Chapter 15: The Summoning
The front door clicked shut. The sound was soft, final. In its wake, the house was preternaturally still.
Mike and Casey stood frozen in the hallway, the reality of what just happened congealing in the air between them. Five kids—no, young adults, their kids and their friends’ kids—had just walked out into the suburban night like sleepwalkers. The gentle creak from Mandy’s room had ceased. The quick, rhythmic sound from the hallway wall was gone. Only the hum of the sentient fireplace and the low buzz of the holographic chess game remained.
Mona stumbled back from the front door, staring at her hands. Shards of amethyst littered the floor around her bare feet. The strange, resonant blue glow was fading from the fragments, leaving them dull and ordinary.
“They’re called,” Mona whispered, her voice tremulous with awe and horror. “The crystal sang her song back at her, and she… she called them home.”
Casey moved first. She shoved past Mike, yanking the front door open and staring out into the dark, quiet street. Nothing. No figures retreating under the sodium-vapor glow of the streetlights. They had simply vanished.
“Ben!” she shouted, her voice cutting through the suburban silence. “Mandy! Maryam! Goddammit, get back here!”
No response. A dog barked two houses down. A sprinkler system hissed to life.
Mike was already on his phone, his thumb swiping with frantic speed. He put it on speaker as it rang.
Jason Bryant answered on the first ring, his voice tight.“Mike? What’s happening? We just heard a… a sort of hum from Ben’s old baby monitor—we kept it for the cats—and then Portia said she felt a pull—”
“They’re gone,” Mike cut in, his voice flat. “Ben, Mandy, Maryam, Kim, and Beth. They just walked out the front door. Mona’s crystal did something, resonated with whatever Lorna planted in them, and they left. They’re thralled.”
A sharp gasp from Amy in the background. “No. No, the magic was supposed to be gone! Jan cleansed it!”
“She harvested samples,” Casey said, joining Mike, her arms wrapped around herself. “She didn’t remove the link. She just… collected the evidence. The link was still live.”
Another line beeped in—Hank. Mike switched over. “Hank?”
“Maryam’s tracker just went offline,” Hank’s voice was a low rumble, strained. “The one in her watch. Kim’s too. They’re not at your place?”
“They were. They walked out thirty seconds ago.”
“Fuck.” There was a sound of something slamming—a fist on a countertop. “Fatima’s scrying. Nothing. It’s like a fog.”
Then, Stacy. Her call flashed on the screen, and Mike answered, merging the calls into a chaotic conference of panic.
“Rick’s feeling it,” Stacy said without preamble, her tone all business, but a thread of fear ran beneath it. “A massive pull. West and south. Like a tide. He’s shaking. Jan just ran back in here with her samples, headed for Brigid’s. What the hell is happening at your house?”
“Mona’s crystal reacted to Lorna’s magic,” Mike summarized, his mind clicking into a weird, calm IT troubleshooting mode even as his heart hammered against his ribs. “It resonated, amplified the signal. Activated the tags. They’ve been summoned.”
“So we find the source and break it,” Stacy said.
“It’s not that simple,” Casey interjected, pacing. “The crystal shattered. It was a… a sympathetic vibration. It wasn’t attacking the magic. It was singing along with it.”
From the kitchen doorway, Calista appeared. Her silver hair seemed to glow in the dim light, her pointed ears twitching. She held another of Mona’s crystals—a large, rough piece of rose quartz. She looked pale. “I don’t hear a song,” she said, her half-elf Glamour making her voice seem to echo slightly in the tense air. “But I can feel the pull. It’s like a hook in the world, tugging. It’s coming from the lakefront. The old grain silos.”
“How can you feel it and not be affected?” Jason asked, his voice faint through the phone.
“My mother was an Elf Lady,” Calista said simply, as if that explained everything. To her, it did. “Siren magic is rooted in enthrallment, in stolen will. Elven Glamour is about revealing truth, enhancing what is. They cancel. I am a void to her call.”
