Tenebrism

Fuzzy. Everything was fuzzy. My head, my mouth, the shapes I could see when I cracked my aching eyes open, the voices I could hear talking quietly somewhere in the room. My arms were slow and clumsy when I moved them and didn’t go anywhere I wanted them to. I hit myself in the face trying to find something to grab, to touch, to figure out where I was.

My hand finally landed on familiar worn corduroy. I was on the couch in my living room. When I blinked a couple times and tried to focus, my vision cleared up just a little. Everything was still kind of a blurry mess, but I could at least tell what was around me. Keyd and Rysa were sitting on the floor near the patio doors, cross-legged, having a quiet little chat. It was dark outside. When I struggled up to my elbows, Keyd noticed me. He nudged Rysa and both of them got to their feet and came right over. They both looked gummy and out of focus, even close up.

“Hey guys,” I said, and my dry throat closed up on the words.

Keyd held something out to me. As soon as I got my stupid drunk hand to grab it, I realized what it was and why everything was still blurry. Glasses. Right.

I slid them on clumsily. Then took them off again and rubbed the lenses against my shirt, and put them back on. Well, that’d barely helped. My shirt was kind of a mess. I was kind of a mess. But still not as bad as Keyd or Rysa, who looked—

Actually, they both looked fine. Sort of like they’d been in a fight, but maybe days or even weeks ago. All the blood and dirt and dust was gone. The cut on Keyd’s face was now a closed pink line, but there was something weird and black under the skin around it. Almost like a bruise, but the wrong color and too even. Rysa’s side looked the same; her skin closed up into a raw pink scar that looked like it’d been healing for weeks, with that same black coloring underneath it. Their clothes were still wrecked to hell, but other than that...

“You guys look...okay,” I said. “Like, really okay.” Fuck, how long had I been unconscious?

“Superficial injuries,” Rysa said. “Simple to heal.”

But Keyd couldn’t heal me, I didn’t say. I hadn’t been hurt bad enough to need whatever kind of crazy magical healing that these guys could clearly do. Just some scrapes and bruises. I could feel them again, kind of tender and raw against the couch and my clothes, so whatever Keyd’d done on the roof must’ve worn off. But it wasn’t even a big deal.

“And you’re all right,” Rysa said. It wasn’t really a question; more like a statement she’d like me to agree with.

“Yeah. Yeah, fine, I think.” I pulled myself the rest of the way up, and leaned forward over my legs. “How long was I…”

“Not very long,” Rysa assured me. “It only just became dark.”

So like…probably less than an hour. Still, fuck. What the hell had laid me out like that? I sort of remembered Keyd, and talking with him on the roof of the bank, and then getting flown back here, and then…not much else. I rubbed careful circles on my temples and breathed slow through my nose, just trying to get myself stable again.

“What happened?” I asked finally.

Rysa dropped her palms outward at me. “Likely your body is just not used to being exposed to so much energy all at once. It doesn’t know how to handle it yet. We think. We don’t see this sort of thing often,” she said, which sounded more like an apology than an explanation. Oh, good. The magical aliens didn’t know what’d happened. Fucking reassuring.

I swung my legs off the couch and—really carefully—stood up. Both Rysa and Keyd were watching me like they expected me to faint again at any second. I didn’t, but the room spun and flashy spots went off in my eyes.

“I’m just gonna…get cleaned up,” I said, jerking a thumb back towards my room. Rysa made a move forward, maybe to help me or something, but I waved her off. I could stand, I could walk, I wasn’t totally out of commission here.

But moving around got me realizing that I didn’t feel as good as I’d thought. My skin was sensitive and prickly, kind of aching and too tight over my whole body. It almost felt like I was getting over the flu or something. My muscles burned with a low constant throb. Every once in a while a really bad kink flared up and sent a twisting pinch running deep though an arm or a leg. I hobbled off down the hallway like an old man and just hoped Rysa and Keyd weren’t watching how sad this was. I hadn’t even been in the goddamn fight.

But I managed to get myself back to the bathroom. There were little smears of that weird black stuff all in the sink, mostly on the edges of the faucets and handles. Keyd and Rysa must’ve cleaned up in here too.

The sleeve of my shirt had gotten stuck to my shoulder, and peeling it off again was sticky and awful and left little linty threads stuck all over the raw skin. I couldn’t get my shoulder wedged good enough under the sink faucet to wash it off—and I fucking tried—so I stripped down and got in the shower. There was one smeary black fingerprint on the glass near the door handle. I turned the spray on it, but it was on the outside.

What’d happened in the plaza started coming back to me as I stood under the water—with all the passing out and everything I’d probably jarred a few brain cells loose, but now some things were prodding at the back of my mind. Things Ahieel had said to me. Actual good points he’d made when he hadn’t been threatening the shit out of me and playing good cop/crazy cop. And frankly between meeting him and my first real encounter with Keyd, Ahieel had been less handsy and bossy. But a whole fuckton crazier. Clearly none of these guys were all that great at first impressions.

I stayed in the shower until it ran cold, and even then I didn’t get out right away. I leaned on the wall and let the water pound down on my back until I was shivering and grinding my teeth together hard enough to make my jaw ache. By the time I climbed out again, I didn’t feel much better. Sure I was clean, but everything ached, I still thought I might possibly throw up, and my hands shook if I held them up for too long. And I was shuddering all over from dousing myself in fucking ice water like a genius. I could barely dry myself off or pull my clothes back on.

When I’d managed to do that, I went back out to the bedroom and pawed through my closet for the little first aid kit I knew was in there somewhere. Didn’t take long to find it—my cleaning spree the other day’d been good for something at least. I sat with my back against the bed and got to work trying to patch myself up. Gauze and medical tape and Neosporin was good for most of it. The scrape on my face was in an awkward spot right on the bottom edge of my jaw, and it wasn’t real easy to deal with. I dabbed anti-bacterial on it, then left it alone.

I was still sitting there with antibiotic tubes and gauze and Band-Aid wrappers spread all over the floor when I felt eyes on me. Rysa was in the doorway. I had to look kind of pitiful, worrying over these minor little scrapes when she’d had a fucking gouge in her side an hour or two ago. Her shirt was still stained and stiff with black blood.

“What’s going on here?” I said to her. “I just want to know what’s going on. Please tell me what’s going on.”

Rysa crouched down in front of me, and then brushed her hand over the raw skin on my jaw without actually touching it. A warm itchy feeling settled against my skin. It felt just like what Keyd had done earlier.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We haven’t been handling this well at all. But we’d like to talk with you.”

“Right now?”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

“’kay,” I said. I didn’t really want to talk right now. I wanted to sleep again, maybe for days. But I wanted to know what was going on even more.

So I forced myself up to my feet and followed her back to the living room. I kept one hand skating along the wall just in case. I wasn’t real dizzy anymore, but little bursting spots were going off in front of my eyes once in a while and if I looked around too fast I got a little lightheaded. It was slow going getting out to the kitchen.

Keyd was sitting in a chair out there, and he actually didn’t look as okay as I’d thought before. He was kind of greyish and sweaty, and he was leaning pretty hard on the table. Rysa still looked totally fine, relaxing against the wall on the other side of the table from Keyd. Her arms were crossed low over her ribs, and she didn’t waste any time dancing around the topic.

“Ahieel being here is serious,” she said as soon as I was in the room.

“No shit,” I said. And then, “sorry. But half the plaza is fucking destroyed. I get it’s serious.”

Rysa and Keyd glanced at each other. I edged around the wall and got myself braced against the edge of the kitchen counter.

“It means you’re gonna be staying around for a while, huh,” I said, when it’d been awkwardly quiet for a couple long seconds.

“Yes,” Keyd said. Even his voice sounded kind of wrecked and awful, like he was talking through a mouthful of gravel.

“Dude, do you want some water or something?” I said to him. Keyd made a vague little gesture that kind of looked like he didn’t, but Rysa caught my eye and gave me a definite go-ahead.

