Read Red Equinox for Free Online Page B

dressed in a gray suit, tousling his long black curls with his fingers to cover his horns, and stirring the wisps of lazy blue fire that played in his locks.
    At the corner of Commonwealth and Charlesgate the Fenway Towers reared into the purpling dusk: a marvel of red brick, vine-inscribed stone, and mint-green copper, crowned with sandstone finials and iron gates along the roof.
    He had absorbed enough energy on his walk through the marshes to push his form into an almost material range, enough to make it difficult not to see him, but not enough for his hands to manipulate objects like door handles. He glided through the plate-glass door into a lobby lit by wall sconces in the shape of frosted glass seashells, and stepped up to a desk of gold-flecked green marble.
    The concierge was a young man in a dark blue blazer and crisp white shirt, with impeccably trimmed sideburns that stretched as his jaw worked a stick of gum. His brushed nickel nametag read “Gordon Shea,” but Nereus Charobim didn’t look at it; he plucked the name from the man’s mind like a card from a deck.
    “Gordon,” Charobim said without moving his lips, “You have a vacant unit, do you not?” The ambient light from the seashells pulsed with the syllables of the pharaoh’s telepathic speech, and Gordon Shea turned his head slowly to one side to watch it. Charobim knew what the man was seeing. To his human vision, it would look as if the individual photons from the incandescent lights were gliding slowly away from their source, like beads of dew running along a string, and when Charobim spoke, it was like a subwoofer in a passing car was causing those beads to buzz and blur and speed their way across the room. The sight mesmerized the clerk, and he realized that although the visitor knew his name, he no longer did: a plucked card that the magician had pocketed while he was distracted by the light show.
    “Am I having a migraine?” Gordon asked.
    “No,” Charobim replied, somehow making the single syllable melodious.
    Gordon had stopped chewing his gum, and his jaw hung slack. “Do you see those beads of light? The way they’re pulsing?” He laughed at the absurdity of his own question.
    Charobim studied him patiently with a not unkind smile on his face, an African face of a kind that had not been seen in this city for a very long time, save in the statues enshrined on the second floor of the MFA. He knew that Gordon Shea would now be realizing that he felt rather drunk and would feel a dim sense of alarm at the possibility that he was indeed drunk, an alarm heard distantly through a wooly dream, like pain in an anesthetized limb. Mr. Shea would be aware that his boss would not abide drunkenness on the job. Unable to recall the name of his boss, he would nonetheless retain the core fear imprinted on all primates, no matter how sheltered, before they reached puberty—that the meal ticket might be revoked.
    Gordon’s gaze had been drawn to the seashell sconces again, and Charobim wished he could drum his long brown fingers against the desktop to politely regain the man’s attention. Instead, he sighed, and the lights flared, and the concierge looked at him, a wave of relief breaking across his brow as he remembered that this man , right here, the one who had asked about a vacant unit, was his boss. Of course he was. Gordon typed on his keyboard and told his boss, “Yes, sir, we do. Number seventy-two.”
    “Perfect. Fetch the key.”
    The wide drawer below the keyboard slid open on smooth rollers, and the concierge produced a key attached to a ring with a wooden diamond, the number 72 inlaid on it in what looked like mother of pearl. My, but this place was fit for a king . Nereus Charobim smiled at the number. It reminded him of evocations he could neither recall nor recite in this weak incarnation, of books he could no longer read. It reminded him of his old friend and rival, Solomon, who had trapped 72 demons in a box, and of the