Leashing the Tempest by Jenn Bennett

witch’s familiar.
    These Hermeneus spirits don’t physically cross over from the Æthyr to our plane. Instead, they use Heka to transmit a kind of noncorporeal hologram of themselves. Because of this, they aren’t much use for earthly tasks. All they can really do here is relay information from one magician to another. Before the phone was invented, this was probably helpful, but now? Not so much.
    Unlike the binding triangle I’d just powered up in the bar, my guardian’s homing sigil didn’t need to be charged with Heka that had been kindled with electrical energy. It required a more passive, personal energy gained from bodily fluids. Might sound a little odd, but magicians have used fluids to charge spells for centuries: blood, saliva, sexual fluids, tears. Inside all of these is raw, unkindled Heka. The amount of raw Heka varies by fluid type—blood has more Heka than saliva, for example—and it also varies person to person. Not that there’s some lab test available to verify this, but I was pretty sure that my blood had a hell of a lot more Heka than the average person’s. And this definitely gave me an advantage, magically speaking. Just as anybody can learn how to draw, anybody can learn to do magick; however, someone who lacks natural artistic talent might take twice as long to master the basics. And let’s face it: that person might eventually learn to pull off a decent landscape, but they’ll probably never be Michelangelo.
    Ready to call my guardian, I stuck my finger in my mouth, extracted a small amount of Heka-rich saliva, then wiped it on my guardian’s sigil. “Priya,” I whispered. “Come to me.”
    A familiar wave of nausea rolled through my stomach. The air in front of me shuddered, and a wispy, glowing figure pulsed into view. Like other Hermeneus spirits, Priya has a birdlike head and a unisex body, too rugged to be female, too soft to be male.
    Priya nodded at me, bending at the waist. Command me , it said inside my head.
    â€œMy parents are in trouble. They’ve been spotted by authorities in Texas and are no longer hidden. The Luxe Order will soon know that they’re still alive, if their wards haven’t already alerted them. Contact my parents’ guardians in the Æthyr and relay this message. Wait for a response. I need to know what they want me to do to help. Go.”
    Priya nodded and disappeared.
    My guardian was my solitary link to my parents. Only in an emergency was I supposed to send it out to contact their guardians; I thought this qualified.
    When I sent Priya out on these errands, the return time varied. Sometimes the spirit would come back to me with a report after a few minutes, sometimes several hours later, I could never tell. So I plopped down on Kar Yee’s chair and hoped it would be a short trip.
    Opening one of the desk drawers, I reached toward the back until my fingers skimmed a stash of hand-rolled valrivia cigarettes. Calming like nicotine, but with a mild euphoric kick, valrivia doesn’t trash your lungs the way tobacco does and is about as addictive as caffeine. Half the demon population has a valrivia habit. I picked up mine from Kar Yee in college. I’d already smoked two that day—my self-imposed limit—but under the circumstances, I thought I deserved another. I dug a lighter out of my jeans pocket and lit up.
    It was hard for me to believe that it had been seven years since the so-called Black Lodge slayings had thrust my parents into the public spotlight, making them villains in the lead story of every news organization, half a dozen true crime novels, and God only knows how many television investigative reports. They even got their own trading cards, part of a collectible set of serial killer profile cards that included Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy. Classy.
    Their sensational story was everything that the American public craved: gory murders, witchy ritual