I was flying!

I can’t explain how that first moment felt. Elation doesn’t begin to cover it. As much as everything else that night had felt wrong, this felt right. Like I was born for this. Soaring upwards, it didn’t seem like I gained a superpower but rather remembered an ability as natural as walking or breathing.

My meta-awareness didn’t disagree either. Gliding free of gravity’s chains was what the moment had demanded. Only I was doing more than gliding. I was shooting into the sky like a rocket and it was effortless.

From far below, I saw a burst of golden light from the top of the tiny anthill that was the building I’d been on. I wasn’t the only one who could fly. The blonde girl came after me leaving a trail of brilliant light in her wake.

I wasn’t sure how high I could go, so I leveled out my flight and began fleeing towards a cloud bank that was a few miles to the south. I’d been hoping to lose her in the reduced visibility but up close the cloud was a lot more diffuse than it had appeared from a distance. If she’d been far enough away from me the cloud might have worked as cover but she was faster than I was. She’d closed the distance to where I could see her clearly, outlined in a nimbus of gold, and she was gaining on me.

I dove deeper into the cloud, hoping to hit a patch that would obscure me enough to get away with a quick change of course. It didn’t help that I was leaving a trail of multi-chromatic sparks in my wake though. I’m sure from the ground the effect was beautiful. A stream of sparkles painting a kaleidoscopic swath across the sky.

A part of me marveled at how pretty the effect was. The rest would have been delighted with something uglier and much stealthier.

Fortunately my pursuer was even more visible than I was. The golden glow around her was like a miniature sun to my shooting star. I’d put something like a half mile of distance between us with my initial escape but she’d narrowed the lead down to the length of a football field.

I pushed for more speed and the shower of sparks coming off me intensified. I wasn’t leaving a trail of scattered flecks anymore. Instead a tail of fire, silver, blue, and pink stretched back like a comet. It was hard to tell, but it felt like I’d matched her speed.

She plowed through the tail I was leaving and I began to sense something. It wasn’t an out of body experience, but I felt like I was flying along beside her.

The sparks from my comet tail rolled over her and, as she absorbed their light, my meta-awareness finally found her. It felt like I was sensing where she was by looking at her shadow.

She wasn’t a shadow though. She was an emptiness. That was the best description I could find for her but the word didn’t begin to capture what I was perceiving.

Pen had spoken of being more alien than I could imagine, my meta-awareness was showing me what that really meant. There was something within her, something fundamental to what she was, that was not, could not, be part of anything real. It was corrosive to the very concept of reality. To the concept of being.

She was an impossibility. The antithesis of form, crafted into the shape of a girl? That bothered me. It didn’t fit. My meta-awareness was telling me that she wasn’t a “someone”, or even a “something”. So why did she appear to be a girl?

A girl and her beast. Why would either of them be here? How could “unbeing” have an incarnation? Wouldn’t that be the opposite of “unbeing”?

I couldn’t find any answers to those questions, and I wasn’t managing to outrun her either. The clouds had gotten thicker at last but with the comet tail behind me there was no way she was going to lose my trail. Not unless I stumbled on a miracle.

Instead of a miracle I got lightning. Because that’s the kind of luck having super powers leads to.

The clouds crackled with power and flashed jagged teeth of eye searing light as we plowed through them. My sparks looked like they were seeding the clouds because the intensity of the storm behind me was worse than what lay ahead. If this was another power though it was definitely not a safe one.

It was pure luck, as far as I could tell, that spared me from a thunderbolt hit. My pursuer wasn’t as lucky in avoiding the lightning, but her golden aura shattered the bolts into brilliant flares without faltering in the slightest. I could sense that she wasn’t slowed by them either.

Above us, hidden by the clouds, there was something large taking shape.

I began to wonder if I was capable of surviving in space and just how far the girl would be willing to pursue me when a  less suicidal idea occurred to me.

I waited for the next bolt to hit the girl’s shield and provide a distraction. Then I simply stopped flying. An instant later I was falling like a stone.

I expected it to be terrifying. Instead the wild joy of flight was replaced by a calm serenity as I snuggled into gravity’s embrace once more. It probably helped that I was high enough up that it took a little bit to clear the clouds. Intellectually I knew I was falling at roughly thirty two feet per second per second, but within the cloud it felt like I was a piece of gossamer slowly drifting in the wind. It would have been wonderfully peaceful if I wasn’t still fleeing for my life.

The sense of some third presence arriving on the scene remained, and was intensifying, but the sense I had of the girl faded rapidly as the comet tail I’d left behind thinned out. Without the light of the sparks playing over her, I was blind to where she was.

Losing the comet tail was the key to my plan though. That plus the dark of the night and the storm that was raging? However good the girl was, I was hoping those would be enough to make her lose track of me.

I cleared the clouds and saw that the ground was getting closer when it occurred to me that I’d started flying reflexively. Meaning I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to “turn it back on”. Looking at the city below me, that was going to be a problem. I was over a manufacturing area. Lots of smokestacks. Unless one of those buildings was a mattress factory, made out of mattresses, I wasn’t going to have a particularly soft landing.

As it turned out though, that wasn’t my biggest problem. The girl? Yeah, she wasn’t “that good” at tracking me. She was better. The clouds blew apart with a gigantic bolt of lightning revealing the golden glow that surrounded her as she flew straight at me like a hawk.

For however good she was at tracking me, she hadn’t caught me yet though, and I didn’t get the sense that she was toying with me either. This wasn’t a game of cat and mouse. She wasn’t prolonging the chase to enjoy my suffering or anything like that. It felt like she was holding back for some other reason.

That might have been wishful thinking, or a more mundane form of intuition, but I had the sense that if she had been going all out she would have caught me before I left the police station, and certainly before I learned how to fly.

Her beast for example. It had jumped up and wrecked the stairs leading to the roof. That was five floors up. Yet it’s first few leaps had only been high enough to dismantle the fire escape below me. I hadn’t considered that at the time but the idea bothered me as I fell.

Had it been trying to herd me somewhere? Either that wasn’t the case or it had failed spectacularly when I’d taken flight. So if it wasn’t herding me, why had it been chasing me? For that matter, why had it chased me at all?

The girl had said she had to kill me because of what she was. I’d managed to outpace her beast through a combination of luck and the sheer destruction it wrought slowing it down. She’d beaten me to the top of the building in the blink of an eye though. Why bother sending the beast to chase me at all if she could catch me that easily? For that matter, with how fast she was, how had she missed me with her scythe?

Those questions were interrupted by a brightening of the golden glow a moment before it lanced out at me.

If I’d been falling helplessly I couldn’t possibly have avoided it. Flying, as it turned out, proved to be quite a natural thing for me though. I needed to move and so I did, shooting downwards at a new angle and dodging the blast before it reached me.

The blast tracked along through the sky behind me and set fire to the buildings below where it didn’t simply blow them to flinders.

They were empty. Most were abandoned to begin with. And it was night. So people would be home. Not burning to death or blown to pieces along with the buildings. I hoped.

I saw the golden aura charging up again and ramped up my speed. That was a very short term solution though. She might be holding back. She might not want to kill me. Those were “maybes”.

In the “definitely” column, I definitely couldn’t dodge forever and I definitely wasn’t tougher than a building. Worse, if I kept flying we’d be over a residential area before too long and that would definitely be bad for anyone caught below.

I needed something to hide behind. Something big and tough enough to keep me safe. Mt. Everest would have provided as much shelter as I was looking for but since it hadn’t conveniently migrated to town, I wasn’t sure what other options I had. That’s when the sense of something large approaching was replaced with the sense of something large having arrived.

A huge sailing ship burst from the clouds above, air braking with it’s sails unfurled. Fire in a dozen shades of pale and brilliant green outlined the edges of the ship like neon stripping. From the decks the more common sort of orange red fire was visible and smoke was billowing from blasted areas in the ship’s hull.

It didn’t look like the sturdiest bucket of wood and iron and canvas to sail the Sea of Stars, but I knew she had it where it counted.

A shock passed through me. How did I know that? I knew because I was remembering the dream I’d had before waking. This was the ship I’d been on!

I changed course to put the ship between myself and the next golden blast, hoping I could make it in time. The ship’s descent was slowing as the crew frantically fought the fires and adjusted the sails. That left me with farther to go to reach the safety of it’s far side and I’d just managed to get there when the ship’s intricate shields of light and force flared around it.

