Thaumatology 02 - Demon's Moon Read online

  ‘Oh,’ Ceri said. ‘Don’t your boyfriends get a bit… annoyed at you offering yourselves to Dane?’

  The grin resurfaced. ‘Hell no. For starters he’s the Alpha. If he was the kind of leader who did that sort of thing he could have any of us whenever he wanted. He never did, but he could have. Second thing, they’re as worried as the girls. Like I said, we’re a small pack, we need a strong Alpha.’

  ‘Uh… wow…’ Ceri stammered.

  ‘Sorry,’ Tabitha said softly. ‘I’ve made you uncomfortable. I was sure you liked him too.’

  ‘Oh! God, no Tabby, don’t get me wrong, Dane’s gorgeous, I’d love to… uh, get him out of his funk.’ Ceri could feel her cheeks heating. ‘I’m just probably not the right girl to do it.’

  Tabitha looked confused. ‘You like him, he likes you. You get out in the fresh air under the stars, share a bedroll, get all cosy, and I promise we won’t listen.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Ceri said. She let out a soft sigh and turned, moving to the chaise longue, patting the space beside her for Tabitha to sit down. ‘My parents built this house. I mean, contractors put the thing up, but they designed it, put the enchantments in, everything. We moved here when I was tiny and I’ve lived here more or less all my life. Then they went to Wales one day. I stayed home alone because I was big enough… Only they didn’t come back.’

  ‘Oh,’ Tabitha said. Her hand reached out to rest on Ceri’s. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know your parents were dead.’

  Ceri smiled weakly. ‘Thanks. Thing is, it was a car accident. They ran off a cliff. I took it pretty badly. I hardly ever left the house for over a year and a half. I get panic attacks when I travel long distances, or when I’m in a car for more than about thirty minutes.’ Her smile broadened a little. ‘Being on the back of Dane’s bike wasn’t so bad, actually, but it wasn’t for that long. Even if Dane likes me, I don’t think he’d be too keen on someone who might freak out behind him after a few miles.’

  ‘Ah,’ Tabitha said, nodding. ‘Alec told us you got nervous around cars, but not why.’ Suddenly she was wrapping an arm around Ceri’s shoulders and hugging her. ‘Damn,’ she said, ‘I was sure you were the one.’ She sucked on a fang thoughtfully. ‘Still not convinced you aren’t.’

  Ceri began to feel a little uncomfortable at the way Tabitha was staring at her. ‘Seems unlikely,’ she said.

  Tabitha’s nose wrinkled. ‘There’s something about you. You smell of power, but not like a magician. More like an Alpha… or a demon.’ She grinned. ‘Not that you smell like a demon. I know what demons smell like and it’s not you. Just like… power, not magic.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ Ceri said. She grinned to hide her discomfort. ‘I’m no Alpha either.’

  Tabitha smiled brightly and bounced to her feet. ‘When we need to know, you’ll tell us,’ she said.

  November 17th

  Ceri opened her eyes, wondering what had woken her. It was still dark and she did not feel like lifting her head to find out what the time was. She was just starting to think that some noise outside had got through to her sleeping brain when Lily moved against her back.

  ‘You awake, Lil,’ she said softly.

  ‘Yeah,’ Lily replied. The arm which had been laid around Ceri’s waist squeezed a little tighter. ‘I woke you, sorry.’

  ‘What’s up? Restless?’

  ‘Kind of,’ Lily replied, wriggling slightly against Ceri’s back. ‘It’s Tabby and Kort. They’ve been taking advantage of the more comfortable bedding.’

  Ceri lifted her head, looking at the dimly glowing digits on her bedside clock. ‘It’s four-fifteen! They’ve been at it for four hours?’

  ‘Pretty much. They’ve taken a couple of breaks.’

  ‘So you’re horny?’

  ‘As fuck,’ Lily said, giggling softly.

  Ceri opened her mouth to say the first thing that came into her head, and closed it again. Lily did not sleep in Ceri’s bed for sex. Lily slept there to be close to Ceri. Lily did not initiate sex, because that was giving in to her demon-self. Ceri was the Mistress, Ceri had to start it, even if she was responding to Lily indicating in some way that she would like to do something. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you woke me up, you better do something to get me to sleep again.

