One of its windows had a light on.
Marceline stopped in the air above the water. Somebody had moved into her tree.
She went around it once, slowly. There was a ladder where she'd never put one, a swing on a low branch, and a smell of pancakes coming out of the wood that she was going to have to burn out of it. The lit window was open a crack.
Somebody inside was telling a story. It was a lazy, deep voice, and it said "vampire" like it was the scariest word it knew.
'Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me.' She floated closer to the glass and started to grin.
...
Inside, Jake was just getting to the good part.
"...and every night, when the wind was blowing just like this, the vampire came back. Looking for blood." He held the flashlight under his chin. "Lots of blood. Like, a bucket."
"Uh-huh." Finn pulled his sleeping bag up to his nose.
He hadn't been able to sleep. Every time he shut his eyes he got the mall instead, and mostly the little fork, the one that was smaller than the other one. So Jake had climbed up with the flashlight and said what Finn needed was a fun scary thing, to push out the not-fun scary thing. That was how it worked. Jake had said so.
"BMO. Thunder."
BMO, sitting on the shelf, made a long rumbling noise out of its speaker. Outside there wasn't a cloud in the sky, but the wind was going pretty good, and a branch kept tapping the roof.
"Is it true?" Finn asked. "Like, for real?"
"I got it from a very reliable source." Jake lowered his voice. "And you know where the vampire used to haunt?"
"Where?"
"This tree."
Finn wiggled deeper into the bag. Then he said, "I'm not scared," because somebody had to say it.
"Course you're not." Jake turned the flashlight off and stretched down the ladder hole like a long orange noodle. "Night, buddy. Don't let the vampire bite."
"That's not funny!"
"It's a little funny!"
Then it was just Finn and the wind and BMO, who had gone to sleep with its screen on. He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. He was a hero. He had fought skeletons that got up and swung swords at you, and a whole slumber party of candy zombies. He was not going to be scared of a dog story.
The branch tapped again. Finn turned his head to the window.
There was a face in it, white as a bone, with black hair everywhere and two little points sticking down over the lip. It looked right at him and smiled.
"JAKE!"
He was down the ladder before he knew he'd moved, sleeping bag and all, and landed on Jake, who was asleep in his drawer and came out of it swinging.
"Whuh? What! Who!"
"The vampire! It's at my window! It looked at me!"
"There's no vampire, man." Jake rubbed his face. "I made it up. There's no reliable source. I'm the source."
"But I saw it!"
"You saw a branch." Jake patted him on the head. "You had a weird day, buddy. Your brain's just doing stuff."
"Actually," somebody said above them, "his brain's doing great."
...
She was sitting on the ceiling.
Her legs were crossed, and her hair was falling down toward them like she was the right way up and they were the ones who had it wrong. She had grey skin and pointy ears and a big axe on her back, and she was eating something red that Finn really hoped was an apple.
"AAAH! Vampire! Real vampire!" Jake had gone the size of a cup and was trying to get back into the drawer. "I made you up! I made you up!"
"Wow. Thanks." She turned the right way over and came down slowly, until her boots were floating just off the floor. "Hi. I'm Marceline."
Finn got between her and Jake's drawer. He didn't have his sword; it was upstairs in his backpack, which was the dumbest place in the world for it right now. He put his fists up anyway.
"What do you want?"
"Me? Nothing much." She drifted past him and looked around like she was shopping. "I've been all over, you know. Kicked some goblins out of a castle. Kicked a bear out of a cave. Kicked out a wizard, and he cried the whole time, it was super embarrassing for everybody." She picked up one of Jake's mugs, sniffed it and put it back. "I've been around Ooo a lot longer than you've been anywhere, kid."
"Okay," Finn said. "So?"
"So." She smiled with a lot of teeth. "This is my house."
"No, it's not! It's our house! We live here!"
"Uh-huh." She floated to the corner, where Jake kept his old blanket hanging on the wall to cover a crack, and pulled it down.
There was an M carved into the wood. It was big, longer than Finn's arm, and it was really old; the edges had gone dark and smooth. The middle of it dipped down way too low, and the last leg leaned out like it was trying to leave. Finn had lived in this tree his whole life, almost, and he'd never once looked behind that blanket.
"M," Marceline said, and tapped it. "For me."
"You can't just carve a letter and say stuff's yours!"
"I can, actually. That's how it works." She turned around in the air. "I'm not mad, though. Seriously. Thanks for keeping it warm for me. It used to get super drafty."
She went along the wall, touching things. She passed the table, the stove and the pile of Finn's spare swords in the corner, all six of them leaning together with no scabbards, and there she stopped. She looked at them for a while, with her head a little on one side.
Finn stood up straighter. 'She's checking out my gear.' It was a good pile. Anybody could see that.
"Cute pile," Marceline said, to the swords. Then she turned back around, and she was smiling again. "Okay. Time's up, boys."
"No way!" Finn charged.