Mike looked from Calista’s determined face to the shattered amethyst on the floor. A ridiculous, dangerous idea began to form in the back of his mind. It was the kind of idea that Jan would have, but with fewer naked sprints across the city. It was the kind of idea that relied on things not making sense.
“Mona,” Mike said, turning to his mother-in-law. “Your crystals. Do you have more? A lot more?”
Mona blinked, coming out of her daze. “Of course! My cleansing stash! Boxes in the attic!”
“Case,” Mike said, looking at his wife.
She met his eyes. She saw the plan forming there, the dumb, beautiful, reckless audacity of it. A grin flickered across her face, chased away by worry. “We’re not magicians, Mike.”
“No,” he agreed. “We’re annoyances. And right now, we need to annoy the shit out of a siren’s frequency.” He addressed the phones. “Stacy, get Rick to Brigid’s. Maybe between her math and Jan’s samples, they can find a counter-frequency. Hank, Jason, Amy—get to our place. Bring any weird rocks, tuned forks, or magical shit you have lying around. We’re building a dam.”
He hung up before the protests could fully form.
The next twenty minutes were a blur of chaotic activity. Hank and Fatima arrived first, Hank carrying a duffel bag full of what he called “Fati’s weird meditation crap.” Fatima went straight to Calista, touching her forehead, her eyes closed as she sensed the direction of the pull. Jason and Amy arrived seconds later, Amy clutching a velvet bag of rune stones and Jason holding a cheap, glow-in-the-dark “crystal” from a long-ago museum gift shop.
Mona directed the operation from the living room floor, where she was rapidly wiring chunks of quartz, amethyst, and citrine together with copper wire and what looked like genuine intention. “We must create a dissonant chorus!” she insisted. “If her song is a single, pure note, we answer with noise!”
While the others worked, Mike and Casey slipped away. The weight of the situation was a physical pressure, a cold ball of lead in their guts. Their child, their niece, their friends’ children—all were marching toward some unknowable purpose at the call of a predator. The helplessness was paralyzing. They needed to break it.
They didn’t go to their bedroom. They went to the basement—the finished rec room, with its old, sturdy pool table and the worn, oversized sofa that had seen decades of movie nights. It was their space, away from the chaos above.
Wordlessly, Casey pushed Mike down onto the sofa. She climbed into his lap, straddling him, her knees sinking into the cushions on either side of his hips. Their faces were inches apart, her breath warm and quick.
“We can’t fall apart,” she said, her voice low and fierce.
“I know,” he breathed.
“So make me feel something else.”
She kissed him, hard and desperate. It was less a kiss of passion than of warfare—a claiming of focus. Her hands fumbled with his belt, yanked his jeans and boxers down just enough. He pulled her leggings and panties aside, the fabric stretching, tearing.
She sank onto him in one smooth, wet stroke, taking him deep. They both gasped into each other’s mouths. There was no slow burn, no tease. This was grounding, an anchor in a storm-tossed sea. She began to move, a hard, rolling rhythm of her hips that drove him deep into her welcoming heat.
“Fuck me, Mike,” she panted against his lips. “Fuck me until I can’t think about her, about any of it.”
He gripped her hips, his fingers pressing into the soft flesh of her ass, helping her set a punishing pace. The wet, slick sound of their joining filled the dim basement, a raw, biological counterpoint to the magical terror upstairs. He thrust up to meet her downward slams, his cock sinking to the root inside her dripping cunt with each drive.
This was their skill, their unspoken power. In the face of the impossible, they chose this: the sheer, visceral reality of connection. Casey’s breasts heaved under her t-shirt, her nipples hard peaks against the fabric. Mike devoured her neck, sucking marks into her skin, claiming her in the most primitive way he knew.
“That’s it,” she groaned, her head falling back. “Right there. Don’t stop. Make me come so hard I forget my own name.”
