Two of the boys looked them up and down and elbowed each other. Ana ignored them and fixed her eyes on the one behind the register, a skinny boy with long, greasy black hair and a goatee that came to an uneven point under his chin.
“I’m looking for books on demons,” she said.
“No shit,” he said. “What school are you guys in? Crowley? Chaos magic?”
“I’m not in any school. I just want some details about demon possession, or inhabitation.”
“You should study with us,” he said abruptly. “We’re the best in the city. We’ve summoned spirits.”
“Really?” Sabel asked, her tone thick with disbelief.
“We did the Abramelin ritual,” the kid said. “The whole thing.”
“For six months—?” Sabel started, but Ana missed the rest of it because a strange sensation hijacked her attention. She became completely certain that these kids had nothing to do with spirits or demons or whatever they were called, but that they were only interacting with lingering patterns of the dead that hadn’t dissipated yet. That thought was foreign to her and bordered on the ridiculous since she’d never spent any time before thinking about the dead, demons, or the difference between the two.
You shut up
, she thought fiercely.
I don’t want you taking over my thoughts. I will knock myself out first, do you hear me?
The odd sense of certainty withdrew. Ana rubbed her temples. She wanted to get out of this cramped and busy room. Sabel was listening to two of the kids detail how they’d set up an oratory for this ritual. Ana touched her elbow.
“They don’t have what we need,” she said. “They’re not talking to demons. Let’s go.”
“Sorry, guys,” Sabel said cheerily and followed Ana out the door.
In the closed silence of the car, she asked, “Do you mind telling me how you knew that?”
“I don’t know,” Ana said. “I just did. The other store is out in Oakland. Do you want to get something to eat afterward?”
“Sounds good.”
Part of her reason for asking Sabel on this errand was to get her talking too. She’d seemed reticent on Thursday night to say what she’d done to the man with the phone to drop him with a single word, but the longer she thought about it, the more Ana knew she needed the knowledge Sabel had.
This wasn’t the way she imagined they’d spend their first outing together. She’d only just started thinking about asking Sabel to get together when all this happened and hadn’t figured out where to suggest going or even how to ask.
She’d noticed Sabel the first time she walked through Roth Software on a tour ten months ago, but it was more like “she’s hot” than an actual thought about connecting with the woman. Even for San Francisco, Ana’s office was mostly a desert of straight men and a few straight women, predominately in marketing and sales. She remembered Sabel pausing in the doorway to Helen’s cubicle accompanied by the director of HR. Helen’s cubicle was across from hers so when Ana turned around to the sound of unfamiliar voices, she saw a slender woman in a milk chocolate brown sundress and those fashionable Greek-style sandals with straps around the ankle. Her eyes followed the flow of straight black hair down the woman’s back to her shoulder blades and from there she had to appreciate the way the soft material of the dress clung to her body.
When they all turned around to face Ana’s cubicle, she was left blushing and trying to pretend she’d been waiting to ask Helen a question. She should have known then that Sabel liked women because somehow, mysteriously, Ana was the one requisitioned to help set up the two-session diversity training with her—but it really didn’t dawn on her at the time. She just figured that the HR director was swamped with hiring and that he assumed since Ana was the one out lesbian in the office, she’d be the logical choice.
She didn’t know that Sabel wasn’t just a pretty straight girl until after the second training was completed. Ana had been helping to gather up the materials around the room when Sabel said, “I was glad the clouds cleared off for the festival last weekend.”
Ana stopped with a handful of dry erase markers and tried to remember what bag they went into. How many festivals were there in the city of San Francisco on a given weekend? Dozens? Did she mean the Pride festival?
“You were there?” Ana asked, keeping her question neutral.
“I spent two hours at the SFSU booth and then wandered. You?”
How many festivals could SFSU have at booth in? She had to be talking about Pride. She hoped Sabel would volunteer whether she’d gone by herself or with someone.
“I went with Ruben, my roommate,” Ana said. “He had a schedule of all the stage acts he wanted to catch.”
