Evocation

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

DAVID

The next time he was supposed to go meet Moira and Rhys at Beacon Hill, David woke up with a splitting headache. It felt like five vodka sodas on an empty stomach and two hours of sleep, though he was coming up on three years sober and was the most well-hydrated person he knew. Either the psychic sickness was getting worse, or he was dying. David wasn’t entirely sure which one he preferred.

When he shouldered open the front door to the Beacon Hill house, hands full of car keys and a cardboard tray stuffed with lattes, the house didn’t put up a fuss. If anything, it almost seemed happy to see him, like he was a king restoring order to a domain long left to grow fallow and wild. He didn’t like that.

Rhys and Moira were in the library, shoving open the huge bay windows to let in a spring breeze. Moira loitered close to the windows, breathing in the fresh air and wearing some kind of floor-length orange paisley Charlie’s Angels number. An amber dragonfly pendant gleamed on her throat.

“Wasn’t sure if you were going to show,” she remarked. She looked a little short of breath, which didn’t surprise David. How she managed to breathe at all in the evil atmosphere of this house, he would never know.

“Why wouldn’t I? I confirmed the date with you.”

“You sent me a Google calendar invite called ‘training’ with no description. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.”

“Well, we’re all here now,” he said. Pleasantly, he hoped. He was going to be diplomatic today. He was going to keep it together and stay in control. This was his house, after all. He should start acting like it.

He held a latte out to Moira. “I stopped at Tatte on my way down and it seemed rude not to bring you anything. You like sweets, right?”

“I suppose. What is it?”

“Your new favorite.”

Moira brought the coffee to her lips and sipped delicately. David generally avoided drinking his calories, but this was one of his favorite cheat meals. Strong espresso and frothed milk mingled with the decadent taste of honey, cardamon, and sugared pistachio.

“Oh my God,” she said, eyes round with delight.

David felt a pulse of self-satisfaction go through him. He didn’t actually have many reasons to be nice to people in his daily life, but he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what Moira had said to him the last time they were together. She had thought he was mocking her. David was appalled to find that he actually cared that he had insulted her, and even more appalled to find that he wanted to make amends.

Emotional entanglements were tricky, most often not worth the headache and heartsickness they induced, but if Moira was going to do her best to help him, he should do his best to show his appreciation to her.

“Rhys?” David held the third cup out to him. “Before you ask, no, it isn’t a triple shot, because your heart is gonna burst one of these days and I’m not aiding and abetting.”

“I won’t say no to caffeine,” Rhys said.

David dumped his coat and briefcase down on a creaky loveseat. He gestured Rhys towards his father’s sprawling library. “Well, we’ll leave you to it. Work your magic. Literally or figuratively, I don’t really care which.”

“Where are you two running off to?” Rhys asked, glancing nervously between David and his wife.

David gave Moira a sweet smile, and she couldn’t have looked more wary. Amazing how she could freely offer him kindness without making any preamble towards trusting him as far as she could throw him. It was a skill he was jealous of. All the charm in the world, and he still couldn’t fabricate a kindness that anyone believed.

“She hasn’t been given a proper tour of the house yet. It isn’t quite Southern hospitality, but I was brought up to make sure guests knew their way around.”

“I never got a tour,” Rhys said, almost sounding offended.

“You were never a guest. Ms Delacroix?”

David offered her his arm. He was in shirtsleeves, and he could feel her warm touch as she wrapped tentative fingers around his bicep.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “Lead the way.”

They ambled through the second floor of the home, their steps leaving ghostly footprints in the dust. The portraits on the wall scowled down at them. Whorls of oil paint, thick and dark as blood, ate up all the light in the room.

David spoke without looking at her, a small smile tugging at his lips. “You’re nervous.” Her anxiety was a thin thread pulled taut under his skin, emanating from their point of contact. He chased it with his mind, trying to root out the heart of her. “Don’t worry, I’m not taking you up to my gothic attic to murder you.”

“And you’re trying very hard to keep a calm mind and not give me anything,” Moira replied. “But you aren’t actually relaxed.”

David grinned, glancing down at her. She kept her gaze fixed ahead of her, never breaking stride.

