“Also, while Soleil has a working relationship with demons, even most of the hell princes, she’s not a huge fan of possession. Possession causes the possessed physical, mental, and emotional injury. Soleil can’t watch Disney movies without bawling and she felt guilty for causing her ex-brother-in-law to be possessed after he cut off his daughter’s wings, which is incredibly painful. There’s no way she could cause a mass possession and live with herself afterward,” Jerome said.

  “And her family is rich, there’s no reason for her to cause possession to commit a burglary,” Penelope added.

  “I think you need to ask her where she was during all three,” Magda said.

  “Three?” I raised an eyebrow at Miguel.

  “Yes, there have been three robberies where possession was used to control the homeowners,” Miguel said.

  “All of them magical artifacts?” I asked. Miguel let out a long, slow, loud sigh. “Huh, Magda Red let out a similar sigh the first time she suspected me of a crime and interviewed me over it.”

  “Yes, it was a sigh that meant she could probably be useful to the investigation even though I wasn’t positive she wasn’t still involved.” Magda smiled at me.

  “I have that unfortunate effect on people,” I admitted. “I promise that isn’t my grimoire and I’ve never seen it before today. I’ll swear to it with truth spells or whatever. I can help with your investigation. I can probably summon the demons that have been used and allow you to question them about who has been summoning them to do the time-limit possessions. They might even have information on the how.” As I finished, Miguel sighed again, just as loud and just as long.

  “Fuck, I can’t even consider that,” Miguel said.

  “Sure, you can,” I said. “I can be an asset, no one knows more about demonic possession than I do. If the demon Glees is correct, someone is trying to do a mass summoning.”

  “Demons lie,” Miguel said.

  “Yes, they do, a lot,” I said.

  “But they can’t lie to Soleil, it is one of her Stygian powers,” Jerome said.

  “Fuck!” I said as a thought passed through my mind. “So, if they are using possession to rob magical artifacts from homeowners, the mass summoning is probably an attempt to distract from something similar. Isn’t there a museum exhibit at the St. Louis Art Museum on Cursed Objects right now?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Magda said.

  “And the grimoire had a potion for a mass summoning that they wanted Melody to make,” Penelope said.

  “Where the fuck did they get a potion for a mass summoning?” I exclaimed. The question was mostly rhetorical.

  “This grimoire,” Jerome said, nodding at the book still wrapped in the evidence bag with magical shielding.

  “How did it end up in that grimoire though? That’s the real question. I would never summon a demon using a potion. Not once have I even considered it. I know summoning potions exist because I’ve exorcized a few possessions caused by them, but wow.” I mostly muttered the last sentence and let the wow trail off. Fan-fucking-tabulous, I thought to myself, and put my head on the table.

  “If you let Jerome examine the grimoire, he might be able to tell you something about the magic in it,” Magda said.

  “What?!” Miguel exclaimed, looking at her.

  “There’s no magical resource on the planet like that kid,” Magda said. “He can sense magic that even our magical empaths can’t. And he’s a mimic, so if there are spells on it, he can mimic them as well as track their source.”

  “Wait, wait, I may not be able to track their source,” Jerome protested. “The most I can be sure of, is that I can mimic the spells and be able to give a general idea what kind of magic it is. However, if it’s like the break-in at our office, the magic was predominantly from potions, and while I can tell you which sort of supernatural made the potions, it may not be much help.”

  “I can’t believe I am doing this,” Miguel said as he slid the bag over to Jerome. “I can’t leave you alone with the book or anything, though. I can ask everyone to leave the room if having them here will interfere.”

