by Nazri Noor
“Don’t be sulky,” I said, draping an arm across his shoulders. Asher shrugged and harrumphed, but he didn’t shake me off. “All we’re saying is that we have to scale down here. Do you really think you’re powerful enough to dazzle a god of their caliber? I mean, I’m full of myself, but come on.”
“Excuse you.” He shrugged again, this time throwing my arm off his shoulders. “I am charming and delightful.”
“Well, you’re going to have to charm and delight someone a little closer to home,” Gil said. “A forest entity. What about, I don’t know, someone like Pan?”
I nodded, pursing my lips in approval. “Not a bad idea. Goat man? Sounds sexy. I’m into it.”
“Yeah, Pan sounds good.” Asher shook his head, glaring at me. “But don’t you go flirting with him. We’ve got enough problems without you trying to rub up against every single person we’ve met.”
“Whoa. Whoa, now.” I lifted my hands up, eyes wide in hyperbolic offense. “Our friendship would be a whole lot smoother if everyone wasn’t constantly trying to slut-shame me.”
Gil lowered his eyes and shook his head. “It’s a miracle he didn’t start humping Uriah’s monument on sight, honestly.”
“I’m right here, you jerks. Whatever. So what do we need to summon Pan?”
“On it,” Asher said, scrolling through his phone. “Pan, Pan. Satyr, god of the wilds and lust and drinking, etcetera. There. Huh. Well, this is vague. Says here that Pan is attracted by an offering of nature’s bounty.”
The two of us slowly craned our necks in Gil’s direction. He blinked at us, then scowled.
“Oh, no. You bastards. No way I’m carrying all that stupid fruit out into the middle of the forest.”
“We’re not asking you to,” I said sweetly.
“Yeah, Gil,” Asher cooed. “We just need you to put together a fruit basket.”
He threw up his hands and roared in frustration. “So I’m suddenly the gopher now? Why am I carrying shit and making fruit baskets?”
“Because you’re so good at it,” Asher said, batting his eyelashes.
“So good,” I repeated. “You know, I think I saw an old wicker basket in the kitchen. You can dust that off, put some fruit in it. And the basket would look extra nice if it had some wild flowers and mushrooms in it, too.”
“You’re both assholes,” Gil said, stomping off into the forest, clearly annoyed but obviously slightly tickled about being seen as so competent and useful.
I slunk over to Asher, digging my chin into his shoulder as I bent in for a closer look at his phone. “So where’s the tether? Do we know?”
Different entities took different precautions for their home dimensions, and access was normally only granted through a tether, a physical object or location that could serve as a gateway between our worlds. A powerful god might have a tether in every major city, the better for their supplicants to come and worship. There was this one guy whose tether was the same rundown apartment he lived in. Poor sap.
“Good news,” Asher said. “No tether. It’s just like Pan, too. Frivolous, wild, and unpredictable, so he wanders. We just need to lay down a circle, put in the offerings, and I’ll handle the summoning myself.”
“Blood and chanting?”
He squeezed his fingers in the air. “Little bit of blood, medium amount of chanting.”
I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Hey, Gil. What’s the status on those twigs and berries?”
Gil’s distant, shouted answer kindly invited me to suck several bags of dicks.
I shook my head pointedly at Asher. “He can be so rude sometimes.”
About fifteen minutes later, we locked up both the cabin and the car, then headed back into the forest. Any old clearing would do, Asher said, so we found an open patch of ground large enough to draw a circle that would fit us three. Asher pulled out a knife, tracing the summoning circle’s outline and digging an unbroken groove into the earth. It didn’t need to be perfect. It just needed to be.
We took our positions around the circle, forming a loose triangle, each of us facing the center, where the piece de resistance awaited.
“Beautiful work, Gil,” I said. It really was. Asher had selected the nicest bits of fruit from the crates. Gil had found some pretty flowers, a couple of glistening wild mushrooms, even a sprig of berries. Probably poisonous. Probably deadly. But that was Pan’s problem.
“Whatever,” Gil grumbled, looking away.
