“If anything goes wrong, you banish it, you hear?” Lon whispered.

“Nothing’s going to happen,” I assured him. The Silent Temple put on this little freak show every week. Hopefully their casualty rate was low. “Wait until the ceremony’s over before you go shooting a hole in the ceiling,” I suggested, sneaking a quick scratch under my sleeve. Lice made me think of roaches, and that made me think of the cannery. I shuddered.

Epic, dark opera boomed over speakers near the altar. From Wagner’s Ring cycle. I was pretty sure that was the equivalent of playing Eye of the Tiger at a wrestling match. The altar girls finished with their task and stood sentinel at the bottom of each set of stairs, their handheld torches held above their heads.

Two figures descended, one from either staircase. The first was a wiry boy, maybe early twenties. He wore a black T-shirt and matching pants, and had one too many pointy facial piercings. His booming voice didn’t match his thin body as he announced the second figure descending the second set of stairs—

Frater Merrin.

“I’ll be damned,” Lon mumbled, tensing up as the man greeted the congregation. Guess Frater Merrin really was his old Frater Karras. Ten points for Jupe’s not so useless horror movie trivia.

The magician looked to be in his sixties. He was extremely short, balding like a monk, and dressed in standard gray ritual robes, with a hood lying against his back and zipper at his throat. Bare toes peeked out below the hem. Dark, pouchy circles gathered under mismatched eyes that swept across the congregation. He nodded occasionally at those who waved or called out to him.

“Welcome, Sisters and Brothers, to the Morella Silent Temple,” he announced, holding out his arms while ambling by the front row. “For those of you who are first-timers, I hope you are enlightened by what you’ll witness today. For those of you returning, I hope your faith will be renewed.

“Other churches,” he continued, “talk a lot about miracles. But talk is cheap. I’m not saying that the beliefs that fuel other religions are wrong, I’m only saying that I can prove that our faith has substance. Our beliefs are grounded in what we can see and hear, not just what we’re told.”

The magician walked to a short table and picked up a small brass container with an elongated, skinny spout—somewhere between an Arabian oil lamp and a watering can. He carried the object to both sides of the altar and held it up for each of the girls in the red dresses to kiss in blessing.

A red circular carpet lay in the center of the altar. While the magician moved behind it, the girls rolled up the carpet and carried it off between them. And what do you know—where that carpet once lay was now an exposed summoning circle, though not as fancy as the glass tubes in the floor of the Hellfire caves. This one looked to have been constructed of a cement disk that had been recessed a couple of inches into a hollowed-out portion of the wood flooring. The edge was ringed with a dark stained channel, into which the magician poured oil from the spout of the brass watering can.

“From fire they are born, and to fire we all go. Let the sacred oil flow,” Frater Merrin said. The congregation repeated these words in an off-key drone. After he made it all the way around, the prairie girls took their places at either side of the circle. The magician chanted something in Latin. His back to the congregation, he kneeled—with no small effort—in front of the sculpture of the lion-headed deity, and prayed.

“This is ridiculous,” Lon complained in my ear.

“You think?” I hissed back. Pomp and show. A bloated ritual to impress the crowd.

The magician gave a signal to the girls. They held their dresses tightly around their legs and knelt by the oil-filled channel, touching their torches to it. A foot-high flame leapt up and spread, filling the entire circle in a flash. A ring of fire.

Yes, quite a production.

The humans who came to see it weren’t savages. They believed in demons. They couldn’t see the halos on the Earthbounds who sat alongside them, but they had proof, nonetheless: their church conjured up a living specimen every Saturday.

I crossed my arms, listening as the magician recited the real words to set the summoning circle.

If the occult organizations got wind of this place, they’d fan the flames licking around this circle and burn the whole temple to the ground. Especially my order—this was so against E∴E∴ policy. I mean, come on. A rogue magician conjuring demons in front of nonmagicians—conjuring demons to be worshipped, to boot. Such a big no-no.

Like most esoteric orders, the E∴E∴ believed Æthyric demons were to be summoned only for two reasons: information and tasks. They should be tightly controlled at all times, and there should always be another magician present in case something goes wrong with the binding.

Of course, I never followed these rules myself. And in the big picture, what the Hellfire Club did every month—summoning Æthyric demons for heaping helpings of sex and violence—was far worse than what this guy was doing.

But I didn’t really care about that either. All I wanted to know was whether the magician in front of us had kidnapped, and likely killed, seven human children in the early ’80s, and if he was the one who’d been recently abducting Hellfire kids.

Merrin brought out a caduceus from under his robe. The wood was blackened at the bottom. He stuck it through the wall of flames and hit the inner ring of the summoning circle. The low lights in the room crackled and dimmed for a brief moment, throwing the room into near-dark, the only light coming from the torches on the wall and the ring of fire.