(This is a rough draft of Chapter 1)
The pentagram, carefully drawn out in pig’s blood, wavered and blinked in and out as Bridget’s vision swam. She sighed and steadied herself with the edge of the table, knocking over a salt shaker. Swearing under her breath, she hastily sat it back upright and swept the spilled salt away, then sank onto the bench and rubbed her eyes.
Warlock training was nothing like she had thought it would be. The elementary training, the secondary schools, even the first years of university had been a breeze – a blur of schoolyard curses, playing with the chickens until they were sacrificed to their chosen devil, sneaking behind the bleachers with lesser demons, and sometimes even some learning here and there. This final course of study, though, this one was a doozy. There was no time to sneak anywhere with anyone, or have too many glasses of port. Fight training every morning, Advanced Curses before lunch, then Advanced Summoning, Pacts and You seminars, and Sacrificial Offerings in History all before a late dinner and hours of working on final projects late into the night. After months of getting little to no sleep, Bridget was exhausted.
“Sleep when I’m dead,” she muttered, slapping her cheeks. Her project for Advanced Summoning was due in the morning and she wasn’t getting any younger. She slapped her knees and forced herself back to her feet, then checked the video camera’s alignment with the pentagram on the lunch room’s floor for the hundredth time. For at least the eightieth time, she pressed the record button, took a deep breath and looked straight into the camera, her tired violet eyes staring back at her beneath a mountain of black hair knotted on top of her head in the camera’s little viewing monitor.
“Bridget Davidson, Advanced Summoning, final project,” she said as clearly as she could. “I will be attempting to summon Luvart, former prince of Angels.” She nodded curtly and then solemnly used the salt shaker to create a ring of salt outside herself and the pentagram. She picked up one of the black candles that flickered on the outside ring of the pentagram, and dropped black wax on each point of the star, before using her fingers to put out the flame. As the smoke from the wick and her charred fingers rose to the ceiling, she blew into the cavity the melted wax created in the top of the candle, blowing black wax across the pentagram.
“Hear me, Prince of Angels, thou tempter of good, thou fallen demon. Hear me, agent of the Morning Star, rise and meet me face to face. Come forth to me, whose name is known to man as Lucifer.” She paused as the floor began to rumble sharply beneath her. “Luvart. Wait. What did I say?” she gasped, as the floor began shaking more aggressively than before. She fell hard on her knees as the floor cracked suddenly across the pentagram, the edges of the crack curling and turning black. She threw her hands across her face to shield it from the intense heat that emanated from the crack, and tried to get back to her feet, although the floor was still shuddering violently and kept throwing her back down.
“Shit, what is happening?” she cried, as she crawled backwards away from the crack in the floor. She glanced over at the camera, which had fallen to the floor; the red light was still on. It was still recording. Despite her terror, she felt some relief that she’d have something to turn in the next morning, if she made it out of the lunch room alive. She turned back to the crack, and froze. A mess of bat wings were rising out from the depths, six great pulsing black wings whose ribs were edged in red, with mottled black claws on the tips at the top. Claws on the bottom tips too, she noted, as the wings breached the crack and spread out to their full glory. Six wings belonged to the seraphim, and there were only four choices when it came to fallen seraphim. Her stomach sank as she realized what, in her exhaustion, she had said.
“Fool,” he said. His voice, rich and euphonic, seemed like it would tear her head apart from the middle of her brain out to her ears. He laughed, his still handsome face contorting in his bemusement. “I have spent more millennia than I can count, child,” he purred, as his cloven feet hit the still trembling floor, “attempting scheme after scheme to walk the realm of man.” He laughed again, flexing his arms and stretching his long fingers out in front of him in wonderment. His very skin seemed to made of fire, as if it were dancing beneath translucent skin. “Who could have guessed all it took was an inept warlock?” He began to stalk past her, the floor shaking with every step of his hooves.
“Stop!” Her voice squeaked. It actually squeaked. In the movies the plucky heroine shouted with the fury of nine different hells, but no, she had to squeak instead. “Stop, I’ve summoned you, demon! There is to be an – an agreement!” He stopped and stared at her in amazement, the skin crinkling around his black eyes. He laughed again, long and loud, which made her clap her hands over her ears in an effort to keep her head on her shoulders.