  Lily’s hand crept up toward Ceri’s breasts. ‘Yes, Mistress,’ the half-succubus breathed. ‘I’ll make you very sleepy. Promise.’

  Soho

  The bell over the door jangled as Ceri walked in and she was favoured with a bright smile from the perky blonde behind the counter. Ceri smiled back, though she was feeling less than perky; Lily had been very horny. Closing the door, Ceri started to walk through into the main floor of Baltzman’s, the best magical supplies shop in London, but then something caught her eye and she stopped at one of the display cabinets.

  The front room of the shop was designed for one purpose. It had lots of stuff which caught the eye, looked magical or mystic, cost too much, and appealed to normals with a taste for the supernatural but no knowledge of it. Baltzman called them “tourists,” and the front room was a tourist trap. In the display case were a number of figurines carved from jet set beside some cheap charms for warding off curses and a number of interesting crystals which likely did nothing at all. She picked up one of the jet statuettes and examined it. It was a delicately carved figure of a woman dressed in a flowing gown; perhaps a fae.

  ‘I doubt you’re interested in that, Miss Brent.’ She turned to find a stooped old man with intelligent, grey eyes looking at her over wire-framed half-glasses. Earnest Baltzman had scared the living hell out of her when she was young. If she were honest, his ability to sneak about like a ghost was fairly scary now.

  ‘I know the girl who makes them,’ she said. ‘She gave me one for my last birthday.’

  ‘A wolf?’ he asked and she nodded in reply. ‘Tabitha is a talented artist. I pay her more than I should for her figurines, but then, I charge more than I should for them as well.’ Ceri glanced at the bottom where a price label had been stuck and her eyes widened. ‘The tourists snap them up,’ Baltzman said. ‘I could move twice as many as she sells me.’

  ‘She stayed over at my place last night,’ Ceri said, ‘with her boyfriend. The pack are helping with one of my experiments next week.’ She straightened up and put the figurine back on the shelf. ‘But for something this week, I need some supplies. Wolfsbane powder, three ounces, and silver shavings, two ounces.’

  ‘Hmm… dealing with a lycanthrope?’

  ‘Yeah, need to contain him safely without all the iron,’ Ceri said. ‘I’m researching the thaumatological mechanism for the transformation, comparing that to the were-forms.’

  That actually got a raised eyebrow from the old man. She thought she saw approval in his eyes, but it was probably a trick of the light. ‘You’ve discovered the mechanism for natural shape-shifting?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Ceri smiled. ‘That’s going to get me my doctorate.’

  ‘The Wolfsbane powder is on the second floor. The poisonous herbs section. You’ll need to talk to an assistant. We keep the precious metals in a safe so I’ll have the silver measured out and put behind the counter for you.’ He turned and looked at the blonde behind the desk. ‘Trudy, charge this to Miss Brent’s account when she comes down.’

  ‘Yes, Mister Baltzman,’ the girl said. She had a perky voice to go with the perky smile.

  The old man led the way into the main shop floor and then vanished off into the racks of less dangerous magical ingredients leaving Ceri to navigate the maze. She had vague memories of how to get around from her childhood visits with her parents and she found the stairs up to the first floor relatively easily. However, that did not get her to the second floor, the place had been organised to make sure no one had an easy journey. Most of the herbal and alchemical supplies were on this floor and the comingled smells had Ceri wishing for nose plugs by the time she found the flight of stairs up.

  At least the poisonous herb s
ection was easy to spot once she got there. It was actually labelled for one thing; a sign over the door indicating that the contents of the small room was hazardous. The room had a heavy, iron-grill door which was open since there was an assistant waiting inside. The middle-aged, portly man sat behind a small desk with scales and packaging on it. He rose to his feet as Ceri walked in.

  ‘Can I help you, miss?’ he asked in a rather nasal voice, though it sounded like he was saying, “You’re lost, where do you want to be?”

  ‘I hope so, I need three ounces of Wolfsbane powder.’

  ‘I’ll need to see a PPC card,’ he said in reply.

  Ceri looked at him and fished her wallet out of her shoulder bag. Finding the little plastic card which proved she had passed her Public Practitioners Certificate exam, she showed it to the man and then said, ‘No, actually you don’t. I could go to a good herb shop and buy Aconitum. I’m getting it here because my family has used Baltzman’s for its supplies for years. Mister Baltzman doesn’t pull that attitude with me, so you sure as hell don’t get to.’