I got around the corner of the wall and into the kitchen, keeping my hand on the counter edges just in case. Dealing with glasses and the Brita filter was way too much effort right now, so I just grabbed two bottled waters from a cabinet. I downed half of one myself before I got back to the table, then twisted the cap off the other and plopped it down in front of Keyd. He didn’t look real interested in drinking any of it, but after Rysa stared him down for a couple of seconds he reached for the bottle. He took a tiny baby sip, and then put it down and ignored it again.

“So that’s really what the clarbach look like, huh?” I said to Rysa, and her eyebrows went up. “Just like you, but blond?” That was the only difference I’d seen. And that their magic stuff was different colors.

“What did you expect?”

I lifted a shoulder. “I dunno, after that crazy frog thing I saw, I wasn’t sure—you know, maybe they’d be more like…monsters.”

Rysa made a weird sound in her throat; kind of a grunt, kind of a sigh. “No,” she said. “As you said, they are…like us.”

“So…you’re in a war with other guys basically like you. And Ahieel really has it out for you two,” I said. Rysa looked surprised, like she hadn’t thought I could’ve figured that out on my own.

“Come on, I’m not stupid,” I said. Ahieel clearly knew the two of them, plus he’d almost flat-out told me he’d put that stasis spell on them, which seemed like a kind of petty personal thing. Even the way they’d all been yelling at each other during the fight seemed personal. There was definitely history here. “You knew he was here since that gai thing showed up, huh?”

Rysa’s mouth flattened out a little. “Yes.”

“Okay,” I said. “What does this mean, then?”

“Your world…may or may not be in any kind of danger,” she said. “Ahieel may only be here because of us. Or, he may be here with others. That’s why finding him, or finding a grove—“ right, the magic tree things that would eat all the energy here or…something, “—has been so important. We need to find out if this is an advance mission, or—”

“—or he just wants to throw down with you guys, got it,” I said. “What’s the chance of it being just that second one?”

Rysa’s mouth got even tighter and she let out a hard little breath.

“Right, okay,” I said. “That’s—well, that’s shitty, actually, but thanks for letting me know. Seriously. I want to know this kind of shit at this point, especially if it’s gonna actually threaten me to my face.”

Now Rysa actually looked a little angry. “Is that what he did?”

“He said it was just a warning, but—yeah. Basically. He said some other things, too. About you guys.”

“I heard what he said,” Keyd said, and I blinked. Rysa had shown up on the scene first, long before he had. Where the fuck had Keyd been if he’d heard?

“All of it? I didn’t believe him or anything,” I said quickly, when Keyd nodded. “He sounded a little nuts. And by a little, I mean completely.”

Rysa glanced away and Keyd shifted in his chair, leaning more weight onto the table. Neither of them said anything.

“I think all he really wanted was for me to tell him where you guys were,” I offered. “That kinda seemed like his big thing.”

Keyd tapped one of his fingers on the table for a couple seconds. Maybe he was waiting for Rysa to say something. But when she didn’t; “it seems he’s unable to sense energy here,” he said. “The same as us.”

“So you guys can’t find him and he can’t find you,” I said. “Then how’d he find me? I mean...how the hell did he know that I’m helping you guys out? He wasn’t even guessing; he knew. He knew my fucking name.”

Keyd and Rysa exchanged looks again. I didn’t like when they did that. “He may be getting help from another native here,” Rysa said. “Someone who knows you.”

“You think that’s it?” But the only person who knew that I had a couple of weird new friends was Martin, and he definitely wasn’t palling around with Ahieel. I think I’d’ve noticed that. Martin could have told someone else that they were here, but...he didn’t have much of a reason to. He thought they were my weird foreign cousins.

“Ahieel is resourceful either way,” Rysa said. “With or without help, he’ll manage to do whatever it is he wants.”

“And…what’s that?”

“He—“

Keyd’s hand shot out and caught her wrist. The move seemed to be too much for him; he closed his eyes and swayed forward like he’d lost his balance while sitting down. He really looked like he was about ready to keel over. There was a coat of sweat over his skin and he looked exhausted and drained and even paler than before. And it totally distracted Rysa from whatever she’d been about to say to me.

Instead, she pushed the ignored water bottle closer to Keyd. “Kahle eyuhadva,” she said, and Keyd shook his head.

“Ysta kajdrat mrisit,” he said, and Rysa sighed. Then she got up from the table and nearly dragged Keyd out of his own chair along with her. She pointed to the couches and said something else, and I saw Keyd getting this real stubborn set in his jaw. Either he didn’t like Rysa trying to take care of him or he was just an idiot. Maybe both. Even I could see the guy needed at least a nap or something.

But, after a tense little stare-off between them, Keyd did go over to the couches and lie down on one. He had to tuck his knees up to keep from hanging off the end, and he was still partially draped over the couch arm. Then he rested his chin on his arm and glared at a spot on the carpet. I almost wanted to laugh; he just looked like a grouchy little kid on a time-out.

Rysa looked pretty satisfied with it, but—I don’t know, it didn’t seem like enough. What if he needed some serious help? I caught Rysa by her sleeve and pulled her aside, a couple feet down the hallway and hopefully out of Keyd’s earshot.

“What’s wrong with him?” I said, keeping my voice low. “Do we need to get him to a fucking hospital or something?”

Rysa frowned and glanced back towards the living room, then back to me. Like she wasn’t actually sure I was talking about Keyd.

“Yeah, I mean him,” I said. “The guy isn’t exactly looking good.”

“It’s because his bejji was destroyed. They’re connected closely with the core of our energy. Keyd will be weak because of it, but he’ll recover. The same way Ahieel did. ” Rysa dropped her hand to my shoulder and gave me a single firm squeeze. “Don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t,” I sort of lied. “Just, you know—not exactly prepared to deal with someone dying right in front of me.”

“He’s not dying,” she said. “It’s temporary.”

I was about to ask what the fuck Keyd’d been thinking using the thing to fight with, if losing it was such a big problem, when I remembered that he really hadn’t. The bejji had popped out when Ahieel had totally trounced Keyd to the curb, like some kind of last defense. It might’ve actually saved his life.

And Rysa clearly wasn’t worried about it, so I didn’t have to be either. I had another question, anyway. “Hey, what were you going to say, before? About Ahieel.”

Rysa shut her eyes for a second. “Only that he’s dangerous, and driven, and if you aren’t actively helping him he will probably consider you a liability or an outright threat. We were trying to keep you out of this, Alan, as much as we could. Now it doesn’t seem like that’s an option, and I’m sorry for that.”

“Hey, it’s—I agreed to this,” I said. “You gave me a lot of chances to back out. I didn’t.”

“Yes, but we weren’t telling you everything.”

“But you are now, right?”

She actually laughed. “Telling you everything would take quite a long time. But we won’t keep what we learn here from you again.”

“That’s all I wanted to hear,” I said, leaning back against the hallway. Something uncomfortable in my back pocket jabbed into me, and I frowned and dug it out. Keys. My car and apartment keys. Which got me thinking, and remembering that—

I groaned and dropped my head back against the wall. “Aww shit, my car is still at fucking school.”

I’d walked to the bank from campus, and Keyd had hauled me directly back here. Not that it’d take all that long to walk back to school to get my car; I just didn’t fucking want to. I was tired and sore and unhappy. And there was a fucking bad guy out there who might or might not want to mess me up somehow.

“I’m gonna have to go get it,” I said anyway, because I needed the stupid thing, goddammit.

“One of us should go with you,” Rysa said, clearly thinking the same thing.

“Uggh,” I said, and dragged my hands down over my face. “Yeah, all right.”

‘One of us’ clearly meant Rysa, because Keyd was totally out of commission. He was still collapsed on the couch, on his stomach like some kind of deflated balloon. But he tried to pick himself up when Rysa and I came back into the room.

“Agmi omakij,” he said, and it kinda sounded like he was trying to object to this plan. Maybe he’d heard our conversation anyway. “Halj ujaretanhi—“

Rysa shut him up by flicking her pinky finger up at him.

