Greg’s house was not what I expected.
What I expected was the typical rich people home you see on television. Sprawling living rooms with a couch that takes up the center space, instead of being shoved up against a wall. Nice dressers, tasteful plants, and cheap-looking overpriced works of art lining the halls. I like to think that there’s a certain pattern to the lives of people who belong in the same socio-economic statuses, and that extends to house decor too.
Instead, what I got were overgrown plants that climbed up the staircase. The type of plants with fur on their stem and leaves, the kind they warn you about in free school science magazines. The floor was real bona fide dirt. Scratch that, it was soil. The kind that tended to sink with each step, with enough moisture to them that the whole place smelled of pungent fertilizer.
And it was night.
Forests at night are scary.
I thought the Mother Tree’s forest was scary up in Westchester. The trees with their naked branches, and the howling wind that sang high above me. The trees here, though… they breathed. They seemed to move and hide things in them. Up there, the forest felt abandoned and empty—a fear that came from being alone and being found by something.
Here, it was the opposite.
I definitely wasn’t alone. There was no doubt about it. The fact that I had been found wasn’t a question in the first place. The forest here was full of things that had already noticed my presence. My instincts told me so.
The fear came from the question of whether they cared or not.
There were sounds. Chirps of crickets, strange cries that seemed to come from miles off, but we were inside a house. The walls seemed older than they were supposed to be, nearly covered by the overgrowth. I couldn’t tell one passageway from another. It was really like I had just been dropped off in the middle of a forest with no sense of direction.
“I… Greg did not tell me he lived in the Brazil Rainforest,” I quipped.
“Not a tropical forest, Hallow,” Mina said quietly from next to me. She had her staff out. “A temperate forest.”
“Oh ok, Ms. Forest scientist. Since when were you the expert on this?”
“I’m going to major in biology with a track in—” she stopped talking, then continued in a much lower voice. “Does it matter how I know?”
“Does it matter what type of forest it is?” I returned in the same tone.
“I’m afraid it does, Practitioner,” Wol said politely from his comfortable place in my bookbag. “Different places mean different stories. History, culture, the path of events… that will determine what thing you face.”
I gave Wol an imaginary scowl. “Whose side are you on?”
“The side that keeps you alive,” Wol said evenly.
Hwari tickled my neck as she ghosted by. ‘There are things in here.’
“Yeah,” I said, swallowing the last bit of quiet panic. “I figured.”
That was one of the reasons why I kept talking. Well, it’s why I talk in any high-stress situation: to keep a sense of normalcy amid the underlying rise of panic. Talking meant I was alive. I think. It also meant I could talk, and still do stuff. I guess being the smartass who got more beatings than the other kids for mouthing off paid off in moments like this.
Small victories.
There was a small glow that lit up our area. Looking to my left, I saw that Mina had her staff out. Abigail also had a—
“Holy shit, is that a gun?” I hissed.
Abigail gave me a cool look and a curt nod. “Mortal ferromancy is one of the more effective defenses that humanity has invented in the last century.”
“Why does no one just call it a gun?” I asked no one in particular. “It’s going to work?”
“Somewhat,” Abigail replied.
“It depends on how much of the preternatural’s existence and identity is rooted in the material plane,” Mina said with a glance at the gun.
With a source of light, I could take a better look around the house. It was just as I intially saw. Overgrown plants had taken over the place. I spotted the couch in the middle, covered in what looked like vines. My eyes traced the trees because they couldn’t just extend infinitely upwards. We were in a house with ceilings, but the glow from Mina’s staff couldn’t penetrate the thick darkness above us, and I couldn’t see the top. The tree trunks simply faded into the shadows without ever reaching the ceiling.
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There was a roaring in my head that could only be described as a waterfall. A free-falling gut-wrenching sound that something was wrong here.
I also realized we had spent the last five minutes just talking without really discussing anything important. That was because we were dithering. Because we might have been practitioners and… whatever Abigail was, but we were still teenagers. Capital T Teenagers.
None of us really knew what to do.
Damn it. I realized I’d been leaning way too hard on Abigail or Mina to know what to do. Mina talked like she had dealt with cults before, but I think the darkness inside the house and the trees had thrown her off, because she just stood there without a lot of purpose to her movements.
It was up to me then.
“Mina, can you see if you can spot a light switch by the walls there?”
Mina took a step towards the wall, then stopped. “It won’t work. This is… whatever this magic is—”
“I know that, but let’s make sure,” I said firmly.
Mina took carefully measured steps to the wall, in a sort of shuffling movement that made sure she didn’t lift her feet too high up.
She found the light switch and flicked it on and off a couple of times. Nothing happened in response. “I told you.”
