Tenebrism

“What?” I said. Oh, fuck, it hurt to hear my own voice. “What?”

“Come with me,” the statue said. It pulled on my wrists and hauled me up. Oh hell no, that didn’t help at all. There was a sick hot pulsing behind my eyes and shit, shit, I was so close to throwing up. Everything was way too bright and my mouth felt like it was full of lint and bad milk. “Now.”

“What?” I shook my head—which was stupid, because oh fuck oh Christ—and blinked. Hard. I felt awake. I had enough of a really disgusting headache to be awake. I just didn’t think I was. “Who the fuck are you?”

“My name is Raen Keydestas,” he said. He said it with a punch to the last syllable. It didn’t even sound like a name, just a goofy bunch of sounds.

“You’re who the fuck? I—“

“It’s not important,” the statue said. He was still leaning close to me, and he smelled like outside. Like trees and leather and earth and rain. It actually cleared my head a little. “You have to come with me.”

“I—what? Why?” I patted my hand around on the cheap little nightstand next to my bed, and actually found my glasses. After last night, I’d almost expected them to be smashed into pieces somewhere. Whoever’d dragged my sorry ass back here must’ve rescued them and put them here for me. Probably Martin. Usually I was the one looking after him when he got tanked, so he’d owed me one anyway.

The guy who’d just broken into my goddamn apartment came into clearer and scarier focus after I fumbled my glasses on. I hadn’t gotten a good look at his face last night, and I was kind of glad about that. He didn’t look friendly in the fucking slightest. He had intense bone structure—the word ‘chiseled’ was pretty fucking apt—his hair was jet black, and he had a tattoo on his face. Just right there, some kind of dark tribal design, over his left eye. And he had the bluest fucking eyes I’d ever seen. He was also only about half a foot from my face.

“Whuh,” I said, dumbly. I just about reached up and poked him, just to make sure he was real this time. But it felt like a bad idea. I kept my hands to myself.

The guy leaned back just a little, like he’d realized just how fucking close up to me he was. He’d actually had one knee on the edge of my bed. But even when he backed off he was way closer than I wanted him. I did get a better look at his armor, which was matte-black and kind of complicated looking. There was dark brown leather underneath it that showed through in places. But it was still a full fucking suit of armor.

“You removed the spell from me,” the guy said then. I had to still be drunk or something, because his mouth was moving in all kinds of ways that definitely didn’t match the words he was saying. I pressed my palms against my eyes and tried to force my brain to catch up. “You could do so for Rysanys.”

“Hang on,” I said into my hands. This was all just going way too fucking fast. Especially because I was talking to a guy who’d broken into my apartment at god-knew-what-the-fuck-hour in the morning. When I had a hangover and not very much sleep. And when the guy had been a statue a couple of hours ago.

I dropped my hands and looked up again—Jesus, he was still just right there, right in my face.

“Hold the hell on, okay,” I said. I wanted to push him away, get him the hell out of my personal space, but I still didn’t think touching him was a great idea. “I don’t just follow your fucking orders, all right, I—“

“I’ll answer anything else you want me to, if you first do this,” the guy said. He closed his eyes for a second, and a muscle in his jaw tightened. “I need your help.”

I think it was that little hesitation that got me. There was something about it that almost seemed...desperate. Like he honestly needed me for whatever this was, and didn’t know where else to go. Even if he was intimidating as fuck, he’d just asked for my help. And maybe he’d broken into my apartment to ask for it, but he seemed real sincere about it, and how the fuck do you say no to a huge guy in armor? You don’t.

Plus, the rest of what he’d said sounded almost reasonable. So I rubbed at my face and said, “let me…get dressed first?”

He nodded once. “I’ll wait.”

Then he turned right around and left. Just walked right out of the room, no more conversation. He moved really quietly—his armor made a little noise, kind of clinky, but the floor didn’t even creak when he stepped on it. And he had to be heavy, I mean, shit, just being in armor had to weigh him down, and then on top of how big he was.

After he’d gone, I just sat there for at least a minute. It was hard to fucking believe he’d even been in here, or that he was real. I couldn’t hear him out in the apartment at all. It was totally quiet, except for Martin’s ridiculously loud fucking wall clock that had the loudest ticking second hand in existence. If I could hear it, it meant his bedroom door was open. Was Martin here? He had to be here. Unless he’d wound up at someone else’s place last night. But I was here, so he pretty much had to be too.

I glanced over at my alarm clock, which must have gotten unplugged or there’d been a power outage last night or something, because it was stuck on flashing 12:00 over and over. So I didn’t even know what time it was. Fucking early was my best guess. I stuck my hand between the window blinds and squinted outside. The sun wasn’t even up. The sky was too light for it to be the middle of the night, but not by a lot. There was no way I’d been asleep for more than like...three hours. And I had a hangover and a stranger in my apartment.

This day was not starting out awesome at all.

I dragged myself out of bed and realized I was already dressed—in my clothes from yesterday. I thought about changing, but it didn’t really matter; a statue had just broken into my apartment and demanded that I help it. A change of clothes wasn’t going to fix anything. My head still hurt like hell; throbbing heat behind my eyes, and my mouth was dry and fuzzy and awful. Even the low light in my room wasn’t easy to handle. I crawled around and found one of my shoes almost under the bed. I couldn’t find the other one at all, so I had to dig through my closet for a different pair of sneakers. Then I put them on the wrong feet and it took me almost half a minute to realize why they weren’t working right.

I really needed to wake up and pull it together, here. If any of this was actually happening at all, if there was really a guy in armor out in the living room waiting for me, I had to deal with it. I went into the bathroom that was attached to my bedroom and threw some water on my face from the sink. It didn’t help much. Now I was just damp and hung over and exhausted. I sure looked like an awful fucking mess in the mirror.

That was about all the stalling I could manage. It was time to go face...whatever the fuck was out in my living room.

I leaned out into the hallway, looking down past Martin’s open door and into the part of the living room I could see from back here. Saw the guy right away. Fuck, so he really was real. He was pacing around between the living room and kitchen. Now that it wasn’t night and he wasn’t right up in my face, I could kinda get a better look at him. First of all; fucking tall. He had to be pushing six and a half feet. But even with all the armor on him he didn’t look real bulky or built. His hair was black and hacked up into layers and looked like he’d never brushed it, ever. I thought I even saw some dead leaves tangled up in it. He actually looked scruffy all over; all muddy and smudged up like he’d been out in the rain for a while. Except it hadn’t been raining. Not recently and definitely not last night.

I ducked back into my room and leaned against the wall. Closed my eyes. Breathed in. Out. In again. This was fucking nuts. I was pretty sure I was awake by this point, but I wasn’t sure about sane. Maybe I was still drunk. Maybe there’d been something in one of Jack’s drinks that hadn’t been alcohol. Maybe I’d died—I mean, that made just about as much sense as anything else. But if the afterlife was my own apartment, that just sucked.

