Today is my birthday!! An excellent day to support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Thank you for reading my funny story. Have a great my birthday.

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[Transcript]

        “There you are, Miss Zarei,” came the whispery hiss of Clayview Middle School’s least-liked librarian. “Where have you been, you naughty, naughty girl?”

        Devilora Demonelle DuNacht curled from the darkness of the doorframe, slinking into view to stand between June and her prey. The shadows clung to Devilora’s silhouette like cobwebs. Clayview’s desert dusk went cold, eerie and autumnal in her suffocating presence. 

        June blinked in speechless surprise. There, as plain as night, flowing from this woman’s shoulders, was a swirling plume of—

        Her focus joined Peter’s as the pair watched a startled Mina go rigid with anxiety. She didn’t dare look down or look away from Miss DuNacht, and so her wide eyes wavered like a spider on a string, dangling between fear and the risk of disrespect.

        “I, I, I—I got lost, and—” Mina began to stammer. She tugged at the hem of her shirt and cast a nervous glance at June.

        “Don’t lie to me, young lady,” Miss DuNacht said, trying on a sugarcoated smile. Mina snapped back to attention and the face of her tormentor. “The other girls have already returned and told the tale.”

        “It’s—it’s not true!” Mina sputtered. “They’re lying! They—”

        “Tut tut!” Miss DuNacht interrupted, holding up a sharp finger to silence her. “I didn’t even tell you what they told me, Miss Zarei! And yet the first words from your naughty lips accuse them of deception.” She shook her head. “This need to run away, to run and hide, to shift the blame onto your classmates... it stems from guilt, you know. You’ll never be at peace, young lady, until you face the punishment you know that you are due.”

        June felt anger spark inside the furnace of her chest.

        “It’s not guilt. You’re scaring her,” she said. June cocked her head sideways to match the crooked angle of the sneering woman’s slouch. “Your punishment’s the problem if sweet kids like her are lying to avoid it.”

        Mina and DuNacht both slowly turned to face June, equally dumbstruck by her sudden interruption. Mina had gone pale with fear, the librarian with condescending shock at June’s audacity.

        “She didn’t do anything wrong,” June insisted. Peter Puckett gulped behind her, nodding nervously to back her up.

        “...Unlike the rest of this school’s softhearted staff, I’m not fooled by these cunning little children and their cloying bids for sympathy. I know their wicked tricks and secrets like they were my own, you see,” the librarian sneered. None of her chosen students had anything left to hide from her. She’d made her nest in their nightmares, donned the mask of lesser fears she had devoured from within. She’d dreamt their dreams, and they were dark. That was why she had selected them as candidates. “Excuse me, then, if I’m reluctant to accept a stranger’s affidavit on the subject of their character.” Devilora scoffed, scanning June from head to toe with deep distaste. “Especially some half-dressed minx who greets her elders with a scowl.”

        June gasped in gobsmacked offense.

        “HUH?! What kind of skirt-measuring convent crap—” June stopped short before she said worse swears in front of an innocent child, realized this was part of her own prudish programming, but swiftly made the right call in deciding she had better ways to stand up to a scolding puritan tyrant than teaching Mina every single curse word in one sentence. “The scowl is more than earned! How can you talk like that at all, let alone in earshot of a kid who’s gonna take that trash to heart?? Weren’t you ever a girl getting blamed for ORIGINAL SIN just for existing?” June gestured at her own flattering outfit, fuming with feisty indignance. “Didn’t you ever have CURVES worth SHOWIN’ OFF, you rude old rag?!”

        Fauxbia’s grin spread ear-to-ear, the last curve she possessed besides the deep slope of her spine. True fury was a rare delicacy these days; she’d gone unchallenged in her humble Clayview hunting ground for years. She was going to enjoy picking this woman’s fears apart like scrumptious strands of sinew. Human fools, however proud, were all defenseless when they strayed from the mundane. Just beyond the treeline of normality, the Witch was waiting in her web for her next meal.

        Mina’s jaw had dropped in sync with her spectacles, which had slipped from the bridge of her nose, carried downstream by cold sweat. June had exchanged little more than a few sentences with DuNacht—they hadn’t even learned each other’s names—and she was already confronting her without a hint of fear. This June woman had a death wish. She had no idea who she was dealing with.

        No, thought Mina, dismissing her scorn with a shake of her head. This was the courage that came with remove and adulthood; what did a glamorous drifter, all beauty and fire, have to fear from a crooked librarian? Mina wanted desperately to grow up just like her without delay, to come out clean and normal and take flight to somewhere far away from Clayview. Why did time have to move so much slower for her? In her haste, and its sloth, she was coming out wrong. She could feel her wings, shriveled and bent on her back. By the time she emerged, she’d be stuck where she stood. There was no one like her who could fly.

        “Some people grow up, Wendy, darling,” sneered DuNacht, “though clearly some ticks cling to Neverland to get their fill of its debauchery. As much as it would seem that you belong in middle school, young lady, I would guess that you’ve outgrown your welcome here... even if dear Peter Dustpan disagrees.” Devilora’s glowing eyes whipped from June to the janitor beside her. “Always trailing filth across these halls. Mina here is not the only youth in need of past-due punishment.”

        June’s pulse revved to pounding rhythm, and her blood ran molten hot.

