CHAPTER SEVEN
DAVID
The High Priest’s office was a small room off to the side of the inner sanctum with an old-school frosted glass window and a brass plate on the door displaying Wayne’s title. The wooden desk inside was covered in books and binders of financial records, spells, and God knew what else. David didn’t even want to think about what a mess the inside of the filing cabinets behind the desk must be; there were probably membership records in there dating back to the Society’s inception in the swinging sixties.
Wayne gestured to the worn, black leather armchair that sat across from the desk, and David took a seat. He had been in here plenty of times before, whether it was to be reprimanded or congratulated, and he always lost himself in fantasies of how he was going to redecorate. At least two of the walls were coming down to bring in more light, and he was going to swap out all the heavy furniture for minimalist pieces.
Wayne poured himself a dram of Scotch from a nearby decanter and swirled it around thoughtfully in his glass. He knew better than to offer David a drink, even though it had taken quite a while to get that message through to him. When David had been a drinker, he and Wayne would spend hours shooting the shit at a local distillery with some of the older Society brothers, talking politics and economics. David was one of the few men in the Society who could float between the older set and the younger set effortlessly, but he felt like his influence was somewhat diminished now that he couldn’t show up at the bars.
“I didn’t realize you and Rhys were so…” Wayne sorted around his vocabulary for a moment. “Convivial.”
“He owed me a favor,” David said, lacing his fingers in front of himself. “Just business.”
“Of course. And I trust there’s nothing else going on between you two, considering Rhys’s recent marriage?”
“Of course not.” David ground his molars together. “Not for years.”
“Good,” Wayne said, nodding thoughtfully. The gesture clearly communicated to David that the conversation was far from over. “David, we’ve known each other a long time.”
“Yes, we have.”
“I remember going to one of your father’s séances and seeing you at work for the first time. You couldn’t have been more than fifteen, but you had such an immense gift. And an immense attitude.”
David couldn’t help the smile that pulled at his lips. He always warmed under praise, even though he suspected Wayne was buttering him up in preparation for asking a favor.
“Maybe so.”
“Yours is a once-in-a-lifetime talent, David. It was only natural for you to follow in your father’s footsteps and join the Society. It’s been my great pleasure to watch you grow and progress in your studies, and all before you turned thirty.” Wayne rattled the ice cubes in his glass thoughtfully. “Now, Rhys… Rhys is another matter.”
David knew better than to interrupt, even though heat was crawling up the back of his neck. He’d rather climb out the window than discuss Rhys with Wayne.
“I’ve never met someone so ambitious, or so sharp,” Wayne mused. “That boy sees everything that goes on around him: never forgets a name, never misses a detail. Bringing him to that first Society meeting was probably one of the greatest gifts you ever gave me.”
“I’m happy to hear it,” David said, working hard to keep the disdain out of his voice. When he had invited Rhys to a Society meeting with him all the way back in college, he had thought he was showing off to a wide-eyed freshman boyfriend with an amateur’s interest in the occult. He didn’t realize he was letting a fox into the henhouse, cementing his greatest rival’s place right next to him.
“I don’t think it’s any surprise to say that you’re the two brightest stars the Society has to offer,” Wayne went on, finishing his Scotch. “The older guys respect you; the younger men look up to you. But when you two work together, things get… volatile.”
David swallowed hard. He had heard a version of this speech before, when Wayne had hauled David off Rhys in the middle of a drag-out fight. They had gotten into some shitty immature altercation in the middle of the summoning circle a few weeks after the breakup, Rhys acting as sorcerer and David as scryer, and it had escalated so badly that Rhys had set his spirit court on David. David had responded by wrestling Rhys to the ground. Not David’s finest moment.
Neither of them had ever put their hands on each other when they were dating, not even during their worst screaming matches. But with the bonds of love and loyalty worn away, it was so much easier for hatred and violence to take their place. By the time Wayne tore them apart, Rhys’s lip was split, and David had a bloody nose. Not that David really cared; he had gotten his nose broken in schoolyard fights twice before, and there was very little plastic surgery couldn’t fix. But it hurt worse, somehow, coming from Rhys.
“I hope I can rely on both of you to maintain a professional distance,” Wayne said, rattling the ice in his glass pensively. “It would be the greatest honor either of you could give to me, and to what we’ve all built here together. Oil and water don’t mix. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Yes, High Priest,” David muttered, suddenly unable to meet Wayne’s eyes. He felt eighteen years old again, guided by Wayne’s firm hand on his shoulder away from self-destruction.
