***Tom***

“911, what’s your emergency?”

There’s a bunch of murderous LARPers on the 88th interstate, mile 105.

….

“Sir?”

Tom’s mouth was open, his tongue was working, his brain knew exactly what he wanted to say. But the words wouldn’t come out.

“H-Hold on,” Tom stammered.

“Sir, what is your location?”

Mile 105 on the tollway, Tom tried to force himself to say, but it died in his throat. There was some invisible…thing stopping him from directing attention towards the knights. It was like the mental block that prevented people from jumping off cliffs or petting spiders, but a thousand times more intense.

Tom then tried to inform the woman he was going to kill some people and go on a joyride in his car down the tollway. That didn’t work either. He couldn’t seem to consciously direct attention towards the knights.

That explains the lack of official government response, Tom realized.

“Sir? If this isn’t an emergency, please hang up and dial a non-emergency line.” She went through the trouble of giving him a few even though everyone had Google.

“Nevermind,” Tom said, hanging up.

***Stacy Devon, 911 Operator***

That was odd, Stacy thought, brow raised. It might’ve been a crank call, considering the kid’s voice sounded young. Late teens, maybe. Still, it was her job to be thorough. She tried to get a quick bead on the young man’s location.

Oh, prepaid phone, right in the middle of a trailer park…

Stacy frowned when she pulled up the numbers and realized that over eight hundred 911 calls had been made from that location in the last twelve hours.

That’s…really alarming, Stacy thought, frowning.

She turned to her superior to mention it, but the words died on her lips.

***Tom Graves***

Okay, so the police can’t help. Great.

It wasn’t that the police couldn’t help, it was that Tom had no way of getting them where he needed them to be.

Despite his beef with the cops, Tom understood that the easiest way to solve the knight infestation on route 88 was to throw disposables at them until the problem was dead.

Just to be thorough, Tom tried texting Manager Dan that there were a bunch of knights on the highway killing people.

He couldn’t.

Tom ran his fingers through his hair as he paced back and forth across the singed backyard outside the burned-out trailer.

Tom would have much preferred guys with automatic weapons to do the heavy lifting with those knights. Each and every one of them seemed to have some kind of magical ability that let them murder stuff.

What am I, chopped liver?

Essentially, yes. Tom’s ability was very handy for gathering information in a way that couldn’t be detected, but it was shit in a one-on-one fight.

Tom had an approximate fifteen hours until they took Ellie through a portal to Wonderland and he never saw her again.

Assuming they regroup dead center between them and the portal is only a few minutes beyond that. Tom’s supposition could be totally wrong. They might just as well have already taken her. She might even be dead already, and they stashed her body because it had some kind of key ingredient they wante—

Tom chastised his hyperactive brain. It did Tom no good whatsoever to panic and imagine all the worst-case scenarios.

Okay, can’t call the cops or the National Guard within the time frame. My best option is sealed. What is my runner-up?

Tom glanced down at the ring on his pinky finger, focusing on the burning sensation in his chest.

Damn.

Tom kicked the plywood right side up and placed his soul engine in the center of the spellwork. A moment later, he was connected to Luz.

“Tom Graves…you look a bit worse for wear. What can I do for you? We offer healing scrolls for fifteen soul-pulses each.”

“I’m looking for the summoning address of a Nim’tek named Carol. She worked for Lily and was banished from this plane recently via lethal damage.”

“Let me see.” Luz turned away and began typing offscreen. “I couldn’t find a Nim’tek, but I did find a Greater Wratz’got named Kar’el who was recently banished from your planar address. She’s got a hold placed on her summoning account, for…”

She glanced over at him and blushed before clearing her throat and continuing, “The sperm donor.”

“Yeah, that’s the one,” Tom said, too tired to rise to the bait. “What’s a Wratz’got?”

“They’re similar in appearance and behavior to Nim’tek, but rather more powerful. Without a control ring supplementing your soul, I wouldn’t—”

Tom held the ring up so Luz could see it.

