The vendor, Mrs. Calloway, used to slip my sisters and me extra cookies at the library bake sales. When she recognizes me as we step up to her booth, she beams. “Poppy Hallowind! Lord, I thought that was you. My, you’re the spitting image of your mama.”
“Hi, Mrs. Calloway.”
“Three hot ciders, please.” Asher slides cash across the counter of her booth.
“So, what’s new with you, dear?”
“Oh, you know. A worrisome case of ley-line instability, a few missing souls, possible demonic corruption. The usual.”
“Uh-huh.” Her focus is incredible as she pours from a steaming urn.
Wylder gives me a crazy look, and Asher barks a laugh, but Mrs. Calloway doesn’t even notice. Nothing has changed there. She never listened to the answers to the questions she asked us as kids.
A moment later, she delivers our cider, each cup garnished with a cinnamon stick and a dusting of sugar along the rim of the disposable cup. The first sip burns my tongue in the best way.
It’s sweet, spiced, exactly how I remember.
Asher takes a sip and grins at me. “On a scale of one to pumpkin-spice-overdose, how ‘harvest festival basic’ are we right now? What would our friends in Wichita say?”
I side-eye the cider in his hand. “You’re holding a drink with a cinnamon stick and a sugar rim. They’d laugh their asses off.”
“But it’s so festive.”
“It’s dessert in a cup.”
“And yet you’re still staring at it like you want to make out with it.”
I laugh and take another sip. “It’s fuel for a long night. We’re gathering intel.”
“On cider?”
“On everything.”
Wylder takes his cider without comment, scanning the crowd like he’s searching for hidden threats. Which, to be fair, he probably is.
We drift deeper into the festival, past stalls selling hand-knit scarves, dried lavender, and jars of honey so golden they practically glow. A woman in a velvet cloak reads tarot cards under a canopy of fairy lights. A blacksmith hammers iron into horseshoes, sparks flying like tiny stars.
Everything feels alive. Vibrant. Normal.
But when I let my vision blur just slightly, when I stop trying so hard to see with only my eyes, the festival shifts.
Golden threads shimmer around people, faint and delicate. Their souls are tethered, I realize. Most burn steadily, as warm as candlelight. But some flicker. Dim. Like flames starved of oxygen.
I follow the strands of golden threads and there, hovering near those dimmed souls, is a barely visible, translucent being.
I’m not sure what I expected a demon minion to look like, but these things are barely humanoid. They’re spindly, almost spidery. They’re freaky wrong is what they are.
The hair on my arms stands on ends, and I stop walking.
Asher glances over at me. “P?”
“Just give me a second.”
I focus on one figure near the kettle corn stand. An older man, gray-haired and stooped, fumbles with his wallet. His movements are sluggish, his face pale. And clinging to his back like a second shadow is a thing with too many limbs—tendrils sinking into his shoulders, his spine, drawing somethingout.
Light. Energy. Life.
My stomach turns.
