Mojo Queen Read online

  I made Seth wait in the front of the office, doors locked, curtains drawn. I only threw up twice, which surprised me. I couldn’t stop shaking and I’d done a lousy job of cleaning up the cut at my hairline, above my right eye. It didn’t occur to me until I heard Daniel knock that I was about to let a vampire in the room while I still had blood on me.

  Before I could make a decision about how to handle that, Seth unlocked the door and let Daniel in. He lit a few candles and guided me back into the bathroom and the first aid kit, cleaning me up like a pro. Tilting his head toward the front room, he said, “What did that kid hire you to do? Be troll bait?”

  “No,” I said after chugging down more from a bottle of water. “An exorcism. Wait, trolls?”

  “What did you exorcise?” His fingers were cool against my skin as he washed the last of the blood away. The stone set of his face betrayed nothing.

  “I didn’t exorcise a damn thing. It got away, bubba.” I was the only one who could get away with calling him that, which somehow felt comforting. “It hurt a kid, real bad, and now it’s loose.” I tried taking another drink from the water bottle but my hands shook so much I couldn’t.

  He packed away the first aid kit, washing his hands with hot water and soap. Twice. “What was it?”

  “It was a demon. They summoned a demon.”

  He cleaned my glasses for me before handing them back. As I put them on, I took a quick peek. A smear of rust twisted through his usual muted yellow. He pursed his lips, giving me a look, and I knew I was busted. He didn’t say anything about it, though. “What has he told you?”

  “Not much. I really need for him to talk.” Asking without asking.

  “Shit.” He shook his head, running his hands through his dark-blond hair. “What the hell kind of ass-hats play around with shit like this anymore?” Something in his movements suggested a rubber band about to snap. Seeing him this tense wasn’t doing my nerves any good, either.

  “College boys who think they’re badass? I don’t know how this got started. That’s one of the things I need to find out.”

  “So how do you want to play this? You want me to scare him, show some fang?”

  I wasn’t expecting an offer like that and it made me wonder how well he was dealing with the smell of my blood. “Can’t you just, I don’t know, do your vampy whammy thing?”

  The rust in his aura flared so bright for a moment I could see it even with my glasses on. I took a step back, finding myself against the wall. He glared at me, one side of his mouth curling up in a snarl to show just a hint of a canine as the fang extended. He tipped his head toward me and said, “I really prefer calling it Jedi mind tricks, if you don’t mind.” Then he winked and like that, all the tension drained from him, all that angry red rust left his aura, and I wanted to smack him.

  I sagged against the wall. “God, you’re a diva sometimes.”

  He snickered. “Yeah, but I’m a diva who’s going to do what you want. Let’s get this over with. I need some fresh air and a drink. Maybe some O positive with lime liqueur.”

  “Oh, dude.” I held my hand up in a “please stop” gesture.

  Seth was where we left him, slumped on the couch, staring vacantly at nothing. Daniel dropped himself gracefully onto the coffee table. Without preamble he took Seth’s head between his powerful hands, forcing eye contact. “Okay, so here’s what’s going to happen.”

  Seth tried to extract himself but couldn’t. “What the hell is your problem?”

  Daniel ignored him. “What’s going to happen is Roxie’s going to ask you some questions. And you’re going to answer every single one of them.”

  Seth continued to struggle for a moment, to no avail. Daniel maintained eye contact, hands like a vise around the kid’s head. They stayed like that for long moments and I could feel Daniel pushing his will on Seth. After almost a minute Seth quit fighting and sagged back against the couch. His eyes looked a little glassy, but otherwise he seemed fine. I didn’t like having to do this but Seth had made it clear he didn’t want to be honest with me, and if I was going to find Delia and stop her from hurting anyone else, I needed more information. Having Daniel use a little mental coercion wasn’t going to hurt Seth at all.

  That was all the justification I felt the need for at the moment. I sat next to Daniel with a notebook and pen in hand, ready to start asking questions.