  ‘My apologies, miss,’ the man said, clearly taken aback. ‘I’ll get your powder.’ He scurried across the room to one of the many small, wooden drawers.

  Ceri was self-aware enough to know that her anger was partially born of tiredness. On the other hand, she knew what she was doing, did not deserve to be lied to, and the creep did not deserve an apology. When he returned with three vacuum packed and sealed plastic bags containing a greyish powder, she checked the labels and left.

  As she approached the front desk, Trudy produced a small bag from under the counter and laid it on top ready for her. Next up was a thick, black book and a pen. Ceri put the Wolfsbane packets down beside the silver and Trudy picked one up to check. ‘Okay, three of the Wolfsbane, two ounces of silver…’ She jotted something down in the book; Ceri suspected that if Baltzman’s ever went computerised, the world would end. Putting the book aside, Trudy put Ceri’s purchases into a paper bag and handed them over. ‘Wow,’ she said, ‘working with a lick. Good luck.’

  Ceri grinned and took the bag, dropping it into her shoulder bag. ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘but it’s all in the preparation.’ She turned and headed out onto Great Pult Street feeling rather happy with herself. She would go north and catch the tube at Oxford Circus, do a little window shopping on the way to work.

  Holloway, November 21st

  Everything was prepared. The moon was already up, hidden behind a blue sky fading into evening and Professor Mallow was already sitting in the lab’s containment circle wearing a towel wrapped around his waist.

  ‘To be honest,’ he said to Ceri as she laid a trail of powder around the outer ring of the circle, ‘this is rather nicer than my accommodations on most full moon nights.’

  Ceri smiled. Mallow was nervous and he was talking mostly to cover it. Partially it was because the experiment could potentially go wrong and he could rip the participants apart before rampaging through London. Mostly it was because he was sitting in a room, half-naked, with a werewolf, a half-succubus, and two of his female colleagues. ‘It is?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got a cage in my cellar,’ he said. ‘The cellar door is reinforced as well. Both are on time locks so I can’t get out until morning. You’re quite sure this will work?’ He indicated the circle.

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘This is a mix of Wolfsbane and silver, bulked out with salt.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Alec said from across the room, ‘I can smell the ‘bane from here.’

  Ceri grinned. ‘Once it’s energised, which I’ll do shortly, you won’t be going anywhere in wolf-man form. And just in case anything goes wrong, either Alec or Lily will be on hand all night to stop you if you get out.’

  Mallow eyed Lily carefully. ‘Begging your pardon, but Miss Carpenter doesn’t really look like she has much chance of stopping me.’

  Alec laughed. ‘I can tell you’ve never been hit by a succubus aura,’ he said.

  ‘Lily’s aura, full on, could stop a charging rhino,’ Ceri said. ‘I’ve seen it take down a werefox. It even gives old vampires pause.’

  ‘And I’m really just here for health and safety reasons,’ Cheryl said. She waved a dart pistol. ‘I doubt I could hit a barn door with this thing, but regulations say we have to have it on site.’

  ‘And you have the anti-virals?’ Mallow asked.

  Cheryl picked up a small, plastic case with a set of pneumatic injectors in it. ‘Really Peter, you read the experiment plan Ceri produced, she has all the bases covered. Frankly, if it came to it, I’ve seen her blast a demonically possessed zombie into dust. I have no doubt she could stop you herself.’

  ‘Yes well,’ Ceri said, ‘let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. All right, I’m going to raise the circle and check the instruments.’

  Standing straight, she moved to the northern side of the circle, marked by the top point of the pentagram inscribed into the enormous granite slab. The circle was designed for magical containment, the design cut into the rock to make it permanent. Ceri was not really using the circle itself, all the carefully cut runes were superfluous. She concentrated on the ring of salt, focussing her will on it. Raising her arms she poured power into the ring and there was a gasp from Lily and Mallow as the powder glowed a delicate golden colour.

  Ceri grinned. ‘There we go,’ she said.

  ‘That’s a different colour from usual,’ Lily said. ‘Your circles normally glow white.’

  ‘It’s the Wolfsbane,’ Ceri said. ‘Yellow flowers.’ She turned to her instrument panel and powered up the recording heads set around the circle. ‘Let’s see… Yep, the circle isn’t interfering with reception.’

