Back home we went to work pulling out any books from my collection that seemed might contain any information relating to either creature. We were able to find a small stack of potential candidates and set to work pouring over the texts and placing markers on pages that mentioned anything to do with either. Several cramped hours later, we surfaced, only a few books down. It was going to be a full time job to try to find the correct information relatively quickly.

“Probably going to want to go the imp route,” Alan said, tossing his book onto the finished pile, a few pieces of paper sticking out of its marked points, “people just seem to have met more imps, I’ve only found one or two mentions of crystalids this whole time.”

“Me too, probably harder to summon then, I guess. I don’t know how this works really.”

Alan shrugged. “I have no clue, but that makes sense. If I had to guess, if they are seen less in this realm, that probably means it’s hard for them to cross the barrier between our worlds. That would make it more difficult for you to bring them over as well.”

The idea of imps being seen in the real world sparked an idea, the process we were going through suddenly dawned on me as being extremely archaic. Why I hadn’t thought of all the paranormal forums out there I had scoured for information before, I couldn’t explain. Of course, there had to be people out there labeled as “crackpots” who had seen or experienced something with imps. I knew for certain that fae existed and you couldn’t even begin to search for anything paranormal online without having to sift through sixty fae sighting claims, so I had faith that the online paranormal community would have what I needed. I didn’t have a laptop anymore, but I still had the check.

“I need us to go out tomorrow, cash my check, and get a computer. You have internet access here, right?” I asked.

He looked at me like I had grown another head. “Of course I have internet access, I’m not some baby boomer complaining to the coffee shop staff that their internet is broken and they can’t stalk their grandchildren.”

I explained my now obvious idea to use the internet to do most of the research, but he did bring up some good points about downsides to the plan. He had managed to trick me into thinking that he was a werewolf, so I would have to be very careful to sift the fact from the fiction. It was tempting for a lot of people to entirely make up sightings to garner attention and be the new hot topic of the forum. In hindsight, I had been a major part of a very strange outlet for socially starved weirdos.

Night approaching and my eyelids growing heavy reminded me that I needed to do something about my sleep that night. I wasn’t willing to risk Alan either losing or ending up hurt trying to pull me back again. Alan was willing to brew me a potion to use each night I needed it that would put me into a deep enough sleep to avoid the problem all together.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just go to the store and pick up some sleeping pills?” I asked, looking over all the ingredients he had specially selected for me. It made a lot of sense that he was pulling down chicken ramen flavoring powder to add into the concoction.

“Where’s the fun in that? Plus this is just good practice,” He said and set up one of the burners. “You have some skill in this, think of it as a good lesson.”

I watched as he started with a base of powdered milk and water, warming it gently with a small pinch of cinnamon. The scent was comforting and familiar, it was already making me sleepy. After letting the mixture steep a moment, he added the ramen flavoring packet, and a small hair that he pulled from a vial labeled “werewolf.”

“Is that really werewolf hair?” I asked excitedly.

“That’s what it says on the tin, my supplier is pretty reliable.” He held out the bottle for me to handle.

I popped it open and was met with a pungent, musky aroma. It smelled close to wet dog, but it had hints of human body oil and sweat. I gently took out a strand and ran it through my fingers, it was thick and course, it almost hurt if I pressed too hard. I felt giddy that I had in my hands proof of their existence, though it might be the most contact that I would ever have. Though it was becoming painfully obvious that as far as magical creatures went, it was probably the safest route to stay as far away as I could get for any and all werewolves.

I set the bottle back on the shelf and leaned over the boiling potion. The oppressive scent of the werewolf hair had somehow managed to mellow with the addition of the other ingredients, the mixture smelled like a strange, stinky cheese. It was not unpleasant, but not exactly the scent of something you’d assume you could ingest either.

Alan timed exactly two minutes on his phone, occasionally stirring the potion and checking the consistency. When the timer went off, he poured it into a dark amber bottle and screwed on a dropper top.

