Henrietta's mom's boyfriend's van pull into the driveway of the faggy vampire kid's humble suburban abode just as the sun set.
Twilight pushed at the horizon, making everything seem more ominous than it already was as Evan hopped out of the backseat and headed around back to help Georgie with his drumset. Dylan was back there too, lugging a bag full of ritual supplies along with his bass. He and Evan exchanged uneasy looks, but before they could part to start lugging all their stuff to the faggy vampire kid's basement, Evan gave Dylan a bracing pat on the shoulder, in spite of the dread pooling in the pit of this stomach. They were totally supposed to be done with pagan rituals.
Then Dylan surprised him by surging up on tiptoes and kissing him quickly on the mouth.
"Everything'll be fine," he said, with an almost-smile.
Evan felt better in spite of himself. As he lugged a hi-hat towards the front door, he forced himself to run through the lyrics of the first couple songs of their set. He couldn't go into a show too happily, it would ruin the mood. And Henrietta's poetry definitely never made anyone happy, if she could help it. Speaking of, Henrietta nudged him as she walked past, carefully carrying her keyboard. "We gotta hurry up," she said. "They were expecting us five minutes ago."
Evan swore. "How long is it gonna take to get all this stuff set up?"
She glanced behind her and shrugged. "I just hope it works."
Evan followed her down the steps to the basement, largely ignoring all the faggy vampire kids who came up to him with requests for his autograph or chord progressions or 'that keyboard girl's' phone number. Affixing the hi-hat to its proper position, Evan glanced down at Georgie as he played an absentminded fill.
"Cool?" he asked, not even sure if the other boy could hear him over the resounding crash of a cymbal.
However, Georgie answered, reaching out a hand to still the instrument's vibrations. "Cool," he said, flashing a barely-perceptible smirk and then twirling his sticks at someone in the audience—probably his Canadian boyfriend, who still inexplicably followed their band to all their shows and sometimes lobbied to come onstage and do a harmonica solo. He hadn't worn them down yet, but it was getting riskier with every gig.
Evan wondered if Georgie had told him about all the shit that had been going down lately—probably, but then again, it was almost impossible to tell with him.
Henrietta was busy rapidly unpacking things from the big bag, balancing three black candles on top of her keyboard and carefully arranging the herbs they'd decided on in the patterns Bradley had said would work the best. Dylan was carefully affixing a sprig of something to the neck of his bass, and Georgie had stopped flirting for long enough to kneel down in front of his drums, drawing careful chalk outlines. Evan looked around uncomfortably, wishing he hand something to do, but his part didn't come until the show had actually begun. Instead, he hung over the side of the makeshift stage and pretended to be interested in something some hipster was saying.
Eventually, Henrietta caught his eye and gave him a thumbs-up, giving him cause to scramble to his feet and cut the hipster off mid-sentence, turning on his mic and gritting out something unintelligible. Georgie counted them in way too fast and they launched into their first song of the evening, a noisy, meandering number called Gutterhead that Ike had called a "nightmarish aural landscape" when he sat in on one of their practices. He hadn't meant it as a compliment, but they had decided to take it as such.
The audience was eating it up, anyway, and Evan could only hope that they wouldn't notice Henrietta starting off the ritual by blowing out each of the candles in turn as she played, whispering something quietly to herself.
Once she was finished, she glanced over at Georgie, who tossed a handful of salt in the center of his chalk drawings with a muttered word. Then Dylan, who deftly lit a match on the neck of his bass and set the sprig to smoldering, executing a Charlie Brown-style spin to get the smoke circulating around the room with undeniable panache.
Ridiculous as it was, Evan couldn't help but feel a little bit proud of him. He'd been easily the most freaked out of all of them when this whole mess had started in the first place, but he was being totally cool about it.
There was no time to get all disgustingly warm and fuzzy about things, though. It was his turn.
In an abrupt departure from the wailed lyrics of heartbreak and disembowelment that he'd been halfheartedly spouting in between extensive keyboard solos, Evan began chanting into the mic, voice dipping low and gravelly. He'd practiced the words for a solid hour before they got into the car, and the whole way to North Park as well; his voice sounded much more confident than he'd thought it would as he spoke the words that would supposedly drive the spirit out of hiding and into the open so that they could banish it.