They’d unintentionally intercepted the golden bolt the girl had thrown and I heard the crew reacting to the attack with surprise and alarm. They were speaking a flowing slippery language I’d never heard before, but that I could understand perfectly.

“<Where in the Seven Slipstreams are we? And why is someone still shooting my ship full of holes!?>” Captain Rumbeard demanded. I knew him from the year of service I’d put in under the black pirate flag of the Star Runner. He’d taken me in when I’d been set adrift on a steam coracle for being a witch, abandoned by Her Majesty’s Finest for the crime of their own superstition and ignorance. We’d sailed the skyways and plundered the finest ships. His crew had believed I was a witch too, but they hadn’t been afraid of that. They had taken me as a good luck charm.

I knew all of that the moment I heard his voice. I’d even experienced some it, inasmuch as a dream can be an experience. The rest though? The year of service as a pirate? My time before that in the Royal Sky Navy? Those were things I “knew” I’d done even though none of it was real. It was as though for a moment I was another person and her whole life was a real as mine.

I almost wasn’t even conscious of gliding down onto the deck and calling out to the crew.

“<That’d be my fault Captain!>” the words came out in the same language the crew was babbling as naturally as if it had been my native tongue.

“<Molly? Is that you girl?>”, Rumbeard bellowed, “<Thought you were blown to the devil’s deeps.>”

He regarded me with as much wonder and fascination as I felt for him. I knew he was asking himself the same thing I was: “Can this person be real?”

“<Not yet Captain. Devil’s not quick enough to catch me!>” I spoke the words, but it was my other life, Molly’s life, that was running the show.

As punctuation, or perhaps a counter-argument, more golden blasts slammed into the ship and its shield flared and dimmed dangerously. On the upper deck a crewman was thrown out of his seat when his station erupted in a blaze of magical fire.

“<Where’ve ya brought us lass? Ain’t never seen skies like these nor a shore like the one below.>” Rumbeard asked. I had no idea how to answer that question, and fortunately didn’t have to try before a distraction appeared.

“<Captain, we can’t many take more shots like those. Permission to return fire?>”, MacReady, the ship’s Chief Electromancer, asked.

“<Granted. Unlock all cannons and fire smartly! Run up the rotors and raise personal shields!”

As the crew scrambled to bring the ship to a full battle posture, attention turned away from me. Part of me, Molly I guess, wanted to climb to the highest crow’s nest and start calling out firing vectors as was my role during a fight. Her role during a fight.

I pushed “Molly’s” thoughts back. I wasn’t a sky pirate. I wasn’t even a superhero. The burning buildings below me showed what I had to look forward to if I started losing perspective.

Another golden blast slammed into the outer shields and they collapsed completely. As Molly, I knew they’d take about a minute to regenerate. Until then we only had the ship’s internal shields and our personal shields to rely on. Or rather the rest of the crew had personal shields to rely on. I was fresh out of magitech gadgets.

Molly knew where the spares were stored below decks so I followed her instincts and dove down one of the open hatches. The thunder of the Electrocannons discharging nearly flattened me as the first volley flew.

While their target was invisible to my meta-awareness, I could sense the crews reaction to the shots. No one seemed happy or comforted and all of the casters were scrambling to recharge the ThunderCaps for another volley.

The girl must have evaded the first wave I reasoned. The crew’s reaction to something that could shrug off cannon fire was not to continue firing blindly. They were many things but stupid was not one of them.

I grabbed a shield pin from the armory and hurtled back topside in time to witness the next round of electrocannon fire. Having missed with a blanket attack, the Star Runner’s crew had adopted a strategy of continuous firing, each cannon blast hemming the distant golden target in so that the next one missed by less and less.

It looked like that strategy was going to work if they could keep up the bombardment long enough, but watching the swiftly darting gold aura in the distance I saw we didn’t have anywhere near long enough.

The electrobolts that missed the girl were being captured in circular bands of force she was casting as she flew. I didn’t need my meta-awareness to guess what was going to happen next.

“Incoming Fire! Max Shields!” I shouted above the din a moment before the dozen circles of force the girl had constructed released their stored electrobolts back at us. I was blown off the deck by the shockwave that rocked the ship. The crew, having had their shields engaged, fared better until a wave of golden blasts shot through the ship’s hull and set the sails ablaze.

I watched, floating in mid-air, as the Star Runner pitched nose down and began spiraling towards the city below. As “Molly” I wanted to scream, but as Jin all I could think was that I couldn’t possibly fight this girl. On the other hand if I didn’t do something she was going to annihilate the Star Runner, her crew and maybe move on to the rest of Brassport from there until she got me.

I launched myself skyward. If she wanted me, then I could at least lead her away from anyone else. I’d been able to dodge her before, I thought, maybe if I could keep it up I could buy enough time for someone who knew what they were doing would to show up.

The Star Runner took a few more blasts before the girl noticed me fleeing and flew off after me. I could sense that the ship was in terrible shape. The crew was mostly ok though and were fighting to get control of it. They weren’t going to succeed. It was going to crash into, of all things, a mattress factory. Thanks to their efforts the crash would leave the ship largely intact. My awareness didn’t extend much beyond that except to tell me that the ship would be repairable and that the crew was likely to go to ground while they looked for the parts to get it flightworthy again.

I had more immediate concerns however. I’d put enough distance between us that the girl hadn’t resumed her barrage of golden bolts yet. That wasn’t likely to remain the case for long though.

“What do you want!?” I yelled back to her, in “dream speech” as Pen had called it.

“I don’t.” came the answer. Or non-answer.

“Who are you?” I tried.

“I’m not.” she replied. The words conveyed no meaning, they “sounded” (for lack of a better way to describe it) flat, but they felt like a dam holding back a vast longing.

“C’mon!”, I screamed in frustration, “You are Way Too Powerful! You don’t need to be all cryptic. I can’t hurt you! Just talk to me! Tell me why you’re doing this! There’s people who can…”

I was going to say “help you” but my voice and even my thoughts trailed off in surprise.

I could sense her. She was there. Filling my awareness.

Way. Her name was “Way”. I’d named her?

I saw her struggling in the air, no longer moving forward. She was holding her left hand to her head, like her skull was threatening to burst. My awareness of her was much spottier than it had been with the pirates, but I could tell this was no headache she was fighting against. Again, I found myself starting to move towards her and again it was a bad idea.

The crimson light that flared from within her confirmed that. A moment later a countless array of golden blasts filled the sky. I turned to flee, knowing that any one of those bolts could burn me to ash.

I was too late and too slow and too distracted. I’d barely turned around when the first bolt caught me. The personal shield I’d grabbed from the Star Runner held it off, but the next two bolts that caught me overloaded it instantly.

I tried to scream. This wasn’t supposed to be my life. I wasn’t anyone special. I wasn’t supposed to have to deal with anything like this. I wasn’t supposed to die this way.

And then, after I burned, after the blackness took me, I woke up.

Blonde hair tumbling over her black cloak, the girl I’d seen when I was running from the Shadow Court stood outside the glass doors to the police station. Beside her, a shadow lurked in beastial form with four legs and a body that was taller at its shoulder than the top of her head. If it was the creature from before it had grown, a lot.

The girl was gazing intently towards me but not making eye contact. She was clearly looking for something, but when I met her sweeping gaze she didn’t react. Sort of like she couldn’t see me at all.

“Hello?” I tried thinking to her, the way I’d ‘talked’ with Pen.

It had seemed like a silly idea but as I formed the word in my mind the girl’s eyes flew wide in shock and locked on mine. I hadn’t expected it to work and the intensity of her gaze startled me enough that I flinched back half a step. I couldn’t really have superpowers, could I?

“Thank you for earlier.” I added quickly, thinking how the giant beast at her side had probably saved me from being captured by the mistmen.

The girl’s froze for a moment and then her surprise melted away into an unreadable expression. She dropped her gaze from mine at last and looked down at a point on the ground between us.

“I’m here to destroy you. You should run.” the girl said, her voice soft and sad and weighed down by incredible fatigue.

For a moment, I didn’t process the words, didn’t convert them into meaning. I just marveled at the sense of them. The girl was at least a dozen feet away from me and on the other side of a pair of glass doors.

