Born Again Read online

  Peter eyed him, then dropped his bags by the door to put on his coat. “I’m bringing some extra things, okay? Your place isn’t exactly the Hyatt. Not even a three-star hotel.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  With his coat on, Peter slipped the backpack over his shoulders and grabbed the duffel bag. “I know I’m sleeping on your couch.”

  “So?”

  “When was the last time you cleaned it?” Peter opened his door, turned the lock on the inside, and stepped into the hallway.

  Ben took a minute to catch up. “You clean your couch?”

  7

  Ben only got a few more hours of sleep after they got to his place a little before 4:30 a.m. It wasn’t exactly easy forcing himself to calm down enough to pass out. Plus, he’d started to worry a little more about Peter. The drive back down mostly empty streets seemed enough time for his friend to snap out of whatever weird mood he’d been in, and he’d been his completely normal, annoying self by the time he was spreading his overly washed blankets out on the couch and pulling his own stupid pillow out of that duffel bag. That only strengthened Ben’s awful feeling that leaving Peter around the demon stone for as long as they had—just the last two days—was doing something funky with the guy’s head.

  He woke up at 9:30 feeling like crap. Peter was already awake when Ben shuffled out into the living room, and the guy had definitely made himself at home. The fact that he’d put a pot of coffee on took priority over everything else; Ben made his way to the coffeemaker first, hoping it would make a difference as quickly as he needed it. He felt like he’d been trampled.

  “When did you get up?” he grunted after the first sip. Why wasn’t there a quicker way to caffeinate than drinking it?

  “About an hour,” Peter replied flatly.

  Ben finally looked at him and found the guy huddled on his couch over a textbook, of all things. “And you feel awesome enough to study?”

  “Light reading.” Peter didn’t even look up from the page.

  “That’s not light.”

  After a few more seconds, Peter closed the book and set it down on the couch. “I wanted to get something done today for class. I already sent the emails that I’d be taking another day out.” He shrugged. “I actually kinda feel bad about it this time.”

  Peter’s instructors definitely already knew the drill with this particular student. The guy pretty much handed them an instruction manual when they passed out the syllabus at the beginning of each semester. He got sick. A lot. The hemophilia and the asthma were always running in the background, but he got lots of infections and bad colds, and every one of them hit him hard. It was actually kind of amazing that he was about to graduate after the same four years as almost everyone else. But when Peter wasn’t wiped out by some kind of illness, he was shockingly efficient.

  “Is this seriously the first time you’ve ever called out sick and actually weren’t?” Ben smirked into his coffee cup.

  His friend glared at him. “So?”

  “So you get to spend your first day playing hooky on campus anyway, buddy.”

  Peter shook his head and somehow managed to shove the textbook into his backpack with everything else in there. “Ready when you are.”

  “I just gotta get dressed,” Ben said, taking another gulp before he just couldn’t stand it anymore. “I wanna stop somewhere first before we hit up the library. You make the weakest coffee I’ve ever had.”

  With a dismissive grunt, his friend just sat back against the couch. “Hurry up.”

  After stopping at a bagel shop on Burbank for breakfast and a real cup of coffee, they stepped out of Ben’s car in the student parking lot and headed through the chilly morning air to the Mugar Memorial Library on campus. Most of the students were either in class or in the stacks, and when they stepped inside, it was just a little too crowded for Ben’s comfort. But he dealt with it just like he had for the last three and a half years. At least in the middle of the morning on a Monday, it wasn’t as busy as it could have been.

  “Hold on a sec,” Peter said, stopping at one of the tables beside the checkout desk. Ben stood there and watched the guy thunk his ridiculously heavy backpack onto the table before rummaging through its swelling contents. The same could have been said for Ben’s own bag—which he obviously hadn’t brought with him today, because why?—but he really only carried his stuff around with him when he went out to a coffee shop for research reading or when he just needed all his material in one place so he wouldn’t forget where he’d left it. He didn’t exactly go to class, seeing as he’d basically been building his own angelology major as he went, occasionally checking in for the loose and extremely laid-back guidance of his curriculum supervisor Dr. Montgomery. Just another thing on the list of what made Ben Robinson so very different than most other people.