But I wasn’t gonna hide back here forever. I moved into the hallway, just a couple of steps, until I could get a look around Martin’s door and into his room. Just to check. And Martin was there. He was asleep on top of his blanket, in his clothes, on his stomach with his arm hanging off the edge of the mattress. I thought about waking him up, just so he could tell me if I was hallucinating or dead, but I didn’t get a chance.

Armor-guy saw me there in the hallway, and headed right at me. He didn’t even say anything; he just snagged me by the arm, about-faced, and dragged me back towards the front door.

“Hey, wait,” I said. “Can you at least tell me where—“

“Cemetery.”

This guy was all business and real few words. He didn’t give me time to grab my keys or my sweatshirt—which I spotted on the kitchen table—before he pushed us both out the door. The sky was kind of a dull periwinkle color; still not even dawn. The outdoor lights around in the complex were all on, orangey and buzzing. I managed to pull the door shut behind me with my free hand before the guy dragged me halfway towards the parking lot. Did he want me to drive him back to the cemetery?

But he stopped before we got there, in the middle of the sidewalk. Then the guy’s hands came down on my shoulders, and he spun me right around so my back was to him. His arms slid under mine and pulled up tight, crossing around my ribs and dragging me right up against his chest. It’d happened so fucking fast that I didn’t have a chance to duck out of it.

“Hey, dude, whoa—“ I said, because getting that friendly was seriously not cool. And then the guy kind of...jumped. That’s what it felt like; like he’d bent his knees and then just hopped off the ground. But we didn’t come back down. We kept going up. The ground dropped away and suddenly I was seeing rooftops and everything was getting smaller and what in the fuck.

I squirmed around in the guy’s grip and managed to get a good enough look above me to figure out what was going on. There were wings up there, a huge set of giant fucking wings, coming out from behind his shoulders. And they were moving, beating at the air and pushing us higher and higher above the roofs of the complex.

“Ohholyshit,” I breathed out. He could fly. He had goddamn wings, and we were flying.

They weren’t even normal looking wings; not normal for any kind of thing that flew. Not feathery bird wings, or leathery bat wings, or anything that actually looked living. Instead they were all made of something that looked like dozens of pieces of dark glass, all glittery and ridged like volcanic rock. The pieces weren’t connected to each other by anything; there were big spaces of air in between them all even if they moved like one solid thing. But they didn’t even look like they should have been able to get anything, let alone two people, into the air. He hadn’t had these when he’d been in my apartment, and I had no idea where they’d even come from.

But I got it now; how he’d disappeared in the cemetery last night. He’d just flown away.

“Holy shit,” I said again. I wasn’t afraid of heights, I was definitely kind of fucking nervous about being pulled into air by a guy in armor who had wings that shouldn’t even fucking work. We’d shot pretty high up above the apartment complex by now, and if we fell it was gonna mean death, no question. And there’d be nothing I could do about it.

“Stop moving around,” the guy said from above me. “Or I’m going to drop you.”

“Okay,” I said, and just put my hands over my face instead so I didn’t have to look. That helped. Sorta. The guy had a really good grip on my upper body, but my legs were just hanging down uselessly and I had no idea what to do with them. I was trying not to move, but the whole situation was just so damn uncomfortable that it was really hard not to. But this dude must’ve been really strong to carry me like this at all. I’m not that short, and even though I outgrew my chubby phase in high school, I’m not scrawny either. I would’ve been impressed if I wasn’t seriously thinking I could die in the next couple of minutes.

The cemetery wasn’t real close to town—we’d driven up into the foothills to get there, because all the nice suburban ones hadn’t been cool or old or creepy enough to screw around in on Halloween. It’d been kind of a drive to get there, probably not the best idea when the plan had been to drink all night, but this kind of stuff only ever sounds stupid the morning after. Though I hadn’t actually been planning to drink as much as I had, and I still had no idea exactly how I’d gotten home.

So by car it’d taken a while to get to the cemetery, but it didn’t take long flying.

We weren’t even that high; when I took my hands off my face again I could see a few cars moving around down in the streets, headlights on in the early morning. But we were going pretty damn fast. This guy could really book it, even with dragging my extra weight along. Houses and streets and buildings just scrolled right along under us. All the streetlights were still on, and everything looked blueish and sleepy and quiet down there. Not up here—it was fucking loud up here. Wind whistled and wooshed in my ears and slapped my face cold and raw. My clothes flapped all around me and I really fucking wished this guy’d let me grab my goddamn sweatshirt on the way out.

I was almost—almost—getting used to all of it by the time I saw something that definitely looked like a graveyard down there, crunched up against the bottom of the hills. I had no idea how this guy had known where I lived, where the cemetery was in relation to my apartment, and how to get back and forth between them, but he’d done it somehow. This guy could fucking fly, I wouldn’t’ve been surprised if he had a GPS in his goddamn brain.

Right about then the guy shifted his grip on me, one hand crossing down to my hip and the other right up to under my arm, and then everything tilted over and we took a fucking dive right at the ground. Wind tore at my hair and clothes and I slammed a hand over my face to keep my glasses from getting blown right off.

“Hey!” I said, but with all the air rushing past it was way too loud to even hear myself. We were still pretty much falling out of the air, towards trees and bushes and hilly ground, and this was exactly what I didn’t need with a headache and a rocky stomach.

Don’t throw up, do not fucking throw up, I told myself, clutching at my glasses and bracing myself for smashing face first into the trees.

But the guy pulled up right before we hit them, leveling us out real sharp and sudden. Then he skimmed over the tree tops for another couple dozen yards while he slowed himself down. Branches and leaves started dragging at my legs as we got even lower, and I could feel my heartbeat pounding through my whole body, and little aftershocks of adrenaline buzzing through me.

“Jesus,” I said weakly. “Could you warn a guy next time you do that?”

I got no answer. Nice.

We dropped down through the trees, right near the same crypt that me and the guys had been screwing around near last night. The landing was rough and I didn’t get my footing right away, so when he let go of me I stumbled and went shoulder-first into a bush. I flailed around in there and crawled out all scratched up by twigs and pokey leaves. My scary new friend didn’t seem to care. He just left me there and went around the side of the crypt. I stayed where I was, rubbing at my arm where a twig’d gotten me and still trying to get my breath and my nerves back.

“Come here,” I heard the guy say a couple seconds later. He didn’t yell, or even say it real loud at all, but there was just something in his voice that really felt like I’d better jump to.

When I got around to where he was, he was pulling ivy off the crypt wall. Just yanking it off, breaking the vines away and throwing them off to the side. I stood there, with my hands in my pockets, waiting. My stomach was starting to grumble at me, which was just weird. That I was hungry. It was way too normal a thing to be feeling.

I was just starting to wonder why this dude had called me over here just to watch him do some landscaping when I saw that there was something inside the plants. Some kind of whitish thing up against the crypt wall that had been mostly hidden by the leaves. It looked like another statue.