Wayne smiled, and the expression made him look warm and jolly. “Good.” He laid a finger aside his nose. “And when I make my choice for High Priest, I assure you that I’ll pick someone who understands tradition. The way business ought to be handled.”
David’s chest swelled with pride. That was him; it had to be. Rhys was always trying to pass new motions and introduce new ritual texts, and the younger set loved him for it. But David had a family name no one could argue with and the decorum to match. He would restore the Society to its former grandeur, not propel it forward, open throttle, into ruin.
“Thank you, Wayne.”
The two exchanged a few minutes of pleasantries before David dismissed himself into the cool hallway. He clenched and relaxed his hands at his side, burning up with electric energy.
His. The High Priesthood was his.
Rhys was still sitting out in the meeting hall when David passed by, scrolling through his phone. David didn’t bother saying goodbye.
It took David almost a week to make the congested drive into the Beacon Hill district. He told himself it was because he was busy at work, not because he was nervous about setting foot in the house again. He tried to ignore the gnawing sense in his stomach that he was working on borrowed time, and that whatever had spoken to him out of the scrying glass wasn’t done with him yet.
David considered slipping in through the back door, so as to avoid getting the neighbor’s hopes up about an Aristarkhov returning to the neighborhood and upping their property value, but he didn’t want the house to realize he was afraid of it. So, he shouldered through the front door as thoughtlessly as he used to in high school, even leaving it slightly ajar behind him.
The emptiness of the home rushed up to meet him, cloying and desperate for attention. The scent of wood polish and dusty damask and stale liquor dried in the bottom of crystal glasses rushed into his nostrils.
David didn’t allow his eyes to alight for too long on any stick of furniture, or any face staring out at him from any hanging portrait. He breezed through the foyer with clinical efficiency, taking the stairs at a brisk clip.
If he didn’t make eye contact with anything, the house might stay asleep, and grant him a few more minutes of peace.
The library was on the second level, opposite the rooms where David had wasted hours banging out piano exercises or smoking joints or sifting through the piles of designer clothes he left for housekeeping to hang up. He didn’t bother to visit his old bedroom. He had rescued what he wanted already: the vinyl records and the letters from his sister, sealed with neon stamps that charted her trail through Munich, Florence, Morocco. The only things of real value left in this house were shelved in alphabetized rows in Evgeni’s study.
Evgeni’s private collection of esoteric texts had drawn colleagues from all over the world. David’s childhood memories were full of visiting occultists who had long ago abandoned the armchair, stern-eyed men in tweed jackets or ties. David had been forbidden from speaking to them, unless he was leading a séance; and even then, Evgeni hovered over him. David sometimes glimpsed them smoking with his father in the library, or caught a whisper of their cologne, lying in wait for him in the kitchen when he scrounged for breakfast before school. The foreign, fading scent of spruce pine or lemon balm irritated his nose, and the thought of strange men milling around his house at night, holding private conversations in rooms a stone’s throw from his own, made heat crawl up the back of his neck.
David tossed the memory aside as he shouldered into the library, ignoring how small the cavernous room still made him feel. He didn’t allow his eyes to linger on the dark corners where he had liked to sulk with his headphones on during rainy days. Instead, he moved straight to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that held more of the Aristarkhov fortune than any bank account or investment portfolio.
Notoriously meticulous, Evgeni had devised his own categorization system for his library, which David had never bothered to learn. Psychic ability was inherent to David’s being, and he didn’t need anything in a book to tell him how to talk to ghosts. He conducted his own occult experiments – under Evgeni’s watchful eye, of course, or in the secret attic rooms where he and Leda had played during those sparse years of companionship – and came to his own conclusion. He had never given a damn what a dead Renaissance alchemist thought of it.
Now he ran his fingers across the shelves, muttering to himself. As far as he could tell, the books were broken into sub-genres and then alphabetized, but no thought had been given to language, or for arranging the titles in a pattern anyone but Evgeni could parse.
There were books here that men had killed for, books that had been smuggled out of war-torn countries or acquired in under-the-table gentlemen’s agreements to the tune of a few million dollars. That wasn’t even including the ones kept under glass in a nearby display case, crisscrossed with lead bars and lacquered with a bulletproof coating. But those weren’t what David was looking for. He had something more inconspicuous in mind, something he couldn’t get anywhere but inside this house.