He shifted his angle slightly, and the broad head of his cock rubbed relentlessly against that sweet, spongy spot inside her. Her inner muscles fluttered, clenching around him. She was close, teetering on the edge, using the physical peak to eclipse the emotional abyss.
“Come on, Picasso,” he grunted, his own control fraying. “Let go. I’ve got you.”
With a shattered cry, Casey fell apart. Her cunt clamped down on him in a series of rhythmic, milking pulses, her entire body shaking with the force of her release. The sight, the feel of it, dragged him over the edge instantly. He held her tight, slamming up into her one last time as he erupted, his come pumping into her in hot, pulsing jets, filling her as she continued to convulse around him.
They clung to each other, sweaty and spent, breathing in ragged gulps. The terror was still there, a cold knot in the background, but it was now compartimentalized, held at bay by the shared, pounding certainty of their bodies. They were here. They were together.
As they slowly disentangled, rearranging clothes, a new, different hum began to vibrate through the house. It wasn’t the pure, pulling note of the siren. This was a jagged, complex vibration, a cacophony of conflicting frequencies. It rattled the pictures on the wall. The pool balls on the table shivered.
They hurried upstairs.
The living room was transformed. Mona’s crystals, wired together and arranged in a spiraling pattern on the floor, were glowing—not with a unified light, but with a chaotic, strobing riot of colors. Fatima and Calista stood at the center, hands clasped. Fatima was chanting in Arabic, her Green Moon magic weaving through the physical matrix, not to harmonize, but to amplify the dissonance. Calista’s elven Glamour poured into the mix, a thread of unwavering “is-ness” that refused to be bent.
The sound was unbearable, a physical pressure in the teeth.
“It’s working!” Mona yelled over the din, her eyes wild. “I can feel her song straining! It’s having to push through a wall of static!”
Hank’s phone buzzed. He looked at it, his face hardening. “Tracker’s back online! For a second! They’re at the lakeshore, like Calista said. The old Municipal Pier.”
Mike looked at Casey. The fear was back, but it had shape now. It had a destination.
“Then that’s where we go,” Casey said.
“With boxes of rocks,” Mike added, hefting a plastic tub full of wired-together geodes.
“To annoy a siren,” they said in unison.
The chaotic hum from their living room thrummed through the walls and out into the night, a grating, invisible shield thrown up against a perfect, enslaving song. It was a stupid plan. It was the only plan they had.
As they loaded the tubs of shrieking crystal into Hank’s van, Mike looked back at his house. In an upstairs window, the cats, Rembrandt and VanGogh, sat side-by-side on the sill, their tails flicking in opposite, irritated metronomes. Watching. Judging.
He nodded to them. Then he got in the van. They rolled out toward the lake, toward their kids, armed with nothing but noise, love, and a profoundly stubborn refusal to listen.
They rolled out toward the lake, toward their kids, armed with nothing but noise, love, and a profoundly stubborn refusal to listen.
Across the city, Jan’s borrowed delivery sprite transport—a buzzing, insectoid contraption of shimmering force—deposited her, Stacy, and Rick onto Brigid’s rain-slicked driveway. The orb samples glowed ominously in Jan’s makeshift shoebox lid. They sprinted for the front door, which was already hanging open.
They arrived just in time to see it happen.
Will and Sarah were in the doorway, their faces etched with helpless anguish. Sarah was pleading, her hands outstretched. “Jenny, baby, please. Look at me. Fight it.”
Jenny O’Connor, her red hair a bright shock in the hallway light, walked with a mechanical, placid stride. Beside her, Amanda moved in perfect unison, her blonde hair swaying. Their eyes were open, glazed, seeing nothing in this world. They moved with the same eerie purpose as the others.
“No!” Stacy barked, lunging forward, but Rick grabbed her arm.
“You can’t touch them,” he said, his own voice strangled. “The compulsion might jump. Jan said the tag is contagious at peak resonance.”
