I didn’t get to see what Underthebed was really capable of back in the house. The monster had been in the middle of feeding and to be frank, he hadn’t really been impressive. Some kind of nightmare-parasite that preyed on people by giving them bad dreams. I’d cornered him fairly easily, and he’d been amicable to the idea of following around.
But what I didn’t account for was the fact that Underthebed isn’t some two-bit folklore legend that’s gone stale people no longer remember. It’s the idea of fear manifested into a creature that lurked under people’s bed. Thousands of children across the globe experience this phenomena: a monster hiding somewhere in their room.
And Underthebed could tap into that.
He was a part of that global phenomena.
The duct tape tore themselves off the teddybear as it’s stomach churned open, becoming a fanged mouth with tongue lolling out.
Nightmares came crawling out the dirt and snow.
Shadowy arms rose out of the snow, pale fleshly hands with red-nail polish. Legs came next, tangled with the arms, the same shade of white-grey pale skin covering them. Yet, no bodies. In between the trees, where the night was too thick for us to see, eyes opened up.
And so did the pair of eyes in the teddy bear’s stomach maw.
Derek faltered forward, his eyes half-lidded.
What I also didn’t account for was the fact that Derek wasn’t alone. Not only that, he wasn’t the type of practitioners I was used to facing. Scratch that. They hadn’t been practitioners at all. Just two-bit dabblers who got lucky and contracted a familiar, or gifted a staff. Or comparably some local alley-lurking bogeyman who had been pushed out by the more powerful creatures.
No… Derek, and by extension everyone else from the Valentines, were scions of one of Society’s most powerful family.
His familiar rose from behind him: a valkyrie. There was no mistaking it. The wings, the armor, the helm that covered her face—a norse myth in the flesh. The valkyrie reached out, covering Derek’s eyes, and whispered in his ear, “Do not fear, descendant of the Seiōmaōr. Merely dreams.”
Then she took a war horn to her mouth and blew on it, sustaining a note that reverberated in my very being with unwavering clarity.
And Underthebed’s nightmares dissolved with it. They had never been physical apparitions. Just illusory.
They bought me maybe ten seconds.
“RUN!” I screamed, picking up the teddy bear tucking it under my arm. Then I bolted.
Abigail must’ve taken that time to reload, because a few more gunshots rang out. I didn’t stop to look. Whatever that axe was, it was drawing the fire by using the embedded ghosts whose death had been due to gunshot wounds. The wind roared in my ears as I sprinted down through the forest, fueled by nothing but adrenaline and the flight portion of my fight-or-flight instinct.
“Underthe—,” I gasped. “—bed, be still.”
The mouth on the teddy bear’s stomach which had been gnawing at my cast stopped. The remaining duct tape attached themselves to the doll. There was no need to keep him out here, not when I had nothing to empower his abilities. As it were, I was just throwing eggs at the wall.
Another note rang out from the warhorn. This one sounded angry.
A call.
They answered.
“The valkyrie. It has abilities related to conjuration,” Wol commented.
I swallowed, as my Third Eye started going haywire. “She’s hunting us.”
No sooner had I said that than dozens of ghosts began to rise up from the snowy ground all around us. Many of them wore dark blue wool coats, paired with a tricorn hat. They held ghastly muskets with bayonets, pointed at nothing. Dazed eyes, holding scenes of gunfire and charging into enemy lines: ghosts of the soldiers who fought in the American Revolutionary War.
I stopped. “What the fuck…”
All this from a familiar.
Derek was no Dabbler. Hell, he wasn’t even a teenager Practitioner. He was a fully enabled Practitioner with a Valkyrie familiar, and I’d just set the stage for his solo show.
Somewhere along the way, I’d begun to overestimate myself and underestimate other practitioners. Maybe I really was talented. Maybe I had a knack for it. After all, I outsmarted the two mercenaries that came after me. I had a talent for conjuration—a significant one too. Mina didn’t seem that much better than me.
I’d been dead wrong. I’d just been unable to see what a real Practitioner was capable of, because I hadn’t faced any. The man had wiped away my attempt to buy time without lifting a finger himself. His familiar had done everything. And now, a literal ghost army was surrounding us, cutting off our way of escape.
