The cold air dried us the moment we reached the woods. Unfortunately, our wrinkled robes were still wet enough that Darcy and I collected autumn leaves like they were mosquitoes on a flytrap. Nathan's coat wasn't as sticky, but in exchange, he still had his scarf sticking to his face like a sponge.

A shroud of glamour concealed us from the vengeful mob only a few dozen yards away. Nathan was a tall man. Tall enough to stroke the branches with every step he made. He had no idea how much Darcy and I struggled to keep up with his wide stride to stay under his glamour.

I barely had the energy left to stand. My breath ached and my vision faded as I watched Darcy take a seat on a small tree stump. The small willows around the stump looked so gnarly and sinister that they might have qualified for the Erlking's daughters. With the wind whispering through their leaves, one always had the paranoid feeling of being followed.

"You girls have some terrible stamina," Nathan said.

"This is all your fault!" Darcy said.

"Of course it is," he said. "Everything is always my fault."

"Don't you feel the slightest bit of shame?" Darcy asked. "We could have escaped earlier without your distraction!"

"I know," Nathan said and turned around. "And the old men and women of the Council will punish you, won't they? They'll be angry and there'll be saber-rattling with their enemies."

"Are you enjoying this?" Darcy asked.

Nathan adjusted his glasses. "No. But I don't like closing my eyes before the inevitable. The Veil is not made to last forever. Those silly Cold War will games end and only the strongest will survive. When the time comes, we need to know where we stand. Destiny has it that we'll find each other again. Until then, think wisely about which side you choose. Goodbye."

He walked away.

I can't tell how long it took him to leave since my night vision potion wore off. Instead of blurred cat colors, I saw nothing until Darcy shot her flashlight into my face.

"And this is your fault, too!" she said.

"Mine?"

"Yes." Droplets of tears and sweat dripped down Darcy's chin and her breath fastened. "What did you do? Why did the monster get into our world?"

Her anger surprised me. "I-I was running an experiment," I said.

"Experiment? You did this for an experiment?"

"Yes," I said. "I can show you my results."

"No, thanks! Why don't you blow up your house first to reproduce them?"

"Darcy, I'm not lying. I recorded what happened."

I tried to show her my phone with the demon's aether signature recordings. I tried to tell her I wanted to find out the Erlking's killing methods.

Yet, my fingers froze. No words formed in my open mouth. A rasping voice left my throat when a piercing, choking noose of aether clouded my mind and speech.

"You want to rat me out?" the seductively calm voice of my new familiar asked. "I gave you power over the Veil, protected you from the consequences of your broken oath, and this is your gratitude? Don't be a fool! Look at what happened to Mrs. Turner when she tried telling the police about the book! Of course, if you want to be a killjoy, there's always the possibility that you give me just one more name-"

Shut up!

I gasped for air. The frigid forest air bit my throat like a serpent, only to heat up once it reached my lungs. The noose restraining my throat had loosened. I was allowed to breathe and speak again, aware that the slightest slip guaranteed my perdition. That was contract magic at work – a discipline similar to divination. An entity gave me powers and in exchange, I needed to fulfill the conditions it wanted. Regardless of what I wanted.

"What did you want to tell me?" Darcy asked, her voice colder than the Kelvin scale.

What could I tell her? "I found out more about the attack on my school's basement."

"What exactly?" she asked.

"I can't tell you this."

"Why not?"

I looked at Darcy, her eyes showing few emotions other than a glare of disapproval.

"Promise that you won't go there," Darcy said.

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because people need us. You've seen their despair. They're forming militias!"

"You aren't gonna help them in the slightest," Darcy asked. "Not while you think like Simon."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you don't take this seriously. You think this is some kind of game or movie where you can risk your life and break as many rules as you want. My Mom used to think like you, too. Wanna know what she did? She and Dad had a honeymoon in the Catskill Mountains. It was a fun trip until a storm came. Mom ignored any warnings Dad gave her. Why? Because she had a phone call and that was more important! So, she remained outside and the sluagh came. These Unseelie ghosts broke her tailbone, ripped out her familiar, and traumatized her so much that she couldn't even make healing potions work anymore."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I didn't tell you this to get your pity. I told you this to teach you a lesson. Evil only needs to get you once, while you don't pay attention. You think you're just making a minor slip, but then you fall off a cliff, and this small evil snowballs into something great until it eats you. "

I remembered my conversation with Simon; how useless he felt and how desperately he wanted to help. "Does Simon know?"

"No. He knows about her injury, but not the reason why only Dad got a soulcore to pass on. This secret stays safe with you. Unless you want me to tell your Daddy where you've been."