“Kahle davket. Kahle kritjanhi akalan. Sroro atka,” she said, and I could just imagine the subtitles to go with it. Lie down. Stay. Good boy. Because Keyd sunk reluctantly back down to the couch and curled up there like an angry cashew. I bit down on a laugh; the guy was actually kind of funny when he was sulking.

Rysa turned to me, and I realized that she still looked like she’d walked out of a fight. At least, her clothes did. Her shirt still had a huge burned hole in the side of it, and the rest of it was stained with dried black blood. Not great to go strolling around town in.

“Let me at least get you another shirt first,” I said to her. Rysa didn’t protest the idea, and she followed me back to my room. I started hunting through my dresser for something that could maybe fit her, and when I glanced over at her to try and gauge it she was already pulling her ruined shirt off.

“Hey, whoa—!” I said, shutting my eyes quick. “With the naked thing again!”

Rysa’s laugh was quick and warm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not completely undressed.”

I cracked one eye open. She wasn’t. She had something under her ruined shirt that kind of looked like one of those cropped exercise tops girls went jogging in. More like a tight shirt than anything, soft leathery brown and stopping midway down her ribs.

Right under the hem of the shirt was a giant scar. I hadn’t noticed it when she’d been totally naked before, but it couldn’t be from the fight today. It looked way too faded and dull, and the skin around it was pinched and puckered in places. It went almost all the way across her body, gashed right between the bottom of her ribcage and the tattoo on her stomach, like she’d been gutted open. And from the way she and Keyd were barely damaged from today and had magically healed themselves up in no time—she must have been seriously hurt once to have a scar that looked like this.

She caught me staring and I looked away fast, but she didn’t say anything. Neither did I. I didn’t even want to ask.

I went back to shuffling through my dresser and found her a plain white t-shirt that was a loose fit on me, but was too tight for her in the shoulders and barely went down to her bellybutton. It was the biggest shirt I owned.

“You’re the first girl I’ve ever met who can’t fit my clothes,” I told her. “And shit, that sounded rude, but I just meant—you’re so damn tall. Sorry.”

“Your people are rather small,” Rysa replied, throwing me a smile.

“Wait, so, all you guys are like this?”

“Keyd and I are both a common height.”

“Wow,” I said. I looked back towards the living room like I could see Keyd through the fucking walls or something. “That’s—wow. And I bet I can’t even ask how tall you are ‘cause it’s gonna come out in some kind of bizarre scale of measurement that includes horses.”

Rysa laughed, a totally bright amused sound, and her eyes crinkled up. I just about patted myself on the back for making a joke she even got.

“I suppose it would,” she said. She tugged at the hem of the shirt, but it didn’t do much. Half of the magic tattoo on her stomach was completely visible. “Well, it’s fine for now.”

In the couple minutes we’d been out of the living room, Keyd had fallen asleep. His head was slumped down into the corner of the couch, head cricked against the armrest. Even though he was still pale and sweaty he looked a little less like he was gonna die on the spot. Rysa reached down to flick some of his hair out of his face, and he wrinkled up his nose and made a little snorting sound.

“Heh,” I said. Nice to see Keyd could have a human reaction once in a while. Rysa glanced at me, and I shrugged. “Well, let’s get going.”

It was dark by now, the night sky filled with cloudy brown and black. Not real cold; the air was pretty much room temperature. It was all neighborhoods for most of the way to campus, a couple of strip malls here and there but for the most part it was a quiet and uninteresting walk. Cars hummed past us in yellow and red trails of light and little moths swooped around in the beams of the streetlights.

“So, uh,” I said to Rysa, after we’d gone a block or two in a fairly comfortable silence. “About the plaza....it’s kind of wrecked, and a lot of people saw it happen. I’m thinking your cover’s kinda blown here.”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “People in muted worlds...tend not to want to comprehend things related to energy or the Presence. More than likely they’ll want to explain it as something else, they’ll tell themselves they saw something other than they did. The physical damage done is real, but perhaps nothing else.”

“Yeah but, we’ve got these things called camera phones,” I said, but she kinda had a point. I even knew what’d been happening, and half of the fight still felt like a weird unreal half-dream to me. People who had no clue at all...they’d probably come up with anything else except magical aliens. And if they did anyway, then I guess I’d be hearing about it on the news.

There were still plenty of students around the school campus since it wasn’t actually late, just dark, and Rysa got a couple of looks as we walked through the underground parking lot. It took a while to find my car—I was an idiot who couldn’t remember where I’d parked, also I’d had a rough day—but finally we were in it, and driving back to my place. I really could have done this on my own, but…I got why Rysa’d come with me, and I appreciated it, but I didn’t want this to be a constant thing.

So when we got back to my apartment, right before we went inside, I caught Rysa’s sleeve to get her attention.

“Hey, uh—“ I started, letting my hand drop when she turned around. “I think I should, you know. Learn something. About all this, and my—whatever, ability, and what I can do with it. You know. Just in case.”

Rysa leveled a slow smile at me. “Good decision.”

That expression was a little more satisfied than I’d expected to get. “...you were just waiting for me to ask, huh.”

She gave a little jerk of her eyebrows. “It would have been no good forcing you,” she said. “We’ll start tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? What about—“ –the fact that I had classes, and that Ahieel could maybe show up again at any damn time because he’d already mysteriously found me once, and—

“Tomorrow,” Rysa said again, firmly. She reached for the door handle and, because I’d left it unlocked when we’d left, pushed it right open and went inside.

“Right. Tomorrow,” I said, and followed her in.

Rysa headed right down the hall, I guess to the bathroom or something. I was fucking exhausted and ready to go crawl into bed and sleep off the rest of my body’s aches, but there was one thing I had to check first. And that involved finding Keyd.

At first I thought he wasn’t even here. But I finally spotted him out on the patio, leaning against the fence in the dark. A thin wiggle of dark yellow from the complex lights outlined part of his shoulder and face, which was the only reason I even saw him out there. I tapped my fingers against the sides of my legs, frowning at the glass doors. I’d never really tried to talk to Keyd before, at least not starting a real conversation in a normal situation, and the guy still got me kind of charged up and edgy. But I had a question, and I wanted it answered.

Keyd looked up when the sliding doors pulled open, and had absolutely no reaction when he saw it was me.

“Hey,” I said, taking a few steps out onto the patio concrete. Keyd dipped his head down toward his chest, eyes on me. Kind of like an acknowledging nod, I guess, so I just went on ahead with the talking. “Look, I just wanted to ask you—you heard everything Ahieel said to me in the plaza. Right?”

He nodded once.

“How? You weren’t even there.”

Keyd shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and crossed his arms low across his chest. “A tracking spell,” he finally said. “I can see and hear what you do, through it.”

“What?” My skin crawled at just the idea of that; it was creepy and way out of my comfort zone. “Is it still on me?”

Now even Keyd seemed uncomfortable. “Yes.”

“Take it off. I don’t want any shit like that on me.”

“It’s how we knew Ahieel had found you,” he said. “And how we were able to find you ourselves. Without it—”

“I don’t fucking care!” I barked, and Keyd almost flinched. It was more like a blink and an eyebrow jerk, but I think I’d actually startled him. “Take it off me, right the fuck now.”

“It’s not on you, precisely,” Keyd said, shifting his weight again.

“The fuck does that mean?”

He made a little gesture at me, sort of a scooping motion like he was tossing water on himself. It looked close enough to ‘come here’, and so I took a guarded step forward. And almost jumped back again when Keyd tried to put his hand right on my face.

“Hey!”

“Did you want me to remove it, or not?” Keyd said. That was as close to exasperated as I’d ever heard him sound. The faster we just got this over with, the better.

“Go ahead,” I said, and forced myself to stay still.

Keyd touched his fingers to the frames of my glasses, held them there. I barely felt anything happen, except a faint buzz and a quick brush of heat. Then Keyd dropped his hand. “It’s no longer there.”

It’d been on my glasses? That was…weird. “Great. Thanks. Don’t do it again,” I said, and turned around to go back inside.

