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indriSUMMARY: Giles and Ethan, the electric Kool-Aid funky Satan groove year, in the early seventies. Rated M. Spoilers to Band Candy. Acknowledgements and disclaimers.
48.
Ripper finally got the car onto the A344. It wasn't a mass exodus yet from the festival, as many people were staying on for the longest day of the year, but it was still pretty crowded. Plus, there were some more standard sorts of tourist arriving in buses and family cars. Who knew what they'd make of the site right now.
Ethan was looking out of the passenger window. "Right," he said, "I've got it."
"Your story."
"Yes," he said. "This is my version of the story of the seven intelligent species to arise on Earth."
"Can I make the obvious joke?" asked Ripper.
"No," Ethan told him. "We'll presume that there have been some. May I start?"
"By all means," Rupert said.
Ethan began: "The first of the seven intelligent species to arise on Earth were the Ethereals. They had no physical form at all but existed only as pure mental energy. They couldn't eat or smoke or have sex or play music. Nor did they have any stories, as they didn't have anything really to tell stories about. So they spent all their hours devising ever more abstruse mathematics until they'd discovered and created every last possible theorem. Then there was nothing left to distract them from the indifference of the universe, so they killed themselves.
"To date, no-one has worked out how.
"The second of the seven intelligent species to arise on Earth were the Hyperboreans. They lived in the Arctic in the days when the Arctic was as warm as the tropics. They were asexual and reproduced by budding. Their lives were very dull, but not as dull as the Ethereals'. On wet Sunday afternoons, they could eat cycads and bud as much as they wanted. But they budded and budded and budded until the entire land was covered with them: they ate every last cycad and then they took to eating each other.
"So the last of the Hyperboreans awoke on a pile of cannibal bones, in a landscape denuded of edible plants, and with nothing to eat except its own newborn offspring. It decided to swim south in search of a land it had not yet eaten, but it drowned upon the way.
"Although another legend has it that the Hyperborean was met and befriended by dolphins, who taught it to eat fish. But when the dolphins saw how vociferously it budded, and how much its offspring ate, they caught and killed every last one of them."
"Wait," said Ripper, "that would make dolphins the second intelligent species."
"Yes," said Ethan. "That's why that part of the story is usually considered apocryphal."
"The third of the seven intelligent species to arise on Earth were the Lemurians. These were huge creatures, sixteen foot high, with feet that extended both forward and backward so they could never tell if they were coming or going. They were hermaphroditic and so were seldom bored at all. But they were not very bright, and they were plagued by the dreams of the species which had come before. They wanted, like the Hyperboreans, to travel south, and they wanted to dance the complicated geometrical patterns of the Ethereals. So they danced and danced, always southwards, through the forests and marshes of Lemuria, through the grasslands to the deserts, where they died of exhaustion and thirst. The winds of the desert wore their bones into dust.
"Even now, when the sunlight is at the right angle, you can see their motes still dancing in the air.
"The fourth of the seven species of intelligent life on Earth were the Atlanteans, who looked very like us. They had two sexes and reproduced in much the same way we do. They had music; they had art; they had magic. They built great cities and ran machines through the power of their will. They were, in short, fantastic. But they were too powerful in some ways and they were even more distracted by sex than we are. They devised whole new species of animals and animal-Atlantean hybrids to have sex with. Eventually everyone was too busy fucking their own metamorphosed animals to reproduce and the species died out. But they did die happy.
"This is where the story of Titania and her donkey-headed lover comes from. Titania was an Atlantean."
"Ah," said Ripper, "an apposite touch for midsummer's day."
"Exactly. Now, the fifth species of intelligent life on Earth are the humans. Humans remember that it's not good to stay all in the mind, so they smoke and drink and eat and have sex. They don't usually eat each other, or cycads, and they don't completely trust dolphins. They dance, but they know not to dance all the time. They mostly pretend that they can't remember magic and they prefer to have sex with each other, generally speaking.
"They are quite dull."
"Hey," said Ripper, "that's us you're talking about."
"Not necessarily," said Ethan. "It is said that the sixth intelligent species will arise from the fifth, and that some members of the sixth may be alive even now. Homo novus, if you will. Don't tell Randall, but they're supposed to mainly arise in California."
"What about the seventh species?"
"Nothing is yet known," said Ethan. "But it gives us something to aspire to."
Ripper laughed. "That's amazing rubbish, Ethan."
