Chapter 12. Temple
Temple
“Stupid piece of shit.” Annette glared at her phone as if her anger could force the cracked screen to repair itself.
Jenny and I were sitting together on the bench on the front porch while Annette paced and fumed. We both knew when Annette got to this point, the best thing was to let her move and shed excess energy.
“Maybe your thumb was blocking the lens,” Jenny suggested.
“My thumb was not blocking the damn lens.” Annette spun and shoved her phone at us.
The damaged screen reduced the right side of a photo to colored vertical lines.
The rest was black. She slashed her finger across the screen several more times, showing one useless shot after another, until a partial photo of Morgan and Ava from last week appeared beside the colored lines.
The instant she’d tried to show us pictures of the spell she’d seen in Sage Parker’s room, her screen had frosted over and cracked.
“Some spells don’t appreciate being photographed or recorded,” I said.
“How the hell did a twelve-year-old kid create a spell like that?” Annette demanded.
I shrugged. “When I was that age, I was calling nature spirits to mow the lawn for me, and I had a pet rock who followed me to school like Mary’s little lamb.”
“Sage isn’t you,” said Annette. “Aside from his little plastic portal, there was zero evidence of any interest in magic or the supernatural. The most mystical thing in the whole house was a LEGO dragon being ridden by what looked like vampire ninjas.”
“Vampire ninjas are the worst,” said Jenny.
Annette shoved the broken phone into her pocket and sat on the front step.
“I want to fight some vampire ninjas,” muttered Ronnie.
Jenny had put her new apprentice to work pulling weeds around the rosebushes. She’d told Ronnie it was a meditative task that would help his focus. It also happened to be one of her least-favorite chores.
Annette dug through her purse and produced a sock. She twisted to hand it to Jenny. “This has Sage’s scent.”
“I’m not your pet bloodhound.” But Jenny took a quick sniff.
Next, Annette gave me a bloody tissue and a bag with two pills.
I held the tissue by a clean corner. “There are other ways to track people than blood. Maybe next time, you could bring me a nice, clean strand of hair from a hairbrush?”
Annette ignored me. “Sage told Ava those pills let him see other worlds. It sounds like he might have seen more than that. He knew Ava and her family were different.”
I set the tissue aside and held the bag to the sunlight. The black pills were ever so slightly translucent. I unsealed the bag and rolled one between my thumb and finger.
Annette pointed at me. “Do not put that in your mouth.”
I took off my glasses and whispered a spell. The frames grew warm. When I replaced them, my vision was magnified a hundred times. I studied the pill again, and this time, I saw tiny symbols etched into the capsule. “There’s a containment ring.”
“What kind of containment ring?” asked Ronnie.
When I turned to answer, I was momentarily taken aback by the enormity of his face. Thanks to my glasses, every pore looked like a chipmunk burrow. I leaned closer. “You need a sharper razor. Your stubble should end in clean cuts. Those are like broken tree branches.”
“Focus, please.” Jenny’s smile softened the words.
I studied the symbols, then tugged the ends of the capsule, trying to pull it apart.
Jenny reached to stop me, while Annette just swore.
The capsule didn’t budge. “The writing looks Aramaic. Whatever’s inside stays there until you swallow the pill.
Then the capsule dissolves, and the containment spell goes with it. ”
“What else can you tell us?” asked Jenny.
“The characters are inhumanly perfect. I wonder if they were done with lasers.” I dismissed the spell on my lenses, unzipped my fanny pack, and pulled out my book.
“Stuart Little?” A sad smile softened Ronnie’s face. “My mom used to read that to me.”
Pages fluttered past my fingers, eventually stopping at the beginning of an Assyrian spellbook I’d nabbed in Mesopotamia back in ninety-three.
Ronnie peered at an illustration that hadn’t been part of the original book. “I don’t remember Stuart Little dissecting giant fire-breathing slugs.”
The writing in the book was a close-enough match to confirm the spell on the pills was Aramaic in origin. “It’s an expanded edition.”
Jenny scooted closer. “Is that Nabu-rihtu-usur’s spellbook?”
Everyone turned to stare at her.
“You read Aramaic?” I asked.
“First of all, rude,” she said. “But no, I don’t.
I came across a copy when I was nineteen.
I’d flunked out of community college and taken a job working the fryer at Gold ’n Crispy, a local fried chicken place.
G and C had a longstanding rivalry with Bubba’s Chicks across the street.
The staff were encouraged to prank the other stores, and the sign war got pretty nasty.
