True to her word, Mina had dropped off everything I asked for at the bottom of the stairs. Fortunately for me, that meant I didn’t have to brave the cold and limp out into the fearsome neighborhoods of Brooklyn, where yuppies and hoodlums congregate. Honestly, I didn’t know which was scarier: the possibility of getting jumped or rising prices at local grocery stores. Don’t even get me started on eggs.
I looked around the RV, making sure the candles would last for a few more hours. I’d also taken care to close the blinds. Finally, I stared down at the floor that I’d spent the last hour scrubbing clean with water, soap, and sponges. I fiddled with the chalk in my hand.
“Have you made up your mind on which daevil or daemon you will summon, practitioner?” Wol asked, lounging from his spot on the desk. But his voice was alert and snapped me out of my stupor.
“Narrowed it down to two,” I said. “Sort of. Maybe three.”
“What is the trouble?” Wol said.
“Well, just because we know the names of these daevils doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll answer or comply,” I said. “With normal preternaturals, it’s more of a contract. A law, a rule, that if you give an offering established from practices determined long ago, they show up. They either answer questions, offer help, or form contracts; as long as there’s a payment involved.”
I took a breath and walked over to the desk. I began to flip through Infernal Contracts. Hwari flew over to my arm and rested there, weightless but watching. “Infernal Names is mostly a binding or exorcism book. Used to figure out the names of daemons or daevils inhabiting our plane of existence so we can bind them, or banish them. Infernal Contracts is where we deal with the conjuration aspect. The book says they’re malignant, and by the very nature of trying to conjure a daevil, things are likely to go wrong.”
Wol hadn’t read the book along with me. He said he could help, but that he could not look at the book. Something about rules, so I mostly spent the time bouncing ideas off of him like I was doing now.
“Interesting,” he said. “But makes sense. Infernal beings do not belong here. The mage-kings saw to that.”
“Jesus?”
“Among them,” Wol said.
I ignored the possibility of another tangent. I needed to focus on the task at hand. “When summoning a very specific daevil, you gain its attention. By the second or third chant, it will have already noticed you and try to fuck up the ritual. Even without it, now you’re on its radar. It will know you exist, that you have the power to summon it, or morals gray enough to do so, and start hounding you for a foothold in this reality.”
Wol nodded.
“Most people who have ongoing contracts with daevils or daemons were those who found them haunting a place and bound them into objects or contracts,” I said. “Which brings up the whole question of how diabolists are supposed to bargain with them when none of them are around. Well, that’s where this book comes in. The Hallows designed summoning rituals so that you’re not summoning a specific being, but narrowing the search down to specific conditions.”
Wol gave me a cat frown. “How so?”
I sighed. This was where things got iffy, even for me. “The summoning rituals are like a search bar. You can type in the name, but it’s dangerous. So instead, you search by other traits and hope that you get a hit close enough to what you’re looking for.”
“Practitioner. Are you telling me that your ancestors have surveyed the hells and categorized their denizens by habitat and characteristics?”
I flipped back to the first page, where there were more than a dozen names. I traced them with a finger. “Not all of them. I think…” I gulped. “I think only a few managed to do it. Whether it was by making bargains for information, or trial and error…” I stopped as the language turned from English to something else. “More than a few of them got to step through.”
“Step through?” Wol asked incredulously.
Hwari slithered up my arm. ‘Step through, pass on, change, descend, visit, become something else.’
Wol looked at Hwari. “You knew this?”
‘I wasn’t always contracted to the Shins,’ Hwari said. ‘Not about the Hallows, but practitioners treading where they should not be is not anything new, Wol.’
“What kind of places?” I asked.
“Places that young practitioners have no business being,” Wol shot Hwari a warning glare.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Hwari spoke at the same time. ‘Pockets within planes. In-betweens, could-have-beens, frozen-places.’
I waited to see if she’d say anything more, but the ghost koi said nothing after. She remained on my arm, looking down at the book.
It was rare to hear Hwari offer information like that on the matter. Most of the time, she was aloof. Whimsical, even. But other times, she got so serious and spoke in this empty, all-knowing voice that sent a chill directly into my bones. It also surprised me that Wol, who was more of the teacher between the two, seemed to be surprised by what Hwari knew. Maybe my mom had done more than just stuff Hwari full of forbidden circles. Or maybe I was wrong about my initial assumption that Hwari was more of the muscle between the two—she had smarts, it was just too forbidden, or esoteric, for it to be of any use except in the very specific situations.
Hwari creeped me out sometimes.
“Ok, back on topic,” I said, clapping my hands to clear the air. “So my ancestors organized the hells into little categories with some search engine optimization tactics, which, to be honest, is a little too abstract for me to understand,” I flipped over the page with the names. “They separated them by culture or religion, hierarchy, and function.”
“It seems that you have all the tools needed to go ahead with the summoning, practitioner,” Wol said.
“Emphasis on culture, Wol,” I said, turning more pages.
Wol’s delicate brows rose. “You mean they do not speak English.”