"Your turn."
"Me? No."
"What then?"
Ripper thought about it. This might be a good time. "Can I ask some embarrassing questions that I should know the answer to but don't?"
"Is this Truth or Dare or Latin declensions?"
"What's your surname?"
"You're kidding me," said Ethan. "You've been living with us for months now. And you could have looked at my driver's license."
"I'm still not convinced that you have one."
Ethan snorted. "It's Rayne. R-A-Y-N-E."
"How old's Diedre?"
"The same age as Adrienne," said Ethan, "give or take a couple of months."
"Don't make me hit you," Ripper warned.
"Twenty-two. But I think they're both coming up to twenty-three soon. Diedre's family always have a garden party around this time of year."
"What's Tom's surname?"
"Sutcliff."
"Is 'Randall' his first name or surname?"
Ethan laughed. "Neither. He's an American -- it's his middle name."
"Did his parents really move all the way to London to keep him away from magic?"
"I imagine they were at least as concerned with his eligibility for the draft," said Ethan, "but he doesn't really like to mention that part."
"Is he sleeping with Diedre?"
"Randall doesn't sleep with anyone."
"That's why she's got Tom as well?"
"Yes," said Ethan. "Got any difficult questions?"
"Where did you grow up?"
"That's dull," said Ethan. "Ask me something else."
"How did you first get into magic?"
"I found a book, or, really, it found me. I was in a bookshop, and I could hear it from across the room. I'd never heard anything like it. So I stole it."
"What does a magic book sound like?"
Ethan took some time to think about this before he replied. "Like that scene in 2001 when they find the monolith on the moon."
"That's quite disturbing," said Ripper. "How old were you then?"
"Ten or eleven."
Ripper was surprised. "But you didn't start practising magic until much later, yes?"
"No," said Ethan.
"Did you have anyone to show you how to do it?"
"No," said Ethan.
"Bloody hell," said Ripper. "Do you have any idea how incredibly dangerous that was?"
"No," said Ethan, "and I don't recall having any difficulty."
"At that age you'd have no control whatsoever of the entities working through you."
"If that's what your grandmother taught you," said Ethan, "she was a timid old fishwife."
"I just mean," said Ripper, "that you're lucky to have got through that at all. It's fantastically dangerous."
There was a long silence.
"I think there's a Little Chef coming up," said Ethan. "Maybe you should get a cup of coffee."
As Ripper parked the car, he became acutely aware that he looked like he'd slept in a muddy field. However, that turned out not to be a problem, as almost all of the other customers looked that way too. There was a lone family of conventional neatness hunkering down at one of the back tables, but otherwise it was wall-to-wall tunics, head-bands and really wide coats.
They picked out a table and Ripper went to the counter. He was very hungry now, so he ordered a coffee and a large breakfast. Then he found he had less money than he thought he had. Enough, but not much.
"I forgot to ask Randall for the petrol money," he told Ethan when he came back to the table. "And I won't get paid again until Saturday."
Ethan looked mildly sympathetic.
"Aren't you having anything?" Ripper asked him.
"I have fifty pence left in the entire world," said Ethan. "And it's not going to be a good afternoon for busking."
"Can't you borrow money from the household kitty until you can make some?"
"I suppose so." He came back with a cup of tea and a plate of gammon and eggs.
"I have to give you an apology," said Ripper, around a mouthful of bacon and toast. "All this time I've been thinking you dress like a common or garden hippy."
"Oh?"
Ripper waved in the direction of man wearing a buckskin shirt and a hat sporting a small pair of antlers. "Now I see that in fact that you dress like a conservative hippy."
"And who are you supposed to be?" asked Ethan. "Marlon Brando?"
"I'm aiming more for Mick Jagger."
"Then you're bit wide of the mark."
Ripper looked down at the mud and blood on his jacket. "Do you think we could do something similar?" The loci spell, I mean."
Ethan raised both his eyebrows and looked out the window.
"Well?"
"Sorry, I was just trying to imagine what the genius loci of Camden Town would be like."
"Of course, we wouldn't want to do something that large, given that one took fifty people and rather more goat blood than I'm comfortable with."
"I don't know. There's nothing in Spivak even vaguely like that. That owl's about the largest entity I've ever summoned."
"Would be good though."
"Yes," said Ethan.
They finished their meals. Back in the car, Ripper asked, "Why don't you normally go to midsummers?"
