The black hound lunged toward me.

It was too fast. I couldn't run. I couldn't hide. In the split second it took to close the distance, all I could do was put my arm before my body. It seized my cloak's sleeve with its jaws, sank its dagger-like teeth into my arm, and scratched my skin with its fangs.

My legs buckled from the pain. My knees sank into the muddy ground as the hound fought with the tissue between its teeth.

A heartbeat later, I was lying on my back and the hellhound's large, bear-like claws sat on my stomach. It barked and snapped at my face while all I could do was use my wounded arm to hold it back. There I was. Seconds in and I lay curled up like a fetus, hoping my head was gonna stay on my shoulders.

A tooth scratched my ear. The hound seized my wrist and pulled it away from my head so that my nape was free for another bite.

It was over. I was going to die. I frantically looked at the exit, the boilers, and the bushes before I saw the miracle that saved me.

The frightened kitten leaped from the bush and slammed its retractable claws into the hound's hide. It was too small to do damage, but it distracted the hound long enough to let go of my arm.

My body shook. My first instinct was to grab the wooden bat and put it between the dog and my bloodied sleeve.

The hound chewed on the bat and tore off its barrel as if it were the skull of a prey animal.

And I thought she could just homerun its head off. If I had time to cover the barrel with barbed wire, maybe it'd have injured itself. As it was, chewing on the wood just barely distracted the hound long enough to put its claws off me.

I stood up.

Time to run. Quickly.

My heart pounded like a fist as I dodged another bite, skittered across the vine-strewn mire, and slipped past the purple hedges. The hound chased after me, close enough that I smelled its breath, close enough to bite my swooshing cloak. Why was I wearing this bathrobe again? At least by channeling aether, I could lift my cloak's rim and prevent it from getting caught around my legs or in the monster's jaws.

The boilers stood roughly where the Otherworld ended and where the real world began. Time to test a theory.

I lowered my head, sprinted towards the water pot, and, at the last moment, jumped to the side. Instead of hitting my flesh, the hound hit the water pot. Its jaws broke a pipe while its body froze upon contact with the hull's stainless steel. Gallons of boiling water rinsed over its body and glued the wet mutt to the room's concrete floor. The water washed over the rim of my cloak and flowed even into the Otherworld's sludge. I'll pay for that collateral damage. Or, at least, my hero insurance will.

The hellhound lay in the resulting puddle. Not that I felt pity for it, I was more of a cat person.

It worked. Folklore had it that the Barghest refused to cross rivers. This was based on the whole idea people had that running water was a purifying force. Hence, Medieval inquisitors thought you could throw people in the water and if they floated, they were witches. The Barghest was an omen of death and water was associated with life, so the antipathy was there.

The hound's flesh melted away into black mud. In many myths, the Barghest was a shapeshifter that, no matter what form it took, always retained its glowing red eyes.

Once its excess mass flowed away, the goblin presenting the true form of the hound remained. It was a wizened creature as small as a dwarf that wore no clothing and showed no life signs other than the occasional twitching. Was it still alive? Was it dead or under an anaphylactic shock?

Was it dangerous to check? Even a discipline like transfiguration couldn't ignore thermodynamics, so with its mass gone, it couldn't transform again while I cradled my bitten arm.

Tears welled in my eyes. I couldn't see my wound below my robe and she hoped there wasn't much to see, to begin with. Who knew what poisons or pathogens this thing had?

I heaved a few raspy breaths before turning around to the mire. As I walked from the basement's concrete to the sea of mud, I felt like my head suddenly became warmer and the air around me heavier.

The sweet kitten slowly crept out from the bushes. Its white fur was caked in mire and its black eyes regarded me with cautious apprehension. Thorns stuck out from its arms and shoulders, but it didn't bleed or cry.

"Thanks," I said. "You saved my life."

The cat looked at me. "No problem. Now, let's close this huge portal to the Otherworld pronto!"