I grimaced. “There’s a chance they don’t speak it, yes. The book delves into preferred methods of communication. Latin, Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Sino-tibetan…” I kept flipping the papers so hard that the wind stirred, causing the candle next to me to waver and cast long shadows inside the RV. “Some of them predate written and spoken language, continuing conversation through sign languages. Any chance you know how to speak one of those?”
“I can speak a bit of Japanese and Chinese. I speak Korean fluently. But those languages? Practitioners of that era hardly set foot in the tiny peninsula where I spent most of my time,” Wol said.
I looked at Hwari.
‘I do not, Caller,’ she said simply.
“Caller, we don’t have to go through with this,” Wol said suddenly, stepping off his cushion and approaching me. “There are other creatures we could conjure and ask for aid in carving a staff.”
“No, we have to,” I said, my mouth feeling dry. “It’s not just the staff. Everytime I meet someone, they’re kind of looking down on me, you know? I think they can tell that I’m not what I’m supposed to be.”
“An inexperienced practitioner?”
“A dangerous, inexperienced practitioner,” I responded. “Everyone says diabolists are dangerous, but they act like I’m not. They all act like I could become dangerous. But I have a feeling that on this little errand, people won’t be so nice. I can’t just scare them off with what I could be in the future. I need to have something in my back pocket, an ace-in-the-hole that I could take out at any moment.”
“And you feel that this is it?”
I laughed. “Yeah. I mean, that’s what it is, isn’t it? The Hallow name? Fuck,” I swore, the laugh dying in my throat, “I hated all those rich kids who shoved it in my face that they had their parents’ money. Now, I’m going to be doing the same thing as them. Walking around and bullying little preternaturals by telling them I’m a Hallow, and my ancestors put daevil-marked coins in the proverbial family trust, trying to scare them and getting them to answer me.”
“I fail to see how that is a bad thing,” Wol said.
I looked down at my hand, the bandaged one. “I guess it’s not. I could finally hurt someone back when they hurt me.”
“Practitioner, are you scared? Of hurting someone?”
I released the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “No, I think I’m scared that I might become someone who likes hurting others.”
Wol stared at me.
I looked outside through the gap in the curtains. The snow had picked up again, lighter than the last few nights but just as steady. It was dark. Really dark—like can’t see two inches from your face dark. There were no lights anywhere in sight. Not from the cars, and not from the nearest street lamps. I could imagine the RV being a beacon of light in this place, even though the only thing I had was a few candles. Maybe that was why all those scurrying preternatural critters had been drawn here, because as much as they lived in the dark, they yearned to exist in the light.
I didn’t want to become a bad person. I really didn’t.
But everyone was afraid of my mom and dad for a reason, weren’t they?
Hell, there’s a reason why I stopped wanting to reach out to my dad. Logically, that’s the first thing I should have done through Emyrith: checking to see if my dad reached Europe safely and asking him if he was out of his goddamned mind.
But I hadn’t.
I don’t know what to expect anymore.
Reading about some of the summoning circles outlined in Infernal Contracts, I don’t think my ancestors were good people.
One circle required twenty corpses of freshly slain hogs, their blood mixed with that of a man and a woman, both virgins, among others. Another required the scent of a newborn babe on a winter’s night, left alone on a windowsill. That wasn’t the end of it. Working men stuffed inside scarecrow costumes and crucified in the middle of a cornfield in a circle made of fire—those were the things that my ancestors experimented with.
Let me rephrase that: they did trial and error with the blood of babies.
My circle did not need anyone’s blood except my own. I wasn’t summoning up some apocalypse agent, just a minor devil who could offer insight into staff-making and my knife. A daevil that could teach me a trick or two that only Hallows could employ, so that I could show others that I had some way of defending myself. I wasn’t against learning actual defense mechanisms either.
But I wondered how much of me actually relished the thought of inflicting pain back on the people who’ve made me suffer for so long. God knows, a few faces came to mind immediately. Most of them were the kids at school, some of them belonged to teachers who blatantly shunned me, and other individuals who weren’t as memorable.
And I’ll be honest. When I imagined Kevin Sloan coming face-to-face with something like Maw the next time he tried to mess with me, scaring him out of his wits, both of us knowing that it was me who did that?
It felt good. It felt real good.
I got a sick little sinking feeling. Maybe I wasn’t a good person at all.
“Practitioner?” Wol asked, breaking into my thoughts.
Good person or not, I needed to do this. Instinct told me that if I didn’t, there was a chance that someone might decide Jain Shin Hallow was an easy target, that I’d be dragged into some dark alley somewhere without me even realizing what just happened.
I couldn’t appear weak.
I couldn’t be weak.
I grabbed the chalk, then the supplies that Mina left me: shattered mirrors, sand, kitchen knives, rope, sandpaper, and more.
“Practitioner?” Wol repeated.
“We can deal with the language problem if we come across it. Worst case scenario, we banish it back to hell and try another summoning with different parameters.”
“Which parameters are we starting with?”
“Christian-catholic, middle, and enlightenment,” I said, then got on the floor to start drawing the circle.