#crys13nightsofocs

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"I don’t wanna go to the rose lady’s place,” Nate griped at Tom, who he knew wouldn’t listen even if he’d been right next to him instead of a call. “What’s wrong with the Halloween Depot by the craft store?”

“What’s wrong is it sucks.”

“C’mon, we can be creative with—”

“Go to the rose lady’s place, get some of her creepy shit, and come to my place. We’ll have a real Halloween party and you can thank me later.”

“No, I don’t wanna do that.” Nate turned to his phone screen and saw his mom smiling back at him with the time displayed on her forehead. “He hung up. Great. Just hung up.”

With a heavy sigh and unnecessary violence directed at a pebble on his way, he shoved his hands in his hoodie pockets and got started to her weird shop. If anyone shopped there before the leaves turned color and fell, he’d be shocked. But it was the city, and who knew what people were willing to buy after midnight?

Her curio store wasn’t anywhere he wanted to be after dark, anyway.

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Even the old timey shopkeepers bell by the door sounded off as Nate stepped into her musty store. It was like sunlight was stripped of all warmth and color once it drifted those windows, and he pulled his zipper hoodie up a little more.

“Hello? You open?” Walking between overcrowded shelves of knickknacks and baubles and dusty books, Nate started toward the front desk. Or what he could see of it. The fat, weary register gave it away as where things were bought and sold, at least. “Just looking to pick up some c—” Creepy stuff? Not about to offend the local witch. “Cool stuff.”

Looking left and right once he reached the counter, he didn’t see anyone else in the place. Weird, how noise just didn’t exist there. Not even the leaves rustling outside in the breeze got in. He eyed the bell on the counter but thought he’d like to keep his fingers. Never know what it might be. 

If Tom wanted this haunted junk so bad, he should’ve come to get it himself.

“Maybe it’s witching lunch hours,” he muttered to himself, chuckling at his joke.

“Oh, it’s far too late for lunch!” Her chipper, airy voice made him recoil and that’s when he spotted her coming up from a hatch in the floor. Because of course she was. She plucked a pocket watch from her dress, which looked like a used Victorian period drama reject, and tsked. “Too early for dinner too.”

Once her beady black eyes landed on Nate, he didn’t dare move. She leaned over the counter and climbed up on it with folds of her faded dress ruffling around her as she kneeled there. He only gulped as he got a few inches from his face and took a deep breath.

However long they were like that was too long.

“Yes, yes, you’ve got the gift! A new student, then?” She shimmied back of the counter and onto the floor, like any reasonable person, of course... The rose lady yanked the hatch shut and didn’t even wince at the thud.

“Uh, no. I’m a senior? I forget what else it’s called.” Europe had another word for it she probably preferred as part of her whole schtick, but not much else was on Nate’s mind but getting whatever Tom needed for this dumb party and bolting.

She tsked again, giving him a patient sideways smile as she walked around the desk. The last thing he wanted her to do, really. He got good witch vibes off her. Just a weird good witch. More eye of newt, less cooking up twins, but that didn’t mean he wanted to hold hands and sing songs with her.

“A shame. We could use you.”

“I, I betcha could.” For what, he’d live without knowing. Probably live better. “I’m just here for some things my friend wanted, if you could show me some spooky stuff. Halloween,” he offered as a weak explanation with a half-shrug.

He stood heads over her, almost, when she came to a dead stop in front of him and stared again. Nate glanced at the door, and honestly, he thought about just going. But Tom would only send him back and call him a bitch. Not in that order.

“Let me sense you, child,” she said more than asked, already putting her lace-gloved fingers to his temples so he froze in place. Again.

“Oh, okay. This is happening.”

The rose lady hummed, head lowered, taking deep breaths when she wasn’t following her aimless tune.

Nate jumped again as she pulled her hands back suddenly to clap and dart behind the counter. 

“What, what? What’s—why’re you—?”

She grabbed a crate that looked like it was from 1802 from the wall shelf behind her and dropped it hard enough on the desk to make the bell chime.

“Everything you need is right here, child.”

“Oh, no. I can’t afford all this.” Together, all that trash was probably $5. But Nate didn’t want to have it exorcised, purified, or otherwise ruining his spiritual wellness somehow.

Not getting the hint he wasn’t a fan, she reached over the box to grab his face and stare deep into his eyes again. 

“You, with your bright mind and open heart, you can’t afford not to have this.” She shoved the crate over to him and on instinct, he grabbed it to stop it from hitting his chest. “Take it. Take it and shield yourself. I know you sense what’s coming.”

