hex the moon

A story from the casefiles of Daniel Faust. The secret ones. The ones no one wants to talk about. Because they’re embarrassing.

1.

“First things first,” I said. “What the hell is a ‘TikTok’?”

“Right, I forget you’re old and decrepit,” Pixie said.

I took the phone from her outstretched hand.

“If I’m not allowed to forget, neither is anybody else. Is this like a YouTube?”

She rolled her eyes. “Not a YouTube, it’s just called — never mind. Hit the play button. You know which one that is, right?”

Sure I did. Same one that was on my CD player. I tapped the screen and found myself on the set of some Saturday afternoon horror-show host. Wrought-iron candelabras, flickering candlelight, a Plasticine gargoyle crouched on the edge of a butcher-block table. The dim lighting almost hid the suburban kitchen in the background, complete with chintz curtains in the windows and a minivan parked outside.

“We,” said a squeaky-voiced young man in a black hooded cloak, head bowed to conceal his features in shadow, “are the Disciples of the New Twilight.”

He folded his fingers before him in a triangular sign, matching the inverted silver triangle on the drooping folds of his cloak. The material was…chiffon, maybe? Two more hooded figures stepped into frame, flanking him, mirroring the ritual gesture.

“For too long, the old gods have been permitted to hold sway, without rendering onto the witching world what is properly ours. Soon, that changes. We, the Disciples of Twilight—”

“New Twilight,” whispered the figure on his left.

“…of New Twilight are preparing to commence the first of six apocalyptic occult operations. We will begin by laying hexes upon the entire pantheon of ancient Egypt—”

“Except Bastet,” whispered the hooded girl on his right. “She’s cool.”

He took a deep breath and tried again.

“Except Bastet, and then…we will hex the moon.”

I looked up at Pixie. “This is deeply stupid.”

“Keep watching,” she said.

“Ancient Rome? You’re on notice. Norway? We’re coming for you next. We are the Disciples of New Twilight, and we are here to bring a new eldritch age of magick — that’s magic, spelled with a k on the end — and wizarding wonder. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”

The playback ended. “Isn’t that—”

“Anonymous’s slogan,” Pixie said. “Yeah, they seem a little confused.”

“No shit.”

“So I tracked them down.”

I tilted my head at her and handed the phone back. “Why would you want to do that?”

“You know how we’ve been hunting that psycho for the mayor?”

Sure. Favor-for-a-friend deal. “That psycho” was so new the press hadn’t given him a catchy name yet, and Mayor Seabrook wanted it to stay that way. Calling on the local organized-crime element made sense; serial murder was bad for tourism, and bad for our business, too. My crew had some extra incentive to lend a hand: the killer in question was a necromancer and an ink junkie, getting his fix of the occult drug by squeezing it from his victims’ veins. He’d been leaving gutted corpses and ragged, mad ghosts all over town, and we’d been playing clean-up.

Pixie showed me a map, and it all made sense.

“That’s the ritual site they picked out?”

“Same spot where he struck last, and killed three people in one night,” she said. “The bodies are gone, but Jennifer says the energy there is all kinds of rotten.”

“She’s not wrong. These geniuses aren’t going to curse any gods — or the moon — but they’re liable to call up something and piss it off.”

“So you have to stop them.”

“Why?”

She glared at me.

“What?” I said. “You don’t find this funny? At all? Not even a little?”

She kept glaring. I might have kept arguing — I had things to do tonight — but an idea occurred to me. My apprentice had been asking for more responsibility, and I had just the job for her.

2.

“So you’re going on a solo mission,” I told Melanie. “To save the moon.”

She gave me all the disdain a blue-haired teenager could muster. That was a lot of disdain.

“This feels like a thing you could handle yourself really easily,” she said.

“Yes, but I don’t want to.” I held up a finger. “Also, they’re holding the ritual in an abandoned factory on the east side of town. I can’t go in there.”

“Why not?”

