6 by 6 by 6

written by weeaboobs - illustrated by Hausinge and Varigo

CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE

Notes

Thanks to my awesome beta, fab artist, and A++ Tumblr friends who listened to me complain about this for basically the whole time I was writing it.

---

CHAPTER 1

Henrietta's car crept forward, inching its way toward its destination. Inside, Dylan and Evan were crouched down on the backseat floor as Henrietta hunched over the steering wheel with her brow furrowed in concentration. Fetal Libido, a marginally cool band from North Park, provided the soundtrack to their mission.

The song changed, and Dylan scoffed. "This one's so overrated. I mean, last time we saw them people were going crazy, and—"

"God, shut up," said Evan, whacking him halfheartedly on the arm. "Does the phrase 'stealth mission' mean anything to you?"

"No," Dylan whispered back sullenly, even though they'd been planning this for hours. Not for the first time, Henrietta wished for slightly less useless partners in crime.

"Give it a rest," she said, rolling to a halt a few feet away from a cheery-looking two story house. There were lights on inside that lent the place a cheerful glow. Henrietta couldn't even look at it without wanting to throw up. "We're here."

"What now?" Evan whispered.

Henrietta just sat back in her seat, taking care to stay out view through the window. "We wait."

Dylan shifted uncomfortably, sagging against Evan and settling in for a good round of complaining. "This is so lame. My knees hurt. This is so lame."

But his complaints faded to background noise when Henrietta spotted a top-floor window being jimmied open. A dark figure climbed out of it after giving the ground a glance that seemed way too cursory, in her opinion. The figure shimmied across the gutter until it was able to grab onto a trellis overgrown with pretty red-and-white flowers, wrecking a pretty good number of them in the process. Finally, it dropped to the ground and snuck down the gravel driveway, taking care to stay away from the warmly lit windows.

-Varigo-

Executing a highly unnecessary stunt roll, Georgie approached the passenger-seat door to Henrietta's car and climbed in. "Drive, drive, they think I'm in the bathroom or some shit but I made a shitton of noise getting across that drainpipe and I think someone's looking through the window—"

Obligingly, Henrietta floored it. As they peeled out of the nauseatingly picturesque tree-lined cul de sac and back onto the main road, Evan and Dylan popped back up from the floor and slouched back into their respective seats.

Dylan nodded at Georgie. "Did you get it?" he asked, trying and failing not to sound excited.

Georgie unzipped the plain black backpack slung over his shoulder and reached inside, pulling out a small object wrapped carefully in two pink gingham dishtowels. He passed it back to Dylan and Evan, who set it down on the seat between them, and were just about to unwrap it when Henrietta sailed over a speedbump.

"Shit, Hen," Dylan said reproachfully.

"Cut me some slack, I haven't had a smoke in like four hours."

"Whatever," said Evan as they carefully unwrapped the object. Henrietta kept a close eye on it in the rear view mirror. This was arguably a lot more important than any oncoming vehicles. The last layer of violently pink checkered fabric fell away, and the object of Georgie's theft was finally revealed—a cat skull in a glass case. It was fine-boned and delicate looking, old enough for the bone to have crumbled in places, leaving tiny holes and hairline cracks in the dome of the skull.

Dylan let out a low whistle. Evan studied it intently.

"It was hard as fuck to steal," Georgie bragged, reclining the front seat back and digging in his pocket for a cigarette. "They had it in this display case, right, in the living room where anyone could see me."

"Impressive," Henrietta remarked, managing to keep most of the sarcasm out of her tone.

Georgie just nodded in a manner that indicated he totally knew it. A second later he leaned across the console and gallantly held out his cigarette for her to get a drag while she drove, however, so she couldn't hold it against him too much.

Evan and Dylan passed the skull back and forth in the backseat, taking turns cradling it in their hands and studying the delicacy of the bones. Henrietta wanted to look at it too, but she knew there would be plenty of time for that later on.

"This is exactly what we needed," Dylan marveled, finally putting the skull down and beginning the arduous process of wrapping it up again. "It's kind of weird that your conformist aunt just had one right there on display, right?"

Henrietta sped past a stretch of road that was empty save for an abandoned liquor store, considering. She'd been working on a new song when she'd gotten a call from Georgie, who'd taken refuge in the bathroom of his Aunt Elle's house during one of their annual family reunion dinners. She had a cat's skull on display in her china cabinet, sticker of authenticity and all. Normally, that wouldn't be anything to freak out over, but this time it was different.

Just a few days ago, during one of their periodic online dabblings in the occult, they'd come across instructions for some kind of repelling ritual. The website had seemed innocuous enough, boasting the usual walls of white text on a dark background with a badly photoshopped banner presiding over it all. The instructions for the ritual, however, had definitely been different than the Wiccan or Druidic stuff they usually looked at. If done properly, the ritual would apparently make every unwelcome person in their immediate vicinity want nothing to do with them. The black clothes and crucifixes took care of all but the most adventurous, but they'd agreed that reinforcing the sentiment with weird pseudo-voodoo was always a good way to go.

At least, it had seemed like one until they checked out the list of materials, which included a whole bunch of shit that was either so creepy or so arcane that they had to put the idea out of their minds for the time being.

Except, starting the next day, they'd been stumbling across everything they needed. At first it was only little things, like the right kind of candle or a bundle of sage in the spice rack, and Henrietta had attributed it to the same thing that made people suddenly hear a new word all over the place once they learned it. Once Georgie had called from his aunt's house, though, she began to wonder. Maybe they were meant to do this after all.

Georgie shrugged. "I saw an opportunity, whatever. We still need that old fucking coin or whatever it was; how are we gonna get that?"

"Right," Evan agreed. "Let's try not to be total bonerjockeys about this, yeah? That's how we ended up in a cult."

Henrietta rolled her eyes at the mention of the cult. It definitely hadn't been one of their finest moments. But bygones were bygones, and as she pulled up in the driveway of Dylan's house, she felt something almost akin to optimism about the ritual. If by some miracle it actually worked, they wouldn't have to deal with any more jackasses for the rest of high school. As far as she could tell, it would even work on the teachers. Total bliss.

Dylan climbed out of the car, giving Evan a sideways kind of look. Evan's eyes darted towards him and then resolutely forward. "Bye, or whatever."

Henrietta fought the urge to roll her eyes. Georgie didn't even bother.

They rode in relative silence the rest of the way to Evan's house, and then Georgie's, each lost in their own thoughts.

"Tomorrow, right?" Henrietta asked Georgie as he got ready to hop out of the car, cat skull once again shoved deep into his backpack. He had been charged with taking care of it until they were able to set up everything.

"Bright and early," he said sardonically, offering her another puff of his cigarette. She smirked and watched him go, catching herself making sure that he got safely all the way to the door before leaving. Probably a bad idea. She knew that Georgie hated to be babied, but he was the youngest, and he'd just jumped out a window to help them with a questionable ritual. Really, she couldn't help it. It had always been sort of a mystery to her how Evan and Dylan managed to careen through their lives so carelessly, especially now that they were weird awkward boyfriends, or whatever was happening with that.

On the short drive back to her house, Henrietta kept one eye on the windshield and the other on the radio, waiting for the part in the CD where it started skipping so badly that she always had to fast-forward manually.

Just as she was about to turn into her own block, she noticed something out of the corner of her eye, glittering in the dirt by the side of the road. Normally she'd just assume that it was a piece of litter catching a streetlight or something, but what with everything that had been going on recently, she found herself stopping off by the side of the road and getting out of her car. She walked over to where she'd seen the object sparkling and searched the ground with the aid of her headlights, and it only took a few seconds for her to find it again.

It was a piece of gold, severely tarnished but still recognizable as a coin. She didn't even have to rub off the dirt to read the year, because she already knew that it would be from 1900. Just like the ritual required.

Henrietta stood there for a few moments, gazing at the placid bust on the front of it and running her finger over the ridges of the stars. Eventually, she pocketed the coin and climbed back into her car, barely noticing the cold. That was definitely enough to convince her.

Tomorrow night, they would go for it.

-Varigo-

CHAPTER 2

By the time the next evening fell and the others were supposed to start arriving, even though there was roughly a 98% chance that they'd resorted to a life of crime for no reason at all, Henrietta couldn't help feeling somewhat anxious. Looking out the window at the night sky strewn with stars, she heard Dylan let himself in. He came up the stairs, ignoring Bradley's indignant comment from where he was doubtlessly lying around in the living room and playing stupid video games.

She met him at the door, and thankfully he looked just as nervous as she did.

"Ready?" she asked.

He just nodded wordlessly and dumped the contents of his backpack on the floor, busying himself with lighting all the candles and arranging them in an ovular shape like the website had said.

Henrietta had lit the sage and was waving it around the room by the time Georgie and Evan showed up, both doing at least a marginally better job at being calm. Georgie wrinkled his nose as he reached into the pocket of his coat for the carefully-wrapped skull, staring accusingly at the smoldering bundle of herbs in Henrietta's hand.

"Shut up," she said immediately, going over to a corner that looked a little bit less hazy with smoke than the others and waving it around. "Help us get things ready."

Georgie started to carefully arrange the items in a small pile at the center of their makeshift altar, like a sacrifice.

Evan just stood around looking skeptical, but he did that most of the time anyway, so it wasn't too big of a deal.

"Okay," said Henrietta, once everything looked as close the the website as it was going to get. "Dylan, you stand to the east. Evan's at the south, Georgie's at the west."

They moved to their respective positions, and Henrietta took her own place at the north. She wished she'd thought to write the incantation part down on a yellowed scroll of parchment or something else equally fitting, because holding up her laptop to read from definitely wasn't the most dramatic way to do things. But there was no helping it now, and so she lowered her eyes and began to read.

For a few lines, the words were unfamiliar on her tongue and she almost just wanted to stop and laugh at herself. Once she got past the first paragraph, though, the words suddenly became almost effortless to pronounce, even though they were in a different language and she still had no idea what she was actually saying.

As the incantation reached its end, the candles around them guttered and died.

"Focus your energy," said Henrietta, remembering a footnote at the end of the directions. "Try to call it up from the earth, or some shit like that."

She shut her eyes and concentrated, and it wasn't long before she almost thought she could feel it happening, feel the energy rising—but just as it reached its peak, the feeling died abruptly and was replaced by a profound sense of dread, settling deep in her stomach. Looking around at the expressions of the others, she could see that they were experiencing something similar.

"Is that it?" Evan finally ventured to ask, looking nauseous.

Henrietta shrugged. "I guess." She was just about to leave her northern position when a noise from Georgie stopped her.

He whipped his head around to stare at the elaborate chalk sigil they'd copied onto the carpet, pointing out a line through the chalk that hadn't been there before. "What's that?" he asked, sounding nervous.

Henrietta craned her neck to see. "Don't know," she shrugged. "Probably nothing," she said, shrugging. For a second there she thought it might have worked, but if everyone went around successfully completing rituals they found on the internet then there would probably be a lot more supernatural things going on in the world.

"No," Georgie insisted, "That definitely wasn't there before."

He had Dylan looking nervous now, too, and Evan rolled his eyes. "You guys are such pussies."

Dylan huffed, but said nothing more. Fighting down the growing apprehension she was feeling, Henrietta got to her feet in order to start cleaning up the mess they'd made before the wax started to drip.

"C'mon, help—"

Before she could say anything else, there was a fantastically loud bang, a searing flash of light, and she was thrown to the floor. "Fuck!" Dylan shouted from somewhere next to her. As her eyes struggled to readjust to the room's dim lighting, Henrietta could have sworn that she saw a mass of dim, twisting shapes emerge from the center of the sigil. Dylan, Evan, and Georgie seemed to fall away as she watched them, frantically attempting to force herself to focus on them. They were writhing and dancing around each other like dark flames, but the occasional glimpse of a spidery limb made them seem much more obvious.

