Hurricane #7: The Ritual (Patreon)

Serrano rubbed her eyes, then threw her head back and groaned. She’d checked out both a book on faerie magic—including summoning rituals—and the mythology survey Webb had been reading, now back to its presumably normal, merely bulky size. That one she’d checked out just because it looked cool. The ritual book was assigned work, and it was just as much fun as she remembered from high school.

No. Less fun. The book looked intimidatingly large, but half of it seemed to be taken up by tedious, repetitious descriptions of faeries, faerie lineages, faerie folk lore, faerie this, faerie that. And half of that half flat-out contradicted the other half. Sometimes in adjacent paragraphs. Worse, the summoning “rituals” turned out to be mostly useless. Be born with a gift for seeing faeries, or “be close to nature,” or use a four-leaf clover (with no description of what “use” actually meant), or look backwards through a piece of wood with a knot that’s fallen out. At least a few rituals actually did seem to be rituals, ranging from drawing a simple chalk outline to filling three silver goblets with chicken blood collected at three consecutive full moons. She didn’t have time for that shit, and it wasn’t like she was trying to summon the Queen of Faerie. Chalk outlines and four leaf clovers it was.

Not that she knew just what she was trying to summon, or what she was supposed to ask if, by some miracle, she actually succeeded. The drawings in the book were almost all cute little winged pixie cats and bunnies, with a few bigger, classically sexy ones depicting the more important ones. Despite the endless admonitions about how dangerous they could be, nearly all the threats described sounded comically pedestrian. Spoiling your milk, ruining your laundry, poisoning your crops. Maybe taken away by the spirits for a fortnight. The mythology book briefly mentioned kelpies, faerie-ish creatures that wanted to drown you, which sounded like a good lead—but they didn’t match anything in her dreams. There weren’t any summoning rituals for them, because what fucking idiot would summon a faerie that wanted to drown them, presumably. But that was about it for danger. No “fuck with this one, and it’ll rip out your heart and eat it in front of you while you bleed out” warnings.

Unless she’d missed that. But it was already past midnight. Now or never.

Taking a deep breath, she drew a chalk circle about two feet across on a clear part of her apartment’s floor, then stacked the three four-leaf clovers she’d been able to find in the circle’s center. The book said she should be doing this outside under moonlight, or “where three ways meet,” whatever the hell that meant, but a later passage reluctantly admitted it could be done inside by candlelight. She’d draped a few black sheets around the walls, as close as she could get to black curtains. After setting the candles—six tapers and a scented one in a jar her mom had mailed her around the holidays—around the circle, she went back to the book.

Now for the part she couldn’t figure out. This book listed various faeries and spirits by name; was she just supposed to pick one randomly? And while some of the spells were elaborate listings of names and commands in ancient languages, others just boiled down to “Name of spirit, I command you to appear and do my bidding.”

She looked up, clearing her throat, and raised her hands. “Ulohne, I command you to appear and do my bidding.”

As soon as she said it, she regretted it. If Ulohne existed, she wasn’t a pixie—she was a raging, beautiful monster. Even if the spell worked, it shouldn’t work on her, which was good, because if it did work on her, Serrano would be beyond fucked. “I mean, uh, ‘command’ might be a little strong,” she muttered, shifting back and forth on her paws.

She fell silent, waiting to see if anything happened. It didn’t. No distant crack of thunder, no unexplained wind, not even an ominous flicker of the candlelight. Okay, strike one.

She raised her hands again, and tried to sound more authoritative, despite having no name in mind this time. “Spirit of the portal, I command you to appear and do my bidding.” After a good three minutes of nothing happening, she gave the invocation again and waited another couple minutes. Still nothing.

Serrano looked back at the circle, at the candles, at the clover, and sighed, moving to crouch at its perimeter. “Hey, look. Forget the command and bidding and whatever shit I’m supposed to say here. Whoever might be on the other side of this portal that’s been wrecking my sleep lately, I want to talk to you. I want to know, like, why. Why me. Why dreams of storms and drowning. What the hell keeps happening in my shower. What was in that drink. If you’re there, just…give me some kind of sign.”

At this point, she didn’t expect anything to happen. Even so, she couldn’t help feel a pang of disappointment when nothing did, even after a few more ad-libbed requests over nearly half an hour.

When she finally climbed into bed, it was one a.m. on the dot. She didn’t open tomorrow, but she had to get in at eight-thirty, and after the craziness of today she was flat-out exhausted. She fell asleep within minutes.

One of them points at you, and barks again. “There she is!”

No. Not again. Damn it to hell, not again. You may not be Ulohne, but this is a dream. You can be like her.

Now they’re around you, three of them, grabbing you, lifting you up, avoiding your claws, your teeth. A feline looks into your face and yells: “Just a branch!”

You twist out of their grip, snarl, snap, spin around to face them. And suddenly they’re tiny. They’re mouse-sized. Or you’re huge. Even better.

They stare up at you, the cat and others you can’t see clearly. They stare up at a feral, four-legged coyote many, many times their size—and they run.

The rain slows them, but it doesn’t slow you. Two of them dash toward a fancy sports car, but you’re faster, smashing it to sheet metal under your forepaw and growling. They stare up at you, terrified: an arrogant-looking vixen still clutching a paper cup of coffee, and a hamster. He stares up at you, and you recognize him. Ned. Your shift manager.

“No,” Ned breathes. “This isn’t—they said—Serrano, you’re supposed to be…”

Supposed to be what? Small? Terrified? Drowning?

“What is even happening?” the vixen shrieks.

Finally you find your voice. "What’s happening is this is my dream, bitch, and now it’s your nightmare."

Before she can react, you drop your muzzle, teeth bared, and clamp your jaws shut around her. She shrieks, and you can feel her futilely fight against your teeth and tongue, her shriek increasing in pitch as you tilt your head back. Her struggles make your tail wag. The hamster—Ned, the nebbish shift manager who never quite gives you enough hours to make ends meet—stares dumbly, watching you down Karen in one gulp, whole and alive. His eyes widen as you fix a predatory gaze on him, flinching when a drop of drool covers his face.

He starts scrambling backward. “I’m nothing, Serrano, I swear! I don’t even really understand what’s going on! Please, don’t—”

You snap him up. His pleading dissolves into incoherent screams as he slides along your tongue, as you tilt your head back and swallow, feeling a pleasingly ticklish squirm as he goes down your gullet. Lightning races along the clouds, the sharp light silhouetting you against the pitifully tiny city at your paws. Thunder cracks and rolls—

Serrano sat bolt upright, gasping, the deep bass thunderclap echoing in her ears. She touched her throat and shivered. The sensation of gulping Ned and Karen-vixen down remained disquietingly vivid.

As the sleep fog dissipated, she realized she heard water, but not from the shower. It came from all around. Jumping to her feet and throwing on the light, she looked back and forth wildly until she realized it was actual rain from outside. A hard rain. The thunderclap she’d heard was real.

Biting her lip, she padded into the bathroom. The shower stall remained bone dry.

After a moment, she let out a little laugh that became wild, almost uncontrollable. She felt relieved. Happy. Weirdly aroused. Powerful. She threw herself back on the bed, still laughing, and fell back asleep listening to the sound of the rain.

When she woke up the next morning, she was already running late, and threw on her clothes and dashed out of the apartment. She didn’t notice that the little pile of four-leaf clovers she’d left in the chalk circle was gone.