Jester woke up surprised to be alive. Chained, beaten, bent but unbroken. 

His supernatural eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness. His legs and arms were held by silver shackles. They held him up against a wall. The wolf would be no help. Rebel was tied down to a table, a black cloth under her and candles formed a pentagram around her form. Their kidnappers had dressed her in a black dress with red highlights at the edges. She was sleeping and breathing softly. 

Jester reached out with his heightened senses. The wolf could not be free, but supernatural senses were a part of the man now and had been for some time. As we get older, Jester’s master liked to say, the man remains and yet the wolf grows more powerful inside him until the man and the wolf are inseparable and indistinguishable. 

“Rebel,” he whispered. “Now, would be a good time to wake up.”

No dice. She snorted a little. Rebel had been having trouble sleeping lately. Jester wondered if she would thank their captors for the chloroform and the rest. That seemed unlikely. 

Jester reached out farther. They were in the basement of an old building, from the smell of it, built with real stone and more than a century old. The air was heavy with alcohol and sweat. Couples danced above them on the ground floor. A drunk was passed out in the floor of one of the bedrooms on the second. On the third floor a young woman lay alone in a bed and wept. 

Suddenly, this seemed funny, and his face uncontrollably cracked into a houndstooth grin. 

Jester recalled what he said to Waylon when he announced he was going to visit Rebel at her University in Atlanta. 

“I need to get out of here,” Jester said. “Away from the craziness.”

“Jester,” Waylon replied. “You are a guardian of The Southern Woods, a wolf of the old kind, who hunts down predators and protects the weak. The craziness always finds you.” 

Back in his shackles Jester replied. “Screw you old man,” he said. Why did he always have to be right.  

The wolf wanted him to remember something else, how the men had busted down the door to Rebel’s dorm. They wore riot gear and shot him with tasers. 

Jester remembered being relieved, even as he faded to black, when he saw that Rebel’s roommate was in a supernatural sleep. Rebel and Jester had not even felt the spell the kidnappers had used to put the rest of the dorm down.

“Down Dog,” one of them said. 

Keep that memory close, keep it warm, let it burn hot, the wolf whispered. 

After a few hours, the party died down and single file they marched in. Their leader leaned on a cane as some of the sycophants lit up the basement with tiki torches that hung on the wall. 

“Hello Dog,” he said. “I trust you slept well.”

There were six of them, each dressed in polo shirts and slacks. KTULA embroidered on the front. Right then, Jester vowed he would never tell Waylon he had been kidnapped by frat boys on a bender. 

“Tell you what,” Jester said. “Y’all let us go and we’ll forget about the whole thing. I mean, if the dean finds out, you will all be on double secret probation.”

The leader picked up his cane and pressed a button on the side. Snikt. A knife extended out of the bottom of it. Without a word he slashed the side of Jester’s face. Then, he used the stone ground to push the blade back into place inside the cane. 

Blood ran down Jester’s cheek and into his mouth. The wolf rumbled. “So you got a plan, or are you like a yard dog, finally caught that tailgate he was chasing?” Jester asked.

The leader started to lift up his cane again when one of the others called his name. 

“Tucker, we didn’t do all this just so you could go stabby stabby on the werewolf,” he said. 

“Sean, suck my ass, broh,” Tucker replied. Then he turned to Jester. “You speak out of turn again dog, and I’ll have your eyes.”

The six of them began working and insulting each other. One painted archaic symbols on the floors and the walls. Another drilled several strips of metal waist high across Jester. Sparks bounced off the wall and bit into Jester’s legs. 

“Not any higher than that,” Tucker ordered. “She needs to see him.” 

Jester prayed softly to himself, an old chant that separates the spirit from the body. He recalled how, several years ago, Rebel had given him half a pendant to wear. She wore the other half. 

“I don’t care what happens,” she said then. “Wear this and I’ll know you and you will know me. Our hearts will always be together.”

The little pendant glowed yellow for a moment. Not enough for the frat boys to notice as they were lost in their work.  

Once his spirit was free, Jester slipped into Rebel’s subconscious. In her dream, she was back at Lady DeFuniak’s home. The school were Jester, Rebel and a host of other magickal children had studied looked less like fortress Jester remembered. It was, instead, a small collection of cottages overlooked a calm river.  