“I meant to see some of those, but I got caught up in shopping.” Sabel held up her delicate right wrist to show off a thin leather bracelet with a pearl clasp.
“Pretty,” Ana managed through dry lips. Did the right side mean top or bottom? She tried to remember the complicated handkerchief code that gay men used and Ruben seemed to know intuitively. Did a leather bracelet count or did Sabel just prefer it on her right wrist even though she was right-handed? Did it even matter? Maybe Sabel was just showing off a pretty bangle.
“Well that’s it for me here.” Sabel snapped shut her soft-sided, burgundy leather briefcase. “You have my contact info. Call me if there are any questions.”
Ana unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “Thank you.”
“Anytime,” Sabel said with a small smile and a bright flash of her eyes. She had turned and walked out the door and Ana watched the way her loose pants swayed as she moved.
She and Ruben had dissected that conversation every which way and decided that yes, in some subtle way, Sabel was coming on to her in a completely appropriate corporate diversity trainer fashion and she’d be insane not to fabricate an excuse to call her. Ruben also felt that the bracelet should be significant and reminded Ana more than once that the right side meant the receptive partner. Ana had trouble picturing Sabel as all that receptive, but it didn’t stop her from trying.
She had forwarded Sabel the information about the company party and was working on a question that would warrant a phone call—but she still hadn’t figured out how to turn that into an actual date. And then everything happened with Helen and the men in black masks and the hospital. Now it was all backward. Sabel had already spent a night at her house, and been in her bed, however briefly, and it was all wrong.
Sabel pulled into a parking spot near a small storefront in a strip mall sandwiched between a drugstore and a children’s clothing outlet. The door opened with a tingle of chimes and Ana smelled sweet sandalwood and floral musk. A lean, older man stood behind the counter with his graying hair pulled into a ponytail hung with two feathers that trailed down his back. As dark as the other store had been, this one was light. White bookshelves sparsely populated with bright titles lined the walls and display tables held little bowls with unburned sage bundles, small drums, carved totem animals and other friendly knickknacks.
“May I help you?” he asked.
“I’m looking for books on demons,” Ana said. “Specifically, possession.”
“Well, I’ve got Dion Fortune’s
Psychic Self-Defense
here, but that’s about it.”
Sabel wandered toward the back of the store. Ana watched her pick up one box of incense and smell it, wrinkle her nose, and move to another.
“When you say ‘demon,’” the man asked quietly enough to reach her ears only, “Are you speaking literally?”
“I think so,” she said.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“It was an accident.”
He raised an eyebrow and shook his head. “I hope it turns out well for you.”
He walked back to the counter and beckoned her to follow. From a drawer under the register he pulled out a business card in a subtle, designer eggplant color with gold script.
Ingenious Books
, the card read in a florid but very readable font, with the tagline, “Put Our Power to Work for You,” and below that the name Lily Cordoba, a phone number and an email.
“Go see Lily,” the man said. He was still speaking quietly and watching Sabel as she moved along the bookshelves, making sure that she didn’t see him give Ana the card. His secrecy and discretion told Ana that this referral was serious. This man believed in demons and knew she needed help, and he was going to be careful about how he gave it to her.
“Who is Lily?” Ana asked him.
“She’s the one you need. She’s not cheap, but she’s the only one in the city who really knows what she’s doing.”
She slipped the card into her pocket with a grateful, “Thank you.”
Sabel walked back toward the front of the store and raised her eyebrows in an unspoken question. Ana considered showing her the card but suppressed the urge to share. If Lily could get the creature in her head to leave, maybe Sabel didn’t need to know that part of the ritual. On top of her other transgressions, Ana didn’t want to add hosting some otherworldly demon.
“He suggested another bookstore,” Ana told her. “But let’s go eat.”
They picked a little Asian place where Sabel could get sushi and Ana ordered noodles. Their tiny table was crammed into a corner by the window with an excellent view of the parking lot. The whole place held maybe twelve tables and appeared to do most of its business as carryout.
“What’s ‘Ana’ short for?” Sabel asked when they were settled with tiny cups of hot, woody-scented green tea.
