Freydís ☾ — The Summoning : NEVER SAY DIE
Chapter One
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Chapter One
Aiden Moore was absolutely certain the moon would show up for a ritual sacrifice. He searched the sky for its face and found the bright, white sphere looming behind rainclouds high above the ocean, hiding from a predetermined future. Fucking coward. His boot clipped a rock, then another, sending stones toppling over the edge of a mossy cliff on the outskirts of Malibu. Rich folk didn’t waste their time on the Ocean Grove trailhead. It was, at once, too harshly overgrown and too moderate. People carrying purse-dogs would linger in the dirt lot, satisfied with a Facebook check-in and a portrait-mode snapshot of their running shoes. Fitness junkies sneered their noses at the bumpy trail and complained to their friends during post-workout juice-brunches about forestry maintenance and where do my taxes even go and it’s not that good of a burn, anyway. No one worth a damn swatted their way through Ocean Grove’s spindly branches unless they were looking for a place to get off, get well, or worse, and he certainly hadn’t lugged a backpack full of store-bought pig’s blood and freshly plucked dove feathers to the cliffs for nothing.
So, where the hell was Shay fucking Bennett?
Adrenaline sank into his marrow, quickening his thoughts. Every what if lashed at his heels. What if this is too crazy? What if it doesn’t work? What if I’m making a mistake? What if I regret it? Aiden swallowed to wet his throat.
For eight years, he’d listened to seasoned musicians backstage at shows yap about the business—what they’d gone through, what they’d do differently. But it was always the four-person bands from truck-stop towns in middle America who nodded and gritted their teeth. It was always the openers playing hand-me-down instruments and agreeing on exposure payment who would do whatever it took to get where they wanted to go. Buy a van, leave your hometown behind, head west to the city of lights. Get blinded. Hooked on something cut with bleach and gutter water. Peek at the dirt caked under each Hollywood star. After a while, you’re missing Mom’s Sunday dinners. Dreaming about church cookouts with a needle stuck between your toes.
He’d known too many hopefuls like that. Seen bands come and go—guitarist last spotted on Sunset Boulevard, vocalist court-ordered to attend a twelve-month wellness program, talented drummer found dead in Venice Beach. New players on the block rarely held their own. They got sidetracked by lights and nightclubs. Top-shelf this and Colombian that. Record deals on silver-plated platters shaped like dreams they’d carried from one place to the next. Well, Aiden wasn’t from some haybale, cow-tipping turnoff, and growing up in this soulless city had taught him a few things.
First, free drugs were never actually free.
Second, don’t fuck your bandmates. Don’t fuck their boyfriends either.
Third, hormones change everything. Especially your voice.
Fourth, not one single talented, ridiculously good-looking, checks-every-stupid-fucking-box musician got where they wanted to go without doing a few things they never thought they’d do.
Despite the laughably edgy, black eyeliner wearing, satanic frat-boys who somehow became overnight millionaires—murder was most people’s bugaboo.