The night was crisp, fall in full swing. It had felt like it had just been the height of summer, but I supposed that several weeks cooped up inside would make it seem that way. It felt like a lifetime ago that I had been living in my own apartment researching werewolves. The idea of getting back into school again hadn’t even crossed my mind and it seemed unimportant now.

On the way, Alan filled me in on why it was sometimes sketchy to walk at night. The act of people going to sleep and passing into the dream realm sort of softened the barrier between the more magical dream realm and the human realm. While normally, the human realm was difficult for many things to access due to its low magically affinity, at night it was a bit easier. Lesser things still had a lot of trouble accomplishing it, but bigger things, if inclined to, could. From the way Alan explained it, it seemed like the reasons such creatures would become inclined to travel here were often not positive. He didn’t further explain and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know while walking outside during the softest time of the barrier.

Once at the graveyard, Alan beelined for the correct grave and looped Bubbles’ leash around the headstone. The headstone’s name read “Peter Reed” and the dirt in front of it was freshly placed. He dropped his bag beside the dirt and knelt to the ground, placing his phone face up, turned on to be a sort of a soft light. He used the light to carefully pull out and examine the vials he had brought, before choosing one to open. He pulled out the stopper and poured the yellow liquid over the loose dirt from the base of the headstone down to where it met the undisturbed ground. The air filled with a sour, rotten-egg scent, Bubbles gagged and wretched at the smell, I whole-heartedly agreed.

“It’s awful,” Alan admitted, “but it makes this whole process so much easier.”

The dirt began to bubble, releasing more of the noxious gas, but the level of the dirt seemed to be receding. It fell until only the intact walls and the coffin remained. I wanted to ask how he managed it, but I knew the answer would likely take more time than we should spend looking like grave robbers.

Alan carefully lowered himself into the grave, wrapped his rope around the latch of the coffin, then climbed back out and pulled the cover open. It was distinctly creepy and wrong to see the poor dead young man in his final resting place, no one was supposed to see his face again, yet here we were. I looked around us, expecting to see an angry caretaker or family member coming back to say one last goodbye, but there was nothing but the eerie stillness of the night.

Alan dropped back into the grave again, straddling the sides of the coffin with his feet. He untied the rope from the latch and began to bind the man’s hands and feet together. Finally, he wound the remaining length of rope around the outside handles of the coffin. If he did wake up as a violent zombie, there was little chance he was going to be easily able to get up.

Alan pulled the metal bottle from his back pocket, carefully pried the man’s mouth open, poured in the contents, then quickly climbed back out. We both peered over the edge with our breaths held. Nothing seemed to happen for a minute, then breath seemed to rush back into the body and his eyes flew open in panic. The now-moving corpse gasped deeply, as if hyperventilating and tried to thrash, but seemed to calm as it realized that it could not.

“Alan?” It said, voice weak and raspy.

“Peter is that really you?” Alan said, voice full of glee.

“Yeah, what’s going on, where am I?”

Before Alan could get his first word out, the air around us grew icy cold and the corpse jerked violently and let out an inhuman roar, the humanity seemed to dissolve from his eyes. The corpse looked to each of us, mouth beginning to foam and teeth snapping together. Alan sighed and muttered “so close” before whipping another vial out of his back pocket and throwing the violet contents over the body. The flesh hissed violently, causing the corpse to cry out a high-pitched squeal of pain before becoming deathly still once more.

My heart was beating in my ears, I thought I had prepared to see some kind of magic and that zombies were likely, but it was one thing to think it and another to experience it. It felt like my chest had been gripped by an invisible hand during the ordeal, the look on Alan’s face told me he had felt the same thing.

“Damn wretches,” he panted, “I guess I should be honored that I managed to attract one.” He rolled over onto his back and breathed in deeply, trying to regain his full breath. “That weird pressure in the center of your chest? He was literally trying to rip our hearts out.”

I honestly had no idea what to say to that. What would anyone say to that?

“I was closer though, that’s good, any progress is good.” He rolled back over, pulled out a final vial from his back pocket and dumped the contents into the grave. The brown sludge quickly grew, filling the grave with fresh, earthy mud.

“You didn’t even close the lid.” I pointed out, not sure if ethics had any meaning anymore.

He shrugged and stood, then offered a hand to pull me back to my feet. “I really don’t think it matters anymore. I used to make every attempt to respect the dead and their burial, but after some of the things, like that one, that pop up, I find it best to cover them back up as soon as possible. Hard to feel righteous while dead.”

We gathered up everything and woke up Bubbles who didn’t even have the dignity to try to defend us. Alan was quiet on the walk back, I wasn’t sure if he was deep in thought about what happened or disappointed, either way I felt it best to leave him be. I had a lot to process on my own, I doubted I would sleep well that night, especially with the knowledge that something tried to literally rip my heart from my chest. I sincerely wondered if it was better to know about and prepare for those kinds of monsters or if I would rather be ignorant and live a life unburdened by knowledge.