“Yeah. Yeah, for sure,” he spoke as clearly as he could. Whatever made her let go sooner. Tom’d be happy it was all free for the low, low cost of Nate’s peace of mind. Nbd, no need for that or anything.

“Now look.” She angled his head down to the crate packed with tarnished silver antiques and battered books. Looked like an old stone dagger that was probably about as lethal as a toilet paper roll.

“I’m looking.”

“No.” She covered his eyes with her other hand, probably half on the counter again. “Look.”

“Oh yay,” he said aloud, apparently not valuing his eyes enough to keep that in his head. Fumbling through the box, he tried to grab for something that would probably fit whatever prophecy she saw in her crystal ball that morning. He passed on a book and a hair brush, digging for anything else.

A sharp, chilled pain made him recoil from her and the crate, looking down at his left hand to see what horrible illness he just contracted.

Then up at her. Back down at his unmarked, just-as-he-remembered-it hand. 

“Alright. The hell was that?”

Laughing with uncomfortable cheer, she shoved the crate back towards him to the point where it was almost over the counter.

“You looked. Find it again.”

With a shaky breath and a silent vow to get even with Tom for this, Nate reached back into the box. Using his right hand. Ambidextrous like most lefties, he still wasn’t taking any risks.

He fumbled past a mirror and that dull knife that time to find the chain he vaguely remembered before the pain. Drawing out the small book-shaped locket, he glanced up to see her night-dark eyes fixed on him.

“It is you.” Then, for the first time maybe ever in her whole time living in the city and having rumors spin about the grinning, giddy witch, the rose lady, named for her shop ‘Rosenfeld’s Wonders’... Seemed sad. “I am sorry. Take this as some comfort to ready you for what lies ahead. Take it and go, sweet child.”

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[You can read more from Nate here]

——–

“Got your sketchy stuff for the party,” Nate announced, using his elbow to open the lever door handle and nudge his way into Tom’s apartment. He stayed back a year or two, so he was older than Nate and could afford things like his own place. With a little help from his parents, who seemed plenty happy to take over his room back home.

“Took you long enough,” Tom joked, if his half-smile meant anything. And maybe it didn’t. He stood at the same height as Nate, but broader, so he looked more mature than he really was and even more when he had that easy smirk. “What’d you do, get a job there?”

“She almost recruited me for the forces of darkness, I think.” 

Nate dropped the box on a pile of mail on the first surface he came across, clearly building on a habit Tom started. It was his house, so blaming him for it seemed fair.

“Should’ve accepted, maybe you’d get a discount.” 

Going through the box, Tom shoved aside basically what Nate thought he would: the hairbrush, the little baubles that wouldn’t be useful to start, nothing surprising.

“Doesn’t get cheaper than free,” he pointed out, stealing a snack from the cabinet. The stress of being scoped out for the dark arts worked up an appetite.

“Poor Nate.” Tom laughed, tossing a silver picture frame to the far side of the box from where he was digging. “The only girl giving him attention is the rose lady.”

With a shrug, he unwrapped the cookies enough to pull one out. 

“Not my fault the guys like me better.”

“Sure they do.” Tom nodded to the book locket hanging over his hoodie. “What’s that, then? Gift from your new girlfriend?”

Nate glanced down at it, frowning. Whatever happened to enjoying a cookie in peace without being pestered about maybe cursed jewelry he felt compelled to keep?

“I brought the box, I get to pull loot from it.”

“Loot?” Tom scoffed. “Go home and tell your mom she raised a weirdo with bad tastes.”

“She knows,” Nate answered, heading out and waving over his shoulder with that first cookie. “I’m friends with you.”

——–

It was close to 11 when Tom called it a night for decorating, but that didn’t stop him from getting a drink and taking a lap around his place to appreciate his own work. Not that he had a big apartment to decorate.

The faded books got covered with fake spiderwebs, then he set up the stone knife near those. After splatting costume blood on the hand mirror to cover up the crusty black smear on it, he put that down by the plastic skull on the coffee table. The moonlight coming through his dingy windows made it spookier too. Tom’d seen creepier setups, but he had time to finish the rest. And Nate to send on more fetch quests if he needed it.

“Ah, shit,” he grumbled, catching on that smudge on the mirror was larger as he flopped onto his futon. The cheap fake blood probably caused it, but cleaning it off seemed like a waste when the damage was done. “Gonna throw it out anyway.”

He had better things to do. Like propping his feet up on the coffee table and binge watching whatever until he couldn’t keep his eyes open. 

But the longer he watched, the larger he swore that smear grew.