“Jain!” Wol snapped me back.. “Focus!”
“S-salt,” I stammered. “I have salt in the bag.”
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I brought my backpack around, so that it hung over my stomach. Reaching in, I brought out the box of salt. You know the one. The girl in the yellow dress holding the umbrella. I nearly ended up dropping the box, because my freaking right hand was still covered in the cast. I struggled to open it, because my fingernails had been basically ground down in all the scuffles I’d been in the past few days.
“Atteeeeeeen—tion! Hut!” One of the ghost soldiers—the only one on horseback—raised his arm high. “For Liberty!”
The soldiers immediately snapped to attention. The confusion from being awoken flipped, turning to awareness overwritten with a robot-like precision to obey. They were just boys, some of them even younger than I was.
Abigail snatched the box from me. “Jain Shin Hallow, if we get to the tree, do you have a plan?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“Good enough,” Abigail said. She stowed her gun, grabbing a fistful of salt. “Do stay behind me. Let’s go!”
At the same time, the horseback soldier screamed, “Charge!”
The next few moments became a blur, as Abigail rushed ahead of me, scattering handfuls of salt in the direction of the oncoming army. But the trees blocked most of them. What little salt made contact hissed and popped, followed by the ghost falling to their knees in pain or outright perishing from our plane of existence. But for every ghost soldier that fell, three more took it’s place. They were going to overrun us through sheer numbers alone.
The war horn bellowed again. Closer. Angrier.
We weren’t going to make it.
I put the entire weight of my Third Eye on the ghosts, diving deeper into the turmoil. Thin faded lines struck out from every single soldier of them, stringed up to the ghost on horseback.
“That one,” I said, pointing. “Unless we get rid of that one, we’re not getting through.”
But the general, or corporeal, or lieutenant or whatever his rank was, this ghost was surrounded by the heaviest concentration of soldiers. They practically swarmed around him, so that even if we threw the salt, it would lose it’s effectiveness before ever reaching him. Not only that, the number of boy-soldiers guarding him were growing at an alarming rate.
“He’s too far. I can’t—” Abigail gasped, ducking out of the way as one of the ghosts swung his musket at her. She lashed back out with a scattering of salt. The boy fell to his knees, clutching his stomach in pain.
“Practitioner, we have to do something,” Wol said, in his usually calm manner.
There was a crack of thunder.
About fifty yards away, one of the ghosts lowered his musket and stuck his ramrod into the muzzle. Then another ghost next to him raised his musket towards me, closing one eye and aiming at me with the sight notch pointed towards me.
Oh god, they were starting to shoot.
They were so young.
The teddy bear squirmed in my arms.
“Abigail, I’m going to make you an opening. You have one shot, okay?”
“What? Jain Shin Hallow, what are you—”
I grabbed the teddy bear by the head and lifted it in the direction of the captain, screaming out, “Abigail! Now!”
Underthebed summoned a different set of nightmares this time.
It created visions of more ghosts, these ones torn apart and bleeding. One of the wounded nightmares grabbed the nearest ghost and started wailing, ‘You let me die! Why did you leave me!’ A little starving girl with a basket full of mishappen fruit, whispering to the boy in front of her, ‘I’m hungry, Oliver. Oh, I’m so hungry, I could eat a whole cow.’ Mad horses frothing at the mouth and rearing back, their momentum carrying them to crush the small boys under its hooves. Captains screaming at the boys that any deserters would be captured and hung. Another set of nightmares weren’t alive at all; they were explosions from cannonballs.
Underthebed was showing them visions of war.
And it worked. The rank-and-file was broken, and chaos ensued.
Abigail rushed through the mass of soldiers who held up their bayonets out of instinct. Whereever the bayonets touched her skin, it grew a welt, then peeled open into a small cut. However, the ghostly blades didn’t pierce clothing, just the skin. Dark black spots began to leak through her dress.
But the Abigail threw the salt on the commander. The horse shrieked in pain, rearing up and threw the commander on the floor. Abigail dashed more salt at him, twice. He faded.
