Carols For The Midnight Bonfire [Wraith]
Snow sat thick on the cul-de-sac roofs like icing someone slapped on in a hurry, streetlights humming over tire-scarred frost and inflatable snowmen breathing in and out on extension cords that really wanted union pay,
Three carolers shuffled past trash cans and lawn reindeer, cheeks numb, hands curled around paper cups of cocoa that scorched their tongues in the most comforting way,
Lily in that red scarf with stitched white flakes, Mark with a hat that refused to sit straight and made him look like a drunk elf on probation, Sarah layered in every sweater she owned, swearing she still felt the cold anyway,
Their songbook pages wilted with steam and breath, ink starting to run like even the carols were tired of rhymes about peace while the neighbors yelled about parking two houses away.
They had already conquered “Jingle Bells” for the fifteenth time, endured one old man’s speech about how in his day people sang from the diaphragm and not the throat,
Collected three candy canes, two cookies, and one lecture on the spiritual meaning of the season that nearly froze solid in mid-air before it reached their coat,
Now Lily wanted to aim higher, chasing notes she’d cracked a dozen times in December, teeth chattering as she announced her ambition with dramatic throat-clearing and a modest shrug of her coat,“O Holy Night or I’m revolting,” she declared, voice chipper, eyes bright in that dangerous way that foretells both miracles and ambulances when you hand someone a microphone and a high note.
“What you’re revolting, sure,” Mark answered, breath steaming, blue eyes lit with mischief that could start a bar fight in the children’s choir if you gave him a minute to stoke,
Sarah snorted into her cocoa, scalded her lip, and declared this a hate crime against hot chocolate,
Snow squeaked under their boots while they argued about who got which verse, who took the risky parts, who would mouth along and fake it,
Their laughter scattered up into the dark, tangled itself in the strings of lights stretched between rooftops like electric spiderwebs, finding every bulb that flickered.
They drifted off their usual loop without noticing, drawn past mailboxes and porch wreaths into the black seam at the edge of the subdivision where the pines thickened and the sidewalk gave up,
Streetlamps thinned out until the last one stood behind them like a nervous friend who refuses to leave the driveway,
Ahead, the woods loomed—tree trunks banded with old snow, shadows packed dense between them, breath of resin and frozen earth rolling out to meet the cheery smell of cinnamon still clinging to their coats,
The sound reached them first: something low and layered, not quite song, not quite speech, more like the way a power line buzzes when winter air gets brave and leans in close.
“Tell me that’s not carolers with better harmony,” Sarah whispered, voice dropping like the temperature every time someone opened a front door and complained about drafts,
Lily lifted a mittened hand, signaled stop, heart knocking at her ribs with the same hammered beat as the door she had just pounded asking strangers if they wanted to hear about shepherds and wise men,
They stepped off the road, boots crunching frost-crusted needles, branches clutching at their scarves with bony fingers that left little showers of snow dusting their shoulders like cheap confetti cast by a drunk stagehand,
Through the tree line, light pulsed—orange and angry and alive, licking upward in tall licks that painted the trunks in a color you never see in nice stories about manger hay and starlit haystacks.
They reached the clearing’s edge and saw the bonfire.
Not the cozy sort with s’mores and badly tuned guitars, but a blaze that roared up out of a tangled nest of dead branches and something that looked a lot like broken furniture from a church basement hall,
Around it, cloaked figures moved in slow circles, hoods deep enough to swallow faces, sleeves long enough to hide fingers that might have done awful things even before tonight’s call,
The air felt packed, charged, like every atom had been given instructions they did not want to follow yet obeyed,
The chanting thrummed through the soil and up their soles, into their ankles, humming in their knees in a rhythm that didn’t belong to any hymnbook they’d ever mispronounced or misplayed.
“That is not the youth group,” Mark muttered, bravado dropping off his face like slush from a bumper,
Lily grabbed a branch for balance and stared, eyes dragged toward the center where one figure lifted a dagger that gleamed like a broken star through the sparks that flew from the fire,
She had made enough paper snowflakes this year to know that blade’s silhouette did not match cut-out angels or any cookie cutter that rolled out of Grandma’s cupboard,
Sarah wheezed softly, “Holiday book club from hell?” then winced at the way the words felt right and wrong in equal measure.
The chant rose, guttural and coiled, syllables wrapping around each other like serpents knitting a net in the dark.
The one with the blade held it high over something bound at the center of the ring—shape half hidden, edges twitching in a way that said living, not prop, not roast, not theatrical bark,
Smoke streamed up in spirals that twisted into shapes for a second—horns, teeth, eyes that did not match human skulls—then broke apart again,
Every carol they ever sang about joy and mercy felt miles away, muffled behind walls made of pine trunks and fear,
Frost bit their cheeks while the fire’s heat touched them only in fragments, as if the blaze already knew who belonged and who merely watched from the cheap seats in the rear.