  “How’re you doing, Seth?”

  A listless shrug. “I want to go to the hospital. Check on Gabe.”

  I liked his loyalty to his injured friend. “We’ll take you as soon as we can. But you need to tell me some stuff first.”

  Seth closed his eyes and leaned his head back. “I really fucked up.”

  “You weren’t the only one there.”

  He raised his head back to look at me. “They didn’t take it seriously. I tried to pretend like I didn’t either, but I knew. I knew.” He looked away again.

  “Knew what?”

  He was silent for several seconds. Daniel tapped a knuckle against my leg, questioning. I shook my head once. Seth looked at me again then sat up. He ran his hands through his hair, leaving it sticking up in patches. “Whatever you had him do to me, don’t do it again. I’ll tell you everything.”

  A pang of guilt hit me and I nodded. “Where did you find your ritual, Seth?”

  “See, it wasn’t my ritual. I didn’t find it. Somebody else did. This all started with him. I’m starting to think maybe he used us.”

  The mystery man again. I wondered about the five cauldrons, five points of a pentagram. “Tell me about him.”

  “His name is Blake. I don’t know his last name. I met him at a club a bunch of us would go to. He was a little older but he was cool. We got to know him. One night Titus asked him if he’d get us some beer and whiskey. He said sure. The next time we asked him, we asked him if he’d like to come hang out with us.”

  “Is Titus one of the five?”

  That got me a sharp look from Seth and Daniel both. Seth nodded then continued. “It’s hard to explain how it happened. It’s almost like overnight he was a part of things. Me, Levi, Titus, and Gabe--we were all good friends before we met him, and then he was part of the group too. He was like a big brother to all of us.” He laughed--a short, mocking sound. “The big brother who hooks you up with booze and girls.” He looked away from me.

  Daniel stepped in, sounding much friendlier now. “He introduced y’all to girls, huh?”

  Seth nodded. “Yeah. Lots of girls. There was other stuff, too.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  No response. Daniel said, “Where do y’all go to school, Seth?”

  Seth answered with the name of a school I wasn’t familiar with.

  “That’s a Christian school,” Daniel said. “You boys all have Bible names.”

  I blew my breath out. Had these kids been targeted? “Seth, what else did he get you into?”

  Seth shook his head slowly, ugly realization dawning across his face. “I guess he didn’t become part of our group, maybe. I guess it’d be more right to say, we became his group. He is the one who came up with the name, after all.”

  “What name was that, Seth?”

  He looked away again then met my eyes. “The Brimstone Club.”

  Seth continued and I let him speak without interruption. “At first it was parties. We’d go to his place and we’d drink. Just hang out and bullshit, you know. Then he started bringing girls. Some of us wore purity rings, and he thought that was…so, anyway, there were girls. We’d go to clubs to meet girls too, but not like the places we’d been before, without Blake. He took us to this place with no name on the door, people dancing in cages. He liked the Goth girls especially. He didn’t like meth but we’d do ecstasy, stay out all night. It was just…unreal.

  “But it wasn’t just partying. Blake is really, really smart. I mean, here we were taking college courses in chemistry and physics, and he’d help us get the homework done quick. And he could t
each more than we were learning in class, stuff I couldn’t even begin to understand. We have to take Bible classes, theology and stuff, and he can talk about that too. But he’s not a Christian. That was pretty clear, real quick. We’d have these conversations about what we were being taught in Bible study, and it’s like…he questions everything, and showed us that we should too. He’s intelligent about it, so you can’t dismiss the stuff he said. But he had a sense of humor too. I know there are things he said and did that were blasphemous, but it just seemed harmless. We didn’t take it seriously. Even when he started talking about magic, even when he did spells right in front of us, it felt like a game. It was fun.