The song crashed to a jangling halt just a few seconds after he finished the words of the chant, and for a while, nothing happened. A few faggy vampire kids and Ike cheered, but other than that the house was still and quiet. Maybe they'd done it wrong. The whole thing had seemed a little bit slapdash, after all. Shrugging internally, Evan barked out the first lyrics of their next song, a considerably more energetic number.
They'd barely been playing four seconds when the thing tore its way out of the interrupted hipster and made straight for them.
-Hausinge-
Evan hadn't seen all the spirits when the others had, so it was a definite shock when it appeared. It seemed to explode outwards, huge and constantly shifting, insubstantial as smoke and yet somehow glistening with a sick, oily-looking sheen. The body it had created or possessed or whatever it did had disappeared, stretching grotesquely out as the thing emerged from it and then dissolving into nothing. There wasn't much time to think about that, however, when the spirit seemed to be all teeth and talons, arms and legs, an ungainly mass of ectoplasm coming for them at stunning speeds.
"Oh, shit," Evan blurted out, head still lowered to the microphone. The audience simply looked on, frozen.
Then one kid screamed, and the whole situation became utter pandemonium.
Over the cries of kids and their attempts to claw each other out of the way to the exit, Evan heard Henrietta shout. "Keep playing!"
He shot her an incredulous look. "Are you fucking kidding?"
The thing was fast approaching. It would be on them in a second, and then, he presumed, all would be lost.
"Just do it," she shouted back. "I know what I'm talking about."
Frantically, Evan glanced at the others. Dylan looked almost as skeptical as he did, but Georgie had grimly resumed banging on his drums the moment that she told them to. Figuring that it was too late for anything else now, anyway, Evan leaned back towards the mic and began to stumble over the lyrics to this amped-up version of Heart Philanderer, he closed his eyes, expecting any minute to feel its very real-looking claws sinking into his flesh, ready to tear it to ribbons.
Instead, he heard Henrietta's voice raised over his, over the din of the crowd, over the strange squalling noises that the ghost was making as it bounced frantically off the walls, smashing a tacky landscape portrait to pieces, ricocheting off a light fixture and plunging them all into murky darkness that made the thing seem even more terrifying than it did already.
Georgie was shouting something, too. Dylan was frantically making signs, apparently throwing everything he could think of at the ghost-demon-whatever it was. Seized by inspiration, Evan seized the canister of salt still lying on the ground next to Henrietta's keyboard, angry words spilling from his lips as he began to seal their makeshift stage.
As if it could sense what was happening, the spirit seemed to gather its energy, focusing itself into something less like total chaos and more straight malevolence. It shot towards them once again, and before he could shake the final bit of salt out of the canister, it reached out a spindly hand and slashed at the sleeve of his jacket.
Barely even registering the pain, Evan finished the circle and shut his eyes, pouring every ounce of his own energy into the song they were miraculously still playing; it may have been the shittiest version of it they'd ever done, but they were still going all the same. And maybe it was just some weird defense mechanism that his brain was making up for his own sake, or maybe he was just going crazy, but Evan could almost feel the energy of the song gathering and focusing itself, much as the spirit's had. He could feel it gathering, feel the tension rising in all parts of his body as the song built to its crescendo and the spirit's furious loops around the room increased in speed.
Just as it peaked, Evan felt a strange sense of calm. Before the energy was released, before he could possibly know what would happen, Evan felt, with absolute sureness, that they would be fine. He groped around behind him unconsciously, without thinking even for a second, and found a fistful of Dylan's t-shirt to cling on to as the energy slammed out of their salt circle and impacted the spirit, bowling it over, swallowing it up in a flash of pearl-gray.
There was one last keening, roaring noise, and then it disappeared altogether, leaving nothing but an acrid smell in the air and the dozen or so stunned kids who hadn't been able to make it out, cowering under tables and crawling for the door.
