Tenebrism

My car was a ’95 Honda Accord that I’d worked a full summer in high school to buy used from a family friend, and it was definitely a ‘first car’ kind of ride. It’d come with scuffs and dings all over it just from being on the road for way over a decade, and the AC had busted after a couple months and I’d had to pay to fix that up too.

My youngest sister Andrea’d named the car when I’d gotten it. Well, I’d let her name it. She’d been getting into her big animal phase right then, where she and Adam had started begging our parents non-stop for a dog and I didn’t figure they’d ever give in, but maybe if she got to name something it’d distract her for a while. But then a couple months later our parents had actually caved in on the dog thing, so my cool big brother act was a total forgotten bust. But the name stuck around, so my car was still named after the Golden Retriever in Homeward Bound. Probably because the thing was beige everywhere, inside and out, so it was basically the same color. It was kind of a cool name, and nobody had to know it was from a kid’s movie about lost animals.

Anyway, other than being a little beaten up it was a pretty good dependable ride. It got me places and hadn’t given me any real problems. And I was way better off than Martin, who only had a bike to ride around everywhere and had to bum rides off everyone if he needed to get more than about ten miles.

And apparently my car was also great for impressing alien ladies. Rysa was just fucking fascinated by it.

“We’ve seen similar things in other worlds,” she said, running her hands over the top of the roof. I winced a little. I hadn’t washed it for a while and that probably wasn’t the best thing for her to be doing. “But we don’t have anything like it of our own.” She leaned over, looking through the window. “How do I—?”

“The handle right there,” I said. “No, you gotta pull on—there you go.”

It was pretty weird having Rysa riding shotgun with me. The interior wasn’t all that big, and she had to slouch way down in the seat and cram her legs up against the dash just to keep her head off the ceiling. And that was after nearly crawling inside on her hands and knees because of how low to the ground my car sat.

“You comfy over there?” I asked her, even though she couldn’t possibly be.

She looked at her hands, and then brushed the dirt from my car off against her legs. “Fine.”

“Right, ‘kay, cool.” When I started the car up, Rysa pressed her hands against the door and the side of my seat and glanced around. The radio blared on, a pop song with some woman belting out a powerful sustained note, and both of us jumped a little. I jabbed it right off again. Rysa pushed her forehead to the window and watched interestedly as I backed out of the space and then circled around the complex towards the automatic gate at the end. Then we had to sit there and wait for it to rattle open on its tracks. I ran my hands back and forth over the sides of the steering wheel and tapped my thumbs against the top.

“So. Where you’re from. What’s it like?” I said. It involved armor and swords and no cars, so I was getting a sense of like...the fucking Middle Ages. With magic.

Rysa didn’t answer right away. She dropped her hands and folded them neatly into her lap. But she was still all bent up like a crazy pretzel over there, so it wasn’t as dignified as it probably should’ve looked.

Then she said, “gone.”

“Gone? ”

“In a way,” she said, and I got a real strong ‘not going to talk about it’ vibe. So I dropped it. Wasn’t real important anyway; I’d just been fishing for something to say.

My college campus was only a few blocks from my apartment, and the drive was about eight minutes tops if every light was red. So we were there before the silence in the car really had a chance to get awkward. Rysa was glued to the window most of the time anyway, craning her head around to look at things going by and keeping one tattooed hand spread against the glass. I parked on the small side parking lot next to the football field, which normally was impossible to get a spot in but only had like five or six other cars in it now. Weekend, right.

“So,” I said, looking over at Rysa. “Are you...sensing him?” If Keyd wasn’t here, there were a couple public libraries around town we could try. But I hoped he was here; the longer that guy was running around on his own the more trouble I was gonna imagine he could cause. Especially since he couldn’t speak English.

Rysa went real still for a second, fingers tensing up against her legs, staring unfocusedly at the dashboard. Finally, she nodded. “Yes. He’s nearby.”

“Great,” I said. “Then let’s go get him.” And stick him back in his goddamn Pokéball or something.

Rysa figured out her door handle from this side without any issue, and after she climbed out of the car she spent a couple seconds rolling her shoulders around and stretching her neck back and forth.

“Sorry about that,” I said to her, and she lifted an eyebrow at me. “My car being...small.”

What an idiot thing to apologize for. Rysa’s expression looked like she maybe thought the same thing, but just wasn’t gonna say anything about it. I even had to roll my eyes at myself as I locked the car and dropped my keys in my pocket.

I hadn’t thought about grabbing my sweatshirt—again—but at least the day’d brightened up from the greyish blah that it’d been earlier, and now there was a nice morning sun and a little breeze. Pretty regular for this time of year. I almost could’ve forgotten about all the crazy shit that’d gone on today, like it’d happened a million miles away to someone else, if I hadn’t had Rysa striding right along at my side. And if we weren’t here looking for her other scarier half.

“What is this place?” Rysa asked as we got around the corner of the athletics building and into the main part of the campus. I was just glad it was a weekend and there weren’t too many people around to see her. Seriously, she had to be at least six and a half feet tall. Maybe more. With these tattoos all over her. Wearing kind of weird-looking clothes. At least the armor and sword were gone, because somebody probably would have called the cops.

“It’s a school,” I said. “A college. I go here. And...study things.”

“Ah,” Rysa said. “Then you’re a scholar.”

“....sure. I guess.”

“What do you study?”

“Uh, graphic design.” I got a pretty blank look at that. But I sometimes got that from normal non-alien people. “Art,” I said. “There’s the library.”

It was long brick building, a narrow rectangle with solid banks of windows running down the sides. There was a round tower thing hitched to one end with a sad little coffee/snack bar stuck inside. Nobody ever went to it, because there was a much better one in a nearby building. The whole library’d only been built a couple years ago, and the trees that had been put in around it were still tied up to support sticks. All the landscaping was neat and sparse because it hadn’t had time to grow much.

