We Have a Good Old-Fashioned Witch Burning. (It’s Us. We’re the Witches.)
In the demigod business, we have a technical term for situations like this. We call them bad.
I collapsed on the porch. The ghosts rushed in, ready to feast.
Fortunately, there was Annabeth. (That sentence describes a lot of my life, actually.) She lunged, snatched the fallen torch before the flames could gutter out completely, and positioned herself between me and the dead.
“Get back!” she yelled. “Begone!”
She crossed the torches in front of her, the way Hecate had done in Eudora’s waterspout. The spirits crashed against the edge of the torchlight and reeled backward, hissing and howling, but they didn’t disappear. They raged through the front yard, rattling the fence, then zipped up and down Gramercy Park West with such force they shook streetlamps and peeled flagstones off
the sidewalk.
Annabeth muttered, “Why aren’t they going away?”
(That sentence also describes a lot of my life.) I was too worn-out to respond. Maybe we’d messed things up by passing the torches between us. I tried to get up, but my chest hurt. My arms were limp spaghetti. Nope valiantly tried to help by tugging at the hem of my jeans, but it was no use.
Grover, Hecuba, and Gale rushed to join us on the porch, because that’s where all the cool kids who didn’t want to get eaten by ghouls were.
“Not good, not good, not good,” Grover fretted. “What do we do?”
Gale barked and ran inside the mansion, though this seemed like a bad time for a chicken-carcass break. Hecuba stood her ground, growling at the blizzard of ghosts.
“We’re going to die!” said the lion door knocker. “We’ll be fine!” said the horse.
“I’m gonna stick with STROOPWAFELS!” said the dog.
For the moment, the torchlight seemed to be keeping the dead at bay.
They tore up the street and ripped limbs off the trees in the park in
frustration, but the manse itself appeared to be within the protective radius of the blue fire.
We needed to keep it that way. Whatever else happened, we couldn’t let the ghosts wreck the mansion and undo all our hard work. Okay, all their hard work, but still …
“These are getting heavy.” Annabeth’s arms shook under the weight of the torches. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep the ghosts out.”
Gale reemerged from the mansion, dragging a bandolier of little glass vials behind her. She dropped them at Grover’s feet and chittered urgently.
“She says you both need these!” Grover fumbled with the vials, pulled the stopper from one, and dribbled the contents into my mouth. I worried I might turn into Octopus Boy again, develop beast breath, or go full flaming purple armadillo, but I wasn’t in any shape to protest. I gulped it down. A surge of warmth washed through my organs.
I recognized the sensation. It was nectar—the drink of the gods. The flavor varied every time I tried it. Usually, the taste reminded me of some favorite form of comfort food. This time … it was candy corn.
The taste brought me back to kindergarten. I was trick-or-treating with my mom in our apartment building. Everybody was giving out little bags of candy corn …. I guess because there’d been a sale at Duane Reade. I got such a stomachache I swore I’d never eat the stuff again.
It was a simple memory, but it was enough to clear my head. My arms tingled. I struggled to my feet. While Grover poured nectar into Annabeth’s mouth, I managed to pull out Riptide and uncap the blade without decapitating myself.
I still felt awful. It would’ve taken another twenty or thirty vials to get me back to full strength, but I knew that wasn’t possible. In small amounts,
ambrosia and nectar did wonders for demigods. In larger amounts, they could make you spontaneously combust, which didn’t fit in with my healthy lifestyle.
“Thanks, Grover, Gale.” I jabbed my blade at the nearest ghost, who was getting a little too close to the edge of the torchlight. “How’s everybody feeling?”
“Fine,” Grover said. “Just an average night, you know.”
“Squeak!” said Gale.
The dogs snarled in their respective sizes: extra large and child’s medium.
“I’m better.” Annabeth waved the torches at the spirit mob. “Not great, but I’ll manage.”
Years ago, when she’d been Atlas’s prisoner, she’d held up the sky for much longer than I had. I knew she had next-level stamina. Still, I didn’t want her carrying those torches any longer than she had to. Oh, wait …
carrying a torch for someone. Wasn’t that an old-fashioned way to say you loved somebody? That was kind of sweet.