“You can pick up layers. That’s fantastic.”

“All I do is pay attention to the way people are feeling, even when they don’t say it outright. It’s nothing special.”

“I beg to differ. You’re empathic. Genuinely. I could hold hands with someone in a darkened séance room for an hour and only be able to pick up the littlest threads of dread or anger. The strong emotions. But you’re a maestro.”

Moira shrugged. “Thanks, I suppose. But you shouldn’t be walking me through this place. The air’s no good; I feel like I’m breathing in mold spores or asbestos or something.”

“I promise you’ll be safe.”

“I’m not worried about me; I’m worried about you. You’re sick as a dog. If I were you, I would get far away from this house, or any other place that agitates whatever you’ve got going on inside you. I can feel it circling you like shark, waiting to bring you down.”

David untwined their arms, shoving his hands into his pockets. He turned on his heel to face her, trying to maintain his self-possession. “What about auras? Can you see those?”

“No. Can you?”

“Sure.”

Moira pursed her lips. “What does mine look like?”

David wasn’t expecting that one. She’d asked it with such an open curiosity, a little bit of marvel in her eyes. How could she do this sort of thing for a living without it losing every ounce of glamour? David had stopped being impressed by magic tricks years ago. But maybe he could do one more for her. It couldn’t hurt anything, and it might make her trust him a little more.

David unfocused his gaze and looked slightly beyond her in that sweet spot a few inches from her shoulder. Looking at people this way gave him a headache even on the best days, and it wasn’t helping his migraine, but it was worth seeing if he was still capable of such a small thing. As a child, he had picked up auras without having to try, but the human eye didn’t like taking in so many wavelengths at once. He flexed the muscle often enough that he could usually still pick up a shimmer of color here and there, if he tried.

“Sort of a pinky-purple,” he declared, blinking a few times to clear his vision. “On the lavender side more than magenta.”

Moira looked down at her fingertips as though she too might see a glow. “Huh. What’s that supposed to mean? Open-heartedness, right? Or creativity?”

“Oh, I don’t know. If you ask me, they don’t really mean anything; they’re just energetic vibrations most people can’t see. I would just make up something that sounded nice when I worked in Lorena’s botanica. Then I was twenty bucks richer, and the client felt that much better about themselves.”

Moira stopped short. “You worked for Lorena Vargas?”

Every occultist in Boston knew that name and spoke it with a mixture of reverence and justified intimidation. Lorena was the city’s premier supplier of occult paraphernalia, and a revered priestess of Santeria. If you had a magical problem no one else could fix, you went to Lorena. If you wanted to get your hands on obscure spell ingredients or needed a reference for a spiritual teacher who wasn’t accepting initiates, you went to Lorena. She also just happened to be whom David had gone to for homework help and friendship advice, once upon a time.

“She practically raised me. Evgeni sent me to her shop after school, hoping a job would keep me out of trouble and teach me a little work ethic. She was always waving her palo santo around me and making me sit through reiki healing sessions. She likes adopting stray kids.”

“It sounds like she was trying to teach you basic self-defense. Maybe if you had listened to her more, you wouldn’t need me. You two keep in touch?”

“Not really.”

“You should. And you should thank her. That’s your homework.”

“Can do,” David said, even though he knew he wouldn’t. He hadn’t talked to Lorena in ages, and he hated awkward reunions. David gestured to the narrow dark halls winding through the townhouse like a tangle of snakes. “This floor is mostly bedrooms. I slept on the opposite side of the house from the study. Not very interesting.”

Moira pushed up on her toes to peer over his shoulder into the darkness. “It was just the two of you alone in this big old house?”

“Trust me, space to get away from each other was nice. After you.” David nodded down the curling staircase that led to the lower floor of the house, and they descended towards the intricate marblework pattern on the floor.

“And you think whatever I can do is more useful than reading auras?” Moira asked.

“The dead always have their uses, Ms Delacroix. How long have you been seeing ghosts?”

“Since I was tiny. I tried to tell my mother about it once, but she wasn’t having it. I just stopped trying to tell folks after a little while, and then I tried to stop seeing them all together.”

“How?”

