I woke up to the sun prying my eyelids apart like it had a personal grudge, warmth spilling over every inch of me. All of me. A headache pulsed behind my temples, the kind that suggested poor decisions had been made—possibly by a version of me I did not currently respect.

I blinked, squinted, and looked down.

Naked.

Correction. Mostly naked. I was still wearing my hat. My trilby. The good one. The one with the luck charm sewn into the inside band, the one that used to belong to my dad. So. Silver linings. Minimal, felt-based silver linings.

I carefully adjusted it to cover what dignity I had left.

The air smelled… fresh. Not city fresh. Country fresh. The kind of fresh that comes with a lingering undertone of cow manure whether you invited it or not. That narrowed things down geographically in a big way.

Corn stalks surrounded me on all sides, tall and whispering, their leaves rustling in the breeze like they were having a meeting about me. I groaned, pushed myself upright, and immediately regretted it as my skull tried to split into parallel timelines.

Okay. Inventory.

No clothes. No boots. No coat. No wand, rod, focus, or familiar. That last one bothered me the most.

“Bertram?” I croaked.

The corn did not answer. Rude.

I sat there, hat clutched low, and asked myself the most important question a wizard can ask under these circumstances:

How did I end up naked, unconscious, in a cornfield in rural Ontario?

Follow-up question: Is this the afterlife, and if so, why is it agricultural?

No. No, I couldn’t be dead.

Dead men don’t get headaches. They don’t wake up with a growing, sinking certainty that the previous night has stolen their dignity, their clothes, and—far more unforgivably—their raven familiar.

I sucked in a breath and straightened as best I could, joints protesting like they’d unionized overnight.

“Bertram!” I shouted, louder this time.

My voice came out hoarse, scraping my throat raw and hammering my skull in retaliation. Apparently my head wasn’t the only part of me that had opinions about existing right now.

“Bert!” I tried again, wincing as my own volume punished me.

A flutter of black feathers cut through the corn. Something landed near my bare feet with deliberate timing. I looked down.

Bertram stared up at me.

He looked immaculate. Feathers glossy. Eyes sharp. Posture smug in that uniquely corvid way that suggested he had not suffered at all and found this deeply amusing.

He clacked his beak—once, twice—the prelude to commentary.

“I told you not to go drinking with faeries,” he said, voice dripping with vindication. “Salt and iron. Simple. Efficient. But nooo, you had to be diplomatic. Had to ‘redirect the party somewhere less urban.’”

I groaned and rubbed my face, immediately regretting it as my temples throbbed harder.

“I remember,” I muttered.

And unfortunately, I did.

Faerie folk in a city park. The loud kind. The kind that sings too well and laughs too hard and pulls unsuspecting mortals into dances they don’t consent to remembering. I’d suggested relocating—more room, fewer bystanders, less paperwork for me later.

They’d agreed. On one condition.

The wizard came with them.

That wizard being me.

I should have said no.

I should have salted the ground, ironed the air, and sent them scattering back into whatever half-forgotten hedgerow they crawled out of.

But then she looked at me.

Tall. Golden-haired, bright as noon sunlight. Pointed ears tucked just barely beneath the illusion of normalcy. Eyes like polished sapphires—too focused, too knowing. When she smiled, it felt personal, like the universe leaning in to see how I’d respond.

Mistakes were made.

Very specifically, mistakes involving thinking with the wrong head.

Bertram hopped closer, tilting his head to inspect my state. “You’re lucky,” he added. “Last time I saw that look on a nymphs face, a druid woke up married to a river.”

I stared out over the cornfield, naked but for my father’s hat, dignity scattered somewhere between last night and sunrise.

“Did we at least win the drinking contest?” I asked.

Bertram clicked his beak again, pleased. “Define win.”

I sighed.

“It’s going to be one of those days.”

A nymph.

That explained the eyes. The hair. The lips. The curves. Everything about her, really. Nymphs didn’t so much have features as they had arguments for poor decision-making, and last night I had apparently lost the debate.

“At least you aimed high, Blackwell,” I muttered, squinting against the cursed morning sun as it tried to drill straight through my skull. “If you’re going to make poor life choices, do it with ambition.”

I adjusted my hat again—carefully, defensively—and glanced around the endless rows of corn, all identical, all judging me in silence.

“How close are we to home, Bert?” I asked, hoping—foolishly—that the answer would include words like near, walking distance, or miraculously next door.

Bertram paused. He tilted his head one way, then the other, performing the kind of theatrical calculation that existed purely to irritate me.