        “I’m Peter Puckett,” said Peter Puckett, kindly correcting the librarian’s misnomer. June’s name wasn’t Wendy, either. Given her age and the heat of the desert, DuNacht’s brain lapse gave him pause; Peter briefly considered splashing her with a little bit of mop slop to cool her down, but realized that was rude and maybe might have made her melt if she was like some sort of wicked witch or something.

        “Yes, yes. Mr. Bucket. You can understand an old woman’s confusion, mixing up one empty tool en route to nowhere but the landfill for another. I’ll be sure to get it right on your pink slip.”

        “I don’t think you can fire me?” You could never be too sure. Peter had been fired from his last job by a customer who’d paid his boss ten bucks to downsize while his daughter watched for edutainment purposes.

        “As for you,” hissed Devilora, craning back to squint at June, “I would suggest that you vacate the premises before the police arrive, for I intend to call them momentarily. I can only speculate that you would face more charges than just trespassing, should they arrest a vagrant of your libertine variety.”

        June stared back at Fauxbia in steely silence. Something in her gaze burnt Devilora’s grin away. Was it her imagination, or was it getting hot in here, despite the slowly setting sun?

        “Miss Zarei,” the Fear Witch snapped, and Mina jumped as though she’d been awoken from a dream. “Get back to your desk. You and your fellow ne’er-do-wells have far more work to do before detention ends.”

        “Y-yes, Miss DuNacht!” Mina stammered, scuttling past her, back into the Witch’s shadowed lair. She cast one final pleading look at June before the darkness of the library consumed her.

        As Devilora cast a snarling smirk at June and turned to leave, a searing shackle closed around her wrist: June’s iron grip. Fauxbia stopped, and felt the pain, a distant curiosity, then matched her captor’s sharp gaze as an equal for the first time since they’d met.

        “Who. ARE. You?” asked the Fear Witch. Her voice was sweet and dripping with a famished captivation, twinned across two whispers coming unspooled from their braid.

        “That’s my line,” said Agent Summers.
         
        “Is. IT. Now?” Fauxbia hissed. Stolen powers activated in the bowels of her malevolence. She probed the woman’s thoughts, started to weave her wards and intricate illusions—

        June’s grasp tightened, and Devilora flinched at last. These worthless brittle bones! Fauxbia thought. She couldn’t wait to be rid of them once and for all—

        “Whatever you are, you’ve gotten sloppy.” Dark gray spectral energy swirled from June’s shoulders like the smoke of a snuffed matchstick... but her anger, her fuel, was only just beginning to catch flame. “You’ve been streaming yours from the start like you’ve got nothing to be scared of,” June said, nodding towards Fauxbia’s pitch black aura. Her voice dropped to a threatening resonance. “Don’t you think you’re being just a little bit too reckless?”

        Fauxbia leaned close enough to press her rage-contorted brow against her challenger’s. Her grimace flared, revealing far too many rows of sharpened teeth.

        “THAT’S. MY. LINE,” the Fear Witch echoed, and the air began to crackle with the tension between them. 

        A worried Peter Puckett loomed into the clashing pair’s peripheral, and the pressure snapped at once, two jousting riders parting undefeated. Fauxbia whirled and slammed the doors of her lair shut behind her. Their fight had been deferred, if only until just after the sun set.

        June’s chest rose and fell with burning anger. For a moment, Peter was certain that she was about to kick down the doors of the library.

        “...She really will call the cops,” Peter warned her, apologetic on behalf of the reception she’d received. He loved his hometown, but Devilora was an emblematic nexus of its flaws. Clayview was an enduring dead end branch in the evolutionary tree of small town Somewhere, and its worst denizens were just as insular and hateful as its best were warm and welcoming. He wanted to take June to its brightest cliffs and corners, to show her something breathtaking—the riverbed and all its fossils, the sunset view from the plateau. In somewhere beautiful like that, she’d fit right in. “The police are slow to show up, but they’re bored and overzealous. Really bad with women, too. Total scumbag cowboy types. This one time, my garage band was doing an impromptu soundtrack for the silent movies at the drive-in—y’know, without permission or whatever, from the next lot over, and—” Peter shook his head and mopped his face a little bit to keep his focus. “I, uh. I can ditch work if you need a ride, June. Did you, er... wanna get out of here?”

        “No,” said June. She wasn’t going anywhere. She needed a plan. She needed to stop needing a plan. She needed to—

        “...Are you okay?” asked Peter. If he didn’t know better, he would have guessed that her balled fists had started smoking, as if June held a searing ember that had begun to burn her skin. Was it his imagination, or had June just winced in pain?

        “Who cares?” June answered without thinking. That poor kid wasn’t okay. That was all that mattered.

        “I... do?” Peter admitted, and hoped that would be worth at least a little bit of something.

        June blinked, and looked at him, and laughed, and let her hands go slack.

        “Be honest,” she said, dusting ash off on her jeans. “It’s because I’m a half-dressed minx, isn’t it?”

        Peter thought for a few too many moments and pushed his slipping glasses back in place.

        “I mean that doesn’t detract,” he confessed, then made a sound like a sputtering lawnmower when June slapped him hard on the back.

        “It BETTER NOT!” June laughed with renewed cheer, and took Peter by the hand to drag him with her as she beelined for an exit. “C’mon, Puckett! Let’s go commit more crimes before the cops get here!”