  “No,” Jerome said, shaking his head. “It won’t.” He took the bag and opened it. Then I heard his breath catch and watched as he stopped breathing. I’d seen him do this before, his own magic interfered more with the investigative side than other people’s. I wasn’t sure why holding his breath made the magic work better, I just knew he said it did. Carefully, he slid the book out of the bag and left it closed in front of him on the table. He put his hand on it, and suddenly the room was alive with colors. Miguel Smith and the deputy were the only ones that had never seen this particular trick before, and I heard both of them gasp in wonder. The ribbons of moving magic were color coded for each person. Jerome opened the cover of the book and magic he’d colored a charcoal grey seeped into the air.

  “Huh,” Jerome said as he flipped the pages, sending more dark colored magic shimmering into the air. “It has a similar spell to the one I cast on Soleil’s grimoire that records her thoughts. But this one is potion based and the potion was made by an angel with a dash of glamour from a member of the fey.” He closed the book and put it back in the bag.

  “Angel magic like Soleil’s?” Miguel asked.

  “No, it’s different, very different. It’s not like any angel magic I’ve run across before. It might be that the person is part angel and part fairy, maybe.” Jerome said. “It’s weird. If it had been Soleil’s magic, it would have shown up the same color as Soleil’s, but it’s different.”

  “You said the spell was similar to what you had cast on Soleil’s grimoire, what did you mean?” Penelope asked.

  “It records Soleil’s thoughts,” Jerome said. “But it’s a potion and it’s recording way more of her thoughts than my spell. The spell I cast specifically records her thoughts about writing things in her grimoire, meaning if she thinks ‘I should write this down’ it starts writing things down, but this is recording all her thoughts.” Miguel frowned and took the bag with the book back from in front of Jerome and opened the book again. He slowly flipped the pages, examining them. About halfway through the book, words were appearing on the page. Words about the investigation.

  “Oh shit,” I breathed, and the words appeared on the page. “Still not mine,” I added after a moment. The words appeared on the page.

  “This is a memory recording potion and it’s among the list of restricted use potions,” Penelope said. “You aren’t walking into a store and buying this.”

  “But it’s not forbidden,” I said.

  “No, it’s not forbidden, you can get one made special, but you have to sign a bunch of waivers before you can buy it. That information is logged by the AESPCA, and the creation of this potion is restricted to being made by the AESPCA. Meaning if a store wants to sell it, they have to get it from us. We put a special clause in it, and if it’s consumed by someone other than the purchaser, the magic dies and it doesn’t work.”

  “Meaning we have a black-market potion maker who is also selling them,” Magda said. I blinked at them for a full minute. On the page in front of Miguel, the words “What the fuck is a black-market potions maker?” appeared on the paper.

  “That’s creepy. Jerome, can you stop it?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Jerome said with a grimace. A string of swear words appeared on the page.

  “Yeah, that needs to stop,” I said. I had definitely thought the words on the paper. “So, I did think about mass summoning potions as well as regular summoning potions last night,” I said. “But not until after Magda left my house around 2 a.m.”

  “And we were interrupted around 4 a.m.,” Penelope said.

  “Why did your meeting last so long?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “We were trying to perfect a protection spell,” Penelope said, and blushed. “We were about to give up and I was going to call Jerome today to help us,” she admitted sheepishly. “I would have had to get permission first, but I could have gotten it.” Penelope’s coven was among the most powerful in the country and sometimes Jerome assisted them, beefing up their magic even more.

  “That’s a bit cagey,” I said slowly.

  “We are putting new spells around this building,” Penelope said.

  “Oh,” I nodded slowly. “Gotcha.”

  Miguel turned his attention to Penelope. I wasn’t entirely sure what Penelope did for the AESPCA. I didn’t even know her job title, let alone job description.

  “You were going to use Jerome even after the break-in?” Miguel asked.

  “Yes. You may think Soleil and possibly Jerome are involved in something nefarious, but you’re alone in that opinion. As head of Magical Protection of the AESPCA, I trust Jerome implicitly, Soleil too. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to make them invisible to the possession detectors, but it’s been slow going.” Words appeared on the page in front of Miguel, and Jerome helpfully projected the words onto the wall for everyone to read. It said, ‘huh, I always wondered what she did.’