When I’d been talking to Pen, it hadn’t seemed like magic. At least not on my part. I’d thought things and he’d spoken back to me. It had felt like he was doing all the work there.

This girl was though far enough away that I knew I couldn’t be ‘hearing’ what she was saying. Her ‘voice’ was too soft to carry across the distance. I was hearing her projected thoughts the same way she was hearing mine. Between that and the return of my ‘meta-awareness’, it was getting harder to deny that I had some kind of superpower.

That meant my life was going to get a lot more complicated, and probably deadly, from everything I’d ever read. Most heroes didn’t seem to mind that but being able to project my thoughts didn’t seem like a superpower that would do much to keep me from getting killed.

If I was even halfway sane at that point, I would have taken the mere fact that she was speaking to me as a sign to bolt as fast as my feet would carry me. Instead I took a step towards her to…I don’t know…comfort her?

Speaking with our thoughts, the meaning of her words didn’t have as much impact as the sadness that was projected with them. I’d felt empty like that when my Dad had died. It hurt encountering it again, even in someone else.

The momentary insanity that was moving me towards her passed before I took another step. My return to clarity was helped in part by the growling from the beast beside her. Also, the words she’d spoken finally translated in my mind. She wanted to kill me?

“Why?” was all I could manage to put together.

“Sorry. It’s what I am.” she said, lifting her eyes back to meet mine. There wasn’t any anger in her expression. No malice or cruelty. Just emptiness.

Before I could ask her anything else, the glass doors shattered inwards and the giant beast leapt at me.

There wasn’t time to think so I reacted. Pure instinct. Primal fear. All I knew was something impossible to fight was rushing at me.

I ran.

I could lie and say that I thought about James and the clerk. That I fled to draw the beast away from them, but at that moment they simply didn’t exist for me.

I got two steps away from the desk before the beast crashed into it, crushing the wood into kindling. The shadow mass of the beast lost its definition as a four legged entity and it rose up like a wobbly starfish. Random limbs punched through the remainder of the desk as the beast tried to free itself from the wreckage.

I made it another three steps before the beast recovered its balance and lunged again. The corner of the nearest hallway shielded me from that leap and I was off, racing down the hall as fast as I could move.

Even in its more amorphous form, the beast was too huge to fit down the narrow hall but that barely slowed it down. It followed me, destroying the walls on either side as it simply rammed its way through them.

The interrogation rooms whizzed by me to the left and right before I reached the end of the hallways. Heavy fire doors barred my exit but in my panic I slammed the one on the right open like it was made out of tinfoil.

Night air hit my face as I paused for a second to see where to run. I was on the top landing of a short flight of concrete stairs. A railing bordered the stairs and the landing beyond which lay the parking lot for police station.

I jumped over the railing without a thought. I had to get away and it was a only short drop to the parking lot. As I landed I felt my awareness flood with a number of unpleasant facts.

First, there were no corners or hallways here to slow down the thing that was chasing me. My meta-awareness couldn’t sense on the beast or the girl but I didn’t need that to know I was in danger still.

The Shadow Court on the other hand? I could sense them very easily. I knew they were waiting in the pools of darkness just outside the lights of the parking lot. They had found me and ringed the building waiting for me to leave.

They’d planned to follow me, to study the mortal that had destroyed their servants with iron. When I was unguarded and alone, they would come for me. They weren’t directly interested in me though. The damage I’d done, the loss of their minions, was an insult that would be paid for in agony, but it was inconsequential compared to what had happened to them afterwards. They wanted to learn about the beast.

I was unguarded as I started to run again. Alone for just an instant. So they swooped in, quicker than any human could move.

The things that came out of the darkness were a blur of dead arms, rotting razor teeth and chitinous eyes. They were fast and merciless, sinking claws into my arms and legs like a thousand fish hooks. Any other night that would have stopped me. The touch of one of the Shadow Court was more than a human could bear without screaming and I had at least a half dozen cutting into me.

Unfortunately for them, there were two other factors at work. First, I had momentum. The horror of their touch didn’t paralyze me, it just made me struggle harder to get away. That alone wouldn’t have amounted to much. The Shadow Court was used to victims that struggle. What saved me was that there was something much worse after me than them.

The fire doors didn’t slam open for the beast. It didn’t give them time to. Instead the doors exploded outward to announce the beast’s arrival.

Bricks and concrete, torn metal and shattered wood, the pieces of the door flew everywhere. As the dust swirled away the Shadow Court faeries saw the hungry beast staring at them from the top of the stairs. There was a quiet second while all of the parties took each other in.

Then came the inhuman screaming.

The beast had moved too fast for my eyes to follow and snatched up the luckless Shadow Courtier than was closest to it. The rest of the Shadow Court was just a little distracted by the beast ripping the Shadow Courtier into screaming pieces. That was enough of an opening that I was able to pull free from their hold. Tearing myself loose hurt worse than anything I could remember, but the freedom to run again was worth every ounce pain it took.

A fire escape at the far end of the parking lot caught my awareness and I was off for it like a shot. Behind me, I knew the Shadow Courtiers were fleeing as well. I couldn’t see the beast directly with my awareness but I could see its effect on the Shadow Court. It was totally outside their understanding, and for immortal predators that was an experience they’d never had before.

Nothing before this had hunted them. Nothing before this had scared them, horrified them. More so than the beast, that sensation of horror threatened to destroy them. They literally were not capable of feeling fear like this, and yet this thing, this beast was instilling it in them. As creatures of magic, their identities weren’t bound into flesh the way it was for a human. Fear had never been a part of them and now that it was it was corroding the very essence of who and what they were.

If there’d been any room in my mind for an emotion other than terror, I probably would have felt a wicked, righteous joy at their misfortune but I only had room for one thought; I had to reach that fire escape.

I’d made it a little over half way across the parking lot when the screams of the Shadow Courtier came to a sudden and terrible end. My meta-awareness rebelled at the notion. It was as though a hole had been punched in the script. The Shadow Courtier hadn’t been killed, or destroyed, or even consumed. He simply wasn’t.

Wasn’t alive. Wasn’t dead. Wasn’t anything. Had never even been anything. It was like he’d been erased from his beginnings to his end and whatever had been part of him was lost to the world. All his yesterdays, all his tomorrows, gone.

I didn’t have time to dwell on that. Survival was all that mattered, the only goal I had to run towards.

I made it past another few police cars before I heard the one nearest to the beast being torn in half. It had been in the beast’s way and it was simpler to go through it than go around it. It shredded two more car before it gave up on the mayhem and bounded over them to save time.

The destruction had bought me another few precious seconds. Just enough time to reach the fire escape. I jumped impossibly high and managed to snag the bottom rung of the ladder that formed the base of it. The metal had frozen in place, but desperation gave me the strength to pull myself up and over onto the first landing.

When I got to my feet, I didn’t pause for an instant before racing up the rickety narrow stairs to the next level. I left the first landing an instant before the beast crumpled it into a twisted gnarl of scrap metal. The beast’s next blow threatened to knock the entire fire escape off the building but somehow the bolts held on. Frustrated, the beast ripped the crumpled metal of the first landing completely off the wall and dropped back to the ground.

I ran up and up, not sure how far I needed to get to escape the monster below me. I’d reached the fourth landing before the beast leapt up again. I’d barely gotten far enough.

The great shadowy body of the beast crushed the stairs and landings below me. With it’s enormous claws it held on to the wreckage and reared back for another blow.

I screamed, knowing it wasn’t going to do any good but unable to stop myself. If I hadn’t been in motion the fear that was surging through me would have ripped away my strength and left me paralyzed and helpless. I couldn’t run any faster but I did keep going, reaching the stairs up to the fifth level just before the beast tore a huge section of them out from in front of me.

I choked on another scream. I couldn’t stop that thing. It was too close. I couldn’t even get away.

A tearing metal sound from below me was met with an unearthly growl as the beast’s sheer weight ripped the fire escape away from wall and tore the crushed lower floors loose sending the beast falling to the ground again.

My heart skipped a beat. I wasn’t dead yet. The roof might even be safe if I could cross the gap the beast had ripped in the stairs.