  “I don’t know where he met Delia. She just showed up one night, and from then on she was in the club. We thought she was his girl, you know, until she slept with…one of us. Then the rest of us. He didn’t care, though. He said it was her choice, and she would do what she wanted.

  “We did a couple of rituals before Delia, but most of that stuff came after she was part of the group. The rituals were intense. Really intense. Anyway, he started talking about this spirit, like a guardian angel, and he had conversations with her. I always thought it was weird that he never said he talked with her. He always used the word ‘conversation,’ like it meant something. He wanted to do a ritual that would bring her into Delia, so they could meet face to face. He said it would take really powerful magic to do that, and he would need our help.

  “We’d partied at that church before. He liked it there, out where no one could bother us. He set everything up. We just met them out there the night it happened.”

  Seth had been talking for a while and seemed to need a break. I continued making notes while Daniel went to a convenience store down the street, bringing back three sodas. The drink tasted terrible but I welcomed the caffeine. Neither of us pushed Seth. We waited for him to feel like talking.

  “We wore black robes, all of us. Blake ran through the ritual with us, made sure we all knew what we were supposed to do. It didn’t seem all that much different from some of the other stuff we’d done, so we didn’t think it was too big a deal. He had those black candles out in a circle, and the cauldrons. He taught us about circles in magic, and the five points of a pentagram and all that. This just seemed like a bigger version of stuff we’d already done. Each of us stood behind a cauldron--for the four elements, you know?” He looked to me to see if I understood. I nodded. “Blake was at the top point, spirit. He started the ritual. He consecrated the space and closed the circle.”

  Something in Seth’s voice changed. The boyish hesitation left. He sounded as if he knew exactly what he was talking about. I traded a glance with Daniel. He’d noticed too.

  “I could feel it. Like everything outside the circle fell away, as soon as the candles lit. I’d seen him light a candle before, one candle, just with magic, but this was incredible. That whole circle of candles lit, and all he did was raise his hand. He invoked the elements, and each time a fire lit in the cauldron, and it would be the color of the element, you know?” He looked to me again, his face glowing with wonder.

  I nodded. “What element were you?”

  “Fire,” he said, and I swear he sounded proud of that. “The fire was red. Gabe wasearth, and his fire was green. Levi was air, which is yellow. Titus was water, which is blue.”

  I nodded along. It seemed to help him to be speaking to someone who was familiar with the language of magic.

  “It was really beautiful, to be honest, and just amazing. He made all that happen with magic. He never left where he stood.”

  “Where was Delia?”

  That seemed to dampen his enthusiasm a bit. “Uh, in the middle. She was lying on the floor in the middle. She was covered with a black cloth.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Do you know what a lesser banishing ritual is?”

  “Yeah, I think so. It’s for banishing anything that might get in the way of the primary ritual, right?”

  Seth nodded.

  “Fear, doubt, just whatever might hinder your purpose.”

  He nodded again. “Yeah. That’s what Blake started with. We’d done this kind of thing before, but when he moved on to the main ritual, I could tell it was different. He wasn’t speaking English, or Latin or anything else I could recognize. We knew what we were supposed to say and when, but he was really vague about what the words meant.

  “We’re chanting, and going around the circle widdershins. Do you know that word?”

  I waved at him to continue, tired of nodding.

  “After a while it’s like there’s this light in the room, in the middle of the pentagram. Where Delia is. It got stronger, the more we chanted. He gave us the signal and we started chanting something else. A word--delipitore. Do you know what that means?”

  “No, I don’t know that one. What is it?”

  He shrugged, his brow wrinkling. “I was hoping you would know. Anyway, we kept up that chant, and the light over Delia kept getting stronger. Then all of a sudden the blanket on her came up in the air. I saw him directing it, with his hand, like when he lit the candles and the cauldrons.”

  He paused. After about a minute I gave him a nudge. “What happened next?”

  He looked embarrassed again. “Do you know what a five-fold kiss is?”

