“No.”

“I didn’t either, at first,” he said. “Then I realized what it looked like—an astrological birth chart.”

I held it closer, turning it to catch the light better. “If it was in a circle, maybe.”

“Yes, if it was a chart from Earth, but what would one look like from another plane?”

He had my attention now, and he knew it. His brows lifted enthusiastically.

“Different plane, different planets? I’ve never considered it,” I admitted.

“Why would you? Who cares about Æthyric sun signs?”

“I barely care about mine.”

“Exactly.” He strode to his desk at the other side of the room. “But one of my rarer books—”

“One of the Vatican’s books?” I teased.

“Maybe.”

I snorted. “Go on.”

“This book has a strange chapter about planetary alignments. I never paid much attention to it—the planets are all wrong, so I thought it was just medieval hooey.”

“Hooey?”

One corner of his mouth curled. “You know as well as I do that there’s a lot of fucking hooey in thirteenth-century grimoires.” He marched back with a photocopy from the book and handed it to me.

I pretended to be offended as I snatched the paper from his fingers. “You don’t even trust me to look at the real thing? Is this from the Liber Sacer?”

“It’s in the preservation safe—I wasn’t going to leave it out until you came back home.” Yes, I’d heard all his grimoire-geek talk about how that particular book, and a few others like it, could “under no circumstances” disintegrate away in the air like the bogus transcribed copy in the Sloan Collection.

I was too tired even to roll my eyes. “What am I looking at?”

“Æthyric astrology, I think. See the diamond here?”

“Holy shit,” I muttered. He was right—had to be. The diamond was divided into quadrants and marked with small symbols that looked remarkably close to Earth’s planetary symbols, just cleaner—and oddly familiar. I glanced at Chora’s name etched into the silver tube, comparing. “The weird alphabet from the cannery!”

A proud smile spread across Lon’s face. “There’s more.”

He handed me another photocopy of the spell from the silver tube. His finger moved across the paper, pointing out seven letters within the strange text. I never would’ve been able to pick them out myself, but when he put the cannery photos in my lap, I made the connection immediately.

“Seven stars,” I murmured.

“Seven stars that open seven doors,” Lon said. “This spell opens doors between worlds.”

“Between earth and the Æthyr?” Definitely not good.

“They can only be opened during a planetary alignment.”

“One that occurs when Saturn completes an orbit?” I guessed.

“It’s not just about what’s going on here. It’s when Saturn’s orbit conjuncts with a planetary alignment in the Æthyric plane.”

“Alignments on both planes open doorways between.” I stared at the photos in fascination. “But are these doors temporary? Only open during the alignment, or . . . ?”

“Even if they were only open for a few hours of the earth alignment, it could be disastrous. All of the goetic information I can find on Chora jibes with what your incubus told us when he claimed that the duke controls two legions of Dragoons in the Æthyr. You remember the etching of that nasty Pegasus? Can you imagine what would happen if hundreds of Æthyric demonic warriors broke into our world riding beasts like that? What about thousands of them?”

I remembered the pointy teeth and scales on Grand Duke Chora’s winged horse and grimaced. “And if these are permanent portals between the planes . . . ?”

“Oh, we’re screwed.”

“So we know what the ritual is, and why it’s happening now, and we know that the kids are part of it. What went wrong back in the eighties? Why didn’t the doors open back then?”

“Maybe it had something to do with Cindy Brolin escaping.”

“They had to go with a second choice.”

“Maybe the second choice fouled up the ritual.”

I tucked my legs sideways in the chair. “Merrin bit Cindy when he tried to take her. What if he made a pact with Chora to allow the demon to possess him back then? Maybe with Chora inside him, he was able to taste something in the blood that was needed to ensure the ritual’s success.”

“It’s entirely possible. There’s been blood at some of the recent crime scenes.”

“Lon,” I said, “if the ritual failed the first time, it stands to reason that the demon’s going to try harder this time. That’s why he’s going after transmutated descendants. It’s not revenge against the Hellfire Club—Dare’s wrong again. There must be something stronger in the blood of those kids. You told Dr. Spendlove that your empathy is stronger than it was in either of your parents’ knacks.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe it’s because children of transmutated parents have fortified demon essence,” I said quietly. “And maybe that’s really why Jupe’s knack is stronger.”

Lon’s face fell.

“It’s just a theory,” I said quickly. “But it might explain why the demon is choosing these kids this time around. And as much as all of this explains the ‘why’ of things—and no matter how much warding magick I did today—we need to find Merrin more than ever.”