Bad Luck, Baby

25 - Bad Business

"Cold in here," Al remarked, rubbing his hands together as we entered my father's study.

He wasn't lying. The room was freezing, and as my breath clouded the air, I remembered it had been freezing the last time I was here, too—the day I met Ro. Then, I hadn't understood why (and I'd been too distracted by a cat turning into a man to care), but now I had a suspicion.

This suspicion was confirmed (and my hopes for a ghost-free evening dashed) when a quick sweep of the room revealed my father's shadowy figure lurking in the corner behind his desk.

Had he been there, watching me, the last time, too? Why hadn't I seen him? Why hadn't he revealed himself to me or Ro?

I opened my mouth to ask as much when my father's eyes gleamed, and he shook his head, pointing a spectral finger at Al.

I shut my mouth again and frowned.

Al's gaze swept past my father without a pause, and if parakeets could see ghosts the way Ro said cats sometimes can, the little bird gave no sign. Ro caught my eye and raised his brows at me, and I nodded very slightly towards the corner. He gave me a barely perceptible nod in return and followed my lead.

For whatever reason, my father didn't want Al to know that he was there—in spirit, anyway—and for once, I had no desire to disobey him.

"Lords below," Al said wonderingly, examining the tall bookshelves lining the wall. "This is some collection. Some of these books are incredibly rare."

I perked up at that. "Are they valuable?" Maybe my dad had left some gems among the crap, after all.

Al nodded. "Valuable to the right people, sure. Some of them are also incredibly dangerous, and more than a few are restricted."

"Restricted?"

He pulled a book off the shelf and opened it. "You know that saying, 'Knowledge is power?' It's especially true of magic. Knowledge of certain spells, knowledge of a demon's name, knowledge of secrets known only to the initiated—all of those can be paths to power, and power is dangerous in the wrong hands."

"Or the right hands, sometimes," Ro commented, absently spinning the strange globe on its stand. "That was part of your father's duties, as Ivy Throne. He tracked down dangerous knowledge and confiscated it, and helped determine what should be restricted and what shouldn't. He was conservative, too, and that rubbed some the wrong way."

"Conservative?" I glanced in my father's direction, but he'd either left his corner or was no longer visible.

"Not in the usual political sense," Al said, "but philosophically, yes. He was careful and tended to rule on the side of caution when deciding what to restrict and to what degree it ought to be restricted. It didn't help that, to do his job, he routinely engaged in the highest levels of forbidden magic, himself."

I pulled the little chain dangling from the lamp on my father's desk and turned it on. It wasn't very bright, but it helped dispel a few more shadows. "At the Drake wedding, I... overheard you say that Lucian and my dad were researching something about... angels," I said. "Is that forbidden, too?"

A smile touched Al's mouth, and he glanced up at me from the book, the light of the green-shaded lamp flashing off his glasses. "Absolutely. Angels are, or were, beings of immense power. Some say that in their true form, they're taller than skyscrapers. If a demon like Ro is dynamite, an angel is a megaton bomb. Few have been foolish enough to attempt summoning one, and fewer of those have survived that attempt. Usually, all that's left as proof of the effort is a charred corpse. It's bad business."

"So... why was my dad looking into it?" I glanced at Ro, who continued to spin the globe lazily.

He shrugged. "If he was, he didn't tell me about it."