“Nothing. Really, it’s on my birth certificate like that. I used to make up names it could be short for. I even had an Anabelle phase for like three weeks. What about you?”
“Sabeline.”
“Nice.”
“Pretentious,” Sabel said. “I’ve been going by Sabel since I started college.”
Ana smiled into her tea. She didn’t want to threaten the light mood, but she had questions. She remembered very clearly how Sabel seemed to step out of the darkness when Ana was running from the summoners and how she spoke what looked like a single word to the man holding the cell phone and he dropped like a sack of potatoes.
“Thursday night,” she started, paused, and then pushed on. “What did you do to that man?”
“I made him sleep,” Sabel told her. She stopped and Ana feared she wouldn’t continue, but then she went on while her slender fingers played with her half-filled cup of tea. “There is magic in the world; it’s just not the kind you see in movies with fireballs and all that. It’s invisible and hard to do and not many people know how to use it, but I do. Lots of people do magic and don’t realize that’s what they’re doing, but I’ve only met a few people who really train in it. I think it’s a vicious cycle—people don’t believe it exists so they see magic events as chance or explain them away, and then they never learn how to do real magic. You’ve been trying to explain away parts of what you saw the other night, haven’t you? When the summoners took you, did they do anything to you that seemed…uncanny?”
“They said they wanted to put a demon in me,” Ana admitted, though there was a lot more uncanny to the event than just that. She thought of the flaming serpents falling from the sky and how she assumed it was the result of a concussion.
“Did they?” Sabel asked.
“I think it’s my turn,” Ana said in order to deflect the question. She wasn’t ready to answer that question fully for herself yet, let alone share the answer with anyone. “Did you make me sleep also?”
“Yes,” Sabel said quickly and then looked away out the window though there wasn’t anything of note to be looking at. “I’m sorry. I hate doing that to friends.”
“How do you do it?” Ana asked.
The corners of Sabel’s mouth quirked up. “It’s my turn. Did the summoners’ ritual work?”
The server showed up with their orders and Ana turned gratefully to her bowl of noodles. They were hot and savory. She took a mouthful but it was hard to swallow around the nervous tension in her throat. She made herself eat a few more bites and then answered the question.
“I’m not sure. I don’t think it went the way they planned or I wouldn’t have gotten out but—I don’t know how I got out.”
“Shock and adrenaline?” Sabel suggested. “Or did you do something you can’t explain?”
Ana shrugged. “How does your…ability to do magic work?” she asked.
“What I can do is usually a lot more subtle and takes planning,” Sabel said. “And with the Voice, it’s an innate ability that my training has honed. I can use it to give commands, basically to override the information in your brain for a moment. I never use it to harm anyone. I’m not like the summoners.”
“I know.”
The muscles around Sabel’s mouth relaxed and her shoulders settled back against the chair.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
Ana laughed. “That’s your next question? South Dakota.”
“A long way from here.”
“Thank God. It’s not the best place to be a lesbian, or a smart woman of any kind. At least not the part of town I was from. When did you come out?”
What passed for a grin on Sabel’s delicate mouth would have been a wry smirk on anyone else—she had a way of packing a lot of mirth into a very small gesture.
“Well, I started having sex with women when I was sixteen. Coming out took a lot longer, maybe ten more years. My family wasn’t particularly open to the idea. They wanted me to get married and come into the family business. Your family wasn’t supportive either?”
Ana stared down into the tangle of noodles. “I didn’t come out until college. All the shit with my family was just…shit.” She didn’t know how to describe it to Sabel and she wasn’t sure she wanted this woman to see her as the girl she’d been in South Dakota. Finally she settled on, “You know: alcohol, no money, no education, no hope. But we got out, my brother Gunnar and me. He lives here too. My other brother…he’s not worth thinking about.”
“College?” Sabel asked. “Girls?”
“Yes to both. You
were
coming on to me after that last training, right? Ruben and I talked about that for days.”
“Of course. You were one of the few people asking the smart questions. And anyway, Helen outed you to me when we first talked about setting up a series of trainings, probably to demonstrate how cool she was with diversity.”