“Any way I could. I would shut my eyes, slap my hands over my ears, say nonsense over and over again until I couldn’t even think straight. If I saw somebody I thought might not be… really all there, I just looked somewhere else. Like averting your eyes from sin in the Bible. Eventually, you train your brain not to pick anything up.”

“Muscles atrophy over time if you neglect them. But some people are born gifted.”

“I bet you’ve been told that you’re gifted since you were old enough to sit upright, huh?”

They came to the bottom of the stairs, and David quirked an eyebrow. “I thought I was asking the questions.”

Moira smoothed the long skirt of her dress, looking innocent as a daffodil. A daffodil with a taste for secrets and a merciless mind.

“Well, that is why I came all the way out here, isn’t it? We can’t very well help each other if we don’t know anything about each other, can we? And I’ve been so forthcoming with my personal details.”

David screwed up his mouth like he had just tasted something sour, but nodded. “What do you need to know?”

“You could start by telling me what the hell your family was into,” she said, strolling leisurely at his side through the high-ceilinged living room. David barely remembered what the furniture looked like under the sheets; he had just told the cleaning company to put the house into hibernation.

“Most of the money comes from international trade and investing.”

“Rhys said y’all were rich; he didn’t mention the library stuffed with long-lost grimoires. Are you, like” – she stole a glance at him, butterfly lashes fluttering – “some kind of occult crime prince?”

David barked a laugh. He had almost forgotten that his childhood wasn’t normal by any stretch. “Barring a better word. Although, in my family’s defense, we’ve only ever been tangentially involved in crime. We don’t have any direct ties. None you can prove, anyway.”

“I take it magic goes way back in your family.”

“Centuries,” David said, leading her into the kitchen. It was big enough to prepare a banquet in, open-plan and decorated to early-nineties tastes, down to the track lighting and ugly oak cabinets. “You don’t get as established as we are without practicing magic for a long time, or without doing it very well. My father was on a first-name basis with some of the most influential occultists in the world; they were always coming through the house to smoke cigars or trade spellbooks or borrow money. Oftentimes, I would host séances. Evgeni liked showing me off.”

It was impossible to keep the bitterness out of his words. Moira’s mouth formed a soft, concerned O, poised with a question, but David wasn’t in the mood for any kind of sympathy.

“My father knew what he was dealing with when I was born,” he went on. “He made sure I had access to the right resources and teachers.”

“And what was he dealing with?”

“A prodigy.” There was no pleasure in the word, just a cool statement of fact. It felt like slow-melting ice in his mouth. “Parlor is on your left. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m done talking about Evgeni.”

They had emerged back in the airy foyer, right at the base of the stairs.

Moira looked around her, craning her neck up to see the dark beams of the ceiling. “Fine. But I’m not done with you yet. You’re a hard man to get alone and I don’t intend to waste the opportunity.”

“Easy, your husband’s not around. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t want him to hear.” Flirtation, slippery and glib, came easily. It was his favorite way to wriggle out of hard conversations.

Moira swiveled to face him, chin jutting out sharply. “Are you trying to charm me, David Aristarkhov?”

She spat the verb out of her mouth like a bite of rotten fruit. David sucked air through his teeth. He had miscalculated, but he had to commit to the bit now.

“No, I’m being charming. I’d like to posit a semantic difference between the two.”

Anger shadowed her face like thunder clouds rolling over the horizon. “You try to butter me up and I’ll march myself right out of this house and never come back. I’m not some cocktail waitress you can bat your eyes at for free drinks.”

David blinked the playful light out of his eyes. Fine. If she was going to get her hackles up about everything, he didn’t have to sugarcoat himself. “That Aristarkhov charm never worked on Rhys either. It works on everyone else. Judges, bartenders, doesn’t matter. What gives?”

Moira wrapped her arms around herself. She looked half-frozen, even in long sleeves. “I’d wager Rhys liked you too well to go in for it. When you love somebody, you only want what’s real. Even if it’s less pretty than that first date sparkle.”

David smiled at her, genuinely this time, with that bitter quirk to his mouth that an especially poetic ex had once compared to the lemon twist in a martini.

“Don’t tell me you’re getting soft on me, Ms Delacroix.”

