It was the thirty-third of October, and the blood-red moon had once again resolutely refused to set. Emmy gave it a cursory glance upward as she locked the front door, trying not to stare too long--it was waxing well past gibbous now, fuller than full, and she'd heard rumors about what happened to people who lost themselves looking at the stain it spread across the sky. She put her hood up over her short dark hair and cast her eyes down at the ground, making her way to the bus stop as fast as she could without running. Only two days since Halloween, and she'd already picked up a whole bunch of new habits.

The jack o'lanterns cackled and catcalled to her as she walked past her neighbors' porches, each one carved into a different hideous face that glowed with a light no earthly candle could produce. Emmy wanted to run up to them and kick each and every last one of those misshapen smiles in, but she'd heard too many rumors about the nasty effects of pumpkin bites to risk it. Besides, even if she smashed every single jack o'lantern on the block, it still wouldn't make November come any quicker. Whatever had fucked them over on October 31 this year had fucked them good and hard, and Emmy wasn't about to fix it with a little bit of petty vandalism.

Emmy thought back to that morning, laughing bitterly to herself as she realized she'd almost thought of remembering it 'as if it were yesterday'. It was yesterday when everyone woke up to what they thought was an amusing little glitch in their smartphones' software, a mistake some programmer must have made in the date and time settings that left every phone and computer on Earth insisting it was October 32nd. But then those last few people who still used good old-fashioned paper calendars tore off the old sheet to reveal the new, and saw to their confusion that the dates matched. It wasn't November 1st. It might never be November 1st now. And nobody knew why.

And Emmy still had to go to work. That was fucking bullshit, right? If there was ever going to be an upside to endless night and cosmic horror and flocks of bats so thick and vast they blotted out the stars, surely it would have to be a couple of days off work, right? But Emmy's landlord was still collecting rent, and her boss was still expecting her to show up at 9 AM sharp even if the sun didn't come up, so here she was. Avoiding scarecrows and wearing Grandma's old crucifix and drowning out the cackles of jack o'lanterns with the help of her wireless earbuds.

She picked up her pace a little as she approached the house on the corner, risking a little trot as she approached the creaking Gothic mansion that was bursting out of the suburban rambler like a parasitic insect emerging from its host. The cities were supposed to be safer than the suburbs, but not everyone could afford to pack up and move, and anyway Emmy didn't think anywhere would be safe if this kept up more than a few days. She'd seen plenty of haunted high-rise movies and books about spooky hotels. People had written horror stories for every space human beings inhabited, and now they were all coming true.

Not that Emmy thought it was the end of the world or anything. Not exactly, at least. Oh, it was unquestionably shitty--she'd done her share of doomscrolling on social media, trying to avoid the posts written in wriggling, glowing sigils that made her eyes hurt to look at, and she knew all about the parade of tragedies that marked what CNN was calling 'The Long Halloween'. Plenty of people were getting got by gangs of zombies, or finding out the hard way that not every gargoyle was just a statue anymore. But people were adapting. Abnormal was becoming the new normal.

Take Emmy for instance. Only two days into the new supernatural order, and she'd already figured out how to fend off the grasping hands that emerged from the cemetery that the Mitchells had put up as a Halloween decoration. She'd already learned that wolfsbane was the same thing as aconite, and that you could get it in tablet form with your Prime subscription for same day delivery. She knew what to do when her eyes started bleeding, and she knew what not to do when the pop-up windows on her browser promised her dread arcane power if she would only click on the convenient link. She was picking up the new rules of this strange, altered reality, and so was everyone else. Everyone who survived at least.

Of course... not everyone was adapting. Some people were just changing. Emmy felt a thick lump of despair settle into the pit of her stomach as she glanced up from the sidewalk and saw a group of five young women standing between her and the bus stop. She recognized a couple of them, even if they were wearing leather miniskirts and belly tees that made them look like they'd gotten their outfits from the costume designer on 'The Craft'. Kelly Saunderson, Belle Maitland... their skin was ashen pale now, and their eyes were jet black, but it was still them. Sort of.

Of course Emmy knew about the people who'd decided to make deals with the various supernatural entities that offered potent and immediate benefits in exchange for long-term possession of certain intangible assets. The President's state of emergency declaration had made soul trafficking illegal, but it wasn't exactly easy to enforce from whatever bunker he was holding his press conferences from. Plenty of folks were throwing in their lot with fae, demons, Great Old Ones, anyone who could promise them safety and security in the brave new world they found themselves in. And it looked like Kelly and Belle had decided to form their own little coven of witch bitches and throw their weight around.

Not that they were real witches, Emmy grumbled resentfully in the privacy of her own head. Not that she was bitter about being a practicing Wiccan ever since freaking high school, enduring all the nasty taunts from the girls on the cheerleading squad who kept asking how Black Philip was doing, only to discover that absolutely none of the spells she tried did anything despite living in a universe where magic was demonstrably and provably real. Apparently the only thing that counted for shit in the endless October was who you knew, not what you knew, and Kelly and her friends had more occult power in their little fingers than Emmy did in her whole body right now.

Fucking typical. Even after the goddamn sorcerous Apocalypse, it was all about making the right friends. Emmy half-expected to get to work and find out that Belle Maitland had gotten that supervisor position Emmy put in for last week.