Georgie sat up, rubbing his head where it had collided with her wooden desk. She glanced over at him instinctively, and when she looked back at where they had been, they were gone. Finally able to see properly again, she searched the sigil for a breach only to find that it was as whole as it had been when they made it. All of the candles were snuffed out, and in fact looked as though they had never been burnt in the first place.

Their eyes found each other's, and Evan said what everyone was thinking. "What the shit just happened?"

"Dunno," said Dylan, squinting at the place the ghosts had been.

Henrietta turned to him. "Did you see them?" She wasn't quite sure if she wanted him to say yes or no.

"See what?"

"The gigantic throbbing mass of evil energy that was just in my bedroom, Dylan, what else?"

He paused for a moment, eyes widening. "Shit! I thought I imagined them."

"I saw, too," Georgie volunteered. "Kind of out of the corner of my eye, but they were there."

Evan folded his arms. "You guys are crazy. I didn't see anything."

"Nope," said Dylan immediately. "Overruled. We all saw it, we're not crazy."

"You were facing away when it happened," Henrietta reasoned. "By the bed."

"They were totally there," Georgie added simply.

Evan searched all of their faces for a moment before sighing and giving in, letting his arms fall to his sides.

"Alright," he said. "So what the fuck were they?"

"Dunno," Henrietta mused, bending over to pick up all the candles and relight some of her familiar ones. Not even a demon summoning or whatever the fuck had just happened would make her go back to fluorescent bulbs. "But I get the feeling it sure as hell wasn't what we wanted to happen."

"I knew this was shady," said Dylan, sitting shakily on the bed. "I totally told you guys. I said we should just practice and forget about it, I said—"

Evan sat down next to him and silenced him by covering his hand with his. Georgie mimed puking, but it at least shut Dylan up for a moment. Henrietta tried to think rationally, but it was kind of difficult when all she could think of was a twisting mass of black and gnarled faces rising from her carpet.

"Alright," she said finally. "We need to—"

Before she could finish however, Bradley flung open the door to her room, panting. The video game controller was still in his hand. Henrietta hurried up to the door frame to block his vision of the room.

"What the fuck happened up here?" he asked, craning his neck around her. "What's all this stuff? Is that a cat skull?"

-Varigo-

"No, Bradley," Henrietta snapped. "It was nothing, we're just hanging out. Now get out of my room."

Bradley looked at her incredulously. "Bullshit, it was nothing! I thought you guys were launching nuclear missiles at Stan's house, or something!"

"Ha," Evan muttered darkly. "I wish."

"So not the time," said Dylan, giving him a look.

To everyone's surprise, Georgie spoke up next. "Maybe we should tell him."

Henrietta shot him a quizzical look.

"I mean, he is a creepy alien or whatever. Maybe he knows something about shit like this."

Henrietta snorted. "Not hardly. He's way too uncool to be into the occult."

"Hey!" Bradley said indignantly. "I'm right here, you know."

Evan glared at him. "Your point being?"

"I totally know about the occult," Bradley said defensively. "How do you think that whole Cthulhu thing worked? I hardly expect you guys to have pulled something like that off, though."

"Yeah, well you expected wrong," said Henrietta indignantly. "We were trying to do a repelling spell, and then I guess we messed up something, and there was this huge bang, and—"

Bradley rolled his eyes. "Just let me see."

Henrietta stood aside reluctantly, allowing him into her room.

He walked into the room and surveyed it wordlessly, circling the scene several times. When he spoke next, all the mockery was gone from his voice. "This could be really dangerous. What happened after you finished?"

"There was this big flash of light," said Henrietta. "And we thought we saw, well. A black cloud, I guess, but all twisted around itself, with all these spindly arms and legs coming out."

Dylan cast a longing look at the notebook lying on Henrietta's desk, clearly aching to write something down about what had just happened. Henrietta had entertained the thought herself, admittedly, but again, so not the time.

Meanwhile, Bradley looked at the four of them with abject horror. "Oh, my God. I don't know how the hell you managed to do it, but you've summoned a host of malevolent spirits."

Evan scoffed. "Yeah, right. It wasn't anything. Trick of the light, maybe."

"It was definitely something," Bradley said sharply. "I can't believe this is happening."

"Can't you go all Mintberry Crunch on them and beat them with the powers of fagginess, or something?" Dylan asked. Henrietta could hear the anxiety in his voice. It matched her own, roiling in the pit of her stomach. This was definitely more than they had bargained for.

"Of course," said Bradley, puffing out his chest and putting his hands on his hips in a way that he probably thought looked heroic and not like basically the lamest thing ever. "Piece of cake."

"Awesome," said Georgie. "We'll just let you get on that, then."

But Bradley just shook his head.

"Oh my God," said Henrietta. "Is this really the time to pull the whole pissy younger brother thing, because I don't think—"

"It's not that!" said Bradley, looking offended. "Jesus. Mintberry Crunch never jokes about justice!"

"Then what the fuck is it?" Evan asked impatiently.

"My hands are tied," said Bradley. "All four of you participated in the ritual, right?"

They all nodded.

"Then you're the only ones who can undo it. You're going to have to send them all back down yourselves."

The four of them considered this for a moment. Finally, Georgie spoke up. "What if we just don't?"

Evan nodded, Dylan looked considering, and Henrietta bit her lip in thought. It really was kind of an appealing notion. They could probably die or get grounded or something if they actually tried to do something about this. The spirits were gone, after all, probably out to wreak havoc on tons of conformists, and it was a lot easier not thinking about them when they weren't writhing in an ectoplasmic mass on her carpet.

It just seemed like way too much effort in the long run to try and banish them or kill them or whatever, when all they'd really be doing would be saving the lives of a bunch of lame assholes who could probably benefit from a hospital trip or two. Bradley looked from face to face, aghast. "Oh my God," he said. "Are you guys kidding?"

Georgie shrugged. "It makes sense, right?"

Evan, Dylan, and Henrietta nodded.

"Yeah, we're fine with this plan," said Dylan.

"I can't believe this is happening. Innocent people's lives are in danger."

Henrietta checked her nails. "Innocent people are lame."

Bradley threw his hands in the air. "There has to be a way around this. I gotta call Mysterion." With that, he turned on his heel and slammed out of the room, muttering to himself.

"Tell McCormick I said whaddup," Georgie called after his retreating back, which was disturbing in and of itself, but not something Henrietta felt the need to dwell on at the moment.

The four of them sat in silence for a little while longer, wondering where to go from there. With every minute that they weren't being attacked by swooping, shadowy ghosts, their plan seemed more and more solid.

Finally, Dylan broke the silence. "Wanna go practice a little more?"

Henrietta shrugged. "My parents won't be home for a while."

Evan and Georgie nodded in agreement, and the four of them trooped downstairs to the garage. As they passed the kitchen, snatches of Bradley's agitated phone conversation made its way to their ears.

"—Totally didn't even care, I can't believe we're even related. Hey, how do you think malevolent spirits feel about the refreshing crunch of mint and berries?"

Once in the garage setting up their equipment, Henrietta put the incident out of her mind. It was freezing cold, but they all managed to work up a sweat after a few plays through their most recent set, a pretty good one thought up by Georgie. They'd been playing a lot more shows lately, and Henrietta felt like they were slowly but surely making the switch from unintelligible clamoring noise to genuinely terrible music, which was definitely a step up.

"We're the Manic Episodes," Evan growled into his shitty mic. "And this one's called Minuet in Fuck You."

~

The next morning, Henrietta woke up groggily. Evan, Dylan, and Georgie had ended up sleeping over. They'd more or less stopped doing that once Georgie hit puberty, because Henrietta didn't much like to start off her day in the same room as three sets of morning wood, but last night's events had thrown them all for a loop.

Everyone else was still sleeping; Georgie had sprawled himself out across the foot of her bed, still small enough to fit comfortably. Evan and Dylan were on the floor, more or less on top of each other amidst an impressively tangled nest of sheets and comforters.

They looked sort of peaceful, really. Henrietta allowed herself a moment to regard them with something like fondness but less gross, and then headed downstairs to make some coffee. Pouring the beans into their compartment, she noticed the microwave clock showed it was only nine in the morning. Her parents were both at work by now, and normally her and Bradley would be asleep until late into the afternoon. This ghost thing must have really screwed with her subconscious, to get her up this early.

As the coffee brewed, she searched for everyone's favorite mugs; Dylan's, with an ironic picture of a weeping Jesus on it, Evan's plain black one, Georgie's, that read "#1 Grandpa," and hers, a flea market find emblazoned with a drawing of a black widow. But as she was reaching up to get the her own, it slipped out of her hands with a crash and shattered on the floor.

Henrietta stared down at it, attempting to fight down the initial rush of fear. It was just a coincidence, she hadn't been concentrating hard enough, anything except for the one solution that her mind really did want to jump to.

It took a few seconds of staring silently at the mess of broken ceramic shards before she was able to shake herself out of her reverie and get the broom out of the pantry, picking up the big pieces and sweeping up the rest of it. As the coffee finished brewing, she picked out the stupid bright orange Garfield mug her brother always used and poured herself a cup, trying not to think about the tremble in her hands.

A few minutes later, Georgie padded downstairs, still wearing the same clothes as yesterday, makeup smeared and hair all scruffy. "You break something?"

She just nodded, gesturing over to the coffeepot and three mugs lined up on the counter. He shuffled over to pick his up without further comment, filling it up three-fourths of the way with coffee and then choking it with generous splashes of milk and sugar.

He moved to sit in the chair across from hers, taking a sip of the coffee even though it was still probably scalding. He seemed to wake up a little bit afterward, surveying the tiny pieces of mug on the floor that Henrietta hadn't managed to get to.

"You think it was," he said, pausing to slurp down another sip, "you know?"

Henrietta blew on her own black coffee and shrugged, glad that she wasn't the one to have to bring it up. She'd thought it would seem insane to assume that the reason behind her dropping a mug on the floor was due to a bunch of evil ghosts, but apparently everyone else was just as on edge as she was. She shrugged. "I dunno. I thought maybe, but. It didn't seem like anyone was knocking it out of my hands, or anything."

Georgie nodded, looking considering.

"Evan and Dylan up yet?" she asked, mostly just to change the subject.

Georgie shook his head. "Still playing cuddle party or whatever up there. I left a post-it on Dylan's forehead telling them to get a room that isn't yours, but it's not like they'll care."

-Varigo-

Henrietta had to snicker. Their weird quasi-boyfriends thing was kind of amusing to watch, but it did seem like it was getting out of hand occasionally. Taking another sip of her coffee and picking her way over to the couch in front of the TV, she dug out the remote and switched it to the news channel. She never watched the news unless Georgie was around to heckle all of the anchors' weird hairdos and all the stupid things they chose to report on. It seemed like it would be a good way to ease them all back into normalcy, anyway.

"I would like to personally congratulate the person who does his hair," Georgie said, squinting at the TV. "That right there is an abomination of science."

Henrietta snickered, but a minute later she too was squinting at the screen. The anchor had just shown a picture of Fetal Libido. It was unmistakable; the same one that was on the tape the singer had given her, the three of them posturing moodily next to a Dumpster. She shushed Georgie and leaned forward to listen, wondering what in the hell a band like Fetal Libido was doing on the local news.

"Members of local band Fetal Libido were assaulted last night while playing a show," the anchor said in her weird news-voice. "All three members were hospitalized. Witness descriptions of the assailant varied wildly, and police are still attempting to determine what exactly happened at the scene of the crime. Now, Tom is standing by in the studio with Liam Darcy, here to tell us a little bit about his prizewinning crocheted potholders—"

Henrietta paused the TV and looked over at Georgie, seeing her own shocked expression reflected in his face.

"You don't think—" she started, even though they were both obviously thinking it.