Moira put her hands on her hips and stared him down. Her face was carved from stone, her orange lipstick set into an unimpressed line. David couldn’t help but smile wider. He didn’t appreciate spinelessness in people, or bravado they couldn’t back up. But her unflinching ability to stare down an opponent impressed him.

“I’d rather swallow a live crayfish than harbor one soft thought in my heart for you,” she said. Slowly, deliberately, with niceness that stung. “I don’t go in for it because I can smell a liar at a hundred yards. And any man who can turn from nasty to sweet that fast is nothing but one big forgery.”

David clapped a hand over his heart, reeling with the delight of an insult aficionado. “Absolutely merciless. You’d make a good defense attorney.”

“Are you trying to compliment me?”

“Yes,” he said, and walked past her. He positioned himself in the eye of a large slab of marble that looked like churning clouds frozen in stone. “This should be about the center of the house. Come here for a second.”

“Why?”

She seemed off-balance and a little tired. The energy of the house was wearing her down, but he needed her present and alert for a few minutes more.

“I want to test a theory.”

Moira took a few wary steps forward, and David mirrored her with steps back until her wedge heels were right over where he had just stood.

“Let’s see if you’re any good with houses,” he said.

“You want me to try and read this whole house?”

“If you can.”

“I don’t know how,” she muttered. She stuck out in the gaping maw of the antique foyer. An orange lick of flame lighting up the lifeless wood around her.

“I suspect you’ve been reading the house without realizing it for some time now. Just try to relax,” David said.

“I’m never relaxed when I’m here,” she said. She didn’t add when I’m around you, but he heard it loud and clear.

David moved behind her and raised a hand over her shoulder, pointing straight ahead into the gloom of an unlit hallway.

“Pick a point to focus on,” he said. “Let everything else fall away. Just look right there and breathe.”

This was one of Evgeni’s methods, most often employed when a school-aged David had been too wound up to see straight, much less to see beyond the veil of death. Sometimes Evgeni would dangle a pocket watch in front of the boy, or spin a top, anything to capture his focus and induce a trance state. David knew darkness worked just as well. Darkness drew the eye and enfolded the mind, quieting conscious thought. David’s habit of closing his eyes during a séance wasn’t just for show; it was a mental trick to help him slide into the right frame of mind. If Moira played along, she should feel like she was falling into the dark, pulled in gently but irresistibly.

“How does that feel?” he asked.

“Better.”

He waited until her shoulders dropped down from her ears and her breathing deepened. Then he brought his palms up over her eyes, close enough to feel the warmth of her skin but not close enough to touch her. Another one of Evgeni’s tricks, to kick her consciousness down into an ever-deeper state. David’s stomach twisted a little at the thought of training anyone the way his father trained him, but he reminded himself that Moira wanted to be here, that she was consenting to every step of the process. It wasn’t the same.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “Breathe with the house. Tell me what you see.”

He stepped back and settled against the staircase banister to watch. A tiny furrow appeared between Moira’s brows as she listened intently.

“I don’t know…” she murmured. “Everything just feels cold. A little sluggish.”

“It’s not a lived-in house. It’s lethargic. Go deeper.”

Moira took a deep breath, and her fingers spread at her side, fanning out to search the atmosphere for any energetic messages.

“I’m cold,” she said. “And a little dizzy. But I think… I don’t know.” Her face turned from side to side as she tried to riddle out the mysteries of the house.

“Something isn’t right about the place. Something’s… off. Like rot underneath the floorboards, or… Oh God.” She swayed a little, pressing a hand to her breastbone. “Oh, that’s not nice at all.”

Moira’s lip wobbled, and David pushed himself up from the banister, heart kicking into high gear. He never knew what to do with criers.

“God, it’s so bad,” she said. She gasped for air in gulps, dancing dangerously close to hyperventilation. “It’s just this ugly malice, pressing down on me from everywhere. I’m scared. I can’t breathe.”

David rushed forward and grabbed both her hands.

“Moira. Open your eyes.”

She shook her head rapidly, lost to terror. Her fear coursed through him like the one line of blow he had tried at a freshman party, all jitters and nausea and crushing helplessness.

“It’s alright, you’re safe. Moira. Listen to me. Open your eyes.”

