Quintessence by Hugs.And.Kisses (book recommendations website TXT) 📕

last one!" Aubrey cried, pointing toward the dark violet pillar that was spiraling toward the sky.

"Bout damn time." Lock growled, wiping blood off his chin. "Remind me why I thought this was a good plan!"

"You think all of your plans are good plans until they fail!" She called, laughing. He rolled his eyes and leap-frogged over a charging skeleton, sending it into a metal fence. "Stop complaining and come on! We're almost finished."

"Hurry up, you two!" Jack ordered, already halfway to the next broken headstone.

"Not my fault I wasn't built like a daddy long-legs." Lock muttered, running after the Pumpkin King. He vaulted over the metal fence and into the fray of possessed skeletons and ghosts.

"Where've you been?" Aubrey asked, a bit winded, as she fended off a pair of. "You've been missing all the fun!"

"Not on purpose, I assure you." He said, slicing a wailing ghost into halves. "Where's Jack?"

"Fixing the grave. Trying to, anyway." She corrected, seeing a severed skull flying away from the broken grave.

"You ever think that maybe Jack has some hidden anger issues?" Aubrey rolled her eyes and sliced a rather persistent skeleton's legs off.

A roar suddenly went through the monsters as they collapsed to the ground, dissolving into mist and dust. Lock and Aubrey turned to see Jack standing in front of the newly mended gravestone. "We should get to the crypt." Lock said after a moment. "The barrier should be losing power, now that it doesn't have any souls to draw from."

"Let's go." Jack said, running toward the far end of the graveyard. It only took a few minutes for the three to reach the patch of barren land in front of the giant mausoleum.

"There it is! And no sign of Oogie's creatures." Aubrey called, landing next to her father and fiancé.

"The barrier's down, too." Lock said, giving the decrepit building a cursory once over. "We should hurry and get Sally out."

However, Jack had barely taken a step toward the door when a frustrated scream cut through the air. "Why do you have to ruin everything?" Mercy demanded from the building's roof. "We were so close…" She groaned, covering her face with her hands.

"Mercy, why are you helping Oogie?" Aubrey yelled. "You're betraying the entire town- your family!"

"I'm the traitor? Ha, that's a laugh." Mercy growled. "You're the one who has Oogie's key!" Aubrey gasped sharply. "Yeah, that's what I thought."

"Whatever Oogie's told you is a lie, Mercy." Lock yelled. "That key was never his. It belongs to the Skellingtons!"

Mercy frowned, but then waved it off. "Yeah, cuz I'm gonna believe you. I can't let you into this crypt."

Jack stepped forward. "Mercy, your mother is in there, with god only knows what."

"Yeah, I know." Mercy said, a bit sadly. "But she's safe, and if you get in there, then you'll only put her in danger."

"Did Oogie tell you that? You can't trust him, Mercy."

"Enough of this. You aren't getting in here, and that's that." She snapped her fingers, and the ground began to quake.

"She's opening the geysers again!" Lock said, watching the gravestones begin to crack at their bases. "Jack, go!"

The skeleton nodded and leapt toward the door, managing to get inside just before the violet barrier rose again. "No!" Mercy shrieked. "Do you have any idea what you've done?"

"I'm really hoping that the answer's something along the lines of 'gotten you in serious trouble'." Lock said. Mercy stomped her foot against the roof.

"You are so dead." She snarled before disappearing. The rumbling grew worse, cracking the ground open around the two. Skeletons began to claw their way to the surface, while ghosts began to pour out past them.

"You know, I'm thinking that the crypt would've been safer." Lock noted.


Chapter 7

Chapter 7

The Crypt Creeper

Jack looked around the crypt warily. Nothing seemed to have changed- coffins lined the walls, covered with cobwebs and dust. Though he didn't remember quite as many spiders being in here…

"Sally?" Jack called, stepping over a particularly large spider. Was it just him, or was that pattern familiar…? "Sally?"

"Jack!"

Jack's empty eye sockets widened at the of his wife's voice. "Sally!" He cried as he ran further into the tomb. The door leading from the sarcophagi room slammed shut behind him, but he hardly had a chance to worry about it before he caught sight of his wife. Sally was entangled in the threads of a giant spider web hanging near the top corner of the large room.

"Jack, you have to run! It's a trap!" Sally pleaded.