The automatic doors swooshed open as we got close and Rysa jumped back a step, her hand going to the place on her hip where her sword had been. Then she straightened herself up and marched right through the doors like it hadn’t even happened. I followed her in, definitely not biting back a laugh, nope, not at all.

The air conditioning was turned up high inside, and goosebumps washed over my arms and neck. Papers fluttered on the bulletin boards above the bank of computers on the wall, and the overhead lights hummed quietly. Nobody was around in the lobby area, except for the woman at the reference desk shuffling through some papers. I kept us walking until we were mostly out of her line of sight.

I had to admit I didn’t actually go into the library that often. Usually only for study groups or when some GE class professor forced us into group projects. I did most of whatever other research I had to do for papers online, and I just didn’t read books that much anymore. So I wasn’t real familiar with the building. Study rooms were at the back on each floor and the computer labs were in the basement—whenever I did come in here, that was usually where I went—and I knew where to make copies, and that was about it.

And I had no idea where to find a six and a half foot warrior guy. But that’s what Rysa was for.

“Okay,” I said to her. “Can you tell where he’s at?”

Rysa’s forehead was scrunched up, a muscle in her jaw flexing. “Somewhere near,” she said, and sounded honestly frustrated. Not with me, but with herself. “I can’t tell.”

“Okay, okay, it’s cool,” I said. “We got four floors here—well, five, with the basement—so we could just split up, find him faster.”

“No,” Rysa said, and for a second I thought she was totally dismissing the idea, until she added, “there.”

I saw what she meant right away—a really tall shape at the way back of the library had walked out from one row of shelves and disappeared right into the next. It definitely looked like Keyd. I didn’t see a lot of people who walked like that, sort of a military stride. Not around campus, anyway. Rysa moved right past me and headed after him, and I followed her.

By the time we got back there, Keyd had finished his lap through the aisle and was headed back in our direction. Rysa intercepted him right as he turned out of it.

“Keyd,” she said, and grabbed him by the shoulder. She spun him around and pressed him neatly up against the end of the nearest bookshelf. It looked near effortless, just one graceful motion. And so smooth that the shelf didn’t even shake. Keyd’s eyes flicked between the both of us. He didn’t seem surprised that we were here, but with him it was pretty hard to tell.

“I saw his gai,” he said to Rysa. “I followed it here.”

The word he’d said sounded almost like ‘guy’. But I didn’t think he was actually looking for a dude. Rysa’s hand squeezed in on his shoulder and she leaned closer to him.

“You’re sure,” she said. Keyd just looked levelly back at her. Rysa frowned, glanced around with narrowed eyes. “I can’t feel anything. But, it was even hard to feel you.”

He nodded. “I know. There’s something interfering here.”

The two of them were having this conversation at a totally normal volume. Even though there was nobody around back here, their voices were definitely carrying.

“Hey, guys,” I whispered at Keyd and Rysa. “Can we use our library voices?”

They both ignored me. Rysa had her tattooed hand up in the air now, fingers spread wide, and she was turning it back and forth like a satellite dish looking for a signal. Then she huffed a breath out through her teeth and shook her head.

“No. I can sense it, but not where,” she said.

They looked at each other for a couple of meaningful seconds. Then Rysa let go of his shoulder, Keyd leaned off the shelf and strode right back into the rows of bookcases. I was still trying to figure out what was going on when Rysa caught me by the arm and started hauling me along with her, back towards the front of the library.

“What’s going on?” I asked her. “He thinks something is here?”

She nodded. “We have to track it down.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait. What’s it, and why do I gotta come?” It wasn’t like I could be very useful; I didn’t even know what was going on.

“Keyd found a gai here,” Rysa said. Again, that fucking nonsense word that almost sounded like guy. “That means a clarbach is also here in your world.”

“Oh,” I said. Those were the guys Rysa and Keyd were at war with on another planet, or something like that. The ones that Rysa hadn’t thought were here, and Keyd had. “So he was right.”

“Apparently,” Rysa said. She sounded distracted, like this conversation wasn’t really what she was thinking about. “I’d hoped he wasn’t.”

We were back near the lobby area by this point, and Rysa suddenly dropped my arm and turned to face me. “You said there were four more floors,” she said. “How do we get to them?”

“Stairs right over here,” I said, and she followed me to them.

The stairwell was just a big plain concrete chute, white walls and textured grey rubber on the stairs. It was completely empty except for the two of us. Before we went anywhere I leaned over the railing and craned my head around to look down a level—the doors to the basement level were closed and locked.

“We’re good down there,” I said to Rysa. “So, you wanna each take a floor here or what? We can find this thing faster if we split up.” I hesitated, then added, “unless it’s dangerous or something.”

“It wouldn’t be.” She gave me a long look, clearly trying to decide if I could handle going off on my own. “If you find it, don’t try and do anything with it. Just find one of us,” she said finally.

“No problem.” I seriously didn’t need to tangle with any more strange aliens on my own today.

Our footsteps echoed up the walls as we climbed up to the higher floors. Rysa got off on the second, and I went up to the third.

It was as quiet and uneventful on this floor as the first one, just faint humming noises from the row of computers running under the windows and the long banks of lights on the ceiling. There was one guy dicking around on one of the computers, and besides him the whole area was empty. That was about when I realized I had no idea what this thing I was looking for was actually supposed to look like. I couldn’t even guess; how big or small or what color it was or anything. Rysa hadn’t told me anything, and really all I knew what that it had a name that sounded like guy.

Although, I was fairly sure that I could spot an alien if I saw it.

I headed to the right, down the wide aisle in between the rows of shelves and the center chunk of the library that had the copier rooms and bathrooms. That middle section was the same on every level of the library and kind of split them into two halves, turning every floor into a big long loop and also making it impossible to see the entire floor from any one spot. So I’d really have to walk around the entire thing to make sure nothing was here.