Also, The Rebel that lived inside Rebel’s mind wasn’t quite the young women Jester knew, but, instead the woman as she saw herself. A little taller, lankier and skinnier but not in a healthy way, he thought. 

She was standing in a clearing furiously brushing a canvas with a mixure of blues and greens. She was, he realized, attempting to paint a little cottage by the water.  

A version of Jester stood with her. Not the real one, but the version of him that she had created in her dream. He was taller too, but his features were jagged and almost unkind, Jester thought. 

“I want us to live in this one Jester,” she said. “It needs work but it’ll be fine, a very fine thing, when we’re done.”

“God, Rebel, here?” Rebel’s dream version of Jester said. “I don’t want to live here. I just want to travel the world over and wake up somewhere new every morning and get somewhere where it don’t matter who we are or what we’ve done.”

“Jester Earle,” Rebel said. “You gotta love yourself, be comfortable with yourself, you want to love me.”

Jester slipped down and entered the dream version of himself as Rebel leaned in to kiss him. 

“Hey, you know you’re dreaming, right?” Jester asked. To Rebel, two of them bobbed in and out of her vision. One man the dream, the other the reality. 

“Yes of course … Jester, Jester, what the hell,” Rebel said. “Get out of here.” 

“We’re in trouble Rebel,” Jester said. “I’m going but you gotta wake up, now. Get free.”

Jester retreated back to himself. The blood still flowed freely down his face. The wound should have healed by now. A silver knife, Jester realized, to go with the silver shackles. 

“So,” Jester began. “Y’all were well prepared.”

“Oh Dog, talking again,” Tucker said. 

“We’ve killed your kind plenty of times,” Sean said. 

“Shut up Sean,” Tucker said. “It breaks the oaths to tell him.”

“No it doesn’t. The dead will never tell.” 

“Oathbreaker,” Tucker said. 

“Suck it,” Sean said, making an X with his arms and pointing at his crotch. 

“The men of Kappa Tau Upsilon worship as our fathers and their fathers before us,” Sean continued. “When your kind, and hers and the others warred amongst yourself, and used us as fodder or our women as breeding stock, the old ones protected us, and we grew strong.”

“The book of KTHULAS law,” I said. “Yes, I’m familiar with it. It’s, well, bullshit.” 

“Ohhh what fun we are going to have,” Tucker giggled. “We’ll burn you and make the witch watch. And then, cut out her broken heart and build a door of blood for the emissary.”    

“You celebrate slavery and hell and call it ‘peace.’ The god you want to raise will destroy you and your families. He’ll drag you all down to outer darkness, cackling at your stupidity all the while.” 

“Who are you to judge my faith and my heritage?” Sean shouted. The others watched, clearly bemused. Although one of them stared too longingly at the blood on Jester’s cheek.

“Your heritage, human, is mud huts and outhouses,” Jester said. “Each generation is given a chance to cast off heritage and build something better. And your faith is only worthwhile if it’s in the right things. Many have cried out to the Lord when it was too late.”

“If I believe it, faith makes it so,” Sean replied. 

“If I have faith that this house is made of chocolate, how will it taste if I take a bite?” Jester said. “Will you have enough faith for a spoonful with me? Faith only matters if it’s in the right things.”

“I told you,” Tucker said. “Deadeyed cucks like him never understand the world. They sheep, think they’re wolves.” 

“Boys, this really is your last chance,” Jester said. “Set down your weapons, unshackle us and let us go.” 

“Dog, you think you can get out of those shackles?” Tucker said. “Do you know how many times we’ve done this sacrifice?”

“How many?”

“Five before you have gone to the flames in honor of the old ones,” he said, but his voice changed as he spoke. It was ancient and evil like the moon scraping the pyramids. “And you, Jester Earle, and you Rebel Grateful shall be the final sacrifice for the emissary.”

Sean grabbed a knife and walked to Jester. “More blood must be shed,” he said. 

He reached up and cut Jester’s other cheek. Jester began to pull at the chains. Maybe the wall would give way, he thought. 

“You think you can escape,” Sean said. “You still think you can stop us?”

“I’m not trying to stop you,” Jester said. “I’m trying to save your lives.”

