“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
“You always look as if you’re thinking about something, but every time I ask, that’s what you say,” Eerie scolded, crouching down so her mad eyes were level with his own. Alex was currently confined in the uncomfortable grasp of an intricate Japanese exercise machine. “What is it that you keep inside that head?”
“Nothing. Seriously. So, I, uh, don’t think I’ve ever seen you here before. The gym, I mean.”
“Alex is a jerk,” Eerie proclaimed, folding her arms, more agitated than he could remember seeing her. She was talking fast and loud, and didn’t seem to realize it, her cheeks flushed with emotion. “I swim every morning, two hours before you wake up.”
“You know when I wake up?” Alex asked, alarmed.
Eerie nodded hesitantly, and then wandered off to a neighboring machine, while Alex took the opportunity to extract himself gratefully from his own. He grabbed his towel and dried off hurriedly; wishing Eerie could have picked a different, less public time to arrive. Sara excused herself from the machine nearby them, pausing to give him a pointed look, assuring him that Emily would soon find out about this.
“Of course. Are you busy?”
“I’m not sure how to answer,” Alex said, waving his arm in the direction of the gym behind him. “I was doing something, but it can wait if you need me…”
“That is good, because I definitely need you,” Eerie said, sounding reassured, squeezing the handle of her knitting basket.
“Okay,” Alex said hesitantly, feeling as he always did when talking to Eerie; slightly over his head, as if he had agreed to something he didn’t understand, and now could only hope that it would turn out for the best. “I’d really like to take a shower before I go anywhere, though. We aren’t going to San Francisco this time, right?”
Eerie poked his chest experimentally, causing him to start back involuntarily and yelp, and then wish, immediately and wholeheartedly, that he hadn’t done any of that. At this point, pretty much everyone in the gym had stopped what they were doing and were staring at them. In the free weight section, a number of early morning lifters watched and laughed openly.
“You aren’t that sweaty. Can you please just change and come with me? I don’t have a lot of time.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble, Eerie?” Alex asked, toweling off the back of his neck.
“Because if you are, I can try and help you…”
“Good,” Eerie said, smiling at him and urging him toward the locker room. “Because I am in trouble.”
Alex couldn’t get anything more out of her no matter how he asked, and she seemed very nervous and eager to leave, so he settled for a quick rinse in the shower. He put his clothes back on, wishing he’d worn something a little nicer than the track pants and sweatshirt that he was wearing. He did his best to ignore the guys who were staring at him.
Eerie was in the lobby when he came out of the locker room, so nervous that she was literally hopping from one foot to the other in a little shuffling dance while she stared out the window, clutching her knitting basket as if she were afraid someone would try to take it from her. For all he knew, that was exactly what she was worried about. She wasn’t aware of it, but almost everyone in the gym had stopped making even a pretense of working out, they were so absorbed by Eerie’s bizarre performance. He was feeling raw about the situation until she saw him, but then she smiled as if she were truly happy to see him, and his resentment evaporated. Eerie latched onto his arm and practically dragged him from the gym, relaxing only when they were out of sight of the building, heading away from the dorms, toward the crest of the hill the Academy sat on.
“Eerie, what’s going on?” Alex asked, wondering how a girl so much shorter than him could set such a demanding pace. “Are you okay?”
“I am in trouble,” Eerie repeated, as if she was describing the weather outside as sunny. “I am okay,” she said, taking a deep breath and then launching into a breathless tirade. “But Rebecca is mean, and Gaul is mean, and they are mad at me! They are mad even though they told me to make friends! And I am trying to make friends! And Rebecca tried to make me do things, but I said ‘no’, and then Gaul looked all scary, and then they said they would stop but that I had to wait outside, and when I was waiting outside they were talking about suspending me and I don’t want to be suspended and I don’t want to be in trouble and it isn’t fair because I didn’t do anything wrong…”
“Uh, Eerie? You’re talking too fast. I’m not sure what you are trying to tell me. Are you in trouble with Gaul and Rebecca?”
Eerie nodded, her eyes moist with frustration.
“Is it because of San Francisco? Because of, you know, what happened to Edward?” Alex was certain that he already knew the answer. He had been waiting for weeks to hear the inevitable consequences of their unauthorized trip.
Eerie nodded again, and Alex got angry. He suddenly realized that they intended to punish Eerie but not him, probably because they didn’t want to upset him. Because he was valuable and, though he didn’t like admitting it, because he was fragile. The unfairness of it all made him puff up with indignation. Not that he wanted to volunteer to be punished or anything, but still…
“What are you thinking about?” Eerie asked him again, making him realize that they had been walking up the hill in silence for an indeterminate period while he was lost in thought.