I reached the end of this half of the floor, hitting the couple of study rooms down here and some more computers in little wooden cubicles. Through the glass window of one of the rooms I could see a couple of guys and girls sitting around an open laptop with papers and books everywhere. One of the guys was clearly asleep on the table top, mouth slack open on top of his textbook, and that only reminded me how I’d been up since before dawn. But everything else around here was perfectly normal. Nobody looked like they’d seen an alien.

Okay, seriously, how useful was I really being right now? I didn’t know what I was looking for, and I couldn’t even do anything if I actually did find it. The smartest for me to do was probably just go wait back at my car until Rysa and Keyd were done in here. I sighed, jammed my hands into my pockets, and turned around to go back to the stairs.

Then I saw it.

It had to be it, because I had never seen anything in my entire fucking life that looked like this thing.

It sort of mostly looked like a frog. A bright white-gold frog the size of a toddler, with four thin gawky legs and a thick body and wide head. But it didn’t hop like a frog. It fucking skittered. It was clinging sideways against the wall like a goddamn spider, down near the door to the copy machine room. It was heading right in my direction, and it was moving fast.

“Holy shit!” I backed up until my shoulders slammed into a bookshelf. “The fuck is that?”

My skin started to itch and buzz as the frog thing got nearer, all the little hairs lifting up on the back of my neck. But it didn’t seem to care that I was there, or notice me at all. A weird shiny mist was coming off its skin, and it left a trail of it in the air as it scuttled around the corner of the copy room and disappeared inside.

“Shit,” I muttered. It looked like I’d found the fucking thing. Now what?

Get Rysa and Keyd up here to deal with it, that’s what. If I shut the door to the room I could trap that thing in there, make sure it didn’t go anywhere. That sounded like a pretty good plan.

I eased a step or two forward, keeping my eyes locked on the doorway and trying to see more inside the room before I just jumped right in there. I couldn’t see much except the corner of a big clunky copier and a cabinet mounted on the wall. The door opened inward, so I was gonna have to get a pretty good ways in there to grab the handle and pull it closed. I edged a little closer, nearly right up to the doorway. Now I could see the whole copier and part of a green countertop with an automatic stapler and a pencil sharpener and a heavy duty three-hole-punch on it. The clock on the wall above the copier read 9:39. And then—

The frog-thing burst out of the copy room and blew past me in a stream of white and gold mist. I yelped and stumbled back, smacking into a bookshelf again. But the thing still didn’t even seem to care that I was here. It rebounded off the side of the shelf right above my head, and landed sideways against the wall again. Then it took off, skittering towards the back of the library and around the corner, and disappeared into the other half of the library floor.

I let out a long, heavy breath and braced my hands on my knees, closing my eyes and giving my heart a seond to slow the fuck down. Jesus, whatever I’d been expecting to find up here, it hadn’t been that. A giant fucking frog? I officially didn’t fucking understand any of this or how it made sense. But it didn’t matter, because it was still happening somehow, and it was real as hell.

I straightened up again, knocking the back of my head against the shelf. Okay, so Plan A was a fucking bust. I could still go find Rysa and Keyd, but this frog bastard seemed to move around pretty damn quick and it might not stay on this floor for long. I should at least keep track of it until Keyd or Rysa found me; make sure it didn’t leave the library or something. Following this thing around wasn’t real high on my list of life goals, but Rysa had said it wouldn’t be dangerous. So far it hadn’t been.

I took a deep breath, rubbed my clammy hands against my jeans, and looked around. There was a faint hazy glitter hovering in the air around me, stretching down towards the corner right where the frog-thing had gone. So it left a trail; nice. It started fading away as I started to move through it, but at least it’d give me something to follow. Especially when I got down to the corner and peeked around it, and the frog was nowhere in sight.

I was right in front of the study rooms again, and I could still see that same group of students hanging around in there. It didn’t look like they’d seen a big glittery frog-thing go past in the last couple of minutes. Or if they had, they were taking it a lot cooler than I had. The misty trail went right past their window, too--how the hell had they missed seeing it? I headed past them and over into the other half of the library.

The sun was cutting right in through the banks of windows over here, and suddenly it was impossible to tell what was just dusty sunlight and what was crazy alien glitter. And there was absolutely no frog in sight. Fuck, why was this so fucking difficult? I waved my arms around in the air, hoping to—do something, maybe feel some fucking magic going on or something, but nothing changed or felt different. I moved some dust around. Yeah, I totally had an ability. Jesus.

“Fuck,” I muttered, and let my arms drop.

Well, I’d lost the frog and had no idea what to do next, so I was gonna go back to my find-Rysa-and-Keyd plan. Or maybe the go-back-to-my-car plan. Whatever plan included getting all of this over with as fast as possible. I still glanced down every row of shelves as I walked back towards the stairwell, just to check, but there was nothing down any of them. As I turned around the corner to the stairs I nearly slammed right into Rysa, who was coming out of them.

“Whoa!” I said, and grabbed at her arms. “Hey! I found the whatever, it’s—well, I sorta lost it, but it’s on this floor somewhere.”

She didn’t even hesitate. “Where was it last?”

“That way,” I said, pointing. Rysa moved right past me without another word and disappeared around the corner. Keyd came out of the stairwell about two seconds later.

“They both went that way,” I said, before he even got to ask. Keyd glanced at me, and then promptly went the complete opposite way, around to the other half of the library floor.

“Wow,” I said. “Okay then.”

And then I followed him, out of some sheer stupid curiosity. I should have been leaving, going back to my car and staying out of this, but I actually wanted to see what would happen next. What they were gonna do with this frog thing once they caught up with it. Like Rysa had said, it really didn’t seem dangerous; it was just running around like it wasn’t sure where it was or where it wanted to go. Were they going to catch it, and just hold it prisoner or something? I was pretty sure I didn’t have a place in my apartment to keep a giant frog. Martin might notice.