“Haunted-looking, I said,” he eventually muttered to himself. Nate was too much of a problem magnet to be trusted with even that, apparently. He turned the mirror facedown on the table and shoved it away with his foot. The blood trailing after it would probably stain, if he cared.

The shrill whine started about an hour later, and Tom chalked it up to his TV. Some technology thing he didn’t care to know about. That was Nate’s thing. 

But when it became more of a far-off scream than a whine, making the mirror rattle... He took his feet off the coffee table and watched it. Unblinking. He started so long, the engraved swirls in it looked like they were moving.

“Fuck this,” he breathed, wiping his hand over his face and getting up. He dropped the half-full bottle of beer into the trash. Didn’t need more of that, obviously.

He barely had a glass for water in his hand before the scream turned to a shriek, warping and distorting everything. The surreal voice was miles away and behind his eyes at the same time, to the point where Tom couldn’t hear the glass shatter when he let it go to cover his ears. Calling it a sound was wrong. He felt the wordless wailing snake around his bones, rising over his head like rushing water, and it was all he could do to turn and walk back to the living room for that damn mirror.

Had to be the mirror. What else?

The black smear started to spill out past the edge of the tarnished silver, crawling and winding over his coffee table bit by bit. Nothing else made noise. Not the scream he felt in his throat, not his heart pounding away in his chest, not the buzz of the lights outside with zaps as bugs flew into them. The city was never quiet where he lived. Now, it was only that shrieking so loud that his eyes hurt. Inhuman and layered and getting louder with every intruding step he took towards it.

He took his last heavy step by the coffee table and grabbed the mirror’s handle, watching as the black stain thrashed towards him when he did, and slammed it into the table. The wailing peaked, but he heard his own scream that time too. So he raised that mirror over his head and brought it back down with another shatter. Twisting and mixing with his own screams, the damn cursed shrieks turned so shrill that he felt it vibrating in his skull like it came from inside.

“Shut—up!”

The last time he slammed it down, shards of mirror burst out of the front to thrumming, muffled noises. Tom could finally hear himself breath. What else mattered? He threw the mirror down the hall to his bathroom and rolled onto his back to wait for his heart to slow the hell down. Tom was going to give Nate hell for this stunt. A shaky breath in and out, he let his eyes drift close... 

And winced as his right palm ached. When he went to massage that soreness out, his hand went too far. Or he missed, he must’ve. The throbbing pain spread with a cold feeling and giving up, Tom opened his eyes. 

Where his hand was, the black stain was growing. Fast.

“No, no, shit, no,” he stammered, scrambling into the bathroom to the sink. “Come off, come off!”

The water passed through his hand like nothing was there, coming through black and swirling down the drain. 

“This can’t,” he faltered, rasping as that chilled feeling of nothing, nothing at all, crossed over his chest. When he tried to speak again, he made a shrill whine and nothing else. The black kept spreading, up his neck and down his arm, until Tom was calm and still. He watched himself dissipate in the mirror and felt nothing as the last of him fell to the ground.

The mirror, face up and absorbing any trace of a reflection, waited as what once had been Tom whispered and whined over the floor and to its new home.

——–

——–

Placing a coffee down in front of Darius at the smooth, black table, Vera took her seat beside him and crossed her legs. The warmth of coffee in her paper cup sharpened her focus already. Conveniently, she was staring at a combination of almost-but-not-quite connected facts pinned to a board for her case.

“You’re my hero,” Darius exaggerated, lifting the coffee for a drink as if it wasn’t steaming.

“Says the man helping me.” With her pro bono case, no less. One no one asked her to take, just one of many luxuries of having inherited wealth.

“Part of my job, isn’t it?” He gave her a sideways smirk, the teasing lighting up in his green eyes. One of his many attractive features, alongside a well kept beard and long locs he kept partially in a bun on top of his head. Darius carried himself with the calm ease of a detective she’d like to work with, which is why she called him in for this puzzle, but that wasn’t his title in the slightest.

“Oh, yes. Casework is exactly why I hired someone to maintain the academy grounds.”

She didn’t see why she couldn’t tease him back, smiling over the edge of her cup. These small moments shared with him also kept her from getting burnt out on the case as quickly. She knew it wasn’t strictly practical, but that one part of it was something Vera could hold onto. For her own sake.

“Lucky you, then.” Darius quipped, nodding to the board and all its pinned pictures and articles and written notes. “Where’re we at with this?”

“There’s more behind these events.” Skimming the facts represented there again, Vera stared until her eyes hurt a little. She let out a breath with the tension in her shoulders. Finally having a sip of coffee herself, she took that break to gather her thoughts into something succinct. “I don’t have evidence, but I can see the marking of an underground organization involved here.”

