Page 3 of How to Seduce a Slender

Right…Melody…Her name was Melody. Eyes fluttering open, she stared up into an array of paper floating over her.Whoa.A giddy, childish glee filled her chest as a giggle erupted from her. Her right hand floated over her. Glittering magic brushed her fingertips before a tiny paper airplane bonked its nose into her middle finger. It dropped from the air and fell to her belly. Her hands clumsily grabbed at it. It took every muscle in her body to sit up. Whoever her savior was, they’d placed her on an old but soft fainting couch. Black velvet, ashy from age with a few scratch marks along its edges, the couch creaked ever so slightly as she leaned back. Her woozy head fell back against the spine of the couch.

The paper floated around her like busy street cars whizzing past each other. As the room cleared up around her, she realized she was in an office. Wall to wall shelves full of books, scrolls, parchment, and folders, all thrumming with activity. Books flipped pages as pieces of parchment were slid inside. A quill scribbled across paper on a massive, black desk. The kind she imagined lasted the test of time. Her legs were wet noodles, hardly usable, but she climbed to them. Flopping her feet, still fast asleep, in the direction of the desk, she rammed the top of it into her gut. She felt it, but there was still a lingering numbness within her.

Shock? Probably shock.

“Where am I?” she breathed, finally taking the full room in. It was longer than it was wide, with the velvet fainting couch, massive desk, and endless sea of papers. Copper tubes ran the length of the wall into the ceiling and floor. There was a tiny opening like a mail slot at the front of it. Melody stood still, studying every inch of the room with bewilderment.

All until the door to the office swung open. Her heart stopped. She stumbled backward, hands up near her chest. Something made of dancing flames, massive and lumbering, stepped through the doorway. A dog, from the looks of it, face against the ground…and it inhaled sharply. Melody backed up till she fumbled back onto the couch. Pulling all of her, like ripping up layers of skirts, off a dirty floor, she squeaked in terror as the flaming beast quickly sniffed its way to her. When it was upon her, its head popped up. Like looking into the burning face of a mastiff, Melody realized she was staring at a hellhound. She’d never seen one up close. But the ruby, glowing eyes, dancing flames, and sizzling drool all screamedhellhound.The hound took one more whiff of her before their massive tongue popped out the side of their mouth. Melody grimaced, watching the beast watch her.

“Uh…good boy?” She grimaced.

Ruff!The bark echoed around the room. Melody jerked, putting a finger to her lips. “Shhh, shush boy.”

Ruff!

“Carl? Carl, where are you, boy?”

Melody scrambled up onto her feet on the couch, making flailing movements with her hands to shoo the dog. “Please, please go.”

“Carl?”

Ruff!

“Shush! Please!” Tears welled up in her eyes as she tried to shoo the dog again to no avail. Melody was in a stranger’s home, trapped against a wall on a fainting couch by a hellhound. Tiny paper airplanes booped her before zipping around her as the magic never stopped. Melody lightly stuck a foot out, thanking the gods that the flames licking up the side of the hound didn’t actually burn, and prodded the dog to move along. “Shoo! Shoo!”

They turned their massive head to the side and lazily licked at her foot. It wasn’t burning but the saliva was rather warm, like that of a hot tub. Melody shivered, shaking out her foot. The hound continued to pant at her.

“Oh! There you are, boy. What are you doing in Smith’s—Oh, hello!”

Melody hugged her torso, locking gazes with a new face in the doorway. Like all the alarms in her body went off, she lost all sense of mind. Melody shrieked, “Zombie!”

“Where?” The zombie whirled around. A garden trowel flew out of their skull, skittering across the ground toward Melody and the hellhound. Not the smartest move she’d ever tried, but Melody sprung for it. Like a rabid flying squirrel, she flounced off the couch, flopped to the ground, grabbed the trowel, and scrambled backward from the hellhound and the zombie with the trowel held out in front of her.

“Get back! Both of you!” she cried, shuffling backward as all her body parts finally came back online. Her legached. Something stung somewhere near her left foot and there was probably something cracked in her arm as it trembled from the pain. It slowly, ever so steadily, all her sensors returned back online. Tears spilled down her cheeks in frightened globs as she hiccupped. The trowel trembled harder in her hand. “Get back!I’m warning you!”

“Whoa there, lady, I don’t mean any harm. I’m just a gardener.” The zombie in question was a pale mint green with patches of peach, brown, and purple flesh. A mop of dirty brown hair sat on top of a head with big eyes, half the left cheek missing, and a maggot that writhed out of their lower lip. Despite that, the zombie was, funnily enough, wearing cargo pants covered in dirt with corn kernels falling out of their pockets, a flannel shirt, and a bunch of carrots dangling by their greens in their right hand. The zombie used the other to pat down the air. “How’d you get here?”

“I. Don’t. Know!” She snapped her jaw with every word, her lungs rattling like empty husks desperate for oxygen. Melody’s attention jerked from left to right, looking for an exit. The only one was the doorway the zombie currently occupied.

“Well, I’m Kevin,” he motioned to the panting, drooling mastiff on fire at the foot of the couch, “and that’s Carl.”

“Melody,” she squeezed out. Sparing a hand to the wall behind her, she felt her way along it, putting as much space as she could between Kevin and her. “Where am I?”

He picked a clump of dirt out of one of his ears, eyeing her with confusion. “Rosemont Manor.”

Melody squeaked, “That old, haunted mansion in the woods?”

“Yup!” He pointed at her with one finger while the other touched his nose. The carrots smacked at his face.

She sank back into the shelving, her heart sinking.Oh…no, no, no…oh no…how did I end up here?

The last thing she remembered was getting ready for work. Brushing her hair, pulling on her uniform, trying a different eyeliner and hating it, thus making her late when she had to fix it. Melody remembered her sneakers slapping against the concrete as she rushed into the diner. But the moment she passed through the steel doors in the back, their rusty hinges crying out in pain as they were forced to move…it was gone.

“Kevin! What are you doing—oh no.”

Melody jerked her gaze up from where it had fallen to the floor. She redirected the trowel to the doorway again, her hands trembling. “Stay back! I’m not afraid to use this!”

Kevin was ripped out of the doorway cartoonishly by horrifyingly long arms. They wrapped around the hellhound and dragged the barking dog from the room. The lights in the room dimmed, paper and magic dropping from the ceiling as something took up the doorway.

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