Her round brown eyes flew open, glassy with tears, and her grip on David’s hand tightened so much it was painful. That was proof she was present and fighting, proof she hadn’t lost herself somewhere in the dark underbelly of the spirit of this place. She tangled her fingers through David’s, and he squeezed to show he was real and there with her.

“Moira,” he said, for the third time. It was enough to break the murky spell around her, like magic words in a fairy tale.

She looked straight at him and took a shaky breath.

“This house,” she said quietly, “is not fit for man or beast. There’s something wrong with it.”

“I know.” David ran his thumbs in unconscious, soothing circles over the delicate bones of her wrist. When he’d been small, Leda used to rub circles into his back to help him stop crying. David hadn’t cried in years, but the gesture stayed with him, an incantation against emotions running wild.

Moira stared at him with an awful understanding shining in her eyes. “What happened here?”

“Plenty,” David said, quieter. He really hoped she wouldn’t try to talk to him about it. He hated talking about it.

“Your father… You two didn’t end things on good terms, did you?”

David laughed. Her gentle hedging made the horrors of his childhood sound like a sitcom.

“We didn’t end anything; I came home from school one day to find my father in his study, dead from a heart attack. I took his black card, bought myself an Audi, and threw a party in the house so big the neighbors called the cops. I didn’t cry over him. Evgeni was a controlling, mean-spirited son of a bitch. And yeah, he beat the shit out of me.”

He spat the last sentence out flippantly because it never got easier to say out loud. But she didn’t need to know that.

Moira released his hands and laced her fingers together, doe eyes full of so much compassion. She was pretty like this, pretty like the old picture of his mother he kept in his wallet, the one where she was giving the camera a faint Mona Lisa smile that belied gentleness and good humor.

That prettiness made David want to lock himself in his old room until Moira left.

“I don’t want you to think that Rhys ever said… I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. But this house is…” She shivered in the oppressive malaise.

David led her lightly by the elbow away from the center of the home. He had barely ever touched her before now, but suddenly it was easy to press his fingers lightly into her skin and send a pulse of reassurance straight into her heart. Easier than saying it out loud.

“An energetic black hole two murders shy from a hellmouth,” David supplied. “It doesn’t take a very strong psychic to know there’s something off about this place, and in my estimation, you’re more than competent. Rhys might not notice anything, but he’s got the intuitive aptitude of a Roomba. He just looks at this house and sees comfort and money and status, everything they aren’t exactly handing out on the street corner in Southie.”

“David?” Rhys’s voice floated down from the second storey, echoing like a memory. “Where did you two run off to? I found something.”

Rhys appeared at the top of the stairs, leaning over the banister to peer down at both of them, and froze. He looked like he was seeing a ghost, not a man and a woman standing so close to one another they could be mistaken for old friends. Maybe that was what made the scene so shocking.

David released Moira’s elbow as though he had been caught shoplifting. “What is it?” he called.

Rhys blinked, a bit dazed, then waved David up the stairs. “I think you should come have a look at this. Both of you.”

David looked back to Moira, who was standing ramrod-straight, dabbing the tears from the corners of her eyes with a lace handkerchief. She sniffed and brushed past him, her shoes clicking along at a brisk clip.

“You heard him. Let’s go see what he’s found.”

David followed behind her carefully, just in case she swooned. There was no telling how she would react to that much negativity in one go, and while he wasn’t feeling chivalrous enough to carry her bridal-style up the stairs, he wasn’t going to let her crack her head on the hardwood, either.

There were books of various sizes laid open-faced on the desk in the study, meticulously marked with sticky notes. A number of notebooks had been sectioned off and marked as well.

David didn’t look at Rhys when he passed by, but he heard the other man slip over to his wife.

“Are you alright?” Rhys asked quietly. David pretended to study the dense academic writing of one of the books as though it meant anything to him. Eavesdropping was not a good look. “What did he say to you?”

“Nothing, I just got spooked is all. It’s this damn house.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, with the sound of a fleeting kiss.

“What am I looking at, Rhys?” David asked, a little too loudly.