"It could just be a coincidence," he reasoned, sounding unconvinced. Henrietta nodded uneasily, sipping her coffee and watching Liam Darcy display his potholders without so much as a single remark. They watched TV in silence for a little while longer. Henrietta's mind was racing. Just like with the mug, she couldn't work out whether or not the entire thing was just going on in her head, or if whatever they'd pulled off last night had something to do.

Just as Henrietta was about to go back upstairs and wake them up, Dylan and Evan came shambling down the stairs. They both headed straight for their coffee mugs without so much as a word to anyone, coming over to flop down on the couch in tandem.

"Look what just came up on the news," Georgie said, making a grab for the remote.

Evan groaned. "I hate the news."

"Who watches the news?" Dylan agreed, snatching it out of Georgie's reach. "Who even watches TV," he mumbled to himself, pulling up the guide and idly channel-surfing.

Before he could change it, however, Henrietta nabbed the remote back from him.

"Seriously," she said, rewinding back to the anchor's report.

As the picture of Fetal Libido came up onscreen, Dylan's eyebrows raised above his coffee mug. "Is that—"

"Yeah," said Henrietta. Evan leaned forward to hear the rest of the story, eyes narrowed. Watching, the four of them sat in silence for a few seconds, considering.

"Maybe we should go see them and ask," Georgie finally said.

Dylan looked considering, but Evan just shook his head.

"Nah," he said. "We're just being paranoid. Give it a couple days, it'll turn out that some crazy hobo attacked them or something."

Georgie shot him an annoyed look. "You fucker, you're just saying that because you didn't see—"

"No," Henrietta interrupted. "We should wait. It won't hurt to wait."

Georgie scowled, but didn't argue further. Dylan just shrugged, and no one objected when he turned off the TV.

The rest of the weekend was more or less uneventful. Nothing else even remotely questionable happened, and the four of them were able to squeeze another practice in on Sunday night.

Monday morning, Henrietta pulled up in front of Dylan's house. He came outside a few seconds later, slinging his backpack over his shoulder, purple Creepers crunching through the snow. He climbed into the backseat next to Evan, grumbling incoherently about the cold.

She pulled away and headed for school. No one said anything about the events of the weekend, but no one ever said much of anything in the morning. Henrietta played Fetal Libido's tape into the silence, as a tribute to their fallen comrades.

She'd gotten there early enough to find a pretty good spot, and the four of them huddled around the flagpole for a pre-class smoke. Just after the first bell rang, Georgie's Canadian boyfriend Ike came hurrying up to them, nose bright red behind his scarf.

"Hey," he said, pushing his glasses further up his nose and coughing pointedly at all the secondhand smoke. The four of them gave a collective eye roll, but stopped their puffing for the time being.

"Sup," said Georgie, trying to sound cool. It would never not be hilarious to Henrietta that he did that, but she knew by this point not to show it.

"Not much," said Ike, in a voice that suggested to Henrietta that he found it just as hilarious as she did. "I'm getting ready to look at this abandoned theater next week, it should be interesting. You?"

"Some pretty crazy shit," said Georgie truthfully. "I'll tell you later, alright?"

"It's sort of a long story," Dylan added. Evan nodded his assent.

Ike looked at them each in turn, skeptical. "Did you have another bad trip, or something? Georgie, I've told you a million times, research states—"

"No," said Georgie, regarding Ike in a way that was sort of scarily affectionate. "It wasn't a bad trip. Get to class, I don't want to mess up your perfect gold star attendance or whatever."

Ike rolled his eyes, giving Georgie a quick kiss on the cheek before he walked away.

-Varigo-

"Don't say anything," Georgie ordered immediately, staring straight ahead with an impressive poker-face. "Don't say anything don't say anything don't—"

"How adorable," Evan snickered, and then winced as Georgie socked him hard on the arm.

~

That afternoon, Henrietta was the last to arrive at lunch, due to hold-ups from her dried-up old Nazi of a math teacher. As she approached their spot, she noticed that the three of them looked thoroughly unnerved. Heart sinking, she wondered what could have happened now.

"What's up?" she asked, dropping her stuff on the floor and then sitting down next to Evan.

Georgie turned to her. "Heidi Turner's cousin is in the hospital, too. Same deal as Fetal Libido."

Henrietta took a moment to process the information, shocked. Heidi Turner's cousin played in a reasonably well-known punk band, and was pretty much the only success story to come out of South Park ever, as far as good music went. It was hard to imagine that it was a coincidence, with all that had happened.

It was Dylan who gave voice to her concerns. "We gotta do something," he said anxiously, picking at a hole in his jeans. "These ghosts or what the fuck ever aren't just scaring all the lame kids at our school, they're going after people who are actually hardcore."

"It could still just be a coincidence," Evan offered weakly, but Dylan leveled him with a glare, and he caved almost immediately.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. So what do we do now?"

What they did now, as it turned out, was to finish out the school day and then go back to their respective houses, because Evan's mom had been threatening to ground him if he didn't come home for dinner at least one night a week.

CHAPTER 3

The next time they saw each other was Wednesday, when Henrietta came by to pick them all up for school. Instead of driving to Park County High, however, she pulled an abrupt U-turn and sped in the direction of her house, holding the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip. Well, whiter.

"What's up?" Dylan asked, coming out of his morning daze for long enough to realize that they were headed in the entirely wrong direction.

"There's no time for school," Henrietta answered tersely. "Not anymore. Bradley's been listening to police scanners again, and he told me some kind of riot broke out at a Lemuria show in Denver. This thing is spreading."

She drove in silence for a moment, allowing the others to process this new development before adding, "Also there's a math test today."

Georgie sighed as if this whole thing was nothing more than a minor annoyance. "Man, now the attendance assholes are gonna call my house. They always call my goddamn house."

"Bigger things to worry about," Dylan gritted out. He looked thoroughly panicked by the whole situation. "How do we kill them? Can we kill them? How do we even know where they are?"

"Bradley's working on something," Henrietta answered, pulling into her driveway. She kept talking as she slammed the car door and led everyone into her house and upstairs. "He can't actually do it for us, but all his superhero bullshit will definitely come in handy."

Evan gave an incoherent grunt, his first noise of the morning, and flopped down face first on Henrietta's bed. "It's way too early in the morning for this," he pointed out rightly. "Also, there's no way we're going to be able to kill a bunch of ghosts. We can't even run the mile in PE."

"Protecting the nonconformists of the tri-state area is so not comparable to PE," said Henrietta, lighting a cigarette. "We'll be fine." Holding it carelessly between two fingers, she started digging around in the general clutter of jewel cases and dirty clothes that littered her bedroom floor until she found what she was looking for; a device roughly the size and shape of a TV remote, with multicolored blinking lights at the end of it.

"Oh my God," said Evan, sitting up to look at it. "That's hilarious."

Henrietta glared at him, brandishing the thing in her non-cigarette hand. "It's an EMF reader," she said. "It tells you when there's ghosts around. And right now it's going crazy."

-Varigo-

Even Dylan looked somewhat dubious. "So we're just gonna go around the whole state making ghost-sweeps?"

"Of course not," said Henrietta, rolling her eyes. "Bradley says he has some kind of radar thing going, and he hooked it up to a computer, so all the motherfuckers within a hundred-mile radius will show up. He showed it to me last night, it actually works."

"How many are there?" Georgie demanded.

"Six," Henrietta answered, rolling her eyes. "It's almost too much, right? I looked up the address of the closest one, it's somewhere we've played before."

Evan raised his eyebrows. "But pretty much the only people we play to are faggy vampire kids. They're all totally conformist."

"That's what I thought at first," said Henrietta, "but then I remembered which gig it was, and this was the kid who had that sister who was into Bauhaus."

Georgie thought for a second, and then nodded. "We probably have their phone number somewhere. We'll just call 'em up, ask to play another show at their house, and do some sneaky exorcising. Or whatever we have to do. Piece of cake."

"Maybe not," said Henrietta grimly. "I mean, we had to do that convoluted ritual to call them up here in the first place, right? Maybe we have to do something like that again to send them back."

"I'm sick of rituals," Georgie sighed. "You'd think we learned nothing at all from Cthulhu."

"This is different," Dylan reasoned, even though it really wasn't. "Why don't we just Google it?"

Googling, however, proved to be largely unsuccessful. Every website had a different story to tell: the only main points that at least a good number of them seemed to agree on was that the spirits fed off of or were repelled by different types of energy in turn, and that as long as you weren't ascribed to a certain faith, whatever you believed would work the best would probably be the best thing to use in order to banish them.

"So the energy part of those instructions was the only part that wasn't bullshit," Evan muttered, eyes narrowed as he scrolled through posts on a forum.

"We might as well bring everything, just in case," Henrietta said, absently reading over his shoulder for any information they might not have had already. Proving unsuccessful, she stretched her arms out and sighed. "I'll pack a bag."

CHAPTER 4

Henrietta's mom's boyfriend's van pull into the driveway of the faggy vampire kid's humble suburban abode just as the sun set.

Twilight pushed at the horizon, making everything seem more ominous than it already was as Evan hopped out of the backseat and headed around back to help Georgie with his drumset. Dylan was back there too, lugging a bag full of ritual supplies along with his bass. He and Evan exchanged uneasy looks, but before they could part to start lugging all their stuff to the faggy vampire kid's basement, Evan gave Dylan a bracing pat on the shoulder, in spite of the dread pooling in the pit of this stomach. They were totally supposed to be done with pagan rituals.

Then Dylan surprised him by surging up on tiptoes and kissing him quickly on the mouth.

"Everything'll be fine," he said, with an almost-smile.

Evan felt better in spite of himself. As he lugged a hi-hat towards the front door, he forced himself to run through the lyrics of the first couple songs of their set. He couldn't go into a show too happily, it would ruin the mood. And Henrietta's poetry definitely never made anyone happy, if she could help it. Speaking of, Henrietta nudged him as she walked past, carefully carrying her keyboard. "We gotta hurry up," she said. "They were expecting us five minutes ago."

Evan swore. "How long is it gonna take to get all this stuff set up?"

She glanced behind her and shrugged. "I just hope it works."

Evan followed her down the steps to the basement, largely ignoring all the faggy vampire kids who came up to him with requests for his autograph or chord progressions or 'that keyboard girl's' phone number. Affixing the hi-hat to its proper position, Evan glanced down at Georgie as he played an absentminded fill.

"Cool?" he asked, not even sure if the other boy could hear him over the resounding crash of a cymbal.

However, Georgie answered, reaching out a hand to still the instrument's vibrations. "Cool," he said, flashing a barely-perceptible smirk and then twirling his sticks at someone in the audience—probably his Canadian boyfriend, who still inexplicably followed their band to all their shows and sometimes lobbied to come onstage and do a harmonica solo. He hadn't worn them down yet, but it was getting riskier with every gig.

Evan wondered if Georgie had told him about all the shit that had been going down lately—probably, but then again, it was almost impossible to tell with him.

Henrietta was busy rapidly unpacking things from the big bag, balancing three black candles on top of her keyboard and carefully arranging the herbs they'd decided on in the patterns Bradley had said would work the best. Dylan was carefully affixing a sprig of something to the neck of his bass, and Georgie had stopped flirting for long enough to kneel down in front of his drums, drawing careful chalk outlines. Evan looked around uncomfortably, wishing he hand something to do, but his part didn't come until the show had actually begun. Instead, he hung over the side of the makeshift stage and pretended to be interested in something some hipster was saying.

Eventually, Henrietta caught his eye and gave him a thumbs-up, giving him cause to scramble to his feet and cut the hipster off mid-sentence, turning on his mic and gritting out something unintelligible. Georgie counted them in way too fast and they launched into their first song of the evening, a noisy, meandering number called Gutterhead that Ike had called a "nightmarish aural landscape" when he sat in on one of their practices. He hadn't meant it as a compliment, but they had decided to take it as such.

The audience was eating it up, anyway, and Evan could only hope that they wouldn't notice Henrietta starting off the ritual by blowing out each of the candles in turn as she played, whispering something quietly to herself.