Evan gulped in deep lungfuls of air, feeling as though he had just run five marathons without even one cup of coffee beforehand. Dylan was sporting a rapidly-forming bruise from where the impact had sent him careening into the drumset, and Georgie looked the youngest that Evan had ever seen him. Even Henrietta was shaken.
For a moment they all just stared at each other in silence. It felt like that moment could have lasted forever, but before they could test that theory a girl with hair dyed flame-red and a Twilight t-shirt on climbed out from under a card-table.
"That," she pronounced, "was totally hardcore."
Another beat of silence, and then more and more kids were emerging from their hiding place to tell them the same; almost immediately, the stage was swarmed with kids who were wondering how they did it, and why, and if they could do it at their birthday party.
Some seemed to think the whole thing was some kind of gimmicky light-show, while others spoke sagely of feeling a bad presence in the room right off the bat. Either way, the hardcoreness of the event seemed to be agreed upon unanimously.
At the end of their line of congratulators, a kid in skinny jeans and a skull beanie stepped forward, not sporting the huge, exhilarated grins of his peers. Evan recognized him vaguely as the dude who this house belonged to.
He appeared to waver for a moment, and Evan wondered if he was about to get pissed at them for bringing bad juju into his house, or something. Instead, he appeared to get overcome with emotion, seizing Henrietta's hand and pressing his lips to it emphatically.
"Thank you," he said, looking at each of them in turn. "Thank you all."
"It's cool," said Henrietta, still looking vaguely bewildered at what had just happened. Ridiculously, Evan got the urge to stifle a laugh.
Then, Dylan was at his elbow, tugging up the sleeve of his jacket with a concerned look on his face. He scrubbed his bangs out of his eyes anxiously, and Evan could see that the bruise already forming over his right eye was a bad one. He seemed wholly unconcerned with it, however, instead eyeing the blood that stained the ripped sleeve of Evan's dark coat even darker with growing alarm.
Evan shrugged his jacket off obligingly, even though he was still riding high and could barely feel any kind of pain in it at all.
"They're just shallow," he said, relieved, staring down at the three jagged cuts in his arm.
"We should still get them looked at—" Dylan said anxiously, then trailed off as Georgie pushed past him as well as a clump of admirers, still as young and scared-looking as before.
"Ike," he was saying. "Ike, you fucker, where are you, come on."
There was no answer. Evan found himself scanning faces in the crowd, but he didn't see a single Canadian smartass about.
"Ike," said Georgie, sounding like he was coming dangerously close to losing it, something that hadn't happened in years.
And then, finally, a muffled voice in the corner said, "I'm over here, Jesus. Don't have a pulmonary embolism."
And he came out from where he had scrunched himself into a corner, scribbling furiously into a notepad and clutching a portable tape-recorder.
"You got all this on tape?" Evan asked incredulously.
"Yes," said Ike firmly, pushing his glasses up his nose. "And I was also able to take some notes while everyone else was busy screaming themselves to death. They'd probably be useful, if you swallowed your pride for long enough to use them. Really, Georgie, 'protecting me' is nowhere near a valid excuse for not letting me help you—"
Before he could finish, Ike was cut off by Georgie wrapping his arms around his shoulders and kissing him square on the mouth.
Ike assented to the kiss, but when they pulled apart a few seconds later he was still muttering. "—really, I'm an excellent field researcher, and—"
Turning away from their decidedly un-Goth PDA with a grimace, Evan turned back to Dylan and picked up his bass for him, so that he wouldn't have to make two trips.
Later that night, once they got back to Henrietta's it was decided that another impromptu sleepover was in order. The same sleeping arrangements were made, and they stayed up well into the night going over everything that had happened, in exhaustive detail. By the time Evan finally got to sleep, somewhere around midmorning, it only seemed like five seconds before Bradley was banging open the door to Henrietta's room, looking disgustingly cheery and well-rested.
"Wake up, assholes. I assume from the fact that you're all alive that everything went well last night," he said. "So you'll be happy to hear that I tracked down the next one for you. We should get to work as soon as possible."
The four of them groaned as one.