“That just might work on the lesser of my race, wench. Did you expect a pact or a salt circle to keep out the Morning Star himself?” He grinned and crouched slightly, then with a leap and a thrash of his wings, crashed through the wall of the building and was gone in the night.
“Holy shit,” Bridget sputtered, the realization of what exactly just happened crashing down on her. “Holy shit holy shit holy shit,” she continued to babble, as she scrambled to her feet and frantically patted her face and chest and legs. Okay. She still had everything, she was still solid, this hadn’t killed her. Yet. She ran a few steps towards the door, then ran back into the room to grab the camera. “Come on, come on,” she muttered frantically, trying to jimmy it off the tripod. “Screw it. Liquescimus,” she said as she wrapped her fist around the connection, causing the metal to melt in her hands, then let the mangled tripod drop to the floor as she sprinted out of the lunch room.
“Bridget Davidson, WHAT just happened?” She shrieked as she ran into Elder Calogerus, nearly dropping her camera. The strips of black gauze, permanently burnt into his flesh, crumpled as he furrowed his brow and sniffed through the lunch room door, all his other senses telling him everything his blind eyes couldn’t see.
“I – I don’t know, I was working on my project and – “
“That sulfur only comes from one place, Bridget,” the elder said grimly. “No, hush, come with me, quickly.” He grabbed her elbow and hurried her through the halls towards his office. Torches on either side of his door sprang to life as he pushed her into the office and sat her in the chair across from his desk. He closed the door firmly and then swept into his own chair.
“Elder Calo, I swear, I’m not sure how this happened,” Bridget started, clutching the camera so hard she thought she might break it.
“Neither do I,” he said gently. “Start at the beginning please.”
“Well I – I haven’t been getting much sleep,” she said. Tears sprang to her eyes. “I’ve been working so hard on these final projects. And this one tonight, I’ve been working on it since dinner, trying over and over with no luck.”
“You were supposed to summon Luvart is that correct?”
“Yes,” she said, dropping her gaze.
“And where did it go wrong?” he asked.
“I – I accidentally said Lucifer.” She whispered the name, then quickly looked towards the door.
“You’ve already summoned him, child, you can’t summon him again,” the elder said. He chuckled, but when she looked back at him his face held no mirth. “What color candles did you use?”
“Well,” she said, sitting up a little in an effort to look like an eager A+ student who most definitely did not just summon Lucifer to earth. “I did quite a bit of research, but the truth is very little is known about Luvart, so in absence of a particular attribute, I chose the default black.”
“Mm hmm. And the incense?”
“I used five, one for each element and the moon. Frankincense, myrrh, sweet gum, galbanum, and clary sage,” she finished, ticking them off on her fingers. The elder fell into thought, his fingers peaked in front of his face. The silence seemed to make the very air in the room hum with tension.
“It makes no sense,” he said finally, throwing his hands up in the air. “Generic candle, generic incense, generic call forth – I assume you used the scripted one Elder Pompey gave you?” She nodded. It always felt strange to nod to a blind man, but he was no ordinary blind man. “Bridget, you’re a good warlock, but no one is that good. I don’t think even I, using those props, could summon the Lord of Hell himself just by saying ‘Lucifer’ instead of ‘Luvart’. There must be something we’re missing.”
“Well I – I have the camera,” she said meekly, holding it up.
“The what?”
“The – the camera. For the final project we had to film the summoning. It fell down when the earth went all shaky but it still recorded it I think – “ The elder leapt out of his chair and snatched the camera before she could finish her thought.
“Stay here,” he commanded as he hurried out of the room towards another office down the hall, leaving her to sit in the office alone with her increasingly weighted sense of impending doom. She turned a little in the chair so she could keep watch out the door, which Elder Calogerus had left open. She sighed heavily, and propped her chin on the back of the chair. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the flame in one of the torches suddenly get brighter and grow into the shape of a man.
“When our pact agreed you would provide me with the souls of the wretched, this isn’t quite what I meant.” Beleth’s voice still made her shiver down to her toes, even after all this time. She didn’t think she’d ever again hear a sound so melodic, so hypnotic, as that of this King of Hell she had made her pact with.