Back at the house, Alan went directly to the basement, but called back for me to put on a pot of coffee. I thought it was a little late for coffee, but who was I to argue with someone who had protected me from a nightmarish fate? He returned from the basement just after the final drips completed the pot, his face still refused to betray what he was thinking. I poured him a mug and sat it at the table in front of him.

“Well it didn’t go quite as well as I hoped,” he said and took a long drink, “but that’s always been true.”

“I would assume that meeting something like that would rarely be considered a success,” I replied, adding sugar to my own drink.

“Hmm, yes, though at least I was prepared for that. The real success was that I had a flicker of who he was, at least I hope, it could have been a trick to lure me closer.” He stared into the liquid in his mug and pondered the possibility. “No, probably not, wretches are not typically that thoughtful in their tricks, that would have been way more effort that it would have cared to expend.”

“That means you could be much closer to what you want though,” I offered, “maybe soon you could figure out how to raise someone permanently. You could undo your mistake and get part of your old life back.”

Alan stared at the table, silent, his coffee cup untouched. Awkward moments ticked by, broken only be the noisy slurps of Bubbles taking a drink out of the toilet down the hall.

“I don’t know if that’s the best idea anymore,” he finally said, barely raising his eyes from the table to meet mine, “after talking with you about how hard it is to keep relationships with people who don’t understand the magical world, what would I really gain from it? The question hung in the air, he wasn’t really looking for an answer. “Probably nothing, even if we could try to pick up where we left off, how would he react to the life I have now? I am not the same person I was then, I don’t think he would recognize me.”

“If he loved you though, I’m sure he would adapt, that’s what people do,” I said, trying to inject some sort of positivity.

“I wish I still had your level of naiveté about human nature, but I know that once magic is involved, humans without a connection to it will do anything to get away from it. I don’t know if I want to bring him back only to have him slowly and intentionally pull away from me. I know that seems so selfish, his parents would love to have him back again, but I just don’t know if I could handle it.”

“I’m sorry.” It was all that I could think of to say.

“Don’t be, it’s just something that I wish I didn’t have to consider. I had thought up until a little while ago that I wanted more than anything to have him back, it’s been tough to have it dawn on me that it might not be what I really want.” His eyes were misting over, I tried my best not to notice.

We sat in silence and finished off the pot of coffee. Neither of us seemed to want to make any suggestion of going to bed.

“I’m going to watch TV, no way that I want to sleep after all this tonight. Coming?” he asked, tossing his mug in the sink.

I agreed and followed him to the living room. The only thing decent on cable in the wee hours of the morning was, fittingly, old B-list horror movies. We watched bad interpretations of very real monsters until the sun began to rise over the horizon and the programming switched over to infomercials. We agreed that it was probably safe enough to sleep now that the night had passed, though I still wasn’t keen on the idea, I had run out of pain meds and didn’t have a reason to get anymore. Without them, I was afraid that I was powerless to stop Thusillia from snatching me back to her plane.

Alan considered my predicament for a moment, before suggesting that I wait to go to bed for about a half hour longer so that we could ensure he was asleep before me and could make sure to be there to try to stop the sprite. Neither of us knew if it would work or if we would just both end up trapped by it, but it was worth a shot. I wasted a half-hour watching an infomercial for a device that turned every day, ordinary, oranges to instant sorbet, then crawled into bed.

As I passed the line between consciousness and sleep, I could hear a crackle, like a fireplace, creep into the room. I tried to fight falling asleep, terrified of the sprite, but it was useless, I was slipping further down. I tried one last ditch effort to force my eyes back open, the world around me seemed to be swirling, the image of bright flames peeking through into my reality. Thusillia’s girlish giggle began to creep up from the flames, until I was snapped upright by Alan, his hands digging into my shoulders.

“Okay, I’m only marginally stronger than a sprite,” he wheezed, “do me a favor and never let Juniper know that, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Sure, as long as you keep saving me.” I gave him a thumbs up and weakly stood. I could still feel the heat receding from around me. “Is that going to happen every time?” He shrugged, which did not make me feel any better. “What exactly happened?”

“It was like a tug-of-war, I had a hold of you, but you were fading out to somewhere else. I think it gave up once it realized that I was not going to just let go.”

“Did you see the flames?” I asked.

“Nada, you probably only saw them because the veil to its realm had thinned for you.”

