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Tanne grunted and I heard the scribbling of pencil on paper. “I’ve got it noted down. I’ll see you at ten. And, Menolly, thank you. And your sisters.” And with that, he hung up.
“Who was that?” Camille had her basket of herbs and was sitting at the table, tying them up in bundles to hang from the ceiling out on the back porch.
“Tanne Baum. We’re meeting him at ten tonight, at the Blackthorn Starbucks. He thinks he has a lead on Violet—said something about a ritual he told you he was going to do?”
“Oh thank gods.” Delilah stopped in the middle of frosting cupcakes. She set the piping bag down and turned. “I hope he’s right. This whole mess with Lowestar Radcliffe and Violet has gotten shoved to the side by everything else that’s been happening, and I keep thinking, where is she? Is she all right? What must she be thinking now?”
“Well, we’ll meet him after we talk to Daniel and see what he has to say. Meanwhile, what can I do?” I jumped up, eager to be busy, but the phone rang again. This time it was my cell phone, and it was Nerissa.
“Sweetheart, I’m so sorry but I’m going to have to work late tonight. Chase is, too, but he’s already called Iris to tell her. So don’t wait dinner for either of us. We have a rather sticky situation here—nothing you guys need to know about, but it’s not very much fun. And Chase needs me here to smooth the path over between a disgruntled FBH family and their all-too-volatile OW houseguest. A few broken bones involved, and some very hurt feelings and threats of lawsuits and further assaults.”
“That’s going to take all evening? Sounds like an easy situation to me.” Of course, compared to the crap we’d been through, anything less sounded easy.
“Well, there are extenuating circumstances. Father of the household has a daughter who is seventeen and pregnant from the very handsome, very charming young man from Otherworld. The two obviously are down with each other, but Daddy is threatening to slap him with a statutory rape charge. That’s what started the argument.” Nerissa sounded put out and I did not blame her. That sort of crap was a ridiculous waste of the authorities’ time.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. That’s… yeah. I can see. Tread lightly and try not to break any skulls, though if you need some help, I’ll come down there and shake some sense into the pair of them. What about the girl?” I had a feeling she wasn’t playing any sort of victim in this case.
“She’s enjoying it. I think it tickles her to see Daddy and Lover Boy fighting it out. I have a feeling the little princess doesn’t get much attention otherwise.” Nerissa’s laugh was derogatory, and yet I also sensed a hint of sadness there. “So yeah, don’t count on us for dinner. We’ll grab something here. I’ll call before I’m headed home.”
I punched the End Talk button and slid the phone in the holster hanging off one of my belt loops. My jeans were too tight for me to put anything in the pockets. As I once again turned my attention to the bustle of the kitchen, I thought about mentioning Shamas’s departure but it wasn’t really the time for that. Camille would have to know by tomorrow, but I didn’t want to throw off the rest of the evening. I could tell her afterward—on the way to meet Tanne Baum.
I tried to find a way to help out with the rest of dinner, but there just wasn’t room. Too many cooks, and all that. So I meandered into the living room. The first thing I saw was Delilah’s laptop, sitting open. And then I noticed a file folder next to it, open. I could tell it had come from Carter’s because he used specially colored folders, and a special archival brand, and this was no ordinary cream-colored file.
As I sat down, nosy, and flipped through the articles in the folder, I realized they were about the Farantino Building. That’s right! Camille had said Carter gave them a folder on the building, but then with the disaster in Elqaneve, everything had slid by the wayside. Apparently somebody had decided to dig it out today.
There wasn’t much in the file—a few clips out of the Seattle Post’s business section. A couple from the Seattle Tattler’s social section—the damned rag was going strong fifty years back, long before the Fae and Supes were out of the closet. Then, there were Carter’s notes. Indications of unusual spiritual activity, in his spidery, very clear, handwriting. The dates went back to around 1914… a few years after the building was erected. All in all, there had been some hints of daemonic activity since near the beginning, but it was strung out enough to where, unless someone was specifically keeping an eye on the building, it wouldn’t have been all that noticeable.
So… let’s see.
Fact number one. Lowestar was attempting to wake a sleeping demigod. Which meant that Suvika—the demigod in question—had to be sleeping somewhere.
Hmm… it occurred to me that we hadn’t looked into him much yet. We hadn’t had the time. I frowned. Maybe there was some information online, though I rather doubted it. He was obscure, and all we knew about him was that he was one of the triple lords of debauchery and vice. What pantheon or mythos he hailed from, I wasn’t sure. At first, with his name, I’d thought maybe Hindu or Asian, but that felt off to some degree.