Keyd was halfway down the main aisle by the time I’d even just turned the corner. And then I saw exactly why he’d gone this way—at the far end of the library, the frog-thing skidded around the corner and started scuttling right in our direction. But as soon as it saw Keyd, it pulled itself to such a hard stop that it nearly flopped itself ass over head, legs flailing all over as it scrambled to turn itself around. It clambered up a bookshelf to the very top, right up near the ceiling. Rysa banked around the corner a second or two later, and the thing was pretty much trapped between them. Nice teamwork, especially when they’d done it without even talking to each other.

Keyd and Rysa closed in on the frog-thing from either side, slower now that it was treed like a cat and didn’t have anywhere to go. The ceiling dropped down about four feet back, nearly right down to the top of the shelves, so it couldn’t move that way. And there was nothing in front of it but a solid wall. I didn’t have much experience with giant frog expressions, but the thing actually looked kind of scared. But that could have just been the way it was huddled up into a little ball and flicking its big watery eyes around.

Rysa was already the closest to it, and the next step she took startled the frog-thing into motion. It bunched itself up and launched off the shelf with its back legs, trying to jump past her by throwing itself over her head. Rysa flung her arm up towards it, and for a second I thought that she’d thrown something at it. A mass of black stuff flew out of her hand and all I could think was, where the hell did she get a net?

That’s what it looked like at first; like she’d tossed a net at the thing or maybe a handful of dark broken glass. It’d just bloomed out of her hand, coming out of nothing, a dozen little pieces that were pulling out longer and thinner, stretching out towards the frog-thing on their own. They caught it right as it was coming down from its jump, wrapped around one of its back legs and curled around the middle of its thick body. The frog-thing hit the ground on only three legs and flopped off balance, rolling partially into an aisle and halfway out of sight. Those long black shadows were still stretching back to Rysa, connected to her by each of her outstretched fingertips. And...all the tattoos on her hand and wrist were gone.

“What,” I said, but nobody was listening to me. Rysa gave a little twist of her hand and all the dark shadowy whatevers pulled back to her hand, hauling the frog-thing towards her along the floor. It was thrashing around pretty wildly now, but a lot more of those black pieces had wrapped it up nearly from head to foot, so mostly just the top of its head and patches of its goldish-white skin were visible. Its little froggy hands were sticking out, but its arms were pretty well trapped against its body. It struggled with them and kicked with its one free leg as it was dragged along the floor, but it definitely wasn’t going anywhere. Its pale eyes were big and blinking frantically on either side of its big froggy face, and somehow they looked kind of….sad. I almost felt kind of sorry for the thing. Almost.

“What are you going to do with it?” I said to Rysa. The thing waved its little hands helplessly, as if asking the same question.

Neither Keyd or Rysa answered me; they were busy looking at each other. Then Keyd reached for the tattoo on his face. He pressed his fingers at the edges of it, caging them around his eye, then pulled his hand back. The tattoo….followed. Just came right off his skin like smoke, pouring off his face into his hand. It started to make a shape inside his fingers—in just a couple seconds it was pretty clear what. A handle, a guard, and a long narrow blade.

Keyd had just pulled a fucking sword out of his goddamn face. The tattoo around his eye was gone, but the guard that curved around the hilt of the sword was sort of in the same shape and design. The entire sword was jet black, glinting under the library lights, and about the length of his entire arm. That’d been just about the coolest and weirdest thing I’d ever seen, and he wasn’t even done yet.

Keyd hefted the blade and spun it around in his hand so that the tip was pointing down. The frog-thing started seriously freaking out now, twisting and thrashing against Rysa’s living nets again. Rysa flicked her fingers and all the dark pieces pulled tighter, squeezing harder around the thing’s goldish skin. Then Keyd stepped forward, going down on one knee in one fast move, and drove the black sword straight down. Right through the top of the frog-thing’s head between its eyes.

An invisible soundless ripple of something pulsed out through the air, like the deep vibration of a bass beat. It thudded once through my whole body, hardest in my chest. I stumbled back and bumped into a bookshelf for about the fifth time today, and a high ringing pitch started up in my ears. I couldn’t pull in any air, like the wind had been knocked out of me.

Every light on the entire floor cut out, leaving only sunlight coming in through the windows. The room didn’t get much darker, but I was suddenly standing in a faint shadow from the bookshelf behind me, and the silence was suddenly heavier and more silent. Like everything around me was holding its breath, waiting for something to happen.

Then the frog-thing started to dissolve. It just came apart like it was made of nothing, curling away from Keyd’s sword into a cloud of glittery goldish smoke and fading away into the air. It only took a few seconds before it was completely gone, like it’d never been there at all. Those shadowy things whipped back up to Rysa’s hands and settled down on her skin. The lights suddenly flickered and stuttered back on overheard. I heard the sound of the half dozen computers under the windows booting up again.

Right about then was when my body decided it didn’t want to stand up anymore. My knees just folded in and I slid down the side of the bookshelf until my ass thumped to the floor. I could breathe again, but only in shallow gulping pants that were pretty fucking embarrassing. There was still a deep buzzing throb in my chest, and my arms and legs were tingling like they were asleep. All my muscles were weak and shaking, some of them seizing up so hard they were cramping.

Rysa was suddenly next to me, down on one knee and holding onto my shoulder. It actually hurt where she was touching me, a deep vibrating burn that felt like it was searing down to my bones. I knocked her arm away.

“Don’t fucking touch—what the fuck was that?”

