Lief was smiling with satisfaction; he had gotten the last piece of apple pie.
"Enjoy," he said, ignoring the envious looks around him.
He raised the fork, opened his mouth, and then...
!
An unnatural coldness made his skin crawl, and before his brain could process it, an absurd gravitational force pulled at his ankles.
The floor beneath his chair dissolved.
Feeling a violent lurch in his stomach, he looked down, and surprise flooded him, for the floorboards had transformed into a swirling vortex of darkness.
A black whirlpool spinning beneath his feet.
"What the...?!"
Instinct kicked in, and he tried to push himself toward the table, desperately searching for something solid to hold onto, but it was too late. He was glued to the chair as if he were part of it, and the suction wasn't just pulling his body, but the very space around him.
His fingers frantically closed around the edge of the tablecloth.
But it was useless.
Slurp
With the sound of a plunger, the darkness gave a final tug.
He, the chair, and the tablecloth vanished into the abyss.
And as quickly as it had begun, it ended.
The vortex disappeared with him, and the wooden floor was perfectly normal again.
"..."
"AAAH—!"
The trance broke with Carrie's scream, and the plate fell from her hands, shattering on the floor as she covered her mouth, unable to take her eyes off the empty spot where Lief had just been.
"Underworld Aura. Unmistakable."
Lilith licked the remnants of cream from her spoon with a sneer on her lips.
"Someone was in such a hurry to see him that they sent him a direct transport to his feet. What a lack of manners."
Beside her, Emma didn't scream; she got up from her chair and walked to the exact spot where he had disappeared.
She knelt down, running her fingers over the intact wood, her eyes gleaming with excitement.
"How incredible..."
Amidst Carrie's scream, Lilith's cynicism, and Emma's obsession, Esther simply placed her fork on the table and clasped her hands with her eyes tightly closed.
'God... I beg you. If you are going to allow this house to continue being a magnet for disaster, at least take me first next time. I don't want to have to explain this to the police.'
...
The sensation of falling never ended.
A descent through a tunnel of darkness where the wind howled like a thousand lost souls.
The cold wasn't just temperature; it was a physical presence trying to bite his skin through his clothes.
And he didn't know how long he had been falling, but gravity suddenly returned.
The impact wasn't against solid rock, but against something soft that cushioned the blow, kicking up a thick cloud.
Lief immediately stood up, dusting off his trench coat, and his eyes quickly scanned the surroundings.
The landscape was the very definition of depression.
A gray sky crushed an infinite horizon of white ground, covered not by snow, but by an eternal layer of ash.
In the distance, skeletal, twisted trees clawed at the air, devoid of any trace of life.
"So this is the Underworld?" murmured Lief, observing the monotony, "I expected more fire..."
Just then, a familiar voice echoed directly inside his skull.
'Darling, welcome to my backyard. I have an urgent matter with organizing the event, so I'm afraid I won't be able to greet you personally with a red carpet. Feel free to start your hunt. Don't die~'
Lief clenched his jaw, suppressing the urge to scream at nothing.
"Fantastic," he grunted, looking at the empty wasteland. "She kidnaps me, dumps me in the middle of nowhere without a map or guide, and leaves. Five-star service."
He sighed in resignation; there was no point in complaining.
He had to complete his objective.
As he started walking, only the same sound was heard, the crunch of his boots on the ash, but suddenly a discordant noise broke it.
It was the frantic jingling of sleigh bells.
He looked up just in time to see a blur crossing the gray sky.
A sleigh, pulled by six reindeer that were nothing but bones and will-o'-the-wisps, nosediving toward him, totally out of control.
"What the hell...?"
He didn't have time to get out of the way.
The sleigh didn't slow down and crashed into the ash hill a few meters from him, kicking up a curtain of dust and debris that swallowed everything.
The sleigh's momentum dragged him along, and before he could stabilize himself, he was tangled up in the mess.
When the dust cloud finally settled, he found himself, by pure chance or misfortune, lodged in the sleigh's passenger seat.
Brushing the ash off his shoulder, he turned his head toward the driver's seat.
There, struggling to untangle the reins, was an extremely tall and thin skeleton, wearing a Santa Claus suit and a fake beard hanging from his jaw.
"Hello?" he said in a dangerously soft tone.
!
The skeleton jumped in his seat from the fright, and turned his skull toward the unexpected passenger.
His empty eye sockets seemed to widen in surprise.
"Hmm? Who are you?" asked Jack Skellington, "And why are you in my sleigh? I don't remember picking up stowaways!"
Sensing the skeleton's strong personality, Lief simply reached under his trench coat and, in a fluid motion, drew Ivory.
Without hesitation, he pressed the cold barrel directly against the driver's bony forehead.
!
With a golden glow on the barrel, the weapon reacted to the undead creature's presence.
A sizzling sound, like meat touching a hot griddle, filled the air, and a wisp of smoke began to rise from the point of contact.
Feeling this, Jack went rigid.
"You ran me over."
"O-Oh! Wait! That burns, that burns!" Jack quickly raised his hands, "Buddy, calm down! It was a mistake! An unfortunate festive accident! Put that thing away, please. How about we forget about it? I can give you a gift!"
"Let me see what you have there." Lief kept the barrel steady.
Visibly nervous, Jack reached toward the huge sack resting on the back seat.
He rummaged around for a moment until he finally pulled out a box wrapped in dark paper and handed it to him.