I pulled up a new browser and typed “Suvika” into Howl, a new search engine that was aimed at Supes and dealt first and foremost with magical information. A few seconds later, a handful of links came up. I scanned through them. Most looked like reference material.
Clicking on the first one took me to a brief, four-line entry in the MythicaPedia. Nothing there we didn’t already know. I clicked back to the listings and tried the second. Again, a brief mention, only this time whoever had Tumblr’d the information had included a painting that was supposedly of the three lords of vice. The drawing looked almost Japanese in origin, but I had the feeling it wasn’t. A third link led to nowhere, and a fourth. But on the fifth, I realized I’d stumbled onto something.
It was a personal entry in a magical blog that an FBH pagan had written. I glanced at the profile of the blogger, but it was only a magical name—and no information on where the writer was actually from or who he really was. But TheoLogos, the blogger, had apparently discovered mention of the demigod somewhere.
I cast a Circle of Summoning and used the root powder my grandmother taught me how to make. I was determined to bring Suvika here, to my life, even though the old texts say he is sleeping in his tomb. The conjuration worked, all right, but it wasn’t the demigod who showed up. Instead a handsome man, tanned with a glow that seemed to emanate through his clothing, appeared. He was in modern wear—and I would have mistaken him for a human if I passed him on the street.
When I asked him who he was, he would not say. He only laughed and told me I was foolish and lucky— foolish because I had no idea what I had asked for, and lucky, because my demands were not granted. And then, he told me that should Suvika wake for the wrong person, he would rain down mayhem and anguish on the summoner, and his freedom would be complete.
If not controlled by the proper channel, Suvika would be all too willing to rampage through the city and take whatever—and whoever—he wanted. And then, with a pale flash of light, the demon—I believe it was a demon, though he might as well be a guardian angel—vanished. I decided to abandon my quest to waken Suvika and concentrate on invoking someone more compliant.
Here, the entry ended, and I quickly scanned the entries before and after, but there were no further mentions of Suvika. Only haphazard ramblings of a wannabe magician who had gotten cocky, dove in over his head, and then had gotten very, very lucky. But who had he summoned? Obviously a creature from the Subterranean Realms.
I jotted down a few notes and bookmarked the site, then checked out the remaining links. The first three added nothing we didn’t already know, but the fourth was from a university site. Frowning—usually universities kept their online records to academic papers and the like—I scanned the page, trying to figure out what I was reading. The page looked like an image rather than text, and then it hit me. I was reading what appeared to be an old—perhaps ancient—book or scroll that had been scanned into the university’s databanks. And there, in a few concise sentences below a line of runes, was the entry I was looking for.
Suvika will waken from his tomb deep in the ethers. Born of a goddess and a daemon, when he rises, gold and silver will fly to his beck and call. Suvika will lay claim to all women he finds suitable for his use, and their screams will echo against the chamber walls. His carnal lust is equal in nature only to his lust for coin. And then, when his thirst for both is sated, he will waken his brothers, Viatu and Levvial, and they will use the greed of men to control the world. As was in the days of Atlantea, and then again in Rome, so shall be the new regime until once again, their enemies rock them back to sleep until the next turn of the cycle.
Okay then, that was promising. Not. I didn’t much like the sound of any of that, and I had no doubt that if Lowestar Radcliffe was able to wake up this demigod, we’d all be in for a world of hurt.
Using the URL, I followed the path back to see if there was any information about what it was I was looking at. The trail led me to an entry about an archaeological find deep in a group of caverns in Mongolia. Among the antiquities discovered there were a group of scrolls, one of which I’d been reading. They had all been scanned in, but only some of them translated—hence I’d lucked out by finding that one in particular. Who knew what the others held? But by what I could piece together, it appeared that Suvika had originated as either a Mongolian or a Finnish deity—the former seemed more likely.
Considering the power-crazed lust the Khans had possessed, it didn’t seem surprising to find Suvika attached to that culture. Feeling like we had a little more of a handle on things, I finished my notes as the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it!” I headed to the front door. As I swung it open, a short, thin man with brilliant blue eyes was standing there. He was grace, fluid in motion, and his hair looked like he’d just crawled out of bed but it was a good messy. He was in his late forties, perhaps early fifties, but he looked trim and fit. Dressed in a pair of indigo wash jeans with a button-down silver shirt and a black blazer over the top, he was wearing sneakers—seemingly incongruous to his outfit, but when I took the entire picture in, he made it all work. Daniel had two bottles of what looked like very expensive wine under his arm. I nodded for him to enter and he silently slid past me.
