The crypt hummed with a low, sickening energy that made the fillings in Eris's teeth ache. Otto's satchel had vomited its contents onto the dusty floor—a chaos of notebooks, crumbling scrolls, and a dubiously stained bag of what he claimed were "warding herbs" that smelled suspiciously like pizza seasoning.
"Perhaps a counter-ritual invoking the sevenfold name of Metatron!" Otto proclaimed, waving a sheaf of papers covered in frantic, spidery script. "Or! We could attempt a sympathetic binding using a lodestone and the tears of a virgin!"
Eris, kneeling beside him with the heavy spell book open on her lap, listened to this with intense focus, her brow furrowed in concentration. When he finished, she blinked. "Okay… but how does that help us right now?"
Otto stood up, striking a thoughtful pose. "I don't know!"
Eris nodded, her expression utterly serious. "Okay!"
"Do you have anything?" Otto asked, desperation creeping into his voice.
Eris ran her finger down a cracked vellum page, her eyes lighting up. "I think I might!" she said, her voice bright with sudden hope.
Sarah, who had been floating near the ceiling with an air of bored detachment, instantly swooped down, her spectral form leaning over Eris's shoulder to peer at the ancient text.
"Here!" Eris announced, pressing her finger against a block of faded, looping script. "Where it says, 'When the work is done, chant this song, and the gate will be gone.'"
Otto's face split into a wide grin. "Ohhh, perfect! Poetic, yet direct! Let's try it!"
Sarah's translucent features tightened with skepticism. "Are you sure that's what it says?" she asked, her voice a nervous whisper. "The Old Tongue is notoriously… flexible. It could also mean 'when the moon is high, sing this lullaby and the gate will sigh.' Which is vastly different."
"Nope, it's this one," Eris said with unwavering confidence. "Let's do this!"
"I mean," Sarah pressed, wringing her ghostly hands, "is there a specific melody? A required vocal range? These things are rarely meant to be belted out like a pop single."
Eris began to clear her throat, ready to launch into the chant. "Well, there's only one way to find—"
The ground lurched. A deep, grinding tremor shook the crypt, sending loose stones skittering across the floor. Eris and Otto stumbled into each other, their eyes meeting in a shared moment of pure, unvarnished concern.
"Um," Sarah said, her voice rising an octave, "maybe we should go. We can come back with a linguist, or a choir, or perhaps a very small, sacrificial—"
Another, more violent shudder rocked the chamber. Then, from the glowing, jagged maw in the floor, a roar erupted. It was not a sound of air, but of raw, tearing reality, a wave of psychic noise that felt like needles driven into their eardrums. Eris and Otto clapped their hands over their ears, their faces contorted in pain.
From the pulsating heart of the gate, a seething mass of entities erupted. They were not solid forms, but shifting constellations of shadow, rage, and jagged intent, their collective presence sucking the warmth from the air and filling the crypt with the smell of hot iron and ashes.
Otto and Eris screamed in unison, a perfect harmony of terror.
They didn't need to discuss it. They turned and ran, scrambling over the scattered notebooks, their earlier resolve shattered. As they fled the crypt, Sarah, floating safely above the chaos, let out a sigh that was equal parts relief and exasperation. With a swift, practiced motion, she swooped down, her insubstantial fingers somehow finding purchase on the physical world just long enough to scoop up the heavy spell book from where Eris had dropped it.
"Honestly," she murmured to the raging portal, "you'd think they'd never seen a minor demonic incursion before." Tucking the book under her arm, she drifted after the fleeing humans, a ghostly librarian salvaging the only useful thing from the disaster.
*****
The thought was a fragile, new thing in his ancient mind, and it was shattered a moment later when the ground beneath their feet gave a sudden, violent lurch. It wasn't a natural tremor; it was a deep, grinding shudder that felt like the world itself groaning in pain. The whisper-vine on the nearby fences thrashed as if in a gale.
"That," Casper remarked, his tail fluffing out to twice its size for a brief second before settling, "does not sound like the local geology."
Their eyes were drawn to the crypt as its heavy door flew open. The two humans—Eris and the gangly boy—burst out, their movements a frantic scramble of pure, unadulterated panic. They were a portrait of terror, their faces pale and eyes wide. A split second later, the demons exploded from the same doorway.