“Oh,” he said brightly, “just a bit outside the sprawling Greater Toronto Area.”

I closed my eyes.

“Small mercies,” I muttered, rolling one shoulder and then the other, working through the stiffness like my body had been folded into a suitcase by someone who hated me personally.

Still. Ontario soil. Familiar ley currents. No immediate hostile entities. No active curses trying to peel my soul like an orange.

I could work with this.

I took a careful step forward, then another, navigating the corn like a naked man who very much did not want to explain himself to passing farmers.

“Alright,” I said, mostly to myself. “Step one: acquire pants. Step two: get home. Step three: never, ever let a faerie buy me a fourth drink.”

Bertram fluttered up to my shoulder, talons light, feathers warm.

“You say that every time,” he noted.

“Yes,” I replied. “And one day I might even mean it.”

Bertram settled more firmly on my shoulder and added, far too casually, “For what it’s worth, boss, you were smart. You downed that potion of drunkenness resistance right on schedule.”

I snorted and carefully stepped over a low ridge of dirt. “And yet here I am. Naked. In corn.”

“Yes, well,” he continued, clearly enjoying this, “you didn’t account for the leprechauns swapping your drink for faerie poitín halfway through the night.”

I stopped walking.

Slowly turned my head.

“They what.”

Bertram clicked his beak. “Classic maneuver. You cheated chemistry. They cheated reality. Very on-brand.”

I resumed trudging forward, corn leaves whispering against my legs like they were gossiping. “Great. Fantastic. They out-cheated my cheating. That’s… humiliating.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Bertram agreed. “Textbook case.”

I dragged a hand through my hair, every muscle protesting as if I’d been used as human origami, and left out in the rain. “The other wizards are never going to let me hear the end of this if they find out.”

Bertram nodded solemnly. “The witches either. Getting out-cheated is downright shameful for a spellcaster. Especially by faeries with nice racks and pretty smiles.”

“I’m never living this down,” I muttered.

“Oh no,” he said. “You’ll live it down. Eventually. After the mocking. And the nicknames. And at least one lecture about ‘hubris’.”

I sighed, shoulders slumping.

“Please tell me no one took pictures.”

Bertram hesitated.

Just long enough.

“…Define pictures.”

I groaned, trudging onward through the corn, hat still my only shield against the world, dignity somewhere back there with the empty bottles and poor life choices.

“Next time,” I said, “I’m bringing iron. And salt. And a very firm no.”

Bertram fluffed his feathers. “You say something like that every time you meet a pretty supernatural woman.”

“Are you implying I have a type?” I asked conversationally, because talking made the walking easier, and I had no idea how long it would take to hit a road—or civilization, or more importantly pants.

“Magical. Pretty. Female. Low-key a conceptual or existential threat,” he said, because of course he did. “Like that witch you met in London. On the trip you took to put that War of 1812 ghost ghost to rest.”

I flushed, ears going warm and pink in a way that was deeply unhelpful. “Wendy is not just some witch.”

Bertram clacked his beak three times. Judicial. Final. “Correct. She is the witch you asked out on a date, got tongue-tied trying to impress, and nearly walked into a lamppost for because you couldn’t stop staring at her eyes instead of where you were going.”

“That lamppost came out of nowhere,” I muttered.

“It was installed in 1896,” Bertram replied.

I sighed and kept trudging, corn brushing my legs, hat still doing heroic work. “She’s… different.”

“Oh, she’s very different,” Bertram said. “A walking probability hazard with big blue eyes and the emotional regulation of a fireworks factory. You practically lit up like a Christmas tree around her.”

“That’s not—” I stopped, then amended, “—entirely inaccurate.”

I remembered Wendy laughing in the rain outside a London tube station, boots splashing, hair doing impossible things, magic humming around her like reality was holding its breath. The way spells bent near her without breaking. The way she made chaos feel… kind.

Bertram leaned closer to my ear. “You nearly destabilized your own wards trying to impress her.”

“I was fine.” I grumbled back.

“You tried to explain necromantic tether theory using tabletop game terms.” Bertam lazily replied.

“…She asked.” I grumbled yet again because grumbling felt like the correct response to my life.

“She did not,” he said. “She complimented your coat.and you started yapping about magic” 

We walked in silence for a few steps and I replied “She likes when I yap about magic...” I added defensively. 

“Still,” Bertram added, magnanimous, “at least she didn’t steal your clothes and leave you in a cornfield.”

“Low bar,” I said.

“But an important one.” he replied.

I nodded, reluctantly. “Yeah. Wendy would’ve at least left a sweater.”