“One drop under your tongue right before you want to sleep should do the trick. Make sure you screw the top back on and set the bottle down quickly, this is pretty concentrated and therefore fast acting,” he warned.

I took the bottle from him and unscrewed the top. The resemblance to stinky cheese was only intensifying as it began to cool.

“You’re sure it will work how you intend?” I couldn’t help but think of how ineffective the one he had used on Daniel had been.

“It’ll work like a charm. Sleeping potions are easy enough and I know you well enough to tailor it. The problem comes when you don’t really know someone and therefore have to use something generic. Generic potions never turn out well.”

I accepted his answer and thanked him for the potion. I made sure to have everything in place, already covered with the sheets, and teeth brushed before I unscrewed the lid. I placed a small drop under my tongue and raced to close the lid. The next thing I remembered was waking up to the sound of the birds singing outside my window. The bottle sat on my chest and my sheets seemed unmoved, I hadn’t seemed to move a muscle all night. I felt great, well-rested and physically better than I had in awhile.

Alan was shuffling his way to the kitchen when I came out of my room. He seemed much less energetic than I, his eyes had dark shadows and crust stuck to their corners.

“We need to fix your issue sooner than I thought,” he grumbled and started making coffee. “All damn night that sprite kept trying to peek into the dream world to stalk me. She’s not strong enough yet to get in, but I think she’s trying. She was ripping tiny holes here and there, but I managed to patch them up.”

My heart sunk, if it was becoming an arms race, then maybe I wouldn’t be able to summon a forest imp in time and would have to waste more time trying to find something else.

“By the end of the day, we need to have a solid plan for a summoning spell for you,” he groaned, “I know it’s too soon, but if she gets stronger than me, I don’t know if I will be able to stop her from getting into the dream world. If she can do that, then she can get here and won’t need you anymore. That’s maybe good news for you, but terrible for everyone else.”

“Wouldn’t another, stronger being like Juniper be able to stop her before it got too out of hand?” I suggested. It would make sense that they would want to protect the same realm that they also called home.

“Eventually, but magical things hiding in this realm don’t particularly want to reveal what they are most of the time. They seem to let things happen, then take care of it in the resulting chaos. The great Chicago fire ring a bell? Sound a bit like something you know?”

“That was a fire sprite?”

He nodded and poured us both cups of coffee, though I didn’t feel like I particularly needed it. “The only reason your fire didn’t end up spreading any further than the building was because your sprite chose not to. It was smart enough to know to stop and flee before anything bigger came along. Now it’s trying to realm walk on its own because it’s becoming one of the bigger fish.”

“By tonight doesn’t give me much time,” I lamented, “I don’t know anything yet really, I barely understand what I did the first time.”

Alan gave me a worried looked and reached out to gently clasp my arm. “I know, unfortunately this is the reason why summoners tend not to survive for very long, but I am here to help and I will be there to help fight it in any way I can. I promise we’re going down together.”

I buried my face in my hands, trying to find some kind of belief in myself that I could manage to pull something off. I seemed to have bungled magic horribly so far, things didn’t look too bright. I didn’t know how to reconcile the idea that this might be my last morning alive.

“I think you can do it,” he reassured, giving my arm a squeeze, “you managed to have enough power to summon a sprite, you can figure out something just a bit tougher. We have about twelve hours until we need to start to really worry, let’s get you a laptop and get the research out of the way.”

The bank was less than cooperative, refusing to fully credit me the funds since the check was so large. I had to accept that the laptop be bought on Alan’s credit card, then I would pay him back. I felt bad having to do it that way, he had already been feeding me and putting a roof over my head, but I had little other choice. We grabbed the first laptop from the first electronics store we ran across and rushed back.

I sat for most of the remaining morning and early afternoon frequenting my old haunts, begging for help to find anything on forest imps or imps. Apparently it had gotten around that I had been in a fire, only most were certain that I had actually died, so I had to ignore a lot of comments and messages asking me what the afterlife was life or if I had come back to let them know that ghosts were real.

