Chapter One: Target Practice

ONE TARGET PRACTICE
The Ghost-Hunter’s Companion is an ancient book from a time forgotten by history. It is also so rare that only one copy exists in the known world, stashed in the labyrinthine library at Castle Motteberg, high up on Mount Moth.

Presuming you survive the trek through the Dreadwald—a dank, dismal, and deadly forest, as vicious as it is vast—a terrible trial will then await you. To read the book you must brave magical warding spells, a telekinetic baby, an enchanted suit of armor, and the single most evil, most horrendously bloodthirsty VAMPIRE there has ever been, among other horrors.

This is a pity, because the book contains expert advice on an oddly specific but worthwhile topic: HOW TO KILL A GHOST. It includes even more information than The Novice Hunter’s Murder Manual, a popular title found in all good libraries today (which is to say, every library).

Ghosts, according to the Companion, are some of the most difficult creatures to kill. They cannot be staked like vampires or burned up in sunlight. Nor can a ghost be slain by silver bullets like a werewolf or cut down by iron or steel like the fey folk. Not only this, though they themselves cannot be touched, a powerful ghost is undeterred from interacting with our world. Ghostly tactics may include dropping a heavy book on your head, throwing you off a cliff, or squashing you flat against the ceiling. Few have successfully banished a ghost. Even fewer live to tell the tale.

Leo the Vampire—a natural enemy of ghostkind—already had quite the story. The question was: How long would she survive to tell it?

Dropping to her knees, Leo ducked behind a lopsided tree stump, snow soaking through to her skin. The impact made her wooden right leg groan beneath her, but she was too busy listening out to pay it any mind. All around her, the Dreadwald forest was abuzz with familiar sounds of the night. Winter insects whirred sleepily in the thorny brush. Pines stretched and sighed. Malevolent laughter approached, winding through the branches overhead—

“Leeeeoooo! Where, oh where, did you go?”

Eerie light emanated from the canopy, casting a sickly glow. Leo hissed and crouched lower, mindful of her wild hair poking out.

It was here, wasn’t it? This was where Leo had left what she was looking for. It was definitely this stump; she had hopped over the River Mothling to the north, turned left at the clawed-up beech tree, and then snuck beneath the bowed willow. Her wayfinding in the forest was second to none and she would need it to escape unscathed. Leo scrabbled in the dirt with both hands, reaching through a hole in the bark to nudge aside the mushrooms that grew inside.

“Are you… HERE?” A branch shuddered directly above her. Leo’s skin prickled at the sight of pale toes drifting through the pine needles. “Oh, come ON now—you know you can’t hide from me!”

The ghost-killing ritual—good for spirits, specters, phantoms, wraiths, and all manner of apparitions—is complex. It demands the total destruction of the bond between the ghost and the world of the Living. Leo knew this ritual very well, having learned every component by heart. The list had been stuck in her head for weeks, replaying over and over in her mind.

To kill a ghost, you needed salt. You also needed sulfur. And smoke. If they weren’t difficult enough to come by, there was also twice-blessed water and the glow of a sunrise—good luck getting ahold of those. Finally, perhaps trickiest of all, you needed a weapon of intent: something to actually wield. Leo gritted her teeth and stretched, reaching deeper into the stump….

Yes!

Her questing fingertips found no weapon of intent. Nor was there salt, sulfur, or indeed any of the ghost-killing items. Rather, there was the thick coil of rope she had previously stashed, its rough fibers stiff with frost. Leo hurriedly unwound it. She could feel her black heart pulsing, strong enough that her usually dormant vampiric blood began to rush in her ears….

“HEY!” she shouted. A thrill knifed through her as the pale light drew closer. “Who said anything about hiding?”

Throwing her weight backward, Leo tugged the rope with all her strength.

A shrub rustled violently. From the tangle of twigs sprang three circular targets. Each had been cut from wood, then crudely painted with white rings and a red dot in the center for—

“BULL’S-EYE!” someone yelled. There was an almighty CRACK as the first target burst into splinters. “Ha! Too easy!” The second target was swiftly snapped in two; the broken half ricocheted off a tree trunk and clattered out of sight.

