“Do not curse, Seléne,” my mother scolded. “It is unfitting for a messiah.”

“I’m not a messiah.”

“Of course you are. Everyone believed in the beginning, when you were a child, but their faith wavered when they became impatient for results. They doubted us. Talked behind our backs.”

My father nodded. “They made us doubt it too. When your powers didn’t manifest at puberty, we were all confused. We waited and hoped for several years, but nothing happened. You wore the silver crown of the messiah, but did not wield her power.”

“Who cares? Why are you talking about all this crazy stuff? What about the council? I came to prove your innocence—the Luxe Order will start a war if we don’t.”

My father laughed. “Let them! Once the ritual is complete tonight, there won’t be a single magician in the world who will doubt us or wield enough power to stop us.”

“Besides,” my mother added in a practical voice, “we aren’t innocent.”

I looked back and forth between them, my altered vision making it hard for me to differentiate who was who.

“We killed the three,” my mother said … or maybe my father. “Our plan was to kill all five heads of the major orders, but we were sloppy.”

“You—”

“When you didn’t manifest the Moonchild powers, it hurt our reputation as magicians. No one believed in our abilities anymore. People stopped inviting us to conferences to speak. Our book sales declined. Your father lost his job.”

“We realized that we had to do something big to shake things up,” my dad explained. “You don’t build a new city without razing the old one. And we tore it all down.”

My world began shattering. As pieces broke off, I tried my best to catch them before they were lost forever, but it was happening too fast. “Tore what down?”

“The entire occult community!” My father swept his hand across his throat. “We tried to get the orders to unite under a larger umbrella—”

“What?” I said in disbelief. “You killed those people because they wouldn’t back your stupid United Occult Order? You can’t be serious.”

“No, this is much bigger. It stands to reason if you take out the leaders, the order weakens. So in that regard, we succeeded. But we were also experimenting with an old, rare spell. One that Frater Blue helped us find. It enabled us to siphon the Heka from dying magicians and absorb it into ourselves.”

I recalled the white demon’s goetia entry: She can be forced to answer those questions regarding the Harvesting of Æthyric energy. Dear God, they were using her to harvest Heka from the murder victims?

“This increased our Heka reserves and created chaos among the orders at the same time—killed two birds with one stone, so to speak.” My father gave me his used-car-salesman smile; I thought I might be sick. “And it worked beautifully. We are so much stronger from conducting those rituals. We’d be even stronger if the Luxe Order hadn’t meddled. That ruined everything.”

My mother nodded with a pained expression, remembering. “It was a terrible time for your father and me. We felt as if we’d failed twice. Once in conceiving you, and then the Black Lodge scandal …”

“I was a mistake?”

My father shook his head. “That’s what we thought, but we were wrong. You, little butterfly, were not a failure at all, but our greatest success. Once we left you in the States, we found a cache of old grimoires in France. And that’s where we discovered a journal kept by a magician and his wife in the twelfth century. They completed the Moonchild ritual, and like us, thought it failed. But they had expected results too soon. The power wasn’t supposed to manifest at puberty. It came later.”

My mother pressed her hands together. “You are a modified human, able to evoke beings from the Æthyr at will. Able to control them without drawing the messy seals. Inside, you have the ability to summon not one demon, but an entire army! Imagine that—an entire legion of servants ready to do your bidding. A god’s power inside a human body. You, my love, are progress.”

“The new Aeon,” my father announced proudly. “Your power will allow us to usher in a new age. An Aeon ruled not by the laws of earth and man, but by the laws of the cosmos and the strength of the Æthyr! Your birth was engineered to save this world. Transform it. Cleanse it.”

“Oh my God, you’re both out of your fucking minds!” I said, laughing hysterically. “I’m not progress—your stupid Moonchild ritual didn’t work! I’ve got a halo and can see Earthbounds. Big deal. I still have to do the spells the same old way anyone else does them—by hand. And …” I instantly realized my error. “The incubus in the Hellfire caves. I was using Heka to kindle moon power …”

My mother straightened her robes, smoothing out the lines around her waist. “You’ve had only a taste of it. As we learned from that twelfth-century grimoire, your powers don’t fully manifest until you’re mature. The age of your magical maturity, twenty-five, will occur in … fifteen minutes.”

Twenty-five. Traditionally, there is a public ritual marking a magical adept’s twenty-fifth birthday. The symbolic coming-of-age, like a quinceañera or bar mitzvah.

“We realized a way to bring everything together. Learned from our mistakes.” My mother’s brows darted up in smug excitement. “Siphoning Heka from other mundane magicians wasn’t enough. But we could apply the same technique to siphon something much more important.”