Free Summer's End by Lisa Morton

Conor?”
    He looked away, abashed. “Only
once…”
    “When you summoned the sidh .”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, at least we know it
works.” I enjoyed mustering that sarcasm; I still didn’t like Conor ó Cuinn,
despite the fact that we would soon be partners. “So…have you thought about
where…this…will happen tomorrow?”
    He nodded. “Mongfind specifies
that it must occur in a sacred oak grove. There isn’t much sacred here in
Southern California, but at least there are plenty of oaks.”
    Touche. I had to admire the way
he’d just repaid my sarcasm. “Thousand Oaks [19] ,
perhaps?”
    “Actually…yes. I’ll e-mail you
directions.”
    We sat silently for a moment;
when we weren’t discussing the supernatural, we really had nothing in common.
After a while, Conor said, “You understand that there is an element of danger
to us in this.”
    I wasn’t sure if he meant the
ritual or kidnapping someone to be offered as a blood sacrifice. “Do you
mean…?”
    “Summoning Bal-sab. That’s why
the first part of the ritual calls for the creation of a protected space.”
    Of course I’d read Mongfind’s
description of encountering Bal-sab, but I realized only now that I’d still
thought of it as fiction. A real encounter with a physical representation of
Death…do any of us know ourselves well enough to perfectly anticipate how we’ll
react when confronted with something genuinely terrifying?
    “Then we’ll just have to be
sure we create that space well, won’t we?”
    That shut him up.
    The rest of the meeting was
devoted to lunch. We ate quickly and quietly. A last meal? Or the last meal of
an old world?
    As we finished, Conor asked,
“Do you know where you’ll look for your wand? Maybe you’ve got a special park
you like, a garden…?”
    “I do know, but it’s…neither of
those things.”
    He realized I had no interest
in sharing a private plan with him, and he accepted that without further argument.
“Well…tomorrow afternoon, then.”
    He left. I followed him out of
the restaurant, climbed in my car, and headed toward the 5 freeway. Even though
it was just past three p.m., traffic was heavy, and I headed south at barely
ten miles an hour.
    What will this all be like, if
we succeed? Will there still be traffic jams, road rage, smog, hundred-degree
fall temperatures thanks to global warming, gas at five dollars a gallon,
increasing ranks of homeless, greedy corporate heads, ambitious politician, junkies,
cancer, and all the other things that grind us down every day even as we take
them for granted?
    It was hard to imagine a
renaissance in the middle of the SoCal metro sprawl.

 
     
     
     
    October 30
    -
    October 31
     
     
    I left the freeway at Cesar Chavez
Avenue and headed east. My destination was only a mile from the freeway.
    When Conor had mentioned a
“special tree,” my thoughts had immediately gone to a photo I’d taken sometime
in the early 1980s. Back then, I’d briefly considered going into professional
photography for my day job, and I’d worked to assemble a portfolio. One day,
completely by accident, I’d stumbled across an amazing cemetery just east of
downtown L.A. At the time I didn’t know that Evergreen Cemetery was the oldest
extant cemetery in Los Angeles, but its melancholy beauty, age, and hodgepodge
of monuments and headstones had yielded some of my best photos.
    My real prize, however, was a
picture of a gigantic spreading oak that overlooked a significant chunk of the
graveyard. In the final black-and-white print, the tree looked impossibly huge,
and somehow wise.
    I knew exactly where to find my
wand.
    At this time of the afternoon,
on a weekday, the cemetery was mostly deserted. I was also saddened to see that
it had fallen into some disrepair in the years since I’d last visited, but I
spotted the oak easily enough, and parked as near to it as I could.
    Evergreen dated back to 1877
and supposedly held some 300,000 interments. There were no superstars