Zooming overhead, brandishing a shimmering poker like a sword, was a girl who looked about Leo’s age—she could have been no older than perhaps eleven or twelve. Unlike Leo, however, she was floating in mid-air. Her long colorless hair fanned outward as if she were underwater. Her ratty nightgown was cast in the same peculiar translucent white color as her body. She could be made of misty glass all the way down to her bare toes.

The ghost.

Perhaps Leo should have been afraid. The Companion detailed more than three hundred different ways unlucky souls had fallen victim to ghost attacks. They were alphabetically listed from ABSORB’d BY A GHOSTLY FOG to ZIPP’d AWAY THROUGH AN OPEN WINDOWE AND UNTO THE AWAITING JAWS OF THE NIGHT.

But…

“Hey! You missed one!” Leo called out, hopping up on top of the stump. The ghost girl wheeled around, a young tree bending as she swept past it.

Before Leo could react, the ghost sailed straight through her in a freezing rush.

“I know, I know!” the ghost’s voice snapped in Leo’s ears. “Give me a chance!” She jabbed with the poker. A ragged circle was punched through the center of the third target. The deadly prong gleamed sharp through the hole.

A shower of splinters rained down on Leo’s head.

“There!” the ghost exclaimed haughtily. She flew down, brushing her hair away from her face and adjusting the see-through hairband she wore.

Jumping down from her perch, Leo’s feet hit the icy ground. Inside her scruffy winter boots, one foot had gray flesh and clawed toes. The other was a heavy prosthetic, whittled from oak. Thin and spindly and easily six feet tall, Leo loomed over her ghostly companion as she drew herself up to her full height. She grinned her needle-toothed grin. Her black eyes, deep and dark and unsettling, curved happily.

Leo and Minna made an odd pair. Vampires and ghosts, despite both being technically Undead, were as different as night and day. There was a reason the two factions had been SWORN ENEMIES for as long as unliving memory, ever since the very first vampire-ghost war.

The vampires needed the blood of the Living to survive… and an unfortunate side effect of the vampiric diet was that the Living tended to die. The ghosts blamed the vampires for their deaths. The vampires thought the ghosts should stop complaining and continue about their business. And so it had been forever, back and forth, locked into a never-ending cycle of hatred. In some corners of the world, it was now a sport for each side to hunt their enemy, inflicting harm with increasingly creative cruelty.

A vampire and a ghost being friends was unheard of. Worse still, it went against everything Leo’s family stood for. The Von Mottebergs were a proud noble clan. Their ancestry could be traced back to the first aristocratic vampires. Their ferocity was unmatched, as was their cunning. They had the Ghost-Hunter’s Companion in their library, after all.

“Your aim is getting scary, Minna!” Leo said cheerily, brushing shards of the broken target from her tattered cape.

The ghost called Minna tossed her head. “What do you mean, getting scary? I’ve been a great shot for ages! You haven’t been paying attention!” She paused to push the sharp end of the poker through her own shoulder, sheathing it through her body.

“Bleurgh…” Leo looked away. Despite all the times she had seen Minna do this, it still made her feel squiggly inside. “I-I was just trying to say, you’re clearly improving! I’m sure that was dead-center on all of them this time!”

“I appreciate your help with my training, Leo—I do—but I don’t need your approval,” Minna said. Her chubby cheeks and the gap between her two front teeth didn’t make her expression any less stern. “This is a… a ghost thing, after all. You wouldn’t really understand. All you have to do is keep the targets coming. Or, I don’t know, throw me some rocks again, so I can practice making my hands solid.”

Leo pinched the bridge of her nose, feeling a headache coming on.

Though she considered Minna to be her most precious friend, Minna remained a mystery to Leo in many ways. Her temper was one such conundrum, as it rivaled even the moodiest vampire Leo knew: her sister, Emmeline. On top of this, for weeks now Minna had insisted on meeting in the forest at night for ghostly combat practice, for reasons she wouldn’t explain. If only Leo could see into her brain and spy on what she was thinking….

