𝔀𝓸𝓾𝓵𝓭 𝓲 𝓵𝓲𝓮 𝓽𝓸 𝔂𝓸𝓾?| 𝓪𝓵𝓮𝓬 𝓵𝓲𝓰𝓱𝓽𝔀𝓸𝓸𝓭

Chapter Two

(sotc *song of the chapter* is high enough by k.flay happy reading)

Ness stared at the mirror and allowed a grin to spread over her face. The nymphs had done a good job at making her look like mundie, that was for sure.They'd dressed her in a pair of blue straight jeans and a pair of Docmarten boots, with a blue tank top that said "Angel" in cotton candy print. She laughed a little to herself at the irony. They'd used a black bucket hat to disguise her ears and left her blonde hair loose down her back. When she looked closer, she could see the dangly toadstool earrings they had chosen peeping through her hair. The nymphs looked expectantly at her. She nodded and smiled her thanks before turning to leave, patting her wallet full of mundie money to reassure herself. She waved her goodbye to the nymphs as she left and let the cool breeze of the mundane world wash over her as she left the court forever.

Ness breathed in the fumed filled air of the Brooklyn as she strolled down the street munching on a panini that she'd bought from one of the delis. The noise of the cabs and the pollution in the air didn't put her off in the slightest. The cheese was too good to be distracted from.

The Queen had told her to look for a warlock called Magnus Bane, and had given her his address. He was the High Warlock of Brooklyn, and he had connections the Queen had said, so that's where she was headed now. She finished off her panini and went to throw the wrapper in the bin. The wind had other plans.

A gust of wind blew the paper down a side street and Ness sighed irritably. She hated when things were inconvenient and chasing a panini wrapper down a side street on a Saturday evening was certainly up there on the list-of-things-that-are-really-inconvenient-and-pointless, but she was a Seelie, and Seelie's didn't litter, so she sighed and started down after it.

She turned down the dimly lit street, which was littered with bins and graced by the sound of drunken laughter coming from a nearby bar. It smelled foul, but she supposed that anywhere like this would be used for less savoury parts of your night on the town, so she ignored it and tread cautiously down the after her paper, which was resting against a trashcan. A feeling that something was off was sending cold chills down her spine, but she brushed if off, thinking that being new to the place would make you paranoid, right? She reached the paper and plucked it off the ground between her index finger and her thumb and wrinkled her nose at the stench. She stopped short and sniffed again, a cold feeling of dread creeping up on her. That wasn't a human. That was-

Demon blood.

Ness whipped her head around, and pulled her lip-gloss out of her pocket, flicking out the blade on the end. She glanced around and froze in shock and horror when she saw what was behind her.

The demon was crouched on the ground like a frog, facing away from Ness. It was about as big as a ten-year-old boy, but its head was massively out of proportion with the rest of its body. Its skin looked as though it were made of papier-mache, and it came away from the rotting skeleton in strips that flapped in the evening breeze. The skin that was sticking to the skeleton was painfully thin, as though the demon were a starving child, and its fingernails were at least five inches long, scratching the ground to make a sickening beat as the demon groaned, as if it were humming. Its voice sounded nasally and scratchy, like nails on a blackboard, and it made high pitched tuneless noises that could have been a song if this had been a horror movie. It stopped humming and whipped its head around to face her. It was the most horrifying thing that Ness had ever seen.

It had a massive forehead and big white bulging eyes, dilated by ugly black pupils. It had no eyelids and no lips, and its teeth were rotting and decaying, and were as long as its nails. It grinded the horrific teeth together as its face stretched into a grin, the cheeks cracking at the edges. It let out a screechy laugh that echoed through the streets and left Ness' ears ringing, and only then did she allow herself to scream.