“Long story. A couple of years ago, I was involved in a weird string of abandoned-factory-or-warehouse incidents—”

“What exactly is an ‘abandoned-factory-or-warehouse-incident’?”

“—anyway, I promised some people I’d stay clear of any such situations for as long as possible and I’ve been very good about keeping my word. You don’t want me to break my word, do you?”

“I don’t see why you’d start caring now.”

“Ow.” I touched my heart. “You hurt me. Right here.”

“Yeah, the gaping empty pit must be aching. What do you need me to do?”

“Stop the ritual. However you want to play it, that’s up to you. This is a test of improvisation in the field, just like I’ve been training you for.”

She glowered at me. “I kinda hate that you’re right.”

I gave her a parting gift. One of my spare .22 automatics, with the short storm-gray tube of a sound suppressor screwed onto the barrel. She looked at it like it might bite her.

“You know I don’t like guns.”

“It’s a twenty-two,” I told her. “You can shoot somebody with this thing at pretty much point-blank range and they’ll probably be fine. I’m not sending you out alone without protection. The Disciples of Twilight Sparkle might not be dangerous, but they’re dumb, and dumb is dangerous.”

She stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“How do you know who Twilight Sparkle is?”

“Take the gun,” I told her. “Go. Save the moon. The entire world is counting on you tonight.”

3.

The desert skies turned too dark, too fast.

It only rained in Las Vegas a couple of times every year. The city was a catch-basin, honeycombed with storm tunnels to contain the inevitable deluge as monsoon weather rolled in. Melanie could feel the bad air. She tasted it on her tongue like a tarnished copper penny, and a damp breeze brushed against her heat-prickled arms. She was down on the east side, in a tangle of streets she normally wouldn’t walk alone, not by daylight and definitely not after dark.

“Mom, I really have to focus here,” she said.

Her mother sighed on the phone, her voice carrying a wash of electric static. “Did you bring your travel umbrella? You know it’s going to pour tonight.”

It was in her big white plastic purse, right next to the gun. “Yes, Mom.”

“I want you home by ten, and if you’re going to be late, I expect a call by ten-fifteen.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“And if you have to kill these people, do not touch the bodies. I have the family lawyer on stand-by, along with the company cleaners.”

“Mom.”

“What? Honey, that’s what the lawyer and the cleaners are for.”

“I’m not killing anyone.”

“I don’t know why you want to make things harder on yourself. These people sound absolutely terrible. They won’t be missed, especially after their bodies have been dissolved in a bathtub—”

“Mom. Please. That’s not…that’s not me. I’m just going to stop them before they get themselves hurt.”

Somehow, she thought. She was a little hazy on the details, as she slipped down a narrow alley of broken stone, her blue Nikes light on the dirty pavement. She navigated by memory, making her way closer to the ritual site, contemplating and throwing away plan after possible plan. Daniel always made this look easy, coming up with some last-minute bluff or an improvised swindle that went off like clockwork.

Maybe not like clockwork. The more Melanie thought about the way her mentor’s plans usually worked out, the more capable she felt.

“Remember,” her mother said in her ear. “You have the blood of demon-kind in your veins. That makes you powerful, it makes you wise, and it means — most importantly — that consequences are for other people.”

The sky boomed, a cannon-shot ripple followed by the sound of a hard rain, coming in fast.

“You’re breaking up, Mom, gotta go, love you.” She hung up.

She ducked under a shattered stone arch, around the ruin of a collapsed metal door, just as the storm rolled in. The alley at her back was a wash of sideways water, the sky flickering, and the desert air became a muggy swamp.

The abandoned factory had been stripped bare, the concrete floor lined with rusted bolts where machines had once stood, under long lines of skylights. Lightning chased the boil of thunder, lighting up the empty galleries of mold-caked red brick. Melanie moved from shadow to shadow, keeping low, remembering her lessons.