“And a note,” Bertram said. “With hearts. Possibly glitter.”

I smiled despite myself, then shook my head and refocused on the horizon.

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s find a road. Then pants. Then coffee. Then I swear no more letting pretty magical women trick me into doing something stupid.”

Bertram hopped, amused. “Put it in writing. The universe enjoys irony.”

The corn rustled again—not with judgment this time, but with the distant promise of a fence line.

Civilization.

I picked up the pace.

The fence line led me to the road—and, by some small mercy, to pants.

Well. Pants-adjacent.

A scarecrow stood guard near the edge of the field, arms outstretched in mute accusation, dressed in a faded navy-blue pair of sweatpants. I paused, scanned the road, the fields, the distant farmhouse, and the sky—because experience has taught me never to discount judgmental birds.

Nothing.

I approached like a criminal who knew exactly what he was doing and absolutely planned to justify it later.

“Sorry,” I muttered to the scarecrow, because I have manners.

I tugged the pants free, shook them vigorously, and sent a respectable quantity of hay, bugs, and things that might have once been bugs flying into the grass. Then I stepped into them and pulled them up.

Immediate regret.

There was still hay inside. And it was pokey. Aggressively pokey. The kind of pokey that makes you reconsider your life choices in real time.

I also noted—uncomfortably—that the pants were just loose enough to require one hand constantly holding the waistband up. Still, they were pants, and pants were better than no pants by several important degrees of legality and self-respect.

Encouraged, I committed fully to my crimes.

The scarecrow’s sweatshirt came next—an old, threadbare thing that smelled like sun, dust, and disappointment. It hung off me like I was borrowing it from a much larger, much more rural cousin. Finally, the boots: heavy, well-worn work boots that clomped with all the subtlety of a guilty conscience.

I stepped back and assessed myself.

Oversized pants. Slouchy sweatshirt. Boots two sizes too big. And my lucky Trilby hat was perfectly in place.

Bertram fluttered down to the scarecrow’s shoulder, peering at the now-naked post with interest. “You know,” he said, “this is technically theft.”

“This is survival,” I replied, adjusting my waistband. 

Bertram considered this. “The scarecrow seems unconcerned in any case.”

I glanced at the empty pole, straw spilling from its sleeves, silently judging me.

“Yeah,” I said. “That makes one of us.”

I turned toward the road, boots clomping, hay stabbing, dignity partially restored.

Step one complete.

Well, at least now I could go into most stores. No shirt, no shoes, no service and all that. I’d cleared the bare minimum bar for civilization, even if I was doing it in borrowed sweatpants full of hay and boots that sounded like I was stomping grapes for a very disappointed vineyard.

Money, however, remained an unsolved problem.

Once I got home—actually home—and into my workroom, I could fix that. Conjure back my gear. Divine the location of whatever the fae had run off with. Benefits of being a wizard. Or at least, benefits of being a wizard eventually, after coffee.

I followed the fence line along the road, corn giving way to gravel and weeds. Bertram kept pace on my shoulder, providing a steady stream of commentary, insults, and unsolicited life advice. Which was, unfortunately, normal.

“You know,” he said, “if you’d listened to me, we wouldn’t be doing this walk of rural shame.”

“If I listened to you all the time,” I replied, “I’d never leave the house.”

“And yet,” he countered, “you are currently wearing a scarecrow’s pants.”

I had no response to that.

Not sure how I’d cope with a familiar that wasn’t a snarky chatterbox. I imagined other spellcasters out there with polite talking rabbits or soft-spoken owls that offered encouragement and emotional support.

Good for them.

I got a raven.

At least ravens were less aloof than cats. Cats judged you too, but they did it in silence most of the time, which felt more merciful. Bertram judged out loud, with footnotes.

A pickup truck passed on the road. I froze, hat brim low, one hand death-gripping my waistband.

Bertram leaned close. “You look like a man who lost custody of his wardrobe.”

“Please,” I muttered, resuming my walk, “save the good material for later.”

“Oh, I am,” he assured me. “This story is going to soar.”

I sighed, trudging on, the sun climbing higher, the road stretching ahead.

Still. I was alive. Mostly intact. Wearing pants.

All things considered, it could have gone worse.

Which, given my luck, meant it probably would.

No money. No bus pass. No spellcasting tools. Just me, looking like a disaster recovery effort in progress—albeit a disaster with a very nice trilby and a well-groomed beard. If nothing else, I looked like a person who had standards, even when everything else had gone feral.

I stuck out my thumb anyway. Because hope springs eternal, and because desperation makes optimists of us all.

No one stopped.