Little bits of dust began to stir in the air. The flame on the torches bent and stretched and then finally blew out. And in the darkness, a whirlwind. 

“I want to play,” said the whirlwind. 

The words came out of Rebel’s mouth but they weren’t hers. They were bubbly and childlike, and they turned Jester’s heart to stone. 

“Rebel,” Jester screamed. “Don’t kill them. We don’t know …”

The wind took his voice away. 

Rebel’s shackles broke and she rose in the air. Her eyes glowed a sickly green. Bones suddenly began breaking and the room filled with the screams of their captors. 

“You wanted to blind him,” she said to Tucker. “Is that right?”

He floated in front her. The thing inside him tried to push back but it was too weak. Her magical energies swatted down the attack like a tiger on a wounded gazelle. 

She reached up and plucked out his eyes, first the left and then the right. 

“Rebel,” Jester said. “They’ve done the rights. If you kill them I don’t know what the consequences will be.”

The little girl shrieked and threw the boys of Kappa Tau into the wall. Then she fell to the ground with a thud. A little bit of her magic unhooked Jester’s bonds. He rushed to her and held her face in his hands. 

“You did good,” he said. 

“You’re hurt.” She touched Jester’s cheeks, her voice returned to normal. The thing with the voice of the little girl she summoned to break her free was gone. 

A small burst of magical energy wafted up from her hands to the wound on Jester’s face. It twirled and danced around the cut, but the wound didn’t bind together. 

“Silver, it’ll need stitches,” Rebel said.

Jester pulled her off the ground. In that moment, he wasn’t sure which of them was weaker. 

“Thoughts?” Jester asked. 

“I’ll bring in my coven,” she said. “Burn the magicks out of this place. What are you going to do with the men?”

“They’ve killed for their God, and now they’ll die for it.”

“Then why didn’t you just let me kill them?”

“They’ve sanctified this place,” Jester said. “If you had, it might have opened the gateway and done for them what they couldn’t do for themselves.”

“Clever wolf,” she said. 

He nodded. 

Behind the altar, the voice of a moon scraping on a pyramid rang out.  

“Clever dog,” Tucker said. “Boys, quick now, take my hand. We need a wall. No, not you Sean.” 

Tucker’s bloody hands flexed. The words he said were untranslatable. 

“What are you doing?” Sean shouted. 

One of the boys realized what was happening and tried to let go. But he couldn’t – his fate sealed. His body convulsed, his spirit left him and his flesh imploded, burned and smoked away. One by one, his brothers suffered the same fate. 

“What have you done,” Sean shrieked. 

“I needed a wall,” Tucker replied. The smoke from their bodies moved together until it solidified across the room. Tucker and Sean were on one side and Rebel and Jester were on the other. Tucker’s wall, translucent and flesh colored, separated him from Jester and Rebel, and circled around the mystikal markings on the floor.

Rebel touched it, curiously. It wailed and stretched. Blood and puss trickled out of it. 

“A soul wall,” she said. “Those boys would have been better off if I had killed them.”

“I don’t know what he’s doing but we’ve got to stop him,” Jester said. “Can you break it?”

“In time, maybe,” she replied. 

“Give this up,” Jester said. “The door is on our side. You can’t escape.”

Tucker and the thing inside of him cackled. He lifted up his cane. The knife slid out of the end of it with a quick pop of metal on metal. 

Jester let the wolf loose. It slashed at the wall, which bled but did not open. The souls of the boys who had formed it cried out in pain. 

“Evil thing,” the wolf said. 

“Yes my love,” Rebel replied. “And more evil yet to come.”

“Sean,” Tucker said. “Your turn now.” 

Pitifully, Sean began to crawl away. His body, broken by Rebel, allowed him little movement, and even if he could stand and run he had nowhere to go. 

“The spell needs a broken heart,” Tucker said. He was broken and blind but clearly being assisted by the malevolent spirit inside him. He crawled on Sean’s back, stabbing him with the cane and smashing his head into the wet, bloody concrete. He stabbed Sean again, then again, like a snake injecting venom until its prey grows still and helpless. 

Tucker cut into Sean as best he could, hacking, smashing bone and ripping into flesh with his fingers until he pulled out Sean’s heart. His legs broken, Tucker shouldn’t have been able to stand, but he crawled up the wall on his back like a crab. He scraped the heart and the blood it expelled across the wall to create a crude outine of a door. 