Ethan grimaced. "The complex web of obligation. I have to work out who's there, who's not there, who's not speaking to whom, who expects me to drop by, who would rather I didn't, and who's going to be mortally offended if I don't. I mean, it's interesting hanging out with the more powerful wizards, but why would they want you there with them? You're either irritating them or treated like a pet. You spend the whole time wondering what their hidden motives are. It's just easier to stay at home."
"You wouldn't go for the music?"
"No," said Ethan, smiling.
"But last night's spell--"
"I've never been invited to something like that before. And I don't think Evelyn has either. She looked almost as bad as you did this morning. I think she told the others we were her apprentices to get us in."
"We're not, though. I mean, not remotely."
"She does play things fast and loose."
"Who was the man leading the spell?"
"Never seen him before," said Ethan. "You?"
"No. That was really something though, wasn't it? You know, I've really enjoyed this trip."
"Well then," said Ethan, "we'll go again next year."
49.
They got back to the house around two, after half an hour of steady rain.
Ripper went upstairs to get washed while Ethan made himself a pot of tea. He drank it in the kitchen, listening to the rain and the sounds the pipes made as Ripper filled the bath. The rest of the house was empty. He checked the kitty and found exactly five pence. He wondered what bastard had taken the rest.
When it was his turn, he had a long bath, washing mud and blood and who knew what else from his skin and hair. He took particular care cleaning the palms of his hands. His clothes were stained, probably permanently, which was rather a pity for the coat. Maybe he could pick up another cheap one, or dye this one a colour that didn't show up the blood.
He went upstairs in his dressing gown, and found Rupert in his room, kneeling on the edge of the mattress. He had a piece of chalk in his hand and was drawing on the floorboards, sketching out the complicated pattern used for that morning's spell. He was wearing a clean pair of jeans and an unbuttoned shirt.
Ethan fetched another colour of chalk and went to sit next to Rupert. "That isn't quite right," he said, pointing to one section. "Not all of the circles were concentric. Two interlinked." He reached over to correct this.
"Can you remember what happened over here?" Rupert asked.
"No, I don't think we could see it from where we were sitting."
"Perhaps we could work it out from analogy?" He drew a smaller pattern on a separate section of the floor. "I've seen this one before, I think." He frowned. "I'm afraid I didn't bring any of my books with me. I'm having to do this all from memory."
"Why didn't you bring them?"
"They didn't really belong to me," Rupert said. "On loan."
"Your family's?"
"They didn't really approve of me going into music."
Rupert's expression was of happy intellectual engagement, tinged with wistful regret. The combination so moved Ethan that he had to turn away in case Rupert saw his expression too clearly. He went to the locked steel box where he kept the items he most valued. He pulled out a copy of Ogata and passed it to Rupert. "There might be something in that."
Rupert fetched his glasses from his room and then Ethan looked over his shoulder as they flicked through it. "That's the one," said Ethan, pointing.
Rupert rotated the book upside down, to better match the pattern in front of them. "Standard invocation to a major power, modified to indicate that no material manifestation is requested."
"Did you recognise the language our lead caster began in?"
"Absolutely no idea. And you know, I can actually recognise quite a few. Did you?"
"Not at all. I did memorise most of the Latin though." He reached over for a pad of paper and pencil and started to write.
Rupert watched as Ethan wrote as far as the bottom of the page. "That's rather impressive," he said.
"Well, it was my best subject at school."
"What else was there?" Rupert pondered. "The skulls were all from species native to Britain. No rabbits, for example."
"Yes," said Ethan. " I hadn't noticed that. I wonder if that's due to conservatism among the spellcasters though. You'd think Salisbury Plain would have got the hang of rabbits by now."
"Did it have to be goat blood?"
"I understand that it depends on the invoked entity. Some are rather traditionalist while others will settle for any kind of ruminant or any kind of blood at all. I even heard a story where a trickster god settled for Heinz tomato sauce, but I don't know that I believe it."
Rupert laughed. He looked down at their hour's work. "I do think we're rather good at this."
Ethan had thought he was both too tired and too wired for sex, but he was beginning to change his mind, especially when Rupert lay back on the bed.
"But what entity would we summon?" Rupert asked.
Ethan leant over him. "We don't have to decide that right now, do we?"
"I suppose not," said Rupert.
Ethan thought he agreed with Rupert's Watcher family on at least one thing: music was not really Ripper's vocation.