The guy stepped back then, and looked right at me. Like he was waiting for me to do something.

“I—what?” I said, almost taking a step back. “What?”

“I need you to help her.”

Her? I looked a little harder at the second statue. It was a girl. Almost hard to tell under all the armor—but her hair was longer, just past her shoulders, and her face was less angular and a little more...girlish. She was all bright whitish grey and looked completely rock-solid, just like he’d been. Her head was turned to the side, blank eyes narrowed, and she was crouching down a little. Like she had just been about to jump around the side of the crypt.

“It’s a girl,” I said.

“Yes,” the guy said. “Will that matter?”

I spluttered a little. “Uh, no. I just—what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to do whatever it was that removed the spell on me.”

He kept saying that, and I had no idea what the hell it even meant. He was obviously talking about whatever had made him not a statue anymore, but…I hadn’t done that. I was having some trouble actually remembering a lot of last night, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t done anything to turn a statue into a person. I wasn’t goddamn magic here. He’d got it wrong, it wasn’t me, and I couldn’t do what he wanted.

“Look, I have no idea—“ I started, and shut up when the guy turned on me with this seriously hardass look.

“Help her,” he said, in a real low and dangerous voice. “What you did to me, do to her.”

“Jesus, man, I’m trying to think here, but the only thing I did was—well, uh—I kissed you,” I said. That was the only thing, the one unusual thing I’d actually done last night. Or could remember doing. The guy’s eyes widened a little, and I got a panicked idea that maybe he was gonna punch me for it. It’d probably break all my bones if he did. “Not that I wanted to, okay, it was a dare, it was stupid, and I—“

The statue slapped the back of his wrist down against the other one, clashing the pieces of his armor together. The sound that stabbed through my throbbing head was enough to make me shut up again. “Stop,” he said. “Do whatever you need to do.”

“Yes, sir,” I muttered. Not even being sarcastic, the sir just came out of me.

I turned to look back at the girl statue, sucking in a slow breath. What the fuck was gonna happen when I tried this and it didn’t do anything? I seriously though this dude might kill me. Jesus. I took another breath and one little step forward. The girl statue was tall too. My eyes were about level with her throat, even with her slightly crouched down. I wouldn’t be able to reach her face—mouth—that easy, especially on all this uneven ground, so I stepped up onto the toes of her boots instead. That gave me a couple of extra inches and put me at a much better angle.

So this was getting pretty fucking surreal. And it seemed kind of rude or—yeah, rude. Definitely if she was a person too under all that stone. But it was either be a creeper and do it, or not do it and have this guy completely flip his shit on me. He probably would anyway, because absolutely nothing was gonna happen, so I might as well just give it a fucking shot.

I leaned forward, and put my mouth against the girl statue’s cold, hard lips. Not even really a kiss at all. I just pushed my face to hers.

The hairs on the back of my neck lifted up. A shiver wormed down my back, and I jerked backwards. There was color seeping into the statue’s face, in big chunky patches. Like she was...turning real. What the fuck. Had this happened last night, too? How’d I not seen that? Okay, it’d been dark and I’d had a beer or two and my idiot friends were being idiots but shouldn’t I have fucking noticed something like this going on right in front of me? It was making my skin crawl all over the place. My ears were buzzing and hot, but I was starting to shiver and I couldn’t make myself stop.

The girl was turning regular real fast, too. In just a couple seconds she was full-on moving, breathing, living. And I was still standing on her feet like a total tool. I hopped back into the bushes just as her eyes flooded full of color and her whole body jerked like she’d been goosed. She swayed and took a heavy step forward, and then her head snapped right up again. She saw me first. Her lips drew back off her teeth a little, like she was snarling at me, and her whole body tensed up as if she was two seconds away from outright attacking.

Then her eyes flicked over my shoulder and her face changed, completely.

“Keyd,” she said.

“You’re all right,” I heard the guy say from behind me, and he sounded nice for the first time. Like he was actually glad to see her, really relieved that she was okay. And then he basically elbowed me out of his way and scooped her up into a huge hug. She grabbed him back. All that armor crashed and squealed together and my already aching head throbbed with the sound of it. Ugh, fuck, why.

I stumbled back to a nearby gravestone and dropped down on it, pressing my face into my hands. My head was still pounding and my skin was still buzzing. I still had a tongue-sock and I needed some fucking water. I was miles away from my apartment and didn’t have a good way back, because fuck it if I was gonna let tall dark and scary fly me around again. And my glasses had smudgy greasy fingerprints all over them. My dirty shirt didn’t do much good to wipe them clean with. I tried anyway, and put them back on almost worse than before.

When I looked up again, the dude and the chick were still there. They were gripping at each other and talking, quiet enough I couldn’t hear them. Her armor looked the same as his—black and dull and with some designs etched into it in places. It looked like she was wearing fingerless gloves, too. She was just as tall as he was or even a little taller, and with all that black hair they really could have been twins. There was a sword at her side, hanging there in a leather sheath. A sword. Oh Christ honestly what the fuck was going on here.

You know what, I didn’t even care. Not anymore. I’d done my good Samaritan deed for the decade, now I wanted to go home. Right now. I’d fucking walk it, if that’s what it took.

So I got off the gravestone and cleared my throat. “Hey,” I said. Neither of them seemed like they were listening to me, but I kept on talking. “Can I go? Because…I’m going to go. Now.”

“No,” the guy said right away. “Don’t go anywhere.”

I scratched at my neck. I wasn’t really in a place to argue. “Okay,” I said.

The girl pulled away from him and turned towards me, and I got my first actual good look at her since she’d, you know, come back to life. And she was really just gorgeous. I hadn’t been expecting that. Thin nose and bright eyes and nice lips. I’d just been kissing those nice lips. Her hair was black and sort of wavy, but frizzed out and tangled and parts of it even looked wet. There was mud spattered across her and caked up on her boots. She looked messy and roughed over, the same way the guy did. But she was still a knock-out.

“Ro kanys mejit mrit ijjdau?” she said. Whoa, that definitely wasn’t English.

“Baet daemajakal,” the guy said, and then kept talking like that, just a bunch of real harsh foreign sounds. I was really starting to fucking suspect that these people weren’t from around here. I dropped back down to the gravestone and rubbed hard at my face, sliding my fingers up under my glasses and pushing on my temples. If this was a dream, I wanted to wake up right about now.

A hand came down on my shoulder, and I just about jumped out of my skin. Both of them had gotten over to me without making a single fucking sound, and it was the girl who was leaning down and touching me. This close, I could see how pale and bright her eyes were—just like the guy’s, only green. Her eyelashes were really thick and dark. So were her eyebrows.

“You removed the spell,” she said to me. Oh, so she knew English too. “Thank you.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” I said. These people were crazy, and I didn’t understand anything they said even when it was in my own damn language. I scratched at my neck, then at my shoulder, then my elbow. I kind of itched everywhere, actually. Even my teeth and my nails felt weird, and all the little hairs on my neck and arms were standing up. Like static electricity was everywhere against my skin. I was uncomfortable all over and I couldn’t shake it off.