  “Yeah.” Daniel raised an eyebrow at me but I shook my head slightly. I could tell him later.

  Seth went on. “We took turns doing that, to Delia. Then, uh, we took turns, uh…”

  This was getting painful. “You all had sex with her, in the circle?” Trying to help him out, I kept my voice as gentle and non-judgmental as I could. “Blake used sex magic?”

  Daniel coughed, as fake as it gets, and I could have cheerfully handed him over to a vampire slayer right then.

  Seth didn’t want to look at either of us. “That light just kept getting stronger, every time somebody, uh.”

  I made a rolling motion with my hand. “We get the picture. Then what?”

  “Titus was the last one. She was on top of him. That’s how she was with all of us, on top. The light was, it was shimmering almost, and she stretched out her arms. She threw her head back, and when she came it was like all that light went into her. Just, like she took it all inside her. That’s when she changed. What happened with Gabe, when she hurt him?” He made eye contact with me again. “She held him down. We didn’t even realize until it was too late that he couldn’t breathe. I don’t know how she did it, but it’s like she stole the life right out of him.”

  He slid from the couch to the floor, wrapping his arms around his knees and looking way the hell too young to have seen so much death. I knelt beside him, my hand on his arm. Useless, really, but it was the best I could do. “Titus is dead?”

  He just looked at me. Without a word or gesture from him I could read the answer to my question. He shivered and rested his head on his knees. I hated to keep pushing him, but I had to know more. “Seth, what happened to Blake? How did the ritual end?”

  He rubbed his face before answering. “The storm did it. I mean, everybody panicked when she killed Titus. Even Blake freaked. Well, for him, anyway. I broke the circle and things went pretty weird. I felt sick. I could tell Gabe and Levi did too. We hadn’t really been paying attention to the storm during all this but when I broke the circle we could hear it. The church was struck by lightning.”

  “Damn,” I said under my breath.

  “Delia passed out. Gabe and Levi and I tried to help Titus, but he was already dead. When I looked for him, Blake was gone. I tied Delia up and we talked about what we had to do. Things were pretty ugly at that point.”

  “What’d you do with Titus?” Daniel asked.

  “We buried him in the church graveyard. Levi wanted to go to the cops but I knew we couldn’t. I knew we couldn’t just let Delia be allowed to run loose and I figured if cops got involved, she might tell them exactly what she tried to tell you. Just to get herself out of trouble.�
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  Daniel looked at me and I explained, “She tried to convince me they raped her.”

  “I tried calling Blake but he won’t answer his phone. Before we came here we went to his place one more time, but he wasn’t there.”

  Daniel took my notebook, turned it to the back and handed it to Seth. “Write down that address and number.”

  Seth complied.

  “Did you go into his place or just knock on the door?”

  “I just knocked but I tried talking to him, too. I told him what I was going to do. If he was there, he didn’t let on.” He returned the notebook. “Look, I’ll do whatever you need me to do, but I really want to go check on Gabe. Can I do that?”

  I looked at Daniel. “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea. Daniel’s going to take you to the hospital and I think I’ll go check out Blake’s apartment.”

  Daniel laughed like he didn’t think that was funny at all. “Oh, hell no. You’re not going to risk running into those two alone.”

  I stood, taking my notebook and picking up my messenger bag. “All I’m gonna do is take a look around. If somebody’s home I’ll call you and wait.”

  Daniel stood too, which was much more impressive, considering his height advantage. “You may have a concussion, Roxie. You don’t need to be running around after demons and sorcerers all by yourself.”

  I pulled him to the side and whispered. “She killed one of those boys and tried to kill another. Have you stopped to consider why?”

  He shrugged. “Demons are evil. What other explanation do you need?”

  “I think it’s got something to do with the ritual. Look, this guy Blake is probably long gone from that apartment but I need to see if he left anything behind. He probably didn’t but I need to check, just to be sure, but I’m not sure those kids need to be left alone.”