Without lowering the weapon, Lief took the package with his free hand and, with a sharp flick of his wrist and using his thumb, popped the lid open.
Inside, resting on a bed of black straw, was a human head.
The skin was tanned and stitched, the eyes sewn shut with thick thread, and black feathers were embedded in the scalp.
A shrunken head.
Lief looked up, expressionless.
"You got the date wrong, buddy. This looks like a Halloween gift, not Christmas."
"What!?" Jack brought his hands to his mouth.
"Halloween? No, no, no! This is wrong!" He began to tremble, "I have to go back!"
Without warning, Jack shook the reins violently.
"Let's go! Giddy up!"
Letting out a neigh, the reindeer launched themselves forward with incredible acceleration, causing Lief, who wasn't secured to anything, to be thrown from the sleigh like a cannonball.
Thud
His body became a dead weight rolling relentlessly down the unstable slope of ash, hitting the ground until the inertia finally ran out.
"Cough, cough, cough..."
He sat up amidst spasms of violent coughing, patting his trench coat to clean off the dust.
"Great..." He murmured, looking in the direction where the sleigh had gone.
Putting the head in his backpack, he began to walk.
The withered forest surrounding him was depressing, a monochromatic expanse of death and silence.
But upon crossing the last line of trees, the gray ground abruptly cut off into a precipice.
Stopping at the edge, his eyes opened wide.
In front of him, floating over an endless abyss, rose a shining metropolis.
A luminescent city, built with thousands of houses stacked one atop another in a defiant verticality.
The structures glowed with lights in electric purples, deep blues, and warm oranges.
Aerial trams crossed like fireflies, and connecting the whole city, there were immense bridges made of bright golden petals.
"Is this... also part of the Underworld?"
He crossed the nearest petal bridge, feeling the soft texture under his boots.
Upon entering the city, the silence of the forest was replaced by mariachi music, laughter, and the bustle of an eternal party.
The inhabitants were skeletons.
Some had their skulls painted, dressed in clothes from past eras, chatting and drinking. Lief tried to blend in, adjusting the collar of his trench coat, but it was impossible to go unnoticed.
He was a speck of flesh in a sea of bones.
A group of skeletons with top hats stopped dead upon seeing him pass.
"Does he have... skin?" whispered a skeleton woman.
"He is alive..." murmured another, pushing his children behind him.
Ignoring the murmurs and the gazes that followed him, he walked with a firm step so as not to show weakness.
He needed to get his bearings.
Turning into a less crowded alley to escape the stares, he stumbled upon a scene that blocked his path.
A skeleton woman with black hair and dressed in a purple dress was blocking the path of a small boy.
The boy was wearing a red hooded sweatshirt and had his face painted crudely to look like a skull, but it was obvious that he wasn't one.
"No! I'm not going back!" shouted the boy, hugging a guitar against his chest.
Dodging the skeleton woman, the boy ran off.
"Miguel!" shouted the woman with anguish, "Come back here right now! Miguel!"
!
The name hit Lief like a lightning bolt, instantly connecting the pieces: the colorful city in hell, the petal bridges, the festive skeletons, and now, a living boy named Miguel.
He was inside the narrative of Coco.
And if his deduction was correct, the "living human" that Dorothy wanted was none other than that boy.
Simply reading Miguel's body language, Lief anticipated his escape route and took two precise steps to intercept him.
Before Miguel could turn the corner, he extended his arm and closed his hand firmly around the collar of his hoodie, stopping him dead.
"Let go of me! Don't touch me!" shouted Miguel trying uselessly to free himself from the iron grip.
"Miguel!"
The skeleton woman in the purple dress, Imelda Rivera, caught up to them breathing heavily, if skeletons could even breathe.
Her authoritative expression froze upon seeing Lief.
"You... you are also alive?" she asked incredulous, but her protective instinct overcame her confusion, "Let him go right now!"
Without letting him go, Lief held her gaze with an imperturbable calm.
"And if I don't want to?"
With those words, Imelda's rigid posture wavered, her shoulders slumped and her voice lost its edge to become desperate, bringing her hands to her chest.
"Please... he is just a boy. He has nothing to do with the affairs of the dead. Let him go."
And while they spoke, Miguel contorted inside his clothes and dropped down.
Lief felt the weight disappear from his hand, left holding only the empty hoodie while Miguel sprinted toward the crowd without looking back.
"..."
Observing the small figure disappear among the skeletons, he made no move to chase him.
"He sure escapes easily," he commented sighing, "Maybe if you didn't squeeze him so tight, he wouldn't have such an urgency to flee."
Imelda looked up, confused by the comment and by the stranger's inaction.
"Thank you for not chasing him... but, who are you? What is an armed living man doing in the Land of the Dead?"
Lief adjusted his trench coat, putting his hands in his pockets with indifference.
"Work," he declared simply, "I have a contract to find someone alive and deliver him to a certain Dorothy."
!!!
Terror invaded Imelda's face, as she took a few steps back.
"N-No... you can't!" she whispered horrified, "Not Dorothy! Miguel is just a boy, he has a whole life ahead of him! You can't hand him over...!"
"It's my job, ma'am. Consider it a lesson on why children shouldn't play at crossing borders they don't understand."
Without waiting for an answer, he turned his back on the woman and began to walk in the opposite direction to the one Miguel had taken.
"..."
Imelda remained watching his back with anxiety before running desperately toward her family.
________
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