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Knox’s gaze cut to me. “No one is using you as bait.”

“Look at that,” I said. “Personal growth and common sense. Big night for everyone.”

Carrick ignored me with the grace of a man who had survived centuries of Dragon antics and therefore could not be defeated by sarcasm. “We know only that she crossed once without being rejected and could not return. We do not know why.”

A hard knock hit the cabin door.

Knox moved before I could blink, sword up, body between me and the door.

“It’s me,” Guy called. “Do not stab your brother. I brought help.”

“Define help,” Knox said.

The door opened, and Guy stepped in with a man who looked like bad decisions in boots and smelled like smoke, sulfur, and wet dog.

The stranger took one look at Knox. Then Guy. Then Knox again. “Please tell me this is not another Dragon you found wandering around out here.”

“My brother,” Guy said.

“The dead one?”

“Apparently not,” Knox said.

“Do not encourage him,” I snapped. “He has been trying to make that joke happen for hours.”

The stranger grinned. “I’m Hank.”

“Hellhound,” Guy added.

“Obviously,” I said, because nothing about the night had earned a normal introduction.

Hank’s grin faded when his gaze landed on Knox’s arm. He stepped closer, nostrils flaring once. “That’s old Hell Magic. Layered. Used a long time.”

“A century,” Knox said.

Hank had no joke. I was disappointed.

We left on foot because nobody with two working brain cells wanted to hand the Hellmark another Magical pathway to study.

Arrhythmia at night should have been all Hellmouth gloom and murder-cabin vibes. Instead, as we walked back toward Guy’s house using another path, the town unfolded around us in crooked golden windows, porch lanterns, low voices, and the kind of happy chaos that made absolutely no sense in a place designed to contain Monsters. Somewhere ahead, music drifted out of a building with a sagging balcony– fiddle, washboard, and something that might have been a tuba if the tuba had recently made several questionable bargains. Laughter rolled after it, warm and rowdy, bouncing off false-front shops and old adobe walls.

Crooked jack-o’-lanterns glowed on porch steps, some carved with fangs, some carved with runes, and one carved so badly it looked less like a face and more like a tax problem. Paper ghosts hung from the awning of a storefront that might have actually contained Ghosts. A string of orange lights blinked in uneven bursts over the Apothecary, where a woman with antlers argued with the lights as if they had personally insulted her ancestors. Across the street, a resident with horns carried a giant plastic skeleton under one arm while a tiny creature in a Witch hat chased after him, waving what looked suspiciously like a broom and yelling about proper placement.

The best part– or possibly the worst, depending on how much emotional processing one wanted to do while walking through a secret supernatural prison town– was how normal everyone acted about it. A Troll balanced on a ladder to hang fake cobwebs from a second-story window. Something translucent floated through a wall, paused to straighten a paper bat, then floated casually back out. Two kids with tails chased each other past a hitching post wrapped in purple ribbon, shrieking with the particular joy of children who had not yet learned that shrieking in a Hellmouth-adjacent town was narratively unwise.

Someone had propped a scarecrow outside the sheriff’s office, except the scarecrow’s stitched mouth moved when we passed and muttered, “Evenin’.” I did not scream. I did, however, make a noise only dogs, Hellhounds, and possibly emotionally fragile bats could hear.

Hank glanced over his shoulder. “That’s Elias.”

“The scarecrow has a name?”

“The scarecrow has opinions,” Hank said. “Name came later.”

I looked down the street at the crooked decorations, the impossible residents, the purple Ward-light shimmering over rooftops like aurora caught in a cage, and felt the strangest tug under my ribs. Arrhythmia was terrifying. Dangerous. Built on punishment and old lies. But people lived here. They decorated. They argued with lights. They named scarecrows. They made a place where Halloween looked less like make-believe and more like community maintenance. “You people decorate for Halloween?” I asked.

Hank looked offended. “We’re Monsters, not heathens.”

Knox’s hand brushed mine once as we walked. By accident. Probably. We both noticed, because apparently the apocalypse had time for awkward hand tension.