“He keeps saying that,” the guy said, and I almost laughed. What, did he think I was just joking around or something? How many times did I have to say I didn’t know what was going on before he believed me?

The girl was still looking down at me, still with her hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t been face to face with anybody this pretty since...well, a while. But she was pretty in a weird way. She had this wild, natural look that wasn’t like any girl off a magazine cover or TV commercial. She also looked like she could maybe kill someone just by staring too hard at them. And she had that sword. The guy didn’t even have one of those.

“Keyd,” the girl said, suddenly letting go of me. She’d said that word before; was that the dude’s name? It was a way better thing to call him than the long weird-sounding thing he’d told me. “How long has it been?”

Keyd shook his head. “Haij faujj. Ysta demua. Hasn estaran bahn,” he said. He didn’t sound real chatty in his own language either. He glanced towards me, then suddenly flipped back to English. “But I think some time has passed.”

“You were all covered in plants,” I said, and now both of them were looking at me. “So they grew over you.”

The girl turned back towards the ragged section of torn-up ivy on the crypt wall, while Keyd kept looking at me. Then the girl glanced down at her shoulder and pulled an ivy leaf out from between two plates of her armor.

“True,” she said. I really had to quit calling her a girl; she was at least six and a half feet tall, wearing armor and carrying a sword. But she—and Keyd, too— looked about my age. I mean, maybe. It was hard to tell. They were youngish.

“This is a really old cemetery,” I said. “I don’t think anybody really comes here. You could have been here a long time and nobody would’ve noticed.”

Keyd muttered something that didn’t sound like English, and turned away from the both of us. I stared hard at the solid back piece of his armor—where did those fucking wings of his come from? They were gone now, like they’d never been there at all.

The girl ignored him, and looked at me instead.

“Hello,” she said. Hello, now? We’d already had a whole conversation. And I’d kissed her.

“Hi,” I said back, like a big dweeb.

“I’m Kanaar Rysanys,” the girl said. Her voice was rich and slow and sort of smoky. “You may call me Rysa.”

Good, because I’d already forgotten the longer version she’d told me. Her nickname sounded like rice-uh.

“I’m Alan,” I said. She wasn’t getting my last name. I’d seen too many sci-fi movies where the hero awkwardly gets called their full damn name the whole time just because he was stupid enough to share it.

“Alan,” Rysa said. It came out all wrong, big weird vowels and drawn-out sounds. More like aw-lawn than anything. “I’m sorry for these...unusual circumstances. And for—“ her eyes zipped over to Keyd for just a second, “—perhaps being less than diplomatic during them.”

I let out a surprised laugh. Yeah, perhaps. “It’s okay,” I said. It was her partner guy over there that was really the dick; she hadn’t done anything. She seemed pretty decent, actually. Or maybe it was just because she was pretty. “But I’d like to know what’s going on here.”

“Of course,” Rysa said. “We’ll tell you as much as we can. It’s the least we can do for what you have done for us, in removing the spell.”

“Sure,” I said. They could start off by telling me what the hell this spell business was about. It sounded like they were both out of their minds.

“But we should have that conversation somewhere else,” Rysa added, glancing around the cemetery again.

Keyd chose right then to chime in real helpfully. “He has a place.”

“Hey,” I said. “Wait a second—”

“Alan,” Rysa said. “Of course, we won’t force you, but if you’d allow us to just rest and collect ourselves we would be most indebted.”

“Uh, all right,” I said. I would regret this, I knew. I knew it. And I still agreed, like an idiot. “Yeah. Sure.”

Rysa held one hand out to me, palm up, like she was serving me an invisible tray. What I’d thought were gloves before were actually black tattoos on her skin. Just like what was on Keyd’s face, except hers almost looked like fractal art; fitting into each other in repeating angled patterns. They came out from between her fingers and covered her hand all the way up past her wrist.

“Thank you,” she said. I wasn’t sure if I should take her hand or slap it or what, so I just put my hands in my pockets. After a couple seconds, Rysa put her hand down again.

“How do we get there?” she asked.

“He figured it out pretty good,” I said, jerking a thumb at Keyd.

“We flew,” Keyd said.

“All right,” Rysa said, and that seemed to settle it. She rolled her shoulders back a little, and a huge pair of wings stretched out from behind her. Right through her armor and everything. They had the same black-glass look as Keyd’s, but the patterns were different—matching that weird geometric design going on with her hands. And they were also the same as his in that they didn’t look like they could work. The pieces weren’t connected to each other, but they moved together like they were. They glittered in the light, cast shadows on the crypt wall. Beside her, Keyd already had his own wings out. Together they looked like a couple of big badass angels, and I was really glad they were sort of friendly. Sort of.

“I’ll take him,” Keyd said, stepping up right to my shoulder. This guy liked to stand close; what the hell.

“No, dude, back the fuck off,” I said, jerking away. “Don’t even try it.”

Rysa made a really weird sound that might have been a laugh she was trying to cover up. When I glanced over at her, she definitely looked amused.

Keyd didn’t. “Then do you have another way of getting back?”

He had me there. “...no,” I muttered, and let him put his big metal arms around me again. One of the plates pressed real uncomfortably into my ribs, and when Keyd launched us into the air it dug in even deeper. I winced but just kept my mouth shut about it, ‘cause I didn’t want him adjusting his grip in mid-air.

The sun was sort of up now, and it was a lot lighter when we got up above the trees. The sky had gone white-orange at the horizon, and faded into a pale blue above it. I wondered if anybody from the ground was seeing us going by overhead, because it wasn’t like any of this was subtle. Keyd took the lead, and I could sometimes see Rysa off in the side of my vision, just flying along like it was the most normal thing in the world. Those giant wings of hers swept up and down, glittering in the light.

The trip back to my apartment seemed shorter, and this time Keyd didn’t drop us down at the ground like a suicide bomber. He did it gradual and way more steady. As he banked lower over the complex I could see that the neighborhood kids had really done a number on the trees out in front; they were covered in drifting trails of toilet paper and neon silly string. Half the tenants here were other college kids and they’d probably all been out at the frat parties that I hadn’t been at, so this was probably revenge for not getting enough candy.

Keyd even landed better this time, doing a few running steps along the sidewalk until he’d fully touched down, still holding me off the ground the whole time. Then, he just set me down off to the side. He had good aim, I had to give him that—we were right on the walkway in front of my door. Rysa dropped down right beside us on the grass, almost noiselessly. I shuffled away from them, patting my pockets down for my keys automatically until I remembered that Keyd hadn’t given me a fucking chance to even grab them or lock the door.

“Right,” I muttered to myself, and pushed it open.