A month into the job, G and C employees started disappearing.
Turned out Bubba Truett had gotten his hands on Nabu-rihtu-usur’s book.
He was no wizard, but he was able to summon scorpion-men to take out his competition. ”
Ronnie lit up. “Maybe the Gold ’n Crispy guy is behind all this!”
“I doubt it,” said Jenny. “The rest of the Slay Team had to go undercover, and there was a whole thing with Raj getting locked in a meat cooler with a pair of resurrected jackals, but we caught Bubba and took the book from him. As soon as we did, the remaining scorpion-men dragged him back to the land of darkness.”
“Kurnugi,” I said. “I visited there once. Not a fun place to spend your afterlife.”
“What did you do with the book?” asked Annette.
“We gave it to Felipe and the Guardians Council. Their library is like the Fort Knox of magic books.”
I turned my attention to the blood-crusted tissue. My book opened to one of the tracking spells I’d tried on Ronnie. I drew power from the house, touched the tissue, and recited the incantation.
“Anything?” asks Annette.
I should have been seeing through Sage Parker’s eyes, but what I saw looked like an endless cloud the color of curdled milk. I turned to a different page and a spell crafted to show me Sage like I was looking down at him from above. I felt the magic working, but I saw only darkness.
“What’s happening?” asked Ronnie.
“Temple hasn’t had the best of luck with these spells,” Annette answered.
“I don’t understand.” Ronnie stared at me. “He’s Temple Finn.”
“I used to be,” I snarled. I ended the enchantment with a slash of my hand. “If any of you think you can do better, be my guest.”
Annette huffed and looked away. Jenny gave me an encouraging smile. I didn’t know which was more annoying.
I recast the spell, this time adding my own personal twist to the magic. As a child, I’d developed a see-in-the-dark charm so I could read in bed without a flashlight. I braided that charm into the spell. This should let me see Sage even if he was in pitch blackness.
The paired spells worked perfectly.
I handed the tissue back to Annette. “The next time you collect blood for me to track, make sure you know who or what the blood came from.”
Her jaw tightened. “I got that blood from Sage’s bedroom.”
“And he got it from a poor gray squirrel whose body is in a plastic grocery bag in a dumpster down the street from his house.” No wonder everything had been cloudy.
I’d been looking through the eyes of a dead creature.
My own eyes spasmed for a moment as I released my hold on the spells.
The sunlight turned blinding. I squinted and waited for them to readjust. “You said Sage’s portal had blood on it? ”
“That’s right,” said Annette.
I didn’t like the implications one bit. “The squirrel was a sacrifice. Sage was trying to summon something.”
“With LEGOs and a squirrel?” asked Ronnie.
“Maybe he was trying to summon something very small,” said Jenny.
“Or maybe he—or whatever else might be working through him—was trying to recreate something he saw when he took these.” I picked up the bag with the two pills. “I’ll be in my workshop figuring out what the hell they are.”
· · ·
I spent most of the day studying the pills.
When my eyes got too tired, I set the two pills on a silver plate and turned my attention back to my book.
Specifically, to the work of Nabu-rihtu-usur.
His writing was more than just a spellbook; it was a firsthand account of his attempted uprising against Ashur-etil-ilani, around 630 BC or so.
During his failed rebellion, in addition to a small army of scorpion-men, Nabu-rihtu-usur had conjured what wizards today would call a Class III Elemental Marsh Slug.
I turned the page. The drawing of Nabu-rihtu-usur’s summoning spellwork was crude, but there was a clear triangular shape, just like Annette had described seeing in Sage’s room.
The individual symbols had a reality-defying element: parallel lines came together, and shapes dissolved into meaningless, disparate lines if you looked too closely.
Nabu-rihtu-usur wrote of nausea and nightmares following the conjuration. Many who witnessed the creature’s rampage were driven mad. He also mentioned sacrificing fattened bulls and a gazelle.
“That’s not right,” I muttered. Elemental marsh slugs were simple creatures with simple appetites. They didn’t care about living sacrifices. You could hook one with a simple pile of overripe fruit. And while they were ugly little worms, they certainly weren’t horrible enough to cause madness.
“You believe he conjured something else.” Margaret’s presence was a welcome surprise. We hadn’t had much time to talk since leaving the bed and breakfast.
Her words were faint. She couldn’t reach far beyond her van.
“Spying on me?” I asked, my words deliberately light and teasing.
“Just checking your progress. I can go, if you’d prefer. I didn’t mean to violate your privacy.”