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“Power Rangers,” I repeated blankly. “The dudes with the colors?”
“Yeah. But in this case, it’s chicks with magic.” She pointed to each of us in turn. “Necromancer, aeromancer, vampire... and me. I think, if we work together, we have enough power to seal the demon.”
Ariel tilted her head at Lulu. “I thought you decided not to do any more magic. Especially after fireballing Elisa.”
Petra must have updated Ariel, as I hadn’t had time to fill her in on Lulu’s new, if possibly temporary, hobby.
“I had decided that,” Lulu said. “Because my specialty—my skill—is working with dark magic.”
“Oldmagic,” I corrected.
“Old magic,” she agreed. “Long story short, I had been thinking about magic as a dichotomy: white or black, good or bad.”
“Colonial nonsense,” Petra said.
“Truth,” Lulu said. “And I don’t want to think about it that way anymore.” She looked at me. “You’re a vampire from a millennia-old lineage, and your magic—your body—is fueled by blood.” Then Petra. “You’re an aeromancer—that’s elemental magic.” Then Ariel. “You can speak to the dead. That’s a skill as old as life itself. Maybe the problem isn’t the magic. Maybe the problem is people who use magic to hurt other people.”
“So how do we all play into this?” Ariel asked.
“I work the spell. Petra provides juice.” She looked at Ariel. “You ask the ghosts for help in keeping the demon contained until the seal is fully in place. Human, canine, whatever.”
“And me?” I asked.
“You’re the muscle,” Lulu said with a grin, then looked at Connor and Alexei. “You, too. She doesn’t like wolves, so we’ll use that.
“We do this at Cadogan House,” she continued, “because we need her to get the House back before we seal her fully. It’s easiest to start that process at the House.
“This is going to be a multistage process,” Lulu added, pointing to the drawings she’d prepared that morning. Her enormous sketchpad was poised on an old-school easel Roger had dug out of a closet.
“The overview,” she said, “is we call the demon. Then we draw the sigil,” she said, pointing to an illustration of the symbol. “Then we do the spell.”
“How long will the spell take?” I asked.
“Not long,” she said. “The spell gives the power direction. Candle, ingredients, mix, a little bit of hand-flicking, since that’s the language Rosantine uses. Then Rosantine—the demon Andaras—should appear in the sigil, and she’ll be at our command.”
“And we tell her to bring back the House and reveal the truth about the Bermuda Triangle,” Petra said.
“First part only,” Lulu said. “When the House is back, we seal her. She gets sent back to hell, and we all enjoy that dinner at Cadogan House we’d been planning to have.” There was a drawing of that, too, down to her mom’s blue hair and her dad’s resting scowl.
“That sounds simplistic,” Roger said with an apologetic wince. “Not that I underestimate your skills, but...”
“But you’ve never seen my skills,” Lulu said matter-of-factly. “And I’m not battle-tested. It’s okay to say that, because it’s true.” She gave me a look full of meaning, and I nodded my understanding. “That’s why we have the big guns. And, to be clear, it’s not simple, and it won’t be easy.”
She flipped to the next drawing. It was the sigil, with names at four compass points. Her, me, Petra, Ariel. She pointed to the symbol’s outer circle. “This is the ‘do not pass’ line. We’re talking ‘Balrog, do not pass.’ If we don’t keep the circle secure, she’ll get out. And she’ll be smart enough to leave—we’ll never get the House back. And, to add sprinkles on the cake, we’re working on the clock,” she reminded. “Full moon is at two seventeen a.m. We don’t get the House back by then, and we’re in trouble.”
And our parents would be trapped.
“How could this go wrong?” Gwen asked.
Everyone else in the room, from human to shifter, gave a sarcastic laugh.
“I mean, I understand Murphy’s Law,” she said with a sly smile. “And it’s Chicago. But I mean specifically. The mayor wants to be prepared.”
“Managing expectations,” Roger told us.
“That depends on whether we manage to hold the circle,” Lulu said. “Because we do not breach the circle. The circle is inviolate.” She gave each of us a teacherly stare.
“Don’t fudge the circle,” Ariel said. “We got it.”