“It really is, I swear. You could work for Olivia part-time. Old Timmy needs all the help he can get.”
“Will you shut up already?” Asher barked. “We’re about to start.”
I lifted my hands, mouthing the word “Sorry” in as sarcastic a way as I could muster. Asher narrowed his eyes at me, then turned his focus onto the basket of fruit. He closed his eyes, and in words I couldn’t understand, he began to chant.
The words, like the circle, didn’t truly matter, not in their perfection, or shape, or sound. What the entities needed to know was your intent. Did you really want to meet them that badly? Did you really need their help? You could be reciting the ingredients for a pound cake, or reading a magazine article about stylish boots. This one guy I knew liked to read the text on a pack of doggie biscuits, so much that he memorized them.
I still couldn’t make out what Asher was saying under his breath, but I could definitely sense a change in the air. The wind felt like it had reversed directions, carrying leaves it had already brought through the clearing tumbling back around us. The beams of moonlight piercing the gaps in the forest canopy wavered, not pillars of silver, but undulating eels wriggling in the dark.
And then there it was, a distinct and eerie sound that told us Asher had successfully dialed the right number: the distant, sweet, yet sad music of a pan flute. Asher held out his hand, cutting the tip of one finger with the knife, squeezing a bead of blood onto the basket of fruit. It hissed as it touched the surface of a perfect pear, evaporating and turning into crimson smoke.
The flutes came closer, and closer. And then – and then the air smelled of tequila.
I sniffed, then glanced over at Gil. He nodded, then shrugged. He smelled it, too. Oh, not tequila anymore. Now it was whiskey. Then all at once, the pan flutes stopped. Asher fell silent, his incantations complete.
The clearing was silent, the air, perfectly still. And then came the voice.
“Over here, you dorks.”
I looked over my shoulder, and there he was, leaning with one hand against a tree, his other hand holding what looked exactly like an everyday smartphone. I squinted at Pan, then at the glowing device in his hand.
“Were you just playing a pan flute track on that thing?”
Pan sniffed in irritation. “Hey, it beats having to fart out a tune every time some lost mage in a forest needs me to show up and play boy scout. ‘Help me start a fire, Pan.’ ‘Help me find my way back to civilization.’ Please. Unless you’re having to nibble your own foot to survive, or maybe a friend’s, there’s zero need to call on me.”
“This is no mundane summoning, great Pan,” Asher said, his voice reverent, almost quivering. I stifled a giggle. He was doing it right, though – most entities liked it when you went all formal and sycophantic with them. Pan, though, cocked his eyebrow, then his hip.
“You can drop the fancy pants talk, necromancer. I hate it. Language is mutable. Talk to me in emojis, send me a text, I don’t give a shit. Let’s just get this over with.”
The god’s hooves plodded unsteadily into the grass as he approached the circle, every step thudding dully in the earth. He was exactly as described on the label: the hairy legs of a goat, the devilish horns, also of a goat, and totally naked otherwise. Not bad. He was kind of jacked. Satyr gods worked out, apparently. On a good day, Pan’s face might be described as impishly handsome. His goatee ended in a playful curl, his eyes black and twinkling, his grin as curved and bright as a crescent moon.
But only on a good day. This
Pan had seen some shit. This Pan just wanted a nightcap, and a tequila slammer. The smell of various kinds of liquor grew thicker in the air as Pan entered the circle. He stood over the fruit basket, frowning down at it like it had called his mother something extremely rude.
“What the hell is this? Fruit? The only way I’m eating that is if it’s cut up and sitting on the rim of a cocktail glass. With a tiny paper umbrella. Get with the program, boys.”
Asher barely moved a muscle. “So you’re saying you don’t want the fruit.”
“Fine, I’ll take the fucking fruit already,” Pan said, stomping his hooves like a sulking teenager, ducking down to swipe a pear from the top of the pile. He bit into it, the juices running through his beard, and chomped noisily. “Is he always like this?”
“You mean is he always a little nerd?” I said. “Yes.”
Pan thrust a finger at me, wagging it in approval. “See, this guy? This guy gets it. Vampire, aren’t you? Now this guy knows one or two things about drinking.”
