“You locked the Ninth Gate, kid,” he said, his lie making me sick to my stomach. “And a big high five to you. But you think that solved all our problems? You think the world is all peachy keen now?”
I had to agree it was not, and I tried not to hold my breath as I waited for him to tell me about my new mission, searching for this funny little key that would lock the gates shut. Yeah, right.
“Like I said. We got work. We got demons on the streets, infiltrating themselves into the lives of the innocent. And, yeah, we got demons plotting another Armageddon.”
“The fun never stops,” I said. “What are they up to?”
“The other eight gates,” he said. “They’re running around trying to figure out how to open them before the convergence.”
I grinned. Score one for the cynical girl.
“Is that even possible?” I asked, keeping my face serious, my expression concerned. “I thought they were locked tight.”
“It’s not easy,” he said. “But it’s possible. And we need to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
“How?”
“They’re looking for a key,” he said. “The Oris Clef. This one unlocks all the gates,” he said. “The three pieces are scattered, but once they’re assembled, we’re talking some serious mojo.”
“Oh,” I said, actually impressed that Clarence wasn’t trying to hide the basic nature of our quest from me. “So what’s our plan?”
He grinned at me, then said exactly the words I wanted to hear. “Give me your arm, Lily. Because we’re going to find those pieces first.”
SIX
I used my own knife to slice my palm, then smeared my blood over the flat edge of the blade. As Clarence muttered an incantation, I ran the blade down the soft interior of my right forearm, causing two strange symbols to rise on my flesh, the pain as my flesh was seared making me grit my teeth and squeeze my fingers and toes together. A second swipe of blood cooled the pain, though, and I opened my eyes to peer down at the symbols, the first, an Aztec-looking circle. The second, a series of lines and squiggles crammed tight into an area roughly the shape of a triangle.
“I’m running out of arm,” I said, knowing we still needed the third symbol for the third piece of the Oris Clef.
“No worries. We’ve got your whole body to work with.”
“Great. If the demon-killing gig goes under, I can always join the circus.”
He tapped my other arm, and I held it out, ready for yet another demonic tat. “You gonna let me do it this time?”
“You know how to call up the symbols?” he asked.
“No,” I admitted, though I realized it would be a good idea for me to figure that out. I wasn’t sure where one went to learn basic body-map-symbol-raising skills—maybe a Learning Annex course?
Wincing a little, I once again smeared the flat edge of my blade with the blood, then passed the blade to Clarence, who drew the blood down my forearm, all the while muttering the strange, foreign incantation. I cringed, anticipating the familiar burn as the blood seared a new locator into my flesh, then exhaled as another swipe of my blood over the by-then-visible design quelled the pain.
“What is it?” I asked, peering at the strange, geometric marks now burned into my flesh. An odd square, the lines inside seeming to collapse in on themselves as with a spiral descending to a point. A triangle in which another upside-down triangle was embedded. And a design that seemed to resemble a tic-tac-toe board, with dots in the outer squares and the image of an eye in the center.
“The three pieces,” he said, voicing what I already knew. “Each design represents one of the three pieces of the Oris Clef.”
“And all three images rose on my arm,” I said thoughtfully. “So that means the pieces still exist. That they’re in this dimension.” My learning curve about the Rand McNally me thing was pretty steep, and one of my first lessons was that my hyped-up blood could only latch onto things that were in this dimension. No locating lost relics that had been hidden forever within the demon realm.
I scowled down at the image burned onto my flesh. This next bit was the part I really didn’t like. “You ready?”
“Go on in,” he said.
I nodded, disconcerted by the fact that Clarence was now my anchor back to reality. Before, I’d believed he worked for the angels. Now I knew the true nature of the creature who was watching my back.
No helping it, though. Trying not to think about what could go wrong, I closed my palm over the square, then waited for the sharp tug near my navel.
It didn’t come.