Rysa and Keyd followed me inside, both so quiet it was actually hard to tell they were there. Mostly I just heard soft little metal tinks of their armor. I flipped on some lights and then regretted it, because my hangover wasn’t ready for anything bright. It was like a punch in the eyes, and I felt the rest of my way into the kitchen about half-blind.

First order of business. I grabbed a glass out of a cabinet and filled it up from the tap. Drank the whole thing in about ten seconds, then filled it up again. The squeezing in my head loosened up, just a little. And my mouth tasted sort of less like unwashed socks. When I was done with the second glass I closed my eyes, took in a nice slow breath, and then glanced back over my shoulder.

Nope, they were still there. Both of them, just standing right at the spot where the kitchen linoleum hit the living room carpet. In their black armor and their tattoos and everything. Rysa was watching me, Keyd had his arms crossed and was looking towards the front door. Aw, Jesus, why were they still there? This seemed so much more real, and crazier, now that we were back in my apartment. A place I saw every damn day.

Rysa cleared her throat slightly. “Alan,” she started. Aw-lawn.

“Hang on,” I said, and filled up the glass a third time. Downed about half of it before I started to feel all that extra water squishing and burbling around in my stomach. Blehgh. So I just threw the rest of it on my face and hair. That woke me up better. I rubbed my face against the sleeve of my shirt—which smelled like beer, dirt, and you slept in your clothes you lazy slob—and then finally turned around to face my scary new buddies.

They hadn’t moved at all. Well, fuck, at least they were patient. I leaned back against the counter, gripping onto the edge with my fingers. Something nice and solid to hold onto.

“Okay,” I said then. I looked at Rysa because at least she’d never kidnapped me out of my apartment in the middle of the night. “Okay. I. So. So what…who are you?”

“Our race is called the oenclar,” Rysa said. “Keyd and myself are soldiers.”

Right, I should have guessed that with all the armor and the swords and the badass motherfucker attitudes.

“Okay,” I said. “And I’m guessing you’re not from around here, either.”

Rysa smiled. Actually smiled, and that was about the most reassuring thing that’d happened all morning. She was even prettier when she smiled. I relaxed a little. Just a little.

“We aren’t,” she said. “Is that something conceivable to everyone, here?”

What? What a weird fucking question.

“I...don’t...know?” I said. And what a dumbass fucking answer. “I mean, sure, we think about it. Other planets and aliens and that kind of—so you guys are aliens, then.” And I‘d just asked that question seriously. Holy shit.

Rysa’s forehead wrinkled up a little and she glanced sideways, like she was thinking about it.

“I suppose...yes, you could think of us that way,” she said. “Though I’m not sure how accurate that word might be in your language.”

“My language? Lady, we’re all speaking English here.”

She shook her head. “We aren’t speaking the same language as you.”

“Well, I only speak one,” I said, and that was English. And the worst shitty Spanish in the world.

“We’re communicating in frequency,” Rysa said, and it sounded like she expected me to know that already. Her tone was a little ‘well, duh’.

“Frequency,” I said. “The hell’s that?”

She looked at me harder. “I assumed you would know.”

And that was right about when I noticed what was so off about her, the weird thing that been bugging me about both of them. Her mouth didn’t match up to the words she was saying. Whenever they talked in English, it was like a bad dub of a foreign flick. So either they were both really awesome ventriloquists, or...they really weren’t speaking English at all. And I could still understand them.

I was gripping the counter so hard by now I could barely feel my fingers, and all I could do was shake my head. I was getting sick to my stomach again, and I didn’t think all of it was from the hangover or all the water I’d just chugged. My brain was just spinning around all of this and not getting anywhere.

“No, I—I gotta sit down,” I muttered, and just about did right on the floor. But I kept it together long enough to get over to one of the kitchen chairs and drop down into it. I hung my head between my knees and sucked in a couple of long, deep breaths. That was better. Sorta. Over my head, I could hear Rysa and Keyd start talking to each other in their weird-sounding language. So sometimes I could understand them and sometimes not, how did that fucking work? I ran my hands through my damp bangs and looked up again.

Keyd had Rysa by the arm, and he was saying something real quietly to her. When he let go of her, she moved closer to me, leaning her hip against the table.

“Let me try to explain,” she said, and I dropped my face back into my hands.

“Moving between worlds doesn’t make communication easy,” Rysa went on anyway. “Created languages are limiting and take too long to master. We use frequency, instead. That way, other people only have to align themselves to it to understand us, and we them. You’ve already done it.”

“I didn’t know I was doing it,” I said. “How did I do it? How do I stop doing it? I don’t want to do it at all!”

Rysa and Keyd glanced at each other again, and then Rysa leaned in and put her hand on my shoulder. Gave me a firm reassuring sports coach kind of grip; pretty tough for a good-looking girl. But she was a soldier, and an alien, and who knew what else. She just looked like a pretty girl.

“I’m sorry for doing this badly, and for upsetting you,” she said. I was watching her mouth more now; and it really didn’t match. Holy shit, that was so fucking weird. “I was assuming certain things about your world, and you, because of your ability. I thought most of this would be commonplace knowledge here.”

“My what,” I said, but Rysa kept on going.

“I think,” she said, “that we just need to begin again, more simply.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, yeah, let’s do that.”

We moved over to the couches first, so we could at least all sit and sort of face each other. In all their armor, Rysa and Keyd took up pretty much a whole couch on their own. I sat on the other one and put my hands on my knees, feeling Rysa’s eyes on me.

“I’ll start,” she said. Good; she was easier to talk to. Keyd’d barely said anything since he’d dragged me to the cemetery, anyway.

“Your world is not the only one of its kind,” Rysa said. “There are countless others, populated and civilized, among them our own.” Her eyes flicked over to Keyd on the word ‘our’. “Many are aware of each other, and many are in communication with each other. But some are not, and yours is one that believes itself alone.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s—okay. I’m with you so far.” I didn’t know if I believed her, but I was following. So far.

And Rysa wasn’t done. “Many of these worlds are connected by a force, a power that threads through them all. We usually refer to it as the Presence, though the term changes from world to world. It can be accessed by the people who live in the worlds that it touches, and used in many ways. It allows us to use the frequency to communicate, for instance.”

“...okay,” I said. She was saying all this so straightforward and serious, I was just nodding along like I actually understood it. “All right.”

“Your world is lacking its influence,” Rysa said. “Not uncommon, but we’re...more used to interacting with ones that do have it.”

“So, uh,” I said. “If it’s not here, then how am I...doing the frequency thing?”

“That’s interesting, actually,” she said. “You shouldn’t be able to. Though, occasionally, we have come across individuals in muted worlds that have the potential—though they would have otherwise never become aware of that ability without being exposed to us.”

“And that’s...me.”

“Yes. Alan—you’ve not only accessed frequency on your own, but you removed a spell from both myself and Keyd. You’re able to affect our energy, so you have some kind of basic ability at the very least.”

