leader began to chant in Enochian, just like he had last night, beseeching the lord of justice and vengeance to come unto them and set the past to rights.
Rosalyn pushed up the baggy sleeve of her robe and held her closed fist out over the circle. The knife flashed up in her right hand, then came down across her left forearm, drawing a bright line of blood that dripped onto the symbols inscribed on the wood, binding her blood, the chanting, and the incantations written in and around the circles together and bathing the bandstand and everything in the vicinity in a deep purple light.
“Lord Raguel, come to us!” the leader shouted, and a voice darker than anything I’d ever heard answered.
“I am here, my child. You have called, and I have answered. I am here, what would you have me do?” The form in the circle was hidden in a column of smoke nearly six feet in diameter, but the few glances I could get through the shifting mist told me with some pretty solid certainty that this was no angel. That, and the fact that you don’t use a demonic summoning circle to call an angel. Those were dead giveaways.
The leader’s hood fell back and he reached up with his good hand to rip the cloth down from his face. Yep, those were some demon-touched eyes. There was no question in my mind that he knew exactly what he’d called up, even if the others in the circle didn’t. I slipped on my Sight, taking a look at the situation in the magical spectrum, and was stunned to see that four of the eight coven members wore the taint of the demon-touched, and one was a lesser Pit Dweller, not human at all. The other three were human, and probably innocent dupes, but the magic coming from the smoky shape in the circle wasn’t just bad, it was evil the likes of which I’d never seen before, and more powerful than anything that had any right to be walking the earth. This was about to turn into a very bad evening.
“It is time, my lord. It is time to unleash your wrath upon these pitiful mortals and raise me up to sit at your right hand. It is time for us to bathe in a river of their blood and make me immortal!”
“What is this, Jacob?” one of the men in the circle asked, pulling his own hood and face covering away. “This was supposed to be a ritual to go back and stop Hitler before he could kill our people, not summon some cloud of smoke and make you immortal.”
“Be quiet, Hiram,” the leader, apparently Jacob, replied. “Lord Raguel is here to answer our call. He has come from Heaven above to set things aright.”
Oh shit. My conversation with Rosalyn flashed into my head, and I suddenly realized what these poor idiots had done. They wanted to fix the past. They thought they could get an angel to travel back through time and kill Hitler, or at least keep him from rising to power. They wanted to save their families. My heart sank to my shoes, not just because of their mistake, but because I knew every feeling that drove it. I’d felt that same anger, that same sense of wrongness in the world since Anna died. That sense of guilt at being alive when the woman I loved, and so many more, were dead in the camps at the hands of the truly evil.
I knew what they were feeling because I’d wanted to do the exact same thing. I didn’t. Not for lack of trying, but mortals, even long-lived magical ones, can’t travel through time without some serious mojo. There are a few artifacts that will allow it, but I’d never laid hands on one, and wasn’t sure I wanted the responsibility. These people had been offered a chance to right the greatest wrong of the twentieth century, and to take away probably the greatest loss they’d ever suffered. They took that chance, and now they were going to die for it, and if the demon in that circle was as powerful as I feared, everyone within a hundred miles, including all the souls in New York City, might join them.