The temperature in the room slid down a few degrees, and one of the display cases rattled distantly behind him.
David threw a daggered glance over his shoulder. “Don’t fucking start.”
The library fell silent. David resumed his work, crouching down to peer at the books on the lower shelves. He found a slim section of leather-bound journals wedged next to a collection of Pushkin, the only poet Evgeni had thought was worth the space they took up in the grave.
David freed the journals and dumped them on his father’s desk. He remembered being dwarfed by the thing in his childhood, how imposing Evgeni looked, poring over letters at the black walnut monstrosity. But now he fit behind the polished desk perfectly, and the claw-foot leather chair embraced him as he sank into it.
The house took a deep breath and settled.
David leafed through a glossy black ledger and discarded it once he realized it was only where Evgeni had recorded who owed him money. Another catalogued private sales of art and antiques, and was summarily discarded. David had lawyers for all of this, but Evgeni had always been paranoid about involving outsiders in his family business.
The third book offered the answers David had come back to the house for. It was a thin book, wide and flat, with Evgeni’s initials stamped into the leather. Inside, David’s father had recorded their family genealogy by hand, in branching bloodlines that dovetailed neatly into one another. The sheer volume of names and the level of detail with which their professions and place of birth had been recorded would have made an archivist weep.
David kept flipping, barely touching the pages as he scanned the names and read the tiny scrawl of birth and death dates below them. The chart was aggressively patrilineal, with mothers and wives sometimes only being given first names and a death date, or no name at all.
All the men seemed to have spawned a brood of children before they were David’s age, which he couldn’t fathom despite the stark difference in life expectancy. He had never wanted children, not to sire or raise or adopt them, despite the bevy of exes who had gotten starry-eyed at the prospect.
David reached the last page, where a collection of boy’s names funneled into a single ancestor.
ANATOLY ARISTARKHOV.
No profession. No town of origin.
This book didn’t care where he came from, who his people were or what they did for a living. All that mattered was his children, his death date in 1556, and one other date written in bold red ink, about twenty years before his death. David doubted it was a birthdate, since it was rendered so differently from the others.
David leaned back in his father’s chair. The study had grown colder, and his fingertips tingled unpleasantly. He glared at the book for a moment, tongue pressed against his teeth as he deliberated. Then he spread his fingers and covered the name of the first Aristarkhov with his palm.
His father hit him first, that unmistakable aura of severity and quiet disdain. Evgeni’s residual energy was all over this book, his memory thick enough to choke on. David pressed through the white-hot flicker of adolescent rage that flared up in his father’s presence, then leaned deeper into what the book had to tell him.
The dread washed over him first, cold as the pit of the Mariana Trench, and then an awful sense of urgency, hammering in his heartbeat like he had put away three espressos. Behind these names was a terror David could barely hold in his body, surpassing any medieval fear of God. Something reached out for him from within the book, bleeding from the ink and into his skin. It tightened wraith fingers around his wrist and throat and pulled him in tighter, and images flashed through his mind.
Blood on snow.
Beaten gold coins slipping through calloused fingers.
A little boy screaming and screaming.
David came back to himself with a gasp and wrenched his hand away from the book, but something wasn’t right. His head was still light, the world was still hazy at the edges and coming in and out of focus. His feet were lead weights; he couldn’t feel his hands. Instead of returning to his own body, he felt like he was slipping out of it.
He knew this feeling. It happened when his consciousness stepped aside during a séance to let something else take up residence in his body.
He was being possessed.
He tried to stand but staggered, grasping for the edge of the desk. Hands – his own, or maybe someone else’s – grasped for paper, for a bottle of tacky black ink. His ears were roaring louder than Fenway stadium on game night.
Out. He needed to get out of this house.
David lurched against the desk, slamming his hip into the carved wood, but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel anything. He careened in and out of his skin on a nauseating tilt-a-whirl, one moment trying to grasp for his car keys, the other moment standing outside of himself, watching himself scrawl frantically with a fountain pen. There was ink everywhere: on his father’s desk, on his cuffs, dripping down onto his Hugo Boss shoes.
David made one last effort to wrench himself out of the room, but he only got a few steps before the ground tilted beneath him and his knees cracked against the hardwood. The acrid taste of sulfur burned against his tongue, and then the world went dark.