“Okay? What are we doing?”
“We only have a few minutes. I need you to get Dad, get him dressed, and bring him out to the fire pit. We have to execute a Moonlight Ascension ritual in order to banish a couple of entities.”
His mother frowned and shook her head.
“Why is this the first I’m hearing of this?” she asked.
Ricky opened his mouth to blame his brother. George had only told him about the ritual an hour before, and everything had escalated so fast that Ricky could barely understand the progression.
Instead of blaming George, Ricky said, “Sorry.”
“Your father is going to be crabby about getting up at…” She checked her watch. “Is it really two-thirty?”
Ricky nodded. “I’ll apologize later.”
Mary nodded. “Okay. Fire pit. What do we need to bring?”
“We’re going to need more water, and you’re going to have to read a bunch of stuff. Bring your reading glasses and some flashlights. And don’t say anything aloud in front of Amber. It can still hear what she hears.”
Mary narrowed her eyes at him. “You roped her into one of your demon things?”
“No,” Ricky said. “She just happens to have a similar problem. I don’t have time…”
“To explain. Of course,” his mother said, shaking her head. She moved past him and headed for the stairs.
“He’s going to be crabby,” she said as she climbed.
Ricky went to the cabinet near the pantry and grabbed a trash bag. He started piling the unpainted rocks into it. George went by with an armload of old t-shirts and a couple of towels.
“Don’t forget the…” George started.
“Matches?”
“Yes. We have to start at three before the hour.”
“Get going. I’ll be there.”
# # #
Ricky rapped his knuckles on the car window.
Amber opened her eyes.
He mouthed the word, “Ready?”
She shook her head.
Ricky nodded and stepped back while she opened the door. She was perfectly capable of getting out of the vehicle on her own, but Ricky still put out his hand. Amber took it. He let go and took a deep breath before starting towards the woods. The path was easy to see in the starlight. His father had packed it down with his snowmobile countless times over the winter. Ricky stayed towards the center of the trail, remembering his father’s account of stepping off and tumbling down into a snowy trap. This snow wasn’t nearly that deep—in fact it was mostly all melted.
The shadows between the trees were deep.
Ricky could hear Amber breathing behind him. He wanted to tell her that it would all be okay, but he couldn’t lie to her like that. She had a lot more experience with the entity that she was about to face. It would be wrong of him to try to comfort her.
When Ricky heard the voices of his parents through the trees, he stopped and let Amber take the lead. She reached up and touched her head a couple of times.
George had explained it to Ricky earlier—“The entity is tethered to her, probably at the back of her head. Normally, she can’t sense it at all, but when it’s really agitated, she can feel it tug. People describe feeling like they’ve walked through a spiderweb, or like their hair is caught on something.”
Some of the words that his parents were chanting were familiar to Ricky. Years before, he had conducted a similar ceremony on his own. They were the voice of the Moonlight Ascension. George had tried to memorize the lines—they would have been more powerful coming from him. After debate, the brothers had decided that it was too important to trust to his memory. That’s why Ricky had asked his parents to help. Both of them chanting together would have to be powerful enough.
As soon as Amber crossed between the trees, into the little clearing, Ricky stopped. He fumbled with the matches and then got one to light. He touched it to the rag that George had put on a stick. Flame jumped out from the end of his match and raced down the rag to the ground, burning the puddle of fuel that Amber had just stepped through. They were erasing her tracks as the first assault against the entity that was trailing behind her.
She stopped at the edge of the fire pit and pressed her hand to the back of her head.
Mary and Vernon reached the end of the passage they were reading and they stopped. George circled the pit and doused the flames with his jug of water before they could burn out on their own.
Mary started reading from the next passage. Vernon began a moment later and read faster until he could catch up with her. They locked into a rhythm and their words merged into a single stream of syllables. Ricky fumbled his phone from his pocket so he could look up what his next action was supposed to be. The tension of the moment had knocked everything out of his head.
George was holding out his hand.
Ricky remembered. He passed the bag of rocks to George and they headed to opposite sides of the pit. They formed a triangle with Amber.
George looked at Ricky. “Count us down.”
Ricky nodded. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. He had a timer counting down to when the moon would officially rise. That’s when George needed to begin the formal offering to the light.
“One minute,” Ricky said.
George leaned down and touched his lighter to the candles arranged around the pit. Amber had her eyes closed—she feared that the entity attached to her would be able to see through her eyes, despite George’s assurance.
“Forty-five seconds,” Ricky said. His parents were speeding up in their incantation. Their job was to encircle the area with a protective net of words to contain anything that might try to slip beyond the ring of fire.
Ricky’s eyes went up to the trees. It was dangerous to do the ceremony outdoors, according to George. He had read of an ancient wizard who had attempted an outdoor Moonlight Ascension. The flames had