I honestly didn’t think it would work either. I mean, the ceilings were literally made of the night sky for god’s sake. But my asking Mina to do something meant that we were moving. That meant I managed to kickstart my brain into thinking about what to do.
“There door’s gone,” Abigail whispered next to me.
Shit. But there was no going back anyways.
“Basement. We need to find the basement,” I said, recalling Greg’s words. “That’s where everything happened.”
Mina waved her staff. Nothing but forest in front of us. “I don’t see it.”
“Then we’ll have to look,” I said and took the first step.
God, walking in a forest in the dark was terrifying. It was the same for everyone else, because things got real quiet real fast. The tension was a physical thing that pulsed along with my racing heartbeat, ready to spike at any moment.
I spoke first. “Anyone want to volunteer ideas on what happened to this house?”
“I can’t be too sure,” the black cat said. “But I think it’s been taken over.”
“Like haunted?”
“Similar. But not everything in this world can be neatly categorized, especially the world you now live in, Practitioner. Sometimes, it’s a mixture of a few things that happened that might create something new. Others, it’s none of those things, but something old that we’ve never encountered before.”
“Do you remember at school, the woman with the fae? She used illusions of a jungle to strengthen her familiar’s beast glamour?” Mina interjected.
I nodded, then, realizing she couldn’t hear me, “yeah, I do.”
“So you went over how certain creatures are more powerful depending on what’s around them?”
“Like ghosts near things related to their cause of death,” I answered.
“Yup. Well, some preternaturals are strong enough to bend the rules to do just that for themselves. It’s not exactly an illusion, but it’s not a physical transformation either. They take a place in the physical plane, and alter its nature on the different planes,” Mina explained.
“That sounds like a lot of work,” I said.
“There are a lot of names for it. Americans call it a demense. The Japanese call it a domain. Europeans, Africans, Russians… everyone has their own name for it,” Mina explained.
“It’s old,” Wol said. “Older than you children know. A lot of Lost Places were created like this.”
“So presumably, whatever followed the Wickermen back from the woods made this place their home,” I said. “If we can figure out what it is…”
“Or we can avoid it entirely and just get what we came for,” Mina said. Her staff swept the air, lighting up our path.
Something brushed against my hand, and I all but jumped out of my own skin.
Because I stopped, Abigail bumped against me.
It was Abigail’s hand. She was trembling.
“S-sorry,” I said, still feeling the warmth of her hand in my own. “That startled me.”
The outline of her head nodded, barely visible to my eyes. Damn it. I really needed to find some other way to see in the dark. Maybe it was just me, but it looked like being a Practitioner meant lots of time spent walking around at night. The Fox Sister’s norigae would have been perfect for a situation like this. Fire to get rid of the woods, thorns to block things off in a jiffy, and night vision to boot.
Either that or invest in a really good flash light. Or get my staff finished up.
Too many things to do. Too little time to do them all.
I gave Abigail’s hand a reassuring squeeze, ignored my pounding heart, and continued following Mina.
Except when I turned to look, Mina wasn’t there anymore.
The light from her staff. Seoul. Her long black hair tied in a ponytail. Her oversized parka.
She was gone.
The me from before would have frozen in panic. It’s not every day you become the main character in a horror movie plot where the cast starts disappearing one by one. I grabbed Abigail’s hand even tighter and lowered myself down to the ground, dragging her down with me.
“Mina’s gone,” I said, whispering. I began to sweat. The roaring in my head began to grow.
What just happened? I only turned around for a second. Where had Mina just disappeared to? She had been right in front of me. Had she been taken? Shouldn’t I have heard something?
There were two possibilities. One: we’d just encountered a rule of this place. Mina and Wol said that this place was similar to a Lost Place. Then it stood to reason that there were rules. In the Slums, it had been about identity. Common sense told me that rules wouldn’t always be so metaphysical. It could just as well be physical. Stories of groups being separated in forests weren’t a rare one. In fact, it’s a bit cliché. That would be a perfectly acceptable assumption to make.
Two: whatever preternatural was stalking the woods took her. But without a sound? Mina, a practitioner who was way more capable than me? With Seoul, the divine guard dog next to her?
One made much more sense.
But why Mina? Why her and not Abigail?
The hand. Abigail was holding my hand, so she wasn’t lost.
“Abigail,” I said. “Don’t let go of my hand.”
She said nothing, nestling in closer to me. An answer in and of itself.
“Wol, I think there’s a rule that’s trying to get us separated. We have to figure out what it is. Hwari, can you check if anything’s near us right now, just in case?”
Then Wol and Hwari both said…
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
And I realized belatedly that my backpack felt lighter than before. I reached out through the familiar bond between us and received radio silence from Hwari. Wol, too.
They were gone.
“…Abigail?”
She didn’t answer. I knew why. She wasn’t here with me.
So just what was holding my hand?