“Jain! Go!”
I stopped.
In the process, Abigail had surrounded herself with ghosts. A freaking wall of them. There was no order to them, but they were still a mob. An angry mob. They rounded on her.
“I—”
“I’ll hold them back as best as I could! Get to the Mother Tree, Jain! Go!” And with that, she threw the Mother Tree’s branch at me. “Hurry!”
I surprised myself by managing to snatch it out of the air with my free hand, hugging it close to me and squishing the teddy bear in the process. I deliberated throwing the teddy bear at her, but wasn’t sure if Underthebed would do more good than harm.
“Jain Shin Hallow! Go!”
The steel in her voice convinced me, and I started running.
I don’t remember how long I ran for, but when came to, I had cleared the trees.
As I neared the crest, the wind turning to needles of ice, and stinging my neck, cheek, and back of my hands. Basically anything that wasn’t covered, or wasn’t covered enough. The icy-snow broke apart under my weight. I wheezed, trying to get enough oxygen to put out the burning sensation in my lungs and legs. I crested the hill and lookd downwards at the circlular land, barren of everything except a lone burnt tree.
I began the descent, breathing heavy. No real thoughts came to me. Just emotions. Fear. Panic. Guilt. Shame. Nothing good. My teeth began to click together.
So cold.
“Practitioner,” Wol said as he usually did in times like this. “We have to be ready.”
“R-ready for what?” As much as I wanted to blame the cold for the stutter, the nervousness was equally to blame.
“The detritus won’t be able to hold back the ghosts for long. We have to prepare to face off, here,” Wol said.
“Abigail said—”
“She’s weak,” Wol said matter-of-factly.
I nearly snapped but managed to force down the hot-mess of anger in time. I did not like Wol calling her detritus, now that I knew the whole story. I also didn’t like what he was implying. “I’m weak, Wol. I’m c-c-cold. Hungry. Tired. It took everything I had to get you guys out of that place. I—” I shuddered. “I don’t think I h-h-have it in me for a working. Even a circle.”
“You’re weaker because of you have unfulfilled promises weighing on you. Contracts, which you’ve promised to to beings but never delivered. Mina, the three creatures you’d bound.”
“That only proves my point.”
“I’m not asking you to power anything, Jain,” Wol said, his tone a touch more gentle. “I’m simply asking you to think and prepare. You have me and Hwari with you.”
“I…”
“You’ve proven yourself resourceful in the most limited of circumstances,” Wol said. “I believe in you.”
I sucked in a breath. “Tell me about this… what did she say? Seiōmaōr thing.”
“I have never heard of it.”
“He uses ghosts. And his familiar, it was a valkyrie, right? Norse, then. Maybe some kind of viking witch-doctor, or shaman-equivalent. Either way, he’s… he has stuff. That axe. The familiar. Probably a lot more where that came from. Tell me what you can about the axe.”
“He had bound ghosts into it.”
“I bound Underthebed into this teddy bear. It didn’t turn bullet proof.”
“An advanced application of enchantment and transmutation. Enchantment to bring out the desired traits within those ghosts, then transmuting the metal so that it behaves a certain way,” Wol said. “We call it imbuing.”
“But binding things is a aburation and conjuration thing,” I said, then put it together. “The Valkyrie. Could she have bound the ghosts?”
“Possible, but another practitioner is more likely. It’s not strange for Practitioners to trade favors, and those favors can take the form of many things.”
I thought some more. “So he’s either a enchantor-transmutator, or a conjurer-abjurer like me. My bet is on enchantor-transmutator. He’d want to complement the Valkyrie’s conjuring skills. Valkyrie summons ghosts, and he can use enchantments to amplify their emotions.”
“I agree,” Wol said. “But Practitioner, he might have others coming.”
“You just said we should prepare for him.”
“A possibility,” Wol interrupted before I could finish.
Damn it. He was right. I took a mental stock of everything I had available. “I have chalk. Markers. A tape measurer, and a notebook. And this guy here.” I motioned with my chin towards the nightmare teddy bear tucked under my arm.
“And me!” said Tagalong. “Tagging along as always!”