What seemed like a joke of a test, by the light of day, suddenly turned deadly serious. She was alone in the urban sprawl, penned in by the storm and the dark, trapped in a building with a handful of wannabe mages trying to bring on the apocalypse. And thanks to the levels of necromantic energy in the air, so thick she felt it like gossamer scarves trailing against her cheeks, there was a good chance they’d conjure up something a lot worse than they were bargaining for.

Raspy, arrhythmic chanting drifted in on a gust of cold mist. Melanie followed the sound. Candlelight glowed from around a pillar of moldering brick. She crept close, chancing a closer look. The three robed figures stood gathered under the lightning-wracked skylight, surrounding a smoking brazier as curlicues of cheap incense roiled in the flickering air. Melanie could see what they couldn’t: faces in the smoke, agonized, furious, the tortured victims of a killer trying to force their way back into the world of the living.

Now or never, she thought. Her mouth was cotton-ball dry. She spotted an old gantry, rusty stairs leading up to what used to be a balcony over the factory floor. Not much left but a strip of old, broken wood, but it’d do. She padded her way up to the overlook. On the way, she called on her blood. It welled up inside of her, spurred by the flood of emotion, her demonic heritage breaking out from under her human mask. Blue veins wound like sigil tattoos up her arms, and blossomed on her face in a pattern like butterfly wings.

She dipped one hand into her purse, and raised the other high, fingers curling to the storm.

“Knock that shit off,” she bellowed.

She was improvising. It was not her finest moment, but it did the job. The chant died in confused murmurs as the three hooded mages turned their faces up toward her dangerous perch.

“I…am the emissary of the moon,” Melanie called down to them. Her fingers curled around the grip of the gun. “I stand for love. Also, I stand for justice. And in the name of the moon, I will punish you!”

She tilted her gun-hand, keeping it to one side and out of sight, and squeezed the trigger. A peal of thunder and the stubby sound suppressor muffled the crack of a single bullet. It lanced high across the gallery and plowed into the skylight. The old glass burst, shards raining down and driven by a sudden plume of stormwater that roared through the gaping hole and washed across the oil-stained concrete. One of the mages hit the brazier with his hip, knocking it to the floor, killing the incense in a shower of sparks. Another staggered back, wide-eyed, pointing up at Melanie.

“The moon is pissed! C’mon, we gotta go!”

She stood her ground, chin high and solemn, as the trio ran off. Distant doors opened and slammed shut, followed by the panicked rev of a minivan’s engine and the squeal of tires. Her engorged veins slowly faded, human guise slipping back into place.

“Okay,” Melanie said to the empty gallery while her shoulders unclenched. “That went…better than expected, really.”

She made her way back down to the ground, careful on the rusted metal steps, and navigated back toward the way she’d come in. She wasn’t alone. She felt the presence before she saw it, the prickling-skin sensation of a powerful mind moving against hers. More than powerful. Like she was a guppy in the shadow of a whale.

The woman on the other side of the factory floor was so pale she glowed in the darkness. Flashes of lightning turned her dress, an old torch-singer’s gown, from maroon to blood red. The flickers gleamed off the vintage skeleton key that dangled around her neck on a silver chain.

“That was impressive,” she said.

“Uh, thanks,” Melanie said, standing her ground. “I mean, somebody had to do something.”

“There comes a time,” said the woman in red, “when everyone must decide if they fight only for themselves, or if they serve a higher ideal. A higher power. But that decision has always come naturally for you, I think. It’s only the specifics that elude you. So far.”

“Have…we met?” Melanie asked.

“Here.”

She flipped her hand. A silver coin went sailing, turning, arcing gracefully through the air between them. Melanie caught it in her palm.

“What’s this?”

“Fair payment for services rendered,” said the woman in red. “You don’t want me owing you a favor.”

Melanie looked down at the coin. It was thick, tarnished silver. The image had faded with time, but she could still make out the Greek letters that ringed the coin’s rim.

“Payment for—”

She looked up. The woman was gone. Nothing remained but Melanie, and the coin, and the storm outside, howling through the desert night.

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