“Stop, Hastur,” I murmur sleepily. The dog is curled up at the end of my bed, intently pressing its cold nose against the soles of my bare feet.

  Then I remember I don’t have a dog.

  And that I don’t know who (what?) Hastur is.

  And that I can still feel something icy pressed against my heel.

  I lurch up, throw the covers down and yank my legs to my chest. It takes some time before I know for sure that I’m alone, that Wrath isn’t in the bed next to me, that the ticking sound to my right is just Pox sleeping in.

  “There’s something—” I say in something resembling a shriek.

  In a rush of sulfurous air, Wrath appears at the side of my bed, eyes comically wide.

  “Something’s—” I repeat just as shrill as before, but I can’t get more out.

  But there’s nothing at the bottom of my bed. Now that the blankets and duvet have been kicked free, there’s just the sheet. Wrath pulls it back gingerly, like he’s going to scream even harder than I did, but there’s nothing hiding under the sheet either.

  The tension in my best friend’s body releases nearly faster than he appeared. “Oh, thank the broken Hells,” he mutters.

  I tuck my feet under me, and scrutinize the bottom half of the mattress for far longer than I should. I remember something pressed against my heel. Something cold. Extremely cold. I’m validated a moment later when I press my hand to my heel and feel the same cold spot, still there. It’s a drop of ice against my otherwise normal warm skin.

  Wrath mimics me a moment later, resting his clawed hand over the cold spot. His forehead creases when he feels it, and he presses his hand harder around me, warming it exponentially fast.

  “There was something…”

  “Relax, I believe you,” Wrath says, and it’s with all the confidence of a best friend who has been there for a lifetime of odd occurrences and unexplained phenomena. He knows I don’t need to justify myself and he wants me to remember that, too.

  Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes I still feel like that little kid, abandoned by his parents, and trying desperately to make the few and far between adults take me seriously. To believe me no matter how insane the stories sounded. To make Wrath try to speak so they could hear him, but they never, ever could. Even Uncle Doom only humors me about Wrath - he’s never seen or heard from him, but he says he trusts that Wrath is real.

  Even though my feet are now warm and toasty, there’s still the memory of that cold nose pressed against me. After another moment, I start looking around for Pox, but he’s still nestled up in the little bed box I made him, settled on the nightstand where he sleeps every night. When I pull the box to me to check the contents, Pox buzzes sleepily and twists himself into something like a pretzel shape trying to get back to sleep.

  Pox is a Doom Clock, something that I didn’t think was born, let alone started out as a child. A Doom Clock is like a grandfather clock wrapped in old sheets, and it ticks down to… something. Midnight never actually comes, but it always threatens to. Wrath says he’s some kind of apocalypse, but he’s more like a puppy than anything dangerous.

  “I heard you say ‘Hastur’,” Wrath says a moment later, and there’s… something in his voice. A note. Not one I’m used to. “Where did you hear that name?”

  I shrug, trying and failing to push my hair down into some semblance of normalcy. Sometimes when I wake up, my hair defies gravity and possibly also the laws of space and time. I reach down and rub a finger against what I assume is Pox’s back. A gear starts grinding inside the Doom Clock, equivalent of a purr. “Dunno. Maybe it was in my dream?”

  “No,” he says musingly. It’s like he knows that’s not an option. But how? “No, I don’t think that’s it.”

  “Maybe I was dreaming about my credit card. HasturCard, y’know… Never go anywhere without Him.”

  Wrath shakes his head.“That’s an entirely different…” his voice catches suddenly.“I mean, yeah, that’s probably it.”

  “Why?”

  But he won’t tell me. I can feel his eyes on me when I head to the bathroom. Normally when I’m scared, Wrath can’t stop talking. He fills the silence to the brim with nonsense and distractions. But now all I can hear is his silence, and that makes me more worried than I was before.

  ***

  An hour later, we’re in the kitchen cooking breakfast. Meaning I cook the breakfast while Wrath monitors the newly ‘reformed’ coffee maker from hell. He swears it’s not trying to arm nuclear weapons anymore, but I hear something that sounds like Morse code sometimes when I walk past the kitchen, and it stops the moment the coffee maker realizes I’m nearby.

  “You want to tell me what that was about this morning?”

