Summoned by Anne M. Pillsworth

been overexcited. Or drugs.
    The Powders of Zeph and Aghar.
    What if they’d been laced with drugs? As soon as he’d breathed their smoke, he’d felt superstrong, he’d seen things, he’d cut himself without feeling it. Angel dust could do all that, couldn’t it? The white thing had been the last special effect of the high, and now he had a wicked headache, the hangover.
    Jesus, what was with Geldman, selling crap like that? Was it a sick joke? Or a way to give customers the illusion they’d done magic? Either way, it had to be illegal. And what about the Reverend, sending Sean to Geldman?
    God, Dad would implode if he found out Sean had been stupid enough to contact the Reverend, then stupider enough to buy drugs from a weird old dude who thought he was running a wizard pharmacy. Yeah, the Rev and Geldman probably did hang together, snorting Zeph and Aghar in their secret drug den behind the frosted glass. That was why they were so fucked up.
    What he had to do right now was dump the powders left in his bean pots. He had to get rid of the pots, too. They were contaminated, and so were the tubes the powders had come in. To get them, though, he’d have to return to the magical circle. Sean looked up the service road to the line of modern streetlights that marched along Old Post Road. Safe under their sodium glare, he could walk home in half an hour. Come back tomorrow.
    That wouldn’t work. Someone might steal Dad’s bike and camera. Plus there were the spilled briquettes. If the wind picked up, they could spit sparks and start a fire. As for the powders, a bum could come along and try snorting them, and overdose, and die, and his death would be on Sean’s pounding head.
    Big deal, going back for his stuff. He remembered now. Even if a Servitor was unbound, it couldn’t hurt the summoner. The Reverend had said so.
    God, the Reverend said so . Sean was the crazy one if he took any comfort from that.
    He made it safely to the grill, which lay on its side, its lid ten feet off. When he’d fallen on his butt, he must have kicked the grill over. Again, end of mystery. He scraped the scattered briquettes together. They stank with the new stink, the melding of Zeph and Aghar. He held his breath until he could smother the embers under the lid.
    The bean pots he dumped into a plastic grocery bag that still held Geldman’s glass tubes. He tied the bag shut with four hard-pulled knots. It would be safest to chuck it into the river, no matter how much Joe-Jack (Lord of the Pawtuxet Conservation Society) would kick if he could see. Sean had fished crap out of the water five annual cleanups in a row. He’d earned one supposedly nontoxic dump.
    Reluctant to give up the light, he hung his camp lantern on the handlebars of Dad’s bike and struggled into his backpack, so he’d be ready to move. Then he crept to the edge of the parking lot.
    A narrow path led into the brush between lot and river. Sean sidled along it with the grace of a drunken elephant. His racket spooked something in the reeds, and it beat a rustling retreat. Coon, maybe. Skunk, possum. Just a plain old animal, but it could be rabid. Sean stopped, whirled the loaded grocery bag like a slingshot, and hurled it as far as he could.
    It splashed down mid-river and sank. Sean didn’t wait to say good-bye—the animal in the reeds was still rustling, and maybe it wasn’t retreating. Maybe it was moving toward him.
    Stumbling into the parking lot, Sean saw something gleam in the leafy shadows of the woods to the east. Was it stray starlight on an onyx forehead or a golden eye? Back by the river, had something just splashed into the water?
    In three strides, he made it to the bike and jumped on. Though he could only steer with his right hand, he pedaled hard, out of the lot, onto the service road, toward the safety of sodium streetlights and the company of late-cruising cars.

8
    When Joe-Jack arrived the next morning, he took one look at the bloody gauze wadded