Before the beast could jump again, or start scaling the wall, I leapt into the gap it had made in the stairs. I would have fallen forty feet onto pavement if I’d missed but even that had seemed better than letting the beast do to me what it had done to the Shadow Courtier.

I don’t know if I could have made that jump normally but under the circumstances I was extremely motivated. I managed reach the first undamaged stair on the far side of the gap and grab the steps farther up with my hands before I tumbled backwards.

I felt a glimmer of hope at having gotten higher. If the beast could have reached me on the fourth floor landing it probably would have jumped there first. Maybe it had a maximum height it could reach? If I could get higher than it could follow I might be able to get away or at least stay safe until someone else could deal with it. Someone with an orbital kill satellite maybe, or a platoon of super heroes.

I pulled myself to my feet and dashed up the last few stairs to the roof level. I was two steps from the top when a gold blur flashed past me traveling up the side of the building. My awareness didn’t key on it being anything dangerous so I didn’t spare the blur any brain cycles. That was an almost fatal mistake.

I was caught in midstep, just about to reach the rooftop, when I saw the girl who commanded the beast standing above me. The scythe she held was wreathed in flames the color of an empty night sky and she was poised to strike. The blur had been her. She was that fast. No matter how I ran, I couldn’t escape.

So I fell. I wasn’t graceful or quick enough to avoid the scythe in any other way. Surrendering to gravity, I toppled backwards, plummeting head first towards the pavement below.

I was so far beyond panic at that point that the sensation of falling came as a warm relief. It wasn’t much of a choice but at least I’d been able to decide how things would end. At least I wouldn’t suffer the same fate as the Shadow Courtier. Somehow that made a difference.

I thought that my heart felt light at first; that the terror that had filled it was finally receding as one last bit of mercy in my life. A moment later I noticed it wasn’t just my heart that was light though. My whole body was buoyant, floating through the air like a feather. The terror the had consumed me drained away, replaced by an unexpected joy. I felt myself first rising gently, then soaring upwards.

I was flying!

Several conflicting thoughts tore through my head in the wake of the little floating man’s words.

The door nearest to me was closed and locked. It would take extra time to escape that way. James was in the way of escaping the other way. The floating man was tiny, which was good. He was also glowing, which was not. He had angel wings, so that wasgood. Evil things loved to appear in forms that got you to let down your guard though, so back to bad. I was probably going crazy, bad. Or this was a residual spell or trick of the Shadow Court, also bad. He looked tiny enough to smash, good. Which would be really gross, bad.

In the end what kept me calm was the sincerity in his voice. Granted it wouldn’t take a trickster god to fool me.  I’m fairly smart, but that just means I knew I was out of my depth and didn’t have enough real information to work with. So I went with intuition. It’s a terrible thing to rely on but sometimes it’s the best you’ve got to work with.

With slow, deep breaths I forced the flood of panic and surprise down into my stomach where it could have a little party with the cafeteria food from lunch. That discomfort aside, I felt the rest of my body relax slightly.

“Thanks!” the little man said, visibly relaxing as well.

I nodded at him and waited to hear what he had to say.

“First things first; you’re not going crazy, I’m real but you’re the only one here that can see or hear me. Oh and I’m not with those magiclings that you encountered before.”, he said.

I raised an eyebrow, wondering if “magiclings” meant the Shadow Court.

“Next, I’ve got confess, it’s probably my fault they were here. I can’t explain too much without putting you in danger, and I’m sorry for the danger I’ve put you in so far.”

“What do you mean danger?” I wanted to ask him but refrained from saying. James and the cops would go right for the straight jackets if I started talking to myself at this point.

“Well, see, a lot of things would like to get their hands on….wait a minute, how did you do that?” the little man asked, looking as shocked as I felt.

Of course I couldn’t answer him with a “Do what?” so I just glared at him and thought it really loud.

“That! Talking to me! You’re…oh man.”

“You can read my thoughts?” I spoke the words in my mind to see.

“No, I can’t. But you can apparently dreamspeak them just fine.” he answered.

James nudged me.

“Spacing out on me again?” he asked.

“What? No. Just a little freaked out.” I told him, keeping my eyes on the little glowing man. I heard James laugh.

“No worries.”, he bopped me on the shoulder as reassurance, “This kind of thing doesn’t take too long.” he said, referring to the police questioning I guessed. I looked over at him and frowned. How would he know? We could be there all night if the cops felt like keeping us.

“And you can still hear the waking world? That’s…interesting.” the little man said.

“You said we were in danger?” I thought-asked him, irrationally worried that I’d let him out of my sight for even a moment. On the other hand, I knew I’d have to at some point. People would get a little concerned if I kept staring at an empty point in space.

“Yes. Not at the moment though! That’s why I’m talking to you now.”

I looked back over at James to confirm he wasn’t seeing or hearing any of this.

“Think we should tell Mom?” James asked, apparently clueless about the other occupant of the car. I noticed we were moving. Seems I was bit clueless too since I hadn’t noticed when we took off.

“Mom?” I asked. I was distracted by the two conversations and I hadn’t been thinking about how our parents factored into this at all.

“She’s going to flip when she hears about it.”, he said, “I mean, we could just tell Dad and let him tell Mom.”

“What kind of danger is it?” I thought-asked the little man. If it was something that was going to come after my whole family they deserved to know too.

“Nightmares.” he answered.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Bad dreams I could handle. No need to tell Mom either!

“Think we can get home before they notice we’re late?” I asked aloud to James.

“I mean Nightmares that can enter the waking world.” the little glowing man clarified.

“What?” I blurted aloud. James looked at me like I’d grown another head, but then smiled.

“You know ‘what’.”, James laughed thinking I’d been reacting to his expression I guess, “Can you imagine what would happen if we didn’t tell them and they found out from the cops?”

I flushed a bit and shrugged in agreement feeling like an idiot for slipping like that.

“Sorry. I’ll leave as soon as I can, and if I can stay hidden till then nothing should be able to find you or me.” the floating man replied to me.

“What do you mean hidden? Why are you here? Why are you talking to me?” I thought-asked feeling frustrated and afraid.

“We don’t have long, and I can’t go into the all the details. Also you’d be a lot less safe if you knew them all. The short form of the story is this: I don’t come from this world. I’m more alien than anything you’ve ever seen or heard of in fact. That means there’s a lot of things in this world that would like to get their hands on me. I’m tough to find though because, as you can see, I’m very small. I’m also tough to find because at the moment I’m embedded inside of you.”

“Inside of me? How..”

He cut me off before I could continue.

“Not physically inside of you. I’m inside your dreamworld.”

“You’re in my mind?”

That would explain why no one else could see him I supposed. And why he could hear my thoughts.

“It’s a little different than that, but sure, we’ll go with that for now. The important thing is while I’m with you, I’m camouflaged. Anything that looks for me will see you instead. Kind of like disguising a needle as a piece of hay in the haystack.”

“Why me?”

“I think you rescued me.”

The dream from this morning came back to me. Flying through a staggeringly well rendered skyscape with a glowing pendant in my hand.

“You’re…you’re the pendant?”

“A pendant? Hmm, I guess so. I don’t remember. I was in pretty bad shape at that point.”

“What are you?” I demanded. The glowing man sighed.

“I can’t tell you…”, I glared at him but he continued before I could say anything, “…because I don’t remember it all myself. Again, short form, I’m a fragment of someone a lot more powerful than you can imagine.”

“I’ve read about all the metahumans in the last hundred years, I can imagine a lot.”

“I’m starting to see that.” the glowing man said, tipping his head to the side appraisingly. His gaze made me feel like a science project that was behaving in a puzzling way.

“How long will you be…hiding?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Not long though. Maybe three nights? Like I said, I’ll leave as soon as I’m strong enough to.”

“And we’ll be safe till then?”

“If I leave you before I’ve finished healing I’ll unmake – meaning I’ll fall apart on such a fundamental level that it will be as though I’d never been here. I don’t want to disappear like that. As far as I know, I’m the only part of me that’s left, so I hope you understand what it means when I say this: No matter what it takes, I won’t let you come to harm.”

“Hey, no snoozing, we’re here.” James said, nudging me as the car came to a stop in the parking lot behind the police station.

“I have to hide again.” the glowing man said.

“Wait, what’s your name?”