Her words hit me in the gut and below the waistline at once. "You wouldn't!"

Darcy killed her flashlight. "I would."

In the silent darkness, I couldn't read her. Seconds dragged into minutes during which none of us spoke. Darcy, the same Darcy who told me I couldn't get alone through this world, turned on her heels and walked away.

I didn't follow her. My head felt hotter than a volcano. Maybe I got a cold, maybe I was frustrated about how my lacking social skills burned bridges, who knew? Maybe this could have been avoided had I told her what I planned to do. But life doesn't always give you the time to plan. Sometimes, you gotta react to the curveballs it throws at you and live with the consequences. I was like a hedgehog. I wanted to be close with others like me, but when I did, their sharp spines hurt me as I hurt them.

I sat on the tree stump where Darcy used to sit. Nobody was in earshot and nature was silent. Yet, while my outer world remained quiet, my inner world filled with turbulent emotions I felt from the mob nearby and warring familiars I had bonded to.

"Everything has a silver lining," the new familiar said in my head. "You now have me."

"Hi!" I told her. "Got a name or do you want me to call you Evil Siris?"

Evil Siris cackled. "Good question, good question. How about you give me one more name and then I give you mine?"

"I'll just call you Hella. You know, like Hela, only with two 'L's."

Evil Siris giggled. "Tehehe. Fitting, fitting. I used to serve in Hell after Heaven kicked me out. But Uncle Scratch didn't like me either, so I found you."

"Well, that's quite the CV, congratulations," I said. "With such a fantastic resume, I'm sure the Erlking was glad to become your current master."

"My current master? Him? You are such a naïve and ignorant little sweetheart, child. I like girls like you. So innocent, so feisty, so delicious. You wanted to let me in to learn more about me, but I found that too easy. How about we learn more about each other before we're intimate enough that I can share my warmth and stories about my master with you?"

Gosh, I couldn't listen to her creepy voice anymore.

A white ball formed. In its semi-solid state, the ectoplasm's photon-like particles illuminated the woods and made me see the exhausted cat leaning against the tree stem I sat on. Poor Siris. I understood why he needed sleep.

"That was quite the drama," he said.

"Siris, just what did the Erlking do?" I asked. "How did he; how did that weird fallen devil thing get the Nuckelavee in our world."

"My guess? Conceptual manipulation. The Veil is a set of rules that knows it's violated and acts accordingly. Erlie probably rewrote that rule about monsters not being allowed to enter the real world."

"How? Is he that powerful? Why did he need my name?"

"He didn't do that by himself. He probably bartered with an entity 'outside' of reality that gave him power in exchange for mortal names."

"And that entity is my head demon's master?"

Siris meowed. "Maybe."

"And it's in the same ballpark as Seraphiel?"

"Maybe, maybe not. Think of our Veil breach scale from D to S. D-ranked monsters are small, local threats. C-ranked monsters can endanger towns. B-ranked beasts can level a country, A-ranked threats a whole planet, and when the Bible said Satan would destroy a third of all stars in the universe during the Apocalypse, it told you what an S-ranked threat could do."

"What's your point?"

"My point is, the Veil has many rules, but one rule is key. Magic shouldn't change human history!"

"Everything we do changes history!"

"Exactly! But there's a gradient. If you kill Johnny Randomguy, it won't change history as much as when you kill Bill Clinton. And rumors about the existence of magic don't change history as much as irrefutable proof."

"So, fate plays a role?"

"Yep. And the more exemptions to fate he has, the bigger his letter on the threat scale."

"And what can he do with my last name?"

"He? Nothing. He probably bartered it to your new familiar."

"And will she do anything?"

"She's starting small. Her first bargains won't be harmful. That way, you keep coming back to her and she can get more of your names."

Marissa Alice Louisa Carter. "She needs all four for full control, right?"

"Right. But she already outfoxed your mouse brain. Think of what she made you do!"

The Veil breaches. She made me do magic in front of a witness and Nathan implied I could do this whenever I wanted. If the Blood Covenant retaliated, the Society might pin the blame on me, and I'd be isolated. With nobody on my side, I'd turn to Evil Siris again and give her another name.

I won't have Darcy's help anymore, but Simon wasn't gonna let me down. Normal human or not, he could help me look at our school's basement on Halloween.

I stood up from the stump. Twigs and gravel crushed under my boots as I inhaled the cold air and walked back home. Home. My Dad was supposed to be there. For all my adventures, I still had no certainty where exactly he was!