Its words felt like a slap in my face. "Y-you can talk!?"

"Yeah. Moving blood, evil demons, and magic; that's totally believable, but a talking cat? No way!"

My arm ached. I hadto give the cat some credit. Its sass temporarily made me forget about myinjury.

"INTRODUCTION TIME," the cat said, shaking thorns out of its fur. "I'm Siris - Spirit of Wisdom, Witchcraft, and Cuteness. I'm an Otherworlder bound to the bloodline of the Carter family and your Mommy passed me on to you."

"C-can all familiars talk?"

"What do you think I'm doing? Sleeping? Okay, I'm using telepathy and I can only talk to you, but I'm clearly talking!"

"And you weren't in danger?"

"You think I'm some kind of slave who serves everyone? I needed to know if you had the basic decency to pluck a kitten from a tree! You never know with this TikTok generation."

"Why did you bring me here then?"

Siris gazed into my eyes. "I can tell you. There's some bad juju here that might not make you see those guys so well. I can clean it up if you look at me."

"You want to become my familiar?"

"I mean, only if you like. You get one of us only, hope I'm good enough. Normally, this sort of stuff happens at an Initiation and all, but we can do it here."

I looked at him. A white line of aether tethered our souls and solidified the bond between familiar and practitioner.

It felt like an underwater dive where my head threatened to implode from the pressure if I didn't stay calm.

I was in the Otherworld. Siris mentioned it before, but now I felt intimatelyconnected to its multiverse nexus. The Otherworld included Asgard, Helheim,Elysium, the Underworld, and any other realm human mythology recorded. Ribbonsof power engulfed me and made me traverse the universes one-by-one before shereturned transformed and enlightened

I saw things I hadn't seen before. A curtain dropped and revealed a world hidden by more than just by the Veil. There used to be glamour, a mind magic trick altering my perception, disguising what was in this room all along.

I saw a black boy - half-a-head taller than me, but limp and livid in his gait. I recognized his round face, his short-cropped hair, his backward-facing baseball cap, his white T-shirt, and his running shoes that didn't match his sagging pants. Only one boy I knew could make this terrible fashion sense look so stylish.

Simon, is that you? Is this why you didn't show up in class today?

He had the same black eyes as Siris did when he pretended to be possessed. The same droplets of blood dripped from his lips.

I hadn't spotted any incorporeal Christian demons so far. Was this necklace he wore whose pendant disappeared under his T-shirt the reason he felt the way he did? Was it possible to talk to him?

"Si-"

Before I could speak to him, a noose of aether coiled around my throat and prevented the words from coming out.

"As your Spirit of Wisdom, Witchcraft, and Cuteness, it is my duty to protect the Veil," Siris said. "If you ride a broomstick on YouTube, show your powers to the military, and tell your muggle friends about magic, I must smother you with kitty litter."

As the glamour broke further, I spotted the culprit behind Simon's possession.

A figure towered at least three heads above us. Its face lacked eyes, ears, or a nose, rendering it featureless from chin to brow. Unlike the hellhound, it couldn't be identified as belonging to a particular mythology. Its lumbering, gaunt body was covered in a coal-black suit of charred bark while its needle-thin arms forked into twig-like fingers grasping for prey.

But it didn't move. It rested in place, its legs fused into one another, reaching into the ground like roots.

It wasn't a physical brawler like the hellhound. Not that it needed to move. Even just by standing, it emanated dark energy that made me feel sick from being near it.

Siris absorbed the life energy that the monster bombarded me with. Was this how possession worked? By pouring one's life energy into someone else and devouring theirs?

Pieces of its aether slipped through Siris' defensive web and calmed me down. Which wasn't as good as it sounded. It bombarded her with emotions meant to sedate me until she ended up like Simon unless I stopped it now.

"What's that?" I whispered.

"A bad guy!" Siris said.

"More precise, maybe?"