“Umm…I guess it’s ‘Pendant’.” he replied with a shrug.

“Pendant?”

“Yeah, I think I lost my old one, and ‘Pendant’ is what you called me, so that’s what I’m stuck with for now until someone gives me another one.” With that he was gone.

I blinked and then followed James out of the car. I felt light headed. Or in shock. It was hard to tell. It would have been nice to be able to doubt the conversation had been real but I had to be honest with myself. I didn’t have a history of mental illness. The Shadow Court leaving behind an agent like “Pen” was possible but wildly out of character from what I knew of them. Most of all though, weird things happened sometimes.

Pen might be a monster of some kind, but, as I thought about it, I realized he’d passed one crucial test. He hadn’t asked me for anything. He hadn’t even really asked me to believe anything. I wasn’t sworn to secrecy, and I didn’t have to do anything for him.

I believed him when he said he would protect me, or at least I wanted to. That could be dangerous, but some tiny little part of me was already telling me that it could be something more too.

“So are you going to tell them?” James asked as we walked into the police station, and for a second I thought he was asking if I was going to tell the police about Pen.

“I can talk to Dad if you don’t want to.” he added, making me realize I’d forgotten about the conversation we’d been having in the car.

“How about you take Dad and I’ll take Mom?”, I offered, “I think she’ll freak out less if she can grill me immediately.”

James laughed, “You’re braver than I am sis.”

“I don’t know, you’re pretty calm about talking to the cops, I’m jumping out of my skin.” I admitted.

“They’re not so bad. They just gotta follow procedures.” James shrugged.

“I’m not looking forward to ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’ I guess.”

“Pfff, trust me, they’re not going to be like that.”

“Like you’ve ever been brought in for questioning? What did Dad have you hauled down here the one time you got a ‘B’ so you’d be ‘scared straight’?”

James just rolled his eyes.

“No, really, have you met these guys before? It looked like you and Officer Smalls knew each other.” I asked, wondering where our Officer escort had gotten to.

“Nah. Just nice to see a black guy leading a case like this.” James lied.

I don’t know how I knew he was lying, or why he was lying, but the heightened awareness I’d had when the Shadow Court showed up was back and it was clear.

I felt a surge of panic hit my nerves. If I was entering that state again something horrible could be nearby. I couldn’t sense any immediate danger so I settled for looking around carefully as we got to the main desk. James caught the clerk’s attention.

“Officer Smalls asked us to check in. He needs to question us about the incident at the library.” my brother explained.

“He’s supposed to bring you in himself.” the clerk noted unhappily.

“He said he’s setting up the wards on the room, he wanted to get started as soon as possible.” James informed him.

“That’s fine. Just take these and fill them out while you’re waiting.” the clerk passed over some forms in the perfectly normal way a perfectly normal visit to the police station would go.

So why was I in hyper-aware mode? I looked at the clerk, but he was boring and normal. I looked at James, but he was my brother. Not boring, but not a threat either. I looked at the room we were being directed to. Live magic and technology playing together. Amazing stuff, but also run of the mill and boring somehow.

Then I looked at the door leading out and saw her. The girl from behind the library.

Not boring.

It felt like I’d been hit by lightning. One moment I was with Samantha and the next I was sitting against the fence near the library. James, my brother, was shaking my shoulder, worry fueled anger written all over his face.

“What?” I blinked and shook my head.

“What happened? Why are you here?”, James asked, helping me stand up.

“I was waiting for you to pick me up.” my thoughts were still a complete jumble. Where was Samantha? How was I back in front of the library.

“Are you crazy!” he yelled. “You were supposed to be at the Blue Star and you fall asleep here instead?”

The Blue Star was a diner about two blocks away. James sometimes picked me up there when he was going to run late. He hadn’t said anything about meeting there today though, not that I could remember.

“I didn’t fall asleep.”, I saw a look of serious concern cross his face and could only imagine what he was thinking,

“I wasn’t asleep.” I added quickly, still trying to piece together what had happened. Whatever clairvoyant-omniscience I’d had was completely gone. I looked around for anything that would help me make sense of what had happened. As far as I could tell it was just a normal night. There wasn’t even any trace of the fog that had been rising when the Shadow Court approached.

“You were something. I was shaking you for like a hour before you woke up.” James insisted.

“The Shadow Court was here.” I told him simply.

“What?”, that wasn’t something you joked about but it was still the kind of bombshell that invites disbelief. The world was a weird and dangerous place, but usually the weirdness and danger happened to other people.

“The Shadow Court. They were here. Right behind the library.” I wanted to go around the building and see that they were really gone for myself. See if the girl and her beast were still there. See if any of it had been real.

“That’s not funny Jin. Are you serious.”

“Completely.”

“What did they do to you? Did they see you?”

I hesitated. Admitting that I ran after them was bad. Like “get me locked up and heavily drugged” levels of “bad”. Whether or not it really happened, even claiming I’d done it was akin to saying I’d attempted suicide.

Despite our frequent bickering and the fact that we were only step-siblings, James would be “the big brother” if I told him. He wouldn’t lie for me, he wouldn’t cover it up. He’d make sure I “got the help I needed”. And, honestly, I’d do the same for him.

It occurred to me that I probably should let him too. Tonight was too crazy for me to assume that I wasn’t. I had run out after the Shadow Court. That alone should be enough to make me question my judgement.

“No, I crouched down here.” I gestured towards the wall and the fence. The fence that was missing one of it’s bars. My stomach froze.

I’d run my pen back and forth across the bars while waiting for James, playing it like a one note xylophone before I got bored. Ting-ting-ting. There hadn’t been any bars missing when I was doing that. If the bar was laying on the ground in the park behind the library…I had no idea what that would mean. As scary as it was to think that I was going crazy, knowing that what had happened was real was somehow worse.

My head was still going in a thousand directions when James interrupted.

“If you’re sure the Shadow Court was here, we should call the police.” he said, sounding no happier with that than I was.

James was a good student. Great grades, starting line on the football team. Decent odds at getting a full scholarship next year when he started applying to colleges. He was also a teenager though, and I’m guessing there’s not a teenager anywhere in the world who likes talking to the cops.

That was true under normal circumstance but this was an exceptional case. Meta-human stuff was something you did not mess around with. You got the authorities involved as early as possible. They then got the big guns involved.

In this case the big guns, the heroes, were almost certainly appropriate too. If the Shadow Court had made off with any kids then the clock was ticking on getting a rescue operation going.

Samantha was safe. I’d been sure of that. Other kids were another story though.

Could the Shadow Court have picked up someone else tonight? I couldn’t say. I didn’t have that sense when I was in whatever state I’d been in but maybe earlier victims wouldn’t have shown in “the script” that my mind was reading from?

“Yeah.”, I sighed, feeling like I was under a microscope already. It was bad enough lying to James about what had happened, the idea of lying to a trained police interrogator made me feel ill. I couldn’t come up with any reasons not to though.

James looked at me to make sure I was serious and then dialed 9-1-1 on his cell.

“Don’t worry. I’ll stay with you.” he said before the dispatcher picked up. That’s my big brother. Kind of a jerk leaving me to wait here, but he’s got my back when I need him.

That’s why I knew I’d need to have his back too. I’d go along with the story that we were supposed to meet at the Blue Star. Just because I couldn’t remember agreeing to it didn’t mean that James needed the hassle of them interrogating him over it.

The first car to arrive was an unmarked police car with two plain clothes officers. They parked away from the library and the dispatcher had us wait while they surveyed the grounds for a minute. The dispatcher was reassuring James that this was simply standard procedure, but I’d read enough to know what was really going on.

Victims and witnesses are the ones the police are supposed to be protecting. They therefor make great bait for leading cops into traps. The police couldn’t ignore a call like this but they also couldn’t afford to charge straight in. Even if we were visible danger, or maybe especially if we were in danger, they’d have to review the area before entering.

It was horrible in some cases, but then cops were usually the first to encounter the more horrible parts of the world so it paid to be careful.

It took the cops in the patrol car a couple of minutes to decide the scene was safe enough to enter. They drove into the library’s nearly empty lot and parked, with the engine running, behind our parent’s car that James had driven to pick me up.