They were a seething torrent of shadow and malice, forms shifting between insectoid legs and grasping, semi-solid claws. The air filled with the sound of a hundred discordant whispers and the smell of sulfur and rotting honey.
Casper let out a long, weary sigh, the sound profoundly annoyed. "And there goes the neighborhood. I knew property values would drop."
Otto and Eris collapsed against the outer wall of the crypt, chests heaving, trying to catch their breath they clearly felt they didn't have. Sarah Torbit drifted out after them, utterly unbothered by the hellish spectacle. Her gaze swept the graveyard and landed on Dáinn. A slow, flirtatious smile spread across her translucent features.
"Well, hello there, good looking," she purred, winking. "Here to clean up the mess?"
Eris, following Sarah's gaze, saw Dáinn. Her blood ran colder than any ghost's touch. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she cursed, the words a sharp exhale.
"What? What is it?" Otto gasped, his head whipping around. When his eyes landed on the tall, cloaked figure with the piercing blue eyes, he swallowed so hard his Adam's apple looked like it might tear through his skin. "Is that… is he with them?"
"Run!" Eris hissed, the command leaving no room for argument. She grabbed a fistful of Otto's oversized coat and hauled him to his feet. Together, they scrambled away from the crypt, dodging headstones with a desperate, stumbling agility.
Dáinn watched them flee, his scowl deepening. This was not the orderly resolution he preferred. Chaos was spreading, and the culprits were bolting.
He didn't speak a word. Instead, he simply stepped back, and the pool of shadow at his feet deepened, swirled, and rose. Skógr materialized from the darkness, the massive black horse forming from solid night, his hooves striking the soft earth without a sound. He shook his great head, mane flowing like black water.
"I," announced Casper, already turning and flicking his tail in the air as he walked toward a particularly comfortable-looking sarcophagus, "will wait here. You have a good time chasing down the panicked children. Do try not to impale anyone important. The paperwork is dreadful."
Dáinn mounted Skógr in a single, fluid motion. He gathered the reins, his jaw set. He kicked his heels, and the great horse bolted forward, a silent, powerful force cutting through the misty graves. The case, as the humans might say, was afoot.
The world became a blur of tilting headstones and the low, mocking rustle of whisper-vine. Eris's lungs burned, but it was a familiar burn, the kind she pushed through on the final lap of a race. A quick glance over her shoulder turned the burn to ice. The cloaked figure was gaining on them fast, impossibly fast, astride a horse that moved with the silent, ground-devouring certainty of a nightmare.
"We need to hurry!" she yelled at Otto, whose breathing had escalated into ragged, wheezing gasps. "Run faster!"
"I can't!" he wailed, his arms flailing as he nearly tripped over a forgotten floral arrangement. "This is faster!"
A plan, desperate and half-formed, sparked in Eris's mind. It was a classic trope, but tropes existed for a reason. "We need to split up!" she shouted, veering towards a wider path between the mausoleums.
"What?" Otto screeched, his voice cracking with terror. "That's what the disposable side character does right before they get gruesomely disemboweled in chapter three!"
"I'm faster! If he follows me, I think I can lose him in the campus gardens!" Eris explained, her words coming in sharp pants.
"Okay, but what about me?" Otto protested, his face a perfect mask of betrayed horror. "What's my part of this brilliant, suicide-by-numbers plan?"
"Hide!" Eris commanded, putting on a final burst of her track-star speed. "Somewhere dark! We'll meet up at my apartment!"
"But which building? What's the number? What's the security code?" he cried out to her disappearing back, but Eris was already a streak of motion, jetting off into the deeper shadows. Left alone, Otto stumbled to a halt, bending over with his hands on his knees, sucking in air that felt like shards of glass. The sound of hooves, a soft, rhythmic thud on the damp grass, grew steadily closer. Panic reignited. He dashed wildly to the side, aiming for the cover of a large, ornate family tomb.
From his vantage point, Dáinn watched the split with a hunter's calm analysis. The faster one, the marked girl, moved with a fluid, natural speed he could respect. She would be a chase. The other… the other was a flailing, noisy creature, currently attempting to squeeze his lanky frame behind a stone angel that offered all the concealment of a sapling. A smirk, cold and subtle, touched Dáinn's lips. He would start with the easy quarry.
