There was no visible signal, but as soon as the door shut the limo revved to life and began the drive.

  I wasn’t sure where we were going. But the important thing was that we were moving.

  A small part of me noted that there wasn’t a lot of space between me and the goth baddie. All of a sudden, I was all too aware of the fact that I had not had a shower since this morning before I spent an hour bent over the bathroom tiles, scrawling runes to contain the fire which inevitably burned my school down. So I moved an inch away.

  “You smell of smoke,” Abigail said kindly.

  “Thanks,” I said, using all my self-control not to sniff at my pits. I didn’t need to give Abigail that kind of image.

  “You’ve been getting around, I see,” She lifted one dark colored brow, gaze on the abandoned construction lot we just drove out of.

  I sighed, leaned back, and opened up . “Yeah, most of them in the limo.”

  It’s not that I didn’t like Abigail. Well, I didnt’ like her either. But she was also a player in the game. Not as big as Assad or the Intellect, but a player nonetheless. After everything that had been happening, my trust towards strangers was running thin. I didn’t want to talk anymore than necessary.

  I leaned back and opened up The Execution of Euclidean Elements on Eldritch Ensnaring & Exorcisms. A moment later, I felt Abigail stiffen up in front of me.

  “Why did they give you that?” She asked.

  I turned a page slowly, skipping over the part about how geometry was built on logic and symbols. “I’m playing animal control services today. Have to leash an eldritch abomination.”

  Abigail inched away from me, aghast. “Do you have any idea what you’ve gotten yourself into?”

  I ignored the very pointed look from Wol. My eyes never left the book. “Some. Yeah. Better, now that I’m reading.”

  Wol padded over, his head blocking my view. I let him and I felt the familiar soaking up the knowledge and mulling over them. “This book is old.”

  “Oh really?” I separated the inside contents from the binding. “What gave it away?”

  “Not old physically. It’s old in knowledge,” Wol said.

  My fingers smoothed out a wrinkle on the book. “Wol, it doesn’t mater how old it is. I need to learn it. Did you pick up anything?”

  By now, I was starting to pick up on the finer nuances of the supernatural. Things left unsaid, things that were between gaps, and left for me to figure out. What Wol lacked in the practicality that some familiars provided, he made up for it in other less noticeable ways. Not just by being smart, but everytime I did a ritual, he could help me. Funnel my energy a little better, organize my circles, point out places when my circle was too oblong or too light. I was hoping that same ability could come in handy with the book.

  Wol put a small paw on the book. “Skip the beginning, go straight to the practicals. That’s the only way we have a chance.”

  I nodded and flipped over the pages.

  “Here is what little I know. The nameless have no fixed forms, no names, no identity. Their very existence is absence. That is what we are facing. Evocation will roll right off of them. How can one burn or freeze what is not? Transmutation? You cannot change what does not.”

  “Which is good because I’m neither of those. What about conjuring? Abjuration?”

  “That is where we stand the slightest bit of chance. Perhaps that’s why the Intellect chose you. A conjurer or an abjurer would have the best chance at capturing a nameless. Even better would be if you could team up with an enchanter.”

  I took my eyes off the book, fetching what I knew about enchanters. “They have thoughts? Feelings?”

  “Yes. To a degree.”

  I looked at Abigail.

  “I’m not a practitioner, Jain. You know that,” She said quietly, and with more than a little shame in her voice. “And I do not have enchanter talents.”

  “Right. Sorry,” I turned back to the book. “This book is an abjuration book.”

  “Specialized in hunting others,” Wol said. “It’s valuable.”

  “Yeah, I can tell,” I said. Even as I kept reading, there were signs of usage but also the feeling that this book had been treasured. Whoever owned it before me, before the Intellect Transit, had taken care of its upkeep. “You told me the key points of abjuration lies in counteracting forces.”

  “Light for darkness, water for fire.” Wol said.

  Hwari floated by, ‘Wol asks if you are comfortable with the foulness listening in.’

  Foulness?

  Hwari gave a subtle shake of her tail and a trail of ink splashed in Abigail’s direction. It was there just long enough for me to notice then faded.

  It looked like my shadow familiar had a nasty side to her when it came to Abigail. Hwari had referred to Abigail as –what was it again– Detritus, she had said. Now, she called her foulness. Most likely something about Abigail and all the different auras I saw surrounding her.

  Also, Wol had a point. I didn’t want to get in the habit of revealing knowledge out in the open like that.

  “Ok, let me read this and we can discuss more when we get there.”

  “Is there anything I can help with?” Abigail asked.

  I hesitated. “Yes. I need some materials. Can we make some stops along the way? Hardware store maybe? Home depot? A place with tools?”

  “Yes, if they’re open. Do you have a list? I can run inside and grab them.”

  Without looking at her, I reached in my bag and brought out a pen and paper. I began to take notes while reading. “I’ll make one on the way.”

