Inspiration: "Dead Man's Party" by Oingo Boingo

Setting: Alternate Reality (Urban fantasy)

Characters: Lalli, Reynir

Relationships: Lalli & Reynir, the Hotakainens, Lalli and Emil's relationship is left ambiguous, interpret it however you want

Warnings: References to ritual torture

Other tags: Halloween fic, the Hotakainens as paranormal investigators, Lalli and Reynir as unwilling partners, everyone wanted to see that right?

Lalli hated Halloween.

Tuuri always insisted this time of year was fun, but that was only because she couldn't do the job that they did. Onni always said it was the most lucrative time of year and they desperately needed the money—and he was right, on both counts—but no matter what he said, by the end of the season he was always haggard and red-eyed and desperately thanking the gods that November had finally come around, and Lalli knew that Onni didn't enjoy it any more than he did.

…not to mention that Lalli had a particular personal reason to loathe this season. Something bad always happened to him at this time of year, without fail. He even had the hospital records and the scars on his back to prove it.

So, when Onni asked him to come to the agency early, he knew in his gut that whatever his cousin wanted, it was going to be nothing good.

His fears were confirmed the second he opened the door to Onni's office: in his experience redheads were always a walking disaster, and that tall redhead with the obnoxiously long braid looked like nothing but bad news.

"Um… hi?"

"Who is he?" Lalli demanded, not even bothering to answer but instead looking directly at Onni. A client? No—Onni would not have told him to come early for a client. Dread twisted his gut at the thought of what this might mean…

"We're shorthanded," Onni began without preamble. "Reynir," he gestured at the stranger, who was now nervously tugging his braid, "has expressed an interest in working for our agency, and I've decided to hire him on probationary terms. I want you to show him the ropes."

"I work alone." Onni knew that.

"Not on Halloween, and not after what happened last year." Lalli bristled; did Onni think he couldn't do his job?

Onni ignored his indignation, instead pushing a piece of paper across the desk at him. It was a coupon for the local bakery. Lalli hissed a bit but still pocketed it, before turning abruptly and leaving the office, Reynir following close on his heels.

"Hello, Hotakainen Paranormal Investigators! Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Would you describe it as corporeal or incorporeal? Okay. Now have you noticed—"

Lalli ignored Tuuri's chatter as usual, and instead stalked back to the containment room to clean out the ghost traps. Reynir followed him like a second shadow he couldn't get rid of.

"Um… it sounds like you've got a customer. Shouldn't we…?" Lalli set a trap on the floor, held his hands over it, and began chanting. They had a massive backlog of the things, but at least the familiar ritual afforded him a bit of quiet. As soon as he'd finished, though, and set the empty trap on the table for cleaning, the annoying new hire was right back at it again. "I mean, someone's calling, aren't you going to go see what it's about?"

"No." He picked up the next trap, set it on the floor, and glared. "Do something useful."

"Um… okay. Useful like what?"

Lalli didn't answer, instead concentrating on his own work. After a few minutes of nervously wringing his hands, the annoyance wandered off, and Lalli breathed a sigh of relief at finally being left alone for a few minutes. He worked steadily until…

"Lalli!" He turned, and there was Tuuri standing in the doorway, a smile on her face and a handful of reports in hand. As always, she was wearing one of those weird outfits she always wore during this season, this one a ragged black dress and a pointed hat on her head. She waved the stack of papers. "Looks like you've got your work cut out for you this morning!"

Lalli sighed, accepted the papers, and went to look for the idiot. He was in the main office, standing on top of a chair with a piece of chalk in hand and scribbling weird designs all over the walls. When Lalli hissed at him, he dropped the chalk on the floor and followed.

"Don't worry about Lalli," he heard Tuuri say as he was pulling on his jacket. "He does that to everyone."

"So what happened last year?"

Lalli had already investigated three calls and was in the process of driving them to the next, and still Reynir was talking. It was all he could do not to pull over and start banging his head against the steering wheel until the horn drowned him out.

…

"Sorry, sorry! Of course you wouldn't want to talk about it, that was so stupid! Um…" Please shut up now please shut up now please shut up now… "So how did you get into this business anyway? I mean… it seems kinda hard, right?"