Last autumn, only a few months ago, both of their unlives had been turned upside down. In fact, Minna had LOST HER LIFE entirely, in what Leo now privately referred to as “the incident.”

It hadn’t been Leo’s fault, not really, but she still felt guilty. On the night Leo turned one hundred and eleven years old, she had stalked the human town of Otto’s End, seeking her prey on her very first Hunt. A fire had broken out at the orphanage, St. Frieda’s Home for Unfortunate Children. Two humans had needlessly died in the process, their precious blood wasted. One of the humans was a Living girl called Minna, now not-so-Living but just as fierce in personality.

And the other human who lost their life that night, well…

The thought of HIM was like losing your footing in the dark and hurtling down into an endless pit, your screams echoing as you tumble forever.

The Orphanmaster. Their fight with Minna’s former guardian had been the peril of all perils, a potential disaster epic enough to rock the Dreadwald down to its very roots. Leo had almost died (again) and more than once at that. The lives of Minna’s human friends had been on the line and so had the fate of the forest. When you went through something like that together, you should trust each other completely, Leo was sure.

“Leo? Did you hear me?” Minna was asking, peering curiously up at her. “Oh, don’t sulk! You’ve been an enormous help, you have. But it’s hard for me! You’ll never know what it’s like to be…” She gestured vaguely up and down her own translucent body. “Like this.”

“You’re strong, Minna,” Leo said earnestly. “And fast.”

“Not strong or fast enough…,” Minna muttered.

Not strong or fast enough for what? For who? Leo wanted to ask, despite knowing that Minna wouldn’t tell. She’d already tried.

“H-hey, there’s still hours left until sunrise,” Leo pointed out instead, to distract Minna from her brooding. She hopped nimbly up onto a fallen tree, making her cape billow dramatically behind her. Catching rocks was nice, but she knew what was better. She held out a clawed hand in a “come on, then!” sort of gesture.

“Think you can take me one more time, Minnow?”

Whatever ghostly growing pains Minna had, there was one thing that never failed to cheer her up: sticking her poker through the interfering vampire who had (however inadvertently) killed her not so long ago.

“I told you not to call me ‘Minnow’!” Minna snapped. “And I think the question is,” she added, with a gappy grin, “can YOU take ME?”

Minna’s hand flew to her poker. There was a swoosh past Leo’s cheek as she dipped to one side in the nick of time—she bent low to avoid the swift backswing, dropping into a crouch. An inch from the top of her head, Minna swiped again, slashing with her weapon. Its hooked tip gleamed and whirled in Minna’s hand, slicing back and forth with lightweight ease.

Minna was quick, but so was Leo. She rolled forward beneath Minna’s dangling legs, coming up to deflect the next solid blow with her claws. Leo showed her fangs in victory. On top of building hideouts and researching the flora and fauna of the Dreadwald, sparring was now one of her favorite hobbies. It made her feel powerful. Invincible. As though even if he came back, she would be ready to—

“Vaaaampire…”

Leo froze, her ears twitching. Hot and cold flashed up her spine to make her scalp itch, before the freezing bite of the poker through her belly jolted her back to reality. She blinked hard.

She thought… She thought she heard…

“Wow, haven’t got you like THAT in a while!” Minna said smugly, nodding at where the poker felt like a shard of ice between Leo’s ribs. The sight of it might have been shocking, sunk to the handle in Leo’s stomach and angling up through her most vital organs—but when Minna withdrew the weapon, it came away harmlessly. Leo’s shirt was intact, as was her gray skin. All that was left was a residual chill.

Minna tossed her hair snootily. “You’re going to have to be quicker if you’re ever attacked by the REAL DEAL! Not every ghost is as forgiving as… Leo? Are you listening?”

Leo was listening indeed, but she was listening out. She pressed a claw to her own mouth, flapping her other hand to tell Minna to keep it down.

