Wednesday returned to her room after a sequence of classes she found thoroughly unworthy of her time, her patience noticeably thinner.
She stopped at the door. It was open — not fully, but enough.
Enid would be in the cafeteria at this hour, which meant the room should have been empty.
Wednesday pushed the door open and stepped inside, scanning before she crossed the threshold.
Nothing appeared disturbed — beds in place, objects arranged as she'd left them. The kind of normalcy that either meant nothing had happened, or that whoever had been here knew how to leave no trace.
She went to her desk and opened the drawer, her hand moving straight to where she'd placed the key she found from the murder house.
The space was empty.
She closed the drawer slowly. "It seems that thing has moved on again," she said, her tone unchanged. "But why does it need a key."
"A key means a lock. So it isn't wandering — it's going somewhere specific."
***
On the road out of Jericho, Ethan walked back toward Nevermore, Thing resting on his shoulder, both of them taking advantage of the rare quiet.
"I really wanted to spend more time there," Ethan said, stretching his neck slightly. "That place was heaven compared to most of the things we deal with daily."
Thing tapped in agreement.
Ahead of them, a car moved along the road.
Normal.
Then it wasn't.
The vehicle jerked sharply, its tires screeching as it turned too hard, too fast, the front aligning directly with Ethan like it had locked onto him.
The engine roared as it accelerated, the speed climbing unnaturally for that short distance, the car committing fully to the collision.
Ethan didn't step aside.
The impact came hard.
Metal slammed into him, the front of the car collapsing inward on contact, the hood crumpling like thin sheet under pressure, the windshield cracking in a web before bursting outward.
The rear of the car lifted slightly from the force, the entire frame jolting as the engine screamed and then choked.
Ethan didn't move.
The car had hit him—
And stopped.
He stood there, unmoved, as the wreck settled around him, the heat from the engine rising, the smell of burnt rubber and metal filling the air.
Thing tightened slightly on his shoulder.
Ethan glanced down at the crushed front, then toward the driver through the broken glass, his expression flat.
"…you could've just asked."
Ethan frowned, because nothing about this lined up — not the way the car turned, not the way it accelerated straight at him, not even the impact itself.
For a second he wondered if this was some idiot who didn't know how to drive, or someone completely out of their mind.
He grabbed the crushed front and pushed it off himself, metal scraping as it shifted, then leaned toward the shattered windshield to look inside, expecting to see the driver slumped over or at least reacting.
The seat was empty.
No one behind the wheel.
He leaned in a bit more, checking again — he was certain he'd seen someone, a figure holding the steering wheel right before impact.
Then his gaze dropped.
At his feet, just below the driver's side door, something wet had spread across the ground, dark and thick. When he focused on it, the shape stopped being unclear.
A pile of organs. Not placed. Not intact. Just there, like whatever had been sitting in that seat had been reduced to that and nothing else.
Ethan straightened slowly, the last of the confusion leaving his face as the situation settled into something worse than a simple accident.
"Argh— what the hell—"
Ethan jumped back, eyes still on the pile, mind already running through it. Did the accident do this? Is that even possible? That fast?
The thought didn't finish.
A sharp crack from somewhere under the chassis, then the fireball hit — and in the half-second before the flames spread, Ethan caught it: the back seat, packed wall to wall with gasoline cans.
Not an accident.
A trap.
The car went up all at once, fire rolling outward in every direction, and Ethan was already inside it — the heat pressing flat against his skin without burning through, the light violent and total around him.
At the treeline, half-hidden between the trunks, Barry Dort stood watching with his hands in his pockets and a smile that hadn't moved since this started.
Then the fire shifted.
It spun — slow at first, then faster, pulling inward like a tornado finding its axis — and a pair of red glowing eyes opened inside it, staring straight through the treeline at Barry Dort. A voice came from somewhere behind the light.
"Vice principal." Ethan stepped forward, the flames still rotating around him. "Did you just try to kill one of your own students?"
Barry Dort flinched.
Then his body did something wrong — his spine bending the other way, hands dropping to the ground, limbs pulling tight against himself as he crawled backward up the trunk of the tree like a spider climbing a wall, fast and completely silent.
Ethan watched him go, eyes tracking the movement without blinking.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "That answers that."
Possessed. No question.
A voice crawled out of Barry Dort's throat — low and wet, nothing like his own.
"This body is quite good." It tilted his head, tendons pulling at an angle that looked painful. "Compared to the little girl before… this is a considerable upgrade."
"But even that isn't enough to save you."
Ethan snapped his fingers.
A cross made of blood materialized and drove itself into the trunk — short, sharp points punching deep into the bark — but Barry Dort was already gone, dropping from the branch and landing clean on the next tree over, hands and feet gripping the wood without effort.
"Fighting is meaningless." The voice came from a different angle now, higher up. "To kill you, one requires Holy power. Which you lack."
Ethan looked up at him.
"Funny." He tilted his head slightly. "Because last time I remember, you were the one running away with your tail between your ass."
***
A/N: It's decided—the next world will be .
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