Before she could answer, Keyd came up behind her. The sword was gone, and the tattoo was back on his face like it’d never gone anywhere. After what I’d just seen I was pretty sure that these marks on them weren’t actually tattoos, but I didn’t know what the hell else to call them. Rysa got back to her feet and Keyd stepped close to her, sliding his hand over the back of her neck and closing his fingers tight around the slope of her shoulder.

“What just—why did you do that?” I said, sort of to both of them but mostly to Keyd. So the gai had been a big weird frog but it hadn’t hurt anybody and it’d actually tried to run away from them. I wasn’t sure why Keyd had needed to jab a huge magical sword through its head and kill it.

“Destroying the gai will weaken its host for at least a day or two,” Rysa said to me. “It will give us some time.”

“To do what?” I said.

“Find the clarbach it belongs to.”

“Okay. Let’s just get the fuck out of here,” I said, because I wasn’t sure what that meant, and somebody had probably noticed the power outage, or that crazy pulse of energy, or at least all the running around we’d been doing up here. I wasn’t sure if I could even get off the floor on my own, but before I even tried to, a tattooed hand stuck down in front of my face. I grabbed it, and Rysa heaved me up to my feet. The jittering in my chest had calmed down a little, and now it was more like uncomfortable adrenaline. Maybe that was all it had ever been.

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Keyd didn’t give me a chance to offer him a ride back to my apartment. As soon as we were out of the library doors, he made a running start and launched himself up onto a nearby bench, pushing off the arm then the back rest and then right into the air. His wings flashed out and caught him, pushing him into the air with a couple of huge downward sweeps. In just a couple seconds he was nearly out of sight over the football field, heading towards the dorm block.

“Jesus,” I said. That’d been pretty fucking cool, but even just watching it made my stomach drop. I shaded my eyes and watched until Keyd had turned into a little black speck and disappeared. Then I dropped my hand and said, “wait, did we just lose track of him again?”

“He’ll go back to your home,” Rysa said.

I figured she knew what she was talking about, since she had some kind of direct line into his brain or something. “Are you gonna—?”

“I’ll go back with you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well. Neat.”

It was silent between us the whole drive back to my place. I had nothing to say, and even if I had I wasn’t sure that it’d come out in real words. My hands shook on the wheel, and there were prickles of leftover adrenaline rushing around in me. I jumped at stupid noises—like Rysa crunching her heel down on an old empty soda can under her seat—and completely overreacted to stop signs and red lights. By the time I was pulling into the assigned parking space in the complex, I was calmed down a little but way more exhausted than I’d been before. And I had a worse headache.

Keyd was waiting outside the door of my apartment when Rysa and I got there. At first I thought that was weirdly polite of him, and then I realized the door was actually locked when I went to pull it open. Martin must’ve taken off again while we’d been gone. After a couple false starts where I couldn’t actually get my key in the lock with my stupid shaking hands, I let the three of us inside.

There was an entire piece of notebook paper pinned to the kitchen corkboard; a note from Martin letting me know he was at his girlfriend’s place for the rest of the weekend. We’d gotten in a habit of doing this kind of thing after the time he’d gone to get some fast food, ran into some buddies of his and ended up at a party all night long, and I’d eventually called him like a worried mom just to check that he hadn’t died. So now we dropped notes or texts on each other like this.

I was pretty glad to see this note now; it was probably the best thing I’d seen all day. It made things a lot simpler if Martin crashed at Claire’s for the weekend. Maybe all this crazy alien business would be over by then, and we’d never have to talk about my fake alien girlfriend or her scary friend. And Martin just wouldn’t have to get involved in any of this at all. Because it’d clearly all be over by the start of the week. Right.

I trudged over to one of the couches and flopped down on it face-first. I’d been up since the ass-crack of dawn thanks to Keyd, and everything about this day had been exhausting. On top of a hangover and no fucking sleep. I didn’t want to deal with aliens and magic, talk about aliens and magic, or think about aliens and magic. Right now I just wanted to lie here and do nothing.

“Alan,” Rysa said from somewhere far away and unimportant. “Is there a place where we can clean up?”

“Shower’s in the back room on the left,” I said into the couch pillow. There was a closer one in the hall bathroom too, but that one was Martin’s. Even if he was gone it was just safer to send them to mine.

I didn’t hear them leave the living room, but when I lifted my face out of the pillow a couple seconds later, I was alone out here. Good, at least a couple minutes to just chill by myself. I flopped back down, stretched out until my feet poked off the other end of the couch, and closed my eyes.

The next thing I knew, I was rolling over and nearly falling off the couch. I flailed, caught myself, and sat up. More adrenaline wasn’t what I’d needed, and now my heart and head were both pounding. I rubbed at my face and dragged a hand through my hair. The apartment was quiet and still. The clock over the TV read about quarter til eleven. Fucking seriously, it was still this early? I’d had the craziest goddamn day of my life and it wasn’t even noon.

There was beeping going on somewhere in the room. Real soft, real annoying beeping that took me almost a minute to realize was the missed call alert on my cell phone. Which I was fairly sure was in my sweatshirt pocket, and my sweatshirt was on the kitchen table. I flopped off the couch and shuffled across the room, pawed my phone out of my sweatshirt and dropped down in a chair to look at it.

I had about ten fucking missed calls, all from Law. Starting at about nine this morning and going all the way up until about twenty minutes ago. But no messages. I only had the guy’s number in my phone because right when we’d met I hadn’t known he was such a weapons-grade douchebottle and he’d been Martin’s roommate and I’d figured why not. But he never called me, and I didn’t call him. Because we were not buddies.

“Seriously, Law?” I muttered, and went through and just deleted all of the calls. If he couldn’t bother to leave a message, it couldn’t’ve been that important. He was probably just being a dick, calling a ton when he’d known I’d have a hangover and wouldn’t appreciate it. Yeah, that sounded like something he would do. I scowled at the stupid entry for his stupid name, and then hit the edit option and changed him to DOUCHEBAG. There. That’d show him, or something.

