Chapter 4

Not all was sunny in southern California. Some of the deeper, more mysterious corners of the state had been undefiled by solar contact for centuries. Havens of the foulest, scariest demons the world has ever known (prime examples being the succubus and Vincent Price), these spawn points of evil lay mostly in the more remote wooded areas – at least, those remote wooded areas with the most evil trees.

Your basic evil tree comes in three varieties. The first is what you would find in a jungle. Owing to the fact that most of its intimidation factor derives from the fauna living in the foliage rather than the trees themselves, these are probably the least frightening of the group. Occupying the middle of the pack are the leafless, prickly trees, the likes of which Prince Phillip cut through on his way to battle Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. These trees can be dangerous even without any assistance from predatorial animals nesting in them, so they warrant more caution than jungle trees. Most sinister of all are the pure evil trees. These are not so barren as their prickly cousins, so they can hide any number of traps and/or villains in their branches, and they can also be someone unpleasant to cut through. They get their pure evil label from the rumors that they sometimes act as something more than innocent (or malevolent) bystanders, opting instead to strangle or eat passengers. Whether or not the pure evil trees really can more, they at least look like they might, so they add an extra few points of terror to any would-be hero unfortunate enough to be walking in the woods at night. The evil woods.

It so happened that southern California was home to a particular evil wood, known to a few as Nightmare Forest. What made Nightmare Forest special was known to even fewer: underneath it was hidden a place so evil that no priest would dare speak its name without a nearby shower running Holy Water. This fortress of malefaction, this stronghold of sin, this residence of pestilence, this rampart of wrongdoing, this locality of obduracy, stood witness to more foul plots than an out-of-the-way smoke-filled room filled with crooked politicians, Mafioso scumbags, and ill-tempered jealous soccer moms. This place was called Dakota Castle.

On the path – if something nearly invisible and unwalkable could be called that – leading to the front gate of Dakota Castle walked Hayden Panettierre, the Ice Princess. The evil trees respected her. Those whose thorny branches would obstruct the passage of nearly any other traveler shifted into a more navigable position and saluted the Ice Princess as she passed. Even those not directly in her way paid some mind to her. After all, she held one of the highest ranks available at Dakota Castle, and her job involved a lot of torturing and killing.

The front gate was less obsequious, but only slightly. The Ice Princess had to let the biometric identification machine scan her hands and her eyes before she could pass through, but when she checked out okay, a recording of a cordial greeting message played through a hidden loudspeaker. The Ice Princess may or may not have noticed, but she wasn't telling.

The way up from the gate to the door of Castle Dakota consisted of some halfheartedly paved mud and rocks followed by a slimy bridge over some waters that could only be described accurately by a minimum of five synonyms for murky. Lit up eyes belonging to vermin that must have evolved excellent night vision kept watch on the path. Jittery crawly things, most likely extremely venomous, scuttled from one side of the path to the other. A low murmur rose from some of the darker spots off to the side as the Ice Princess came into view; whatever was making the noise sounded like it could have been talking and could have been growling, and what made it creepier was how it could have been both feral enough to growl and intelligent enough to talk. Almost everything about the scenery, in fact, seemed aware of and hostile to anything that didn't belong there.

Fortunately for her, the Ice Princess fit right in.

Something in the moat liked the Ice Princess enough to welcome her with some muck it spat onto the side of the bridge. A dozen birds of some uncatalogued species scattered from the doorframe was she approached it. She dug into her shirt and pulled out a magnetic key on a chain around her neck, and then she pressed it against a receptor where a doorbell might have been. With a groan that could have woken the dead (and in this corner of the world, that wasn't so far-fetched), entrance to Dakota Castle swung open.

Dakota Castle's foyer made the outdoor scenery look like the land of the Teletubbies. In most houses, a guest might be shocked to see a spider web in the corner. Guests at Dakota Castle would have been pleasantly surprised to find a corner without a spider web. Most of the resident spiders were at least as big as a grown man's hand. Paintings depicting grim subjects torn from the twisted minds of madmen perched on the walls, and most of them looked both alive and, if possible, hungry. The furniture, too, looked just peeved enough to be hiding teeth underneath the throw pillows, waiting for an opportunity to chew the limbs off an unwary visitor. The decorations atop every table in the foyer followed, with about half of the wall paintings, a sort of skull motif; it would take an optimist to hope that the tabletop skulls were artificial.

The Ice Princess strode slowly and methodically across a reddish carpet into the middle of the foyer, where she turned right and made for an archway leading to a long hallway. Bats chirped above her, and something resembling a banshee howled in the far distance. The Ice Princess recognized the howl as coming from the Boss, but she was too focused on reaching the hallway to stop to enjoy the music.

Other sounds joined the Boss's voice in the hallway, and while they sounded just as ugly, they were ugly in a different way. The Boss's sang like a bad headache, but the music was happy in its own way. The other sounds seemed to come from people suffering from headaches, or worse. They were the cries of those being tortured. Hearing them brought a small smile to the Ice Princess's face.

The shrieks grew louder as the Ice Princess neared a side passage. Just inside the passage, a flight of stairs led down to the castle dungeon. The Ice Princess put on her best work face, ground her teeth together a few times, took a deep breath, and began her descent.

Another day of punishing dissidents and traitors had begun.