He guided Skógr with a slight shift of his weight. The great horse altered its course without breaking stride, closing the distance to the fumbling human in a handful of heartbeats. Otto, hearing the hoofbeats suddenly right beside him, let out a high-pitched shriek and spun around, his eyes wide with terror.
Dáinn didn't even bother to fully stop. As he drew alongside, he simply leaned down, his movement as fluid and inevitable as a tide. One arm hooked around Otto's middle, and with a grunt of effort, he hauled the shrieking young man off his feet, dumping him unceremoniously face-down over the front of the saddle like a sack of grain. Otto's scream was cut off as the air was forced from his lungs, his glasses dangling precariously from one ear. Dáinn straightened up, securing his wriggling, gasping captive with one hand, and turned Skógr's head, his gaze already searching the darkness for the trail of the blond-haired girl.
*****
Dáinn's sharp gaze swept the darkness where the blond girl had vanished, but the trail had gone cold, swallowed by the labyrinth of graves and the ever-murmuring whisper-vine. With a low sound of frustration that was more a rumble in his chest than a word, he turned his attention to the wriggling burden draped over his saddle.
He dismounted, pulling Otto down with him. The young man collapsed onto the soft, damp grass, gasping like a fish stranded on a riverbank. His face was a spectacular canvas of suffusion, blotchy reds and worrying purples competing for dominance. Dáinn hauled him upright, holding him by the shoulders with hands that felt like stone.
"Where is your companion?" Dáinn's voice was low, a command that brooked no delay.
Otto could only manage a series of choked, wheezing sounds, his eyes bulging.
Dáinn watched his struggle for a moment with an almost academic curiosity before a look of dawning comprehension crossed his features. "Take a breath," he instructed, his tone suggesting this was a novel and peculiar requirement for mortals. "You are a human. Breathe."
"That—" Otto gasped, finally sucking in a ragged gulp of air, "—is what I am trying to do!"
Seeing that the boy posed no immediate threat of flight—or indeed, of coordinated movement of any kind—Dáinn released his shoulders and took a step back. Otto immediately buckled over, hands on his knees, his entire frame shuddering as he fought to steady his breathing. After a long moment, he straightened up, pushing his crooked glasses back onto his nose with a trembling hand.
Dáinn crossed his arms, the dark fabric of his cloak pulling taut. "What is your name?"
Otto, in a valiant but futile attempt to reclaim some dignity, squared his scrawny shoulders and drew himself up to his full, unimpressive height. The effort was so transparently pathetic it made Dáinn's lip twitch, a ghost of a smirk he swiftly suppressed.
"I," Otto declared, his voice still shaky but layered with dramatic import, "am Otto Gordon, my good sir. And you would be…?"
Dáinn struggled to hold his composure, clearing his throat to mask a sound that was dangerously close to a chuckle. "Just call me Dáinn."
Otto gave a sharp, nervous nod. "Well. It is good to make your acquaintance, Dáinn. Now, would you mind explaining why you felt compelled to run me down with your… your spectral steed and throw me over your pommel like a sack of grain?"
Dáinn raised a single, expressive brow at the comically challenging tone. "Who was it you were with?"
"That, Mr. Dáinn," Otto retorted, trying to inject a note of haughty defiance, "is none of your business."
A slow, dangerous smile spread across Dáinn's face. He took a single, silent step forward, invading Otto's personal space and leaning down so their faces were inches apart. Otto swallowed hard, the sound audibly dry in the quiet night. He tried to hold his ground, but his resolve was melting under the weight of that ancient, challenging stare—a gaze that held the cold stillness of deep forests and the finality of a hunter's aim.
"Let me ask you again," Dáinn said, his voice a soft, deadly murmur that seemed to still the very air around them. "Who was it you were with?"
Otto's bravado shattered. A fine tremor ran through him. "I—I assume," he stammered, his mind racing for any leverage, "you originate from the… the other side of the gate?"
Dáinn gave a single, slow nod, his unblinking blue eyes still locked on Otto's. The confirmation hung between them, a truth more terrifying than any of Otto's dramatic theories had ever been.