Blood Pact (Darkling Mage 7)

Not the worst idea, really, considering the kid did need a little bit of orienting in terms of the arcane underground. The fact that they were basically the same age helped, too. Mason had tons of questions about the world behind the Veil, and Asher had tons of questions about, well, practically everything else. A match made in heaven, really.

We found it, finally, the tether – a little stone statue in the shape of a fox, tucked away somewhere among the flowers. It was a little moss-covered, a little grimy, as if the garden’s employees specifically avoided cleaning it. Maybe that was intentional on Artemis’s part, a sort of insurance policy to ensure that no one could meddle with her tether, or worse, accidentally open her gateway and stumble into her domicile.

Not that it was likely to happen, of course, unless you brought the right offering.

“So what, we rip the bag open, pour it over the ground?” I said. “That’s how Arachne likes it. You take out a fortune cookie and smash it on the pavement.”

It was then, remembering Arachne’s own tastes, that I realized how Artemis’s desires weren’t exactly so peculiar after all. In fact, of all the entities we’d encountered, Hecate was really the only one who stuck to tradition, requesting offerings she was actually supposed to want in the myths.

“Hell no,” Gil said. “You want her to smack you upside the head? That’s the whole point of bringing an entire bag. She wants to chow down on it.”

“Huh. Point taken.”

Sterling drew out a rough circle in the grass, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Banjo sniffed curiously at Sterling’s boot, then went around him, snuffling at the fox statue. Then he lifted his leg.

“Banjo!”

Gil dived, sweeping the dog up in his arms. Banjo yelped, once, but loudly. Gil exploded into a stuttered burst of soothing supplications. I might have neglected to mention that we’d snuck into the Nicola Arboretum past midnight. Hey, whatever works for our schedule, right? Also, as Sterling always said: carpe noctem.

Banjo settled down soon enough, and Gil took him off into the bushes to “make pee-pee,” as he called it. It was interesting, to say the least, seeing the biggest and strongest among us softened by a little dog with a waddle for a walk and a cute butt, but you’ve never met Banjo. They returned shortly, and we were ready for the ritual.

Sterling stubbed his cigarette out somewhere in the grass, then elbowed me. “Okay. You’re the expert. You do the incantation. Knock on the door so she lets us in.”

“Sure,” I said. “Consider it done. But only if you clean up after yourself. Pick up that cigarette butt, man, come on.”

Sterling narrowed his eyes at me, grumbled, but complied anyway, checking that the cigarette was totally out, then chucking it in the closest trashcan. Eh, good enough.

The four of us took position inside the circle that Sterling had drawn. He handed me the bag, and I held it close to my chest, focusing my eyes and my will on the fox statue as I mumbled to myself, incanting the great and powerful words of magic that would coax a goddess of ancient Greece herself into inviting us into her domicile.

Two guesses as to what that incantation was.

That’s right. I went for my old standby, reciting the blurb off of the backs of Puppy Yum biscuit bags, something I’d memorized ages ago. As I chanted, I filled my mind and my heart with my request, and my intent. Wisdom, I thought. Divine knowledge. Guidance. That was all we needed, and we would be on our way. Sterling bit into his hand, dripping blood onto the grass, completing the circle.

Somewhere in the air before us, I felt a seam opening, but only a peep, energies rushing out of it in a slow stream, like a draft through the space under a door. The gateway was like a closed eye, and it was taking a peek at who wanted in. We’d attracted Artemis’s attention. We just had to seal the deal.

I raised the bag of snacks to eye level. “We brought your favorite,” I said in a singsong voice.

The draft turned into a full-on gust of wind. Tendrils snaked up from the bushes, multitudes of them twisting, towering, and forming into an empty oblong doorway. Then in the space between, where the entrance would be, the air wavered and turned into a scintillant green, like thousands of drops of dew slipping across a brilliantly colored leaf. That was as good an invitation as we were going to get.

A voice spoke from within the shimmering portal.

“Come in, losers. And hurry, the cold air’s getting in.”

Like I was about to keep a goddess waiting. Sterling went first, the green of the gateway rippling like the surface of a pond as he stepped through. I tucked the snacks safely under one arm, then walked into the portal, too.

My jaw dropped. Artemis’s domicile was nothing like I would have expected. We had found our way into an enormous jungle, except that it was a forest, except that, on closer inspection, it turned out to be both. Plants that had no business being next to each other grew out of the same soil: coconut trees next to towering sequoias, pitcher plants with roses, fruits that thrived in conflicting seasons just chilling out in the same, strange b

iome.

And among the vegetation, I realized, still mostly hidden because of the arrival of new intruders in their land, were all manner of fauna. The goddess of the hunt, it seemed, liked to keep a full menagerie in her domicile. At least they were tame. I hoped.

Somewhere in the distance, obscured by the treeline, came the babbling of rivers, of soothing brooks, and what sounded like an actual waterfall. We could hear owls in the bright daylight, their hoots mingling with the twitter of birds. It didn’t make sense, but it worked, somehow.

Wait? Daylight? Oh, fuck. Sterling. I couldn’t see him. I checked the ground for patches of ash. What if he was incinerated the very moment he stepped in? Fuck. Fuck. I thought Artemis was a moon goddess? She belonged to the Midnight Convocation.

I whipped around, about to yell Gil’s name, when I noticed that he wasn’t there. The portal was gone, too. Had it closed before he and Banjo could get in? What the hell was going on? I turned back around, studying my surroundings. There was a lightly worn path, just through the trees.

“Artemis?” I called out, repeating her name, my throat getting tighter the more I shouted, not from the strain, but from the slow, building terror of not knowing what had happened to Gil, and worse, to Sterling. “Artemis!”