  Peter looked so guilty when he found the book he was looking for, and Ben wondered for a second if the university library checked out pornos. No. That was stupid.

  Then he recognized the gilt letters on the plastic-wrapped cover and winced. “Crap.”

  “Yeah,” Peter almost whispered. “I got a few emails about it, but…” He shrugged. But they’d been busy hunting down and capturing demons, like The Lesser Key of Solomon in Peter’s hand had taught them to do. “I should probably return it.”

  “I mean, you’re the one getting charged the late fee,” Ben said, but that didn’t actually make him feel any better. It could just as easily have been him with a massively overdue library book in his hand; he’d wanted to check it out almost two months ago, when he’d realized he wanted to fight back against all the crappy spirits and evil forces that seemed to mess with him no matter what he did to avoid it. As it turned out, Peter had gotten to the book first, and when that little mystery had been solved, they’d both realized they had some work to do. Namely learning how to summon demons; their trial run had been terrifyingly successful.

  “Hey, librarians are supposed to know all about what kinda books they have in the system, right?” Peter zipped up his backpack and slung it on again. Then he grabbed the book and tucked it under his arm.

  “Probably,” Ben replied. But when he glanced back at the checkout desk, any hope of getting help today went right down the drain. “She’s not going to help us, though.”

  Peter followed his gaze. “Why?”

  “Last time I talked to her, she acted like I was the worst thing that ever happened.”

  Scoffing, Peter passed him and headed toward the desk. “She was nice enough to me.”

  Oh, great. Good to know it was a personal thing, then.

  He followed Peter to the front desk, all but hiding behind his friend’s massive backpack. The woman behind the desk didn’t look up at their approach, even when Peter cleared his throat and said, “Good morning.”

  “What can I do for you?” she asked, staring at her computer screen and typing furiously at something. Her name was Anita; Ben thought he’d remembered it before he saw it written across her nametag again, but he couldn’t be sure. Not like it mattered. Her attitude hadn’t changed a bit.

  “Uh, I’m returning a book,” Peter said, “and I know it’s really overdue. I just wanted to make sure it got back into somebody’s hands instead of dropping it off.”

  The woman with short gray hair—most likely in her late fifties or early sixties—extended a hand over the top of the counter without looking away from her screen. Peter glanced at Ben, then hefted The Lesser Key of Solomon into her hand with a grimace. Of course, she hadn’t been prepared for its weight, which pinned her hand on top of the counter and made her finally look up. Anita stared at the book, raised an eyebrow, then blinked through her frameless glasses at the two undergrad students standing in front of her desk like grade-school kids called to the principal’s office. “If you’re sure it’s late, you’ll most likely need to pay a fine.”

  Peter shrugged. “Sure.”

  Her eyes flickered quickly to Ben, then s
he lifted the returned book with both hands and pulled it toward herself off the counter. A red scanner laser flashed against the barcode, and she returned to her computer screen. “Mr. Cameron,” she said, her eyes roaming over the backlit monitor, “you owe the university library twenty-five dollars for the late return of this book.”

  “What?” Peter shouted. When Anita’s gaze whipped up to ensnare him, he lowered his voice back to library standards. “I’m sorry. I just thought it would be like a few bucks or something.”

  Anita pursed her lips. “It would have been, but this book was recalled almost seven weeks ago. When that happened, you incurred the initial fine of five dollars, followed by a daily fee of two dollars and fifty cents. The maximum fee for an overdue book that has been recalled is twenty-five dollars, unfortunately. Otherwise, you would have owed much more than this.”

  Ben fought so hard against the urge to whistle. Twenty-five bucks was a lot for a library book, yeah, but Peter wasn’t balking at the fee. It was the principal of it. And Anita the librarian was as tight-laced and strictly by-the-book as they came, apparently. Maybe even a robot for all the expression in her face when she spoke.