“Lig Ta Mak, Serve Me Now, a heart for a doorway into your realm,” Tucker called. “The price is paid, now come bring your everlasting rule to this place.”

The brick and mortar wall inside the blood door crumpled and rushed away into a starless void. The human part of Jester’s mind screamed for them to run, but the wolf wouldn’t listen. 

At first Jester couldn’t see what approached from the stars. They were black things that seemed to disappear, to be invisible to a naked eye. They had the legs of men but a mesh of tentacles where their arms should be and faces that ran from the light. 

“If they leave this place …,” Rebel said.

The wolf roared. 

“You fools,” Tucker said. “The master’s creatures will have you.” 

There were two of them, maybe three. As a group they moved past Tucker and examined the soul wall, intrigued. Then they ate it, bit by bit. 

  The wolf couldn’t understand what his senses told him. The creatures radiated coldness and they moved with the quiet of the grave. When they breached the soul wall the wolf struck and missed, and one of them wrapped his arm in its tentacle. The cold enveloped Jester’s arm which suddenly felt like dead weight. 

The wolf cut through the tentacle and backed away, hurt. Little pucker marks gashed his flesh and bone. 

Waylon would have had some totem, a bit of magic, the gun that killed the last viking or the Spear of Destiny, that would have repelled the creatures. Jester had left all that behind when he struck out to see Rebel. 

“You know, this was supposed to be my vacation,” he said. “Rebel, when I’m done, cleanse them with fire.”

“How will I know when you’re done?” she asked. 

“You’ll know.”

The wolf threw itself at one of them. Claws and fangs struck anywhere it could find flesh. The shadow creature wrapped itself around him and tried with all its might to snap the wolf’s neck. 

The wolf kept fighting, inky black bile filled its mouth with every bite, fleshly limbs fell away at every strike. It went on that way until the wolf sensed how deep it was and with one motion tore the creature in two. 

The not quite dead thing screamed. The wolf recognized it for a curse. The other two shadow creatures screamed in answer and flung themselves at him. 

Rebel blocked them with a barrier spell from her left hand and set the torn thing to fire with her right. 

“It’s okay Rebel, let them go,” Jester said. 

Together the creatures wrapped themselves around the wolf bit by bit, fingers, legs, arms. Jester began to fade away until Rebel struck one on its head with a holy fire. Its black face popped, leaving bile and gore everywhere. As it slid off Jester, the wolf bit through the flesh of the other one and ripped it apart. Rebel burned through anything left that put up a fight. 

When it was over Rebel, collapsed to the ground. 

The wolf however, was not sated. He turned its attention to Tucker and growled. 

Tucker held his silver cane aloft, the knife at the end shaking. 

“That was nothing, my master will send hundreds, thousands of those servants through my door,” Tucker screamed. “He’ll overpower you and then we’ll finally take back this mudball for my people.”

Rebel pulled herself up to her knees and then, slowly, to her feet. 

“They’ll all burn,” she said. “Until there is nothing left. Not even the memory of you and yours.” 

Inside the doorway a sound like two cold celestial bodies scraping together interrupted. 

“Your people,” it said to Tucker. “As if the master needs you. And yours. Is that what you think you have done here, little human?”

The voice rested in the back of Jester’s head, like a spider crawling and scratching inside the skull. 

“I made you a door,” Tucker said to it, like a child who hadn’t gotten what he wanted for Christmas. “Now, smite my enemies!” 

The thing that stepped through the door was shaped like a man. Well groomed and dressed although his clothes seemed to change from moment to moment. Sometimes they looked like a white suit, perfectly cut, with a sharp black pocket square. But look again and the man wore a flowing robe from ancient times.

His eyes though – or was it a her – the gender sometimes seemed to change with the clothes. Its eyes were inky black. Behind its pupils, Jester could see shapes, like bone or teeth moving in and out of view. 

The creature bent down and stared at Tucker. “Tell us more of your plans.”

Tucker’s spirit broke as all at once his expression went from something resembling consciousness to an empty void. 

And behold he saw the face of his God and discovered he was a man of unclean lips amongst a people of unclean lips, Jester thought. Rebel began to whisper an incantation. 