A couple of the more coherent forum citizens were able to point me into some helpful directions, including a blurry video of what appeared to be a tiny, pointy-faced creature running between the trees in a wooded area. I had seen all of the fake videos before, but if this one was faked, it was skillfully forged. I watched the few seconds of footage over and over, trying to decipher anything important I could. I made out that it probably stood only about two feet tall at most, seemed to have no toes or fingers, but perhaps vines or branches, and its skin looked to be bark-like. The quality prevented me from discerning much else, but I felt reasonably sure that I had a decent mental picture of its likely appearance.

Next I tracked a comment train that described their encounter where they actually interacted with one. They described the creature to be about what I had seen in the video and that it seemed friendly once they had offered a pile of berries and herbs, which it seemed to enjoy. It stayed as long as there was food, then it wandered off.

While I was typing one last plea for any additional information that might help before I logged off to scour some books, Alan stood up with a spray bottle and doused the room around me with a metallic-scented liquid.

“Potion I just came up with and hope works,” he huffed. He had been a flurry of movement over his potion set-up, boiling several flasks at a time and referring constantly to a giant pile of books he had set up next to his chair. “It should mostly stop any fire she tries to start, if I’m right about how she does it that is.” He nervously laughed and ran back to recheck a book. His eyes scanned over a few lines before snapping it closed and running up the stairs to the kitchen. “Probably.”

While he dosed the house, I kept the laptop open and frequently refreshed the open pages, hoping for some new shining beacon of hope while I pulled open the books we had marked the day before. Much of the information I had learned online was at least partially confirmed by the scant literary descriptions. The recurring theme seemed to be that the correct path was through its stomach, the better the food, the more obliging the creature would be.

Alan came trotting back downstairs, his beard glistening with sweat. “Got all the outside of the house and backyard as well,” he wheezed, “need to make some more so we can drench ourselves and maybe something orally so that our flesh is safe.” He trailed off and began pulling down more ingredients, I was pretty sure that without his advanced knowledge, I would have been as good as dead.

“I need to run to the supermarket, is it okay if I take your credit card again?” I asked, searching online for the nearest organic food market.

“Sure, just want to be alive tomorrow,” he said, not taking his eyes off of the flask he was carefully measuring silver flakes into.

I half-jogged to the market, the closest I had come to running in years. I hadn’t thought to borrow the car, I wasn’t used to having consistent access to one, but it was only a few minutes away on foot anyway.

The market was one of those pretentious stores trying to look like a farmer’s market while shipping in their produce from all over the world and charging five dollars a strawberry. I picked out the best looking organic raspberries and blackberries that I could find, as I thought it would be best to try to use only food that actually tended to grow wild in forests. I also picked up several large bundles of fresh mint and several pounds of their most expensive walnuts. The cashier looked at me like I was insane, he was probably used to people only being able to afford a pack of blueberries at a time.

I huffed and puffed my way back home, holding the food gently in front of me in an attempt to avoid anything knocking together and bruising. I didn’t know how finicky they were, but I needed it to like me as much as I could manage. Once I got the food safely inside, I went back out to pull branches and leaves from the trees. I wanted to be able to create a forest kind of feel indoors, something that would make it feel at ease. I wished that I could perform the summoning outside, but it would leave too many variables open and I didn’t want the sprite to have easy access to set the whole cul-de-sac on fire if she got loose.

I filled two garbage bags full of leaves and a clothes hamper with branches, but it felt like it was going to be missing flowers. Alan didn’t seem to care about landscaping, so my only option was to carefully sneak into his neighbors’ yards and take a few from each. I tried to be somewhat stealthy, but once I realized that it was becoming noticeably darker, I uprooted two entire mums plants and ran back to the house.