At the very least. Fuck, I didn’t want to hear that. And if these guys had this super effective universal translator thing, then why couldn’t they pronounce my name right? It came out like aw-lawn every time. Otherwise, Rysa basically sounded American—not even just American, but like she was from California. Even in movies aliens had accents. Rysa sounded so normal that it was actually weird.

“So here’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question,” I said, because I really didn’t want to talk about me anymore. “Why are you guys here?”

“We weren’t meant to be.”

I actually jumped. I’d pretty much forgotten about Keyd, and I hadn’t expected him to throw anything into the conversation. He’d been real quiet and still over on the end of the their couch until now.

“‘scuse me?” I said.

Keyd leaned forward over his knees, but he was looking at Rysa, not me.

“We weren’t meant to be,” he said again, and then caught Rysa’s hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry, I should ha—”

Rysa put her other hand right on his mouth to shut him up. “We didn’t have many options,” she said.

Keyd leaned away from her, moving her hand from his mouth with the back of his wrist. Then he touched his fingers to her hair, picking a little shred of ivy out of it. It was all real gentle and careful and I kind of wondered if this was really the same guy who’d been ordering me around and scaring the shit out of me all morning. “We could have made a better one.”

“We were alone and outnumbered and had no better choice, or it would have meant that Ah—well. We’re alive, and unhurt, so it wasn’t the worst thing we could have done.” Rysa put her hand around the back of his neck and just kind of held on to him. Keyd sighed through his nose and closed his eyes.

They were definitely having some kind of moment and I thought I should leave them to it. I scooted down to the other end of my couch, leaned on the armrest and just didn’t watch them get all handsy with each other. Definitely dating or related. But they looked so much alike, I was betting on siblings. I hadn’t seen them kiss or anything either, and after how riled up Keyd had been when she’d come back to normal I figured if they hadn’t done it then, they weren’t doing it at all.

After about half a minute, I heard some more clinking and shifting that seemed to mean they’d moved apart again. When I glanced over, Rysa was turning back to me. She was rubbing her hands idly along the outsides of her legs, and I noticed all those weird black tattoos she had there again. What were those even for? And why’d Keyd put one on his face? Was that like...an attractive thing to do on their alien planet? It wasn’t really that attractive at all.

“If it’s all right, we’d like to get out of this,” Rysa said to me, which hadn’t exactly been the next thing I’d expected her to say. She glanced down and touched one hand to the plate of armor on her chest. “We’ve been in it for some time.”

“Oh,” I said. Yeah, it couldn’t be real comfortable hanging out in metal suits. “Sure, go ahead.”

It took them at least a couple of minutes to get all of it, and they had to help each other with some parts they couldn’t reach themselves. Once they were both done unhooking and untying the buckles and straps keeping it on, it all came off in pieces. It was kind of crazy to watch, like—I’d never really thought about how much effort would have to go into taking stuff like that on and off. In movies and shit everybody’s always just wearing it already. Rysa and Keyd stacked all theirs into two neat little piles by the sliding glass doors.

What they had on underneath wasn’t exactly normal, but it was a hell of a lot better than the armor. All of it was in greys and browns and blacks, and both of them were wearing almost identical shirts that buttoned in weird places and had short little stiff collars. Rysa was built like a gymnast; she was just about flat and she was real lean with long limbs going everywhere. Keyd had really nice arms. Both of them had these crazy toned bodies and I was completely convinced that they were exactly what they’d said they were. Soldiers.

But they were less intimidating with the armor gone. Looked a little more regular, too. Rysa came back over to the couch but Keyd stayed near the sliding door that went out to the tiny patio, shoulder against the wall and one long leg crossed over the other.

“So,” Rysa said to me. “Now that you’ve had some time with this; how are you feeling about it?”

“Okay, really,” I said. “I mean, I’m still trying to get my head around it, but...obviously you’re pretty real.”

“For coming from a muted world, you’re doing well,” Rysa said. “Many don’t. Even in places familiar with the energy of the Presence, being confronted with the existence of other worlds and beings isn’t always...well-received.”

“Yeah, and it wouldn’t be here either,” I said. “Not for real. We really like to talk about magic and shit, but we don’t actually…have it. People would flip the fuck out. I probably would be too if I wasn’t feeling so shitty.”

Rysa twitched the corner of her mouth up. I didn’t think anything I’d said had been all that funny, but whatever, if she thought it was. We weren’t even talking the same language, so who knew what she’d actually heard.

“Well,” she said then. “We’d like to show you more about ourselves, if you’d allow for that. It might help you to understand everything a little better.”

Wasn’t real sure about that, but hey—why not. As long as nobody wanted to fly me around again, I was okay with whatever they wanted to show me. Rysa looked pleased when I nodded, and over her shoulder Keyd looked like he didn’t give much of a fuck about anything at all.

#

There was a park a few streets down from my apartment complex. That seemed like a pretty good place to take these guys if they were gonna put on a magic show for me. It was a long flat grassy area, with some trees and a little picnic hut and a kid’s play area cluttered up with colorful plastic swings and slides and stuff, and a softball diamond at the way far end. There were houses to each side behind more trees, a high chain-link fence all around playing field side, and hardly anyone was ever there. It was empty right now, no one around. Just some scattered trash blowing through from an overflowing trash can and a forgotten plastic toy half-buried in the grass near the sidewalk. Probably because it was still really damn early.

Well, maybe at this point it was about eight. But I’d been awake since dawn with almost no sleep, and it felt more like I’d been up for days. The sky was colorless and pale and watery, and a cold breeze blew by every once in a while. I was regretting not grabbing my sweatshirt, again. I stood at the edge of the sidewalk with my hands jammed in my pockets while Rysa and Keyd looked the park over.

“This is good,” Rysa said, and Keyd agreed by not saying or doing a damn thing. But they both headed off together across the grass, moving past the picnic area. I trotted along after them with my hands in my pockets. I could hear them talking quietly to each other in that crazy language of theirs. Their alien language. Because they were freaking aliens.

How’d they even gotten here in the first place? Keyd’d said they hadn’t planned on it, but did they have like a flying saucer somewhere, up in the foothills somewhere near the cemetery? Shouldn’t somebody have fucking noticed that, like—somehow? And then what was up with that statue stuff, and the tattoos, and the magic? Aliens were supposed to be all technologically advanced and everything, right, and Rysa and Keyd had shown up in armor. She had a sword, not a laser gun or a lightsaber or something cool and flashy and futuristic, and we were here right now so they could show me some fucking magic.

I didn’t get it. But that was the point of coming out here in the first place. I think. Honestly I wasn’t really sure.

But I was about to find out, because Rysa and Keyd stopped walking right about in the middle of the park. I hung back a half dozen paces or so, just as a safeguard. I hoped they weren’t gonna do something dangerous—like, I actually had no idea what they were actually capable of with this energy stuff. What if they blew up the park or something? Better the park than my apartment, I guess, but suddenly I was thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a great idea.

Rysa said something to Keyd that was too quiet for me to hear, and a second later the guy started smoking. Like he’d just caught on fire.