“It was only to protect you,” Keyd said after me. For a second I actually felt guilty. Then I thought about Keyd spying on everything I was doing and saying without even telling me, and that feeling went away.

“Next time, fucking ask,” I said, and slid the door shut harder than really necessary.

#

When Rysa woke me up in the morning, I could just tell it was early. At least the sun was up, but the light coming through my bedroom blinds was wimpy and pale. Guess we were getting an early start on this magical training stuff. I yawned all through getting dressed, and poked carefully at all my bruises and scrapes from yesterday. I was mostly better—still kind of sore and slow, but better.

Rysa was waiting for me out in the living room. Keyd was nowhere, and his blankets were folded up all nice and neat on the couch. Rysa was wearing my shirt from yesterday—that was fine, she could totally keep it. We decided to go down to the same park I’d taken them to a couple days back, when I’d first met them. Shit, had that really only been a few days ago? It felt like…I don’t know. Another life.

It was overcast and sorta foggy out, the neighborhood streets grey and almost empty. Rysa and I walked quietly for a while. I just didn’t want to talk, and she had such a calm presence that the silence didn’t even bother me.

Though, eventually, she broke the silence.

“Keyd has asked me to apologize to you for him,” she said. “Though he didn’t say for what.”

“Oh. The fucking—the stupid tracking spell thing, I bet.” This was kind of unexpected; a hand-me-down apology. “I kinda got on his case about it. Made him get rid of it.”

Rysa caught my shoulder, stopped us on the sidewalk. “Alan, I told him to set that spell.”

“Why? It’s fucking creepy!” I said. “Do you guys not have privacy where you come from?”

“Of course. But it was so we could watch out for you, protect you if it became necessary. And it did. Keyd only activated it when we weren’t near you,” she added. “Not any other time.”

“Still,” I said, but my argument was pretty weak by this point. They should have told me about the spell, but they were aliens, with totally different social rules, and I had to stop overacting when they didn’t do things like regular people. Now Keyd had even apologized, if not directly. And I’d’ve probably been dead yesterday, or in some really serious trouble, if they hadn’t shown up when they had.

Now I was gonna have to apologize to Keyd myself, again. First the punching thing and now this. I couldn’t have a single conversation with the guy without something really stupid happening on my end. I wished these aliens came with a handbook, seriously.

The park was empty again when we got to it, and even then we headed back pretty far on the lot. The fog was slowly burning off but the sky was still kind of white and watery, and even our shadows were pretty weak. Rysa held out her hands to me, showing me the dark fractured patterns on her skin.

“This is oen,” she said. “You’ve seen us use it now, you know a little of how it works.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It forms our strongest abilities, but is nothing like your ability at all. But they are connected. At least—” Rysa smiled a little at me, “—this is what Keyd and I have come to think. It makes the most sense.”

“All right, well, you guys definitely know more than me about it. What’s my ability like, then?”

“The oen itself generates energy—an excess power that we can also use. It’s limited in strength, more limited than the power of the marks themselves. It also becomes depleted and needs to restore itself between uses, while using the oen itself is far less restricted. But it’s also more flexible; isn’t bound into certain uses or beings. It’s what Ahieel’s spells are made of, the ones you have in you still.” Rysa spread her hands towards me like she was presenting something invisible. “So this energy, the residue from the oen, is what you’re able to interact with. That’s what you need to learn to control and use.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sounds good, I guess.”

“Now, hands.” Rysa stuck hers more pointedly out at me, and it took me a second to get that she wanted me to take them. So I did, carefully. Last time I’d touched her skin on purpose the result hadn’t been so great.

But nothing bad happened this time. Actually, nothing happened at all.

“Uh,” I said. “What’s—”

“You’ll need more energy than just the two spells from Ahieel. You should be able to take some from me the same way you absorbed those. And it will be a good start in basic control. Try.”

Right, sure. Rysa’d told me before that I’d probably been controlling Ahieel’s spells with simple commands. So I adjusted my grip on her hands, feeling the light little buzz from the oen marks against my fingers, and thought, okay, come to me.

The buzz got stronger, a sharp tingle that sunk into my hands and started traveling up my arms, fast. Rysa made a curious sound, but didn’t let go of me. The feeling got brighter and sharper, and most of it was sliding up into my chest and pooling there. It didn’t hurt, but it was fucking weird.

When Rysa let go, about half a minute later, it didn’t go away either. It was like static electricity on the inside of my skin, a humming and itching and crackling in my blood and under my ribs.

“Fuck, that’s uncomfortable,” I muttered, fidgeting and scratching my nails up and down my arms. “Okay. Now what?”

Rysa shook her hair back out of her eyes in a way that felt familiar, but I couldn’t think why. “We’ll start with how to shield yourself.”

I liked that idea. Learning to fight wasn’t gonna do me much good, since Ahieel’d nearly taken out Keyd and Rysa on his own and they had some serious training and experience. But protecting myself; that’d be useful.

“Right, sounds good. How do we...start doing that?’

“The way we’re trained to, as soldiers, is through our mental connection. As we’ve figured out, your ability is at least partially controlled that way as well. It responds to what you’re thinking, at least the strongest thoughts, and reacts. Normally, we devote time to defining and strengthening the mental connection first, but in your case I think learning by doing would be the most efficient. So, think of something protective, something that could shield you.”

“Like what? A wall, or—”

“Whatever is the most relevant to you,” Rysa said.

Well, a wall sounded as good as anything. What’d come to my mind right away was the faded red-brick wall that’d gone around the playground area at my grade school, separating the primary kids from the older ones. We’d always been trying to climb over that thing to get to the cool soccer field the upper grades got to play on. Never actually managed it; the wall and teachers kept us in.

I closed my eyes; thought about being stuck inside that wall as a little kid, how big and intimidating it’d felt, and now imagining it as something solid and protecting.

“Now—“ Rysa’s voice was distant and vague, “—focus on the energy, move it outwards from yourself. Command it.”

Right. It was pretty easy to think about the energy; I could still feel it prickling under my skin.

“Should I still be thinking about walls?” I said, and Rysa chuckled.

“Yes.”

Okay, walls and energy, got it. I could see that red-brick playground wall pretty clear in my mind, and I focused on the hum of the energy and on pushing it out of me. I remembered the thing about simple commands again, and thought, out. Go out.

The itchy static feel lifted out of me. That’s what it seemed like—that it just lifted up and rolled through my skin and out in a hazy wave. I blinked and looked up. Holy shit, something had actually happened. Something was around me—a weak and shaky something, but it was there. I could even almost see it; the air wiggled in places like heat waves on a summer day. I got distracted from thinking about walls, and in a couple of seconds the whole thing just collapsed and faded away.

“Did I actually just do that?” I said, and had a total cliché new-superhero-powers movie moment where I just stared dumbly down at my hands.

“Yes,” Rysa said, and when I looked at her, she was smiling. “Well done.”

Okay, despite everything, that’d been pretty fucking cool. I’d actually done something, on purpose, and it was kinda sort of magic. Maybe this wasn’t gonna be so bad. I still itched under my skin, about the same as before, so I definitely had energy left.

I felt a zingy little hum start up from Rysa’s direction, and then she said, “now you need to actually use it.”

Before I could reply, or do anything, something slammed me right in the middle of my chest. Nothing like I’d felt yesterday, which had all been big rolling waves of vibration and bone-shaking power—this was compact and sharp and felt more like I’d been slapped with an electric eel. I went right to my knees, my eyes watering and my skin stinging in weird little bursts. Rysa’s shadow fell over me, and I looked up.

“Oww, why did you do that,” I whined at her, and it really was whiny. It was embarrassing to hear myself. But that’d fucking hurt.

And Rysa wasn’t too sorry about it. “So that you know what it will be like if you allow yourself to be hit. You won’t want to feel that again.”

“Nooo,” I groaned.

“So you have a more immediate reason to want to learn how to do this,” she said. She put her hand down, and I caught it. She pulled me easily off my knees, then took a few steps back so we were facing each other again.

