Wild Wild Witch Book 2
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Cherry Redwood
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36,2K
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35
Prologue
Book 2
SEAMUS
“Surge, Beleth. Te mihi alligo. Ecce donum sanguinis mei.”
Seamus Poole sliced open his arm just below the elbow. Blood welled up and followed the line of the cut, dripping into the silver chalice he had carefully carved a five-pointed star into. Into it, he mixed the crumbled, dried hellebore.
“Beleth! Beleth!” he called as he worked, summoning the mighty king of Hell, who was said to have taught Ham, son of Noah, mathematics.
Seamus Poole, whose father had immigrated to the United States during the Great Hunger in 1849, had grown up feeling he had to prove himself.
Discrimination and poor job opportunities drove Seamus’s father west, and when silver was discovered in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1859, his father joined the rush to mine it. Seamus grew up watching his own family struggle, for his father’s income was never enough to cover the needs of his wife and five children.
Despite a talent for the sciences, Seamus chose the law as his path out of poverty, for he had no interest in becoming a doctor like the one he saw trudging about Virginia City, always on the verge of exhaustion and never paid enough for his work.
Seamus left Nevada to attend the University of California in Berkeley.
The law, however, was a cryptic and difficult subject. Seamus was not a strong student, and his ambition far outpaced his skill.
When he went home after a disastrous first semester, he confided in his father.
“You know I spent a year in Pennsylvania after I first landed here,” his father said, chewing on the end of a pipe as they sat together on their porch after supper.
Seamus, overwhelmed with misery, hardly saw the relevance of his father’s comment, but he nodded anyway.
“Ah, sure, I did a few odd jobs for a fella. A bit of handiwork, like. Fixin’ up the shelves in his bookshop.”
Seamus wondered if this was leading to a recommendation that he give up studying the law and take up shelving as a profession. Still, he said nothing, letting the old man speak.
“Ah, he was a queer one, that fella. A German gentleman. Hohman was his name. He’d a sideline going, so he did, sellin’ all manner of herbal remedies and magical cures. Charms and the like.”
Seamus frowned. This was going in a direction he hadn’t anticipated.
“Turns out the man was deep into the magic. A proper witch, he was. Your grandmother, God rest her, would’ve had the heart crossways in her if she’d known.”
His father fussed with his pipe, repacking and relighting it, taking an eternity to suck smoke from it and puff it out again. Seamus felt a rising impatience, though he could not say why—only that he wanted his father to go on.
“Ah, the man told me all sorts of things, d’you see? Gave me more than the one bit of help, he did. A powerful useful friend to have. And he told me there’s always been the likes of them through history—people usin’ the old spells to get by.”
Seamus’s heart sped up. He could see where his father was headed with this now, and he hardly dared hope—could it be true? Might there be another way to succeed?
He’d been bashing his forehead into books and getting nowhere. Might there be a trick to it?
“Ah, sure, in the end, he pressed a book on me, so he did, as payment for one of me last turns for him. I have it still. It’s yours if you want it.”
Seamus did want it.
He devoured the book that night, reading by candlelight, since his folks were still quite poor. That book, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Addressed to J. G. Lockhart, Esq.—changed his life.
He eventually found others. It turned out that he might not have a head for the law, but when it came to reading works such as the Ars Goetia or the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, he had a great deal of talent.
At first, he only performed some spells, creating charms and potions for himself to aid in concentration, memory, and understanding. But eventually, he discovered how the summoning of otherworldly spirits could be used to aid him.
The first, the lower demon Bifrons, had been an invaluable servant, assisting him in learning the law as well as any tangential subjects, being a demon devoted to the acquisition of knowledge.
The second, Gaap, caused William Matthews—a famous lawyer, one of the Pacific Coast Four, in fact—to become enamored of Seamus. Matthews was the chief counsel for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and as such, he held prejudice against Irishmen due to the many labor disputes the Southern Pacific Railroad had with immigrant workers.
With Gaap’s help, however, Matthews was suddenly ready to overlook Seamus’s lack of pedigree.
He sponsored Seamus in his studies and guided him so well that Seamus passed the bar exam on his first try.
He had now been practicing law for over a decade, and he was assigned to the defense team for Lee Yu Chen, a Chinese laborer imprisoned for trying to return to California after the recent passage of the Scott Act, which barred Chinese laborers who had left the U.S. from reentering—even if they had valid certificates.
The upcoming trial would determine whether California would uphold the Scott Act, and it was very important that Seamus and his team achieve a victory.
So important, in fact, that he knew he must forgo his usual appeals to Bifrons or Gaap and go higher up the hierarchy of demons for help.
Thus, he’d chosen Beleth, described by the Ars Goetia as a mighty king of Hell—the grimoire warned that the demon would test the summoner, trying to terrify him, so Seamus was already anxious, even as he stirred the blood and hellebore and chanted Beleth’s name.
He had a wand of hazel, ready to draw the sigil in the air at Beleth’s appearance, just as the grimoire directed.
It was because of this warning that Seamus did not at first realize that something had gone wrong.
The figure that shimmered into view before him was a towering man with the head of an owl and vast angelic wings, which he extended to their full breadth.
He held a long, shining saber, and thunder sounded, shaking the entire building—an abandoned warehouse in the Chinatown district of San Francisco where Seamus had hoped to remain unnoticed as he summoned this new servant.
Several windows shattered, and Seamus bit back a cry of alarm, even as he began forming the triangular sigil, uttering the incantation to command Beleth: “Tene, Beleth! In triangulum quem pinxi, vade. Te ligo et impero tibi.”
The illustration in the Ars Goetia showed a catlike figure, and this giant with its wings and owl head seemed not to resemble it at all.
Seamus repeated the incantation. “Tene, Beleth!—”
But the figure interrupted him, raising its saber high. “Silence, fool. What pride impels you to seek to summon a king of Hell? What indiscretion?”
Seamus gasped and drew the sigil again, his gestures rigid and forceful.
The demon bellowed, “You show none of the respect required of a monarch of Hell. Where is the silver ring? You draw a triangle in hopes of trapping me? You incompetent worm—you blasphemous wretch!”
The demon’s voice battered his eardrums, causing agony. Seamus cried out, still clutching the wand, his heart beating so hard it punched his ribcage like a panicked thing trying to break out.
“Tene Beleth!” Seamus gasped.
“I am not Beleth.”
Seamus stared at the demon in horror, finally understanding that something had gone terribly wrong.
“Behold, wretch, you have instead summoned me, Andras. Mortals fall before me. Your folly has wrought this on you, worm.”
With that, the demon slashed downward.
The saber sliced through Seamus, cutting him from the top of his head to the end of his foot—and yet his body remained intact.
It was his soul the demon sundered.
As the body swayed, the spirit within severed from its mortal vessel forever, Andras stepped forward.
He ducked his head and passed within, taking over the body.
