Giving Way to the Light

Chapter Nineteen

No one moved. I was frozen where I stood, everyone else seemed to be waiting for a cue from me, and the little bat was just watching me curiously. It had skin and fur, but it's skeleton was also very visible. It was confusing to the eye, but the best way to try and describe it was by comparing the sight to a person painted like a skeleton on Dia de los Muertos. Except it wasn't a person. It was a bat. An undead bat.

"I don't understand," I finally said. "I didn't use that kind of summoning charm." I looked up at the rest of the group and there were looks of astonishment, of awe, of fear, and of trepidation. I briefly realized they were more in shock at my little display of power than of the flaw in the summoning charm, but that little detail would have to be sorted out later.

"Well it must have been," Jack S. said, kneeling to get a closer look at my newest creation.

I looked down at the little skeleton bat as well. "But... I was summoning the Wanderer... not a dead bat!"

Bunny shrugged. "Maybe you pronounced it wrong."

Jack F. knelt next to Jack S. and my heart leapt in my throat when I saw him reach out a hand to touch it.

"Wait!" I said, worried that it might bite his hand off, or worse, eat it.

Instead, quite the opposite happened. The little bat leaned into the touch so as give Jack F. access to the soft spot behind its ears, making happy chirping noises. Jack F. grinned and obliged, but I could only stare.

Bats shouldn't be this tame, but it was obviously not a vampire. Too small, and not the right breed of bat. It was... actually kind of cute if I was being honest, but I was still too shocked by her appearance to concentrate on that fact.

"Alright, so obviously that spell isn't going to be too useful to us," Mavis said, bringing us back to the important matter at hand. She must not have been very worried about any hostility from the bat, and while I was reluctant to ignore any possible threats, she was a vampire; if anyone knew a threatening zombie bat from a tame one, it would be her.

"Does that mean we're going back to Plan A?" Wayne asked.

I sighed and pulled my cloak a little tighter around me. "It would appear so," I mumbled. Back to the far-fetched, half-baked, plan of searching the entire earth for a Wanderer who didn't want to be found, and seemed to know exactly how to hide.

"So where do we begin?" Frank asked. "What, in your professional opinion, would be the best way to start looking for this guy the old fashion way?"

Phil was not having a good day.

First thing in the morning, the day after the Guardians left the Pole, the elves had decided to reset the clocks throughout the entire workshop, convinced it was daylight savings... It had taken the yetis three hours to change all of the clocks back. Then the boy, Christopher Robin, had finally woken up, confused and slightly panicky. For a boy his age, he handled waking up in an unfamiliar place quite well. He had eaten some of the scrambled eggs and drank some water. That in itself was wonderful of course, except that, unfortunately, there was not a soul in the entire workshop who could speak proper English, so Phil had spent close to an hour getting the message across that he was at the North Pole, and that Vera had brought him here.

He had left the boy when he was resting comfortably in his bed again, and put Steve in charge. He then tasked himself with finding North and the others to inform them of the boy. He had used only one snow globe, assuming he could just ride back in the sleigh, but when he had made it to Halloween town, he had discovered that the Guardians and Vera had already left for a castle in Transylvania.