A minivan slowed just enough for the driver to make uncomfortable eye contact, take in the scarecrow chic, and accelerate with purpose. A pickup truck didn’t even pretend. A sedan swerved slightly wider.

“Shocking,” Bertram observed. “They fear your st-raw charisma.”

“Its too early in the day for puns,” I said dryly.

“Its never to early or late for puns boss.” He shot back.

I sighed, dropped my arm, and squared my shoulders. “Fine. At least it’s a good day for cardio.”

I followed the road, then the signs—hand-painted farm markers giving way to proper municipal ones, distances measured in kilometers that felt increasingly personal. The sun climbed. The novelty of survival pants wore off. The boots continued their campaign of mutual hatred with my feet.

After a few hours, my stomach made its feelings known.

Loudly.

“Oh good,” I muttered. “You’re awake.”

Hunger set in with the kind of smug timing that suggested my body had been waiting for maximum inconvenience. Thirst followed soon after, my mouth dry, tongue sticking like it had filed a complaint. And hovering over it all was the deep, yawning absence of caffeine—the hollow, existential ache of a man who had not yet had coffee and was being forced to confront reality anyway.

This was great. Truly. A long walk, hungry, thirsty, under a rising sun, no magic, no tools, no shortcuts.

Just vibes. Bad ones.

Bertram tilted his head, eyeing me. “On the bright side, this is very grounding.”

“I will ground you,” I said.

He clicked his beak, unfazed. “You could attempt a minor cantrip. Something subtle.”

“I don’t have chalk. Or salt. Or a focus. Or even a pocket that reliably exists,” I said. “The most magic thing I can do right now is not collapse.”

He gave me a flat look. The kind that suggested he was actively revising his opinion of my life choices.

“I’m not risking hand-casting or vocal casting without any focus objects,” I added, matching his tone. “I’m mediocre at both on a good day. Throw in a headache, hunger, thirst, and whatever fae nonsense is still rattling around my skull, and that’s how you get magical backlash.”

Bertram tilted his head. “Backlash is survivable.”

“Sometimes,” I said. “Other times the universe decides it would be hilarious to make my life worse.”

We walked a few more steps. Gravel crunched. My stomach growled again, louder this time, like it was lodging a formal protest.

Bertram glanced down at it. “Your internal organs seem opinionated.”

“They always are,” I replied. “But at least when I’m fed, they keep it civil.”

Another sign loomed ahead—another distance marker that felt insulting in its optimism. I kept moving, legs aching, boots clomping, sweat starting to cling under the borrowed sweatshirt.

“Besides,” I continued, “the last time I tried hand-casting under stress I set my own sleeves on fire.”

He considered that, then nodded. “Prudent restraint. Growth. I’m proud of you.”

“Don’t,” I said. “It feels worse than the hunger.”

We fell into a quieter rhythm after that—me walking, Bertram watching, the road unspooling ahead like it had all the time in the world.

Magic would come later.

Right now, survival was analog.

We walked on in silence for a bit, gravel crunching, sweat starting to cling. Somewhere ahead, the city waited—coffee shops, water fountains, and the blessed anonymity of people too busy to ask why a man in oversized sweatpants smelled faintly of corn.

I adjusted my hat and kept moving.

One foot in front of the other.

Because if there was one thing I knew how to do, it was endure until things got weird enough to fix themselves.

Thankfully, my house—Blackwell Manor, its official and deeply judgmental proper name—sat outside the city limits. All things considered, it wasn’t that far. Several hours of walking, yes, but what’s a few hours of misery when you’re already committed?

I followed the familiar back roads, boots scuffing, legs aching, the sun inching its way across the sky like it had nowhere better to be. By the time the turnoff came into view, I was running on stubbornness, spite, and the fading memory of caffeine.

Then the manor appeared.

I felt my heart skip. Whether that was hope or exhaustion was up for debate. Probably exhaustion.

Still—there it was. The old wrought-iron fence, black and curling like something that had grown instead of been forged. The looming nineteenth-century silhouette hunched against the trees, all steep gables and narrow windows, like it was watching me approach and pretending not to care. The yard was overgrown in a way I liked—an unruly garden, a few stubborn trees that refused to behave, all of it adding to the aesthetic.

The aesthetic being: old, haunted, and awesome.

At least in my professional opinion.

Blackwell Manor had been built by my family when they first came to Ontario from England, back when optimism and hubris were considered building materials. It stayed in the family for generations before being sold off in the sixties, then passed around, neglected, and eventually abandoned. Decades of no one wanting it. Decades of spirits piling up, wards decaying, the house sulking.