My stomach suddenly gargled at me, long and loud. Whoa. After everything today, I’d kind of forgotten about food. The last thing I’d eaten was the pizza Martin and I’d picked up yesterday before our stupid Halloween graveyard adventure, and that’d been in the late afternoon. Maybe there was some of it left.

Oh yeah. There was. We’d left it in the box, sitting out on the counter. All night.

...it was probably still good, right?

At this point, I didn’t even care. I fished out two ice-cold, cardboard-stiff slices, threw them on a plate and plopped down in a chair at the kitchen table. The whole set was Martin’s, a bunch of real heavy wood chairs and an even heavier round wood table that his family’d picked up at an estate sale or something. It had always looked pretty bizarre in our apartment against all the IKEA furniture.

I was halfway through my first slice of cold pizza by the time I thought that I should maybe drink some fucking water, and that’d help my headache go away. There were some water bottles in the fridge, so I got up to go grab one.

When I leaned back out of the fridge and turned around, Rysa was back in the living room.

Completely and totally naked.

This was like six and a half feet of naked, tattooed, athletic lady. My brain didn’t even know how to process it, let alone how to react.

So all I did was go totally slack-jawed and stare at her. And drop the water bottle like a total idiot. Just about the last damn thing I’d expected to see today, other than maybe statues coming to life or a giant glowing golden frog or a guy pulling a sword out of his face, or—okay. So maybe this was in the top ten last things I’d expected to see today.

She hadn’t dried off very well and her hair was plastered down against her head and neck, black and glistening. All of her was glistening, and little beads of water standing out on her skin. Most of her was muscle. Really tight, compact muscle everywhere like a gymnast or a swimmer or something. And there were a lot more tattoos on her than just the ones on her hands. There was a ring of them on her stomach, a bunch around her ankles that spread up her calves, and I caught a real fast glimpse of one on the back of her shoulder when she reached down to grab something off the back of the couch.

“Holy shit,” I said. Rysa straightened up and turned completely around. “Oh, wow, I—why aren’t you wearing anything?” Now she was holding her clothes in one hand—she must have just left them out here on the couch.

“Still wet,” Rysa said coolly, and gestured to herself like this was no big damn deal.

“There were towels in there,” I said weakly.

Rysa looked me over, bracing a hand on her really naked hip. “You seem uncomfortable.”

“Just sort of, kinda, yeah,” I said. Even if she didn’t care, it still had to be rude to look at a girl who was this naked if you weren’t dating her or paying her. Even when she was practically inviting you to do it.

“Please put your clothes on,” I said then. I stooped down to grab the water bottle off the floor, then gripped onto it with both hands. “I—god, what if someone comes in.” Like Martin or….well, Martin was the only other person who lived here, but still. Maybe I’d lamely explained her as my girlfriend but I hadn’t explained her as a nudist. But then I remembered that Martin was at Claire’s, so that wouldn’t even happen. It wasn’t easy to remember stuff with a girl being so naked right here in front of me.

Rysa crossed her arms, which didn’t help at all. Mostly because she had them too low and it didn’t do anything but give her chest a nice frame. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I—“ I said, and then suddenly everything got twice as bad. Because Keyd walked into the room. Also wet. And naked. More wet dark hair and lean muscle and skin, so much skin.

“Aggh,” I said. And then, “did you shower together?”

I was seriously starting to strangle the water bottle to death at this point. But Keyd was being just as unconcerned and casual and naked as Rysa was. And maybe the guy had reason to be—he was in serious shape, and had absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about. Neither of them did. They had all this lean, toned muscle from legitimate use, not just for show. Fuck, it was just abs everywhere. And biceps, and other muscles I didn’t even know names for. This was like some kind of Calvin Klein underwear ad going on right here in the living room, except with a lot more body parts showing than normal. I really had to stop staring. Right now. Right…soon.

“Yes,” Rysa said, and it took me a couple of slow dumb seconds to realize she was answering my question about them showering together.

Obviously I was gonna be pretty useless as long as I was looking at them. So I dropped back down into the kitchen chair, put my elbow on the table and leaned on the heel of my hand, turning towards the wall. That pretty much blocked my view of everything. “If you could get dressed, that’d be cool,” I said. “Really really excellent.”

Naked giants in the living room, come on. How was I supposed to do anything with that going on?

About a minute later, the chair across from me screeched out and Rysa collapsed gracefully into it. Still wet, but wearing clothes. I glanced around—Keyd wasn’t out here anymore at all, dressed or otherwise.

I twisted the cap off the water bottle and downed about half of it before I said anything to her. “What the hell was up with that?”

“Keyd and I are antshil,” she replied. The word was gibberish to me, so I shook my head at her. Rysa paused for a second, then said, “bonded partners.”

“Okay,” I said. So they really were dating, married, lovers, or whatever. Just fucking weird ones. “That’s...yeah. Makes sense.”

“Bathing together is just a practice of having the bond,” Rysa said. “We don’t always, and we can forgo it if it upsets you.”

“I’m not upset,” I said. Maybe just a little turned on and embarrassed that I was. “You can be intimate all over the place, I don’t care—just, you know. Wear some clothes.”

“Intimate.” Rysa’s mouth pulled to the side, and then she laughed. “No, you’ve misunderstood.”

“I did?” Then what the fuck, seriously.

Rysa was still chuckling, this smokey little humming sound in her throat. “Antshil is a warrior’s bond. Not for lovers. It’s a pledge made between soldiers. A strong connection between us, but it has nothing to do with intimacy.”

“Okay. Kinda weird, but okay,” I said. I wasn’t real sure I even got what she was talking about. “It’d still be cool if you guys stayed dressed.”

“All right,” Rysa said. She still sounded amused, and if they were super cool about being naked with each other and apparently anybody else too, she had a reason to be.