Once she was finished, she glanced over at Georgie, who tossed a handful of salt in the center of his chalk drawings with a muttered word. Then Dylan, who deftly lit a match on the neck of his bass and set the sprig to smoldering, executing a Charlie Brown-style spin to get the smoke circulating around the room with undeniable panache.

Ridiculous as it was, Evan couldn't help but feel a little bit proud of him. He'd been easily the most freaked out of all of them when this whole mess had started in the first place, but he was being totally cool about it.

There was no time to get all disgustingly warm and fuzzy about things, though. It was his turn.

In an abrupt departure from the wailed lyrics of heartbreak and disembowelment that he'd been halfheartedly spouting in between extensive keyboard solos, Evan began chanting into the mic, voice dipping low and gravelly. He'd practiced the words for a solid hour before they got into the car, and the whole way to North Park as well; his voice sounded much more confident than he'd thought it would as he spoke the words that would supposedly drive the spirit out of hiding and into the open so that they could banish it.

The song crashed to a jangling halt just a few seconds after he finished the words of the chant, and for a while, nothing happened. A few faggy vampire kids and Ike cheered, but other than that the house was still and quiet. Maybe they'd done it wrong. The whole thing had seemed a little bit slapdash, after all. Shrugging internally, Evan barked out the first lyrics of their next song, a considerably more energetic number.

They'd barely been playing four seconds when the thing tore its way out of the interrupted hipster and made straight for them.

-Hausinge-

Evan hadn't seen all the spirits when the others had, so it was a definite shock when it appeared. It seemed to explode outwards, huge and constantly shifting, insubstantial as smoke and yet somehow glistening with a sick, oily-looking sheen. The body it had created or possessed or whatever it did had disappeared, stretching grotesquely out as the thing emerged from it and then dissolving into nothing. There wasn't much time to think about that, however, when the spirit seemed to be all teeth and talons, arms and legs, an ungainly mass of ectoplasm coming for them at stunning speeds.

"Oh, shit," Evan blurted out, head still lowered to the microphone. The audience simply looked on, frozen.

Then one kid screamed, and the whole situation became utter pandemonium.

Over the cries of kids and their attempts to claw each other out of the way to the exit, Evan heard Henrietta shout. "Keep playing!"

He shot her an incredulous look. "Are you fucking kidding?"

The thing was fast approaching. It would be on them in a second, and then, he presumed, all would be lost.

"Just do it," she shouted back. "I know what I'm talking about."

Frantically, Evan glanced at the others. Dylan looked almost as skeptical as he did, but Georgie had grimly resumed banging on his drums the moment that she told them to. Figuring that it was too late for anything else now, anyway, Evan leaned back towards the mic and began to stumble over the lyrics to this amped-up version of Heart Philanderer, he closed his eyes, expecting any minute to feel its very real-looking claws sinking into his flesh, ready to tear it to ribbons.

Instead, he heard Henrietta's voice raised over his, over the din of the crowd, over the strange squalling noises that the ghost was making as it bounced frantically off the walls, smashing a tacky landscape portrait to pieces, ricocheting off a light fixture and plunging them all into murky darkness that made the thing seem even more terrifying than it did already.

Georgie was shouting something, too. Dylan was frantically making signs, apparently throwing everything he could think of at the ghost-demon-whatever it was. Seized by inspiration, Evan seized the canister of salt still lying on the ground next to Henrietta's keyboard, angry words spilling from his lips as he began to seal their makeshift stage.

As if it could sense what was happening, the spirit seemed to gather its energy, focusing itself into something less like total chaos and more straight malevolence. It shot towards them once again, and before he could shake the final bit of salt out of the canister, it reached out a spindly hand and slashed at the sleeve of his jacket.

Barely even registering the pain, Evan finished the circle and shut his eyes, pouring every ounce of his own energy into the song they were miraculously still playing; it may have been the shittiest version of it they'd ever done, but they were still going all the same. And maybe it was just some weird defense mechanism that his brain was making up for his own sake, or maybe he was just going crazy, but Evan could almost feel the energy of the song gathering and focusing itself, much as the spirit's had. He could feel it gathering, feel the tension rising in all parts of his body as the song built to its crescendo and the spirit's furious loops around the room increased in speed.

Just as it peaked, Evan felt a strange sense of calm. Before the energy was released, before he could possibly know what would happen, Evan felt, with absolute sureness, that they would be fine. He groped around behind him unconsciously, without thinking even for a second, and found a fistful of Dylan's t-shirt to cling on to as the energy slammed out of their salt circle and impacted the spirit, bowling it over, swallowing it up in a flash of pearl-gray.

There was one last keening, roaring noise, and then it disappeared altogether, leaving nothing but an acrid smell in the air and the dozen or so stunned kids who hadn't been able to make it out, cowering under tables and crawling for the door.

Evan gulped in deep lungfuls of air, feeling as though he had just run five marathons without even one cup of coffee beforehand. Dylan was sporting a rapidly-forming bruise from where the impact had sent him careening into the drumset, and Georgie looked the youngest that Evan had ever seen him. Even Henrietta was shaken.

For a moment they all just stared at each other in silence. It felt like that moment could have lasted forever, but before they could test that theory a girl with hair dyed flame-red and a Twilight t-shirt on climbed out from under a card-table.

"That," she pronounced, "was totally hardcore."

Another beat of silence, and then more and more kids were emerging from their hiding place to tell them the same; almost immediately, the stage was swarmed with kids who were wondering how they did it, and why, and if they could do it at their birthday party.

Some seemed to think the whole thing was some kind of gimmicky light-show, while others spoke sagely of feeling a bad presence in the room right off the bat. Either way, the hardcoreness of the event seemed to be agreed upon unanimously.

At the end of their line of congratulators, a kid in skinny jeans and a skull beanie stepped forward, not sporting the huge, exhilarated grins of his peers. Evan recognized him vaguely as the dude who this house belonged to.

He appeared to waver for a moment, and Evan wondered if he was about to get pissed at them for bringing bad juju into his house, or something. Instead, he appeared to get overcome with emotion, seizing Henrietta's hand and pressing his lips to it emphatically.

"Thank you," he said, looking at each of them in turn. "Thank you all."

"It's cool," said Henrietta, still looking vaguely bewildered at what had just happened. Ridiculously, Evan got the urge to stifle a laugh.

Then, Dylan was at his elbow, tugging up the sleeve of his jacket with a concerned look on his face. He scrubbed his bangs out of his eyes anxiously, and Evan could see that the bruise already forming over his right eye was a bad one. He seemed wholly unconcerned with it, however, instead eyeing the blood that stained the ripped sleeve of Evan's dark coat even darker with growing alarm.

Evan shrugged his jacket off obligingly, even though he was still riding high and could barely feel any kind of pain in it at all.

"They're just shallow," he said, relieved, staring down at the three jagged cuts in his arm.

"We should still get them looked at—" Dylan said anxiously, then trailed off as Georgie pushed past him as well as a clump of admirers, still as young and scared-looking as before.

"Ike," he was saying. "Ike, you fucker, where are you, come on."

There was no answer. Evan found himself scanning faces in the crowd, but he didn't see a single Canadian smartass about.

"Ike," said Georgie, sounding like he was coming dangerously close to losing it, something that hadn't happened in years.

And then, finally, a muffled voice in the corner said, "I'm over here, Jesus. Don't have a pulmonary embolism."

And he came out from where he had scrunched himself into a corner, scribbling furiously into a notepad and clutching a portable tape-recorder.

"You got all this on tape?" Evan asked incredulously.

"Yes," said Ike firmly, pushing his glasses up his nose. "And I was also able to take some notes while everyone else was busy screaming themselves to death. They'd probably be useful, if you swallowed your pride for long enough to use them. Really, Georgie, 'protecting me' is nowhere near a valid excuse for not letting me help you—"

Before he could finish, Ike was cut off by Georgie wrapping his arms around his shoulders and kissing him square on the mouth.

Ike assented to the kiss, but when they pulled apart a few seconds later he was still muttering. "—really, I'm an excellent field researcher, and—"

Turning away from their decidedly un-Goth PDA with a grimace, Evan turned back to Dylan and picked up his bass for him, so that he wouldn't have to make two trips.

Later that night, once they got back to Henrietta's it was decided that another impromptu sleepover was in order. The same sleeping arrangements were made, and they stayed up well into the night going over everything that had happened, in exhaustive detail. By the time Evan finally got to sleep, somewhere around midmorning, it only seemed like five seconds before Bradley was banging open the door to Henrietta's room, looking disgustingly cheery and well-rested.

"Wake up, assholes. I assume from the fact that you're all alive that everything went well last night," he said. "So you'll be happy to hear that I tracked down the next one for you. We should get to work as soon as possible."

The four of them groaned as one.

CHAPTER 5

Bradley, however, was having none of it. "You got yourselves into this mess," he reminded them sunnily. "Now get yourselves out. The closest spirit is at the old Hamish theater outside of town."

Henrietta rolled her eyes, but Georgie felt his stomach drop. "That's the place Ike was gonna check out," he muttered, half to himself. He'd always thought Ike's urban exploring thing was pretty cool, but definitely not when there was some kind of evil spirit out for his blood.

"It could just be a coincidence," said Henrietta, shooting him a glance. It was clear from her face that she didn't believe it.

"No," Georgie said immediately. "Ike's totally a nonconformist."

"I dunno," Evan said dubiously. "I mean, he's definitely nothing like Fetal Libido or Heidi Turner's cousin."

Georgie had to roll his eyes at that. "Do you ever get tired of acting all skeptical at first and then being totally wrong? Ike's not less of a nonconformist just because he isn't goth."

Evan shrugged. "We should work on refining our technique, anyway. I'm still scabbing from last night." He pointedly rubbed at the spot on his arm where the spirit had scratched him. Dylan gave the cuts an uneasy look, like he'd been doing pretty much nonstop since Evan got them.

"Are you sure they won't get infected and turn him into, like, some kind of ghost-zombie?" he asked anxiously, directing the question at Bradley.

"That wouldn't be so bad," Evan said thoughtfully. Dylan socked him on the arm, but made sure that it was the unwounded one.

Bradley rolled his eyes. "You'll be fine. What we need to worry about now is streamlining these rituals into something less, you know, life-threatening."

Henrietta nodded. "Last night was definitely way too close for comfort."

"At least we won't have to do it in front of a live audience next time," said Dylan. Evan shrugged his assent.

"Right," said Bradley, rubbing his hands together. "Let's get to work."

The effect was kind of ruined when Henrietta whacked her brother on the back of the head. "Georgie, call Ike. We're gonna need to use him for bait."

"Nope," Georgie said immediately. "Nope nope nope. Not happening."

"He has to decide whether or not he wants to," Henrietta said sternly. "He already said he wants to help us."

"Yeah," Georgie admitted sullenly. "But he'll say yes."

She just stared him down. Fifteen tense seconds later, he was grumbling to himself and pulling his phone out of his pocket, firing off a quick text and then looking belligerently around the room.

A few seconds later, the phone vibrated again. Georgie read the text and then regarded them all mutinously. "He says he'll meet us there."

Bradley clapped his hands together, then gave Henrietta a wary look when she showed signs of wanting to hit him again. "Awesome," he said. "Let's get started."

~

A few hours later, Henrietta pulled up in front of the old abandoned theater and killed the engine. "This whole deal is costing me a shitload of gas money," she complained. "I might have to start imposing a fare."

Georgie snorted.

"Whatever," said Bradley, from his place squashed in the backseat. "Like you even pay for it anyways."

Henrietta glared briefly and then climbed outside, slinging the bag over her shoulder. Climbing out after, Georgie let out a low whistle. Ike had been talking about this place nonstop for the past week or so, but he'd been too distracted by the whole ghost problem to really pay too much attention.