"I'm not leaving you." Jack protested, only to look up toward the ceiling as a familiar scuttling sound reached his ears- a sound like a hundred spider legs all moving at once. The sound intensified, but also dimmed, as though the amount of legs was diminishing, but the size was…

Jack's thoughts were cut off as something large and hairy and many-legged dropped from the ceiling in front of him. Only one thought passed through Jack's head

'Oh no, not Fluffy.'

Yes, the spider in front of him was a near perfect copy of the beast Shock had created years ago, the perpetrator of the infamous 'spider incident.' And it was alive. Again.

'Oogie must have forced Shock to revive it.' Jack said, looking over the spider. 'But she didn't to her best work.'

And it was true- this newly reborn Fluffy seemed to be put together shakily, at best. Every so often, something seemed to move under the surface of its skin- another spider, perhaps? 'That must be it- she reconstructed him using hundreds of spiders… but she doesn't seem to have healed the wound that Lock inflicted…' Jack smiled, inwardly praising Shock for her cleverness. Whipping the Soul Robber off of his wrist, Jack sent the now-pointed weapon straight for Fluffy's face. It must have caught the spider off guard, because it didn't move as the slimy green weapon sunk in between its eyes. It let out a shriek of pain and… split in half? And in half again, and again, until there were hundreds of mini-Fluffys running around the room. Jack did the logical thing- started stomping. Half the room was clear when the spiders began to swarm together again to form Fluffy, but only half as large this time around.

'Looks like I was right,' Jack dodged a blow from Fluffy, who didn't look very pleased at his sudden decrease in size. 'It's not just a simple growth spell this time. All of those smaller spiders are being bound into a larger form… if I can break it apart enough times, I should be able to kill them all.'

Fluffy lunged at Jack, pincers snapping at the Pumpkin King's bony waist. Jack dodged nimbly out of the way, whipping the Soul Robber at one of its many hairy legs. It snapped off and the spider stumbled, barely catching itself on the more mossier stones of the floor.

"Is that the best you can do, Fluffy?" Jack taunted. The spider hissed and reared back on its hind legs before charging at Jack. There was a screech as Jack stepped aside again and Fluffy smacked into the wall Jack had been standing in front of. The impact was enough to jar the spider to pieces again. Jack quickly leapt around the room, killing the smaller, less dangerous arachnids as quickly as he could.

Finally, there was only a single 'Fluffy' left, the size of a large tarantula. Now he knew why that spider's markings looked so familiar in the coffin room. Jack whipped his arm forward, and the final Fluffy died with a 'squish'. Jack curled the Soul Robber back around his wrist, striding across the room to Sally. He quickly ripped through the thick strands of webbing cocooning his wife.

"Oh, Jack!" Sally cried, throwing her arms around him.

Jack gladly hugged his wife back. "Sally, I'm so glad to see you. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine, Jack." She assured him. "The boys?"

"A little rattled, but fine." Jack said, looking at the ruin of the web that held Sally, then frowned and moved back over to the cocoons remains. "What is this?" He murmured, reaching into a small sack of webbing he hadn't noticed before. His bone fingers easily tore through the sack, and the tips brushed wood. "No… he couldn't have…" Jack groaned as he ripped the webbing away.

"Jack? What- the Christmas Town door!" Sally gasped.

"Oogie has taken this too far." Jack growled. "Come on- Lock and Aubrey are waiting outside."

"Aubrey? She's all right?"

Jack nodded, an arm around his wife's shoulders as he led her out of the crypt. "So is Lock- he was under Oogie's curse, I'll explain more once we're safely back in town."

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"Mom!" Aubrey cried, running over to embrace Sally as the two exited the crypt.

"The monsters?" Jack asked Lock.

Lock shook his head. "Disappeared about five minutes ago. One minute we're up to our necks in Oogie creatures, the next they're all dust."

"It must've been because you destroyed Shock's proxy." Lock said. "I'm sure Oogie'll find another way to channel the magic he needs here, but for now it's safe here. We should probably get back to Hanging Tree and all get out of here."

"Good idea." Aubrey said, coming down the steps with Sally. "Let's go."

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"Shock, are you okay?" Barrel asked as she doubled over.

"Fluffy… it's gone." Shock said, sounding surprised. "Jack's back- he killed it."

"Jack?" Barrel asked, grinning a little. They both looked up as a roar shook the tunnel. "Oogie sounds pissed."

"I'm not surprised. This hasn't been a good day for him." Shock said, grinning wickedly.

Barrel snickered, kissing Shock for a brief moment. "Come on, Shock, let's get some rest." He curled an arm around her waist and let her down the hall, away from the screams of fury that echoed through the lair.

Chapter 8

Chapter