It just started coming right off him, mostly like it was coming out of his chest; this kind of gauzy blackish-purple haze that almost looked glittery. It just caught the light in a weird way, reflecting little shimmers and sparkles. And then something burst out of it, a four-legged thing that was big, fast, and already halfway across the park before I even got a good look at it.

“Oh shit,” I said, taking a step back. It was a huge freaking dog. Solid black, with that same dark glittery smoke steaming off its body as it tore across the grass. I couldn’t hear the sounds of it running, and it didn’t bark or make any other kind of noise at all. After making one big lap around the picnic hut, it wheeled around and trotted right back to Keyd’s side, still totally silent and leaking glittery fog everywhere.

It looked solid and see-through at the same time, like I could nearly see shapes and shadows through its body. But otherwise it was definitely there and real. The dog’s sides puffed in and out and a big black tongue flopped out of its mouth. Its eyes were sort of a dark amethyst color, not glowing or evil-looking or anything like that, but still pretty weird. Keyd put his hand on top of its head, which was about level with his waist, and the dog closed its eyes happily and wagged its smoking tail. Just like a normal dog. This was getting weirder by the second.

“Um, what,” I said. “What is that?”

“A bejji,” Rysa said to me. “They’re an important part of us, a representation of our energy.”

And they were dogs? Dogs that looked a whole lot like German Shepherds, only bigger and blacker and scarier. These guys were supposed to be aliens, and they were showing me a dog to prove it? Well, Keyd did keep it in his chest, and that was kind of fucking strange. But still, what the hell. Seriously.

Keyd said a couple of real quiet words to his bejji thing, and the dog shook itself and padded away from Keyd’s side…and came towards me.

I liked dogs. I was definitely a dog guy. But I wasn’t so sure about huge fucking monster dogs with crazy eyes and paws the size of my face. I stayed real still and let the thing come up to me on its own terms and sniff at my hands. It really did seem pretty much like a normal dog. But its head almost came up to my chest. I mean, Jesus. Little curls of smoke rolled off of it and faded away into the air and I could still see its sides heaving in and out—did a magical chest-dog really need to breathe? Did any of this make any fucking sense at all?

Hesitantly, and real carefully, I put out a hand and touched the dog between its big perked-up ears. My hand touched onto something that didn’t really feel like fur, but like cool silk or smoke. But my fingers didn’t go through it—the dog-thing was solid enough, it just didn’t really feel like a living animal. It sure acted like one though, closing its eyes and whapping its tail back and forth when I gave it a light pat. A vibration went up my arm whenever I touched it, like I was feeling a subwoofer. All the hairs on my arm stood up. But everything stopped when I took my fingers away.

Off in the background, I heard Keyd say something to Rysa in their language. She replied in the same.

“D’you have one of these too?” I said to her, but she didn’t answer. Whatever Keyd was telling her, she didn’t seem to like it. She was frowning and shaking her head at him. The magic chest-dog pricked up its ears and swung its giant head around, suddenly not interested in me anymore. It trotted away and went back to Keyd, padding in a circle once around him before parking its huge ass right at his side. It looked smaller next to him, more like a regular-sized dog, but then again the guy was like six and a half feet tall.

Keyd and Rysa were still arguing with each other. Or, talking louder than normal at each other. I wasn’t sure if it was really arguing, but neither of them looked thrilled with the conversation. They both kept glancing over at me, which made me kind of uncomfortable and edgy. I really didn’t like all this focus on me all of a sudden, like with this fucking ability I apparently had and how Rysa seemed to think I was something special or different because of it. I never liked people looking at me too close. It just got me nervous.

“Hey,” I tried, moving a step or two closer to them. “Hey, guys, you know—“

But Keyd suddenly turned right around and walked away. Fast, too; striding right back across the park like he really had somewhere better to be right now. Rysa didn’t go after him at all, or even try. She crossed her arms low over her ribs and just watched him leave. I’d walked out of so many stupid fights with Ashley just like that, and she’d always let me in just the same way—because she’d known she was winning.

I moved up to Rysa’s side, watching Keyd head off towards the street out of the corner of my eye. “Where’s he going?”

“Oh,” Rysa said, not sounding worried about it at all. “He’s annoyed with me.”

“Really, how can you tell,” I muttered, and she laughed. “Seriously, what was that all about?”

Rysa let out a long breath. “This isn’t a situation that we’re used to,” she said. “A muted world, making a first contact on our own—and you. We’re just not agreeing on how to approach it.”

“A first contact,” I said. That sounded like some serious science fiction shit. But I wasn’t even sure these guys were actually aliens anymore. Not in the ‘beamed down from space’ kind of way. They were just from...somewhere else. “Are there going to be more of you guys showing up?”

“Well,” Rysa said. “That was one of the things we were just...discussing. There may be others already here.”

“What? Seriously?”

“Not exactly the same as us,” she said. “Another race, that we’re at war with. Others—or at least one other—may be here. We know that he was before, but not if he still is.”

“Why not?”

A breeze blew Rysa’s hair across her eyes, and she slid her fingers into it and twisted it out of her face. “As Keyd mentioned, our coming here wasn’t planned,” she said. “We were engaged elsewhere with them, a war in another world. But we were forced here, and followed, and then—well, you saw what happened to us both. And we don’t know how long it’s been since then. Any others who would have been here likely left long ago.”

I glanced in the direction Keyd had headed, but he was already gone. The park was empty and so was the street. I looked back at Rysa. “But he thinks they’re still around.”

“Yes. He does.”

“And he’s—what? In charge of what you guys do?”

“No, but we are partners. We compromise.”

“So that means you guys are gonna be hanging around here for a while,” I said. “Looking for...whatever.”

“Clarbach,” Rysa said. The word sounded like it’d got stuck in her throat and she had to choke the last sound out. “That’s what they’re called.”

“Looking for some of those, okay,” I said. I wasn’t even going to try and say that word right. “Is that gonna take a while?”

“It could,” she said, and then glanced over at me. “We don’t have to involve you any more than we have, Alan. We could go, leave you out of it.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s probably—you don’t have to go anywhere. I mean, if I’m special or whatever and can already talk to you guys and everything, then it’d probably be easier not to get anyone else involved. Not a lot of people here are gonna be cool with the whole alien...thing.”

“If you’re sure,” Rysa said, looking harder at me.

I wasn’t, not at all. This actually seemed like the stupidest thing I’d ever done. And she was handing me a way out, right here. But I almost felt...responsible for them. Not because I’d somehow woken them up or whatever, but because they were alone here, and they completely stuck out, and sending them off to deal with a completely different planet on their own seemed like a dick thing to do. Even if Rysa’d said they’d been other places before, they probably hadn’t been anywhere like Earth. Armor and swords and magic wouldn’t go over real well here. And they’d probably get run over by a bus in like five minutes.

So I said, “yeah, I’m sure.”