One day, I’d decided I was getting it back.

So I did some very heavy-duty divination. A frankly irresponsible amount of probability work. There were failures. Many of them. Then, eventually, I won the national lottery.

And yes, I knew exactly how that sounded.

Not the most ethical use of magic. I was fully aware that my recent streak of terrible luck was probably karma’s way of flipping me off for cheating the system. Still—I stood by my choice. The house needed a Blackwell. Or at least another competent magic user who knew how to listen when the walls whispered and when the ghosts complained.

Bertram fluttered off my shoulder and landed on the gate, tilting his head and examining my face reading me. “You always get sentimental when you’re exhausted.”

“I’m not sentimental,” I said weakly. “I’m vindicated.”

The iron gate creaked as I pushed it open, the sound familiar, welcoming in its own abrasive way.

Home.

The house seemed to lean forward just a fraction, as if recognizing me despite the borrowed clothes, the hay, and the state I was in.

I smiled, tired but real.

“Alright,” I muttered. “I’m back. Let’s fix the rest of this mess.”

I walked up the long drive, boots crunching on gravel, and passed my van.

My van—the van. The Wizard-Mobile.

It was an ’89 Chevy Astro, which meant it was indestructible, questionably aerodynamic, and built like it had been designed by someone who assumed gasoline would always be cheap and plentiful. It got the job done. Plenty of room. Handled like a stubborn animal, but a loyal one.

The best part—the real reason I bought it—was the mural.

Painted across the side in glorious excess was what could only be described as a heavy-metal album cover: a wizard standing on a jagged cliff, staff raised, lightning tearing from the sky while dragons and demons wheeled through storm clouds overhead. It was dramatic. It was ridiculous. It was perfect.

A masterpiece.

I didn’t care what anyone else said.

Bertram eyed it as we passed. “Still compensating, I see.”

“It’s art,” I replied. “And it has themes.”

I climbed the front steps, every joint protesting, and reached the door just as the locks clicked open on their own. The heavy wood doors swung inward with a slow, deliberate creak.

The house was feeling polite today.

That was nice of it.

Blackwell Manor could be temperamental—not dangerous, exactly, just… opinionated. The genius loci here was pretty chill by supernatural standards, but it held grudges, had preferences, and absolutely noticed when you tracked mud into the foyer. The ghosts that lingered were mostly decent, too. A few I’d helped move on. Others were stubborn, confused, or waiting on something I hadn’t figured out how to give them yet.

We had an arrangement.

I kept the wards intact, listened when the house complained, made sure the spirits weren’t miserable or bored.

They didn’t scream at night or shove furniture around unless something was actually wrong.

Fair trade.

The door closed behind me with a satisfied thump.

Warmth settled over my skin, the house’s wards recognizing me fully now, smoothing the aches just a fraction. Not healing—never that—but easing.

“Miss me?” I murmured.

The lights flickered once, fondly.

Bertram fluttered off my shoulder and headed deeper into the house. “The kettle will be pleased you survived.”

“Then the kettle and I are in agreement,” I said, shuffling inside.

I leaned my forehead briefly against the doorframe, breathing in the familiar scent of old wood, dust, incense, and home.

I’d made it.

Now I could deal with everything else.

I tossed my lucky trilby toward the hat rack.

Missed.

Of course I did.

I stared at it on the floor for a beat, then picked it up and hung it properly, very deliberately not acknowledging my failure. I was grateful my attempt to look effortless had no witnesses beyond me, Bertram, the house, and whatever ghosts were currently loitering nearby with popcorn and opinions.

“Smooth,” Bertram said from somewhere overhead.

“Shut up,” I replied, affectionately.

I shuffled toward the downstairs bathroom and shed the scarecrow ensemble with prejudice. The sweatshirt, the pants, the boots—gone, then stepped into the shower and let hot water pound against my shoulders like it was trying to rinse the night out of me by force.Steam filled the room. Muscles unclenched. The headache dulled from existential punishment to merely annoyed. Hay and road dust spiraled down the drain along with whatever lingering fae nonsense clung to my skin. I stood there longer than strictly necessary, forehead against the tile, letting the house hum softly around me.

Home did that. It steadied things.

Clean, warm, and marginally more human, clad in my bathrobe and fuzzy pink slippers I padded into the kitchen, robe cinched, slippers whispering across the floorboards. The house knew where I was going before I did—the lights came up gently, the kettle already shifting on its base like it had been waiting for its cue.

My blood-to-coffee ratio was dangerously low. Critical, really.