Now, he almost wished he had, because the place was really kind of amazing. Run-down, sure, with peeling paint and crumbling columns and a dingy, blank marquee.

Evan took a step forward. "Looks dangerous," he intoned gloomily.

Georgie ignored him completely in favor of taking a moment to just stare, marveling. Then, he caught sight of Ike, standing beneath the marquee and beckoning to them all shiftily. Henrietta locked the car, and the five of them walked over to him.

"You ready?" Henrietta asked Ike. He pushed his glasses up his nose and nodded firmly.

"This still might not work," Georgie sulked. "It might count as him helping us destroy the spirit. I thought that was against the rules."

"I'm not helping you directly," said Ike, with a put-upon air. "Stop being a dick."

Georgie felt somewhat sheepish. "Yeah, okay."

Ike led them down a back alley and through a side-door with a broken lock into the theater, switching on his industrial-strength flashlight to help pierce the gloom with. Bradley had brought at couple along, too, but even combined, the glow wasn't enough to make the whole thing any less creepy.

"So what should I do now?" Ike asked the rest of them once they'd managed to navigate their way to the theater where Bradley claimed the spirit was.

Henrietta shrugged. "I dunno. Climb around on shit. Take pictures. Whatever you would be doing if we weren't here."

Ike nodded and set about his activities, which did indeed look a lot like climbing around on shit and taking pictures.

He'd been at it for about five minutes before Georgie started noticing something weird. He nudged Dylan, motioning for him to point his flashlight toward the walls. Once covered with a ruined tropical mosaic, most of the tiles were now either missing or damaged beyond repair. The murky shadows made it difficult to see anything, but once Dylan swung his flashlight over, throwing everything into sharp relief, Georgie noticed that there was something else coming out of the wall besides mildew.

It was the next spirit, seeping through the cracks like some kind of fast-growing fungus, covering a seemingly huge amount of wall-space.

Freaky as it had been at the time, Georgie suddenly found himself wishing that they were back fighting the first one again, in a basement crowded with faggy vampire kids who could have served as distractions. Instead, they were in a pitch-dark movie theater with no one to hear them scream except for the quietly decaying walls.

"Henrietta," Dylan said in a quiet voice, plainly struggling not to panic. "Now would probably be a good time to start setting things up."

For one terrible moment, Georgie thought she'd frozen; if she couldn't handle it, none of them could. But then, a second later she was scrabbling through the bag for the necessary requirements, not as many as last time. She tossed the canister of salt at Evan, who immediately set about sequestering them all into a half-hearted circle.

Georgie noticed Ike next to him, eyes darting frantically about the room. He looked tense. Georgie could hardly blame him. Without thinking, he grabbed Ike's hand. Ike squeezed it back, for once too distracted to grumble.

Henrietta knelt over, fumbling to light the requisite candles while Evan and Dylan stood protectively over her. "Georgie, north," she barked. "Evan, south, Dylan, west. Ike and Bradley, stay in the middle and try not to fuck things up." She herself went over to stand to the east and started reading a string of incomprehensible words scribbled hastily onto a piece of notebook paper. The ghost didn't appear to like that much, but just as they were really getting into the swing of it, a horrifying new development occurred.

The last ghost had been noisy, and so was this one, in a different way; Georgie could hear it screeching and buzzing and wailing inside of his head. A thousand nails scratching themselves ragged on a thousand chalkboards couldn't compare.

"Do you guys hear that?" said Evan from his post, attempting to shield his candle's flame from the sudden draft that had preceded the spirit's arrival and hold his temples at the same time. "The energy's wrong, I don't feel it gathering like it did last time."

Henrietta looked desperately around. "I don't know how to fix it," she said frantically.

"Concentrate," Ike said, still holding Georgie's hand tight. Sweat was beading on his forehead. "And then brace for impact."

Evan, Dylan, and Georgie looked to Henrietta for confirmation. She gave a slightly manic shrug. "What the fuck, right? Concentrate."

Georgie shut his eyes so tight that spots of white bloomed behind his eyelids, concentrating as hard as he could. He knew somehow to search his body for a focal point, settling on his and Ike's joined hands, even though that was probably pretty gay. He imagined their shared energy building between them and transferring to the center of the group, and he knew that Ike was probably doing the same.

Just like before, the spirit was doing all it could to distract them, literally bouncing off the walls. This time, however, it presented a much more immediate threat; this building was decayed at the foundations, scheduled for condemnation; it seemed perfectly plausible that the spirit could literally bring it down around them.

Whenever he thought this way, however, Georgie could feel his energy waning. Attempting to block out all distractions, impossible as it seemed, he could feel it building back up again, slowly but surely.

After what seemed like hours but could only have been a few seconds, Evan spoke up through gritted teeth. "Alright," he said. "Alright." Georgie wasn't sure how, but Evan seemed to have been decided on as the conduit.

The spirit raged and howled, and Evan narrowed his eyes in concentration, and suddenly everything was still. The spirit hung suspended in the air for a moment, suffused once again with that gray, smoky glow, and then it was gone. At least, Georgie thought it was gone. It was difficult to tell, when they were all of them still in near-complete darkness.

"Let's get out of here," said Ike, giving voice to all of their thoughts.

Next to him, Georgie felt Henrietta nod fervently. They picked their way back towards the alleyway exit, finally spilling out onto the sidewalk and squinting in the midday sun. It was surreal to feel its warmth on their faces, when thinking back to the dank gloominess of the theater. It also sucked, because sunlight was the worst.

"Well," said Ike, at length. "At least I'm pretty sure I got some good pictures while I was being bait."

"Shut up," Georgie told him, but they still hadn't stopped holding hands.

~

After dropping Bradley and Ike at their respective homes, the four of them piled into their favorite booth at Village Inn and ordered the cheapest possible coffees they could.

Their usual waitress gave them her customary death eye as she poured for them, and Evan watched her go sourly.

"Conformist asshole," he muttered. "If she only knew what we've been laying on the line lately."

"She still wouldn't care," said Dylan, slumping back against the vinyl cushions and taking a sip of his coffee.

"Yep," Henrietta put in bleakly. She was nursing her first ghost-related injury; a bruised temple that was making her feel irritable.

"We need a break," said Evan, looking from face to desolate face.

Dylan nodded emphatically, but Georgie shook his head. "Justice takes no vacations," he intoned. "Henrietta's asshole brother will probably have another one waiting for us when we get back to her house.

"Let's just stay here forever, then," Evan said moodily.

Georgie yawned. "We could just rest for a second."

-Hausinge-

It wasn't a minute after he said that that the four of them drifted off to sleep. Dylan's head rested on Evan's shouder, Henrietta nestled in close to his other side with one arm around Georgie, who had simply fallen asleep with his forehead resting against the wooden tabletop. It seemed like only a few seconds had passed before their waitress was rudely shaking them each awake in turn, muttering something about kids these days and telling them that they had to leave, but it was already nine o'clock at night.

The four of them trooped back out to Henrietta's car.

"You know," said Georgie, once they were on the road. "How sometimes after you take a nap you feel worse than before you took the nap?"

"Uhhhghg," grunted Henrietta, looking about ready to nod off at the wheel.

Georgie leaned forward to pinch her on the arm, just enough to keep her semiconscious for the drive home. She roused herself and glared at him, but there was no swerving off the road, which he counted as a win.

"Yeah."

CHAPTER 6

Surprisingly, Bradley had nothing new to tell them by the next time they reconvened. "Nothing's around," he shrugged, brandishing his EMF reader as proof. "I mean," he amended. "There's stuff around, but nothing specific or trackable. Just lay low for a while, I guess."

Evan just shrugged, but Dylan looked hopeful. "Does this mean we get a day off?"

Georgie perked up at that, but Bradley folded his arms and regarded them all sternly. "Go to school," he said. "I've been picking up the calls from the attendance office, but soon they're gonna start emailing."

In the background, Georgie folded his arms and grumbled. "I knew they'd call."

Henrietta rolled her eyes to the ceiling, but sighed in assent. "Alright," she said. "Alright. We'll go."

~

The next day, when Henrietta came by bright and early to pick him up, Dylan almost wishes that another ghost would come hurtling from the snowy roadside and flip the car over as they sped off towards the school. He hadn't done any homework in what felt like ever, and there was pretty much no way his teacher weren't going to start in with that whole old and tired detention and/or referral routine. Not to mention the fact that he wasn't sure that any of them would have enough energy to keep up their usual snarling antagonism towards anyone besides each other.

No ghost attacks were forthcoming however, and eventually they were forced to split up into their respective classes.

Once Dylan was alone, he was somewhat ashamed to find himself jumping at small noises and constantly snapping his head around to look at disturbances he'd seen out of the corner of his eye, constantly worried that the next ghost had somehow tailed them to school and was waiting until they were all separated to pounce on them.

It was even more of a relief than usual once the lunch bell rang, and Dylan hurried out of the classroom before the teacher could call him back to discuss his abysmal test scores, or whatever.

As he was making his way over to their usual lunch spot, Dylan caught sight of Evan's back a few feet in front of him through the mass exodus of students. Dylan hurried to catch up with him. It was good to see someone who understood what the fuck was happening, unlike their hideously oblivious classmates, and Dylan couldn't help but reach up to slip his hand into Evan's as they walked, no matter how gay it was.

"Hey," he said, trying to sound casual.

"Hey," said Evan back, but his tone was carefully neutral, and he tensed up the second Dylan grabbed his hand. He endured it for a few more seconds, and then as they were about to reach the back of the school, he disentangled his hand in an elaborate pretense of smoothing down his hair.

Dylan, who would not be deterred so easily, just folded his arms and stared at him. Evan looked guiltily away.

"My arm's bugging me," he said. It was an obvious lie, but Dylan didn't say anything, too busy battling down his vague and ridiculous feelings of hurt.

"Yeah," he said instead. "Sorry."

They walked the rest of the way in silence, and once they got to their spot Evan sat as far away from Dylan as he could get.

That just seemed slightly gratuitous, and as Evan carried on about the shitty day he'd had talking to all his shitty teachers and dealing with all the shitty people, Dylan started to feel somewhat more annoyed than confused.

By the time lunch was over, he'd talked himself into a kind of a rage, and even Georgie was noticing.

"What's up?" he asked curiously, pushing himself up from where he'd been leaning against Henrietta's side, thumbing through Ike's English notes.

"Nothing," Dylan snapped, unable to resist sending a peevish look in Evan's direction. "I just want to get this shit over with, you know?"

"It's stressing us all out," Henrietta agreed, even as she gave him a look that suggested she understood that, bizarrely, ghost hunting wasn't the real problem.

Before they could force him to submit to any further questioning, however, the bell rang to signify the end of lunch, and Dylan left quickly to endure the rest of his school day.

One good thing that had come of Evan's brush-off was that it was something to concentrate on other than the idea that ghosts could be following him around, ready to reveal themselves at any moment. Dylan spent most of history moodily carving an ankh into the center of his desk and wondering when it became such a crime to hold hands with your maybe sort of halfway-boyfriend every once in a while.

Eventually, school ended, and he was forced to meet up with Evan once more at Henrietta's car. They were the first two to arrive, and Dylan leaned against the hood and refused to look over while Evan hovered around with a vaguely apologetic expression on his face, looking for all the world like he was going to say sorry but not actually doing it before Henrietta came over with Georgie.

Henrietta drove them all back to her place, instead of their respective houses, to see if Bradley had any spiritual activity updates.

It turned out that he did, meeting them at the door and still waving around his stupid-looking EMF thing.

"I've got a reading on the next one," he said grimly. "I don't know why it took so long to show itself, so be careful, I guess. Here's the address," he said, passing it over to Henrietta, who squinted at it carefully and then shrugged.

"Just some place in Breckenridge."

Georgie scoffed. "Who's cool in Breckenridge?"

