Marissa had only seen a corpse before once. It was for a brief moment and she was distracted.

Now, she saw people who had died multiple times. The bouncer died when he became a vampire and once more when he got staked.

That woman might have looked alive, she might have been standing on her feet and walking around, but there was no return from being a ghoul. She was young, about in her twenties – probably some kind of student, and had her whole life ahead of her. Now, Marissa had to kill her.

The woman's neck and her teeth were covered in blood, her eyes were wide open, like a predator's, and her body reeked of death.

Marissa revealed her garlic piece. Energy poured out of her ward to create a psychological barrier that restrained the woman before she lunged forward.

The ghoul was a creature of undeath, much like vampires. She bared her teeth and showed her harpy-like claws, but as long as Marissa's life energy was bigger, she lacked the willpower to break her barrier.

Problem was, this ghoul was pretty strong and its life energy didn't run out as fast as Marissa's. She couldn't hold it off indefinitely unless she was willing to borrow power from Lydia.

"This is futile," Lydia said in her head. "The undead cannot be saved. It is not enough to hold her back, you must kill her."

In the brief moment Marissa's concentration broke, the ghoul pushed her out of the storage room onto the dance floor.

She crashed into a teenage boy in a skull shirt.

A girl who looked like his older sister watched Marissa with a frown. Her frown gave place to a scream of horror as she and the rest of the crowd saw the zombified, salivating woman step out of the storage room. Under normal circumstances, supernatural beings had a cosmic set of rules to obey called the Veil that prevented them from acting in the open. Which was why most people thought zombies existed only in movies. But it became increasingly common for that law to be broken and when it did, it rarely turned out well.

These clubgoers knew what zombies were. And they felt fear. Most of it was directed at the ghoul, but a small amount of it was directed at Marissa. They exchanged frightened looks at their dates and friends to see if any of them had been bitten already.

But the ghoul woman didn't act yet. She was strong. Marissa didn't know the precise figure, the Cunning Folk Academy offered a Guide to Otherworlders this semester, but she was much stronger than a normal human. Ghouls had very little muscle control, particularly when they were fresh, but that wasn't an excuse to lose time. If Marissa didn't act now, people were going to die.

The crowd was running for the exit while the woman grabbed the teenage boy Marissa had bumped into. Before the ghoul could grab his arm and rip him apart, Marissa threw her garlic piece against her head.

The people around him, those who remembered to bring garlic and crucifixes against vampires, realized it worked against ghouls, too, and showed it to the woman.

The ghoul hissed like a rabid, half-starved animal.

The club was being evacuated by bouncers who certainly weren't vampires. They rushed for the streets, evacuating the dance floor, hoping to escape in time. But, contrary to what movies taught people about zombies, ghouls weren't slow. They sometimes walked slowly, but when they wanted to catch someone, there was no running away.

The zombie woman lunged forward and pounced for Bianca and Rose. Marissa expected the worst. She expected they'd be torn apart and turned into undead monstrosities themselves, but that didn't happen.

The two girls ran closer to Josh. Josh, ever the soldier, grabbed the zombie woman's arm and used her momentum to throw her over his shoulder. Ghouls might have had superhuman strength, but their mass was no higher than that of regular humans. He tossed the ghoul against the wall as if she had been anyone else.

"Awesome move!" Isa screamed.

The ghoul stood up.

Marissa picked up the garlic she tossed against her and ran closer. It was foolish of Marissa to try to save her, but she thought that maybe, just maybe, if she shoved that garlic in her mouth, she'd pass out from an anaphylactic shock and some occult expert could find a cure.

"Does garlic even work against zombies?" Bianca asked.

"Why is it sillier than when it works against vampires?" Rose asked. "Both are dead."

The ghoul woman stood up. If Marissa fought her here and now on the evacuated dance floor, there was less of a chance of civilian casualties, regardless of that bouncer gesturing her to get out.

Unfortunately, the ghoul had different plans. She lunged out of the club, broke the bouncer's arms, and lurched onto the streets. Not good. She was gaining awareness. Ghouls were like sleepwalkers when they were freshly sired, but once they woke up, they had the strength and speed of predatory animals.

Marissa wasn't nearly that fast. With Isa and Simon at her heels, she ran as fast as she could through the entrance onto the frozen street in which Darkhallow's Eve was located. Pedestrians formed a circle around a bitten girl in front of a shoe store. They were standing in the snow in their dresses and tights as they hadn't been given enough time to grab their coats. She wondered how long they could stand against the ghoul like that.

Marissa threw her garlic away. The ghoul was currently searching after people who were unarmed and if Marissa disarmed herself, she could divert her attention away from them to her.

She wasn't suicidal though. Isa had called help and help was about to arrive.

A bespectacled, black-haired man dropped from the ceiling. He was the type that, on most days, caught a lot of attention. The leather jacket, the tall height, and his imposing scarf made him hard to overlook, but no one other than Marissa and her friends noticed him.

It was because of his glamour, a mind magic trick the fae were especially good at.

Isa and Simon hid behind him.

He poured a white cloud poured out of his massive wooden staff. The energy he spilled affected the perception of everyone, but his cloud defined a radius of objects which would be affected by the glamour.

Marissa liked to compare glamour to a magician's sleight of hand. If one was paying careful attention and if one knew the tricks magicians used, the illusions failed. But as long as Isa, Simon, and he stood in the cloud, did nothing, and people focused on the ghoul rather than them, they were effectively invisible.

