Isaac is the first to get ready to leave. “I don’t remember drinking enough to have to stay over,” he muses, cleaning up the couch he’d slept on, folding the blankets and setting them off to one side.

  The other three of us keep shooting each other confused looks, but it’s not like any of us have any answers. “We just stayed up too late watching TV,” I try. Isaac accepts that without questioning, despite the fact that the television is clearly broken and unplugged right now.

  So he really doesn’t remember anything about the night before. Interesting.

  Isaac collects the rest of his stuff and then meanders towards the front of the house. “This was really fun,” he says enthusiastically, even though he clearly doesn’t remember a minute of it. “Thanks for having us.”

  “No problem,” Nico replies in my stead.

  “Huh,” Isaac says, throwing open the front door. “How did I not notice that last night?”

  I walk up behind him and flinch automatically. Near the end of the front walk, close to the gate is a hulking, burlap covered monstrosity holding a pitchfork. Most people would call it a scarecrow, though the house does enough to scare all birds off, not just the crows.

  “It’s not Halloween for another month,” Isaac says with a laugh. “Or is he left over from last year?”

  I chuckle awkwardly, looking away. Wrath is still somewhere upstairs, and I have to resist the urge to start yelling at him. With all his ‘keeping watch’ last night, he couldn’t have mentioned that the zombies riled up the scarecrow?

  Another inheritance from the Morecroft family, the scarecrow came with the cemetery out back. He’s not particularly sentient, like the zombies only active at night, but he loves birds and often escapes the grounds to go chasing them. We usually keep him in place by stabbing him with his own pitchfork, but it looks like last night he got riled up and pulled it out himself.

  Then went to the front gates like an angry dog protecting his territory. I’m just glad he didn’t open the front doors.

  “Oh, you know how it is. There’s certain expectations of the most haunted house in Hollow Hills,” I offer weakly.

  “Second-most haunted house,” Nico corrects with a teasing grin.

  I glare at him, because there’s no way his house across the street is anything as bad as mine. He didn’t even have a Doom Clock.

  Winter and Nico follow out a few minutes later, chatting idly about the library at Hollow Hills University, and if it will have anything about real-life zombies. I could tell them not to waste their time, but it might be easier to let them figure it out for themselves. They hesitate near the gate, and Nico goes out first, holding a hand behind him just in case of an attack.

  As I predicted, though, the zombies are long gone, drawn back into the ground where they clawed their way up from. Dawn has the delightful ability to reset most kinds of mundane magic, particularly necromancy and curses. The burst of sunlight over the horizon that precedes the sun drives magic back where it came from. An added benefit would be that whoever raised the zombies in the first place would have one hell of a headache today (no pun intended).

  It’s a palate cleanse for the entire weekend, as a matter of fact. Nothing else out of the ordinary happens and Wrath and I nearly forget about the events of Friday night. At least until I roll onto campus first thing Monday morning and Winter meets me at the bike rack.

  “Oh, she’s not going to give this up,” Wrath says, sounding surprisingly happy. I glance down at him in his stuffed animal form and shove him into my backpack as Winter walks up. Today she’s dressed in something that I can only think of as Wednesday Addams couture, with a crisp white button-up underneath a mid-thigh length black dress, pulled together with a black and white square belt-buckle.

  “It’s about time you got here,” she says, resting a hand on my bike handle. “Did you know that the campus library doesn’t have anything useful about zombies?”

  I did, but no one really asked me for my opinion. And besides, it was probably better for them to figure that out for themselves.

  “And what about those rumors of reanimation experiments that took place at Miskatonic back in the 1920s?” she continues. “Or the mass grave robberies that used to take place up and down the East Coast. There are all sorts of things that our library should have, but they don’t have any of it.”

  Wrath starts to say something, but I bop him on the nose.

  “Most of the library collection is pretty old,” I offer instead of an explanation. “They don’t get a lot of funding.”

  “Given how many students pay tuition but stop showing up on campus after the first week, they make more than enough,” she counters.

  She’s not wrong about that, either. I wonder what lit this fire under her. Was it really the zombies, or did something else happen? Most people didn’t think about the weird in Hollow Hills, or if they do it only lasts for an hour or two before they let themselves sink back down into a blissful normalcy.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  Was it because she was goth? She found a style and a statement that expressed her own individuality in a town so homogenous it didn’t even have a Starbucks. There was only one type of milk, and you were lucky if you could get anything more than 2%.

  “You’d think this would be bigger news. A student disappeared. How are more people not talking about that? I stalked his social media, his friends social media, and as many campus groups as I could. He’s a jock, in a bunch of clubs, and pledging a frat, but no one noticed him missing over the last two days?”

  “Welcome to Hollow Hills,” I say tiredly.

  “Really?” Winter snaps. “I thought you would help me but you’re pretending to be ignorant just like everyone else.”

  “I’m not pretending,” I mutter.

  “Especially since you’re the only person I know that has a demon for a best friend,” she says, dropping a bomb before she stalks off towards the dining hall.

  “Well… shit,” Wrath says.

  ***

  “You can buy me coffee,” Winter says when I finally catch up with her inside the dining hall.