They got out and were both carrying large, heavy looking rifles. I don’t know guns that well, but I guessed that they were probably expensive and probably loaded with something powerful enough to kill elephants. If the police had to open fire on someone or something with super human powers, they tried to have as much chance of putting the meta-human down as their budget would allow.

“Are you the two who called in the meta-human sighting?” the taller of the two officers asked, looking us over carefully

“Yes.”, James answered, looking at me and then at himself.

We made a strange pair for a brother and sister. James was six feet and two inches of solid football muscle. I was five foot three and could do a fair impersonation of a scarecrow. He was smart, well spoken and charismatic. I…I like to read a lot. Also, he was black where I was third generation Chinese-American. I was always surprised at the number of people who didn’t seem to notice or care about that last difference.

“I’m Officer Smalls. This is Officer Biggs.” he indicated the shorter officer with a nod “We have some questions that we need to ask you. If you could get into the back of the car, we’ll be with you shortly.”

Smalls and Biggs? It looked like department policy was to avoid using real names when faeries were around. That made sense from what little I knew of how faerie magic worked.

I looked at James and he nodded for us to head towards the car. As we did, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that James and Officer Smalls shared a quick look. I wasn’t sure what it meant, or whether I was reading too much into it, but something made me wonder if they knew each other.

“So what do you think they’re doing?” I asked as we settled into the back seat of the car. The car may not have been marked but it was pretty clearly a police car from the inside. With the doors closed we were trapped in , or I guess protected by, a cage of metal and bullet proof glass.

“They have to check out how much of the story we gave to the dispatcher they can corroborate with physical evidence.”

“What about looking for any kids that might have been grabbed?”

“If they find anything that confirms our story, or if anyone files a timely enough missing persons report, they’ll put together a team to do a sweep of the neighborhood. Maybe even get Professor Platinum or Heartbeat involved.” James leaned his head back against the seat, not sounding too thrilled by that.

Brassport was a big enough city that we had official heroes assigned to us. We weren’t the big leagues though and the heroes assigned here knew it. Professor Platinum was a power armored (mad) scientist who came out for civic events and official calls but was rarely around otherwise. He’d caused a couple of blackouts over the summer too, so people weren’t too happy with him in general.

Heartbeat on the other hand was a media darling. She was a new hero, supposedly assigned to a junior role under the Professor’s supervision. Her power, blood control, was a little freaky but she played it well for the cameras. How she could be of any help in dealing with the Shadow Court was unclear though. I thought back to the mistmen. Not much blood in them to work with.

“Sorry I wasn’t here sooner.” James offered. “I should have known you didn’t hear me about meeting at the Blue Star.”

“When did we talk about that?” I asked, genuinely puzzled because I had no memory of it at all.

“In the morning. On the ride in.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You were out of it though. I should have known. Dammit.” James was clenching his fists in frustration, I think more with himself than with me.

I tried to remember the ride in. It was just a normal morning wasn’t it?  I struggled to bring up any specific memories. Getting into the car? Nope. Or nothing special enough to remember as different from any other day. Getting out at school? Nope.

I thought back further. What had I had for breakfast? Had I had breakfast even?

I can be a little forgetful but the more I probed the more I realized the morning was nearly a complete blank. The last thing I could remember clearly was the dream I’d been having before I woke up.

It had been in vivid technicolor and involved unrestrained flying, two things that aren’t that common for my dreams. I’d been on a sky galleon, up on the highest crow’s nest when I’d caught a shooting star that had turned out to be sparkling diamond pendant on a chain rather than a space rock.

I hadn’t written the dream down so I knew I’d lost some of the details, but I remembered fleeing from the sky galleon, dodging through clouds and amazing windstorms to get back down to Earth and the safety of my house. What I was running from or why my house was safe I could only chalk up to general dream weirdness.

I shook my head. Whatever I’d dreamed this morning clearly wasn’t important at this point, however much my brain seemed to want to dwell on it.

Officer Biggs opened the back seat door on James’ side.

“Can you please step out of the car.” he instructed us. He and Smalls were both holding their guns, though they weren’t pointed at us, thankfully.

“Did you find anything?” I asked as I followed James out. Both officers ignored me.

“Please step within the circle.” Officer Biggs addressed James, indicating a circle of salt on the ground that was about three feet in diameter.

James nodded and stepped carefully over the edge of the circle so as not to disrupt it.

“You are now bound by the law and custom of this realm. Do you accept this binding.”

“Yes.” James replied.

It was hedge magic. Again, something I’d read about but never had to experience first hand before. Wizards weren’t usually on the police payroll but there were basic cantrips that cops could use to help against supernatural threats. Invoking their authority on something captured within a circle of salt like this, for example, could strip away a lot of simple disguise magics.

For a moment that thought made me panic, not knowing what else it might reveal. I caught myself before I started running and forced myself to calm down. They weren’t accusing us of anything, just being careful that we hadn’t been replaced by changelings.

“You found something behind the library!” I guessed. If they hadn’t they wouldn’t be taking the report this seriously I thought. I tossed that idea aside immediately though. Calling 911 to say “I saw the Shadow Court” was more serious than calling in to say “I found a dead body”. No matter what they did or didn’t find, they weren’t going to treat this call as unimportant.

Neither officer acknowledged me.

“Do you claim and confirm that you are James Smith, a right and proper resident of this sphere, by bone and sinew, blood and heart.” Biggs continued the ritual. His voice was tight and sharp. All authority and hard edges. Until we proved we were harmless kids, his assumption had to be that we were monsters in disguise.

“Yes.” James answered, once again glancing at Officer Smalls.

Biggs nodded to his partner and Smalls instead tossed a handful of dust at James’ feet. No, not dust. Iron shavings.

If James had been an evil faerie the results would have been ugly and horrifying. Instead, it was simply anticlimactic. Nothing happened. Because James was a human. Sometimes that didn’t suck.

I was up next, and despite my insides feeling like they wanted to jump out of my skin and make a break for it, the ritual proved to be similarly unspectacular.

“Thank you.” Office Biggs said “We’re going to take you down to the station now. You’re not under arrest, but we do need to ask you some questions in a more secure environment. If there’s anyone you need to contact we can handle that on the way there.”

“What about our car?” James asked.

“We have a forensics team on the way. They’ll verify that it’s secure as well.” Biggs answered.

“Sorry for this, you guys did a real good thing tonight.” Smalls added “We’ll make sure your car makes it to the station or we’ll give you a ride back here.”

“That sounds good.” James agreed, nodding to Smalls.

I stepped out of the salt circle and felt an odd little pop, like a soap bubble had burst. The jumpy feeling in my guts quieted down. I wasn’t going to be burned as a witch (not that we burned witches, but my subconscious apparently didn’t know that) or locked up in the loony bin.

I slid into the back of the unmarked police car again, relaxing in the knowledge that I hadn’t gone crazy or been turned into a monster or anything.

Then I noticed the six inch tall guy sitting on the back of the drivers seat who was watching me. He had little feathered wings curled against his back, he was all in white and he was glowing.

As I fell into the seat in surprise he put out his hands to me and pleaded:

“Please. I can explain everything, just don’t freak out ok?”

Living in a world with super villains can suck sometimes. Especially when it’s dark, you don’t have powers and there’s no sign of any heroes around. None of that bothered me quite as much as the conspicuous absence of my brother and the ride home he was supposed to be giving me.

He was probably running late because of his girlfriend – whoever that might be this week, Or maybe his team practice went long – that happens a lot too. Or, possibly, he’d been grabbed by a Snatcher. Technically the odds of that were extremely low, but TV and Movies never made it seem that way.

I knew it was kind of stupid to worry. It wouldn’t kill me to take a bus back home from the library. At least according to state and local crime statistics anyways.

From what I’d read, Brassport wasn’t much worse than any other major metropolitan area when it came to crime, super powered or otherwise. True, we were no Unity City, shining hub of super powered heroics, but we were at least better than villain havens like New York City or Isle Diablo.

Staring at the dark path that led from the library’s door to the sidewalk of Summers Ave, I began to regret letting the librarians lockup on time. They probably wouldn’t have if they knew it meant leaving a teenage girl alone outside, but I didn’t want to make them stay. They had homes to get to as well, and it wasn’t any safer for them than it was for me to be out after dark. Still it would have been nice to be inside, in the light.