“I see. Wratz’got are among the most powerful incorporeal spirits you can summon to inhabit corpses; they achieve a similar level of power as an experienced Vith-blooded knight, and are commonly summoned to lead undead hordes or as elite shock troops. This one is a Greater Wratz’got.”

She looked at him like that meant something.

“So?”

“So, she’s very dangerous.”

“I sure hope so. Send me that summoning address.”

“I wish you luck,” Luz said, typing off to the side. A moment later, the hologram flashed off and a sheet of weathered papyrus fluttered out of thin air, bearing Carol’s address.

Tom shrugged his shoulders and got to work.

An hour later, he was satisfied with the oversized circle he’d printed onto the back side of the board, and decided it was time to summon Carol.

I hope to God this doesn’t kill me. Tom could remember what had happened the last time he’d put on the ring when Carol was alive. It felt like he was going to explode.

Tom picked up the soul engine before he realized that he didn’t have a key ingredient: a skeleton.

Where the hell am I going to get a skeleton? Tom thought to himself, scowling at the empty circle. He briefly considered going to the taxidermist again, but decided against it. Carol would probably kick his ass if he put her in an animal body. Besides, she was most likely much more comfortable in a human form. More combat effective.

Tom racked his brain for a good ten minutes. Carol’s original skeleton had been confiscated. He considered digging up a skeleton, but quickly dismissed the idea. Grave-robbing was what got him into this mess. The taxidermist was right out, and Tom wasn’t killing anyone and scraping their bones off. That was for sure.

Where can I get a dead body?

A sudden waft of acrid smoke caught Tom’s attention. His head slowly turned towards the smoldering mobile home, his eyebrows rising on his skull. Beside him was the hollowed-out trailer that Reese called home, now a burnt husk of its former…dilapidated glory.

It also had Reese’s charred corpse in the living room.

Tom winced.

He covered his nose and mouth and ventured into the burnt mobile home, careful to avoid stepping through the compromised flooring. There, in the center of the living room, was the slender corpse of a woman, her body contorted in pain. That was the only clue that Reese had suffered, because her flesh was flaky carbon. She was charcoal.

Tom thought he might throw up, but there weren’t any other options…except…Tom glanced up from where he was and spotted the corpse of Jacob. He was significantly less burned; only half of his body was blackened. The other side had hundreds of flies swarming around it.

Tom glanced back and forth between the two of them, briefly considering Reese’s point of view. Jacob’s corpse was likely the last thing she saw from there. Well, except for the fireball.

No, don’t overthink it. Tom shook his mind out of the guilt spiral. Half this debacle was Jacob’s fault, anyway. The coked-up bastard. The other half was Tom’s for not murdering Ken before he could knock Carol out of commission.

Tom shook the overthinking out and focused on the task at hand: Get Carol back, use her to get Ellie back, then GTFO.

And to get Carol back, he needed a body.

“Sorry, Reese,” Tom said, nodding to the charred body. “If you can see what’s happening from The Other Side, wherever that is, I hope you think having a badass demon possess your corpse is cool. I get the feeling you two would have gotten along. Or killed each other.”

Tom bent down and grabbed the corpse, disturbed by how light it was. A bunch of the dry, charred flesh sloughed off to reveal…wetter insides, which nearly made Tom lose it. In response, Tom withdrew inside himself until only the things he needed to accomplish mattered. The pork smell, the warm oozing sensation on his fingers... They were not important, so he ignored them.

Tom carefully set the body down inside the circle, making sure not to smudge anything.

He glanced down at the four crypts and the soul-engine.

All but the debt-repayment crypt were humming with soul pulses. Why wouldn’t they be? Ken’s had been on him when he died, along with Gramma and Grampa—Tom tore his eyes away from those two.

He couldn’t bear to think that their souls had been drawn through those machines like wheat through a thresher.

Tom’s soul engines, though: those were way more charged. At least fifteen people had died here the night before.

Enough to give Carol a call.

Tom picked up his soul-engine, then slipped the ring on his left pinky, feeling the familiar burning sensation return.