“I already want to learn how! I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t!”

“Yes, but against a danger that’s not here. Having a present threat—“ Rysa flicked her flingers, and some of the marks on her hands just slid off her skin and unrolled into a twisty black whip of energy, “—is a better incentive.”

Shit, she meant business.

“Okay, okay, I get it. Just give me a warning next time,” I said. That whip in her hand was a lot thinner and smaller than the ones she’d been using against Ahieel, but I still didn’t think I wanted to get hit by it again.

“This is a warning,” she said then, and it nearly took me a second too long to realize what that meant.

The whip cut through my wobbly wispy little shield like it wasn’t even there, and slapped me right across the side of my chest with a hot crackle. I got knocked back a step, my entire shoulder and arm went hot and numb, and static electricity lifted all my hair on end. A pitiful whiny sound came out of me, and I had to lean forward and brace myself on my knees, panting.

“Hey,” I called out to Rysa, “can we play on easy mode, here? This is a little much, right now.”

Rya’s response was to shake another whip out of her hand. This one was a little bigger and sizzled like a power line transformer, and she clearly had no plans at all to go easier on me.

“Come on,” I started, “this isn’t fai—“

But she lifted the whip anyway, and I threw my arms in front of me and thought really hard about walls and solid barriers and absolutely not letting that thing get anywhere near me. When Rysa flicked it down at me, it cracked against the air a foot above my head and...didn’t hit me. Static snapped over my skin and something throbbed deep inside my head, but I think I’d actually blocked the fucking thing.

“Good!” I heard Rysa say over the buzzing in my ears, and then she slashed the whip at me again. It hit somewhere to the side of me and the shield held up, but the whole thing rippled around me and jarred me a step sideways. I could sense the shield bending and weakening and I tried to push more energy out into it but it kind of felt like my brain was being scrambled and my skin was gonna catch on fire. I saw the whip whistling down at me again and I closed my eyes and grit my teeth and forgot about walls and just started thinking block, block, BLOCK, BLOCK GODAMMIT, shit shit motherfuck—

Then I was flat on my back, the sky reeling around and trees doubling up and blurring into each other. Little colorful bursts flashed everywhere. It was like a firecracker had gone off near my ears. Sounds were kind of muted and slurred, even my own voice. I blinked a couple of times and moved around. I seemed okay. I could feel everything. Nothing hurt except my head, and only because I’d whacked it against the ground.

A hand came down to me. I grabbed clumsily at it, and Rysa hauled me back up to my feet.

“That was very good,” she said, when I was standing again.

“’kay,” I said. I wasn’t sure how good I was gonna be with staying steady, but I seemed okay when she let go of me.

“I’ll give you a moment,” she said.

“Yeah, ‘kay.” I was wobbly and my hearing was still weird, but I was shaking it off fast enough. Everything was still a little slow and bright, but more like I’d just walked into daylight after being indoors for hours.

“Moment’s up,” Rysa said.

“Hey, whoa whoa whoa, wait—“ I tripped back from her a step, holding my hands up. “Not yet!”

“You wouldn’t get that courtesy in a real fight.”

“We’re not in a real fight, so hang on!” I said, getting myself another step or two back, like that would actually help if she decided to zap me again. Rysa crossed her arms and watched me, looking sort of unimpressed. Man, I really should’ve known she’d be the hard-ass kind of coach. I was gonna be lucky if I survived her.

“Were you always kind of a tomboy like this?” I asked her, if just to distract her for two more seconds.

“Tomboy,” she repeated, and suddenly she had an accent. Like a real soft foreign accent going on where the o’s sounded weird and her mouth actually matched the sounds coming out. So they didn’t have a word for tomboy in their language?

“Just a—I mean, being like a...a soldier who’s a girl,” I offered.

“What do you mean by that?” Rysa said. She sounded curious, just flat-out curious and nothing else.

“There’s a lot of girls in your army, then,” I said, instead of trying to even start explaining.

“Women, men, both,” she said. “Yes.”

“Is that hard for you at all?

“Harder for who?”

“Okay, look, forget I even asked,” I said. This was just getting embarrassing.

“All right,” Rysa said agreeably, and then I felt the warning energy thrum that meant she was getting ready to slap me with something unfun, and I barely got a shield up in time.
#

I was pretty banged up by the time Rysa called it quits for the day and we went back to my place. She’d knocked me on my ass about a dozen more times and it was only towards the end that I started getting the hang of it and how much energy I had to push into a shield to actually make it block anything. I had a couple lumps on my head and probably more bruises to match the ones from yesterday for it, but at least there was a slight—fucking slight—sense of control now that I hadn’t had since Halloween. It was better than nothing.

There was a little part of my brain that was still telling me that this was crazy, that a giant warrior woman was teaching me how to do magic, actual goddamn magic, not David Blaine sleight of hand street magic but like...fucking wizard stuff. And she was teaching me this so I could defend myself, in case something tried to fucking kill me. That was scary shit. Exactly what I hadn’t wanted when this’d all started, but it seemed like I didn’t have a real choice anymore.

Keyd was sitting on the floor against the hallway wall when we got back. Just right on the floor, cross-legged, like that was the best place to be. His hands were loose on his knees and he was zoned out at the wall. Actually, that was wrong. His eyes were closed. Maybe he was meditating or something. He looked better than he had yesterday—more color in his face, and the shadows under his eyes weren’t as bad.

Rysa headed towards him and I went into the kitchen and right to the freezer. I found a bag of frozen peas in there that my mom’d bought when she’d gone grocery shopping for me, back when my family’d been helping me move into this apartment at the beginning of the summer. Peas were not a thing I ever looked at and thought yes, let’s eat these willingly. So they’d been in here for a while, now frozen into a solid lumpy block behind boxes of microwaveable stuff. I grabbed the bag and squeezed at it to break up the big icy chunk inside. Then I draped it over the top of my head, went back into the living room and collapsed over the couch.

Somewhere back near the hallway, I heard Keyd say, “bajt jinnhe mrit?”

A pause, and then Rysa, “yfar, Keyd, jinnhe.” And then a bunch of other stuff that was too fast to make out. Not that I would have understood it anyway.

Keyd didn’t reply. The silence was uneasy. After a couple of seconds I heard the front door open and shut again, kind of hard. I was pretty sure it’d been Keyd who’d just left. And when I craned my head around to look over the back of the couch, only Rysa was in the room.

“Touchy,” I said, and she actually laughed. But she was still looking at the front door and hesitating, like she couldn’t decide whether to go after him or not.

“Jeez, just leave him,” I said, and Rysa glanced at me. “What was that about, anyway?”

“He was concerned I’ve been too hard on you.” She flicked her eyes up to the pack of peas. I bet she was taking some liberties with that explanation, mostly around the word concerned.

“I’m fine,” I said. I might be unathletic and out of shape, but I could take getting knocked around.

“That’s what I told him.”

And his response was to storm out like a teenager? Jesus.

“How do you even deal with him?” I said. “Every second he’s around it’s just like—“ I tangled my hands together, clenching my fingers into a messy knot, “—arrgh. All the time.”

“You just aren’t used to each other,” she said, like that explained every single weird thing there was about Keyd. She came over to the living room and sat herself down on the other couch in kind of a weird elegant sprawl. Her long legs and arms went everywhere, but she still looked poised as fuck. I’d probably never looked half as cool in my whole life.

“Is he like this for a reason?” I asked.

She lifted an eyebrow. “Like what?”

“Look,” I said. “You guys are crashing at my place, he’s around all the time, and I just want to know more about him than his name and his job. That’s all.”

“You could ask him,” Rysa said, and I dropped my hands to my knees and stared at her.

“You’re not serious,” I said. “The guy doesn’t talk.”

“He answers when you speak to him, doesn’t he?”

“I—well…yeah, I guess,” I said. Now I was trying to think if there was ever a time when I’d talked to him and he hadn’t at least done something as a reply. I wasn’t coming up with anything.