If nothing else I could have read a book to take my mind off grim topics like the Snatchers. They were aliens who invaded back in the 50s. The war against them had been the beginning of the “Meta-Human Age”, or so chapter 28 of my history text had called it.

It had been nice to finally get to that chapter last year in World History. Sixty years ago may seem like ancient history for a lot of my classmates but it was the first chapter that felt particularly relevant or interesting. Alternatively, Ms. Grimwald may have just a terribly boring teacher where the substitute who taught that chapter at least still had a pulse.

I have a pretty active imagination, so it’s probably not so great that I’ve read as much as I have about the other beings that invaded the Earth after that, or the various human villains and monsters that have tried to eradicate, enslave or just simply “play” with us. When confronted with a dark and creepy cityscape and an overdue brother, I was able to envision a few hundred different scenarios for how horribly things could go.

He could have been eaten by Narashi Shadowdwellers, I could be converted to a human puppet-doll by Mad Janice the Two Face Harlequin, either or both of us could be burned up by the Cultists of the One True Light. Those and so many other happy thoughts kept me entertained as I waited. I didn’t really take any of them seriously, but my subconscious was still having fun, running one horrible idea after the next over my taut nerves to play out a subtle song of fear.

Of course, for as much as we may dislike fear, it is sometimes our friend.

I don’t know that I would have noticed the tell tale signs of a Shadow Court Gathering if I hadn’t been so focused on the way the darkness was moving around me. In the city, shadows shift and grow all the time. Around the library though they were growing without any lights being extinguished, and shifting without any lights moving.

That let me hone in on the fact that the world had gone wrong. What gave the Shadow Court away was the nearly inaudible singing of the children. Wordless and empty, from far away in every direction, I could hear them when I listened closely calling out for the homes that were forever lost to them.

The Shadow Court were faeries, of the Grimm’s Tales variety. Because with aliens and monsters and mad science, magic had surfaced in the world too.

The Shadow Court were serial kidnappers, they’d once been human before being captured, converted and forced to join the Court. In theory the Shadow Court only kidnapped the “Wayward Young”, meaning children who’d wandered away from home and away from the protection of their loved ones. In practice, away from home could mean “outside their front door” and “away from the protection of their loved ones” could mean two seconds out of their mother’s sight.

We learned about them in kindergarten if our parents didn’t teach us about them before that. There were tricks even a five year old could do that would put off the Shadow Court’s Initiation Rite and buy time for someone to find them. If that “someone” was a hero or a properly prepared SWAT team, the kids even had a decent chance of being rescued.

I should have breathed a sigh of relief. At fourteen, I was too old to be one of their targets. In the Shadow Court’s eyes, I was an adult already. The problem was that their presence here meant that I was right and there weren’t any heroes (or SWAT teams) around. Predator faeries that target children aren’t generally eager to stand up to super powered adults. If any of the local supers had been patrolling nearby the Shadow Court would have stayed well away.

That meant it was just them and me and whatever little kid they were hunting.

I knew what the statistics said about those circumstances too. Children, even ones who knew the right tricks, who weren’t rescued with 24 hours of being abducted by the Shadow Court didn’t make it home. Ever. Worse, the Shadow Court moved quickly. If they were on a major recruiting drive they might stay in the same city for as long as three nights. If they were after a single child though? They’d vanish off the face of the Earth the moment they got their hands on the kid.

There were heroes that could track them, wizards that could follow them into the Faerylands and even occasionally manage to retrieve the stolen children. The odds there were pretty low though. Sometimes the Shadow Court hid too well, other times one or more of the children who were “saved” turned out to be changelings or something worse. And sometimes it came down to simple math. Saving one child from evil faeries vs. saving a dozen from an evil super villain, or an alien press gang.

In the face of that, I knew what I was supposed to do. I’d been to the classes in school, I’d read the police reports and seen the videos so I knew the drill: Stay put unless there was a clear and safe path of retreat. Stay out of sight. If a registered hero or law enforcement official showed up, follow their directives and stay out of their way to the best of my ability.

A prepared SWAT team could deal with the Shadow Court. A regular Police Officer could call in backup. As a normal person, the best thing I could do would be to call 911 if I could manage it without attracting attention. The worst thing I could do would be to try to help.

Against superhuman or supernatural threats, people like me just didn’t stand a chance. Heck, I was a non-athletic teenage girl, I didn’t stand a chance against most purely mundane threats. A guy with a baseball bat was out of my league. Or even forget the baseball bat. Movies aside, being of Asian descent did not grant me any magical martial arts skills. To be honest even a fist fight against most other teenage girls would probably leave me in pretty bad shape.

So I clutched the railing that held back the bushes from the top of the short wall I was leaning against, closed my eyes and  kept quiet as the voices of the lost children moved closer.

They would pass me by. Somehow I knew that. They would leave me behind as they chased down their prey, leave me to answer the questions that would follow. The police, stern and weary from having arrived too late one more time. The grieving mother, if there was one. The news reporters hungry to reassure people and terrify them at the same time.

I would be the one who knew when and where but not why, who’d been there, who might remember something important if only they could ask the right question.

It was a weird sensation. I could feel the future in a way. Not like precognition, but more like I’d seen this movie before, or rather, I’d read the script and now that we were shooting it I knew how the scenes were lined up to play out. It didn’t feel like I knew what was going to happen as much as I could sense what was supposed to happen. The scenes weren’t shot yet though, so there was still time to change things, to pick a different set of lines to follow.

Even the thought of changing things made me shiver. Following the script was safe, nothing terrible would happen to me directly if I stuck to my lines and acted my part. Helpless witness to horrible crime. Not pleasant but I wouldn’t be in danger.

Going off script and ad-libbing my lines though? That would throw all my safety away and would probably cut my future very short indeed. If I spoke up the things that weren’t noticing me…would. All I had to do to stay safe was stay quiet.

Stay quiet and listen to a little girl cry as the Shadow Court hunted her down.

I don’t know how I knew they were after a little girl. Maybe it was all just part of my imagination. Except I could see her. I knew where I was, sitting in front of the library, crouched behind a bush, holding onto a rusty bar in the fence to keep myself steady. That all felt real enough, but somehow so did the sense of knowing where she was.

Behind the library. Running from her father’s apartment to her mother’s. It was a clear night but there was mist and fog rising around her. The Shadow Court was drawing close. I knew she would stumble. I knew in a few minutes I’d see them take her. I’d scream, but muffle it with my coat sleeve. They would hear me but move on, dragging the girl with them over her pleading and tears.

I had to stay where I was. I knew I couldn’t help her. If I went to her there would just be two victims tonight.

“But I want to try.” I whispered, fear and anger and regret trying to turn the whisper into a scream.

The rusty bar I was holding onto snapped and I almost jumped. I hadn’t noticed how it had rusted all the way through on the bottom and my weight, puny though it was, had been enough to crack it loose on its rusted top end too.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

I could get back on script pretty easily. Just put the bar down in dirt on the far side of the fence. No noise. I would stay unnoticed and safe.

Except that I couldn’t. I knew getting involved was wrong in every conceivable way. I was putting myself in danger. I was making it harder for anyone who would come after us. I was probably even making it worse for Samantha.

Somehow I knew the girl’s name was Samantha. And somehow I knew that breaking into a run towards the back of the library was the right thing to do. I was running into darkness, pretty much literally thanks to the lack of street lights, but I’d left my fear of it back at the fence.

I considered throwing the bar away. It was rusty iron, and faeries didn’t like iron in any form. I wasn’t running to fight them, just to grab Samantha and get out of there. Iron bar or no, my chances of even scratching one of the Shadow Court were nonexistent. Despite that they would react very poorly to the threat the iron represented.

Without the bar they would kill me. With it they would get creative in making me suffer.

I held onto it anyways. It might not do anything to actually keep me safe, but since I was defying all common sense, defying the Shadow Court too didn’t seem like a bad idea.

The back of the library opened onto a park around an artificial pond that had been drained for the winter. A couple of the lights on the walkway around the pond were still intact and glowing feebly through the mist that had risen up.

A night this chilly had no business being this misty. I would have shivered again but I left the good sense to do that back at the fence too.

On one of the benches on the near side of the pond, I saw a figured sitting with her back to me. It wasn’t Samantha. The strange clairvoyance that had gripped my mind told me that, though it couldn’t tell me who she was.

