Over the last few weeks, I thought about the meaning of true despair. Despair wasn't just fear. It wasn't sadness. It wasn't depression or anxiety either. It was absolute hopelessness. The knowledge, that things never got better.

I had that feeling three times in my life. When I walked through this very park at the tender age of seven, a bunch of meanies stole my necklace, threw it around, and played monkey-in-the-middle with me. The necklace carried sentimental weight. Dad was always overworked and Mom had some secret job she never told me about. So, after she gave me that necklace for my seventh birthday, I couldn't stand seeing it tear apart. I ran away crying and attracted demons in my first moment of true despair.

The second started shortly afterward. When the demons were about to eat my face off, a robed figure arrived and gave them the lightning bolt treatment. This figure, as it turned out, was my mother in disguise. It not only introduced the supernatural world to me, but it also turned what would otherwise have been a moment of despair into hope.

Which made it hit all the harder when I learned that my mother couldn't come home anymore. All because she broke a law I didn't know of a society I didn't know, resulting in the second low of my life. It was a low I never quite recovered from. Mom introduced me to the supernatural and I had to deal with aether streams in my head without knowing how to ward them off. All while dealing with the usual horrors of adolescence and living with a single parent.

The third moment was now. I had lost everything. Siris, my good reputation, the fight against evil, you name it.

My robe didn't attract much attention, given the time of the year, but I had to drop my burner phone to avoid being tracked. Sure, the Wild Hunt didn't use geo-tagging, but maybe the Enlightened won't find me if whatever the Erlking was doing kicked off a war.

No-one caught me so far. It was stupid to walk around alone at night but walks cleared my head. Walks distracted me and kept me awake, but they also tired me. My nocturnality potion ceased working for good. All those nights I spent sleepless, studying to be the hero I could never be, caught up with me in that instant.

I walked into Summer Hill Park. The Hill after which the town was named was here. It was covered by cherry trees that during spring carried the soft scent of blossoms. Even now, when they carried the scent of the looming Wild Hunt round two, the breeze before the storm felt oddly calming.

I wanted to sleep. Badly. Siris, were you?

"I hope you are not giving up already," Evil Siris said. "Our cooperation has only started."

I was a battery that had been emptied and couldn't be recharged. I clutched my rod and I tried to levitate a leaf, but no life energy, no mist, no magic came out of me.

"I am talking to you," Evil Siris responded.

I collapsed into the soft, wet grass. The mud that covered my face felt as soft as a pillow. At least I earned my sleep.

The gentle breeze picked up the pace. It gave me time to acclimatize so that it didn't disturb my sleep.

Useless. Everything I did over the past two months was useless. If the Erlking only wanted to, he could probably use the last name I gave him to kill me right here and now. Or send his Sluagh to do so as was happening right here and now.

Spectral horrors struck out from the silver lines of moonlight that covered the night sky. Ghostly men with wings and antlers instead of heads swooped down from the cloud canopy, their swords pointed in my direction like sabers. Soon, they would kill me, make me theirs, and force me to join their meaningless Hunt for all eternity.

I didn't care.

I didn't believe in destiny. I believed in dumb luck and missed chances. If these beings took me, that was the way things were.

These things refused to come closer.

A woman created an invisible barrier between me and the ghosts. She was angelic-looking with her blonde hair, the old-fashioned Iron Age tunic, and the puffy wings extending out of her back. Yet, the details were off. Maybe it was the pale and corpse-like skin or the crooked, witch-like teeth that made me question her divine nature. She wasn't ugly by any means, but she didn't have the unblemished appearance I'd have expected from an angelic being.

Her expression was far from wise and merciful either. Her slit-like pupils fixated on me while her bare-toothed smile did not belong to an angel, but a devil wearing the face of an angel. It was a smile that radiated pure power. I couldn't measure it, but the gulf in power between me and her was like that between an ant and a galaxy. A galaxy that only remained stable because gravity held it together.

"Look at you," she said, "is this how you want to go out?"

I recognized that voice. That soft-spoken, deep, feminine voice that I had dubbed Evil Siris before. I was baffled to see a humanoid creature like her. I almost imagined her to be some kind of palette-swapped Siris with black fur and a white star spot behind her neck instead of the over way around, but no one said that familiars had to be animals.

The despair I felt evaporated in the kettle of my hot, boiling anger. "This is your fault," I said.