48.
Ripper finally got the car onto the A344. It wasn't a mass exodus yet from the festival, as many people were staying on for the longest day of the year, but it was still pretty crowded. Plus, there were some more standard sorts of tourist arriving in buses and family cars. Who knew what they'd make of the site right now.
Ethan was looking out of the passenger window. "Right," he said, "I've got it."
"Your story."
"Yes," he said. "This is my version of the story of the seven intelligent species to arise on Earth."
"Can I make the obvious joke?" asked Ripper.
"No," Ethan told him. "We'll presume that there have been some. May I start?"
"By all means," Rupert said.
Ethan began: "The first of the seven intelligent species to arise on Earth were the Ethereals. They had no physical form at all but existed only as pure mental energy. They couldn't eat or smoke or have sex or play music. Nor did they have any stories, as they didn't have anything really to tell stories about. So they spent all their hours devising ever more abstruse mathematics until they'd discovered and created every last possible theorem. Then there was nothing left to distract them from the indifference of the universe, so they killed themselves.
"To date, no-one has worked out how.
"The second of the seven intelligent species to arise on Earth were the Hyperboreans. They lived in the Arctic in the days when the Arctic was as warm as the tropics. They were asexual and reproduced by budding. Their lives were very dull, but not as dull as the Ethereals'. On wet Sunday afternoons, they could eat cycads and bud as much as they wanted. But they budded and budded and budded until the entire land was covered with them: they ate every last cycad and then they took to eating each other.
"So the last of the Hyperboreans awoke on a pile of cannibal bones, in a landscape denuded of edible plants, and with nothing to eat except its own newborn offspring. It decided to swim south in search of a land it had not yet eaten, but it drowned upon the way.
"Although another legend has it that the Hyperborean was met and befriended by dolphins, who taught it to eat fish. But when the dolphins saw how vociferously it budded, and how much its offspring ate, they caught and killed every last one of them."
"Wait," said Ripper, "that would make dolphins the second intelligent species."
"Yes," said Ethan. "That's why that part of the story is usually considered apocryphal."
"The third of the seven intelligent species to arise on Earth were the Lemurians. These were huge creatures, sixteen foot high, with feet that extended both forward and backward so they could never tell if they were coming or going. They were hermaphroditic and so were seldom bored at all. But they were not very bright, and they were plagued by the dreams of the species which had come before. They wanted, like the Hyperboreans, to travel south, and they wanted to dance the complicated geometrical patterns of the Ethereals. So they danced and danced, always southwards, through the forests and marshes of Lemuria, through the grasslands to the deserts, where they died of exhaustion and thirst. The winds of the desert wore their bones into dust.
"Even now, when the sunlight is at the right angle, you can see their motes still dancing in the air.
"The fourth of the seven species of intelligent life on Earth were the Atlanteans, who looked very like us. They had two sexes and reproduced in much the same way we do. They had music; they had art; they had magic. They built great cities and ran machines through the power of their will. They were, in short, fantastic. But they were too powerful in some ways and they were even more distracted by sex than we are. They devised whole new species of animals and animal-Atlantean hybrids to have sex with. Eventually everyone was too busy fucking their own metamorphosed animals to reproduce and the species died out. But they did die happy.
"This is where the story of Titania and her donkey-headed lover comes from. Titania was an Atlantean."
"Ah," said Ripper, "an apposite touch for midsummer's day."
"Exactly. Now, the fifth species of intelligent life on Earth are the humans. Humans remember that it's not good to stay all in the mind, so they smoke and drink and eat and have sex. They don't usually eat each other, or cycads, and they don't completely trust dolphins. They dance, but they know not to dance all the time. They mostly pretend that they can't remember magic and they prefer to have sex with each other, generally speaking.
"They are quite dull."
"Hey," said Ripper, "that's us you're talking about."
"Not necessarily," said Ethan. "It is said that the sixth intelligent species will arise from the fifth, and that some members of the sixth may be alive even now. Homo novus, if you will. Don't tell Randall, but they're supposed to mainly arise in California."
"What about the seventh species?"
"Nothing is yet known," said Ethan. "But it gives us something to aspire to."
Ripper laughed. "That's amazing rubbish, Ethan."
"Your turn."
"Me? No."
"What then?"
Ripper thought about it. This might be a good time. "Can I ask some embarrassing questions that I should know the answer to but don't?"
