Even with his breath held, Nick imagined that he could smell the sickly stench. His lungs burned with the exertion of staying on top of the thick currents below, but he waited to surface. Once he did, he was going to have to make a quick exit from the water or face mortal peril on a variety of different fronts.

“Got something you want to share with the class?” Nick shifted, feeling rusty chains burning into his wrists. “Oh, come on, I’m not Houdini. Is all this really necessary?” Strictly, it was necessary. Nick knew more than a hundred ways to break out of bondage, both professional and otherwise.

As it turned out, the depictions of cutesy cryptids being sold in underground shops and suddenly transforming weren’t that far off the mark. There were plenty of Christmases that had gone wrong from cheap dads trying to make a last-minute impression.

Nick had detoxed before and each time it got a little worse. The shakes were more violent, the sweats wetter, the fevers higher, and the hallucinations more salacious.