“How do you know if your fingernails are growing abnormally fast?” Wrath wonders, glancing down at my hand the next morning.

  I examine my fingernails, not sure what he’s seeing but now worrying that there’s something wrong with my hands. I study them carefully, both hands, until I see the expression on his face from the corner of my eye. “You’re messing with me,” I say flatly.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says distractedly, eyes still staring down at my hands.

  “Stop it,” I snap, before ducking my hands under the table and out of sight. Wrath looks undisturbed and goes back to looking at nothing in particular. The moment I reach up to grab my coffee and take another sip, his eyes immediately go back to my hands until I hide them away again.

  I eventually huff and hide my hands away inside the sleeves of my hoodie but Wrath’s eyes still follow the spot where my hands are. “Stop looking at my fingernails.”

  “I’m not,” he says, eyes still trained on my sleeves. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  We’re saved by the ringing of the doorbell. “Oh, Winter’s stopping by,” Wrath says, immediately going back to normal and acting as though he wasn’t just being a menace. I roll my eyes and head for the front door and open it, to reveal Winter. Today it’s already extremely warm outside, and she’s in something like a baby doll dress, black and lacy, but with a pair of black tights on underneath it and a matching pair of lace gloves on her hands.

  “No parasol?” I ask in lieu of greeting.

  “It’s in the car,” she says without missing a beat. “Are you ready?”

  “Ready?”

  “I thought you’d want to go back to the maul. Since class in cancelled today.”

  “Wait, class in cancelled?”

  “Don’t you read the school’s doomscroll?”

  HHU has a ticker along the bottom of the main portal which lists the mos\t recent news you need to know. Students started calling it the doomscroll a few years ago, and the name stuck. I hadn’t checked it today, but as soon as I pull it up on my phone I see what she’s talking about. Gravechurch has cancelled Recycling and the Living Dead due to attending a conference at Miskatonic U.

  I’m surprised there’s not more backlash to that sort of announcement. Miskatonic U is considered a rival school, though HHU is obviously superior in all ways. When their faculty lose their minds, it ends with excrement-scrawled rants across tenured offices and assistants murdered with their fingers never to be seen again. When our faculty disappear, sometimes we never even know what happened to them, but at least it’s done quietly and discretely. When they unleash ancient curses on purloined artifacts, they anger seaside cults and create a national incident. When we unleash ancient curses, it’s from locally grown artifacts and managed quietly in our own backyard.

  “Wow, he skips us to go to the enemy?”

  Winter shrugs, though her mouth gives a moue of displeasure. “Are they really the enemy, though? Don’t tell me you buy all that school rivalry stuff.”

  “Of course not, but the restless masses? They definitely buy into it.” I point out, to which she nods and concedes the point.

  “Fair,” she murmurs.

  “I’m just surprised there’s not more of an outcry about it.”

  “To be fair, we probably wouldn’t have even known if Freddie was still here. Gravechurch kept him around so that he could live his life and Freddie could keep the class schedule moving. We probably wouldn’t have even met him until closer to finals.”

  “Also a good point.” I reconsider what my day looks like with this new information. I don’t have any other classes today, which Winter obviously knows already. “I went back yesterday. The poltergeist or whatever it is made an appearance while I was wandering through the stock room.”

  “Maulie again?” she asks with interest.

  I shake my head. “Different experience. The room became an endless loop and I was stuck wandering for awhile. Then, right before it stopped messing with me, I heard her voice again. She said something about Ghastly’s grief. I still don’t think it’s actually her ghost, but I think it confirmed that Ghastly’s grief is what drew whatever it was here.”

  “It could be some other poltergeist, couldn’t it? Another angry ghost that latched onto his emotions?”

  I consider that for a minute. “I mean, that’s possible, but to be able to show itself as Maulie? To look and sound like her? Most ghosts can’t do anything like that. They’re too stuck to their own identity. They can’t let go of it. That’s why they’re ghosts in the first place.”

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Winter absorbs that information. “You really know a lot more about this stuff than you let on.”

  I look at her in surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t really speak up in class, but you obviously know as much as Gravechurch, probably.”

  “About zombies?”

  “About the supernatural.”

  “Of course I do. It’s part of my major.”

  Her eyes latch onto the topic. “What’s your major again?” I have a feeling I just walked into a trap. She was waiting for this. Maybe not at this exact moment, but I think she’s been waiting for the topic to come up for awhile.

  “Why?” I know the question is evasive, but I desperately need a moment to think about how to respond.

  “I’m just curious. Friends share that kind of information. I’m undeclared because I still don’t know if my major should have anything to do with my sight. I could do a fashion major, but that almost feels basic at this point.” She blinks innocently at me. “Your turn.”

