He didn’t dislike Rhys’s wife, not strictly speaking, and he knew from her reputation that she was one of the city’s best readers. Magical competence was enough to make him respect anybody, even if he didn’t exactly want to cozy up to them. “I can be nice.”
“I somehow doubt that.”
“Did you get a chance to think about my text?”
“I’ve been busy.”
All of David’s goodwill evaporated. “So, we’re adding lying to our status quo list now? Does that mean I get to take pretending to like each other off?”
“You don’t have to blow everything out of proportion. Either take the client or don’t; I don’t care either way.”
David’s temper sparked, but he smothered it down. There would be no reasoning with Rhys here, where they were surrounded by other people. Still, he was running out of patience for the injured, icyshoulder Rhys kept giving him. How many times did he have to say he was sorry? It had been six goddamn months.
But David didn’t press as they slipped through the door into the perfumed darkness of the inner sanctum. He knew his chances of stealing a word during the ritual were zero, since Rhys attended to their cosmic playacting with rapt attention. He liked to insist he wasn’t as religious as he used to be, but David knew that Rhys’s moralistic affliction had only gotten worse with age. Confession or ritual bath, eucharist or the cup of initiation, it was all the same.
Conversation fell to a hush as the men reached for their wine-red robes, hung up neatly on a rolling rack, and pulled them on over their clothes. Rhys chatted quietly with the others, but he didn’t meet David’s eyes.
David scowled as he retrieved his robe, Nathan blithely talking his ear off about Cyprus. As far as David was concerned, if Rhys wasn’t willing to play nice, David didn’t have to obey the rules either. He hated apologizing, as a general rule, since he didn’t often believe himself to be in the wrong, but a grand gesture along those lines might be the only thing that would help the situation.
A house call had gotten him into this mess. Maybe another one could fix it.