A blast of warmth surged across my shoulders as Pan slung his arm across me, the infusion of a flask’s worth of alcohol enough to make his body rage like a bonfire. I could feel the liquor raging in his blood, hear it thundering throughout his body in a flaming circuit. I held very, very still.
“It’s witch work is what it is,” Pan said, close to my ear. His breath smelled like whiskey with an edge of cinnamon, what I could now assume was Gil’s beverage of choice. “Now, I don’t know enough about their craft to tell you what that thing is for, but you know exactly what witches are all about. Curses. Hexes. Fear.”
“You do smell like a minibar,” I muttered. Pan pulled me in even harder, his skin and his blood blistering even through my jacket. The asshole.
“Hexes and fear,” Asher said. “Exactly like what happened to the corpse.”
Pan leaned into him, speaking a bit too close to Asher’s face. I didn’t realize it took so little for satyrs to get so completely sloshed, but maybe that was to his benefit. It made him a cheap date. The guy could probably get a lot of value out of stretching out a single bottle.
“What happened to what corpse?” he said, frowning as he looked between us.
Asher slowly removed Pan’s arm from his back, careful not to offend him. “I’m a necromancer, right? And all these murders have been going on around Silveropolis, these corpses turning up without faces. Well, we found one, and I reanimated him to get him to talk. But nothing. He just pointed at one of these fetishes, then started screaming.”
“Hexes and fear,” Gil said. “Then there must be a witch who calls these woods home.”
Pan tapped the side of his nose, the tip of it reddish, like his cheeks. “Bingo. You gotta find that sexy bitch – pardon me, hexy witch – and grill her for answers. But in a nice way, you know? I’m not saying you should set her on fire or anything.”
“We got that, yes,” Asher said. “It’s as good an option as any. There are all these stray threads and we can’t make heads or tails of any of it. The Filigreed Masque, the dead bodies, Uriah Everett, and then there’s the blood moon.”
Pan’s face dropped. “Oh shit, dude. Not a blood moon.”
“You know something about it?” I watched his features expectantly. His eyes were distant, like he was trying to remember.
“I mean, it’s never a good thing, is it? Isolated mountain town, serial killings, and then you’ve got a blood moon coming up?”
“The locals,” Gil said. “We heard some of them talking about it.”
Pan pointed his finger at each of us. “You kids watch your backs. They probably know something you don’t. Some serious shit is about to go down.”
I frowned, feeling at my pockets for Bastion’s calling card. He had to know something. An organization as omnipresent and powerful as the Lorica must have picked up on some more of that blood moon chatter.
“So they’
re in on it,” Gil muttered. “I knew it.”
“They’re always in on it,” Pan said. “So, to recap, there’s a witch in these here woods, and you need to track her down and talk to her, ASAP. But also, there’s a good chance you’ve got some cuckoo bananas cult embedded in Silveropolis, and good luck weeding them out before the blood moon, which is, let’s see here.” He looked down at his hands and twiddled his thumbs. “Two nights from now? Yep. In two nights. Clock’s a-ticking.”
“Fuck me forever,” I grumbled.
“We’ll figure this out,” Asher said hurriedly. “We always do. Can’t give up now, guys. We’re on the verge of something big.”
Trust Asher to be the optimistic one. I wanted to think it was naiveté at times, but it clearly wasn’t that. The kid had a good, solid head on his shoulders. It was determination, pure and simple.
“And now,” Pan said, steepling his fingers and grinning. “We discuss the matter of my payment.”
I pushed my hair back, resting my forehead in my hands. There was so much we had to worry about already without having to consider a chaotic god’s whims. This was why I didn’t want to do a communion in the first place.
“What is it that you want from us?” I said, sighing, already a little deflated.
“Party with me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Party with me, please. Everybody’s a huge jerk these days. Dionysus won’t let me back in his club since that time I got too excited and kicked over a jar.” He scoffed, burped, then waved a hand in front of his mouth. “It was totally an accident, but apparently it was rare and precious, something a follower made for him like a thousand years ago.”
“Oh no,” Asher said. “So an actual historical amphora. Like a proper relic.”
Pan blustered, his cheeks puffing up. “Relic my left hoof. Throw me at a pottery wheel and I could whip up something better. Besides, if it was so precious, why would he just leave it out where someone drunk with hooves could accidentally kick and break it? Anyway, the point is, everyone’s an asshole and I need buddies to party with.”