"No. I am the reason you are still alive. I am the reason you prevailed against the Sylph and I am the reason why your Archmage has not executed you yet for breaking the sacred rule against seeking out beings from beyond human comprehension. You are nothing without me."

"Funny. You could say the same about our wizards and any other practitioner in existence. You're just some familiar, get off your high horse!"

"You are right. It is not merely you who is weak. Humans are weak. Aether is not a substance they can expose themselves to without us Otherworlders and Primordials doing the heavy lifting for you. You can be so much more than a human. Give me more of your name and you can become like me."

"If I've got to choose with a gun against my temple, I'd rather become like them," I said and pointed at the Sluagh.

"What a folly. If you refuse my help, I will release all these hunting horrors on you in an instant. Even with the life energy I helped you to build up, you can't ward off so many enemies at once. The Erlking will get you. Cornelius will execute you if he learns about me. Your friends will run away from you in disgust if they see what I made you do to your school. You are alone without me. Why do you not understand this?"

A spiderweb of black lines extended from my angelic familiar. It connected the darkest shadows of our souls and made me feel it when other people thought of me. It even made me see a vision the angelic familiar showed me.

Someone made a YouTube video of me destroying the school. I saw it as if I had a browser open right before my eyes.

A robed, misshapen figure flailed its tentacle-long arms into Summer High's night sky, destroying anything it saw. My tottering, jittering jelly gait and the lack of recognizable facial features under the hood preserved my anonymity.

Nobody was going to ask who this person was. Because this wasn't a person. That thing on those records was a monster bent on senseless destruction. Whether it was due to glamour or poor resolution, nobody saw the Slaugh or the Sylph as I smashed my arms into the school and tore the entire building down.

The video approached a million views. Half of the comments were by the Enlightened's or the Council's bots. They spread disinformation about how the video was supposedly fake, but the other half of the comments, those written by actual people, showed nothing but terror.

"What is this thing? An alien Shapeshifter?"

"I told you, that's dark sorcery at work here. Summer Hill is cursed! Better pray while you can that you will be spared."

"Good Publicity are my middle names," I said, "here, two more names to write in your stupid book, what do I get in exchange?"

Evil Angel – which was how I called Evil Siris now – snickered. I knew why she snickered. She thought she could release the Wild Hunt on me, break the ward that stood between me and certain death at the moment.

She thought wrong.

Because I didn't just feel negative emotions from others. I also felt positive thoughts directed at me, whether directly or indirectly. Someone was forging a connection to me through a divination ritual.

Darcy and Simon stood near the PPE Library and, judging from their signatures, they had Dad and Isa in tow. When they thought about me, some of the

"Is she here?"

"I think she's noticing the mental nudge we gave her."

Sympathetic magic could, besides torture or healing, be used for long-distance communication. This was the basis behind our astral lessons, after all.

Evil Angel's emotion-sensing abilities she gave me combined with the mental nudge I got from Simon and Darcy gave me a rough picture of where they were. They were in the library with my potion equipment having been carried out of my home. Next to them was a table with treacle gingerbread, a glass of orange juice, slices of pizza, a strawberry muffin, as well as a bowl of all my favorite fruits: pineapples, watermelon pieces, and pumpkin.

Friggin' pumpkins. There was this whole storm out there and they went all the way to hell and back to make sure I'd have my favorite foods ready when I went home.

I didn't deserve that. Not after how I destroyed the school.

Yet I got it. And my new familiar didn't like it.

I didn't care. She was my familiar now and I wasn't gonna let Evil Angel break my ward. No matter how much stronger she was than me, she wasn't allowed to influence this world without a host.

Some Otherworlders liked positive emotions, others liked negative emotions. I didn't know who decided the difference – there might have been sympathetic magic involved – but the part of Siris that remained in me liked what I felt more than Evil Angel did.

I stood up from the mud. "You're wrong. I don't need you at all!"

Evil Angel bared her teeth once more. "I am not allowed to take you by force, but nothing forces me to give up either. I have millennia of experience in dealing with rebellious hosts. Sooner or later, you will give in to me."

I pick later, many thanks.

The ward I conjured helped against the ghosts, but not against the rain and the wind the elemental spirits produced. Debris rained against my robe. It reminded me of my battle against Jaclyn, only that these spirits did not hold back with blowing hard objects against me.

A stick hammered against my knee. The ward holding back the monsters lost strength and more ghosts floated from afar into Summer Hill.

I needed to run to the PPE Library to find my friends there. Or I had to die trying.