Alan seemed to have slowed a bit on his potion making and helped me carry everything down to the basement, we had decided that it was the safest place to hold the showdown. We pushed all the furniture against the walls and began to throw down leaves across the whole floor. Once the floor looked something like a forest floor in autumn, I arranged a large, loose circle made of the branches on top of the leaves to hopefully mark where the imp would appear. We arranged the food in the circle, providing, what was hopefully, a bounty. Finally, we outlined the circle with mums freshly plucked off the plant.

The fire protection potion was ready and loaded into the spray bottle. We took turns dosing each other, then hunted down Bubbles to dose him too. He whined and tried to fight up, thinking it was some sort of bath, but we managed to get a good amount into his fur. After we released Bubbles to go sulk, Alan’s eyes lit up and he snapped his fingers loudly.

“I need to make one last thing, get that amethyst out that Juniper gave you and come with me,” he said rapidly.

He threw together ingredients including dog food and vitamin B2 and set them to simmering. He then turned to me and took the small shard of crystal from me, put it into his mortar and pestle. With a loud crunch, he began to grind the crystal to dust, He handed me a tiny shard of it, not much bigger than a dime, and did not stop pulverizing the rest until he had achieved a fine powder. I desperately wanted to ask him if he really thought it was a good idea to shatter a protection crystal, but who was I to say that I knew any better.

He poured the powder into a small vial, placed it in his pocket, then took the potion off the burner and began to blow into the liquid to cool it down.

“What time is it?” he asked.

I checked my phone. “6pm.”

“Okay, we have time to plan this out a bit.” He sat down in this chair and motioned for me to do the same. “We need to first get that imp summoned and agree to help us, that’s the easy part.” I gave him an uncertain look. “Easy in relative terms. Once we do that, then you should just be able to summon your sprite again and that’s when things get dicey. It is likely going to appear near something it feels an affinity for, we should put a candle where we’d like to be, I vote for across the room away from us.”

“As far as possible,” I agreed.

“So we do that, but then we need to trap it, that’s where this powder comes in, if we can get it all the way around it, then it will be very reluctant to leave the circle.”

“Reluctant doesn’t sound like ‘can’t’.”

“We have to hope. Anyway, neither of us should get near it to do that, so I’m sending in Bubbles with a bit of the mind control potion, he held up the flask that he had just finished. I know it works, he loves the stuff, all I have to do is wait to feed it to him when you’re ready to summon her.”

“Then it’s maybe trapped, then what?” I asked, already worried about the number of “what ifs” that this plan had.

“Then hopefully the imp does its job and my fire protection coating works or at least helps.”

“So, in other words, you have no idea?”

“None,” he admitted.

“What if we’re wrong and it turns out that the sprite isn’t growing in power this quickly? We could be killing ourselves doing this, even if we had just a couple more days, maybe we could do much better than this. This feels insane,” I worried.

Alan looked at me, his face full of worry as well. It was obvious to the both of us that the odds were against us in this haphazard battle preparation.

“I can fall asleep and check, but you have to wake me up in ten minutes,” he offered.

“Thank you, if we can possibly get more time I’d feel a lot better about our chances of survival.”

I followed him up to his bedroom, it was a dark room with black painted walls and blackout curtains on the windows. I tried not to draw attention to the fact that I noticed a picture frame with a picture of Alan and who I assumed was Jayme. It looked like it had been thrown across the room. He laid down and I took out my phone to time ten minutes, before I could even look up from setting the time, he was asleep. I supposed that was what happened with years of practice.

At the ten minute mark I gently shook Alan, he woke up with a loud gasp and clawed at the front of his shirt.

“Turn on the light,” he gasped. I did what I was told and he ripped off his shirt, revealing a fresh burn in the shape of claw marks. The marks were at least six inches long, I could see the angry blisters forming before my eyes.

“I think I know the answer,” I said quietly.

He panted and nodded, shaking slightly. “That’s what it feels like to be burned by that thing? I’m so sorry.”

He opened his nightstand and pulled out a container of salve, but the smell of it, it was the same thing he had given me to heal the scars. The blisters hissed and popped as he applied it, but he didn’t stop until every part of the burn was thickly coated.