"Probably a Cad Goddeu! It's a tree vessel hosting a pagan demon with a D-ranked threat assessment."

Dad once told her about the lettering scale, but he only knew hearsay he had heard from Mom. No idea if that meant I stood a chance or not, but I had seen how well I survived against the hound. That was, not at all before I figured out the water trick. "Any bane?"

"Iron's a good bet!" Siris said. "It stands for civilization and these tree-hugging hippie demons don't like that."

The goblin dog left the puddle, maybe it died – maybe it ran away, but it didn't interest me. I reached for the steel pipe it knocked down. Steel was an iron alloy and, along with the running water, it was surely one of the factors that knocked out the Barghest. If I picked it up, I had the option of either creating a ward or of throwing it and stunning the demon through physical contact.

Unfortunately, the moment I touched it, I dropped the pipe again as if it were electric. My hands shook, my vision dimmed, my body quivered, and my brain felt like a needle stung into it.

"Ah, that's the barghest's venom," Siris said. "When it bit your arm, it scratched your skin with its teeth and got its saliva into your body. Its saliva contains a kind of neurotoxin that's gonna block your brian's dopamine supply and makes you feel worse than puberty."

A white line of life energy left my body like a whiff of breath. It flew towards the helltree, nourished the monster, and helped grow a spike on its thickening torso. My eyelids dropped.

"Whoops, did I forget to mention Cad Goddeus absorb life energy from despairing humans and eventually become huge trees against which not even iron works anymore?" Siris asked.

I think you did, kitty.

The helltree gazed into my soul with its eyeless face and practiced the same mind magic it had used on Simon.

I hate mind magic. It's one of the most insidious disciplines of magic imaginable. Picture this scenario: Someone else pours their life energy - their soul - into yours, consumes you and forces their will on you. I can't even imagine a worse violation of someone's personhood.

As my will cracked under the hound's venom, the demon discovered weaknesses in my psyche and discovered the stimuli it needed to make me feel shaky hands, a racing heart, and a lack of breath.

In other words, anxiety symptoms.

The fact that I just fought against the hound made everything worse. People didn't just walk away from near-death experiences without mental scars. Those experiences left wounds that beings like the helltree instinctively picked up and exploited. It was like I had invisible claws and jaws around my throat.

I wished I could curl up like against the hound and wait for it to give up. It couldn't move. It couldn't harm me until it came too close.

But I couldn't hurt it either unless I got agrip of myself and struck back. It was at this point that I remembered the mantra Mom and my therapist told me.

"Bi-bi-di-ba-bi-di-boo. Bi-bi-di-ba-bi-di-boo. Bi-bi-di-ba-bi-di-boo."

It didn't matter what exactly I said. It was the repetition and the rhythm that distracted me and simultaneously allowed me to focus.

It was the same principle that also made magic spells work.

With my remaining will, I ordered Siris to bring me the steel pipe. I reached behind with all my might, lurched forward, and threw the pipe against the demon's head.

The iron alloy made contact with its wood, breaking the demon's focus.

With my tunnel vision gone, I became more perceptive of the environment around me. The door had slammed open and someone was speaking to me.

"Yeah, let him have it!" Distracted by the mind magic attack, I didn't realize that Isa had come here. She stood in the doorway, holding her cellphone to record everything. "That guy is my friend over there," she pointed at Simon. "I'm sure you and your cat won't let those spookies escape alive, am I right?"

You and your cat. She saw Siris. My Spirit of Wisdom, Witchcraft, and Cuteness didn't disappear in a puff of smoke. Well, he did now, but the plant demon's mind magic attack briefly distracted him from following orders. As long as Isa was aware and watching, I couldn't do anything supernatural for the rest of the fight while the Veil-breaking monsters could. That, and her presence gave me stage fright. It wasn't enough to save the world, now I needed to look good while doing it.

But it was dark, she saw me from behind, I had my cloak, and the aether around her might have affected her lucidity. Time to improvise.