“Here?” 

His disbelief was fair, with this city’s reputation. Their underground was mostly focused in contraband and illegal bets. Police busted little, careless operations while the big ones continued undaunted. Cops got the feather in their cap, and the real problems carried on. The usual.

But this was something bigger, and it said something that Darius realized that just from her notes arranged on the board and what little she’d told him.

“Facts don’t lie.” 

Paraphrasing one of the detectives from her family tree seemed the best way to express what her thoughts were. Oddities surrounded all of the recent events, from the death of Tom Corwin to the erratic behavior of his friend, Nathaniel Saito, following his passing. Some events would inevitably get past Vera because she couldn’t officially investigate until there was enough to warrant that. But her instincts told her Corwin’s death was only one ripple in the pond. 

“Well,” Darius prompted her to leave her mental meanderings, “what’s new around the city?”

“Mysterious deaths. Getting worse the past few days.” 

She didn’t have much more to report than that, otherwise, she could take a more official case to her contacts in the police department and expect some cooperation there. Whether these deaths were connected to the unusual hiatus at the curio shop, Rosenfeld’s Wonders, during its peak season for seemingly no reason at all, or the owner being neither there nor home for days on end, Vera couldn’t tell. Not yet.

She could just as easily have accused the little bistro of hiding bodies because they recently got a delivery driver, and they both had the same amount of legal substance behind them.

“Any consistent suspects?”

“Nothing so far.” Vera pointed to a picture of Corwin, his latest mugshot before his unsolved murder. “I think he knew more, and he,” she changed focus, pointing again to a picture of Saito from his social media, “convinced him to come clean. That got his friend killed, regrettably.”

“By who?”

Vera frowned, running into the same wall as before she called Darius in. Talking it out usually helped clear a path in her mind, but encountering that obstacle wasn’t any less frustrating the nth time around. Another convenience of choosing Darius: he knew without having to talk about it that her displeasure wasn’t with him.

“Who wouldn’t? That kid was in with so many criminals, he could throw a reunion party in the prison yard.”

——–

See more about Vera here.

Read about Darius here too.

——–

——–

When Min put her hand on Everitt’s shoulder, he nearly fell over from the sheer terror of it. In this place! At this hour and alignment of the stellar entities! He pressed his hand to his chest, strangling off his scream with a weak laugh. 

Nudging his glasses up for no reason in particular, Everitt observed, “Ah. Min.”

“Focus,” she advised, nodding her head, the flashlight’s ambient light catching in her dark brown eyes. Familiar, they were a comfort here. Her long, straight black hair like elegant drapes had been neatly tucked into a tight bun. She, at least, presented herself like a composed student of the arcane.

They both knew every detail of the estate Elisabeth brought them to. Every noted one that hadn’t been lost in unfortunate and grisly circumstances, in any case. It was a gateway on a good day, and a highway on a bad one. Today was an exceptionally no-good, very bad, truly dreadful day. 

Nathaniel was to be instrumental in warding off the foretold rupture that, while not globally devastating, would certainly trouble the poor city to no small extent. But he wasn’t instructed like Everitt, Min, and Jasper were! Even if Jasper once again chose not to make an appearance... All the more reason to heed his companion’s advice! 

“Yes. Yes, of course.” 

Ahead of them, Elisabeth’s long skirts and petticoat swept across the thin carpet with an entirely uncomfortable absence of noise. He reached for Min’s hand in the dark and found his breath again as her fingers slowly curled around his.

“If you make too much noise, you’ll call attention,” Elisabeth reminded him over her shoulder. He caught a fraction of her smirk in the shadowed halls of that wicked place. Just when Everitt believed he had grown accustomed to her idiosyncratic ways, their mentor found newly unsettling things to take up!

“How... informative.” Everitt knew what she said was true, but he was only more nauseous at the thought. The amount of spirits and ominous creatures that dwelled in those halls and below was too much to handle if they were to descend on them all at once.

They would manage, of course. They always did. But Everitt would much prefer he wasn’t the cause of such a nightmarish scenario as that.

“We’re ready.” Min said that more as a reminder to Everitt, which would have been fine on its own. What made Everitt yank his hand away from those clutching fingers was one simple fact: she walked out of reach to join Elisabeth and still, the grip had been there.

He skittered ahead to meet up with them, burying his hands in his pockets with a barely consoling whimper. When this business was done, he could scream from the rooftops if he wanted. That helped. A little.

“I know,” Elisabeth almost sang, a bright skip to her step that made her skirt sway. A mentor as fabled and experienced as she was had no fear. Naturally. One day, perhaps, he might be the same.