Dylan paused to consider. "There is that one kid. The one we met at the Skinny Puppy gig, remember?"

"Yeah," said Evan, but what are the odds—"

Before he could go any further, Georgie silenced him with a look.

"What are the odds of any of this?" Henrietta asked, and then motioned for Dylan to go on.

He just shrugged. "I remember there was a kid from Breckenridge who was pretty hardcore. I think she went backstage."

"Awesome," said Georgie. "Let's call her, then, set up a gig, and we're ready to go. Just like last time."

"Just one problem," Dylan added gloomily. "She thinks our band sucks." She'd posted on a local music forum about a month ago, talking about what posers they were. Harsh words, but Dylan could hardly deny them, seeing as the Manic Episodes' primary audience was a bunch of faggy vampire kids and hipsters.

Henrietta scowled. "Then she doesn't know shitty-but-promising music when she hears it," she said. "So how do we get into her house?"

Dylan shrugged. "I dunno."

"Maybe we could disguise ourselves as another band," Georgie suggested. "An actually cool one."

Evan rolled his eyes. "How would that even work?"

"It'd have to," said Georgie grimly. "Or else she won't live to insult any more shitty-but-promising bands."

"I think we should do it," Dylan put in, not because the plan wasn't ridiculous, but because he was pretty interested at the moment in doing whatever it was that Evan didn't want to do.

"Alright," said Evan, defeated. "Alright."

A few days, well-placed flyers, and tactical phone calls later, they'd managed to convince the Breckenridge kid that a friend of a friend of a friend's cool band from Arizona needed somewhere to put on a house show, and her house was the best possible candidate for the job. Against all odds, she agreed, and so the Manic Episodes were reborn as Adolescent Antisocial Behavior, given a halfassed quasi-punk makeover, and set out for Breckenridge with instruments in tow.

The whole drive, Dylan was torn between imagining the myriad of things that could go wrong with this plan, and doing his best to physically communicate his displeasure with Evan. On the one hand, the Breckenridge kid might recognize them and kick them out before they could get anything done, or the ghost could seriously fuck up someone in the audience, seeing as it would more than likely consist of people who were actually cool this time instead of lame conformist faggy vampire kids.

On the other hand, Evan looked way obnoxious just sitting there strapped into his seat, going over lyrics and biting his thumbnail. It was practically Dylan's civic duty to sigh as loudly as possible whenever Evan so much as glanced his way, and noisily readjust himself in his own seat when it looked like Evan might be concentrating too hard on something. With any luck he'd fudge the lyrics or something in the middle of the set, and they could kick him out of the band and replace him with the Breckenridge girl, who in this fantasy scenario suddenly loved them, and—

Before he could finish his daydream, Henrietta pulled into the driveway of the right house and slid the door open, glancing into the backseat to make sure they were ready. What she saw seemed to satisfy her, but Dylan was definitely not feeling very prepared.

He forced himself to get out and help lug up equipment, however, purposefully holding his bass up higher than he needed to after ringing the doorbell to her house, just in case she recognized them through the gratuitous safety pins and patched jackets.

She didn't, however, waving them inside and then out through the back door, where her patio was strewn with Christmas lights, Chinese lanterns, and a few people smoking cigarettes and standing around disinterestedly, wrapped up in coats.

Dylan looked around nervously. They'd never really played outside before, and he wondered if it would have any kind of effect on what they were really trying to do. He noticed Evan standing around and wearing a similar expression and immediately switched his own to a scowl that radiated annoyance, attempting to discourage him from coming over to talk. He made no move to, however. Dylan wasn't sure why, but that pissed him off even more.

Soon Georgie finished setting up his kit. The four of them stood there, ready to start, and Dylan noted a subtle shift in atmosphere as the people milling around them paused for a few seconds to check them out, seeing if they were any good before restarting their idle conversations.

Evan, who looked kind of seasick, introduced them.

"We're The Ma—Adolescent Antisocial Behavior."

They got a few looks like, 'so what?' and Dylan just flicked his bangs out of his eyes, concentrated on getting the timing right after Georgie counted them in, tried not to pay attention to the carefully-arranged candles still burning on the top of Henrietta's keyboard.

The chick whose house they were at wandered by with a beer in her hand, wrinkling her nose as she heard the beginning of their first song.

"They sound like that one band," Dylan heard her say, but he forced himself not to listen to the rest. Some of the people there actually seemed to like it, nodding their heads in time and humming along to the more accessible melodies, which were pretty much none of them. Dylan would take what he could get, however.

It was almost starting to feel like just another show with a decent audience. Dylan hardly felt the chill of the night as it began to settle in, and a few people actually cheered as they finished their first song. If it wasn't for Henrietta hastily whispering words copied down in a notebook as she passed a finger back and forth through the flame of a candle, he could almost pretend it was a regular gig.

Eventually, however, her summoning efforts paid off. The air got so cold that it was impossible to ignore, colder than any night chill could ever make it.

Dylan noticed a girl in the front, the only one who wasn't talking to anyone. She had long tangles of hair and hollow-looking eyes. Dylan knew before it happened that it would be her this time, that she was where the cold was coming from and she would be where the ghost would come from, too. Not for the first time, he wondered if she'd ever been a real person, and shuddered to think of the answer either way.

Soon, however, there was no time for thinking. It ripped and tore its way out of her body, same as the last concert but different than from the movie theater. Maybe it had to camouflage itself in public places, or something. Or maybe it was just doing it out of some kind of sick sense of fun, just to hear the screams of the people around it. Dylan couldn't guess exactly how self-aware it was. All he knew was that it was their job to take care of it.

Henrietta's weird candle-finger thing seemed to have paid off, because it stopped short of their makeshift stage without trying anything, loosing a terrible screeching roar that resounded throughout all of their minds.

For a moment, Dylan was relieved that it wasn't trying to hurt them. Relief quickly turned to horror, however, as he saw it pick up a younger-looking boy who was cowering in a corner.

"Holy shit," the boy whimpered. In a moment, his head was smacking hard against concrete, and he was unconscious.

Georgie turned to Henrietta in horror. "It's actually hurting people!" he called out, sounding distressed.

"Let's hurry up and get rid of it while it's distracted, then!" Henrietta yelled back frantically, over the din of fleeing concertgoers. "You all know what to do."

Henrietta and Georgie closed their eyes, and Dylan could immediately sense the energy building up from each of them. He screwed his own eyes shut and did his best to summon his own energy, but every time he felt on the verge of something, his eyes kept cracking open before he realized what they were doing, and glancing over to Evan.

Against his will, Dylan could feel the surge of negative emotions he'd been feeling at his earlier rejection being brought to the forefront of his mind. He felt the horrible, violating feeling of the spirit inside his mind, rummaging through, and then he felt the even more sickening presence of its satisfaction.

He struggled for a moment to put it all together, but soon enough he realized the truth of it. New Agey as it sounded, the spirit seemed to literally be feeding off of his negative energy. Past caring about their dumb fight, or a lack of public hand-holding, Dylan opened his eyes all the way as another kid screamed and focused all of his energy on catching Evan's eye, attempting to communicate with a single look just what exactly was going on.

Remarkably, Evan actually seemed to understand. He fought his way over through the treacherously snarled Christmas lights, finally taking Dylan's hand in his own. If it weren't for the evil spirit raging all around them and delivering what appeared to be an awful lot of concussions, it would have been romantic.

"I'm sorry," Evan was saying frantically, voice small over the din going on around them. Georgie and Henrietta were both yelling at them, not understanding why they were pausing for a heart to heart now of all times. "I was just thinking about how I didn't want us to be like all those Britney-Justin wannabes at our school, and all of a sudden I just got so freaked out, I still don't get why—"

Dylan cut him off with a squeeze to his hand and a rare smile.

"Yeah, okay, apology accepted," he said. For some reason, he felt all of his irrational angers and annoyances of the past few days melting away at once. "Now, can we please get down to it?"

"What he said," Georgie half-shouted, hurling one drumstick at the spirit as it lifted a girl high into the air and then dumped her prone body back down on the grass. It turned when Georgie hit it, apparently deciding that it'd had enough of the small-time.

Dylan felt much better now, however, and he found it infinitely easier to reach inside himself for the stores of energy he knew he had now that Evan was close by and didn't weirdly hate him for some reason.

The telltale build was coming up, and when Evan shouted Dylan knew that it was time, letting go and watching with no small measure of satisfaction as the spirit was suffused and then slammed apart and then sent off to oblivion, all thanks to them.

~

The audience members who hadn't been hurt came back one by one, awed, or angry or, once again, asking for them to play at parties. Most of them couldn't believe what they'd seen, even though it had taken place right in front of them.

The highlight of the night, however, came when the girl who had been dumped down on the grass had woken up and come over to them, rubbing a lump on her head but otherwise looking incredibly enthusiastic.

"You guys were awesome," she said, looking them from face to face.

"Thanks," Henrietta said, smiling magnanimously.

"Listen," said the girl. "My dad's talent coordinator for this dive bar in Denver, would you guys mind if I told him to book you? Your performance was amazing," she said dreamily, still rubbing the lump. "So intense, you know? Really visceral."

Dylan just kept looking at her, hardly daring to believe it.

"Seriously?" asked Georgie.

"Oh, yeah," she answered blithely. "Give me one of your phone numbers and I'll be in touch, yeah?"

Still looking slightly dazed, Henrietta wrote out her phone number on the girl's arm in purple Sharpie. She bounced off, probably to look for attention for her head trauma.

"Let's hope she doesn't forget about this once she's been treated for a concussion," Henrietta said in a low voice. "Now let's get out of here before someone calls the cops."

They managed to make their escape fairly quickly. On the ride back, Dylan sat next to Evan. They didn't hold hands, but they were much closer together than they strictly had to be. Dylan would take it.

Idly, he wondered why he'd gotten so angry about the whole thing in the first place, and why Evan had been so dead set against it from the start. It just didn't seem like them, really. Dylan shuddered as he remembered the ghost feeding off of his negative energy, and wondered with a profound sense of revulsion if it could have possibly been the ghost's doing, if it could have hidden itself until it could create the conflict between him and Evan, and then thrive off of the bad energy between them.

The whole thing left him feeling nauseous, and he did his best to put it out of his mind.

CHAPTER 7

The next day, Bradley showed up in Henrietta's room after school looking thoroughly unnerved. "I think they're evolving or something.

Georgie folded his arms. "Please. This isn't Chinpokomon."

Bradley glared. "I'm serious. I used to be able to track down an exact location, but now I'm only getting a general area."

Henrietta rolled her eyes. "Are you sure you're not just fucking up the readings? We still have three to go, and this is definitely gonna throw a wrench in things."

"See for yourself," Bradley shot back, gesturing to where his laptop was on the bed. Henrietta squinted down at the screen, which had a Google maps-like setup going on. But where there had once been exact points on the map pinning down the hubs of spiritual activity, there was now only a single area near Denver that was glowing softly with the same sinister darkness.

"That wouldn't happen to be the bar we're playing at, is it?" Dylan asked, not sounding at all surprised.

Evan checked the address the guy had scribbled onto his palm. "It's around there, yeah." "What's with all these coincidences," Dylan muttered to himself, sounding unnerved. "I don't know," said Evan gloomily. "But they're getting harder to deal with, and we're not any better equipped than we were before."

"Dunno about you guys, but I'm definitely not interested in any kind of training montage," Georgie put in.

"There's no need for a montage," said Henrietta, attempting to remain calm. "We'll be fine. We just need to go out there and look around, play our show, use that stupid-looking EMF thing, and we'll be fine."

Dylan examined the map closely. "There's three left. How come only one area is lit up?" Georgie shrugged. "Let's just get this over with," he said. "Then we can think about finding the others."

~

They showed up in Denver a couple hours early for their show, just in case something came up. The car ride over had been tense, especially since they'd come out with even less ritualistic trappings than the last time. "The stronger you get, the less you'll need them," Bradley had counseled them sagely. No one seemed to accept this at face value, all of them at least somewhat skeptical.