  “Pox, no!” Wrath’s voice calls from the kitchen. Without missing a beat I take off in that direction, and Winter follows close behind. When we get to the kitchen, Pox has the electric cord to the Diabolos coffee machine in its “mouth” and is trying to gnaw against the plastic coating.

  I snatch him away from the cord, and he looks up at me with a widening expression of his clock face…well, face. “What are you doing?” I ask, though I soften my tone with the little Doom Clock. He looks up at me as though he has no idea what’s going on, and then glances over where Wrath is hovering.

  “Did you let him out?” I do not soften my voice the same way with Wrath.

  The demon’s shoulders hunch and he ducks his head a bit. “I thought he was fine playing over here by himself.”

  I open one of the drawers and pull free a loose screw and roll it on the table next to Wrath, who eagerly scoops it up and hugs it protectively against his chest.

  “Who’s this?” Winter asks, coming into the room even before she sees who we’re talking to/about. Her eyes catch sight of Pox and they go wider than normal. She stops in place, and I can see her brain stop, try to reformat, and try to start again. It stalls.

  “This is Pox,” I say carefully. “He’s a Doom Clock that we found a couple of weeks ago. I kind of adopted him.”

  “What’s a Doom Clock?” is her first question, and I both find it so endearing that someone doesn’t know everything about the supernatural and surprised that I have to explain it. Both Wrath and Nico knew what a Doom Clock was before I brought Pox out of the basement, and I’ve never had to explain it to anyone else.

  “It’a series of art pieces that I think captured an apocalypse inside them. As far as I know, this is the only one that’s alive. The others all exist in museums and art galleries or places like that. I think they’re supposed to reflect how close the human race is to extinction.”

  Wrath snorts. “The cockroaches of the mortal realm? You’re nowhere close to extinction.”

  “I thought cockroaches were the cockroaches of the mortal realm?” I ask Wrath out of confusion.

  “At best they’re the cephalopods.”

  “The what?” Winter interjects.

  Wrath lets out the most exhausted sigh. “Squids.”

  “Oh,” she blinks, “you could have just said that.”

  “And you could just learn the proper names of things, Miss I See Everything in the Dark.”

  I pick Pox back up, with his new treasure, and head out of the kitchen and up into my room to put him in the little playpen area in my bedroom. I close the door behind me so that he can escape and hide his new screw wherever he has the rest of them. I haven’t found the hiding place yet, but I know it exists and it’s somewhere out of the way where he thinks I won’t find it.

  He watches me suspiciously while I close the door, peaking at him through the closing gap. I know he’s waiting until I’m gone before he makes a move for his hiding spot, and I give him the space and freedom to do so. Letting him think he’s getting one over on me is something that Wrath used to do with me when I was a little kid. It always felt so good when I could “trick” him, and I want Pox to feel that same joy.

  Besides, I wouldn’t want him to ever think I would steal his treasures.

  I head back downstairs to find Winter and Wrath settled at the kitchen table, a bowl of corn chips spaced between them. They look to be in the midst of a conversation that cuts off the moment I walk into the room. Wrath, in particular, looks guilty, while Winter looks as effortless and ethereal as always.

  “Did I interrupt something?” I ask, clearly having interrupted something.

  “Noooo,” they both offer, liars the pair of them. They don’t even have the nerve to be embarrassed at the lie. Or the fact that their singsong tone immediately gives them away.

  “The least you two could do is make an effort. This is just embarrassing.” I’ve already had a cup of coffee, but I walk over to the Diabolos, and surprisingly it starts brewing me another cup without me having to do anything. Or say anything. Or press any buttons. It’s almost…friendly.

  Wrath also looks at the coffee maker in surprise, but wisely neither of us says anything. I wait patiently for my coffee to brew, expecting a smell of sewage, a fart sound, the sound of a clearing throat and an incoming spittoon. Nothing. There’s just a perfectly brewed cup of coffee waiting for me.

  I take it reverently, nearly missing Winter’s question out of my shock. The coffee maker has never been nice to me. Not once. It’s never even given me the time of day before. It makes an effort to hide the time, actually, and display a raised middle finger instead.

  “Wrath and I were just agreeing to keep an eye on you at the maul,” Winter says. “You still want to go, right?”

  I nod automatically, then process what she’s just said. “What do you mean ‘keep an eye on me?’ I don’t need anyone to keep an eye on me.”

  They share another long look. I narrow my eyes at the two of them. “Stop…this.” I wave a hand in their direction. “Whatever it is that you’re doing.”

  The coffee maker is being nice, Winter and Wrath are getting along. We’re one ominous portent away from a very bad day.

  “Let’s go to the maul,” I say sourly.