"We're mages."

"So is Tuuri a mage?"

"No."

"Is anyone else in your family a mage?"

"No."

"So, um… Finnish magic. How does it work?"

Lalli shrugged.

"We use runes. You know, like protective symbols? When we want to keep spirits away…"

"So how did Reynir do today?"

"He talks too much." Lalli thought for a few seconds. "And he's rude."

Onni pinched the bridge of his nose. "The job, Lalli."

Lalli shrugged. Reynir hadn't helped him much, but Onni had already said he wasn't supposed to be helping much yet.

A sigh. "Well, I suppose that's as good as I could have expected. At least try to get along with him. He might save your life someday."

October dragged on. The cases continued to get more horrible. Reynir continued to talk too much and be useless.

Sometimes Onni came with them, or took Reynir on himself, but he was more advanced than Lalli and took all of the most dangerous, difficult jobs, the jobs that were no place for a trainee. So most of the time, Lalli was stuck with him.

"Do you think I can't do my job?"

"Right now, your job is training Reynir."

"Ph."

"Lalli." Onni was looking at him from across the desk, his hands clasped together. "Are you sure you're okay after last year?"

Lalli shrugged. "Emil was hurt worse than—"

"I wasn't asking about Emil."

"I'm fine."

Emil had been barely conscious from blood loss, his hands and feet frostbitten without shoes or gloves. He hadn't been able to walk for a month. Even now, a year later, he would still sometimes cringe with pain real or remembered, and Lalli could no longer look at his bare back without encountering a mass of scar tissue. Yet whenever anyone asked, Emil insisted that he was fine.

Lalli had no right to complain about his own scars, when Emil was working so hard to pretend that his weren't still hurting him.

The whole cursed month was nearly over. Instead of relief, though, Lalli could only summon a sick sense of dread.

Halloween never passed without something horrible happening, and last year had been the most horrible out of all horrible years. There was no way that this year would let them simply pass unmarked.

"As you know, this is the final day of the month."

The two of them only stared, Reynir with puppyish confusion and Lalli in bleak despair. Undeterred, Onni continued. "We've survived every Halloween up to this point, and we can survive this one as well." Lalli didn't mention that Grandmother's mistake had also happened on a Halloween—the last time he had, Onni had told him not to bring that up. "Now, we have a job to do."

"Oh good, is Onni done crying?"

All three of them jumped when they turned to see Tuuri standing in the door of the office. Smiling, she waved a slip of paper. "Because we've already got a call."

The phone was ringing off the hook, and Onni was forced to run from the office, cursing, before the morning was even halfway over. Even Reynir had to be put to work, drawing seals over whichever portals to the underworld this year's omnicidal maniacs had decided to open.

"It was a cult."

"Huh?" Reynir was in the process of trying to scrape the paint from under his nails, and looked up, startled, at Lalli's unexpected initiation of a conversation.

Lalli's eyelids were already drooping, and it wasn't even time for lunch yet—not that they'd have time to eat, if things kept going the way that they were. "They were trying to summon something. They needed a sacrifice, so they kidnapped…" no, Reynir did not need to know about Emil, nor about what he meant to Lalli, "…someone. We saved the victim, but the ringleaders got away." Lalli's fingers tightened around the steering wheel.

"Oh." Reynir was very quiet, still looking at his fingers. "Do you think they're going to try again this year?"

Lalli shrugged. Something horrible always happened on Halloween.

The end of office hours, Onni still hadn't come back, and there was a note from Tuuri on the desk recording a message from a panicked caller who had seen something down a darkened alley and insisted it was a manifestation of evil incarnate in spite of the fact that she could provide no description other than "big" and "shadowy".

It's probably just a teenager in a costume, Tuuri's annotation claimed. Or an ordinary serial killer! Probably nothing we need to check out.

…they were still going to need to check it out.

"Did she really mean it when she said it was probably a serial killer?" Reynir asked nervously as he was buckling himself in.

"Could be anything."

"But what are we going to do if it is a serial killer?"

"Call the police."

"Where have you been?" the woman who answered the door demanded, having yanked it open almost before Lalli had finished his first knock. "I called you people three hours ago!"

