Keeping busy occupied her mind and kept her obsessing to manageable levels. Fortunately, there was plenty to do. As humans, the witches didn’t have any great powers, and their magic was on lockdown just in case, but they could find information and free angels to do their angelic stuff. Angels could be annoyingly secretive about what that consisted of, and she didn’t have the energy to pursue the details.
Instead, Bianca had been trying to find out more about the mysterious three that being, Indolex, had mentioned.
Sophia took a seat beside her at the large wooden table in Sophia’s library. “How’s it going?”
With its vaulted ceilings and four floors of books rising on each side of a central atrium, it was a place to warm a book nerd’s heart. So much knowledge retained in that vast space blew her mind. The age of some of the books was similarly dizzying.
“Not too bad.” Bianca carefully closed the book in front of her and pushed it away. This one was a mere four hundred years old and not even worthy of the librarian’s special handling.
Sophia read the titles of the books spread on the table in front of her. “Any idea who or what the three may be yet?”
The angel in charge of the library coughed and handed Sophia a pair of gloves.
“Sorry, Celeste.” Smiling at her, Sophia put on the gloves. As the archangel of wisdom and knowledge, Sophia had the largest library on any of the three planes.
“Any reference we find to the three normally refers to heaven, earth, and hell,” Bianca said with a nod to Celeste.
Celeste had been a major help in narrowing the search to what Bianca needed in the massive repository. Bianca would have wandered around for years without her assistance.
Sophia looked thoughtful. “Given the context, I would say that’s a reasonable assumption.”
“We thought so.” Celeste folded her lips primly. “Other biblical references refer to the father, son, and holy ghost, but we couldn’t connect the witchling Emma to any of those.”
“So, based on the assumption that the three does refer to heaven, hell, and earth, we think we can confidently say that whatever the reason is that they want Emma, she represents the earth of that trilogy.” Bianca showed Sophia a huge tome with leather binding and an elaborately embossed title. “I’m searching for a connection between witchcraft and demons.”
Celeste folded her hands in front of her. “Much has been written about the connection between witches and demons,” she said. “Many accounts of witches summoning demons or being in league with them. Most of these can be dismissed as superstition, but there are a couple that bear closer examination.”
Sophia’s blue eyes sharpened. “How would you know the difference?”
“Right.” Bianca and Celeste had been working on this for days. She’d read more stories and journal entries about cloven-hooved babies than was good for anyone. “We know demons don’t reproduce with humans.” Only hell princes could do that apparently. Who knew? Well, now she did. “We also know that only hell princes can be summoned, so that narrowed it down to only references to one of the seven hell princes.”
“The difficulty has come in the names.” Celeste sighed. “Humans use hell princes’ names interchangeably and incorrectly, and it is not unusual to find several hell princes named in one summoning.”
“I also know a couple of the summonings that were real.” Bianca kept her face and voice expressionless. “Lucifer mentioned some names. So, we started looking for summonings and interactions with demons that bore a resemblance to those.”
Sophia looked impressed. “You have been busy.”
Well, it was that or mope around and wish she had better taste in males.
“Here we came across several consistencies.” Celeste tenderly located a book which had been hand scribed with beautiful gold embellishments and painted illustrations. “Most notable of which was that the more powerful the witch, the more effective the summoning.” She cleared her throat as Sophia reached for the book, and then pushed it toward her.
Sophia snatched her hands back and winked at Bianca. “Sorry, Celeste.”
“In addition,” Celeste said. “The more powerful the witch, the more extensive the consequences of the summoning.”
Sophia frowned. “Explain.”
“A lesser witch performing a summoning would have a smaller effect.” Bianca indicated a pile of abandoned books at the far end of the table. “It would vary from a piece of furniture moved, or something breaking in the house. Small things.” She pointed to a smaller pile near them. “The stronger witches did actually have an interaction with the demon, or as we know hell prince, they’d summoned.”
Celeste clicked her tongue. “Unfortunately, not many of them survived.”
And Bianca knew who was to blame for that. He’d bragged about it to her. Not the right male for any woman, especially a witch. “And their deaths were often consequences of their demand from the hell prince. Like, for instance, if one asked for eternal beauty, she could end up murdered by a jealous lover.”
“Right.” Sophia nodded. “So how does this relate to Emma?”
“Emma is the most powerful witch I’ve ever seen,” Bianca said. “And she’s only eight. She hasn’t even come into her powers properly yet. We know that archangels and hell princes can boost a witch’s power because they’ve done it with me.”
“Most irregular.” Celeste shook her head.
“So, we know witch power and hell prince and archangel power is compatible. And according to anyone who’s gone head-to-head with these rebel demons, they have powers they shouldn’t.” Bianca didn’t want to dwell too much on how powerful those demons were. Indolex had terrified her.
Celeste sniffed. “Ending other demons for instance, should be a power only hell princes can control.”
“But these demons can,” Bianca said. “So, it’s not a far reach to think that a being as powerful as Indolex would be compatible with a witch’s power.” The idea of Emma in Indolex’s grasp made her blood run cold. “In short, Indolex can use Emma’s power and he wants Emma because she is so powerful.”
“To what end?” Sophia tapped her index finger on the desk.
“That.” Bianca allowed her building frustration to escape in a sigh. “Is what we’ve been concentrating on while you were away.”
Celeste clicked her tongue. “To make any progress, we had to make another assumption. If Emma was the earth representative of the three, then the other two would need to be of hell and heaven. And they had to be as, if not more, powerful than Emma.”
Sophia’s eyes widened. “How powerful?”
“The most powerful. They certainly searched long and hard to find the most powerful witch,” Bianca said and waited for Sophia to put the pieces together.
“Heaven and hell.” Sophia took a deep breath. “You mean a hell prince and an archangel.” She looked aghast and shook her head. “They couldn’t actually believe that they could capture either or both of those.”
Celeste broke the bad news. “Belphegor is missing.”
“But she often goes off on her own.” Sophia shook her head more vehemently. “Honestly, I don’t think we can say that Indolex has her.”
“But we also cannot assume that he hasn’t got her,” Celeste said. “We have consistently underestimated our foe to our disadvantage.”
“With that much power, he’s planning something big.” Bianca put another book in front of Sophia. “Something big enough to need that much power. But also, we’ve been working on the basis that the end of days will end all of us, Indolex included. But what if it didn’t?” She looked to Celeste for support and got a tight nod. “Why would Indolex go to this much trouble only to bring about his death? And then we had to ask ourselves if Indolex has found a way to survive the end of days.”
“That’s impossible.” Sophia read the spine of the book Bianca had given her. “A Codex of Ancient Beings.”
“I’m sure those gods would have said the same,” Bianca said. “In their time, they would have believed nothing could come after them.”
“But it did.” Celeste looked grim. “They were vanquished and replaced by hell princes and archangels.”
Sophia paled. “Vanquished but not destroyed.”
Bianca had been shocked to discover there had been beings before archangels and hell princes. Celeste had filled her in. The battle for souls had been taking place for eon upon eon, further back than even the hell princes and archangels knew.
“Fuck!” Sophia sat bolt upright. “They’re trying to destroy the current order.”
Celeste took a careful breath. “And they need the horsemen to do that.”