“I figured you’d be positively giddy, Beleth,” she said wearily as he sat in the chair next to her. He still faintly smelled of sulfur, though to any passerby he was just a dastardly handsome man in an impossibly good suit with dark chiseled features and hair and eyes as black as night. “Doesn’t this mean you can all come to the surface to play?”
“Perhaps,” he said silkily. “Perhaps not. That is up to the Morning Star and he is … not so predictable. You had six, by the way.”
“What?”
“The frankincense of fire, the myrrh of water, the sweet gum of earth, the galbanum of air, the clary sage of moon,” he said. “But there was a sixth, left there from a student before – nutmeg.”
“Of Jupiter,” she said, finishing his sentence. “Holy shit, I need to tell the elder – “
“Why do you always say that? Of everything you humans do, that is the least holy act you regularly commit,” he said crinkling his nose. “And do you really think he can help you? That will require him to admit to all your councils and busybodies in charge that he let a student summon forth the Lord of Hell.”
“What, like you would help me? This is your kind’s greatest goal,” she spat back.
“No, our goal is to get back to heaven,” he said. His silky voice suddenly went hard and grainy, and fire flashed in his eyes for a moment. “No need,” he added as she raised her left hand, the silver ring embedded into her middle finger shining, ready to send him back to the depths. “You’re tired, and this is an understandably stressful situation. I will forgive your … momentary, I’m sure, lack of respect.”
“What would you have me do?” she asked, as she slowly lowered her hand.
“I have a proposition for you,” he said. She could faintly hear the sound of choral music as he turned to face her fully. She struggled to steady her mind and her focus, lest he tempt her farther than she wanted to go.”I can bring the Morning Star back to – well not his rightful place, but where he has ruled for millennia.”
“Just like that, he’ll go with you?” she said, raising one eyebrow. He flashed her an impossibly beautiful smile, liquifying her insides and forcing her to take a deep breath. “In exchange for what?”
“Our pact is not eternal,” he said. “You are mine and I am yours – “
“Until the day in which I die and there hence the chains doth break,” she said, finishing the oath. He nodded.
“If I do this for you, if I drag my Lord back to the depths of hell, then our pact becomes eternal,” he said. “When you die, your soul descends, and you are mine until the end of all existence, humoring my every whim.” She half laughed, as her eyes passed over his chiseled face, broad chest, strong hands.
“That’s it?” she asked incredulously. He grinned and carefully tucked an errant lock of hair back behind her ear, making sure to lightly drag his fingers down her neck before taking his hand away.
“No,” he said, still grinning. She froze, halfway through melting into his touch.
“I knew it.”
“No, I also get your sister,” he said. He waved his hand in the air before them as if wiping a window, and as he did, a vision of her twin sister appeared, her blonde hair in curls and her bright violet eyes smiling as big as her mouth. Purple eyes were so rare, it was the only way anyone believed Bridget and Nora were twins. Bridget stared at the vision, her entire body tense, trembling slightly.
“She’s already in heaven,” Bridget said through gritted teeth, her eyes wide.
“Oh that she is,” Beleth purred, as the vision suddenly changed to a paper doll cut out of an angel hanging from a paper cloud. “But I have my ways of … making her fall.” As he hissed the word ‘fall’ he stabbed the cloud with a clawed finger. Bridget watched in horror as the doll plummeted to the floor and went up in flames.
“No,” she whispered.
“Then catch him yourself.” He smiled as she desperately searched his face. “Think about it,” he said gently, patting her knee. “You won’t get another offer this easy.” She opened her mouth to answer, but a sudden outburst of shouting in the hallway stopped her. She jumped out of the chair and peeked out into the hallway, to find Elder Calogerus arguing loudly with a man in long white flowing robes.
“Holy shit, the archbishop of the priest academy,” she whispered.
“You really should stop saying that,” Beleth said, sticking out his tongue in disgust.
“Shush!” she whispered loudly, glaring at an empty chair; he had already disappeared in a puff of smoke. As she turned back to the commotion, she noticed the elder training his face in her direction – he had turned the archbishop so that the man’s back was to his office door. As her eyes met with where his eyes should have been, he jerked his head to the right. Not needing to be told twice, she immediately scurried out of the office and down the hall, not seeing the glowing figure in her way until it had already grabbed her arm and pulled her into an empty office.