He didn't get far. Jake shot out of the drawer, wrapped around his middle twice and pulled him back.
"Dude, dude, dude! Vampire! Don't punch the vampire!"
"She's stealing our house!"
"She's gonna steal our blood!"
"I'm not gonna steal your blood," Marceline said. "Yet."
Then she grabbed Finn by the back of his shirt and Jake by the scruff, which was hard to do, since Jake was still wrapped around Finn. She tucked BMO under her arm with the sleeping bag. Finn kicked and yelled the whole way across the room, and it didn't do anything at all. She was way stronger than she looked, and she looked pretty strong.
The door opened. The cold came in. Then they were sitting in the wet grass, and BMO was in Finn's lap, and the sleeping bag landed on top of all three of them.
"Bye, roomies." The door shut. A second later the light in the window went out.
...
They didn't go far. Jake said that was strategy.
The first place was a beehive in an old oak, which Jake said was "basically a condo". He squished himself flat and got halfway in before the bees had a meeting about it.
The second place was a birdhouse on a pole. Jake fit; Finn got one arm and his head in, and the bird that lived there didn't like that either. After that they tried a hollow log, and something in the far end of it growled until they left.
Around the time the sky started going grey, they were sitting on a rock by the pond, looking at their tree. Finn's arm was stung in two places. Jake was picking feathers out of his ear.
"I want to go home," Finn said.
"Home's taken, buddy." Jake kept his eyes on the dark window. "We'll get it back. We just gotta get some sleep first. And breakfast. Mostly breakfast."
Finn sat there and thought about it. Then he sat up.
"Ray's place."
"Ray's place is the size of a lunchbox."
"It has a roof! And a door! And Ray!"
Jake started to argue and then didn't. "Well, I did say I'd pick him up. And drag that big stinky thing out of his yard." He sighed and started to grow. "Okay. Ray's place. But if he doesn't have breakfast, I'm eating the porch."
...
Ray woke up on the floor at the same time the flies did.
He knew it was the flies, because they were very loud about it. He lay there with his cheek on the boards and his arm asleep, and the smell came in through the splintered window and sat on his face. Last night it had been burnt monster. This morning it was burnt monster that had been left out.
'Okay. Jake's coming. Jake's coming and then it's not my problem anymore.'
He got up, swept the three pieces of plate into a corner with his foot and drank some water from the mug. Then he went outside to wait.
The stomper's halves looked worse in the daylight. The scavengers had cleaned out a lot of the middle, so now the two pieces were mostly legs and shell, and they had sunk an inch into the grass overnight. There were flies on every part of them.
The sun got higher. Jake didn't come.
'He said morning. Morning's a range.' Ray sat on the step. He stood up. He sat back down.
Around what had to be the middle of the morning, he lost his patience and went to try himself. He picked the smaller half, which was the back end, and got his arms under one of the legs and pulled. It didn't move. He pulled harder and the leg came off in his hands, and he went down on his back in the grass, holding it.
"Oh, that's so fucking gross." He threw the leg back at the rest of it. "Cool. That's one down. Only like forty to go."
He didn't try again. He washed his hands in the stream three times instead, and practiced in his head.
'Jake. Buddy. About your second-favorite bread knife.' No. 'So, good news and bad news. The good news is I'm alive.' That was better. That put the bread knife in context.
It was getting close to noon, and he kept looking at the trail. He didn't really want to know why. Somewhere in the back of his head there was a pale face over his porch, saying, 'What tree house?', and a bad feeling he hadn't done anything about.
'It's fine. She probably went home. Ooo's got a lot of trees.'
That line hadn't worked on her either.
Then the trees at the bottom of the clearing moved, and a lot of orange came through them. Jake was as tall as the cabin and walking slowly, and he was carrying everything. Finn sat on his head, wrapped in a sleeping bag like a burrito, with BMO in his lap and his backpack on.
"Hey!" Ray got up so fast he almost went down the missing step. "There he is! I was about to send a search party. Of me."
Jake put Finn down on the grass and shrank back to normal size. He looked terrible. There was a feather stuck behind his ear. Finn had two red bumps on his arm, and he looked like he hadn't slept at all.
"...Guys? What happened to you?"
"Can we crash at your place for a while?" Jake asked.
"Yeah. Yes, obviously, of course." Ray looked from one of them to the other. "Seriously, what happened? Where's the Tree Fort?"
"We got kicked out!" Finn threw the sleeping bag off. "Of our own house! In the middle of the night! This lady came in through the window, and she floated, and she had an axe, and she said the tree was hers because she carved a big M on the—"
He stopped with one foot on the porch step.
Jake stopped next to him. They were both looking at the door, at eye level, where there was a capital M as tall as a hand, cut deep and a little crooked. The middle of it dipped too low, and the last leg leaned out like it was trying to leave. There was a fresh claw mark right across it.
The flies kept going. Nobody else said anything.