"Sorry," Reynir volunteered. "We had other cases to work on…"

"What, like teenagers summoning imps? I'm telling you, we've got a real problem here, so do your job and go fix it!"

"Soooooooo," Reynir ventured after she slammed the door in their faces, claiming that "It" would get her if she left the door open for long enough. "What do we do now?"

Lalli turned. He looked up and down the darkened alley. Whatever their frantic client claimed to have glimpsed, it wasn't there now, but he could still tell that something was off. Frowning, he stepped into the alley. His magesight showed him the lingering traces of a presence that had been there at some point in the recent past, a trail that led straight through the alley and into a pair of doors through which loud blasting club music was audible even at this distance.

He pointed. "We're going in there."

Even though he'd braced himself beforehand, the wave of noise and closely-packed bodies hit him like a physical blow the second he stepped in the door. Conversation was almost impossible; Reynir had to lean in far too close and practically shout into his ear, "So what are we looking for?"

"Anything weird."

Reynir looked confused, opened his mouth, stood silent for a few seconds, closed his mouth again, nodded, and strode off into the crowd.

Lalli began moving around the edge of the room, attempting to stay as far away from the people as possible. It was difficult to focus on his magesight when his other senses were being bombarded with blasting noise and flashing lights and the heat from hundreds of bodies packed into such a small space, but he had a job to do. Something was wrong here. It was his job to fix it. He had to—

Lightning pain shot through his shoulders and back, and for a moment Lalli was frozen, not from pain but from terror. No. No no no, not those scars…

Abandoning all caution, he shot his way through the crowd, roughly pushing people aside as he honed in on the vague shadowy thing across the room from him. Behind him, he vaguely heard someone calling his name, but the shout didn't register, fixated as he was on hunting it down.

He was not going to let Emil go through that again.

The cool night air hit him as he burst through the door opposite the one he'd entered, a relief from the stifling indoors that sent energy surging through his exhausted body. Lalli ran faster than he'd ever run in his life, the asphalt pounding under his feet, but that thing was fast.

Onni! he tried to call even as he ran; he had no idea whether his cousin had even heard his summons, and didn't have the time to check; all of his concentration was on moving his legs, on the rush of wind through his hair and empty street beneath his feet.

He rounded one final corner. It was right in front of him, nothing but a shifting shadowy mass that he couldn't resolve into anything solid no matter how hard he squinted, but for all that the very sight of it caused a jolt of fear to shoot through him, not like the fear of failure or the worry of what would happen to Emil and to his family if this summoning he'd only just prevented last year was turned loose on the world, but a sheer primal terror the like of which he hadn't felt since he was too young to even train. The ceremonial dagger he'd drawn on the run slipped from numb fingers. He tried to sing a runo, but his throat seemed to have closed. It was going to…

"HEY!" a voice yelled behind him, just as a powerful burst of light poured from the stone in front of him.

All at once the fear released him; his limbs unfroze, and Lalli threw an arm over his watering eyes. When he lowered the arm, the light had disappeared… but so had it.

"Are you okay?" Reynir was doubled over, hands on his knees as he wheezed for breath, a panting dog sprawled over the pavement at his feet. Even as Lalli watched, the dog gave a single bark, rolled onto its back, and faded from visibility.

"Fine." Looking at the wall where the light had come from, he recognized one of the protective seals that Reynir had drawn earlier that day. Gingerly, he laid a hand against it; the power he could feel in that symbol sent a warm tingling sensation through his fingers.

"Um… Lalli? What was that thing? Did we get rid of it?"

"No." Even as he spoke, Lalli's stomach was clenching all over again.

This wasn't over. Whatever horrible thing this year had in store for him, it was just getting started.

A/N: If the Americans start putting up the Christmas decorations in October and the Chinese leave them up through the Spring Festival, then damn it, I am allowed a Halloween fic on Valentine's Day!

-The prequel/backstory to this short was inspired by "Night on Bald Mountain".

-I have a really hard time getting into Lalli's head; I'm sorry if he sounds off.

I am willing to put this premise up for adoption if there's anyone out there who'd like to run with it.