Doppelgangster - Laura Resnick [29]
“You solved your feather problem?” I asked as I swept the floor.
Max paused in his efforts to clean up the sticky blue ooze and gestured to the massive dog, who lay on the floor assiduously licking a blue-stained paw. “As you see,” he said.
“I see a dog,” I said. The huge animal had short, smooth, tan-colored hair, with a darker face and paws, and a long, square-jawed head. “Part Great Dane, I think?”
Max’s baby blue eyes widened beneath bushy white brows. “Oh, no, Esther. No. This isn’t a dog.” He glanced anxiously at the beast, as if fearful my comment had caused offense. “I have conjured a familiar!”
I looked at the dog. It looked back at me. Despite its immense size, its floppy ears were too big for its head. Its long pink tongue hung out of its mouth as it panted cheerfully at me.
“This is a familiar?” I said.
The dog burped.
“Yes.” Max beamed at me.
I supposed this explained (somehow or other) the wet dog fur odor I’d smelled floating up from the cellar when Max first confronted his conjured companion down here. And the explosion Lucky and I had heard must have signaled the creature’s arrival. Magic sure was noisy.
“What’s its name?” I asked.
“She has chosen to be known in this dimension as Nelli,” Max said, his flawless English bearing only the faintest trace of his origins in eastern Europe centuries ago.
“Your familiar is named Nelli?”
He nodded. “I believe it’s an homage to the great Fulcanelli.”
“Who was that?”
Max look surprised at my ignorance. “An early twentieth-century alchemist of great renown. Author of The Mystery of the Cathedrals. Fulcanelli’s writings influenced my thinking on transmutation, the phonetic cabala of Gothic architecture, and sacred geometry.”
“I guess it’s always good to keep learning,” I said.
“Alas we never met. But no doubt Nelli chose her name because she shares my feelings of affinity with the great Fulcanelli’s work.”
“No doubt,” I said, glancing at the drooling dog. “But you seemed sort of, um, disconcerted by Nelli when I arrived.”
“I had not expected quite so large a canine,” Max confessed. “For a few moments, I thought I had made a dreadful mistake and conjured some sort of . . .”
“Hellhound?”
“Precisely.”
I looked at Max’s familiar again. As we exchanged gazes, Nelli began wagging her tail. It was long and thick, and its wagging carried enough force to knock over a floor lamp.
I caught the lamp before it fell. “But, Max, I thought familiars were always, you know, black cats or something.”
“Cats can be familiars,” Max said, “but it’s not as prevalent as people think. That was mostly a rumor started in the sixteenth century by men who resented widows who preferred acquiring a good mouser to acquiring a second husband.”
“So a dog can be a familiar?”
“A familiar can take any animal form it chooses,” Max explained. “My difficulty in summoning this one was—Well, in point of fact, my first mistake was in assigning the task to Hieronymus, as you may recall.”
“I don’t think he was making the effort he told you he was making.”
“Indeed, no. And since his dissolution—”
“Let’s not use that word,” I suggested, thinking anxiously about Lopez, various episodes of Crime and Punishment, and my desire to stay out of prison. “Let’s get into the habit of saying since he left. Okay?”
“Of course, Esther. If that will make you more comfortable.”
“It will.”
“Since Hieronymus left, I have found the demands of protecting New York City from Evil to be a little overwhelming on my own, so I’ve been increasingly anxious to find a familiar to support my efforts until the Magnum Collegium can send me another assistant.” He added a little bitterly, “Preferably one who doesn’t want to take over New York by demonic means and, in the process, kill most of its citizens.”
“So you kept trying to summon a familiar after Hieronymus left?” I finished my sweeping and poured a dustpan’s worth of disgusting substances into the urn that served as a garbage can.
“Yes, but I mistakenly interpreted the spirit I was summoning as avian