A girl my age? Or at least roughly my size. Beyond that she was almost a void. Even seeing her was difficult with the way  the black of her coat and hood mixed with the shadows that were dancing around the drained pond.

What wasn’t difficult was seeing that she was in danger. Bodies were appearing from the mist. Or maybe “of the mist” since that’s what they seemed to made from. None were shaped like a human, though that was the central template which they were mostly deviating from.

These was the Shadow Court’s hunting drones, they were the first wave, sent in so no faeries had to get their hands dirty touching the mortal world directly. The drones were vulnerable to iron, the way all faery magic is, but destroying them would do no harm to their creators. That wasn’t anything I’d studied, I just knew it somehow.

It crossed my mind that if I’d become clairvoyant like that, I might have actually developed super powers. For a moment, I felt a spark of hope. Maybe I would survive this. Then I noticed that the mistmen were outpacing me to the girl who sat on the bench. They’d reach her before I could. They’d reach the drained pond before I could too.

This girl and Samantha would both be taken or killed before my eyes, rather than just in my imagination.

I had the rusty bar still. I could throw it. Maybe knock one of mistmen out. One out of how many? A dozen? Two dozen? I knew, in the same way I knew Samantha was out there, that it wouldn’t be enough. I needed another way to stop them, or at least get their attention.

“There’s no such thing as faeries!” I screamed. The world froze silent except for the clear tone of a large bell. The mistmen hesitated, like they’d been slapped, and then began rolling towards me like a wave. I’d wanted to get the attention of the Shadow Court. I definitely had it.

The girl who was sitting on the bench turned to look at me, pulling back her hood.

She was the kind of gorgeous that even in my best dreams I could never imagine being. Long blonde hair, blemishless pale skin and dark eyes that looked like you could fall into them and never reach the bottom.

Her expression was puzzling and puzzled though. A small frown creased her lips as she saw the mistmen and me. There wasn’t any fear or surprise in her. She wasn’t happy or angry or anything beyond slightly confused.

“Run! I’ll take care of them!” I called out to her as I changed my course. I’d been running to get to Samantha as quickly as possible. That would have taken me right past the girl on the bench. With the mistmen flowing towards me, I swung around one of the dark lightposts and veered ninety degrees to the right, racing counterclockwise around the path that ringed the pond.

I risked a glance behind me as I ran. The mistmen were gaining quickly. They could have caught me already but the Shadow Court was amused. They wanted to play a bit. Or that’s what I knew the script would be saying.

I caught a glimpse of the beautiful girl, who still wasn’t part of the script. She’d risen to her feet. She wasn’t running though. Instead she was staring at me, her head cocked to one side. Her left hand rested at shoulder level on something that was shaped roughly like a dog, if dogs grew to the size of Mini Coopers.

I hadn’t seen enough in the glimpse to know exactly what it was, and my clairvoyance wasn’t saying anything about either the girl or whatever the creature was. I knew it wasn’t any sort of normal animal because even the bare glimpse I’d gotten of it was enough to know it wasn’t any part of this world. It was out of place, just “wrong” for lack of a better term, in a way even the Shadow Court wasn’t. That’s why the screaming that I heard a moment later didn’t come as a surprise.

It wasn’t the scream of a girl, child or teenager. It wasn’t a human scream at all. It was the scream of a mistman being devoured. Even with iron, the metal that was pure anathema to faeries, I couldn’t have hurt the Shadow Court by disrupting their mistmen. The black thing that had been at the beautiful girl’s side though? That could apparently.

I wanted to glance backwards again to see what was happening but instead I changed my course and jumped over the edge of the pond into the drained basin. It was a short drop at the ponds edge, less than a foot. I landed lightly, not even noticing the fall and sprinted towards the center of pond, where Samantha was getting back to her feet.

Whatever distraction I’d provided, the black dog-thing had far surpassed me in capturing the attention of the Shadow Court. The faeries were in full retreat from what I could tell. It made sense. If the Shadow Court were the brave or crazy sort of immortals, they wouldn’t focus on children would they? And monsters used to helpless prey wouldn’t see any point in tangling with something that could actually hurt them.

Even with that though there were still a lot of mistmen around. They were fleeing the beautiful girl’s pet, follow the lead of their Shadow Court masters, but they could still grab Samantha on their way out.

Maybe thinking the same thing, the ones that had been pursuing me began to swiftly overtake me. I felt a little sick at that, seeing proof of how easily they could have caught me if they’d wanted to. They weren’t focused on me anymore though and that was a mistake.

I couldn’t let them beat me to Samantha, I still had the iron bar, and as it turned out destroying them was no more difficult than swiping the bar through smoke if they weren’t paying attention to avoiding the blows.

The first two burst like glass windows as I swung the bar from the fence through them. Samantha was on her feet and saw me at last as a third mistman jumped on my back. I froze. I don’t mean I stopped running, I mean the mistman sucked all of heat out of me and it felt like I turned to ice.

They say freezing to death is one of the less painful ways to go. Apparently they were lying when they said that. I felt like I was shattering with every step I took. I couldn’t scream in pain, couldn’t even breathe thanks to my lungs turning into a solid mass of ice. My legs and feet lost the ability to bend before my forward momentum slowed down and I tumbled face first into the ground.

That probably saved me. The mistman went flying off my back allowing heat and life to return. Another mistman screamed as the black beast tore it apart behind me and the terror of the sound push me back to my feet.

“Samantha, we’ve gotta get out of here!” I shouted as I crossed the remaining distance to her. Seeing what was behind me, she didn’t need to be told twice. I reached out to take her hand as I caught up to her and she latched onto mine in exchange.

Despite racing at her fastest sprint, Samantha still wasn’t able to keep up with me. I’m not athletic but the difference in our ages was enough to set us pretty far apart. Since leaving her behind wasn’t an option, I threw the iron bar behind us and scooped her up into my arms. The mistmen were too fast and too many to fight, but it we could make it to Samantha’s mother’s apartment, we’d be beyond their reach. Heck, if we could stay out of their hands for another minute or two the black beast thing might take care of the problem for us.

My clairvoyance held out as we ran. I could see the mistmen fading out as they crossed the boundary of the park. The Shadow Court had abandoned the hunt entirely and was drawing their magic out of the mistmen as fast as they could before it was consumed by the black beast.

By the time we reached Samantha’s building the curtain had fallen on the play. The Shadow Court was gone and the mistmen were gone, both still pursued by what I could only guess was the beautiful girl’s monster.

I put Samantha down so that she could ring the buzzer to get in and saw that she was shaking with silent tears rolling down her face like a river.

“It’s ok. We got away.” I told her.

Her only answer came in the form of more tears and choked sobs. I tried to stand up to ring the buzzer for her but she threw her arms around my neck and clung on for dear life.

“We’re ok.” I said, holding her gently and letting her cry her fears out onto my jacket. I couldn’t blame her one bit for being freaked out and on some level I had to wonder why I wasn’t in just as bad shape emotionally. Sure, I’d read about things like the Shadow Court, but coming that close to a fate worse than death was a whole lot more intense than anything I’d been prepared for. That we’d survived at all was a miracle.

Looking back on what should have been very immediate memories, It all felt distant somehow though. Like it had happened to someone else. Even the pain from the mistman attacking me and the fall didn’t feel like something I’d actually experienced. It was the flipside of the clairvoyance that I’d been feeling. I’d known things like I was reading a script when it was happening and maybe as a result my memories felt like I was remembering a script rather than the real events.

“I’m going to be ok.” Samantha finally said as her tears subsided and she let go of me.

“You will.” I promised her, enough clairvoyance lingering that I could sense she would be.

“You should go in and see your Mom though.” I nodded towards the buzzer for her Mother’s apartment.

“Could you reach it for me?” she asked. I smiled, stood up and rang the bell for a couple of seconds until someone put their hand on my shoulder.

“Jin!? What the hell? Wake up!”

The Hollow Half is the first part of a project I’m working on to develop my writing talents.

I’m “releasing” the chapters for it as I go in order to motivate myself to keep writing them, though I’m also keeping a bit of a backlog up so that I have time between my first draft and the version that gets out for public viewing.

New chapters go up by end of day (Eastern time) on Sunday and Thursday.