My stomach helpfully reminded me—loudly—that there was leftover curry in the fridge and that it had opinions about being ignored.

“Yes, yes,” I muttered, opening the cupboard for a mug. “One crisis at a time.”

The kettle clicked on. The fridge door swung open. The scent of spices hit the air, rich and promising, and for the first time since waking up naked in a cornfield, I felt like things might actually be okay.

Bertram landed on the counter, eyeing the curry. “Breakfast?”

“Recovery meal,” I corrected. “There’s a difference.”

The house creaked approvingly, a low satisfied sound in its beams.

Coffee. Food. Pants acquired. Magic tools waiting upstairs.

The universe had gotten its jokes in for the day.

Now it was my turn to clean up the aftermath.

By mid-afternoon, things were finally sorted.

I’d showered, eaten, caffeinated, and reassembled myself into something approximating a functional wizard. More importantly, I’d negotiated.

The faeries returned my things—coat, tools, van keys, dignity in several carefully labeled pieces—in exchange for a jar of honey, a loaf of fresh bread, and a favor to be named later. As fae bargains went, that was practically a discount.

I’d gotten off easy.

My own house faeries, however, had opinions.

The brownies—who’d crossed the Atlantic with the Blackwells generations ago—were decent little folk. Industrious, loyal, and absolutely indispensable. They kept the house running in ways magic never quite managed: tending the garden, mending things just before they broke, quietly moving misplaced objects back where they belonged.

When I first reclaimed the manor, they’d been boggarts.

Neglect will do that.

Years of abandonment had twisted them—snappish, spiteful, acting out in all the small cruel ways lonely spirits learn when they think no one’s coming back. I could’ve banished them. Plenty of practitioners would have. It would’ve been clean, efficient, and technically justified.

But guilt has a way of sharpening your conscience.

They hadn’t asked to be left behind. My family had sold the house and walked away, and the brownies had stayed, watching the lights go out one last time. That felt like something a Blackwell ought to fix.

So I didn’t banish them.

I cleaned. Repaired wards. Spoke to the house. Fed the hearth properly. Made offerings. Apologized—out loud—for things I hadn’t personally done but still felt responsible for.

Slowly, carefully, the boggarts softened back into brownies.

It took time. It always does.

Now they scurried about the manor with renewed purpose, muttering to each other, pretending not to watch me out of the corners of their eyes. They disapproved of faeries stealing my things. They disapproved of me going drinking with faeries even more.

A cupboard door closed gently behind me, unprompted.

“Alright,” I said to the room. “I’m home, I’m alive, and I’m wearing my own clothes again. Let’s call that a win.”

Something chuckled in the walls.

I leaned back against the counter, tired but steady, and let the house settle around me.

This was what the manor needed.

And apparently, it was what I did too.

The house had picked up a few more residents since then. Faeries I’d adopted—and yes, that was the correct word—over the years. Faeries and goblins, to be precise.

The hob-goblins came next.

They were as much staff as the brownies ever were, just… louder about it. Practical, gruff, fond of tools and routines. I’d found them haunting an old shop slated for demolition, the kind of place with warped floors and forgotten history baked into the dust. The humans had moved on. The spirits hadn’t.

If you think brownies slipping into boggart behavior is bad, hob-goblins going feral is worse. Much worse.

A hob-goblin left too long without purpose doesn’t just sour—it breaks. Turns into a bugbear. Big. Hulking. All teeth and shadow and hunger, made of rage and sorrow knotted so tight it needs fear to feed just to keep standing.

Dangerous, yes.

Heartbreaking, more so.

I didn’t like to dwell on it. Seeing something that once took pride in fixing doors and sharpening tools reduced to a nightmare that only knew how to terrify… that sticks with you. So I didn’t let it happen. Not again, not after the first bugbear I had to put down because Hobs? When they turn there is no known way to bring them back .

I brought them home. Gave them work. Gave them rooms. Let the house absorb them the way it absorbs everything else that belongs.

Then there were the kobolds.

A small family, living down near the old storage sheds and the half-forgotten root cellar. Nice folks. Industrious. Cheerful in that sharp-eyed, always-evaluating way kobolds have. Excellent with repairs. Excellent with wards. Fond of milk, honey, and very specific boundaries.

At this point, I was basically adopting stray house fae like it was a hobby.

I justified it the same way every time: they needed homes, and I had a big, mostly empty house with a tolerant genius loci and a long family tradition of cohabiting with the weird. If Blackwell Manor became a quiet commune for abandoned and displaced house fey, so be it.

There were worse legacies.

