Blood Moon (Vampire Vigilante 1)

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.