Alan and I dropped the subject, there was no point in dwelling on it, the situation was new to both of us. For our own piece of mind, we walked through the dream world to the graveyard to check that everything seemed the same. If it was disturbed or there were any traces of sketchy magical activity, it was more likely to show up in this realm. I suggested that we take Alan’s elevator instead, but he gave me a wane smile and said that he’d rather walk. I had a feeling that playing tug-of-war with the wraith had taken more out of him than he wanted to let on. The idea chilled me to the bones, if he had been working for years longer with magic than me and Thusilia was about as strong as him, what chance did I really stand?

Luckily, the grave looked the same and nothing felt off when we arrived; it looked like any other freshly dug grave. Alan willed the dirt to move aside so that we could fully check, which I was kind of hoping he wouldn’t do. The sight of the corpse’s eyes and mouth wide open in a perpetual scream was not a sight I wanted to see again.

By the time we had walked back home, enjoying the silence of the world around us, we judged it to be about time to wake up. I was just about to will myself awake when I was violently jerked awake. Daniel was half-way in my window with a ski mask half over his face.

“What are you doing?!” I yelled. This was weird, even for him.

He tumbled the rest of the way through the window and shushed me. “I can’t rescue you if you’re so loud.”

“Rescue? What in the hell do you think is going on?” I refused to lower my voice.

“It’s obvious that he’s holding you hostage, you haven’t been responding to my texts.” He explained, looking towards the door nervously.

“Are you so self-absorbed that you think the only reason I’m not answering you is because I’m being forced not to?” He didn’t reply. “I haven’t responded because you wouldn’t understand or believe me. You probably even have some explanation for the pictures now.”

“Of course, drugs, it’s obvious that Alan has drugged me repeatedly in an effort to manipulate you. He’s probably been drugging you too, that’s why you don’t see the urgency in the situation.”

I shook my head, Alan was exactly right about how this would go down. He was never going to be able to accept how things really were.

“Look, how does that even make sense, how would we be drugged? You have the video on your phone, you can see there was nothing and no one there besides you.” I sat up and rubbed my eyes, a small headache was forming between them.

“Maybe it’s some sort of long-lasting effect from the first time he drugged me,” he insisted. “He drugged me, I feel like that maybe that’s all I should have to say.”

“He never drugged me, I’ve been around him for a much longer time than you have and I’ve been fine,” I countered.

“Do you still believe in this fantastical magic shit?” he asked, then darted to the door to press his ear to it to listen for Alan.

“You saw what happened with the picture, you have the video. I’ve seen what magic can do, for good and terrible. Honestly, mostly terrible so far, but there is potential,” I said. I knew he wasn’t going to even begin to believe me. He had been willing to stretch his mind at first, but there was ultimately a hard limitation to what he was going to be able to accept as reality. It was becoming painfully clear that Thusilia could appear to shake his hand and he would still come to a conclusion, any conclusion, that didn’t have to deal with magic.

He shook his head at me, I could see the true depth of pity and twinge of fear for my sanity.

“Just leave, we’re not going to agree on this, ever. This is my life and you’re going to spend yours thinking I’m insane. I can’t avoid it, I have to accept it.” I stood and pulled open the window more for him and motioned for him to leave.

“I’m not leaving without you, this isn’t what you really want,” he said, face paling as he heard Alan’s steps towards my door. He truly did believe that Alan was some sort of predator out to drug and manipulate the both of us.

“It is and you will rationalize it as that I’m held hostage, drugged, whatever you come up with, but just leave me alone. I don’t need or want to be rescued.”

Alan swung my door open and Daniel, the coward he was, had already shoved himself back out the window.

Alan raised his eyebrow at me. “Daniel?”

“You were right, he thinks you’ve been drugging the both of us.”

He giggled to himself. “It’s funny what people are willing to accept as the truth.”

I closed and locked my window, I didn’t trust him not to come back.

“I’m not sure ‘funny’ is the word I’d use,” I said with a frown, “I knew that he would probably never fully believe me, but I held out some sort of stupid hope since he seemed to be opened-minded after the pictures.”

“Sorry,” Alan sighed, “like I said, I deal with things in a twisted way.” He sat on the bed next to me and awkwardly patted my shoulder. “I wish I could say something positive will come out of this situation, but well… you know how I feel about this. I wish I could be more comforting.”

“It’s all for the best, I suppose. He was one of those friends that no matter what we were ultimately too different to be life-long friends. I would eventually become a hermit and he would probably die of alcohol poisoning before he hit thirty,” I said, only partially joking.

Alan let out a little laugh, but then his face became more serious. “We do need to figure something out about this sprite issue, I think it has been drawing on your magical abilities and growing stronger. I should not have had that much trouble with it.”

“I never want to feel that terror while falling asleep again. I need to figure out how to nip this in the bud. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life living in fear of it.”

We made our way to the kitchen, bouncing around ideas of what we could possibly do. It was fairly obvious that Alan wouldn’t be able to directly help fight, his focus with magic had been one something entirely separate, though he could likely brew us up some protection. We needed a plan that involved using summoning and I was the only summoner still alive that Alan knew. He suggested that we pay a visit to Juniper for help, though he seemed to hesitate sharing the idea, like he was wary that I would actually agree to it.