He wished Jasper came along. She was the most fearless person he’d ever known. All she left him with when she stayed behind for a silly party was frankly unhelpful advice: ‘don’t die’.

——–

See more about Everitt, Min, and Jasper here.

——–

——–

Nate jumped first when Destiny reached for his hand, pulling him aside in some dusty hall in the maybe haunted estate. He was just in all in his head with... everything.

“We should really stay with--”

“They’ve got Elisabeth,” she pointed out, leading him further down the dimly lit hallway. He didn’t want to think about who lit the flickering candles or how ignitable the place was. 

Honestly, she had a real good point. Took him a moment to realize she meant the rose lady, though. So Nate let her whisk him away to the second room on the right. Probably a random pick, considering the mansion apparently only manifested on certain alignments of the stars or whatever. It couldn’t be that Destiny’d ever been there before. She shut the uncomfortably quiet door behind them, guiding Nate in front of it with her hands on his shoulders. She was almost as tall as him, her warm green eyes close to level with his. Tight curls fell loose from her bun and still, she looked more put together than he felt.

Tom’s life was just a bunch of boxes, and Nate could barely wrap his head around that before what the ros—Elisabeth found him after the funeral to sweep him up in her quest to save everyone and everything. More officially, anyway. 

Too late for Tom.

“Breathe, Nate.” 

When he felt her staring is when Nate came back to his senses with a quick shake of his head. Only to find her staring at him like he’d lost every last marble, eyebrows raised and a small grimace in place.

“Oh, you mean--yeah. Yeah, okay.” 

As he breathed in, she moved her hands down his arms until they were holding hands there together in the dark and the cobwebs. Shadows clung to the furniture like forgotten sheets and sat heavy in the corners, but Nate did feel a bit of light there between him and Destiny. Not enough for whatever wicked evil thing Elisabeth warned them about, maybe, but some. 

They exhaled together and slowly, Destiny smiled.

“There,” she breathed. “Now talk to me.”

“Uh,” Nate scrambled in his mind, looking past her to the weathered furniture in vague, dark shapes. Every thought in his head was in about the same shape. Flashing a flimsy smile, he took a gamble on whatever would come tumbling out of his mouth. 

“Pretty sure I asked you out at a bad time last night. It’s just, with everything, and Tom, I just thought,” he fumbled into a strained noise. She giggled, so that had to be some kind of good thing. For once. “And I panicked.”

“Hey, I said yes, Nate.” She let go of his hands to back up and hop onto a creaky table. Like most old stuff, it was built like a fort. A scarily noisy fort. “Tell me how you’re feeling.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” Crossing his arms, he risked leaning back against that door. Not a sound came in the hall, so he guessed the others were deeper in that cursed place. The idea made him a little sick and Nate cringed. “Like I should’ve never gone to the rose la--Elisabeth’s. Never should’ve just left him with that box of stuff.” 

Far away, he realized there wasn’t even a breeze outside or a crinkle of leaves or anything. Just muffled, smothering quiet. The sooner they left that place, they better everything’d be.

“Maybe it’d've gone different if I’d kept the junk.”

“Maybe,” she admitted, the hard truth softened with a light shrug. “But Tom was more likely to steal the box than let you leave with it. And now that you know how bad this is, we’re all in fixing it together.”

One thing sure wasn’t any different. Nate wiped his sleeve over his eyes for no reason at all, totally, and walked up to stand in front of her and rest his very dry eyes on her shoulder.

“Shh, ‘s alright,” Destiny murmured in his ear. She pressed a light kiss to his cheek, holding Nate in a loose hug in that thick silence.

A hug that got tighter when he turned to kiss her better, the best he knew how. There was some salt there from tears that probably were his maybe. Neither of them noticed even on kiss four or five.

“Careful now, watch those hands,” Nate teased between five and six, and Destiny chuckled while she buried her hands between his hoodie and shirt.

“You trying to hint at something here?”

“Nothing you aren’t.” His face flushed when Nate felt a strange, almost searing feeling with her hands getting under his shirt. He didn’t think she’d move that fast with him but maybe she was really into him. That was harder to believe than all the magic supernatural hijinks he’d had thrown at him over the past few days.

“Nate. That’s not me.” 

Her smile faltering felt way, way worse than he could say. She took her hands away, and the burning touch stayed. All that tension was back in her shoulders while she stared at him unblinking. She wasn’t wrong to do that. He might be gone if she did, who could say? Elisabeth, maybe, wherever she’d gone off to. But they were the ones who left, so that’s what he got for that life choice.

——–

Cut it off for potential gore, tbh. ;;