A floorboard creaked approvingly. Somewhere deeper in the house, something small laughed.

I smiled into my mug.

Yeah. This worked.

The world could keep its shiny towers and neat lines. I’d take my crooked old manor, its ghosts, its goblins, its grumpy walls and muttering hearths.

Someone had to look after the ones everyone else forgot.

Might as well be me.

Honestly, sometimes the house felt less like a residence and more like a sanctuary—for magical things that didn’t belong in a world mostly governed by reason. Things that weren’t human, or weren’t human anymore, but still deserved dignity. Still deserved to be treated like they mattered, even if the rest of the world would rather pretend they didn’t exist.

That didn’t mean everything under my roof was benign.

I had worse things, too. Things locked away in what I privately—and with no small amount of dread—called my terrible little museum. Objects I couldn’t banish yet. Or couldn’t destroy. Or that were simply too dangerous for anyone other than me to keep an eye on.

There was a genuine dybbuk box, for starters. Some idiot had bought it off eBay because the internet has taught humanity nothing. Nasty thing. Mean. Clever. Always whispering just enough truth to make the lies hurt more. It stayed triple-warded, salt-lined, iron-bound, and ignored. Attention is what dybbuks want most.

Then there were Ann and Andy.

A pair of rag dolls, stitched smiles and button eyes, possessed by two demons who insisted—insisted—they were boyfriend and girlfriend. When they weren’t terrorizing anyone, they were almost… sweet. They held hands. Finished each other’s sentences. Bickered about movies.

Almost wholesome.

Almost.

They’d nearly driven a family of four to murder before I intervened, so “adorable” was not a word I used lightly. They were the most dangerous things in the house, sealed separately but within sight of each other because separating them entirely made them worse.

Love, even demonic love, is complicated.

The rest of the collection was comparatively tame. Minor cursed odds and ends. Nothing catastrophic if you knew what you were dealing with. A ring that caused bad luck—not dramatic, just constant, grinding misfortune. A gun that always jammed when it mattered most. Harmless curios, provided you actually respected what they did and didn’t try to get clever.

That was the rule with magic, really.

Most disasters weren’t caused by evil. They were caused by ignorance. Or arrogance. Or people who thought curiosity didn’t need supervision.

I checked the wards one last time, feeling the house hum back at me—steady, content, alive with the quiet coexistence of things that trusted me not to fail them.

Blackwell Manor wasn’t perfect.

But it was safe, well safe enough.

And for a lot of things in this world, that was more than they’d ever been given before.

Just a normal day in the life of Chance Alexander Blackwell. The Wizard of the 401. Mister Occult. Canada’s Occult Outsourcer. Or whatever other name the magical community and the mundane world decided to pin on me this week.

“Normal,” for me, meant things were only going to get worse. They usually did. Life has a talent for escalation, and magic has a sense of humor about timing.

That’s where my job—or jobs—came in.

I’m a problem solver. Often for free, if I’m being honest. I rarely take more than I need to cover expenses, and sometimes not even that. Rent’s paid. House is standing. The rest is negotiable.

By “problem solver,” I don’t mean hero. I mean I’m part rat catcher, part plumber, part consultant for problems too strange, too embarrassing, or too dangerous for most people to admit they have. Curses in apartment buildings. Spirits stuck in loops. Things that crawl out of places no one’s supposed to look too closely at.

And yeah—sometimes it’s people.

Sometimes it isn’t.

I don’t judge.

If something’s suffering, if something’s scared, if something’s hurting other people because it doesn’t know how else to exist—I’ll at least listen. Not everything can be saved. Not everything wants to be. But most things just want someone to take them seriously.

The kettle clicked off behind me. The house settled into its quiet rhythm. Somewhere, a ghost sighed contentedly. A brownie muttered about crumbs.

I took a sip of coffee and checked my phone.

Because if experience had taught me anything, it was this:

The quiet never lasts.

And when it breaks, someone always ends up calling the Wizard of the 401.

I had a few dozen things waiting on my phone. Little annoyances, mostly—equal parts skeptics trolling me and people mistaking coincidence for conspiracy. The usual parade of my lights flickered, my dog barked at the hallway, someone moved a can of pasta in my cupboard and I can feel it judging me.

Still, I checked every single one.

I’d learned the hard way that small jobs had a nasty habit of turning into big ones. Dangerous ones. The kind that started with “it’s probably nothing” and ended with blood on the floor and something scratching from the other side of reality.

I sipped my coffee and sorted through them mentally, thumbs moving on autopilot as I typed polite, careful replies. Requests for evidence. Photos. Timelines. Patterns. Calm explanations that, no, cupboards are not liminal gateways just because your groceries got reorganized.