“Sorry about, you know, freaking out over it,” I said.

Rysa did a little thing with her hand, twisting it loosely like she was turning a knob. “Customs are different everywhere,” she said.

“I bet,” I said, and took another long, long drink. “And that naked thing usually goes over well?”

“Usually.”

“So you always just...go ahead and do it until somebody tells you it’s not cool?”

“It’s not easy to predict what will be unacceptable to a culture,” Rysa said. “We’ve encountered a people, for instance, who consider it very rude to smile in public.”

“What?”

“And clearly you find that strange. As do we. Something offensive to them that we think nothing of. No way to predict that doing it would be vulgar, until we were told.”

“Okay,” I said. “I see what you’re getting at.” Even if I still thought it’d be way easier to just avoid the public nudity altogether. That had to be a way more common taboo than smiling.

Rysa looked like she was about to say something more, except Keyd picked that moment to break up the party. He came out of the hallway—dressed this time—and walked straight through the living room. Didn’t even look around at Rysa or me, or say a single word. He just went right out the door. Which was pretty fucking odd.

“Now what the hell is he up to?” I muttered. The guy needed a damn leash.

Rysa made an amused little sound. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s just going to familiarize himself with the area.”

“Sure. Because things worked out so well last time when he ran off by himself.”

“To us, they did.” Rysa leaned forward over the table, bracing one arm on it. “Alan, this is what we do—our responsibility. Finding the gai here proved that we have a reason to stay, to see if your world will need our protection. It was a fortunate thing.”

“So why aren’t you going with him now?”

Rysa didn’t exactly answer; she sat back again and gave me a significant look.

I sighed. “....you’re babysitting me, aren’t you?”

She smiled, and draped her arms over the sides of the chair. “I wouldn’t call it that.”

Yeah, she was totally babysitting me. But now that there were aliens here for sure—well, other than Rysa and Keyd themselves—maybe that was a good thing. I was barely sure what was going on today or what any of it meant, so sticking real close to people who did seemed like the best plan. Or at least letting them stick close to me.

I leaned back in my own chair and looked around the apartment absently, not really sure what to do now. Hanging around with an alien warrior lady from another planet was pretty far out of my talent range. And she was just sitting there, watching me. I rubbed my hands against the sides of my jeans and dragged the edge of my shoe around on the linoleum. When I glanced around the room again, I spotted all the armor that they’d shed earlier, still just sitting over by the patio doors in two uneven stacks. That was something that should definitely not be sitting out here in the open.

“Hey—we should move all that somewhere,” I said to Rysa, flicking my thumb towards the piles. “Out of the way, I mean. Unless you need it handy.”

“Not particularly,” Rysa said. “It’s meant for full battle. I don’t expect we’ll be in one of those.”

“Even with that gai thing? You just said that means there’s definitely bad guys around.”

“One or two clarbach we can handle. If there are more than that, Keyd and I won’t openly engage them on our own. Either way, we shouldn’t need the armor here.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then let’s definitely do something with it.”

She nodded. “You don’t have an armor rack, do you?”

“...no?”

“No,” Rysa echoed, and then gave me a sly little smile. Oh. She’d been....teasing me.

You know, I was kinda starting to like her.

<div align=”center”>#</div>

Together Rysa and I got all their armor back into my room without much hassle, and piled it up as neat as possible in a corner. It all looked big and unwieldy and awkward, but it hadn’t been all that heavy. The metal was thinner than I’d thought, and almost felt delicate. Light sliced in through the blinds and gleamed over the edges, picking out all these detailed designs that were etched into the plates. None of it looked like it’d stand up to a frying pan, let alone anything else. But whenever I’d put my hands on it, I got a real soft hum tingling through my skin. The same way all their energy and magic shit felt.

I slid my hands into my pockets and stepped back from the two piles of armor, letting out a slow breath. All we’d done was move the fucking stuff to a different spot but it seemed more permanent, now that it was back here in my room. These guys were definitely staying for a while, until they’d found or not found what they were looking for.

Rysa was near my desk now, leaning her hip against the corner of it and watching me.

“We should talk about your ability,” she said, and I winced. I didn’t want to hear about this shit. Maybe I was mixed up in this now and these alien soldiers were crashing in my apartment, but I didn’t want it getting any more involved than that. There wasn’t any proof I had any kind of ability to do anything; there was only what they kept telling me, and who knew how much of that was the truth.

“Alan,” Rysa said, sort of sternly. “What?”

“I just don’t think that there’s anything special going on here,” I said. “Maybe it was just a coincidence you guys, you know, de-statue-ified. I didn’t do anything.”

“Maybe not consciously. But we didn’t remove those spells on our own. And they broke in response to you, to your touch.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said again.

Rysa sighed. Or it seemed like she did; her shoulders lifted and dropped again, but she didn’t really make any noise. Then she moved forward and slid her hand under my arm, catching me firmly. She pulled me away from the desk and steered me sort of in the direction of my bed. I hadn’t been pushed at a bed by a pretty girl for a while. I wasn’t even sure how to take it, because this was definitely not going in that kind of direction. Most likely.

But we didn’t even get near the bed. Rysa positioned me in the middle of the room and then held me in place by the shoulders. Then she poked two fingers right into the middle of my chest. Hard.

“Uff, hey,” I said. That’d been unexpected.

“You certainly have some energy inside you,” she said, wiggling her fingertips against the hard bone in the middle of my ribcage like this was a totally normal thing to do. “It’s reacting to mine. Doesn’t it feel different to you than usual?”

“I guess. I mean, I don’t know—I’ve been feeling a lot of stuff today. I thought it was all just from you guys.”

Her eyes flicked to mine. “And the gai.”

“Well, yeah, I dunno how I could’ve not felt that.”