  “Thanks kid, now I feel like a moron, can you please set your mind to breaking the connection and not to projecting my thoughts for everyone to read?” The phrase ’Fucking really!!’ appeared under the first line on the wall. I glared at him, and he smiled back.

  “I also oversee the creation of dangerous potions for resale.” Penelope smiled at me. “You really do swear a great deal in your head.”

  “Jerome!” I said sternly as another string of swear words appeared on the wall. Jerome smiled and the words disappeared. A moment later, I felt something change. It was internal, which was weird as fuck, but my thought didn’t appear on the page in front of Miguel Smith.

  Chapter Six

  “That was weird; it felt like a rubber band snapped inside my body,” I said to everyone.

  “Yeah,” Jerome said. “I wasn’t sure if you would feel your connection to the book break or not.”

  “Okay, let me talk to Magda and Penelope,” Miguel said, motioning toward the door.

  “That would be of little use,” Jerome said. “I’m still going to know what you say to them and vice versa.” He had the grace to look embarrassed. “Even after millennia, Remiel has trouble controlling his mind reading abilities when he’s emotionally involved or invested in something; I’ve only been at it four years.”

  “Fine.” Miguel opened the door. “Why don’t we move to a larger room, like a conference room.”

  We moved into a larger room and Miguel had Penelope and Magda take magical oaths vouching for Jerome and I not being involved in nefarious activities, which was Magda’s wording. Miguel used the word illegal, which caused some meaningful looks to pass between Penelope and Magda, and both agreed to take the oath if the word nefarious was used in place of illegal. Miguel raised an eyebrow at this.

  “Look, sometimes I operate in grey areas that might be construed as illegal,” I said to him after the oaths were finished.

  “Soleil,” Penelope said.

  “No, cards on the table,” I told her. “We are investigating for the insurance company the discrepancies in the homeowners’ statements about the missing statute imbued with a love spell. Demonic possession was not mentioned in the report they got; they don’t believe the statue was stolen. However, the homeowner refused us when we asked to search for it. The wife is a contest junkie, she’ll enter anything. My office arranged to have a contest that went door to door, and she of course entered it and won a dinner date night out with her husband. Since we knew the homeowners would be gone, we searched the house illegally,” I said.

  “How did you avoid being seen by the neighbors?” Miguel asked as Penelope and Magda exchanged another look.

  “I figured out a way to create a potion that would make them unnoticeable,” Jerome replied.

  “You encouraged your son create a forbidden potion to help you?” Miguel asked. “Does that seem irresponsible to you?”

  “No.” I said, a touch defensively. “Do you have any experience with teenagers?”

  “Not much,” Miguel admitted.

  “Okay, well, when you have a teenager who has some extreme magical prowess, you’ll find the phrase ‘forbidden magic’ is like catnip. He experiments with ways to create potions that are forbidden all the time, with supervision. He found seventeen ways to create invisibility-inducing potions in a single day once. No recipe or dark grimoires necessary. Sometimes he just knows how to do something even though he shouldn’t.”

  “We have a theory that Jerome is tapped into the Akashic Record,” Magda said. “Because of this, he knows things he shouldn’t. He’s also dealt with some serious shit. We decided it was best to let him mess with the stuff and give him encouragement and love, not hand slaps and spankings, so that he doesn’t become evil. That is a serious oversimplification, but you get the point. I knew about the invisibility potions. But he didn’t use them to kill anyone, and he didn’t make them for people who were going to use them to commit rape. So, we ignore it.”

  “Yes,” Penelope said. “My supervisor has even offered him a job when he comes of age. It is our belief that as long as Jerome is surrounded by good people doing good things, then even when he does something he shouldn’t, like make an invisibility potion, it’s not a big deal.”

  “You encourage him to break the law in the name of upholding it?” Miguel frowned.