Most of my real jobs—the ones I didn’t stumble into by pure accident—came through contacts. People who treated me as a “recognized” psychic consultant. Air quotes implied.

The RCMP had called me a couple of times. Quietly. Carefully. I’d worked with a few private detectives, some independent agencies that dealt in the strange margins of legality, and even a handful of local superhero types who operated in the city and preferred their occult problems handled by someone who claimed to be an expert..

They didn’t always like how I worked.

They liked the results.

The magical community reached out too, on occasion. Most people with talent handled their own problems, but not everyone with magic was built for combat spells, hostile entities, or higher-order arcane messes. Some folks were healers. Some were scholars. Some were very good at candles and intentions and very bad at things that grow teeth.

Those were the calls I didn’t screen.

I didn’t mind being the one who went into the dark corners. I didn’t mind being the person people trusted to say, yes, this is real, or no, you’re safe, or pack a bag, we’re leaving now.

I stared into my mug, steam curling up past my face.

Which, I supposed, was its own kind of curse.

I like to help.

The house creaked softly around me, settling. Somewhere in the walls, something listened.

I took another sip of coffee and unlocked my phone again.

Because sooner or later, one of those messages wouldn’t be nothing.

And when it wasn’t, I’d be ready.

My phone dinged.

I glanced down at the screen and felt my brain immediately deprioritize everything else.

Chaosgurlsofine69.

Wendy.

Well. That was getting checked first.

I scrolled—and immediately shifted in my chair so Bertram, perched on the back like a judgmental gargoyle, couldn’t see a thing. The photo was borderline not-safe-for-work and absolutely the kind of thing he’d weaponize against me for months.

She was wearing platform boots, knee socks, one of her sweater dresses, and her glasses. Honey-blonde hair everywhere, soft chaos incarnate. The sweater had slipped down one shoulder—no bra strap in sight.

Okay. So maybe it wasn’t that bad.

Unfortunately, my brain had opinions.

Very specific, deeply unhelpful opinions belonging to a man who was painfully aware that he was yearning for a feral gremlin of a witch with a probability anomaly and excellent taste in hosiery.

The caption read: Wish you were here luv 

“Yeah,” I muttered to the empty kitchen, “wish I was there too.”

I typed back before I could overthink it. Yeah, I wish I was there too. Working kinda—will get back to you when I’m free, Whitmore. Also if your photos get any spicier you might kill me.

The reply came almost instantly. Have fun at work. I’ll keep that in mind and increase the lethality of my photos.

I stared at the screen for a long moment.

Then I very carefully set my phone face-down on the counter like it might explode.

Bertram leaned forward just enough to be annoying. “You’re smiling.”

“I am not.”

“You look like someone who just willingly stepped into a trap and thanked it.”

I took a steadying breath and picked up my coffee. “She’s… distracting.”

“She’s a chaos witch with a phone camera,” Bertram said. “Of course she is.”

Somewhere in the house, a floorboard creaked knowingly.

I shook my head, tried to refocus, and unlocked my phone again—very deliberately not opening the photo a second time.

Work first.

Danger later.

And if the universe had any sense of timing at all, it would let me finish my coffee before something terrible decided to knock.

My phone dinged again.

For half a second, I hoped it was Wendy—because I was absolutely not going to pretend I didn’t want another message from the feral chaos witch I adored, scandalous or otherwise.

It wasn’t her.

That was… mildly disappointing.

It was from someone I knew. And the message was short enough to make my stomach sink.

Bailey Morrison.

Kitchen witch. Baker. Alchemist of carbs and caffeine. Owner of a cozy little bakery-slash-coffee shop that catered to mundanes who liked good bread and magical folk who appreciated potion-grade enchantments disguised as soup, espresso, and the crispiest kombucha I’d ever tasted. Her stuff made my own potion work taste like medicinal sadness and regret.

The text read:

Chance. Need help. Come to the store ASAP.

No emojis. No softening language. Bailey didn’t waste words unless things were bad.

That meant trouble.

I stood, already moving, coffee forgotten. “Bertram,” I said, grabbing my coat and reaching for my gear, “watch the house.”

He fluttered up from the chair back, alert now. “Try not to get cursed.”

“No promises.”

Wards, tools, keys—muscle memory taking over as I pulled myself together. Coat on. Boots laced. Focus rod in hand. The Wizard-Mobile keys clinked reassuringly.

Yep.

Just another day in the life of Chance Alexander Blackwell.