#

Keyd hadn’t gone back to my apartment after he’d left us at the park. It didn’t seem to worry Rysa that he wasn’t here, so I decided not to care about it either. Instead, I left her to hang out by herself and finally went to take a shower.

I stayed in there until the water ran cold on me, and then after I was dressed in non-beery and slobby clothes I felt a lot better. A lot better. Maybe it’d taken a while, but I finally thought I could start really accepting all this without thinking I was crazy. Obviously everything happening was pretty damn real, I wasn’t nuts or drunk or high, so the next thing to do was to just roll with the fact that aliens existed and there were some here in my apartment. And maybe more somewhere else out there, who were the bad guys. Or something like that.

Rysa was sitting on the couch when I went back out to the living room. She was going through one of the magazines off the coffee table, which were pretty much all issues of Maxim and GQ. That was gonna give her an awesome impression of this planet; lots of bikini girls everywhere. At least most of those weren’t mine. Magazines were more of Martin’s thing. Still, kind of fucking awkward.

She was alone out here; Keyd hadn’t shown up yet. I was cool with that. I didn’t think he liked me all that much, and he made me kind of nervous. Wasn’t even sure how, he just...did. He was too intense and too fucking alien. Rysa was downright normal in comparison.

But I wasn’t really sure what to do with her right now. Sit down and chat? She was from another planet, there was almost nothing she could say that wouldn’t be interesting. But I had no idea what to start with. There was a total blank in my head, and all I ended up doing was standing at the back of the couch like a dope, not doing much of anything.

Then suddenly, the front door clicked and swung open. Rysa and I both looked up, probably both expecting Keyd to come through. But it was Martin instead. He must’ve left when we’d all been down at the park. He was holding a giant Starbucks cup and pastry bag and wearing his sunglasses. His bad haircut was all ruffled up and he looked just about as happy to be awake as I had half an hour ago. There was a Starbucks just around the block and he must’ve just walked there and back.

“Oh awesome,” Martin said, when he saw me. “Now I can tell Law you didn’t wander off and die somewhere, that dude will not stop calling me because apparently you’re not answering your phone, and I—whoa.”

He’d noticed Rysa. He stopped halfway across to the kitchen, so abrupt it was almost like a cartoon character freezing in place, staring at her. She just looked right back at him.

“Uh, I was gonna ask you if you...wanted...uh, anything, from the...coffee, but you weren’t...here?” Martin said, which was pretty smooth, considering. At least Rysa wasn’t in armor anymore. There would’ve been no suave way to react to that.

“’s cool,” I said. In about two seconds I was gonna need to come up with some kind of story here, even a really stupid one, but I still had that totally white blank in my head and no thoughts at all were coming out.

“Sooo....hey,” Martin said to Rysa, and now it was really time for me jump in here.

“This is, uh, my girlfriend,” is what I blurted out, like a total tool.

Martin did kind of a ridiculous double-take back and forth between me and Rysa.

“Dude,” he said. “What. I didn’t know you had a—“

He stopped talking when Rysa stood up. Martin’s shorter than me, and I think he was legitimately a whole foot shorter than her. I couldn’t really blame him for staring. She came around the side of the couch and put her hand on my shoulder, which at least meant she wasn’t super offended that I’d called her my girlfriend.

“Yeah, it’s kind of a new—hasn’t really been—uh, we were gonna go,” I said to Martin. “I’ll just—I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Sure, man,” Martin said, still staring. “Sure.”

“C’mon,” I muttered, catching Rysa by the hem of her shirt and pulling her towards the door. She went along with me easily enough. Once we were outside and the door closed between us and Martin, I let go of her.

“Sorry about that,” I muttered. I shoved my hands in my pockets and kept on moving down the sidewalk. I could tell she was following me by her shadow. I couldn’t actually look at her. That was not a way to impress girls you’ve just met; telling people they’ve never met that they’re your girlfriend. “Thanks for, you know, covering for me.”

“I understand,” she said. She actually sounded kind of amused, like the whole thing was real entertaining. That was way better than her being offended. I was still embarrassed by my own fucking self about it, though.

“I just needed to...you know, explain you,” I said. But I could have just said she was my friend. Why the hell had I said girlfriend? I really needed to get laid, if that was the first thing that was coming to my mind. Girlfriend. Jesus. What a tool.

“I know,” Rysa said. “You can explain me however you need to. We could call Keyd my brother.”

“...isn’t he?”

Rysa shook her head. “Not by blood.”

“Oh.” Then they had to be dating or married or something. They had to be way closer than just friends, what with the way Keyd’d been so crazy about getting me to help Rysa in the first place. Since then he’d been totally calm, and barely talked or done much of anything at all. But then again, if they were all involved or whatever, I didn’t want to even pretend that she was my girlfriend. Not with Keyd being like that.

“So did I switch back out of frequency or something? Martin understood me,” I said, because I really didn’t want to talk about Rysa being my fake girlfriend anymore.

“Yes, of course he would,” Rysa said. “Your friend speaks a language you already know.”

“So I can understand anyone who speaks English or your language, but not anyone else? Shouldn’t I have like...been able to understand a bunch of other languages here before you guys ever showed up? I don’t get it.”

Rysa chuckled. “You can understand any person who is also aligned with the frequency, and they can understand you. The same for myself and Keyd. But I couldn’t understand your friend, and he can’t understand me, because he isn’t aligned with it.”

“Oh. Wait. So...you have no idea what Martin was saying?”

Rysa smiled. “None at all.”

“And Keyd, he’s not gonna understand anyone he runs into around here?”

“Not unless anyone else here is like you.”

“Then I really think we should go find him,” I said. I could just fucking see it; Keyd terrifying someone by just walking around and looking the way he did, and then only speaking in crazy alien noises and making it worse and maybe even the cops getting called in and basically a huge, huge mess. I wasn’t gonna depend on the off-chance that my weird little talent was actually common around here. Plus, I’d just signed on to looking after these guys while they were here, and Keyd running around on his own wasn’t a great start with that.

“That would probably be best,” Rysa said. Then she closed her eyes, and took a deep breath in. And didn’t move.

I wasn’t sure what she was up to, so I just hung back and watched her. She stood in place for a while, quiet, her forehead slowly wrinkling up like she was concentrating hard on something.

She opened her eyes again finally, and looked over at me. “He’s inside a building,” she said. “Not very far from here. It’s quiet inside. And there are books, like an archive.”

“How do—are you channeling him or something?”

“I can get an impression of his surroundings.”

I didn’t have any idea what that was supposed to mean. “Well, there’s a library on campus,” I said. “Maybe that’s where he is.”

Rysa glanced the way I pointed. “That’s the right direction,” she said. “We’ll start there.”

She stepped back, there was a quick bright flash like light against glass, and her wings came out again.

“Oh Jesus,” I said. “Can we not do that? Seriously. I have a car, we can drive, it won’t take any longer—“

She looked at me. “Car?”