The other half of her didn't expect to get to work at all. The members of the coven were all looking at Emmy now, their dark cold stares pressing against her body with a physical force that left her shivering from even a half a block away. She couldn't cross the street to avoid them, not when feral, driverless garbage trucks roamed the neighborhood every morning looking for anything they could scoop into their bottomless maws. And retreating back around the corner, even if it didn't mean losing her job and her place and winding up homeless underneath the pitiless gaze of the blood-red moon, didn't seem like a viable option. Not when they were floating toward Emmy faster than she could run.

With no other options, she tried to appeal to their humanity. "Hi Kelly," she mumbled anxiously, giving a nervous little half-wave that she hoped looked casual. "Haven't seen you in a couple of weeks. How's school? Still thinking about majoring in English?" Kelly was a few years younger than Emmy--not quite young enough to babysit, not quite old enough to share any formative life experiences with--but she had an older sister that Emmy hung out with sometimes. She was hoping that maybe pulling on a few of those social strings might convince Kelly to see her as a person and not a victim.

Kelly smiled. All the other women smiled in perfect unison with her, like puppets yoked to a single rod. "I'm dropping out, actually," she said. The other four members of the coven mouthed the words silently in sync with her speech, and Emmy suddenly understood. It wasn't a group of five people, it was a group of Kelly and her hollowed-out spare bodies. The itch to run became a yammering demand in the back of Emmy's head. "I think I've found something more fulfilling."

Emmy forced herself to give a wan, weak smile back. Her fingers dug into her pockets, looking for the silver paperweight she carried everywhere now. Silver wasn't a universal weapon, but it hurt a lot of the things that were wandering around these days. "That's, um, great," she muttered, taking a step to the left as if the path weren't blocked by floating bodies. "Um, listen, I'd love to stay and chat, but I have to get to work, so maybe--"

"No. You don't." Emmy felt the intangible wave of icy heat wash over her, stilling her fingers and rooting her feet to the ground. "You don't have to do anything they tell you, Emmy, not anymore. We're living in a whole new world now, and all that boring stuff like school and work and rent and promotions are just the husk of the old one that hasn't finished drying up and blowing away yet." She'd plucked those thoughts from Emmy's mind, the frozen woman realized. She'd reached in and sifted through Emmy's brain and found everything Emmy was thinking, and she'd done it without Emmy even noticing she was in there. Stark terror began to bubble up in the back of her head like sticky, noxious sewage.

And then, just as suddenly, it drained away, leaving Emmy with a placid calm that she absolutely understood to be artificial and just as absolutely understood to be too powerful to resist. "I've always liked you, Emmy," Kelly cooed, reaching out with ten hands at once to caress the helpless woman's face. "I mean really liked you, y'know?" Emmy almost laughed at the irony of it. She'd apparently succeeded in making Kelly see her as something other than a victim, but girlfriend material wasn't exactly the alternative she had in mind.

"Don't think of it as being my girlfriend," Kelly purred, once again casually plucking the thought from Emmy's mind without any apparent effort. "Think of it more like being my new pet." The terror fluttered madly against the spell holding it back from Emmy's consciousness, but she could only feel the faintest hints of its existence. Everything else was docile, almost blissful indifference to anything but the hands and fingers that were slowly caressing their way down her body. She felt a warm, tingly surge of pleasure pass through her, like she'd eaten an edible for breakfast and it was just now kicking in.

"We're not really equals, after all," Kelly continued, her borrowed bodies squeezing and groping Emmy's body with a touch so potently erotic that it took the helpless woman a few moments to realize that her clothing had simply evaporated away, leaving her naked in the chilly October morning. Emmy didn't feel anything but warmth, though. Warmth and a pleasure so intense that her knees shook with the force of it. "Not that I really have equals anymore--Belle and the others found that out the hard way--but you're really more like a plaything than a person to me now. You understand, don't you?"

Emmy nodded, her head bobbing vacantly up and down as her nervous smile widened into something almost beatific in its devotion. She wondered absently whether Kelly had reached into her mind again and convinced her to agree with everything she was told, or whether the witch was simply moving her chin up and down telekinetically... but it didn't matter. They were equally irresistible. She was a small, weak, helpless mote in the face of Kelly's power, and it was just lucky for Emmy that Kelly had decided to show mercy of a sort.

They lifted her up then, carrying her with nothing but the power of Kelly's magic as they floated up over the trees and power lines toward the Saunderson residence. Other things flew past them, things with wings the size of Buicks and things that careened through the air on honest-to-god broomsticks, but none of them trifled with the coven and Emmy instinctively understood that this was going to be the way of it for everyone from now on. They would either have to seek power for themselves, or accept the patronage of those who already possessed it. And if Kelly ran into another witch who wanted to test their strength against hers, a single entity would inevitably emerge as the victor. With plenty of extra bodies to contain their will.

They descended into the Saunderson house, now looking more like a McCastle than the  McMansion Emmy was familiar with, and Kelly brought them to rest in a tower that contained an absolutely massive king-sized bed. "I think I'm going to make you cum until you pass out," the witch said, almost casually, and Emmy quickly discovered that she didn't even mean they were going to have sex--orgasm after orgasm blossomed like fireworks inside her head, each one more intense than the last, until finally Emmy could no longer contain the pleasure and her mind collapsed into insensate bliss. The closest thing she had to a final thought was a wordless surge of adoration for her new owner, something akin to what she imagined a cat might feel while being petted, and a sense of profound gratitude that she was finally safe... or as safe as anyone could be in these bizarre, troubled times.

THE END