“If it looks like I’m going to die, bite the ring off my finger,” he said to Mr. Fluffybottom, waggling his pinky finger.

Mr. Fluffybottom nodded.

Scared. Suzie shot him a fearful emotional statement. The oversized horned frog was sitting at the edge of the tree line, watching the summoning circle cautiously.

Tom would be lying if he said he wasn’t scared. He could easily think of every way this could go wrong. That was his curse: always thinking in worst-case scenarios. It had hobbled him his entire life, as dumb people did dumb things and got away with them simply because they didn’t understand the odds.

But you know what? I’m just a little bit more pissed than I am afraid. Since the soulmonger book had fallen into his hands, he’d been assaulted by an unceasing torrent of horrible shit. But, that unceasing torrent of horrible shit has always been there. If he hadn’t found the book, those knights would’ve still come for Grant and snatched Ellie, probably killing him Tom the process.

Ken would have still come sniffing around, looking for more scraps of Ellie’s inheritance.

No, if he hadn’t found the book, he would have been completely helpless, likely dead. A victim.

With that thought, Tom’s eye twitched, and he grabbed the soul-pulses and yanked them out of his soul-engine before shoving them into the summoning circle.

The sensation of the flow between him and the circle was interrupted by the ring, which seemed to gobble up his soul pulses before allowing a smaller amount to pass through, touching upon the circle.

Immediately, the circle shone crimson red as a blood-red mist descended from above Reese’s corpse. The drug dealer’s body jerked as the Outsider flooded into it. Inhabiting it.

A moment later, a wild torrent of power raged across the connection between him and the Outsider, a terrifying feedback that threatened to rend Tom’s soul to pieces. The ring collected it, then organized the wild fluctuations into a steady flow, creating a constant burning sensation that took hold in Tom’s chest and slowly filled his limbs.

Tom blinked away tears as more and more red mist emerged from the black space between worlds, filling up the carbonized body.

She looks how I feel, Tom thought wryly, as Reese’s body twitched, the crimson mist lifting it to its feet.

Tom felt like he was going to pop, and the mist kept coming. He gritted his teeth and waited, feeling the intense stretching, burning sensation fill every nerve in his body, until he thought he was going to black out.

Then it began to plateau.

Tom didn’t realize he was closing his eyes until the pain stopped growing. It wasn’t going back down, but it wasn’t more than he could stomach, either.

It just made doing anything difficult. Tom carefully opened his eyes, hoping the pressure behind them didn’t shoot his eyeballs across the room.

There, in the middle of the room, was Reese.

Naked, unburnt, and admiring her tattoos.

“You could have done worse,” she said contemplatively, twisting her body to try and catch a glimpse of her own ass. That was the closest thing Tom had ever heard to a positive statement from the demon.

“Carol?”

“Yep,” Carol said, stepping out of the circle and kneeling in front of him. The behaviour was so out of character that Tom couldn’t find any words. Carol had some, though.

“I pledge myself to your service and all that, smite your enemies, yadda yadda, obey you without fail if I feel like it, and so on,” she said, before lunging back to her feet. “Alright, where’s my baby?”

“Kinzena got her,” Tom gasped through the pain. It wasn’t going away, so it still felt like he was going to pop at any second.

“You son of a bitch!” Carol grabbed him by the collar.

“I revoke any restrictions Lily placed on your speech,” Tom gasped, feeling like a piece of his lungs might fly out his throat if he spoke too hard.

“You kaz’benath son of a bitch!” she said.

“Lily’s secrets. You are allowed to tell me them now,” Tom clarified.

“Well, what good will it do now?”

Tom was tired of Carol’s shit. The pain subsided momentarily as Tom’s frustration crested.

“You’re going to tell me who Lily was before she came here. You’re going to tell me why she came here. You’re going to tell me why the Kinzena want Ellie, and you’re going to tell me those things, now.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” Carol said, giving him her vulpine smile. It was odd to see it on Reese’s face.