  I set my bag down automatically and Winter smiles. “Yes, you can definitely leave him with me. I’m sure Wrath and I can get to know each other while you’re gone.”

  Wrath coughs quietly. “She can hear me?”

  “You can hear him?”

  “I can hear you,” she agrees, but she’s looking at the stuffed animal. “Iced American, two pumps of hazelnut,” she says to me dismissively, waving her fingers.

  Stunned, I’m not entirely sure how to respond to the whole situation. Someone else can see Wrath? That should be impossible, shouldn’t it? As far as I knew, I was the only one who could see him even if he didn’t want me to. Other people couldn’t see him unless he let them, or at least that was the story he’d always told me. It’s not like I could generally ask any other demon - he was the only one I knew.

  Did Wrath show himself on accident? It had never happened before but maybe he’d gotten sloppy. I worry about it the entire time I’m in line, and come back to the table with Winter and Wrath, now occupying a spot in his corporeal form across from her. And she’s clearly staring at him. Not through him and not close to him. At him.

  She can definitely see him. I look around the dining hall, but no one else notices the bright red and black demon seated at a table. Everyone else just continues on with their meals, or their conversations, or their phones.

  There’s a couple of guys with thick circles under their eyes, hair a shambled poof of the unwashed, dressed in baggy sweatshirts and ears covered with thick headphones looking in my direction, but that’s it. I take a seat at the table with Winter and Wrath.

  “Thank god you’re back,” Winter says. “He won’t say a word. Just sits there staring at me.”

  Wrath is pretending like he can’t see her which would be a lot easier to believe if he didn’t flinch every time she spoke. It’s weird - I’ve never seen him unsettled like this before. Definitely not enough to show up physically at school - he normally hides inside his stuffed animal and talks to me directly. Maybe knowing someone else can see him is too much.

  He mimes turning a key against his lips and then carefully grabs one of my hands and puts the key into it.

  I roll my eyes.

  “Nope,” I say. “Not today. We’re not doing… whatever this is supposed to be.” I fix my gaze on Winter. “How?”

  It’s a simple question, vague and yet at the same time incredibly important. And I’m not going to let her blow me off. Only it’s not the fight that I expect it’s going to be.

  “Great-great-grandmama Nettles made a deal with a devil a long time ago after her husband ran away with her sister. She never wanted to be surprised by a man again. And it turns out the devil had a sense of humor, because he made sure she always saw things for how they were.” Winter makes a flourishing gesture. “And that’s why I’m here.”

  “So what, it just passed down to you?”

  “That does make a lot of sense,” Wrath muses. “Most of the demons I know love to mess with humans like that. Don’t just bully one human, but get the whole line of them. It can keep you laughing for decades.” Then he makes a sound like ‘meep’ and slaps a clawed hand over his mouth.

  Winter presses down on a smile and turns towards me. “So how long have you had a demon following you around?”

  “How long have you been able to see him?”

  She shrugs. “We weren’t friends before, it would have been rude to say anything.”

  We sit and sip at our coffees for a few minutes, and it seems like neither side is willing to broach the sudden quiet that springs up between us. The morning crowd begins to disperse as people head off to their first class. I don’t have anything until Recycling and the Living Dead which doesn’t start for another hour. I thought I could spend the time finishing my part of the report we were being expected to give by Freddie.

  “Come on, I’m going to head over to the library. You can walk with me,” Winter says imperiously. She gets up without looking to see if I’ll follow, assured that I will. I consider staying back, but Wrath clears his throat and it’s obvious he’s not done with her yet either.

  I notice the two guys who were watching me earlier are still staring in my direction when we leave, though they don’t make any attempt to follow. Maybe I know them from somewhere, but soon I abandon the thought.

  “How long have you noticed things are a bit ‘different’ in Hollow Hills,” he asks carefully once we’re in lockstep.

  Winter glances over at me, giving me a faint smile. “That’s a great question, Theo, I would love to tell you.” It only occurs to me then that it might be weird if someone saw her talking to a stuffed animal. Whatever. I’ll be the proxy.

  “There’s something about Hollow Hills, don’t you think? The quaint, small-town atmosphere. The way everyone downtown treats you like you’ve been here forever. How quickly everyone forgets when something odd happens.” She checks the polish on one of her nails, as though examining for a chip. It’s a solid, glossy black, of course, though some of her other fingers have a sprinkling of white on them as well. “It wasn’t right away, that’s for sure.”

  “You moved here for college?”

  “Among other things,” she agrees. “I got waitlisted for Miskatonic, but if you ask me it was probably a good thing. I’ve heard they’re still a bit behind the times in letting black girls study at a historically racist university.”

  I hadn’t ever heard that before about Miskatonic U, but it doesn’t surprise me. It definitely seems entrenched in everything that happened there a hundred years ago.

  We get to the library and I follow Winter in automatically and nearly bump into her when she abruptly stops.

  “Theo…”

  I look ahead of her and see what’s got her suddenly spooked.

  Severn Reilly, most recently the star of Nec-Romance and attacked outside my house on Friday night, appears alive and well, shelving books from a cart just a few aisles away.