“What’s up with you? What’s wrong?” Minna hissed, now somewhere between annoyed and spooked.

“I thought I… heard something, just now.”

“VAMPIRE!” a voice wailed again, winding through the trees. The log beneath Leo’s feet shook as the sound vibrated through its hollow center. Leaves rustled on a foreboding wind.

“Okay,” Minna said, now gripping the poker tight. “THAT’s definitely something.”

“You hear it too?” Leo’s eyes, with their pupils that were usually catlike slits, were now completely black. She scanned the shadowy trees around them, studying every shape in the darkness. This was the hour of the Undead—no Living person was roaming the forest at night. It was a time only for vampires and ghosts and creatures of the dark….

While a thousand possibilities jostled for position in her brain, a looming, hulking shadow was slowly cast across her mind’s eye. Leo swallowed. “What if it’s…? What if he’s…?”

“He’s dead, Leo. The Orphanmaster is dead.”

“S-so are we?”

“You know what I mean!” Even through her unease, Minna still managed to be surly. “We defeated him. We banished him, with the sulfur and smoke and everything. There’s no coming back from wherever he is—you know that! He’s deader than me, and I’m extremely dead.”

It was the first time Minna had spoken about the Orphanmaster in the months since his defeat. Hearing his name out loud made Leo’s skin crawl.

“R-right!” She braced her feet on the fallen tree. Her wooden leg creaked, the knee joint locking into place and ready to jump. “This is just… a mystery voice!” She huffed out a high nervous laugh. “Happens all the time! Perhaps it’s friendl—”

A great gust of freezing air rushed from beneath them, blasting out of either end of the hollow log. The force of it blew a hole in the weak bark directly beneath Leo’s feet. Her cape flew up and caught around her head, blinding her. She felt for a moment as though something was closing in around her, like the hand of a giant….

“Let’s be going, then!” she heard Minna squeak.

Wriggling her head free of the raggedy fabric, Leo leapt from the log. She didn’t chance a look back, but her vampiric senses were zinging and she could feel a presence close, TOO CLOSE, behind her. Her feet connected with the frozen earth and she was away.

Panic seized Leo as she ran. She stumbled, dodging tree trunks and crashing through the shrubbery, thorns stinging through the sleeves of her shirt. The Dreadwald swelled and morphed in the dark, familiar pathways tangling up in a confusing knot. It was only made worse by the snow, which smothered every shape. Minna flew alongside Leo, sailing through the foliage.

“What do we do?” Leo cried, finally glancing back at where the pines were bowing, bending out of the way of the invisible force barreling toward them. Orphanmaster or not, Leo was now certain it was a ghost. All the signs were there: disembodied voice, bitter wind, horrible chill….

One ghost was enough for Leo. Other than Minna—maybe Minna’s parents at a push—Leo would be grateful if she never saw another ever again. She had encountered a grand total of zero ghosts in her eleven years as a human. After that, her century as a vampire had also been ghost-free.

She wasn’t precisely sure what had changed, but lately she had become some kind of ghost magnet.

“Can you talk to it?” Leo shouted. “Ask it what it wants! WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

There was a long mournful creak from behind them, followed by a CRASH that rattled Leo’s fangs.

Leo gasped. “That was a tree! It’s going to pull down the whole Dreadwald!”

“You should go home!” Minna called back, sounding far too breathless for someone without the need of lungs. The point of her poker jabbed up at the sky; the three-pronged shape of Mount Moth was emerging beyond the thick canopy. “We’ll split up to confuse it!”

“But—” Leo’s wooden leg creaked, and she almost fell on her face, barely catching herself in time. “But, Minna, what about you?”

“Leo. GO HOME. I’ll be fine. I’ll come and find you as the sun’s coming up!”

“I…”

“In your bedroom at sunrise! Don’t you dare be late! I know what you’re like!” And with that final scolding, Minna veered away in a swooping arc, the tips of her toes the last part of her to vanish into the darkness.