"No one's getting any stronger," Georgie had pointed out rightly, and they'd insisted on taking the salt with them. "Maybe we should just sort of drive around for a while," Dylan suggested. "See if we can find anything."

No ghost appearances were forthcoming, however, and after about forty-five minutes Georgie was ready to give it a rest.

"Let's just go get set up early," he said. "It's not like ghosts are gonna go around wandering the streets like a gang, or something."

"It's better than doing nothing," Evan shot back, peering out the window. It was going to get dark soon, and the promise of nighttime set them all on edge. They started calling out a false alarm every couple minutes or so, all of them turning out to be regular shadows. Dylan was about ready to join in Georgie's campaign to drive back to the bar when he saw something out of the corner of his eye. At first, he didn't think anything of it; he'd been seeing things out of the corner of his eye since this whole thing started. But somehow, this park looked different.

A kid dressed in black had been sitting on a bench underneath a streetlamp, smoking. However, just as they passed by, the streetlamp had gone out abruptly. In the flash of light before it was snuffed, Dylan could've sworn he saw a pale, flailing hand fly out to grasp at nothing and then disappear completely.

"Pull up here," he told Henrietta. She did so immediately, turning to him with a tense look on her face. "Did you see something?"

Dylan just nodded. He bounced on the balls of his feet, impatiently waiting for them to unload the bag with their things inside of it. As soon as everyone was ready, he took off in the direction of the streetlamp. For a moment he was unsure of himself; it was almost completely dark outside now, and it was difficult to figure out the exact location of the bench. The mystery was soon solved, however, as they heard someone let out a terrified shriek only a few feet away from them.

"There," Evan shouted. They hurried over to where the shout had originated, finding the kid bleeding on the ground with the spirit hovering over him. Dylan's mind was suddenly filled with an unpleasant sense of self-satisfaction that he could immediately tell came from the spirit.

Hurriedly, Evan set about creating a salt circle around themselves and the injured kid. Dylan felt relieved after it was finished; the spirits had never before been able to cross them.

This time, was clearly different, however; it let out a terribly noise inside their heads, something more intense than ever before. Henrietta groaned and clutched her forehead. Dylan got the sick feeling that this was its way of laughing.

Sure enough, as soon as the noise abated, it blew into the circle as though it was nothing and stretched its ghastly arms toward the kid, who seemed at this point to be beyond terror.

"The rest is silence," he gloomily intoned.

Dylan and Evan exchanged looks. As far as last words went, those were pretty good ones, but hopefully this kid wasn't going to die today. The two of them each grabbed one of the kid's arms, fighting tooth and nail to bodily drag him away from the spirit in a game of tug-of-war.

"Focus on the energy," Henrietta shouted over the spirit's din, neatly dodging an errant swipe of its unnaturally long claws. "Focus!"

"Fuck off, Yoda," said the kid, but Dylan decided to let it go, seeing as he sounded pretty hysterical.

Dylan looked over at Evan desperately. It was taking all of his concentration to just keep this fucking kid from getting ripped apart in front of their very eyes. Evan looked similarly clueless, but as Dylan watched, his face stiffened into something like resolve.

"Focus," he repeated, more quietly. "C'mon, we can do it, alright, just focus."

"God," groaned the kid, jerking wildly between them. "You too?"

Dylan repeated the word over and over in his mind, struggling to block out all distractions, but without the salt circle's buffer, it seemed impossible.

As if sensing Dylan's struggles, Evan leaned forward and pressed their lips together. It kind of hurt because of the whole thing with being jostled by the murderous spirit attempting to rip the kid away from them, and Dylan thought the romantic timing could have been a whole lot better, but he soon realized that Evan meant for him to focus on that instead of everything else that was happening.

Dylan squeezed his eyes shut tight, renewed his grip on the sleeve of the kid's jacket, and worked furiously to block everything out and build up the energy. Soon enough, he could feel it happening.

"Hey," said the kid indignantly. "I thought we were fighting for my life here—" he was cut off by his own shriek as the thing made a swipe at his head, but Dylan and Evan heard approximately none of it.

Once they'd built up enough that Dylan felt positively electric, hair standing on end, toes going numb, Evan broke apart from him. Dylan made a scared noise, thinking that their fragile store of energy would shatter, but it stayed. He couldn't see it, or anything, but somehow Dylan knew it was there.

"Ready?" Henrietta called from where she was with Georgie, holding his hand tightly. Both of them seemed to be attempting to bodily push each out of harm's way, which mostly just ended up with them both being jostled around a lot.

"Yes," said Evan frantically. "Go go go go go!"

And so they did; Dylan felt the energy being unleashed from them and finding its way to the spirit as it paused with its wicked teeth only moments away from the kid's face. He'd fainted after his last unhelpful comment, eyes rolled back in his head and body limp.

The spirit screamed once inside their heads, a sound and a feeling somehow even more terrible than its laugh. It hung for a moment, suspended, and then the pearly gray mist overtook it, just as it had overtaken the others. The four of them collapsed to the ground as one, breathing hard and crawling over to each other until they were more or less just sitting in an exhausted heap, waiting for their breathing to return to normal.

For a while, it was enough to just sit in silence. Soon, though, the kid was roused from his fainting spell. He looked around himself, as he came to gradually, taking a few seconds before he noticed the four of them sitting together and regarding him in exhausted silence.

"Am I dead?" the kid asked skeptically. "Is this hell? Does anyone have a cigarette?"

"No such luck," said Georgie. "I'd get out of here before another one of those things shows up to eat your eyeballs. I would also stop smoking in parks after nighttime if you're not familiar with any pagan rituals."

The kid scrambled to his feet, checking out the perimeter warily. "Right," he said. "Thanks for saving my life." He gave them a quick salute, and with that he scurried away. They watched him go with a detached sort of fascination, none of them able to find the energy necessary to get up off the ground and make for the car.

"You know," said Evan after a solid minute or so had passed. "We're late for our show."

Dylan flopped backwards, not appearing to notice as his head thumped against the dirt. "Shit."

~

They got into the club with little incident, even though it was pretty obvious that they weren't old enough to play in a place like this. Once inside, they met the manager, a bald and harassed-looking man who told them to set up as quickly as possible and kept muttering to himself about booking acts that his kid suggested from his kid.

They set up and launched into their first song with as much enthusiasm as they could muster, but unfortunately, it wasn't very much at all. The people at the bar seemed much more interested in getting drunk on cheap beer and hooking up with each other than they did Evan's tortured wailing, which was pretty much altogether what they'd been expecting. Even so, it was somewhat disheartening to play to an audience so completely disinterested in what they were doing. Dylan would never admit it out loud, but he thought that even the faggy vampire kids were a better audience than these assholes.

They had to cut the set off without finishing because they'd showed up late, and no one seemed to mind all that much.

As they were loading their stuff back into the van, Henrietta swayed on her feet. "I am so tired," she said, stifling a huge yawn. "I don't care what Bradley says, spirits can wait for a day. When we get home, I'm sleeping for literally twenty-four hours."

Evan, however, had an odd look on his face. "I'm not sure that's gonna happen," he said, looking at something beyond them.

Dylan guessed before he looked, groaning out loud as he looked down the alleyway they were parked in front of. He saw the hideous, oily smoke gathering, and felt the thing rummaging rudely through his mind, as it always did.

"This is getting really old," said Georgie.

"Let's just get it over with," said Dylan, attempting to fight down the terror he felt. They definitely weren't firing on all cylinders, and even though it hadn't worked last time it still felt weird to not have any means of protection at all.

"We can do this, said Henrietta reassuringly. "Concentrate."

She grabbed Dylan's hand, and Dylan grabbed Georgie's, and Georgie grabbed Evan's, and the four of them concentrated as hard as they possibly could.

Even though Dylan was bone-tired, it seemed almost easy by now to reach inside himself and draw out the final, guttering stores of energy he had left within him.

He focused on drawing it to the place where Henrietta's hand was in his, and she did the same. The spirit howled around them, sent terrible thoughts into their mind, battered at them. It even managed to slam Dylan's head into the brick wall of the alleyway, but the other three went with him, and pulled him back to safety, and the spirit was unable to separate their linked hands.

"Now," Evan called, just as Dylan was starting to feel the same electricity as earlier.

Dylan focused outward, and for the first time he found himself able to send a message to the spirit's mind.

Got you now, he thought smugly, and the thing seemed almost surprised at that, before it was shot through with the smoke that Dylan was beginning to recognize as being composed of their essences, the physical manifestation of the invisible energy they were able to call forth.

He was still feeling self-satisfied when the side of his head gave a nasty throb just at the same time as his knees gave out, falling to the asphalt for the second time that night.

Using his own last reserves of energy, Evan hoisted him up into the backseat. The four of them slept in the car for a couple hours and then took shifts driving home, because Henrietta thought she would careen off the side of the road for sure if she had to take them the whole way. They stopped at each person's house, made sure that they were safely inside before stumbling through the front path.

Dylan was the last to be dropped off before Henrietta, rousing himself for long enough to stumble up his front path before faceplanting into his bed without even getting under the covers, lost to the world.

CHAPTER 8

If left alone, Henrietta probably could have slept for well over twenty-four hours. Her rest was interrupted, however, sometime in the late afternoon. Surprisingly, it wasn't Bradley barging in to send them out all over Colorado again—it was the sound of glass smashing. One of the many coffee mugs that cluttered her nightstand appeared to have picked itself up and smashed itself against her wall. Heart pounding in her throat, Henrietta sat up in bed and watched as the mugs floated through the air and smashed themselves one by one, until there were none left and her carpet was dusted with broken ceramic shards.

Feeling oddly calm, Henrietta waited until it seemed that the onslaught was over. Then, she groped around on her nightstand, lit a cigarette, and pulled out her cellphone to call Dylan. He picked up on the fourth ring.

"Hen, what the fuck," he slurred groggily into the phone. She took a drag off her cigarette and exhaled before speaking.

"It's here."

~

Ten minutes later, Dylan was flinging her door open and cursing as he practically stepped on a jagged piece of shattered mug. He had Georgie and Dylan with him, and Bradley was there too, no doubt having heard the commotion from downstairs.

"What the hell happened?" Bradley demanded.

"It's here," Henrietta repeated. "I don't know how we missed it, but it's here."

"How do you know?" Evan asked, looking around the room suspiciously.

Georgie rolled his eyes. "Are you serious? Look around you."

Evan folded his arms and glares at Bradley. "Well, what the fuck? I thought you were supposed to be on top of this shit. How did you miss that one of them was in your own house?"

Bradley looked stricken for a moment, and then he hung his head. "It's impossible to truly predict a spirit's comings and goings with technology. They're intrinsically opposed. I thought the stuff I had would work well enough, but it didn't. It must've been under our noses this whole time, and heard everything we said. It's probably listening to us now."

Georgie flopped down on the bed, looking bleak.

Dylan took a more optimistic approach. "So that's it, then. We kill this one, we're golden, right?"

Bradley sighed. "In theory, yes, but—"

"No theories," Evan interrupted. "I'm tired of this. Let's just give it the old one-two and go back to reading poetry and staring at each other. Remember when that was all we did?"

Bradley gave another put-upon sigh. "Whatever. Whatever. I can't stand in your way, this wasn't my fault."

"Alright," said Henrietta, only just then able to come back from what she had seen. "Alright, let's go. We'll call you if things get too crazy."

Bradley nodded and made for the door. He seemed to waver back and forth between saying something, and then just settled on "be careful."

"Yeah," said Henrietta. "Make sure mom and dad are out of the house." That was about as far as they were willing to go into the realm of mushy family exchanges.

Bradley saluted her, and not long after that they heard the rattling of the garage door opening. Henrietta hoped grimly that whenever they came back, they wouldn't be returning to a roomful of corpses.