Pear juice dripped from the end of Pan’s goatee. I clenched my fists and licked my lips. Yeah, I knew a thing or two about drinking, all right. I wasn’t so much a fan of goat’s blood. Satyr blood, though? And a satyr that was a god, to boot?
“Steady,” Gil mumbled, elbowing me in the ribs.
“You stay steady,” I said. “I’m perfectly fine.”
“Scoot over,” Pan said, inching himself between me and Asher, his butt thudding heavily on the ground as he plunked himself onto the grass. Uh-oh. Too close. Way too close. He threw back his head, nearly knocking over the basket when he stretched out his legs, then sighed.
“Rough night?” Gil said.
Pan shook his head, groaning. “You don’t know the half of it. It’s like every ten minutes there’s someone who wants something from me, and no one ever bothers to lure me over with a nice bottle of something.” He leaned over the fruit basket, picked up a mushroom, then licked gingerly at its cap. “I can’t even get high from this. Maybe I do need a tether after all, to filter out all the bad requests. I’m too nice is what it is. My kingdom for some hippies to accidentally summon me. Just once. Bong rips all around.”
Gil nodded solemnly in agreement. “I get that. Work’s been rough for us, too. It’s worse when you feel like you’ve already done everything you can, you know? You’ve exhausted all your options, but you still can’t find what you need.”
“Just a little win, am I right? Something small. But nope.” Pan tossed his half-eaten pear and the moist mushroom cap over his shoulder, then bumped fists with Gil. “You get me, man. Respect.”
This was something to behold. Gil was a man of few words. When it came to communions, Asher was always our point person, the most eloquent among us, and the least offensive. But here he was, winning over a god that might as well have been his polar opposite in personality.
And then Gil reached into his jacket, pulling out a silver flask, offering it to Pan. “Here. Take a sip.”
Pan lit up immediately, grinning from ear to ear as he greedily accepted. “Just so you know,” he said, twisting the cap off, “I don’t have a problem.” He upended the flask and drained it in one go.
I leaned over to whisper to Asher. “I didn’t know Gil carried liquor around on him.”
Asher leaned closer to answer. “He needs it to deal with you.”
I flicked him on the nose. He yelped, then rubbed at his face.
The flask fell from Pan’s fingers, and he let out a deeply satisfied sigh. His cheeks were ruddier already, his smile delighted, yet mischievous. He belched, patted his stomach, then wiped his hand across his mouth.
“That hit the spot,” he said happily. “Thanks, werewolf. Now. How can I help you gentlemen?”
“Right,” Asher said, his eyes flitting between the silver flask on the ground and Pan’s easy grin. “So, there’s been all these killings in this area, and we were wondering if you could help us with some information. We need help finding the killer.”
“Can’t help you there. It’s not like I’m constantly watching every forest on earth every waking minute. I’m not a security camera. But here’s something that I can tell you.” He threw an arm across Asher’s shoulders, pulling him close.
“Oh, God,” Asher muttered. “You smell like a minibar.”
“Enjoy my musk,” Pan drawled. “You should be glad I showered today. Now shut up, kid. Listen. Let me give you a hot tip. That’s not the question you should be asking. Look over there.”
We followed the line of his finger to the base of a tree, right across the clearing. My heart thumped. There, nestled among the roots, was another little bundle of twigs. A fetish.
“The question is: who the hell is leaving these all over the forest?”
21
We never even noticed the bundle. I shifted uncomfortably, staring at the fetish. It was shaped like a little stick figure of a man, pieces of twine holding it together at what might have been its waist, what could have passed for its neck.
“So what is that thing?” I said, eyeing the bundle warily.
A blast of warmth surged across my shoulders as Pan slung his arm across me, the infusion of a flask’s worth of alcohol enough to make his body rage like a bonfire. I could feel the liquor raging in his blood, hear it thundering throughout his body in a flaming circuit. I held very, very still.