Jenny and Amanda stepped over the threshold and turned west, melting into the shadows between the streetlights. Sarah crumpled against Will, sobbing silently.
Brigid stood in the lab doorway, a data-slate hanging limply from her hand. Her clinical composure was shattered. “They weren’t tagged,” she whispered, more to herself than anyone. “I scanned them myself after the warehouse. They were clean. How is the call binding them?”
Jan barged past, setting the shoebox lid on a cluttered lab table. “We’ve got bigger problems. Check the samples. Now.”
Stacy’s phone rang. She answered, putting it on speaker. Rebecca Winkle’s voice, usually so warm and measured, was sharp with panic. “Stacy? Is Jan with you? Felicity just… she walked out. Charley tried to hold her, but she just pushed past. She’s never been that strong. She’s heading west.”
Before anyone could respond, Brigid’s own phone chimed. She looked at the screen, her face going pale. “Liam. Bethany.” She answered, and the frantic, Scottish-broken voice of Liam MacDougal filled the lab.
“Bruce is gone! One minute he was tinkerin’ on his steam-dynamo, the next he’s walkin’ out the damn window like it was a door! Bethany’s suiting up, but we cannae find a trace!”
The scale of it crashed over them. It wasn’t just the ones Lorna had directly enchanted. The net was wider, catching those connected by blood, by friendship, by potential. Beth, Jenny, Amanda, Felicity, Bruce. The siren’s call was harvesting an entire generation.
Jan whirled, staring at the clear tube in the center of the lab. Lorna floated, serene and unconscious, her dark hair adrift in the math-saturated water. The monitoring runes glowed a steady, neutral green. “She’s contained. She’s under. She can’t be doing this. The power required… it’s not coming from her.”
A low, wet chuckle echoed through the lab.
It came from the tube.
Lorna’s water-blue eyes were open. They fixed on Jan, then Rick, through the viscous fluid. A stream of bubbles escaped her smiling lips. The sound transmission runes glowed red.
“Hello, collectors,” Lorna’s voice said, amplified and dripping with amused malice. “You’ve been busy. Harvesting my little seeds. How quaint.”
Brigid was already at the console, her fingers flying. “Vital signs are unchanged. Neural activity is baseline. This shouldn’t be possible.”
“You think this tube holds me?” Lorna’s laugh was a gentle, corrosive wave. “It holds my body. My song is elsewhere. Always.”
Jan slammed her hands on the tube. “How? Who’s calling them?”
“Why, mother, of course,” Lorna said, as if explaining something simple to a child. “I laid the groundwork. I planted the hooks in the fertile soil. But a siren’s true call, the grand compulsion? That is a matriarch’s art. My song was the invitation. Hers is the command.”
Rick felt the blood drain from his face. The pull in his gut intensified, a deep, tidal ache pointing west-southwest. Toward the lake. “Her mother?”
“She finds my methods… indirect,” Lorna purred. “She prefers a cleaner harvest. She will take the ones I marked, and all the bright, delicious potential around them. A full bouquet.” Her eyes, infinitely cold, locked on Rick. “Unless.”
Stacy’s hand found her 9mm at the small of her back. “Unless what, you bitch?”
“Unless the primary source surrenders,” Lorna said, her gaze drinking in Rick’s horror. “The soil must return to the sower. Rick comes to me, willingly, and binds himself to my song. My triumph. My tragedy. In claiming my destined mate, I will call off my mother. The others will be released.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Brigid asked, her voice icy.
Lorna’s smile widened, a crescent of pearly teeth in the blue gloom. “Then mother will take them all. She will unmake their wills and distill their potential into wine. It will be a vintage of unparalleled sorrow. Either way,” she sighed, the sound a parody of contentment, “I get my tragedy. He comes to me in sacrifice, or he lives broken, knowing he let them be consumed. It’s really quite elegant.”