Rhys appeared at his side, eyes lit up with the thrill of discovery. “A common thread. I think. I started by going through the family tree you showed me and then moved on to Evgeni’s ledgers and journals. I found something. A name.”

Rhys pushed one of the giant reference texts across the desk to David. The text was minuscule: a list of demonic names thought to be linked to the same entity. One was circled in blue ink. Not by Rhys – he would probably rather come out as bisexual to his mother than deface an antiquarian book. Whoever had marked this off had come before all of them.

David squinted to read the name. “Baelshieth?”

The syllables slipped through his teeth like oil, like something that might leave a stain behind. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t recognize it, either.

“Wait for it,” Rhys said. He bustled around the desk, showing off another dog-eared page where the name showed up in footnotes, then a clothbound edition of some turn-of-the-century spiritualist’s scribbling. The infernal name was written clearly in the margins next to a section on maintaining relationships with entities through offerings. The handwriting was thin and heavy, and David recognized it immediately.

“Evgeni.”

Moira pushed herself up onto the edge of the desk, crossing her legs primly. She was still a little shaken, but she was bouncing back.

“Those are your father’s notes?” Moira asked.

“And there’s more,” Rhys said. He was breathless with excitement, cheeks flushed pink. Rhys only had two elements: occultism and archival research, and he was deep into both. “Look here.”

Rhys thrust out a palm sized leather notebook and David read the noted section.

Cross-reference with Sumerian text. Possible connection to Baelshieth?

He could almost hear his father’s voice, clipped and brusque. David shrugged. “They’re research notes, so what? He did a lot of research. I don’t even recognize that name. It doesn’t sound real.”

“But it is plausible. You know how these names get bastardized as they’re passed down, but this one is reminiscent of Semitic linguistic patterns. I need to make sure it’s not someone trying to retroactively add a constructed name to the record; it wouldn’t be the first time, but–”

“Rhys,” David said gently, pressing the book back into his hand. “What are you going on about?”

“I’ve found six references to this already, six separate times your father went out of his way to mark some obscure name that I’ve never heard of. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

David remembered Rhys pacing their apartment, running through demonic names and associations on flashcards while his medieval history homework lay untouched. He counted them like sheep at night when he couldn’t sleep, determined to ace his initiation exam and climb the ranks of the Society as quickly as possible. David couldn’t think of someone better acquainted with the widely accepted names on the spirit court.

“I just don’t see what it has to do with my feeling like shit. Or the voice in my head, remember that? The reason we’re here?”

Rhys shrugged expansively. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, and I don’t even know what needle I’m looking for. He marked the name everywhere he found it, underlined it, highlighted it, circled it. You told me to keep an eye out for weirdness; that’s weird.”

“Maybe,” Moira said. She didn’t sound convinced.

Rhys pushed away from the desk and rubbed the back of his neck. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, and David wondered if he had been working on this little research project off the clock. It was very like Rhys to get laser-focus obsessed with solving any problem that crossed his path; he had been notorious for all-nighters back in college. David just never expected his problems to be important enough to Rhys to earn that much attention. Not anymore, anyway.

“Hey,” David said, peering into Rhys’s face. “Don’t spiral. Let’s just… stay focused, alright?”

“It’s a lot to sort through,” said Moira helpfully. “You’re doing a good job, baby.”

David couldn’t imagine where she was finding the energy to be encouraging. Then again, Moira could probably be bleeding out from a knife wound and still stop on her way to the hospital to tie a toddler’s shoe.

“Fine,” Rhys muttered. He had caught the scent of something and wasn’t going to let it go, David knew that much. “But I’m going to keep an eye out for it in the library records.”

David thumped him on the back. “Knock yourself out. As long as you figure out what’s making me sick so I can burn it out of my system and get on with my life.”

“Speaking of which,” Moira said. “I think it’s time for another lesson.”

“Oh yeah?” David asked, turning towards her. All the vulnerability he had seen moments ago was gone, replaced with her usual courteous but firm bearing. “In what?”

Moira smiled, and that smile told him that she was done playing along with his experiments for the day. Now, it was his turn to be uncomfortable.

“I think we’ll start by visualizing a white protective light and then incorporate some deep, steadying breaths.”

David groaned. It was going to be a long day.