After devouring the last of the leftover soup in the fridge, we were off to visit Juniper to hopefully get some ideas on how to best proceed. She had to know of some kind of benevolent creature I could summon and cut down on the risk of the trial and failure. Her fortune parlor was tucked away down a street largely populated by pawn shops and shady, hole-in-the-wall Chinese buffets. Alan triple checked that he locked the car when we got out.

The front of her parlor was a picture of the perfect cliché, down to the neon sign and giant crystal ball in the window. A disgruntled gray cat greeted us at the door with a loud hiss, she didn’t seem to appreciate the sound of the chime alerting of our arrival. Juniper appeared from beyond a psychedelic, beaded curtain clad in a floor-length, bright purple gypsy dress and adorned in tons of quartz jewelry.

“I knew I’d see you soon!” She exclaimed dramatically. A very pale looking middle-aged woman appeared from behind the curtain. “I was just telling my client that two striking young men would interrupt her appointment, you’re right on time.”

“Juniper, are you trying to lose clients?” Alan asked. The woman was trying to slip past us to the door, a terrified look in her eye.

“It doesn’t matter there will always be more curious people.” She locked eyes with the woman and her face became solemn. “Remember what I said about going to the doctor and getting that blood test.” The woman gulped loudly, nodded, then ran out the door.

“Look at you helping out humans, your fae nature may just be fading yet,” he teased.

“When she finds out I’m right and saved her life, she will tell all of her friends and family and I’ll have increased my future income by at least a factor of three,” her voice rose to be a bit more high pitch, “I am still very much a fae, thank you very much.”

Alan chuckled and enveloped her tiny frame in a big hug. “You know I like to pick on you, but I also know that you could turn on me and sell me into magical slavery at any point you thought it was the better economical choice.”

Her face broke into a big grin and she reached up to gently pinch his cheek. “And that show of humility is exactly why I haven’t yet. Now what brings you here?”

We relayed what I had learned about sprites and how I thought I could go about confronting it, along with the incident falling asleep. She listened and nodded, tutting at the appropriate points.

“Well there’s always crystalids or nature imps, they should be around what you’re looking for. They’re still small fry though, you could try to go for something a bit more powerful. What if I let you summon me? I fall under the magical being category and I can tell you my real name, what do you think?” she asked, a warm smile on her face.

It seemed like the ideal solution, there would be no way I would be anywhere near ready any time soon to summon something like her. If I could get her on my side the sprite would stand no chance and either be destroyed or leave me alone forever.

“Well, if you-“

“We’ll need to think about it, thanks for your offer,” Alan cut in, and grabbed my arm to push me towards the door. “We have to be running, I just remember I left a potion that could explode on the flame at home.”

Once in the car he visible relaxed and let out a long breath. “As wonderful as Juniper may seem sometimes, she is still a fae, never make deals with fae.”

“Why? She would obliterate the sprite, no problem,” I asked, annoyed that he had rushed me out of what I thought was such a good deal.

He started the car and began to drive us towards home. “That comment about selling me into slavery? That’s only partially a joke, fae are everything old fairy tales claim they are. They are tricksters only out to benefit themselves. I’m sure she would take care of your problem for you, but then you’d be in her debt. Never owe a debt to a fae.”

“But she is your friend,” I countered, “you’ve even said that she’s been a close friend and confidant.”

“That’s very true and she has been, but I still would never have her do a favor for me. Even when I had her come over to talk to you, I paid her the regular hourly fee she charges so that she couldn’t claim it was a favor. I paid for that crystal and tarot card she gave you too, even though she made it seem like she made it especially for you. It’s not that she necessarily schemes up these things all the time, it’s just in her nature. You don’t trust a wild cougar not to bite, you don’t expect a fae not to trick and manipulate.”

I tried to think back to the fairytales I knew, I did seem to remember that fae were not warmly described. Plus, Alan had yet to really steer me wrong or give me bad advice. It was frustrating to not be able to use such a great resource.

“Why did you take me here then, if you were afraid of her tricks?”

“She has a soft spot for humans, she thinks we’re quaint, adorable creatures, kind of like how we feel about rabbits or chinchillas. I knew that she wouldn’t be able to help herself from giving us at least a couple good ideas.”

“Crystalids and forest imps,” I said, catching on to his plan.

“And now you have a direction to go and I’ll help you out with the research so that we can get you freed from this sooner. I don’t have a problem taking a break from my research now that I have one less goal to meet.” He went quiet, fingers tightening on the wheel slightly. I was not very good with comforting people or knowing what to say to anyone upset, I always seemed to stick my foot in my mouth