This man was Alex. He was a changeling – a human swapped out by a fairy – and Marissa met him last year after his godmother got involved in trouble. He couldn't enter the nightclub due to all the background checks on monsters they did, so he had to wait outside, but on the plus side, that meant he could bring fun weapons others could not.

He threw Marissa her revolver and an important potion.

It was the potion she always drank to alter her gait and her facial features so that her cloak and her mask made her invisible even to people who knew her and to software. As long as the crowds' attention was on the ghoul rather than on her, the potion had time to work.

The moment the ghoul discovered her, however, and realized she was unarmed, she couldn't hide anymore.

She loaded her revolver. Over the last few months, after she told her father of her monster hunting, he taught her how to use a gun if magic failed. He taught her basic tricks like "don't point a loaded gun in a direction in which you don't want it to fire" and let her shoot clay pigeons.

She shot the ghoul straight in the chest – the region Dad told her to aim at in most cases.

The ghoul, unbothered by the shot, lunged forward and slipped over the ice. Her attack didn't connect as quickly or forcefully as she might have wanted, but it hit hard enough to send Marissa flying backward onto the street.

Marissa pulled her trigger. And she hit the snow.

Her ribs ached. A monster hit her there before and now, she probably broke something. If she only had Josh's reflexes, she might have dodged that attack.

Her shot must have hit a kneecap, seeing how the ghoul woman briefly limped. It was going to heal quickly, even if it gave Marissa a time window to stand up.

The only way to kill a ghoul for good was by going for the head. Unfortunately, that was harder than action movies made it look. The head was a small, moving target and Marissa wasn't John Wick. She had a strong pain breathing, her fingers froze from insufficient insulation, and she could barely point her gun straight.

A dark cloud of magic spilling from Alex's outstretched staff attacked the zombie's mind. His mind magic, particularly his modulation of emotions, was the best he could do at the moment. Firing even a single bullet might have drawn enough attention to break his perception-based cover and expose the less-experienced apprentices under his glamour.

This ghoul woman didn't attack. One of her bracelets was made of iron, the bane of a changeling like Alex. It gave her limited protection from his emotional manipulation which meant that his ward wouldn't last forever which forced Marissa to be quick. She looked almost human when she had her salivating mouth closed.

Damn it, Marissa wasn't a killer. She killed monsters before, but they were trees or ghosts. She had to do it. It was an act of mercy. There was no way to help the undead and if she didn't kill her right now, she'd kill other people.

Before Marissa could shoot, one of the people Alex covered was quicker.

"Ignis!" Isa shouted.

Marissa's fingers slipped her bullet hit the zombie's jaw instead of the brain.

"What are you doing?" Alex yelled.

Isa's incantation materialized Mozilla, her red fox familiar. It wore a glamour of its own that made it invisible to mundanes. And, under normal circumstances, it wasn't allowed to perform visible magic in front of people.

But there was a loophole. Marissa enjoyed immunity to the Veil's rules. If Isa made it look like Marissa had cast the spell, that worked. After all, only Marissa changed the course of history that way, not Isa. They did this before and the myth that the Witch of Summer Hill had fire powers had spread.

Mozilla jumped between Marissa and the zombie. An aether cloud around the fox formed and agitated the air through enhanced kinetic energy. Air molecules rubbed against one another and melted the snow Mozilla was standing on. Thousands of little ectoplasmic sparks formed and floated against the ghoul's body.

Under normal circumstances, fire was a powerful tool against the undead. It was purifying and it brought light and warmth against the deathly cold undead.

There was just a tiny problem here.

Isa only had been a practitioner for roughly half the time Marissa had and a fraction of the time Alex was with almost no real battle experience. She was talented, but she lacked the fine control to make a proper fireball, resulting in all these little ectoplasmic sparks. Which didn't move very far in the cold winter night.

Compounding the problem was the fact that this woman attended Darkhallow's Eve largely clad in leather, which wasn't known to be very flammable, to begin with.

Her hair did catch fire, but all that did was anger the ghoul. A lot.

Isa covered her mouth with her hand as she realized what she had done.

The woman abandoned Marissa. Bianca and Josh had thrown away crosses and all, probably in the bravado that they could attract the ghoul's attention to them.

Before the ghoul could wrestle Josh again, a poison dart hit her in the neck.

Marissa heard wailing sirens and police officers left their cars. Her Dad Robert was among them. He held a dart gun that shot allicin-extracted garlic and he must have fired the dart from his rolled-down window.

He tried his best not to look at his daughter. During her career as a monster hunter, she appeared disguised at crime scenes without permission and fled without identifying herself. It was probably within his line of duty to arrest her.

Yet, his attention was not on her nor even on the woman or the victims.

It was on a figure who swooped down from one of the buildings like an eagle.

Graceful like a dancer, they landed in the middle of a prying crowd. Superficially, this person wasn't too different from Marissa herself. They wore a cloak, too, only it was white rather than black and they were a good bit taller than the young witch.

Alex watched the person with a look of disgust while Robert tried his best not to mimic Alex's expression.

The cloaked person grabbed the ghoul woman by the scalp.

What happened next happened without mercy.

The cloaked person squished the ghoul's head like a grape and lead her decapitated body to fall into the snow.

They tossed Marissa bits of her hair with her skull attached, presumably as a reward for having done her part in the fight.

Then, the person grabbed the woman's corpse and leaped away.

Marissa had seen minor feats of superhuman strength from Otherworlders. She had seen monsters crush bone, withstand punishment that would have killed a human, or run slightly faster and jump slightly higher than humans could.

This was an entirely different league.

When the cloaked person jumped, they tore a crater into the street under the snow and leaped so high that they looked like a shooting star.