“We leave, now,” Lily hissed, fingers locking around Sarah’s sleeve with a grip that said she meant it more than any high note she had ever overshot,
Mark’s eyes jumped from blade to hood to bonfire, mind doing frantic math no school had prepared him for—distance, darkness, odds, the approximate speed of terrified teenagers in borrowed boots,
Some stubborn corner of him still wanted to stay, to see if the dagger hit meat or maybe this was some elaborate goth cosplay with an afterparty and hot cider,
Then one hood turned.
No face showed under the fabric, just a darkness deeper than the winter sky,
Yet somehow that gap looked directly at them in the trees, held their gaze, smiled without lips in a way that shoved cold straight down their spines like river water,
The chant shifted, rhythm stumbling then catching again with a new note threaded through it that sounded like their names stretched over a rack and pulled until the syllables whimpered,
The dagger dipped a fraction in their direction, as if marking them on a list written in smoke and future nightmares.
Mark inhaled like he might finally hit that note he teased Lily about, then let it out in a hiss. “Run on three,” he whispered, voice suddenly free of jokes.“One,” Lily answered, knees braced, heart trying to dig out through her ribs.“Two,” Sarah gulped, cocoa churning in her stomach like it wanted to convert into jet fuel.“Three,” all at once, then no more counting, just boots slamming snow, branches whipping at their faces, lungs burning like they’d swallowed their own campfire.
Behind them, the chanting twisted into something faster, footsteps joining it—a sliding, chemical crunch of many feet or hooves or both tearing at the frost.
Something growled, low and layered, the sound of a throat that had never seen a dentist and didn’t care,
Lily laughed once, a shocked, high bark that escaped from somewhere between panic and the absurdity of nearly dying in her good Christmas scarf,“Next year I’m caroling on Zoom!” she gasped, branches clawing her hat sideways, steam pouring from her open mouth like she’d turned into her own engine flare.
“Next year I’m faking the flu until January,” Mark panted, nearly wiping out on a root and catching himself with something like dignity,
Sarah wheezed, “If we get eaten by a goat-demon, I want this on my tombstone: ‘Sang off-key, died on brand,’”The growl behind them swelled, snapped branches popping like bubble wrap stepped on by God’s worst idea,
They didn’t look back; that rule had been wired into them by horror films and common sense long before this night got weird.
Trees thinned, darkness loosened.
Through the trunks, they glimpsed the first shaky glow of suburban light, that familiar pale orange, slightly depressing yet suddenly heavenly,
The chant faded behind them, swallowed by distance or choice or the invisible line where cul-de-sac magic repels forest madness for reasons no one actually understands,
Boots broke free onto asphalt, snow packed tighter here, plowed and salted and stained with tire tracks and glitter from previous parties and one red smear that fortunately belonged to a dropped candy cane.
Christmas lights greeted them—plastic snowflakes buzzing on porch eaves, reindeer frozen mid-leap over lawns that knew only HOA arguments rather than ancient blood,
Traffic noise returned, a distant honk, the howl of someone’s dog who wanted in on the choir but had been locked inside after last year’s ham incident,
They staggered under a streetlamp, lungs ripping air like it was currency, laughter fizzing up through their exhaustion until it shook their ribs,
The world had the nerve to look normal again, and that made everything ten times more surreal.
“If anyone asks me why I’m celebrating this year,” Mark said, palms braced on his knees, breath punching white into the cold, “I’m telling them I survived a satanic Secret Santa behind the cul-de-sac,”Sarah leaned against the lamppost and slid halfway down it, giggling like her body had discovered a new way to purge fear through noise,
Lily adjusted her scarf with trembling hands, eyes glassy and bright, and announced, “I am retiring from live performance and devoting my life to indoor hobbies and background music only,”They laughed harder then, voices tumbling into the night, daring the shadows at the edge of the street to answer.
Under the flicker of cheap string lights and one buzzing plastic angel missing half a wing, the three of them stood in a messy triangle of steam and panting and hysterical relief,
Behind them, past the pines, the fire still burned, unseen yet memorized, its glow staining the underside of the clouds with a color nobody would mention at Christmas brunch,
Yet here, on this strip of salted asphalt and overdecorated fences, their joined laughter felt like a tiny rebellion,
Not against monsters or cloaks or daggers—those would remain—but against the idea that horror owned the night.
Someone on the corner opened a window, yelled at them to keep it down, some of us have work in the morning,
Lily lifted her chin and sang the first line of “Silent Night” anyway, voice cracked, breathless, still hitching from their sprint,
Mark and Sarah joined in, badly, off-key, on purpose, turning the holy hymn into something raw and ridiculous and weirdly honest,
Three scared kids, hoarse and shaking, singing at the edge of a nightmare they outran,
A crooked little carol flung into the dark, reminding it that even on an unholy night, humans still talk back.