  Cheryl wandered up and looked over her shoulder. ‘You’ll have to screen out the thaumic field from it though,’ she said.

  Ceri grinned and tapped her way through a series of menus. On the screen, the image of the sphere of energy surrounding Mallow vanished leaving only a wire-form image of the man sitting on the granite. ‘I had thought of that,’ she said.

  Cheryl laughed. ‘Of course you did.’ She turned to Mallow. ‘I have said she’s the brightest student I’ve ever had, haven’t I?’

  ‘Only a couple of times,’ Mallow said dryly. ‘A couple of times a day, that is.’

  Ceri was busy configuring the recording system. ‘We can’t be sure when he’ll change,’ Alec said, ‘how are you going to be sure that you catch the whole sequence?’

  ‘I know this one!’ Lily piped up. ‘The recorder is reading the data into a ten minute rolling buffer. The buffer can be dumped to hard storage at any time, so when the transformation is over Ceri saves the last ten minutes of data.’ Alec looked at her, clearly amazed that the girl who waited tables at the club where he worked as a bartender had a clue about this kind of thing. ‘I’ve had to listen to her planning this for two weeks now,’ Lily said, grinning.

  ‘It’s true,’ Ceri said, mock-sadly, ‘I’m a thaumatology nerd.’ She tapped a key. ‘Okay, recorder set, now we wait.’

  Ceri was watching with her Sight when it began and she was aware of it even before Mallow. The sky outside had darkened until only the light of the moon was providing a stark, white illumination in the room. As she sat watching the professor, a flare of light burst from the region of his forehead. She recognised the area, it was the Ajna point on the Tantric Median, roughly in the area of the pituitary gland. She watched, fascinated, as the glow intensified.

  Quite suddenly, energy lanced down Mallow’s Tantric Median, from the pituitary gland to the head of his penis, and he doubled over in pain. Cheryl jumped and took a step forward, but Lily was there to stop her. Ceri was watching as the familiar bloom of energy formed around Mallow. To her it looked like the traditional drawings of a magnetic field, but this one was composed of thaumitons. In weres who were actively transforming the field grew quite quickly, but in Mallow it was slow and faltering, and it seemed as though it was very painful.

  ‘He goes thr
ough this every month?’ Cheryl said softly.

  ‘I’ll refrain from the obvious analogy,’ Ceri replied.

  The field bloom seemed to have reached its peak and began to collapse. Again it was different from werewolves. Within the circle, Mallow screamed in agony as his body distorted more and more as the field got tighter. Muscles expanded, ribs seemed to break and then reform, Mallow’s face seemed like it was being torn apart and restructured with a long muzzle. As the field collapsed entirely, there was a slight flare of energy from the wolf-man’s core and Ceri was left looking at a naked wolf-man with grey fur, sprawled on the concrete. It was panting heavily and so it came as quite a shock when it suddenly leapt to its feet and rushed toward Ceri.

  Everyone jumped except Alec, who dropped into a ready stance instead. There was a howl of anguished pain as the wolf-man hit the circle and bounced back. There was a faint smell of singed fur.

  Ceri pressed the save key on the recording system. ‘Well,’ she said, relieved, ‘that works.’ Mallow was prowling around the circle, swiping it and then rearing back. ‘Though if he keeps attacking the circle we might have to tranquilise him before he hurts himself badly.’

  ‘What did it look like?’ Cheryl said. ‘I’ve never seen a lycanthrope change before… thankfully. I wasn’t watching the display.’

  ‘It’s fascinating,’ Ceri said. She was busy pushing the data through the imaging software. The live image was interesting, but the processed image data would be far more informative. ‘The basic mechanism is the same as for true-weres, but the power generation is through the Tantric median, not the Chakral. And it originates in Ajna and then flashes down.’

  ‘Energy’s not supposed to flow that way,’ Lily said, frowning.

  Alec looked at her. ‘Don’t tell me you know what this “median” stuff is too,’ he said.

  ‘Some,’ Lily replied. ‘I asked Ceri to explain how I feed. I siphon energy from the Tantric Median. Normally, the energy generates at the base,’ she smirked, ‘which in your case would be that great big cock of yours.’ Alec blushed, which was cute. ‘Then it travels up to the top, surges, and you come.’