“It’s a good thing that you’re interested in him,” Rysa said, and before I got to object to that, she added, “he is in you, as well. He’d like to talk to you.”

“Where’d you get that idea,” I muttered, adjusting the peas on my head. They were starting to drip water down my neck and into my shirt.

“Well. You are asking questions about him, ones he could answer for himself if you—“

“Not me—him! Where’d you get the idea he gives a shit about me, Jesus.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

Because he’s kind of mean to me probably wouldn’t impress her as an answer. And it wasn’t really true, anyway. Keyd wasn’t mean, he was just…stern. Quiet. And really, really antisocial.

“You and I are the only two people he can speak to right now,” Rysa went on, which was really the literal truth. “Even I run out of things to say to him, sometimes. Especially when all he wants to talk about is Ahieel, the war, his responsibilities. But you have other things to say, and I think that would be good for him. He needs to talk about something else.”

“Isn’t this thing with Ahieel kind of important?”

She sighed, and rubbed a thumb along the side of her jaw. “Of course. But he knows that it won’t really end, not here. No matter where we encounter each other or what happens there, it’s never the end. But Keyd treats it as though it will be, every time.”

“Why doesn’t it end?” I asked.

“That’s a much longer story,” Rysa said. “Maybe for some other time.”

“He does sorta take everything way too seriously,” I said, leaning back against the couch and lacing my fingers behind my head so the peas would stay in place. My head was getting pretty numb and soggy by now, but I felt better. “Is this just what he does in bad situations, or is it like...always?”

“We’re in these types of situations often.”

“So he’s always like this,” I said. She was so good at not actually answering shit directly, it was pretty impressive. “How come you’re so well-adjusted?”

Rysa’s expression turned a little wry. “I have my own worries,” she said. “But Keyd likes to shoulder them too.”

“And you’re really not his girlfriend.”

“We just weren’t made to be that way to each other,” she said. “Maybe we met too early in life, grew up too close—it would be impossible for us to think of each other as anything but siblings. There are other things that would make it even more difficult, but neither of us would want to even if it was simple and easy.”

I still sorta thought Keyd had a secret thing for her, but it was actually starting to seem a lot less likely. Rysa was just as weird and protective about Keyd as he was about her, so maybe they really were just that close of friends and nobody had a thing for anybody. “Are you somebody’s else girlfriend?”

Rysa shook her head. Then she gave me a little sideways smile. “Unless you count what you told that other boy.”

I laughed and then kind of choked it back. “Ah, naw...let’s not,” I said. “You definitely don’t wanna date me.”

“That other boy, then,” Rysa said. “Is he your family? A brother?”

“Martin? No, he’s just my roomie,” I said. She looked like she was drawing a blank on that one. “Roommate?” Still nothing. “He lives with me.”

“Oh,” she said. Then, “why?”

“Because...we...go to school together and the rent’s cheaper?” I said. I had to stop making my answers come out as questions. “He’s my best friend, too.”

“Interesting,” Rysa said. I guess the oenclar didn’t do roommates. They only had super serious hardcore warrior pledges.

“I mean, I have a family. Kind of a lot of them, actually. They just live somewhere else—another town. I’m here for school.”

Rysa nodded, like she was slowly starting to get it. “But you see them?”

“Yeah.”

She closed her eyes, and smiled a little. It made her look soft and sort of peaceful, totally different from when she’d been casually throwing me around the park half an hour ago. “I’m glad,” she said. She cared if I saw my family or not? That was...actually kind of sweet. “I don’t often see any of mine.”

“How come?”

“Also a long story.”

“You guys don’t seem to have any other kind,” I said, and Rysa laughed. When I glanced at her, she’d propped her chin in her hand and was watching me.

“Yes, you should definitely talk with Keyd,” she said. “I think that would be good.”

“I can give it a shot,” I said. “No guarantees.”

“He’s different than you think.”

“Hey, you don’t know what I think.”

“I know what everyone else ever has,” Rysa said. “That he is hard to see as who he is, rather than what.”

“And...what is it that he is?” I said, and then ran back over what I’d said to check if it’d even made sense.

Rysa just kept looking at me, her eyebrows popped up slightly and her mouth set in a way that told me I wasn’t getting that answer either.

“Lemme guess; another long story.”

She smiled. “Not this time. But it’s just not my place to say.”

“Well, whatever,” I said. Wasn’t sure why I’d even been asking anyway.

And, okay, I was really over these peas now. The entire back of my shirt collar was soaked. I got up to go stick ‘em back in the freezer and about two seconds after I’d decided to do that, the front door pushed open. Keyd walked back in, looking like he’d had a fight with the wind and lost. He made a beeline right to Rysa, who was still just chilling over on the couch. He said something to her, and it wasn’t in English but it still sounded kind of grumpy. I wasn’t really sure, because this guy was harder to read than fucking Shakespeare.

She said something back, but it didn’t seem to please him much. He just turned around and went out to the patio, which was turning into his personal lurking spot now, or something. Once the sliding glass door shut behind him, I said, “man, what’s wrong now?”

Rysa glanced over the back of the couch at me. “He’s been looking for a river, and can’t find one.”

“A river?” Was this like…a magic river, like the magical tree grove they were also looking for? ‘Cause finding an actual river with water in it somewhere in this part of the OC was gonna be pretty fucking hard. “What for?”

“To be able to wash our clothes,” Rysa said, and Jesus, could I be more thoughtless about this whole situation?

“Wow, no, I can actually help you with that,” I said. Sure I’d given Rysa a shirt yesterday but these guys had been wearing the same clothes this whole damn time they’d been here, and they’d had a giant messy bloody fight yesterday. I was fucking terrible at having houseguests.

So that was how I ended up washing alien clothes in the laundry room while Keyd and Rysa hung out in my bedroom, totally naked. Or maybe just wearing all the leather parts, which didn’t wash. But that just put the finishing touch on yet another really weird day in my increasingly really weird life.

#

I couldn’t get to sleep that night. I was just way too wound up; I didn’t even feel tired. And I was still sore from the magic thrashing Rysa’d given me earlier. After a couple of hours of flopping around in bed and watching the numbers on my clock drag by, I gave up. Got up and threw some water on my face, glanced at myself in the mirror, wished I hadn’t, and then padded down the hallway out to the kitchen to get something to drink.

When I got to the end of the hall, I stopped. Something felt off. It was colder out here than usual. And I could hear a thin wsshing sound, like wind blowing through something narrow. I reached for the wall and pawed at the switch, turning the hall lights on.

The front door was open a crack. Martin and I always locked the door at night, and we never left it fucking open like that. I spun in place, doing a fast check-over of the apartment just to make sure all of our shit was still here; that we hadn’t been robbed or anything. Nope; TV was there, game platforms were still there; we were good.

So someone must have gone outside and not shut the door all the way. I went towards the couches and looked them over —Rysa was still asleep on one, her hand thrown over her face and the blanket kicked down to her knees. The other couch was empty. Just a wadded up blanket sitting on one cushion. Keyd, of course. I didn’t care if he wanted to go outside, but couldn’t he shut the goddamn door like a human being?

I went across the living room and was about to close it—and maybe lock Keyd out while I was at it, even if that was kind of a dick move—but changed my mind and pulled it open instead. I leaned out into the cold early morning air, glanced around, and then stepped outside and closed the door behind me. The concrete walkway was freezing under my bare feet, and a cold breeze rippled at my shirt. Everything was still and mostly silent.

And I saw Keyd almost right away. He was sitting on the strip of grass near the row of metal mailboxes, his legs pulled up and his arms folded over his knees, about fifteen feet down the path. He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting there on the ground. In the dark he mostly blended in with the bushes that ran along the wall behind him. I probably wouldn’t have seen him if he hadn’t raised his head when the door shut.

I headed closer to him and stopped a couple of steps away, one foot on the grass and one on the path. I tried to put my hands into my pockets before I realized my sweats didn’t have any. Ended up scrabbling my fingers uselessly against my sides for a few seconds, and then just bracing my hands on my hips instead. Smooth recovery.

