“Oh no,” Ricky said, “She roped you into the crafting business?”
“It’s fun,” Amber said.
“What are you doing back?” Mary asked her son.
“George said he needed my help with something. Besides, I’m working lunch to midnight tomorrow, so I’m shifting my schedule.”
Mary nodded, but gave her son a skeptical eye as he passed.
“He has been working hard for the past few months, trying to track down the mystery of those things that came after you guys in the hotel last year.”
Amber nodded. “Yeah, he has been giving me updates.”
“I hope it’s not a mistake,” Mary said. “Some problems get narrower and narrower the more you burrow into them. Before you know it, you’re trapped.”
“Yeah,” Amber said. On the next rock, instead of painting flowers, she painted a skull. She also shortened the message to make it an order. It just said, “Turn me over.”
“I like it,” Mary said, pointing her paintbrush at the rock. “Maybe put a tombstone on the back. It will sell.”
Amber smiled.
Thirteen: Ricky
“What’s up?” Ricky asked, pausing in the doorway to his brother’s room.
George waved him in and motioned for him to close the door behind himself.
“I’m not really working on a project,” George said.
“Yeah, I figured. For one, you didn’t drink any Coke at dinner. You always like to pump up with sugar before you come upstairs to get to work. Second, when I was walking home I saw that your window was still closed. You always like to let fresh air in when you work. Third…”
George interrupted. “First, Sherlock, I stopped drinking Coke two years ago and my window was open, just not very much because I’m getting over a cold. I closed it, like, twenty minutes ago. I think you have a long way to go before you’re going to make a decent detective.”
“I was right though.”
“Okay. One point for getting the answer right without being able to show your work.”
Ricky rolled his eyes.
“So what are you doing here?”
George pointed at his clock.
“We have one-hundred and fifty minutes.”
“Until?”
“Until the bear comes back.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I did some more research on the entity that we called from a parallel dimension into Dr. Hugs.”
Ricky shook his head. “We burned the bear. He didn’t have a chance to replace himself with flesh, so he’s gone. The entity would have been returned to where it came from.”
“Yes, that’s what we thought,” George said. “And it’s exactly the kind of casual thinking that tragedies are built on. It turns out that our interpretation of flesh was too narrow. You remember what happened with the blood creature you accidentally summoned?”
“We stopped it from attaching itself to real flesh.”
“But what about before that? It was made of nothing but…”
“Blood,” Ricky finished. “Just a fragile liquid creature.”
“Because those were the only building blocks it had to work with. We burned up Dr. Hugs in a big pile of ash and embers. That’s a lot of carbon that it could be working with. We’ll be lucky if the thing is even stoppable.”
“Then why are you being so calm about this, and why didn’t you bring it up earlier?” Ricky asked his brother.
George smiled.
“Well, it’s not exactly the kind of belief that one wants to broadcast widely. Even with all the witnesses to the last summoning, people who insisted that they had seen something paranormal were dismissed and ridiculed. And I’m also reasonably certain that we have the tools and skills to take care of this problem pretty easily.”
“Explain,” Ricky said.
“The Ceremony of the King’s Flame is just the calling spell. There’s a bookend to it to banish the entity once it has fulfilled its purpose. We have to execute the Moonlight Ascension, which opens up a rift to pull the entity back into its native realm. It’s the mirror opposite of what we’ve already done and we have to do it exactly at moonrise tonight, which is in one-hundred and forty-four minutes.”
Ricky nodded. “And what kind of entities will this rift pull?”
George scratched his head and looked up at the ceiling.
“I only really studied it in the context as the antidote to the Ceremony of the King’s Flame. The first one is supposed to be like the drawing of a powerful sword and the second is the sheathing of it. Why? What do you have in mind?”
“Hold on,” Ricky said.
# # #
“I think this is a bad idea, Ricky,” Amber said.
“How do we know until we investigate it? Listen, my brother is really smart. Tell him everything you know and he’ll be able to research it more. We only have a couple of hours. If he figures out that we can get a two-for-one, then we can put your problem behind us and focus on the other thing.”
“I think it’s a bad idea to even talk about it,” Amber said. “I was free from that thing for years until I talked openly with you about it at the beach. It’s entirely possible that I reactivated it somehow just by going through all those details. I mean, if it’s really attached to me then it could be that I was unknowingly feeding it by putting all that mental energy into remembering it.”
“And it’s also possible that the reason you decided to tell me about it was because you were already feeling that it was getting close to you again. This is all guesswork. That’s why we need my brother to look into it. He’s really good with this kind of research and the moon is going to be just in the right place in a couple of hours. If I’m wrong, and your thing shows up here, then the worst case scenario is that we have to deal with it now instead of later. I already agreed to help you with it.”
Amber scraped paint from her fingernail as she thought.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“How many days between us talking and when it was in your cousin’s house?”
“A couple.”
“So we would have at least that long, right?”
“How