  Wol had been right to skip the beginning. That had been filled with a historical introduction about Euclid, related mathematicians, practitioner-mathematicians, and how this book came to be. The author didn’t name himself, but it was clear he was also a mathematician by trade. He also hinted at repeated encounters with the Nameless. It almost sounded like he was hunting them out of obsession rather than curiosity.

  The book was complex. It delved nowhere near mysticism, or the occult. It read more like a math textbook than anything related to the practice. In fact, the first half was dedicated to the Euclid’s Elements, a book I’d only heard about it in passing in freshman year geometry class.

  It wasn’t until I finished reading about Euclid’s fifth postulate that I finally got to even the briefest mention of Eldritch beings.

  This was where the author’s notes started getting funky.

  According to him, Eldritch beings weren’t absence of reason or destruction personified as most people –Wol and the Intellect included– made them out to be. That was how I’d been picturing it too. Instead, it was the opposite. They were knowledge and reason, an overabundance of it on a scale so large that the human mind simply could not comprehend it.

  Wol and the others had been wrong. They weren't absence or mindless chaos. On the contrary, eldritch beings were the personification of logic, knowledge, and reason. They didn’t draw people to madness out of malice or some evil intent. They were neither good nor evil. They simply were.

  The metaphysical weight of the absolute certainty of the infinitely stretching cosmos and relative possibilities that were birthed every second was a physical manifestation which birthed madness on a scale that the human mind simply could not bear. People were scared not because they were afraid of getting hurt; it was fear of incomprehensibility brought on by the sheer incapability to understand. Epistemic horror came from knowing too much but not understanding exactly what that knowledge meant, and how it related to us as human beings. To even use the term human was incorrect. That meant the universe centered around anthropocentric definitions but that couldn’t be further from the truth. On the epic scale of karmic redistribution, humans were no different than ants and they were no different from gods, –just as humans simply knew so much that they could crush an ant underfoot and not feel guilty, that’s what we were to the old ones. The egotistical humans could try their best to reason, to beg, to plead for the elongated suffering of their prolonged existence but it would fall on uncaring ears. We were simply not worth the effort, and that was enough cause for psyche-shattering dread. We weren’t being hurt because the universe hated us, we were simply hurt because the Elder Gods were and are and would continue to be. Morality, biology, philosophy, reason; we were but insects and the fact that these beings even deigned to bless our fragile layer of reality was–

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  Someone said something.

  Drool was creeping out of my mouth and pooled into a puddle on The Execution of Euclidean Elements on Eldritch Ensnaring & Exorcisms.

  “Jain!” Wol snapped.

  “Huh?”

  “Close the book, Jain.” He said.

  I looked down onto the author’s rambling, closing it.

  –weren’t nameless, lower lifeforms simply couldn’t comprehend the higher-level of language that they used. So labels had to be used in their stead, translated into a crude combination of vowels, consonants that made up the thing we called syllables. Just by drawing close to the sophistication of their name, the human mind would literally implode into a babbling mass of nonsense. Cthulu, Azathoth; the vastness of their name defied the theories that humans so prided themselves on. Humans were wrong on that note as well, what haunted our world wasn’t the beings themselves. It was their footprints, shades, droplets of existence, even less, that had been left behind when they gazed over us in the process of looking at a diferent direction. They’d never looked at us, we were simply in the way and they’d seen us. That was enough to–

  Hwari’s tail appeared and blotted out my vision.

  “Get the book away from him. Now.” Wol yowled, his claws drawing blood from my arm.

  “Huh?”

  It took me a second to understand what was happening as Hwari’s smudges winked out of existence.

  The last thing I remember was looking down at the book in my lap. Instead, I was clutching the book to my face so hard that my arms were shaking. Wol was on my right arm, claws fully drawn and leaving sharp stinging cuts all over; he’d shredded the shirt to rags. Abigail was on my left, less drawn in physically, but there was no mistaking the fear in her trembling pupils, the type people get when you meet someone crazy on the subway. The unpredictability, the sense that this person was a ticking time bomb and could do something insane at any moment– that’s what Abigail was showing.

  “Jain, close the book. Please.” Abigail said.

  I closed my eyes. My head was pounding. “Ok, I’m going to close it.”

  Something wet dripped down my chin. More drool.

  It took effort to clasp the book closed. My fingers rigid, locked into claws. I rubbed them on my thighs to smooth them out.

  No one spoke.

  The limo stopped. We were in a parking lot.

  “I know you don’t have a list. Do you know what you might–”

  “Tape,” I said shakily, “Uh, paint if they have. A brush. A small one, not a big one. Actually get me both.” I closed my eyes. They hurt. “Maybe a compass set? And one of those things that measures how even something is.”

  “A level,” She said. “I’ll be back.”

  Abigail left the car.

  “Practitioner,” Wol began.

  I held up a hand. “I know. I know. But I don’t think it’s that bad.”

  I didn’t know cats could frown, but Wol somehow did. “How so?”