Keyd just kept watching me quietly, still leaning over his knees. He wasn’t wearing shoes. His feet were right on the edge of the grass, just his toes on the cement. I didn’t think I’d ever seen his feet out of shoes before. They were skinny and kind of bony and he had long toes. But otherwise, just feet. Normal feet. I didn’t know why it seemed weird that Keyd had regular looking feet, but it did.

“Can’t sleep?” I said. Keyd shook his head. “Me either.”

He just kept looking at me, his face totally neutral. I couldn’t tell if I was bugging him or not. I moved my arms to my chest, crossing them against the cold.

“You…good out here then?” I asked, and Keyd nodded. I guess I wasn’t going to get any words out of him. I wasn’t even sure why I’d come out here at all after I’d figured out why the door was open. I was exhausted from stress and not sleeping and my thought processes were all skewed. I’d blame that.

“Okay. I’m gonna…go,” I said. I started to turn, to head back towards my apartment. It was cold out here and I was being stupid. I should just go back to bed and try and get some sleep.

“Wait.”

I turned around. Keyd had his hand halfway raised up, like he was reaching out after me. He dropped it right away. “Stay. If you’d like.”

Huh. Well. Why the fuck not. Maybe we could try that talking thing that Rysa thought would be a good idea.

I dropped down next to him in the grass. Then we just looked at each other. His hair was even more messed up than normal; some of it had matted weird and was sticking out at funny angles. There was something tangled up in it right over his ear, like a little fluff or thread, and I had this real strong urge to pick it out.

“Why couldn’t you sleep?” Keyd asked, after what felt like an hour but probably wasn’t even a minute.

“Just thinking too much. It’s keeping me up,” I said with a shrug. “What about you?”

“Sometimes I don’t sleep well.”

That was all that he said. I took it for the best answer I was gonna get, and propped my elbows on my knees and rested my chin on my folded hands. When I’d sat down, I’d aimed too close to him and now my shoulder brushed his arm every time one of us moved. I could even feel heat coming off him, and hear him breathing. There weren’t many other sounds—something mechanical hummed over from the pool area, and some crickets were cheeping. A car puttered by on the street behind the complex. The only light came from the walkway lights and the ones that were fixed next to each door of every apartment.

“Hey, Keyd,” I said, after another minute or so.

He’d been looking up into the sky; patchy brown from city lights and barely any stars. But he turned to me when I said his name. “Yes?”

I opened my mouth and then…shut it. Blew out a breath and shook my head. “Never mind.”

Keyd just went back to staring upwards, like I’d never said anything at all.

I pressed my chin into my palm, closed my eyes, and wondered how my life had come to sitting on damp grass in my pajamas at almost four in the morning with an alien warrior guy. And that none of that seemed weird. But I still didn’t know how to fucking talk to him.

After another minute, I rolled my head to the side and looked over at him again. He hadn’t moved at all—still staring up at the sky, not doing anything except for breathing. I saw that little fluff twisted up in his hair again and forced my hands to stay right where they were. Not just ‘cause it’d be fucking weird if I actually did anything, but because his reflexes were so sharp he might end up punching me out if I touched him and he didn’t expect it.

“Look like yours at all?” I said, because if one of us didn’t talk I really was going to freak out or start petting his head. “I mean—the sky and stars and everything, where you’re from.”

Then I remembered that Rysa’d told me their world was gone or something and that definitely might have been insensitive.

But Keyd answered anyway. “Yes.”

“Really?”

“Actually,” he said. “No. There don’t seem to be as many stars here.”

“You just can’t see ‘em,” I said. “Because of the lights. They’re there.”

“It’s not the same.”

And then he shut up again, and looked back up at the sky. Was that…it? Did he not want to talk to me anymore? Jesus, having conversations with him was so fucking stressful, I was never sure what the hell was going on during them. Plus, when people were too quiet around me, I ended up talking more just to fill up all the silences.

“What d’you think of it here?” I blurted out. Yeah, exactly like that. “You like it all right?”

Jesus, shut up, Alan.

But Keyd answered. “Yes,” he said. “It’s different here, but I’m used to different.”

“So, where you live now…it isn’t anything like here.”

“I don’t live anywhere.”

It could have sounded like some sort of pity answer, but the way he said it sounded like a simple fact. Just straightforward, I don’t live anywhere. Like he was used to it being like that.

“You gotta live somewhere,” I said. “I mean, where are you usually?’

“Rysa and I go where we’re stationed.”

I couldn’t tell if I was getting these really short answers because I was annoying him by now, or if this was just the way Keyd was—that he barely spoke even if he was having a conversation. Because, somehow, we were actually having one of those. But he was answering me, so I kept asking.

“Where were you last, then?”

“In a battle.”

He was probably the only person I’d ever met who could have said that and made it sound like a serious answer. It sounded so casually badass and I kind of couldn’t believe he was sitting next to me here with no shoes on, talking about being in a war. “How’d you end up here?”

“Rysa and I opened a way here. Our forces were scattered, and we were cut off and outnumbered by Ahieel and several others.”

I think I’d already been told this story, but it really hadn’t mattered much before. I was paying attention this time. “And then…Ahieel followed you,” I said. Keyd nodded. “Then put that stasis spell thing on you.” Another nod. “What the hell for?”

“He may have had a plan, but been unable to go through with it at the time,” Keyd said. He glanced at me. “You’d have to ask him.”

Had he just made a joke? It seemed like a joke. It stalled me out for a second and I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Yeah, I’ll remember to do that next time I run into him on the street,” was what I came up with. Keyd didn’t exactly smile, but something happened with his face that was softer and kind of amused. He really wasn’t such a bad guy. He was fucking difficult to talk to or deal with, but it seemed like he was trying more. This was more words than I’d gotten out of him the entire time he’d been here. And I did kind of like it.

“Hey. You gotta... thing, right here,” I said then, pointing up above my own ear. Keyd frowned and dragged his fingers through his hair, pulling the little fluff out. He flicked it away without even looking at it, and now I was kind of embarrassed that it’d been bugging me so much in the first place.

“Sorry about being a dick over the tracking spell thing,” I blurted out, so that maybe he’d forget about how dumb I’d just been. “Just kinda wish you’d told me.”

“I thought Rysa would,” Keyd said. “She’s better at that.”

“At what?”

Keyd’s shoulders went up and down with a little huff. “Talking,” he said. When he looked at me, there was something going on in his face that was kind of…sorry? Almost embarrassed. Like he was trying to explain that this was why he was so fucking awkward all the time.

“You’re okay,” I said, which was a goddamn lie, but why make him feel worse about it.

Keyd didn’t say anything to that; he just kept looking at me. For an uncomfortably long time. I had to look away and pretend there was some dirt or something on my shirt sleeve I needed to scratch off . When I glanced back, Keyd was actually looking more at my arm. I don’t have any tolerance for cold—anything less than about 65 degrees gets me putting on layers—and California had actually remembered that it was almost winter. I was just in sweats and a T-shirt right now, and I had some major goose bumps going on.

“You’re cold,” Keyd said suddenly.

Okay, topic switch. That was fine. “Not that bad—“

I shut up when he touched the inside of my elbow with two fingers. I felt the hum of his energy, and something flickered out from where his fingers were; an invisible something that was like smoke or steam brushing over my skin. It went over my whole body, fast and soft, and then faded away. But now it was like I was sitting inside a little bubble of warmer air, just above room temperature.

“That was cool,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Thanks.”

Keyd gave me a single nod. It took him a couple of seconds to take his hand off my arm. I wondered why the hell he’d done it in the first place; done something that...thoughtful. About something that wasn’t even a big deal. It was just another weird Keyd thing that I didn’t get.

“Hey,” I said, and he glanced over.

“If you’re ever…not sleeping well again, or anything else, you can always, uh. Come talk to me,” I said. Christ, what was that? Why had I said that? Keyd didn’t want to talk; he’d just basically told me two seconds ago that he didn’t like to. “Any time.” And I was telling him I had an open-door policy? I was out of my goddamn mind.