  Wrath looks up from the coffee maker with something like a sunny expression. On a demon that’s particularly odd. “Ooh, look, a vanilla latte! Your favorite.” He pulls the tall mug from under the drip and sets it down in front of me. Sometimes the coffee maker, while it may have been forged in the fires of perdition, adds cream and sugar before it’s done. Not sure where it gets either of those things, but those are always the very best cups.

  They’re also normally the ones it reserves for Wrath.

  Even more suspicious.

  Despite my reservations, I still take a sip from the mug and it’s as perfect as it can be. The Diabolos Kaffe DK-1 is a super high-end coffee ‘experience’ that Wrath purchased off the internet. I’m not technically supposed to even call it a coffee maker. “That’s reductive,” he always says with copious amounts of side eye. It may make a damn good cup of coffee, but it’s still evil incarnate.

  “Wrath…”

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  “Theo…” he says, matching my exasperated pitch perfectly. “Stop dwelling. You know if it was something important, I’d tell you.”

  If it was something important, he’d keep it to himself and never tell me. I know that for a fact. He knew things about my parents that he never shared, and it’s not like I never asked. He’s my best friend, and I can’t imagine life without him, but I keep being reminded of all the things that I don’t know about him.

  It’s something that sits deep inside me, deeper still than the emptiness that sometimes calls out for my attention. Knowing that Wrath is my best friend, that we will be together forever. That’s an immutable fact. It will never change.

  Unlike the rest of the world. The universe.

  The truth.

  But all that being said, there’s a rift between us. I know now that there are things that he keeps to himself, things about me and about my life. The morning’s weirdness is a perfect example of that. I know he thinks he’s protecting me, but I’m not so sure I want to be protected.

  “Sure,” I reply easily. I give him a moment of respite, and then I add, “You know I trust you.”

  Wrath winces.

  The response lands as painfully as I intended it to be, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. I sit and drink my latte in silence, and dwell on the worries about my friendship.

  Luckily, there’s a knock at the front door shortly after, and I head in that direction although I know it can only be one person. No one ever really knocks at Morecroft Manor unless they really, really, want to be there. Wrath has scared off any number of delivery guys over the years. They rarely stop at the house anymore, it’s more like “ease off the gas, chuck the package and accelerate like your life depends on it.”

  Nico doesn’t wait for me to greet him when I open the door, but he stops long enough to give me a smile before he heads back towards the kitchen. “Morning,” he says, oddly cheerful. He pops over from time to time, but this is the first visit in a few days, ever since his grandmother arrived.

  “Hey. I thought you were spending time with your grandmother?”

  He shudders, and then heads towards the coffee in the kitchen. Wrath is, of course, nowhere to be seen.He can’t be seen by most mortals, and that’s something that he takes as a personal point of pride especially after being introduced to Winter.

  In front of the coffee maker is a perfect, fresh cup of coffee, already steaming. I know it wasn’t there when I left the room, and I know Wrath didn’t start the cup for me. I glare down at the machine. Have I mentioned that the coffee maker also loves Nico? It loves everyone in my life except me, I swear.

  “Oh, you were brewing one for yourself?”

  I shake my head. “Go ahead and take that one. I’m still working on my first cup.”

  He does so without question and audibly sighs in relief after the first sip. Then his expression grows more serious. It reminds me of the Nico I first met when he moved in across the street.

  “My grandmother is taking a job at the university. She had a class at her last school that she couldn’t convince anyone to take over so she couldn’t leave until she did.”He looks like he wants to roll his eyes but is too respectful to do so.“She finally convinced another author or a friend or something to step in for the semester.”

  “That’s good, though, right?” I say as Nico slides another cup under the coffee maker and expertly begins turning dials, tamping coffee, performing elaborate ritual gestures. Whatever it takes to make the coffee maker function. Surprisingly, it starts brewing another cup without protest.

  God forbid Nico think the coffee maker doesn’t like me.

  “It is,” he agrees. “I just didn’t realize how much of my time it was going to take up making her comfortable.The Wakefield house isn’t nearly as move-in ready as here.” He gestures around the kitchen.I open my mouth to point out the basement we just recently trekked through.No one would call that move-in ready.But the less said about that the better.

  I feel like Nico’s working up to something but I don’t know what it is. Unless he’s about to ask if his grandmother can move in here, but I don’t think Wrath is going to be too fond of that idea.

  “She doesn’t think I’ve been doing enough to get the house together. So I’m going to have to spend more time fixing it up than I thought. I should still be able to keep up with my classes, but I don’t know if I’ll have much free time otherwise.

