City. It always sucked. But, after I finally reconnected with Uncle Luke and the man currently answering to the title of Renfield, Jersey City was close enough for me to stay in contact with the closest thing I had to a family, but far enough away that said family didn’t show up unexpectedly for dinner. Because when your only “family” is Count Dracula, the last thing you want is him popping over for a bite.
I lived for a time on the third floor of a brownstone at the corner of York and Barrow, a nice building called Madison Standing. I liked my apartment; it was close to the library, close to the water, and far enough away from the city that I could stay mostly underground. There’s not a lot of supernatural activity in New Jersey, so I could just keep my head down and try to rebuild myself after the war.
I spent a good chunk of 1949 sitting under a tree in the park reading, or thinking, or poking at the gaps in my memory and trying to remember what happened between the time I flew into a rage in France and the time I came back to myself in the Arizona desert three years later. No matter how many books I read or how many hours I spent looking up at the clouds or stars, no hint of those lost years came to me.
The days were fine. The nights, less so. I saw her eyes every time I closed my own; Anna’s eyes full of tears for her lost brother, then wide with shock and pain as the sword plunged through her, then finally dead and glassy and staring up at me from the floor of the French villa where she died. I dove headlong into a fury that consumed me for years and resulted in a level of bloodshed usually only available to governments.
That’s what had me walking through Van Vorst Park at half past midnight on the twenty-first of June. I had no idea it was the solstice; my magic isn’t tied to the seasons or the planetary alignment, so I was expecting to have the park to myself, or maybe share it with a couple of winos sitting under the oaks. I was not expecting a circle of young people bathed in candlelight and chanting in Enochian.
There were eight of them, all shrouded in long black robes with hoods pulled up over their heads. Not content with merely using the hoods to mask their identity, they also had dark cloths covering their faces, completely obscuring any details about them. Even with my heightened senses, all I could pick out was a little bit of pale skin around their eyes. They were all of middling size, no one tremendously tall or exceptionally short, and none looked particularly overweight or muscular. Just a cluster of medium-sized practitioners of the dark arts working a summoning in the park in the middle of the night.
Curious, I stepped forward. They stood in a circle in the park’s gazebo, four at the cardinal compass points and the others making a larger ring at the intercardinals. From the ground, I couldn’t see the floor, but there seemed to be five candles, and they were spaced as though they occupied the points of a pentacle. These kids were casting something, and it definitely didn’t feel like something I wanted happening less than a block from where I slept. I slipped behind some bushes and called up power.
“Audite spatium,” I whispered, barely breathing the words as I wove my spell. I pushed a little sphere of pure will through the space between me and the chanting children, and as my spell took effect, I could hear them as clearly as if I stood in the center of their circle.
The words were guttural, gravelly, more like coughing than speech, but I knew it. I knew it all too well, I soon realized. This was a ritual to summon a demon. A major demon, a General at least, and possibly even one of the Lords of Hell. Yeah, definitely not something I wanted anywhere near where I lay my head.
“Ventus,” I breathed, pursing my lips and blowing a steady stream of air toward the gazebo. The candle nearest me flickered and went out.