“Witch, you’ll have no need of that spell,” the old one said. “I have not yet come to rule. My master’s time will not be determined by such as these. Wolf, let us talk as men.”

“Do you have a name?”

“The Proclaimer, the First Sign of the New Age, the Prince Who was Promised. I have many names,” it said. “So far, in this millenium, I’ve been partial to Jeremiah.”

“We can’t let you leave. You need to go back,” Jester said. 

Magical energy cascaded around Jester and Rebel. It was not painful, instead, it felt like the kiss from a familiar lover. 

“You want me to leave?” Jeremiah said. “But what fun we could have. A wolf of the old tribes and, from what I’ve seen of you, the most powerful witch in this world.” 

And he showed it to them. His plan to walk across the world. A witch at his right hand, a wolf on his left. In his vision, the three of them tore down the foundations of the world and remade it. 

The three servants of the king. They would proclaim it to the whole earth. 

The king is coming. 

“You see,” Jeremiah said, “If they had just followed my whispers, and killed you like they were supposed to …”

“How could we have …”

“Your mind is still a linear thing, witch,” Jeremiah said. “I would have remade you, I would have dried all your tears and mended the heart he cut out of you. But come, look at this. This is the doorway he made with the wrong heart. You see it. It would never sustain. Even now, it folds in on itself.”

The wolf returned and growled. Rebel’s arms lit with magickal fire, reverberating up to her eyes and bouncing out into the air like sparks on a cigarette thrown out in the night. 

Jeremiah raised his hands in a gentle concession. 

“There is no need, my pets,” he said. “I will leave this place. Our time has not yet come.”

The remains of his creatures and Sean’s body floated back through the door. Then he raised Tucker back to himself. 

“What do you think,” he said. “Should I give him his mind back?”

Jester and Rebel stayed silent. 

Tucker returned to himself. And then began to scream. As Jeremiah sent him floating for the door, Tucker turned to Jester. 

“Help me,” he sobbed. “Don’t let him, don’t let him, merciful God, don’t let him take me.”

Jeremiah stopped and turned and stared. 

“Well wolf,” he said. “Will you fight me for this one? Would you risk your life and hers to save him?”

Rebel grabbed Jester’s hand. 

“No,” he said.

And with that, Jeremiah left them in darkness, the portal melting away behind him. 

After some time, Jester and Rebel set a small smoky fire and evacuated the building. Once they were sure everyone was out, Rebel set down the true blaze and reduced everything to ashes down, to the foundation. 

It was done and they were gone before the first fire truck arrived. 

They walked a few blocks away from the ruin and, reaching into her pocket, Rebel pulled out her phone and called an Uber. When the driver got a look at Jester’s gashed face and Rebel’s ash covered hair, he turned a whiter shade of pale. 

It was, Jester later remarked, the quietest ride the two of them had ever shared. 

* * *

Back in her dorm, Jester and Rebel collapsed into bed together and slept, unbroken and undisturbed, for a day and a night. Rebel only awoke when she felt Jester stir. 

His back was straight as a coffin and she heard him gasping for air. 

She reached out to him and waited as his breathing returned to normal. 

“Jester,” she said. “What is it that disturbs you?”

Jester stared at his hands, illuminated by a shaft of moonlight through Rebel’s open window. 

“In my mind I was back there,” Jester said. “Only this time I pushed you aside, raced to Tucker’s cane and used it to stab that thing that called itself Jeremiah in the heart. I killed it, I think, but in death it grabbed me and pulled me through to the other side. And, and I feel as though I am there with him, screaming and falling, into an eternity of darkness and pain.”

“Love of my soul,” Rebel replied. “Let not your heart be troubled.” 

“That isn’t what got to me,” Jester said. “Some part of me believes that my dream  actually happened. And that I am there, even now, falling in that dark realm. And all of this is an imaginary construct my mind created to protect me from that place. 

‘And if that’s so,” Jester’s voice was rising now. “If all of this is just my mind’s way of protecting myself … how would I ever know if this is real?”

Rebel pulled Jester down and kissed him. She held him to herself until the tense muscles in his body finally relented and they both went slowly and stubbornly back to sleep. 

As he drifted off into the dark again, Jester realized that Rebel never answered his question.