Jan stared, her mind racing over the two irreconcilable facts. The new victims, never tagged. The call, emanating from a comatose siren. It wasn’t a spell. It was a resonance. A familial harmonic.
“The tags aren’t just trackers,” Jan breathed, understanding dawning. “They’re tuning forks. You tuned them to Rick’s creative signature. Now your mother is broadcasting on that frequency. Anyone whose life resonates with his—his sisters, his friends, their friends—they’re all picking up the signal.”
“Clever Auntie,” Lorna cooed. “The boy is a catalyst. A beacon. My tragedy will rewrite his song, and through him, the song of everyone he loves. Now, are you coming, Rick? Or shall I listen to the chorus of their screams as mother unmakes them?”
Rick took a step forward. Stacy’s arm barred his chest, iron-strong.
“Over my fucking dead body,” Stacy snarled.
“That,” Lorna whispered, her eyes closing, “can be arranged.” The runes flickered back to green. The connection severed. She returned to her feigned sleep, the ghost of a smile on her lips.
The lab was silent, save for the hum of machinery and Sarah’s quiet weeping from the hall.
Suddenly, Jan’s phone buzzed with a video call. She fumbled it open.
Yukio Harata’s face filled the screen, tattooed and grim. The camera shook, showing a behind-the-shoulder view of Mai. The girl was sweating, her knuckles white where she gripped the edges of a kitchen island. Her body was taut, straining against an invisible leash.
“Breathe, Mai,” Yukio’s voice was calm, a rock in a churning sea. “In for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight. Your mind is your own. Your will is iron. Her song is just noise.”
Mai’s breaths, ragged at first, began to slow, syncing with her mother’s count. The terrifying blankness in her eyes receded, replaced by a furious, focused light. She shook her head, as if clearing water from her ears.
“It’s like… a whale song,” Mai gritted out. “But made of hooks. I can feel it scraping.”
“You’re fighting it,” Yukio said, pride and fear mixing in her voice. She turned the camera to her own face. “Jan. Brigid. It’s a wide-band enervation wave. Source is lakeside, old industrial sector. My girl’s got a strong will, but she can’t jam it forever.” The camera panned down as Yukio hefted a bizarre, bulky rifle. Its barrel was crystalline, its stock inlaid with silvery circuit-like patterns. “This is a sonic nullifier. Prototype. Time to field-test it.”
She looked back at Mai, who gave a sharp, determined nod.
“We’re going siren hunting,” Yukio said, and the call ended.
The statement hung in the air, a spark of pure, violent defiance. It was a different answer than Mona’s dissonant crystals, a different answer than a sacrificial trade. It was an answer Mike and Casey would appreciate.
Jan looked from the frozen, helpless grief on Brigid’s face to the furious resolve on Stacy’s, to the crushing guilt on Rick’s. She looked at the tube where Lorna dreamt of tragedies.
“Okay,” Jan said, cracking her neck. “New data. We’ve got a bigger bitch to find. Brigid, crack the samples, find the fundamental frequency. We need to break the tune, not just muffle it. Stacy, call Mike. Tell them the target’s upgraded. Rick,” she fixed him with a stare that brooked no argument, “you are not going to her. You’re coming with us. Your song, your soil, your friends. We’re going to salt the fucking earth.”
She grabbed the shoebox lid of glowing orbs and thrust them into Brigid’s hands. Then she turned and strode toward the door, Godfrey materializing at her heels.
“Where are you going?” Stacy demanded.
“To get a weapon that actually matches the problem!” Jan called back, already halfway down the walk. “And pants! Probably pants first!”
The night was no longer a passive backdrop. It was a battlefield, and the opposing melody was pulling their children toward the crushing, dark water. But another sound was rising now, underneath the dread: the racket of Hank’s van full of shrieking crystals, the determined breath of a fighter, and the chaotic, scrambling promise of a counter-attack. The chorus of annoyance was mobilizing. The hunt was on.