"Is this Truth or Dare or Latin declensions?"
"What's your surname?"
"You're kidding me," said Ethan. "You've been living with us for months now. And you could have looked at my driver's license."
"I'm still not convinced that you have one."
Ethan snorted. "It's Rayne. R-A-Y-N-E."
"How old's Diedre?"
"The same age as Adrienne," said Ethan, "give or take a couple of months."
"Don't make me hit you," Ripper warned.
"Twenty-two. But I think they're both coming up to twenty-three soon. Diedre's family always have a garden party around this time of year."
"What's Tom's surname?"
"Sutcliff."
"Is 'Randall' his first name or surname?"
Ethan laughed. "Neither. He's an American -- it's his middle name."
"Did his parents really move all the way to London to keep him away from magic?"
"I imagine they were at least as concerned with his eligibility for the draft," said Ethan, "but he doesn't really like to mention that part."
"Is he sleeping with Diedre?"
"Randall doesn't sleep with anyone."
"That's why she's got Tom as well?"
"Yes," said Ethan. "Got any difficult questions?"
"Where did you grow up?"
"That's dull," said Ethan. "Ask me something else."
"How did you first get into magic?"
"I found a book, or, really, it found me. I was in a bookshop, and I could hear it from across the room. I'd never heard anything like it. So I stole it."
"What does a magic book sound like?"
Ethan took some time to think about this before he replied. "Like that scene in 2001 when they find the monolith on the moon."
"That's quite disturbing," said Ripper. "How old were you then?"
"Ten or eleven."
Ripper was surprised. "But you didn't start practising magic until much later, yes?"
"No," said Ethan.
"Did you have anyone to show you how to do it?"
"No," said Ethan.
"Bloody hell," said Ripper. "Do you have any idea how incredibly dangerous that was?"
"No," said Ethan, "and I don't recall having any difficulty."
"At that age you'd have no control whatsoever of the entities working through you."
"If that's what your grandmother taught you," said Ethan, "she was a timid old fishwife."
"I just mean," said Ripper, "that you're lucky to have got through that at all. It's fantastically dangerous."
There was a long silence.
"I think there's a Little Chef coming up," said Ethan. "Maybe you should get a cup of coffee."
As Ripper parked the car, he became acutely aware that he looked like he'd slept in a muddy field. However, that turned out not to be a problem, as almost all of the other customers looked that way too. There was a lone family of conventional neatness hunkering down at one of the back tables, but otherwise it was wall-to-wall tunics, head-bands and really wide coats.
They picked out a table and Ripper went to the counter. He was very hungry now, so he ordered a coffee and a large breakfast. Then he found he had less money than he thought he had. Enough, but not much.
"I forgot to ask Randall for the petrol money," he told Ethan when he came back to the table. "And I won't get paid again until Saturday."
Ethan looked mildly sympathetic.
"Aren't you having anything?" Ripper asked him.
"I have fifty pence left in the entire world," said Ethan. "And it's not going to be a good afternoon for busking."
"Can't you borrow money from the household kitty until you can make some?"
"I suppose so." He came back with a cup of tea and a plate of gammon and eggs.
"I have to give you an apology," said Ripper, around a mouthful of bacon and toast. "All this time I've been thinking you dress like a common or garden hippy."
"Oh?"
Ripper waved in the direction of man wearing a buckskin shirt and a hat sporting a small pair of antlers. "Now I see that in fact that you dress like a conservative hippy."
"And who are you supposed to be?" asked Ethan. "Marlon Brando?"
"I'm aiming more for Mick Jagger."
"Then you're bit wide of the mark."
Ripper looked down at the mud and blood on his jacket. "Do you think we could do something similar?" The loci spell, I mean."
Ethan raised both his eyebrows and looked out the window.
"Well?"
"Sorry, I was just trying to imagine what the genius loci of Camden Town would be like."
"Of course, we wouldn't want to do something that large, given that one took fifty people and rather more goat blood than I'm comfortable with."
"I don't know. There's nothing in Spivak even vaguely like that. That owl's about the largest entity I've ever summoned."
"Would be good though."
"Yes," said Ethan.
They finished their meals. Back in the car, Ripper asked, "Why don't you normally go to midsummers?"