Keyd just kept looking at me like he had no idea what to make of any of that and, frankly, I didn’t blame him.

“The offer is appreciated,” he finally said. And Christ, how polite was that. Nice way of saying, that’s great, you weird little dude, but no fucking way.

“Yeah,” I said. “No problem.”

#

Keyd and I stayed outside for about another ten minutes, until the warm bubble thing he’d put around me wore off and I decided to give going to sleep another shot. He came back inside with me, but he sat down at the kitchen table and didn’t go back to his couch. Rysa was still sleeping on hers, now with the blanket over her head. I told Keyd goodnight, was surprised when he’d said it back, went back to my room and fell asleep almost as soon as I dropped into bed.

And my body thought that waking up about four hours later was a good idea. Around eight o’clock I was awake again and there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe because I was still pretty sore from yesterday. I didn’t get up until fifteen minutes after that, and I only did mostly because I heard talking out in the living room.

Rysa was leaning over the kitchen table, and Keyd was still sitting in a chair opposite her. He looked about as tired as I felt; maybe worse. He had shadows under his eyes again and just looked fucking miserable. I wondered if he’d managed to sleep at all, or if he’d just sat at the table all night. He was in the same chair I’d left him in, and I could actually imagine him doing that.

“Good morning,” Rysa said when she saw me, sounding perfectly awake and like she’d had way more than a couple hours of sleep. I gave her a sleepy wave while yawning and stretching my shoulders back, popping a few joints.

“Hello,” Keyd added, so low and quiet that I nearly missed it. I almost did a double-take at him—had he just said hello to me? Like a normal greeting that normal people did? Holy shit, it was like a miracle.

“Hey,” I said back. Keyd just looked down at the table like nothing had happened. I stared at him a little harder, like maybe that’d make more words come out of him, but he seemed to be done.

Rysa was watching the two of us. It was probably like watching two toddlers trying to figure out how to deal with each other—blinking and drooling and knocking heads together. But she didn’t say anything.

The patched-together Thomas guide maps were spread out on the table, and I got a good look at the big circular grids that they’d drawn on them. A bunch of the sections were marked off—probably places they’d checked already. They were going at this pretty systematically, but maybe Ahieel actually showing up had changed their method or where they were focusing on. The plaza was really close to the train station, only a block or two away, so it was already in the likely area of where they were gonna find this grove thing.

I almost asked them if they needed any help, and then decided—no, I was still gonna stay out of this if I could. Learning to defend myself if bad shit found me made sense, but I didn’t have to throw myself into it and invite it to happen. Anyway, they’d never really been shy about asking for help before, so they probably didn’t need anything from me.

“I gotta go to class today,” I said instead. I’d missed all of them yesterday. If I got my ass in gear right now, I could probably get to calculus more or less on time. “If—you know, you think that’s actually safe for me to do.”

Keyd and Rysa gave each other that Look again, the one that made me a little nervous. “I would think so,” Rysa said, after a couple seconds.

“Would you allow me to put the tracking spell back?” Keyd asked, right as I was turning to go back to my room. Well shit, he just had to bring that up.

“It’s for your safety,” he added, and—fuck, I couldn’t argue without looking like a suicidal moron. And he’d asked this time.

“Yeah, okay. Go ahead.” I’d just have to remember not to do or say anything I wouldn’t want Keyd possibly knowing about. Not that I knew what that’d even be.

Keyd got up from the chair and I moved closer to him. Right as he got his hand to my face I realized I could have just handed him my glasses, but whatever—too fucking late. It only took a second for him to put the spell back. There was a quiet little zing that echoed in my ear and kinda warped my equilibrium for a second. I shook my head and the feeling went away,

“Okay,” I said then. Keyd was still standing real close to me and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. “We good?”

“Yes,” he said. Then he actually put his hand on my shoulder, which I hadn’t expected. “I won’t activate it unless we’re not with you. I promise.”

“Oh,” I said. His hand was really warm, even though my shirt. One of his fingers was pressing down harder than the others, right against one of my sore muscles. “Okay. Thanks. I gotta—I really gotta go, now.”

Keyd let go of me. Stepped away. Went back to the table and the maps and started up a quiet conversation with Rysa, and I was still just standing there like an idiot. I watched as Rysa tapped a spot on the map and Keyd shook his head, drawing his thumb in a big curved line around her hand. There was a rip in his shirt from the fight, right over his shoulder blade, and tattooed skin showed through as he moved his arm. The kitchen lights shone purple off his hair, just like Rysa’s.

Okay, wow, what the fuck was I doing? I was supposed to be going to class. I turned myself right around and headed back to my room, and was dressed and ready about five minutes later. Then I ran my ass to school.

I still got to class almost ten minutes late. There was only one seat left, right up in the front, goddammit. I slunk into it and pulled out my books and shit as quietly as possible. Good thing nobody really cared about tardiness in college as much as high school—professor Ortiz barley even looked at me.

The whole class was prep for the test—fuck—we were having next week, which I hadn’t known about since I’d missed last class and we were supposed to have come in today with questions and problems to go over. Normally I was better at school than this. I took half-assed notes on logarithm problems and figured this was it; this was gonna be the lowest-score test that I got to drop out of my grade. And maybe I could keep the B I was scraping by with in this class.

This had to be seriously boring if Keyd was watching any of it through the tracking spell. My fucking math class. I poked at the frames of my glasses and jiggled them around a couple times, wondering if he could see any of it or if the spell just gave him a really vague idea of what was going on around me or what. How their magic worked was still pretty unclear, even if I sorta understood what I could do now.

And, yeah, in hindsight, this tracking spell was pretty harmless. I really wasn’t sure why I’d reacted like such a fucking child about it in the first place, other than just generally not liking too much attention focused on me. Just made me nervous. But this wasn’t the same thing at all; Keyd wasn’t in my head or anything. It was fine.

By the time class ended I was starving, since I hadn’t grabbed any breakfast. There was a little chunk of time between now and my sociology class, so I threw all my stuff in my bag and headed out of the business forum building and towards the cafeteria.

I was only a couple dozen steps out the front doors when I heard quick footsteps behind me, like somebody was trying to catch up. I glanced over my shoulder and—shit, it was Law, jogging towards me and scowling. I turned back around and kept on walking; hoping uselessly that it wasn’t me he was after.

No such luck.

“Hey, Creer,” Law barked. The footsteps sped up and suddenly the guy was right the fuck in front of me, getting in my way.

Oh my god I didn’t have the fucking patience for this right now.

“Not today, okay?” I said to him, with some serious restraint. “I gotta go.”

I tried to move past him but his hand shot out, fingers scraped against my chest and knotted in my shirt, and I got yanked a full step forward.

“Whoa, fuck dude, what the hell—“

“Shut up,” Law snarled into my face.

I’d never really been intimidated by Law in the first place, but now this was almost just...funny. Law was so riled up but it was all senseless and rabid, and maybe some of it was at me but the guy was just angry, at everything, always. He had no fucking bite at all, and there was absolute nothing about him that scared me. This close to him, I could see the light spangle of freckles over the bridge of his nose and the little bit of gold in his brown eyes. He was so disgustingly pretty I wanted to punch him. Or at least mess up his stupid perfect hair.

“Keep better track of your shit, Creer,” Law said, and shoved something against my stomach. Hard enough to puff some air out of me. While I was doubled over and trying to catch my breath, Law clipped past my shoulder and stalked towards the football field. I looked down at the thing in my hands, and…

“Is this my shoe?” I called after him, kinda stupidly. ‘course it was mine; I’d woken up the morning after Halloween missing it. Law didn’t bother answering; he just kept stomping away until he disappeared around the corner of the athletics building.

Why the fuck did he have my shoe and why’d he taken near a week to give it back?

Oh, right. Because I’d ignored all his calls and had barely been on campus or in class since Halloween.

But who called over thirty times about a fucking shoe? The guy clearly had some fucked up priorities.

“Well, thanks,” I said uselessly, and shoved the shoe into my backpack.