The four of them assembled themselves in the center of Henrietta's room—Henrietta west, Evan north, Dylan south, Georgie east. They joined hands, like last time, and concentrated on focusing their energy. Conditions were much quieter this time, and it was easy to reach inside herself for the energy she knew would be there, but once she had reached it, it felt almost like it was locked.

She couldn't access it, draw it out, focus it towards anything—she could feel it there, but that was it.

Cracking an eye open, she could see from the expressions on the other's faces that they were having similar problems.

-Hausinge-

After a few more minutes of unsuccessful probing, Georgie dropped Henrietta's hand abruptly. "This isn't working," he said with a grimace. "Maybe the spirit has to show itself to us, or some shit like that before we can do the mind-bolts thing."

Henrietta shrugged. His guess was as good as any.

"We should go looking for it," Evan proclaimed. "I just want to get this over with."

"We all do," Dylan reminded him. "But how?"

"Maybe we should split up," Henrietta said. "See if we can draw it out that way."

"Have you never seen a horror movie in your life?" Georgie asked her incredulously. "That's the worst idea ever."

"Whatever," said Henrietta sullenly. "Have any better ideas?"

Georgie sighed. "The thing can probably hear us talking right now. No matter what we do, we're playing into its creepy insubstantial hands. There's nothing we can do but wait."

"No, fuck that," said Henrietta emphatically. "If we do that, it'll just stay here forever, or until it drives us crazy, or it'll just pick us off one by one. This is my house, and I'm not sharing it with some lame conformist boner of a ghost."

Dylan nodded. "Maybe there's some way to send it a message it can't ignore. Like the way it gets in our minds—I thought I could do it, to the last one we killed."

"Might work," Henrietta shrugged. "Give it a shot."

Dylan shut his eyes tight, appearing to concentrate as hard as he could. For a few seconds, all was silent, but then Henrietta felt his voice ringing through her mind, clear and confident where the spirits' had been cacophonous and chaotic. "Listen up, motherfucker," he said. "Get the fuck out of here, or we'll make you get out."

Evan cast Dylan an approving look. "Nice."

Dylan just shrugged flipping his bangs out of his eyes. "Whatever."

He'd scarcely gotten the word out when Henrietta saw it. It was huge, hulking and yet somehow constantly shifting—it melted seamlessly through her bedroom door and advanced on them threateningly, malevolent energy spiking through its every silent step. The most eerie thing about it was its silence; compared to the this one, the others were downright chatty.

The four of them quailed in its wake. Attempting to be brave, Henrietta grabbed for someone's hand, attempting to gather up her energy once more. The hand was cruelly ripped from her, however, as the thing picked her up and threw her bodily against the wall, just like another piece of ceramic.

She crashed to the ground, feeling just as shattered as one of the mugs. It hurt like hell to move even the slightest bit, and she cursed when she felt something warm trickling down her forehead to drip into her eyes.

Wiping the blood away, she saw Georgie looking at her with a stricken expression.

"Looks worse than it is," she managed, even though she had no idea whether or not that was true. Evan attempted to rush to her aid, but the spirit was rounding on him now.

Henrietta wiped more blood and concentrated as hard as she could. The energy was more readily available now that the spirit was here, as she'd thought, but it seemed bent on separating them. Just as she'd gathered a suitable amount, it seemed to do something like punching Evan in the stomach with astonishing force. He dropped to the floor and wheezed, all the air gone from his lungs.

Henrietta had never done it by herself before, and she knew it wouldn't be anywhere near as powerful, but she let the energy fly anyway.

It seemed to stun the spirit momentarily, giving her enough time to drag herself over to the others and help Evan up. Georgie and Dylan were frantically lighting candles in a corner, trying to revert back to their old rituals. "No," Henrietta managed. "We already know it won't work."

"So what do we do?" Dylan demanded, looking slightly frantic as he attempted to hold her up. Henrietta's head swam. Behind him, she could see the ghost picking itself back up again. "We have to do this fast," she said, struggling to focus.

She squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated as hard as possible, harder than she ever had before, only hoping that the others were doing the same. It was difficult to focus, what with the whole head wound and all, but she did her best, and soon enough she could feel the energy building up inside her.

Signaling to the others, she concentrated as hard as she could and waited. Soon, Evan was turning himself towards the spirit, barreling towards them once again. Henrietta registered dimly that if this didn't work, they were probably all going to die.

Evan actually let out a shout as the energy left his body. For the first time, it was visible before impact with the spirit; gray as mist, or the moon, or smoke from a cigarette. It passed out of him and headed straight for the spirit, a full-on collision that stopped it in its tracks only seconds away from the four of them, by this point abandoning all decorum in favor of huddling together on the floor. Dylan clutched at Evan's arm with a horrified expression, anchoring him to earth, as the impact fought to lift him off the ground.

They watched as the smoke appeared to somehow rip the ghost apart on impact, suffusing it with an unearthly glow and eventually fading it away.

It stared at them with eyes like pits as the last of it faded away, and then, for the first time, they heard it in their minds.

Unlike the directionless cacophony of the others, this one spoke precisely, in a voice that filled them all with dread.

"Our time here has ended," it said to them. And that was it.

Henrietta stared at the place where it had been, almost expecting some kind of cheesy horror-movie. "For now."

But nothing else was forthcoming, and soon she came to realize that for the first time in days they were well and truly alone.

More liquid trickled down her face, and she wiped at it, alarmed that she was still bleeding; as her fingers came away from her face, however, she realized that she was crying.

She got herself back under control, wiping the tears away quickly and then looking over at the others, only to see that Dylan had begun to sob theatrically, and Evan was looking kind of teary himself.

Rolling her eyes fondly, she crowded in closer.

"This is getting dangerously close to group-hug territory," Georgie reasoned, the only dry-eyed one in the bunch. "I mean, we already fucking saved the day or whatever, there is literally no need to initiate a fucking—"

"Nah," said Evan, wrapping his arms as far around everyone as they would go. "Fuck it. We're doing this."

Soon, Georgie's protests were effectively drowned out. They stayed that way for longer than any of them would probably be prepared to admit.

Eventually, Dylan broke the silence.

"We should probably head to a hospital."

~

They had to settle for the free clinic, but as it turned out, none of their injuries were all that terrible. They just hurt like hell. Henrietta had sprained her wrist and bruised her ribs, Georgie's arm was broken, the scabbed-over scratches on Evan's arm had reopened, and Dylan managed to get off with only a few cuts and bruises, which they all made fun of him for mercilessly.

Even after dropping everyone off at their respective houses to convalesce, Bradley and her parents still weren't home. He'd texted her a little while ago to tell her that he'd dragged them into three movies in a row just to make sure they'd finished up in time. She had to admit he'd performed his job exceptionally well.

Henrietta returned to her room, surveying the destruction that the spirit had caused and knowing that she was totally going to catch hell for it later.

Not quite able to bring herself to care, Henrietta wrapped herself up in her blankets and settled down for her first good sleep in what felt like forever.

CHAPTER 9

Dylan's eyes flew open for the third time in half an hour, waking himself up once again from his uneasy sleep. He'd thought that once he got back from Henrietta's house after killing the final spirit, or banishing it, or whatever the hell had happened, that he would be ready to sleep for roughly the next twelve years, but not so. Every time he closed his eyes he would slip into some kind of hideous nightmare about the spirit not being banished at all, and every time he opened them he wasn't able to stop himself from peering fearfully into every shadow of his room, replaying its terrible voice over and over in his head, convinced that one of them was about to detach itself from the others and kill him.

Normally, Dylan was not at all afraid of the dark. He was a freaking Goth kid. This, combined with the fact that he had sustained the least injuries out of anyone, prevented him from picking up the phone to see if anyone else was having these problems.

He was determined to tough it out, but as he lay stiffly underneath his stifling blankets, he couldn't help but wonder miserably if he'd ever be able to get a full night's sleep again. At this point, it didn't seem likely.

He wasn't sure how long he stayed that way; maybe a minute, maybe two hours. He was roused from his half-asleep state, however, by the sound of his door softly opening, as if the person on the other end didn't want to wake him.

Nevertheless, he sat bolt upright in bed, groping around on his nightstand and switching on his lamp as fast as he could.

As its glow filled the room, he saw Evan step through the door and couldn't help letting out a sigh of relief.

"Oh," he said. "It's just you."

Evan just nodded, sitting down on the edge of Dylan's bed and kicking his boots off. There was snow in his hair.

"What are you doing here?" Dylan asked, trying to pretend like he hadn't just had a mini panic attack at the sound of his own door opening.

"Couldn't sleep," Evan admitted, and once again, Dylan felt relief.

"Me neither," he finally admitted. "It's so stupid, right?"

"Well, Evan reasoned. "We did just finish fucking up six ghosts with the power of our minds."

Dylan just shrugged. "Post-traumatic stress is for conformists."

"Right," said Evan tolerantly, stretching out on the bed next to Dylan, who helpfully extended the edge of his comforter so that Evan could climb underneath. He obliged, opening up his arms so that Dylan could pillow his head on his chest. The blankets had seemed oppressively hot before, but somehow this just felt nice. "But it's okay to be freaked out by this stuff. I mean, you're the only one who communicated with them directly, right? That had to be a headfuck."

"It was," Dylan agreed, surprised that Evan wasn't calling him a pussy. "You dealt with most of the physical stuff, though."

Evan smirked down at him crookedly. "And it freaked me out so bad that I walked all the way to your place in the freezing cold, at night."

In answer, Dylan just pressed closer, wrapping his arms around Evan's waist. Just as he was drifting off to sleep, Evan's voice spoke again, low and tired-sounding.

"You know," he said. "Henrietta wants us to play a show tomorrow."

Dylan let out a sleepy groan. "No way," he said grumpily. "I think we've definitely earned a vacation."

"She says bands don't go on vacation when they're still as bad as we are," Evan reported wearily. "I told her that wasn't even true, but she won't budge."

"I can't even think about this right now," said Dylan. "Let's just go to sleep."

And go to sleep they did.

~

They were woken up the next morning by Dylan's phone ringing on the nightstand, with Henrietta on the other line to repeat what Evan had said about the show.

"Come on," she pleaded. "It'll get our minds off things."

Dylan had to admit that he could use a distraction. And so that was how, the next evening, they ended up driving to yet another faggy vampire kid's house the next town over.

They were given a hero's welcome once they showed up; for one ludicrous moment, Dylan thought that people had somehow found out about their whole ordeal. It turned out, of course, that they had just heard from their friends about the "awesome special effects" that the Manic Episodes had at their shows, and they were gearing up for a good one.

Of course, no such special effects were forthcoming. Dylan thought it was a good set, anyway; they'd gotten a lot better at multitasking while they played, and they could almost pull off a seamless group hair-flip. Evan even licked Dylan's neck during Canadian Bondage, which was usually good for at least a few delighted screams. This time, however, the audience reception was lukewarm at best; probably the first time they'd played a show that the faggy vampire kids hadn't eaten up.

They played through their set, and once they were finished came a smattering of disinterested applause and then a general exodus to the kitchen, where somebody had wine-coolers.

As the kids moved away, Dylan caught snippets of their conversations;

"Totally lame now, oh my God—"

"—Can't believe I wanted them to play my birthday party—"

"Yeah, there just wasn't that same dark energy as before—"

Dylan looked around at the others, who were all wearing matching expressions of incredulity.

"Fucking faggy vampire kids," said Georgie. "At least Ike is a true fan."

From his place of honor, front row center, Ike gave a thumbs-up.

"You give them a ghost and they take it a mile," Henrietta agreed, leaning over to unplug her keyboard. "Oh, well. Maybe people who don't suck will start liking us more now that they're over it."

Evan just shrugged, and Dylan flicked his hair out of his eyes.

"So lame," he said. "So. Lame."

The End

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