Ethan grimaced. "The complex web of obligation. I have to work out who's there, who's not there, who's not speaking to whom, who expects me to drop by, who would rather I didn't, and who's going to be mortally offended if I don't. I mean, it's interesting hanging out with the more powerful wizards, but why would they want you there with them? You're either irritating them or treated like a pet. You spend the whole time wondering what their hidden motives are. It's just easier to stay at home."
"You wouldn't go for the music?"
"No," said Ethan, smiling.
"But last night's spell--"
"I've never been invited to something like that before. And I don't think Evelyn has either. She looked almost as bad as you did this morning. I think she told the others we were her apprentices to get us in."
"We're not, though. I mean, not remotely."
"She does play things fast and loose."
"Who was the man leading the spell?"
"Never seen him before," said Ethan. "You?"
"No. That was really something though, wasn't it? You know, I've really enjoyed this trip."
"Well then," said Ethan, "we'll go again next year."
49.
They got back to the house around two, after half an hour of steady rain.
Ripper went upstairs to get washed while Ethan made himself a pot of tea. He drank it in the kitchen, listening to the rain and the sounds the pipes made as Ripper filled the bath. The rest of the house was empty. He checked the kitty and found exactly five pence. He wondered what bastard had taken the rest.
When it was his turn, he had a long bath, washing mud and blood and who knew what else from his skin and hair. He took particular care cleaning the palms of his hands. His clothes were stained, probably permanently, which was rather a pity for the coat. Maybe he could pick up another cheap one, or dye this one a colour that didn't show up the blood.
He went upstairs in his dressing gown, and found Rupert in his room, kneeling on the edge of the mattress. He had a piece of chalk in his hand and was drawing on the floorboards, sketching out the complicated pattern used for that morning's spell. He was wearing a clean pair of jeans and an unbuttoned shirt.
Ethan fetched another colour of chalk and went to sit next to Rupert. "That isn't quite right," he said, pointing to one section. "Not all of the circles were concentric. Two interlinked." He reached over to correct this.
"Can you remember what happened over here?" Rupert asked.
"No, I don't think we could see it from where we were sitting."
"Perhaps we could work it out from analogy?" He drew a smaller pattern on a separate section of the floor. "I've seen this one before, I think." He frowned. "I'm afraid I didn't bring any of my books with me. I'm having to do this all from memory."
"Why didn't you bring them?"
"They didn't really belong to me," Rupert said. "On loan."
"Your family's?"
"They didn't really approve of me going into music."
Rupert's expression was of happy intellectual engagement, tinged with wistful regret. The combination so moved Ethan that he had to turn away in case Rupert saw his expression too clearly. He went to the locked steel box where he kept the items he most valued. He pulled out a copy of Ogata and passed it to Rupert. "There might be something in that."
Rupert fetched his glasses from his room and then Ethan looked over his shoulder as they flicked through it. "That's the one," said Ethan, pointing.
Rupert rotated the book upside down, to better match the pattern in front of them. "Standard invocation to a major power, modified to indicate that no material manifestation is requested."
"Did you recognise the language our lead caster began in?"
"Absolutely no idea. And you know, I can actually recognise quite a few. Did you?"
"Not at all. I did memorise most of the Latin though." He reached over for a pad of paper and pencil and started to write.
Rupert watched as Ethan wrote as far as the bottom of the page. "That's rather impressive," he said.
"Well, it was my best subject at school."
"What else was there?" Rupert pondered. "The skulls were all from species native to Britain. No rabbits, for example."
"Yes," said Ethan. " I hadn't noticed that. I wonder if that's due to conservatism among the spellcasters though. You'd think Salisbury Plain would have got the hang of rabbits by now."
"Did it have to be goat blood?"
"I understand that it depends on the invoked entity. Some are rather traditionalist while others will settle for any kind of ruminant or any kind of blood at all. I even heard a story where a trickster god settled for Heinz tomato sauce, but I don't know that I believe it."
Rupert laughed. He looked down at their hour's work. "I do think we're rather good at this."
Ethan had thought he was both too tired and too wired for sex, but he was beginning to change his mind, especially when Rupert lay back on the bed.
"But what entity would we summon?" Rupert asked.
Ethan leant over him. "We don't have to decide that right now, do we?"
"I suppose not," said Rupert.
Ethan thought he agreed with Rupert's Watcher family on at least one thing: music was not really Ripper's vocation.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-15 01:49 pm (UTC)Also, ominous hints at the end there that they're getting out of their depth.