Roy frowned first at the book, then at the circle he'd painstakingly laid out on the forest floor, sweeping his eyes back and forth, hunting for mistakes. He couldn't find any. The lines and curves he'd painstakingly carved into the soil and painted over were immaculate. All the symbols were in the right places. The candles were still burning strong. The sacrifices (items with great emotional value to the summoners) were in place, ready to be consumed.
Which meant that the problem wasn't his fault.
He turned his glare on his two companions. "Did you two do the purification ritual like I said?"
"Yes," said Aimee. "Don't talk to us like that. We're not stupid."
That wasn't an assertion Roy would make, but there weren't a lot of people around who had real experience with the occult and a willingness to, ah, experiment with rituals of this level.
"Did you do the purification ritual?" drawled Beth. She pulled back the hood of her robe and pulled a stray strand of hair away from her numerous ear piercings. "Rituals like this are touchy. Even a tiny mistake can upset things. For all we know, we have the time of day wrong, or the wrong kind of soil."
"We checked everything, though," Roy complained. Not only had they checked everything, they'd practiced. They weren't a bunch of stupid college students in a horror flick. They knew what they were doing. They'd summoned things, real things, before. Nothing as big or as powerful as this, but they'd gotten ahold of some powerful entities.
One of the spirits they had summoned and bound had even traded this book for their freedom.
Maybe that had been a mistake on their part, if the ritual in the book was incomplete or a scam.
Something snapped and rustled in the trees behind him, and Roy turned, scowling. If a deer messed with his summoning circle, he'd scream.
But, no, it wasn't a deer stumbling out of the underbrush. It was a kid. A short kid. A middle schooler? Roy had never been good at figuring out the ages of kids.
"What are you doing here?" asked Aimee.
"Uh, walking. It's public property," said the kid. "What are you doing here?""
"No, it isn't," said Beth.
"Uh, yes it is. I know, because I walked here." The kid leaned sideways and peered around Roy. "Ooh, are you summoning something? What is it?"
"That's none of your business," said Roy, wondering if he could get away with setting one of his lesser spirits on the boy. Beth could be surprisingly touchy about that sort of thing. "Leave."
Between his family, his body type, and his occult power, Roy wasn't used to being ignored or disobeyed by anyone but Aimee and Beth. The boy didn't even look up at him, instead starting to walk counterclockwise around the circle.
"Where are your parents, anyway?" asked Roy, feeling out of his depth. It was an unusual feeling, and he didn't like it.
The kid did look up at him, then, scorn clear on his face. "How old do you think I am?" Before Roy could answer, the kid knelt next to the circle.
"If you mess that up," said Roy, threateningly, marching over to loom over the boy.
"Roy," hissed Beth.
"Geez, chill," said the boy. "I'm just looking. You've got a mistake, here, by the way." He pointed. "You're missing a line."
"What?" snapped Roy.
"And the same thing, over there. Is your handwriting this bad, or did you copy these signs straight from a book without knowing what they really meant?"
Roy almost believed the boy for a minute, then scoffed. "What do you know about it? You're just a kid. You've got a good face for lying, though, I'll give you that."
"I know more than you," said the boy. "For example, did you know that when you summon a ghost, they don't have to portal into the circle? Like, that's usually easier, because where're you going to find a natural portal, or a door, or whatever, and you can jump on the energy from the summoning, but you don't have to. Lots of ghosts can't, even. They're not strong enough to make portals, so they just have to deal with the pull until whoever is trying to summon them gives up. Although I guess stronger ghosts do that too? Huh."
"What are you talking about?" asked Aimee, and, huh, she actually sounded scared.
"Well," said the boy, straightening and brushing off his knees, "I guess what I'm saying is that if you were trying to get a hold of a ghost that happened to already be on Earth, and nearby, they could just walk to a summoning. Or fly. Personally, I prefer flying."
Aimee took a step back, her hand dropping to a protective charm. Beth, lips pursed, mirrored the motion.
"Did you know, there used to be separate rings for the summoners in these kinds of rituals? They sort of fell out of favor over time, because most ghosts did portals and they were problematic or something, I didn't really pay attention to that part, but…" The boy shrugged. "They were there for a reason. All of your protections are in that circle." He nodded at it. "Not great if someone does come from outside. Useless, just about."
Then the boy looked Roy straight in the eye for the first time, and smiled.
The smile was wrong. It started out too white, too sharp, too curvy, bright and moonlike beneath glittering eyes. And then Roy's vision began to blur. Or, no, only the boy blurred, but even as he blurred, two shapes became bitingly razor clear. A dark and burning crown that made Roy want to weep, and a shining ring that made him want to run and never stop.
Bright, unnatural eyes continued to gaze into Roy's.
"If I were you," said a voice that could have belonged to the boy, but echoed with the thoughts and feelings of a thousand other speakers, "I would quit now, while I was ahead. You've already bitten off more than you can chew."
Then the presence, the crown, the ring, and all, vanished. Roy looked wildly around the clearing, but the only people he saw were Beth and Aimee, and they looked downright ill.
He took a shaky breath. "So, should we call our first attempt at summoning the Ghost king a success?"