  “Okay,” Peter said, blinking furiously while he dug his wallet out of his back pocket. “Why was it recalled?”

  “Someone else wanted to check out the book and submitted a recall request.”

  Peter laughed at that, hunching his shoulders in surprise. “Seriously? Who else could have actually wanted to—” Anita’s eyes flickered toward Ben, and Peter turned to look at him too. Then he dropped his hands to his sides with a theatrical sigh. “Dude.”

  Yes, Ben had put the recall on the Demon-Summoning for Idiots with a Death Wish book, but at the time, he hadn’t known who’d checked it out before him. Peter had been sitting on that secret for a few days anyway before finally coming around to admit that they both needed to go back to that old house in Oakwood Valley—for Ian.

  “I’ll… buy you lunch or something, okay?” He shrugged at Peter, not even wanting to attempt defending himself under the twin glares of both his friend and super-librarian Anita.

  ‘Aw, what a nice way to say thank you,’ Ian added.

  Shut it.

  Peter snorted. “A big lunch.” Shaking his head, he slipped a credit card out of his wallet and set it on the desk. “Sorry about that.”

  Anita took his card without meeting his gaze—duh—and charged him the obnoxious overdue-book fee. Peter slipped his fingers through the straps of his backpack and swung his head back toward Ben. Ben shrugged. Again.

  When the emotionless librarian returned his card, Peter asked, “Would you happen to know if there are any more books like that one here?”

  “Such as?” The woman’s fingers had returned to their frantic key-pounding, and Ben had a feeling that whatever she was doing now had nothing to do with either of them anymore.

  “Like, uh…”

  “Like, that book was about summoning demons, which was cool,” Ben offered. He was willing to take on the humiliation of talking about this stuff in public if it meant they might actually get more useful information. His ego was a lot smaller than, oh, the importance of not being killed by the things they were going after. “We’re trying to find something more along the lines of, like, what to do after that. Or how to keep them…” He raised his hands and mimed holding something like a basketball.

  “Contained,” Peter added.

  “Yeah. Contained.” Holy crap, they sounded like complete idiots.

  For a few seconds, Anita just kept typing. And she didn’t stop when she said, “All books with similar content, themes, or within the same genre are categorized and shelved together. It’s called the Library of Congress Classification System.”

  “Yeah, we know how it works,” Ben muttered. He couldn’t help it; this lady was a real piece of work.

  His comment, though, made her swivel her head away from her computer and up to pin him under her gaze. “Then I suggest you look through the section where you found the last book you wanted.” No smile. No ‘Good luck, boys.’ Not even an offer to help if they couldn’t find what they were looking for.

  Ben rolled his eyes. “Hey, that’s a great idea,” he said and slapped Peter’s distended bookbag with the back of his hand. “Let’s go.” He stalked off toward the back of the library and heard Peter actually thank the woman before his friend caught up with him. “You just thanked the least helpful person in the world,” Ben told him as they headed toward the religion section. “After she took your money.”

  “Your money,” Peter corrected. “You’re paying me back.”

  They spent two hours in the religion section, which wasn’t exactly small. Ben understood relatively well how university libraries categorized and organized their books on the shelves, mainly because he’d spent his entire undergraduate career scouring this same section. Technically, his major was theology with a specialization in angelology. This was his way to hide the fact that he’d be repaying ridiculous sums of his student loans in a few years just so he could use a university setting and resources—and at this point the rather flippant benefit of a degree—to submerge himself in everything he could possibly find about demons. Before the voices had returned and he’d nearly escaped being a demon’s barbeque dinner in that frat house, Ben had thought the only thing he wanted out of his undergraduate work—and life, basically—was to arm himself with defensive knowledge and make absolutely sure no demon or evil spirit or whatever could possibly screw with him the way the Guardian had screwed with him and Peter as kids. Of course, they’d only known the thing as a man who’d called himself Constantine eleven years ago, but same demon.