“It’s witch work is what it is,” Pan said, close to my ear. His breath smelled like whiskey with an edge of cinnamon, what I could now assume was Gil’s beverage of choice. “Now, I don’t know enough about their craft to tell you what that thing is for, but you know exactly what witches are all about. Curses. Hexes. Fear.”
“You do smell like a minibar,” I muttered. Pan pulled me in even harder, his skin and his blood blistering even through my jacket. The asshole.
“Hexes and fear,” Asher said. “Exactly like what happened to the corpse.”
Pan leaned into him, speaking a bit too close to Asher’s face. I didn’t realize it took so little for satyrs to get so completely sloshed, but maybe that was to his benefit. It made him a cheap date. The guy could probably get a lot of value out of stretching out a single bottle.
“What happened to what corpse?” he said, frowning as he looked between us.
Asher slowly removed Pan’s arm from his back, careful not to offend him. “I’m a necromancer, right? And all these murders have been going on around Silveropolis, these corpses turning up without faces. Well, we found one, and I reanimated him to get him to talk. But nothing. He just pointed at one of these fetishes, then started screaming.”
“Hexes and fear,” Gil said. “Then there must be a witch who calls these woods home.”
Pan tapped the side of his nose, the tip of it reddish, like his cheeks. “Bingo. You gotta find that sexy bitch – pardon me, hexy witch – and grill her for answers. But in a nice way, you know? I’m not saying you should set her on fire or anything.”
“We got that, yes,” Asher said. “It’s as good an option as any. There are all these stray threads and we can’t make heads or tails of any of it. The Filigreed Masque, the dead bodies, Uriah Everett, and then there’s the blood moon.”
Pan’s face dropped. “Oh shit, dude. Not a blood moon.”
“You know something about it?” I watched his features expectantly. His eyes were distant, like he was trying to remember.
“I mean, it’s never a good thing, is it? Isolated mountain town, serial killings, and then you’ve got a blood moon coming up?”
“The locals,” Gil said. “We heard some of them talking about it.”
Pan pointed his finger at each of us. “You kids watch your backs. They probably know something you don’t. Some serious shit is about to go down.”
I frowned, feeling at my pockets for Bastion’s calling card. He had to know something. An organization as omnipresent and powerful as the Lorica must have picked up on some more of that blood moon chatter.
“So they’
re in on it,” Gil muttered. “I knew it.”
“They’re always in on it,” Pan said. “So, to recap, there’s a witch in these here woods, and you need to track her down and talk to her, ASAP. But also, there’s a good chance you’ve got some cuckoo bananas cult embedded in Silveropolis, and good luck weeding them out before the blood moon, which is, let’s see here.” He looked down at his hands and twiddled his thumbs. “Two nights from now? Yep. In two nights. Clock’s a-ticking.”
“Fuck me forever,” I grumbled.
“We’ll figure this out,” Asher said hurriedly. “We always do. Can’t give up now, guys. We’re on the verge of something big.”
Trust Asher to be the optimistic one. I wanted to think it was naiveté at times, but it clearly wasn’t that. The kid had a good, solid head on his shoulders. It was determination, pure and simple.
“And now,” Pan said, steepling his fingers and grinning. “We discuss the matter of my payment.”
I pushed my hair back, resting my forehead in my hands. There was so much we had to worry about already without having to consider a chaotic god’s whims. This was why I didn’t want to do a communion in the first place.
“What is it that you want from us?” I said, sighing, already a little deflated.
“Party with me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Party with me, please. Everybody’s a huge jerk these days. Dionysus won’t let me back in his club since that time I got too excited and kicked over a jar.” He scoffed, burped, then waved a hand in front of his mouth. “It was totally an accident, but apparently it was rare and precious, something a follower made for him like a thousand years ago.”
“Oh no,” Asher said. “So an actual historical amphora. Like a proper relic.”
Pan blustered, his cheeks puffing up. “Relic my left hoof. Throw me at a pottery wheel and I could whip up something better. Besides, if it was so precious, why would he just leave it out where someone drunk with hooves could accidentally kick and break it? Anyway, the point is, everyone’s an asshole and I need buddies to party with.”