“Either this sprite is feeding off of multiple people or you have a stupid amount of potential, it is able to rip huge holes now. It’s a good thing you listened and woke me up when you did, it was almost through and I was stupid enough to not think to just wake up, I was trying to stop it.” He motioned to the burn still sizzling the salve on his chest.

“That at least lets us know that we aren’t just rushing into this needlessly, we have to do it now,” I said numbly, I really had hoped that he had been overreacting. I felt like I was watching the end of my life being thrust upon me.

After a few more deep breaths, Alan pulled his shirt back on with a wince. He stood and clasped my shoulders and met my worried gaze with one of his own. We didn’t say anything, but we knew exactly what the other was thinking. He moved as if to say something, but instead shook his head and motioned for me to follow him to the basement to start the final confrontation.

I had an awful feeling about the whole thing, but there was no time to come up with anything else. I did not want any more blood on my hands and I couldn’t just sit back and let Thusillia wreak havoc unchecked.

Alan called down Bubbles, who was still visibly upset at his wet fur and sat back in the corner with him, vial poised to be poured down his throat. I stepped to the edge of the circle, a fist-full of leaves in each hand and spoke the first words that came to mind.

“Forest imp, hear my call, my plea for aid. I offer a forest bounty. Hear my call, my plea.” I repeated the words, my voice seeming to rise in volume through no effort of my own. I repeated them once more and scattered the leaves around the circle in front of me.

Nothing seemed to be happening, I didn’t feel any of the same sensations that I had felt that first time. I picked up another two handfuls of leaves, cleared my throat, and tried a different tactic.

“Forest imp, please hear my call, I am small in power, insignificant compared to your potential. Please consider my plea, this lowly creature requires your aid.” The leaves in my hands rustled slightly in an unseen wind, I scattered them carefully while repeating my request once more. A tickle of electricity worked its way up from my feet to the top of my head, causing me to shiver.

As if crawling up from an unseen hole in the basement floor, an imp appeared, its jade green eyes locked on mine. My outstretched hands trembled in effort, all of my mental focus was locked on trying to keep connected to the creature. I couldn’t tell from the video, but its skin was not only bark, but also tiny, white flowers populated its body.

Once fully ascended from the floor, it stood only slightly more than a food tall and crooked its head to the side, as if out of curiosity. I slowly lowered myself to the floor and crossed my legs, then gestured to the offering of food. Without breaking eye contact, it reached out for as much mint it could fit in its gnarled hand and began eating. In the flurry of research I hadn’t been able to find a clue as to if it spoke or understand human speech, but I figured it was worth a try.

“Thank you for hearing my call, I have a problem that I think a mighty creature like yourself will be able to help with.”

It kept chewing, but crooked its head to the other side. I guessed that he could understand me, but not speak itself. I could work with that.

“A fire sprite has been plaguing me, it greatly damaged me and killed many people around me. Now it grows stronger and desires to break into my world to kill more.”

Its eyes narrowed and seemed to nod. It scooped up another handful of mint, it had already eaten through most of it.

“You are more powerful than a simple sprite, I would like to offer you a reward of your choosing if you help me defeat it.”

After a moment of what I think was its thought process, it picked up a single remaining mint leaf and waved it in between our unbroken gaze.

“You want more offerings of mint?”

It nodded slightly.

“How much?”

It held up one of its branched fingers in what I assumed with a symbol for one, but he moved it back and forth to indicate a multiplicity.

“I see, a regular offering. How about once a week, I will summon you and provide you a bounty of fresh mint.”

It seemed to consider the terms of the agreement, sucking the remnants of the leaves from between its wooden teeth. My lungs burned from holding my breath, but I couldn’t seem to bring myself to exhale until I knew. Just as I began to consider the possibility of passing out, it sharply nodded its head and broke eye contact, then began to devour the other offerings.