Stop that! I told myself. Focus!
“Maybe if we keep holding them off,” I suggested, “they’ll eventually get bored and drift away?”
Annabeth frowned. “Until when, morning? It just got dark.” “I’m trying to be optimistic here.”
The ghosts attacked. In wave after wave, they threw themselves at the circle of blue light. Each time one got close to the flames, the spirit disintegrated, only to re-form at the far end of the yard. Great, they had multiple lives.
Why didn’t I have multiple lives?
So far, the torches were keeping them at bay, but the ghosts kept trying.
With each assault, Annabeth flinched and swayed like she was weathering a gauntlet of punches.
Hecuba barked.
“She says the lead ghost is holding them together,” Grover told us. “They won’t leave before they’ve broken through.”
“So we’re in a standoff,” I said.
“Time is not on my side,” Annabeth warned. The torchlight was already starting to dim and cool. Her hair picked up streaks of gray from the light, like she was aging before my eyes.
“What did we ever do to them?” I grumbled. “Besides making them work on Halloween night? What do they want?”
I was immediately sorry I’d asked.
A howl rose from the mob. Frost crackled across Hecate’s garden. The ranks of ghosts parted, and Stuyvesant limped forward, so dark and solid now he might have been sketched with a smudge stick.
Your heretic souls, his voice whispered in my mind. You must burn. The witch’s house must burn.
“Oh, yeah?” Grover called back. “Well, joke’s on you, Pete. Some of us don’t have souls! I’ll just reincarnate … probably as a pumpkin patch if I die on Halloween, but that’s not so bad!”
For some reason, this failed to discourage Stuyvesant. He drew his coal-dust rapier. Witches must burn.
He really seemed stuck on that point. I was starting to think that raising a
dude from the 1600s to rebuild the manse might not have been the best plan.
“This isn’t just any witch’s house,” I said. “This place belongs to Hecate, the goddess of magic. You’re messing with the wrong real estate!”
The ghosts shrieked in outrage, nearly rupturing my eardrums. The spirits swirled together into a massive funnel cloud of ice and dust, and then splintered off in every direction—wisps of ghostly gray racing into the night. Even Peg-Leg Pete disappeared.
The yard fell silent except for the crackling of the torches. “You—you think they gave up?” I asked.
Somewhere down the block, a scream cut through the night. A car honked. Metal crunched against metal.
“Nope,” Annabeth guessed. “Nope!” barked Nope.
When the ghosts came back, they were wearing upgrades.
Some shambled along in piles of garbage that formed vaguely human shells of plastic bags, aluminum cans, tattered blankets, and fast-food boxes. They would have gotten solid grades on SODNYC’s “recycled clothing” project. Other ghouls had apparently ripped the costumes off unsuspecting trick-or- treaters. I spotted characters from Star Wars, some superheroes, pretty princesses, and a whole bunch of Mickey and Minnie Mouses like they were on their way to work the crowds at Times Square. It was horrifying.
Even worse, trailing behind the trash- and costume-ghosts were actual living people. They moved like they had forgotten how to operate their own bodies.
Parents and kids lurched along, hissing in Dutch. They were joined by taxi drivers and bike-delivery guys … and in the back of the horde, a police officer mounted on a black horse. The cop wore the face of a jack-o’-
lantern—like he had ripped it off an actual pumpkin and attached it to his face, which raised his ax-murderer vibe by a factor of twenty. His eyes glowed silver. In his hand was a black baton that kept flickering and shifting form, sometimes elongating into a rapier. Stuyvesant himself … now with a badge.
We know whose house this is, he said. My mother must pay for her pagan crimes.
I glanced at Annabeth. “Peter Stuyvesant … son of Hecate?” “That wasn’t in the assigned reading,” Grover complained.
Annabeth muttered a curse. “I didn’t know. Will the torchlight keep out physical bodies, do you think?”
“GRRRRR,” said Hecuba, which I took to mean I wouldn’t bet your candy corn on it.
“Guard the doors,” I told Annabeth. “The rest of us will take down as many as we can.”
I charged into battle, followed by Grover, two hellhounds, and an angry polecat