  “Not exactly, we just don’t punish him for it.” Magda replied. “He’s been punished plenty up to this point, and sometimes, his rediscovery of magic that’s forbidden is a good thing. The kid managed to find a spell of protection against possession when he was seven years old. A search of our archives discovered the exact spell he uses to give magic to his charms has only existed in one place throughout time; a protected grimoire of an angel that died more than ten millennia ago. There’s no way he got it from the angel who wrote the grimoire. It’s impossible for him to know, and yet, he does and has used it for good.”

  “It’s a possession spell,” Penelope said. “Somehow Jerome reverse engineered it to work as protection against possession. How do you punish a kid for that?”

  “But it’s forbidden,” Miguel argued.

  “Yes, it is, for the general public.” Penelope said. “Just like the AESPCA has a division that makes restricted potions. Those restricted potions are forbidden magic, too.”

  “Okay whatever,” Miguel waved a hand. ”So sometimes you break the law to do good things; you’re both vigilantes.”

  “Yes.” I nodded, and Jerome did too. “I summon demons to get answers to things like who is making demon boxes that summon hell princes and shit. So, yes, I will admit to some minor vigilantism. I also got paid a consultancy fee, as did Jerome.”

  “Jesus,” Miguel whispered. “And I’m going to let you look at case files.”

  “Just keep reminding yourself you are desperate,” I told him.

  “I am desperate,” Miguel agreed. He slid a file over to me. It was a police report filed with St. Louis City Metropolitan Police Department. The stolen object was a shield imbued with magic to help protect the wielder. The homeowners had come running out of their house still possessed. The neighbors called police, and originally the police thought it was just a case of demonic possession until it ended, and the homeowners described the theft. Earlier that evening, they had ordered food delivery, and at some point after the food was delivered, they both started feeling strange. Next thing they knew, they no longer controlled their bodies, and the husband walked downstairs and let a stranger into the house. Most of their memories were vague and unhelpful. As soon as the sun came up, the possession ended and they rushed outside screaming. The police at first thought it was just a prank, but the homeowners were aware that whoever they opened the door for in the wee hours of the morning stole their magical shield, which had been in the wife’s family for the last six hundred years. One of her ancestors had it forged by trolls and imbued it with magic during the process.

  The second file contained a similar story. The stolen item was a painting in which the painter had imbued all his paint with magic. Like the first, the painter was a member of the owners’ family way back in history. The majority of the paintings were not in private collections, because he had a warped sense of humor and the magic made whatever was painted smell like the real thing, some of which were dead bodies and rotting fruit. The stolen painting was of a dragon in a field of wildflowers. I was told it smelled quite nice most of the time, but occasionally when it was windy, the owners would get a whiff of sulfur. I commented on the fact that the painting reacted to the weather and was told if it rained or snowed in the real world, it would rain or snow in the painting as well. I honestly found that tidbit exceptional.

  The third file was the full police report on the theft of the Aphrodite statue. Mentally comparing the report given to me by the insurance company and the report Miguel had given me, there were a significant number of differences, not just the whole possession thing, but the fact that the broken window was not the point of ingress or egress, but an accident caused by the thief fleeing with the statue. Also, the possession always wore off at dawn, which seemed significant. It is in fact easier to summon demons at night, and daytime helped with exorcisms, but not enough that a possession would end just because the sun came up. Furthermore, it was happening at dawn, not at like 7 a.m. when the sun was higher above the horizon. I found this significant, because demons struggle to track or read time on our plane. I suspected it had something to do with the fact that time was not always a constant in the Stygian, and when it was, days and nights were both shorter.

  “Thoughts?“ Miguel asked.

  “I can’t decide if it’s wearing off because the potion is too weak to last longer or...” I stopped myself and regrouped my thoughts. “The time limit thing is an issue. I can do it, sure. Jerome can’t. It seems strange to me that the potion would wear off at the same time every morning. That provides evidence that it isn’t a potion at all.”