I gasped in a breath, my body trembling from the event and concentration. I looked over to Alan who sent me an air high-five. I didn’t return it, I knew the worst part was to come. I nodded to him and he poured the mind control potion down Bubbles’ throat. I quickly stood, before I lost my nerve, and began to summon Thusillia.

“Thusillia I summon you.”

The sprite must have been gnawing at the bit to be summoned again, because just barely after getting the words out of my mouth, heat rose up along the back of my neck and the hairs stood on end. The fading scars across my chest flared with fresh pain, Alan cried out sharply with pain, I assumed that his fresh wounds probably hurt far worse.

As predicted, Thusillia coiled her way into existence next to the candle, lighting it as a finishing flourish. The basement glowed with firelight, the temperature of the room rising to an almost unbearable level. The air also began to take on the same thick quality I had experienced in her realm.

“Couldn’t stay away from true power, could you?”she hissed.

Bubbles darted forward, controlled by Alan, the vial of amethyst dust in his mouth. He quickly encircled the sprite with the dust. She let out a high-pitched, crackling laugh.

“Oh, trying to be a traitor? Even summoned an imp to try to control me? As I said before, you are particularly adorable.” She shot out a stream of fire directly at me, I barely dodged in time. It smacked into the wall behind me, but Alan’s potion seemed to mostly work, the paint on the concrete sizzled, but did not light. The failure to hit me or light anything on fire seemed to enrage her, she let out an ear-piercing scream.

The imp, seeming annoyed at being interrupted in its meal turned its gaze to Thusillia, turned its head to the side, and a thunderclap exploded over the head of the sprite, followed by a miniature thunderstorm that began to rain heavily.

“You wretched piece of kindling!” she squealed, exploding into thousands of individual flames to dodge the raindrops. “Do you think this walking piece of firewood can stand up to me?! I have been feeding off of your power since you first summoned me, you will not defeat me with the likes of that toothpick!”

The flames arranged into a sphere, that quickly expanded, then exploded to fill the room with fire. I flew back and slammed against the wall, my back exploded in pain and the pain in my head seemed temporarily unbearable. Nothing had lit in the blast, but I could see Alan struggling to get Bubbles out of the room, the poor dog seemed scared out of his mind.

The imp had been flung as well, but could only move so far as the edge of the circle. It looked to me and I could see the pity in its eyes as it shook its head, took another handful of raspberries and descended again into the floor. I locked eyes with Alan, he looked absolutely terrified.

I did the only other thing I could think of, I knew it could just be the beginning of a long time of mistakes. I took the shard of amethyst from my pocket, flung it across the room towards the sprite, then also produced the three of wands from my pocket and focused hard on the mental image I had of Juniper. I threw the card to the ground in front of the sprite and gathered up as much air as I could.

“Juniper,” I bellowed, “come to my aid, you are great, greater than this vile vermin sprite.”

My spine threatened to snap as I lurked violently forward, the force of her power coursing through me. She was not kidding about the power difference between her and other creatures. The air shimmered over the tarot card and Juniper appeared, smiling at me.

“I’m glad you came to your senses, I knew I liked you,” her voice seemed less human, more cold and calculating. “Don’t worry, you’re safe now.” I didn’t like how she said “safe,” there was some underlying connotation of things to come, a hint that “now” really meant the foreseeable future.

Juniper turned to the sprite and smiled broadly. The sprite hissed angrily and threw a stream of fire directly at her. The fire bounced off harmlessly, scorching a path through the leaves and narrowly missing my precious bookcases.

“Oh, you really should have left when you had the chance.” Juniper tutted and raised her left hand. She let out a resounding snap of her finger and the sprite let out a cry of agony, the flames floating around the sprite spiraled back into it. With a final, awful gurgling cry, the sprite popped out of existence with a swirl of dark smoke.

“Done,” Juniper said cheerfully, “Now, let’s talk about your debt.”

“I told you,” Alan said with a shake of his head, “never trust a fae.”

She smiled, but not quite as friendly as before, and licked her lips as she looked me over. I was now her plaything, I owed her my life.