  That frat-house party turned demon’s convection oven had changed Ben’s entire outlook on what his life had become; that was the moment he could actually do something to keep the demons from getting to him first—or anyone else. That he could go after them. Now, if he made it through their attempts with the nasty spirit-thing at Buckley Playground tonight, he realized he still had to officially change his undergraduate dissertation from his crawling-under-a-rock analysis to this new go-get-‘em bravery. Or stupidity. Those were often the same thing, weren’t they?

  But he only gave his college education a few fleeting moments. If he and Peter couldn’t figure out how to keep the current demon in the stone from breaking out again—so they could use the metal box and a new stone on the demon at the park tonight, and also because the one in Peter’s apartment was getting really creepy—his chances of ever having the time or being alive long enough to write this final dissertation were considerably lower.

  So many books on witchcraft, demonology as it pertained to cultural evolution, the implications of compared religions each believing in demons, blah, blah, blah. There were even a few collected essays on The Lesser Key of Solomon that had nothing to do with what that ridiculously useful and highly dangerous book could actually help someone achieve—namely summoning real, actual spirits and making them do stuff. Naturally, there was absolutely nothing within the thousands of volumes that gave them anything useful. Of course. Why would anything ever be easy and straightforward for Ben Robinson?

  Finally, they had to call it quits to get some lunch. “Yeah, I’ll buy you a nice lunch, okay?” Ben said as they made their way back to the front of the library. “Just don’t pick like a sixteen-ounce steak or something. You get twenty-five bucks. That’s it.”

  “Great.” Peter tightened the straps on his massively heavy backpack. “Should we come back after lunch? I mean, there still might be something here.”

  Ben winced. “Yeah, there might be. I don’t know what’s gonna help us more. Reading through every book on every shelf that’s even remotely related to what we’re looking for or just Googling it. Right? ‘How to keep a demon trapped in a crystal from escaping again.’”

  “Couldn’t hurt.” Peter snorted. “It’s not like our reputations are on the line or anything. Take your pick, and I’ll just do th
e other one.”

  “I’ll keep at it with the actual books,” Ben said. He tried to stay away from the internet for a lot of reasons—one of them being that his name popped up a lot when he was in high school, and it wasn’t because he made captain of the football team or won a scholarship. Neither of which he’d actually done. And all the only slightly related links leading to one webpage after another shoved him down a rabbit hole he couldn’t even see. At least in the shelves of books, he could physically reorient himself to the library’s exit sign.

  Past the front desk now and almost at the library doors, Ben felt a tingle on the back of his neck, like he was being watched. He turned his head just a little to see librarian Anita sitting there at her post, but her eyes didn’t move an inch from that computer screen.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ian offered, ‘I felt like she was watching us too.’

  8

  Peter only made him spend twenty dollars on lunch—a massive chicken wrap, salad, two different energy drinks, and a bag of chips—which brought the whole thing to literally just a few cents under twenty-five bucks. Obnoxiously high recalled-book fee settled. Ben had a sandwich and a glass of water.

  They did return to the library afterwards for another two hours, and of course, they didn’t find anything remotely useful. Ben did stumble across a collection of Wiccan rituals, which made him think of Dr. Montgomery and the conversation they’d had about substituting listed ingredients. That had been his attempt to ask his curriculum supervisor if she thought making his own charcoal ink at home and skipping the rooster-blood part found in The Lesser Key of Solomon would alter the “ritual” in any way. He’d been trying to avoid blowing themselves up or something the first time they’d summoned the demon Ebra; of course, Dr. Montgomery hadn’t known any of the truth behind his questions at the time. She still didn’t. Probably for the best.

  It was already almost dark by the time they stepped out of the library a little after 4:00 p.m. They had nothing but a demon-filled crystal threatening to quit on them and a super disgusting and dangerous bully demon on the playground to get to soon. Apparently, Peter had also completely wasted his first real day of playing hooky from school, but he seemed only marginally annoyed by that fact. The rest of it was a little more important.