“You wouldn’t, if you weren’t sensitive to energy. You wouldn’t be aware of any of this. You might not even be able to see it. You were also able to physically interact with Keyd’s bejji, which means more than just sensitivity. That’s an ability.”

Rysa dropped her fingers, but there was something weird going on right where she’d been touching me; little lines of prickles moving around under my skin, all moving in towards the middle of my chest and kind of heating up there. It was almost like my heart had fallen asleep and was waking up again, all pins and needles and a soft burn.

Yeah, that was definitely not normal.

I pressed my fist against the spot and breathed out through my teeth. “Shit,” I said. “Shit.”

Rysa moved a step back. She looked me over, carefully and considering, like she was doing some kind of evaluation. “Can I ask why you think this is a bad thing?” she said, finally.

“Look,” I said. My chest was still tingling and rubbing it wasn’t doing any good. “It’s just that I’ve seen this movie. At first it’s all awesome powers and lasers and shit, and then it’s fighting evil and your friends get kidnapped and you gotta lie to everybody and really shitty life-or-death choices and maybe you save the world and there’s a hot girlfriend at the end but mostly it’s always a nightmare. They always get the raw end of the stick deal.” That made no fucking sense. “What I mean is, it always sucks to be some kind of...like a chosen...guy.”

“Alan,” Rysa said, a lot more patiently this time. “You’re not chosen for anything.”

Well, that was fucking anticlimactic. “I’m...not.”

“You have a simple ability to sense and affect energy. It could be very common here in your world to be able to do this. It’s common elsewhere, even though most of those worlds have at least some influence of the Presence in them. Perhaps it did touch your world once, and left some of your people still sensitive to energy even in its absence.”

“Oh,” I said. I honestly wasn’t sure if I was relieved or kind of insulted. I had a simple ability that was no big deal. So much of a non-deal that I could barely tell I even had it except when I got poked in the chest by an alien. “So what can I even do with it?”

“Well,” Rysa said. “What can you do?”

“It—what—that’s why I’m asking you!”

“I’m not inside your body, I can’t tell you what it feels like or what you’re capable of. You have to tell me.”

“I don’t know what it feels like!”

“All right.” Rysa stepped around me and sat herself down on the edge of my bed, right in the square of sunlight coming in through the window. Bright dust motes twirled up into the air around her. “Come sit down.”

I eyed her. “Why?”

Rysa just kept on looking at me, waiting. I sucked on my teeth and made a face, then gave in.

I clearly didn’t sit close enough to her, because she scooted herself right across the space I’d left between us on the bed, like we were real buddies and had known each other for more than a few hours. And she was right next to me too, her thigh against mine. She was warm even though my jeans and her clothes, and there was a strong leather smell around her. Her eyes were so light in the sun that they looked clear and almost colorless.

I just hoped she wasn’t gonna stab me in the chest with her fingers again. I was just starting to feel normal around in there.

“What you removed from us were stasis spells,” Rysa said. “The energy of them is simple, but very strong.”

“I thought it was like some kind of...you guys were like statues. Like stone.”

Rysa shifted, reeled one leg up and rested her heel on the bedframe, then let her arm uncurl out over her knee. Watching her move was sort of mesmerizing; it was all so damn controlled and easy, no wasted motion. “I suppose the effect could seem like stone,” she said. “The spell is meant for keeping things briefly preserved or stabilized. It’s not meant to be used on entire living bodies for long periods of time, not as it was used on us.”

“If you know so much about it, how come you couldn’t bust out of it yourselves?”

“Because there is no awareness when affected by it. We moved instantaneously from the moment of its casting to the moment you removed it. No sense of time passing, nor even of existence.”

“Wow,” I said. “That...kind of sucks.”

Rysa smiled a little. She folded the fingers of her tattooed hand into a loose fist, slow and precise. “It’s also very difficult for us to handle energy of the opposite type. That’s why Keyd came to find you, instead of trying to remove the spell on me himself.”

“...oh.” I let all of this roll around in my head for a second. “So then, this—those spells. If I really took them off you, absorbed them or whatever...it’s all just hanging around in me now?” I thumped the palm of my hand against my chest.

“Yes.”

“What do I do about that?”

“Well. You could use them, maybe as they are, or maybe distill them back into formless energy. It will depend on what you’re naturally capable of.”

“Can I just—” I shook my hands out, frustrated, “—get rid of all of it?”

Rysa gave me a long, level look. “Most likely.”

“Okay. Okay, good. And how do I do that?”

“I wouldn’t suggest that you do. It will be useful to you, to get used to feeling what handling energy is like.”

That I wanted to not do exactly that wasn’t getting through to her at all here. Clearly Rysa was comfortable and natural with this and it didn’t make sense to her that somebody wouldn’t want the same weird magical powers she had. I just wanted this stuff out of me. The more I thought about it, the more nervous it was getting me. This was alien shit; that was almost never something good. What if it was like...radioactive, or poisonous, or just all around fucking shit up inside me? No, I seriously didn’t want it.

“Tell me how to get rid of it,” I said. “I don’t want it in me, I want it out, I really want it out right now.”

“All right. Calm down,” Rysa said, and held up a hand. That wasn’t really calming at all.

“No, seriously,” I said, and caught her wrist. All the little fractured black marks on her skin buzzed against me, and my whole arm hummed back. A wave of hot prickles rushed down towards my fingers, and I jerked my hand off her and clenched it up against my chest.

“Fuck, sorry,” I said, starting to rub and squeeze at my fist with my other hand. But the feeling’d gone away as soon as I’d let go of her. “What just happened?”

Rysa didn’t answer. I glanced over at her, and my stomach just fucking sank. She was just sitting there, rigid and unmoving, a white-grey color from head to toe. Just like she’d been in the cemetery. Her arm was still up in the air and she was turned towards me, her eyes open and creepily blank. She looked mildly startled.

“Oh, fuck me,” I said.