  “Oh.” I’d gotten used to Nico popping over for coffee in the mornings. And generally just getting to know him with school and everything.

  “Shouldn’t you get a contractor to do all that anyway? No one’s lived over there for years.”

  He nods.“That’s what I tried when I first got here.It’s so funny. You have a house that’s considered the most haunted place in the entire valley, and no one wants to work there.”

  “Second most haunted,” I correct automatically.

  Nico looks like he wants to argue the point, but he gives up after a moment and continues on.“My grandmother is really focused on getting the conservatory cleaned up.I’m still not sure why.It’s not like we’re going to start hosting garden parties or anything.” He pauses for a moment.“Does Morecroft Manor have a conservatory?”

  That’s not exactly an easy question to answer.“Not usually,” I start.“Well, I mean, I guess that depends on how you define a conservatory.”

  The look Nico gives me seems less than amused.“Don’t be weird.”

  I bristle at that. I’m not intentionally weird. My mystique is that I am unintentionally weird. I can enter a room and the weirdness that enters with me is the silent killer. It sneaks up on you after dark to ask if you would like to trade LootCasket merchandise.

  There’s a sound near the front door that catches my attention, and I bolt out of the kitchen and head for the entryway before the envelopes even hit the ground. The mail has arrived. It takes practically no time at all, a handful of seconds for me to sprint across the house. But the mail slot has retracted back into place, and by the time I throw the front door open, there is nothing.

  Nico, not understanding the urgency, comes running with his coffee mug in hand. “What’s going on? What’s wrong.”

  From the living room, I hear the low and effortless rumble of Wrath’s laughter, though he doesn’t make an appearance. “It’s nothing,” I sigh, the failure seeping through my pores.“Just trying to catch the mailman.”

  “The mailman?”

  I shrug. “Have you seen him? Or her? Or them? The mail gets here, sure, but who delivers it. How are they so fast? Where did they go?” I gesture to the empty front lawn and the lack of a mail truck anywhere.

  He comes up to stand beside me, looking out into the yard and at his house across the street. “Maybe he’s up by Wakefield dropping off my mail,” he says uncertainly.

  I shake my head.“It’ll be there when you get back, I’m pretty sure.But no sign of the mysterious mailman.”Of all the mysteries in Hollow Hills, I don’t know why this one has me by the throat, but it does.Some mysteries I wish I didn’t know about, like the scarecrow in my yard that escapes into town every so often.Annoyed, I look down at my feet and pick up a loose-leaf flyer at the top of the mail stack.“Hmm?”

  It’s a simple sheet of bright orange paper. Come see the dastardly Grandpa Ghastly! Noon to four, only at Hollowmouth Maul. Just a hop, skip, and a scream from downtown Hollow Hills! Emblazoned across the bottom half of the flyer is a black- and-white Xerox image of my favorite late night horror movie host. One of the few people in Hollow Hills I actually admire.

  Grandpa Ghastly hasn’t had a public outing in months. He’s only the best local celebrity in Hollow Hills and I was starting to get worried about him. There’s usually a cemetery opening or a mausoleum raising for him to officiate. Not hearing about his activities has been a bit worrying, but I’ve had a lot of other things on my mind. I feel Nico peer over my shoulder and it makes me flinch. Without thinking I start to push him through the door. He’s bigger and heavier than me, but he doesn’t actually resist.

  “Hey, what?”

  “Sorry, something came up. You’ve gotta go.” He holds up the coffee cup - my coffee cup - but I just shake my head. “Keep it. I’ll talk to you later.” And then in a rush I remember. “Good luck with cleaning up the conservatory. That sounds like so much fun. Look out for the Venus flytraps. My uncle always said that the Wakefields were growing giant ones for traveling circuses!” And then I slam the door in his face.

  It’s not the flyer that has me so excited, though.It’s what is painted across the back of it, in bright crimson.SEA YOU THERE.The words look like they were painstakingly drawn against the back of the flyer by someone who isn’t used to writing.Like a child or a doppelg?nger or a wendigo or something. The grammar alone tells me it’s not from Grandpa Ghastly, he barely even texts without using periods at the ends of his sentences.It’s ominous, creepy, and utterly delightful!

  “Wrath!” I yell.“Get down here.We’re going to the maul.”