  “I have a plan.”

  Wol groaned.

  I scowled, both because of the splitting headache and Wol's response. “There’s also something else. I think there’s a high chance we’re not actually dealing with an eldritch creature.”

  Wol didn’t reply for about a minute. He made some choking sounds first, then finally articulated it into, “Explain.”

  “What the Intellect Transit and the Wickerman said. The Intellect Transit said her children disappeared and the corpse that they did fetch, was infected with a similar sort of madness. Wickermen said his men, what did he call them again? Embers. The Embers were extinguished,” the words came out in a rush, the dots connecting into lines and the lines turning to angles and stretching indefinitely. Every word hurt my head, but I ignored it. The more I looked at the imaginary shapes, the better I felt. “It doesn’t line up with what the book says. Eldritch creatures don’t do that. They cause madness. They don’t just outright kill.”

  My feline familiar looked at my face, then at the book, then back at me again. “You got this from the book?”

  “No. I’m guessing,” I said proudly. “But I’m really good at studying.”

  Wol groaned again and looked at Hwari. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

  ‘You, Wol. You willingly volunteered.’

  Before I could ask what that meant, Wol changed the topic. “Practitioner, I feel inclined to tell you that you are risking our lives on guesswork.”

  “Don’t say guesswork like it’s bad. We humans call it hypothesis and theory. Say it with me. Hypothesis,” I said.

  “Hypothesis. Theory,” Wol repeated.

  “See? Doesn’t it make you feel better?”

  “No,” He said blithely.

  “Party pooper,” I muttered and grabbed the book absently.

  “Hwari. Please,” Wol said, alarmed.

  Hwari glided over soundlessly and smeared ink all over the cover of the book, blocking it from view.

  “I wasn’t going to open it,” I took off my jacket and wrapped up the book. “We’re going to lock this up in the RV the first chance we get. Speaking of which, you guys still haven’t been to the RV yet.”

  “We’ve been occupied,” Wol said. “Practitioner, we have to be ready for the chance that you are wrong.”

  “I don’t think I’m wrong. Because the Wickerman’s boytoys should have turned up somewhere as a raving lunatic,” I had a thought. “How long have I been reading?”

  “About half an hour,” Wol said.

  It hadn’t felt that long. It felt longer. Way longer.

  “I think, whatever it is we’re going to find, it’s going to have some sort of eldritch influence on it. I think whatever is there went mad. It might have been benign, it might have been malign. It could have been a ghost, a spirit, or maybe even a creature,” I listed out the reasons, “So yes, it’ll be dangerous. But I also don’t think it’s as dangerous as we first thought it was going to be.”

  “Then we’ve read the book for nothing,” Wol said. “Risked your sanity for nothing.”

  “Not so,” I muttered, “If whatever thing that’s there has been infected by eldritch madness, it’s likely going to be susceptible to the sealing circles that the book laid out. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have asked Abigail to grab me those things.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Wol muttered.

  Abigail came back with a big brown paper bag. A few years ago, a lot of states banned plastic bags. Now we use eco-friendly bags. But I also heard that recycling is a scam anyways and more than 90% of recyclables end up in the dump. I don’t know what to believe these days.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It was no problem. Are you feeling better?” She asked.

  “Yeah,” I looked inside the bag and found things I hadn’t asked for. A small saw, a hammer, and even a flashlight. Right, I kept forgetting I didn’t have darkvision anymore.

  Once again, the limo hummed to life and began our trek through the evening.

  “So, I’ve been meaning to ask,” I began, “How come you’re helping me?”

  Abigail looked out the window, then smiled at me. “I do not know what you mean.”

  “From what I can see, the whole supernatural thing is about keeping your word. Or atleast, the letter of your word. Some people keep the intent of it. But I don’t think Assad or Valstein asked you to be my errandboy –er, girl. They just told you to give me a ride, didn’t they?”

  “Technically, to accompany you to the destination. The car belongs to Assad,” She said.

  “So again, why are you going above and beyond?”

  Abigail looked at me. “Do you really not know?”

  “Guessing is different than knowing.”

  “I thought it was hypothesizing,” Wol grumbled.

  Hwari joined in. ‘Theorizing.’

  I ignored them. “So, why are you helping me?”

  Abigail sighed. “Simple. Whatever happens after this trial, there will be a rebalancing of powers. Favors, deals, debts will exchange hands as it always does. I’m hoping that when the time comes, you’ll remember me, and that I had lent a small helping hand.”

  “Ok, so you’re going to ask me for a favor sometime?”

  “One day, yes. Now? While you smell of smoke, bathroom, with madness lingering between your eyes? No.” She said.

  I’d been suspicious of Abigail’s intentions but having it out in the open made me feel better. “Ok, I feel better now. So, where are we heading?”

  She smiled. “Upper west side. Hell’s Kitchen.”

  Hell, of course it was.

  Science, Magic, and Mayhem!