“You.”
Eerie looked at him sharply, checking if he was joking. He wasn’t, but he found himself unable to meet her strange eyes, anyway.
“That is a good answer,” she said, clutching his arm tightly.
“It’s true,” he said, shrugging, trying to play it off as if it was no big deal. “What did they say they were going to do?”
Eerie let her hand drift down, until it came to rest inside of his own. He took it automatically, and intertwining her cool fingers with his own. His clammy palms embarrassed him, but she didn’t notice or didn’t mind and he felt obscurely grateful to her.
“I left before they told me,” Eerie admitted. “But, they are going to send me away, I’m sure of it.”
“But where would they send you, Eerie? Isn’t the Academy your home?”
Eerie hesitated so long before answering that he wasn’t sure that she intended to. When she finally spoke, her voice was so small that he had to lean close to hear her.
“Away from you.”
“What?”
Eerie stopped and looked at him oddly. He wondered, as he often did, what she saw through her dilated, teary eyes.
“They are going to send me away because they don’t want me to be near you,” Eerie blurted out, looking distressed and anxious. “They are afraid of you, Alex, and they get more frightened when I am with you.”
Alex followed along as she led him away from the path, into the gnarled oak trees that lined it, Eerie’s hand in his own, and he tried very hard not to get angry. He remembered his talk with Rebecca after he’d woken in the hospital, after his protocol had put him to sleep for more than a month, and her bizarre offer to extend his sleep, her concern about him associating with Eerie. He stilled had his doubts that Rebecca would actually send her away. He was so engrossed in his thoughts that he hardly noticed at first when stopped beneath a particularly craggy and ancient oak tree.
He squeezed Eerie’s hand and smiled at her until she was able to smile back at him. Alex was going to say something, but then he thought better of it. The mood seemed good, and Eerie was standing right in front of him, looking as if she wanted to be comforted. He put his hand on her shoulder and she slid forward so that she was standing up against him, one of his hands on her waist, the other resting behind her neck. She went up on her tiptoes, eyes closed, and he did what seemed like the right thing to do.
After a minute of mashing their lips together, she extracted herself.
“Uh, Alex,” Eerie said, pushing him away gently, “that kind of… hurts. You’ve never done this before, right?”
Alex was too embarrassed to look at Eerie. He managed a nod.
“Well, then, let me teach you.”
This time he let her take the lead, responding gently to her swollen lips instead of crushing them to him. The mouth that pressed against his own was warm and impossibly soft, and Alex knew nothing but the sensation and his own sweet, laconic response. She kissed him harder, nibbling his lower lip, and he tasted raspberries and honey. He wasn’t sure what to do, but to his relief, she moved slowly and seemed to expect very little from him. Without realizing it, he knotted the back of her blue hair around his fingers, but she didn’t seem to mind. When he bent to kiss her, he breathed in the scent of sandalwood, aromatic and pervasive, and it made him slightly dizzy. His skin tingled, pins and needles along his bare arms and all the way down his back. His other hand crept gradually down from her waist to run along her skirt and the soft curvature beneath it, hesitantly at first, and then more forcefully when she responded.
They found their way to the ground by stages, the logistics of which he was only barely aware, the grass crushing down beneath his back and poking him through his t-shirt. Eerie lay on top of him, her legs intertwined with his, her breasts pressing against his chest, her strange, wet eyes sparkling above his face as she smiled, brushed a blue lock behind her ears, and then bent to kiss him again. His hands wandered across her back, her skin warm through the thin cotton of her tank top. His hands lingered on her legs and the immaculately smooth skin of her thighs. The world swam pleasantly before him, a swirl of colors and impressions and golden motes that caught the light in fascinating ways; but it was the tactile, the rush of sensation from his fingertips and lips that captured him, rooted to the ground like he’d grown out of it, underneath the girl as if he belonged there.
“Alex,” Eerie whispered in her strange, melodic voice, one small hand pressing against his chest, “I like you. I like you so much.”
She squirmed on top of him, nestling closer, kissing along his neck, and Alex sighed involuntarily, his vision blurred and his hands trembling while he ran his fingers down the length of her spine.
“I–I like you too,” Alex managed, his voice catching in his throat.
She yielded when he grabbed her shoulders and pressed her to the ground, misunderstanding his intent when he rolled on top of her. She looked confused when he threw himself on top of top of her like a football tackle, sending both of them tumbling, then she saw what was on the other side of the clearing and froze in place, a deer in illogical and utterly unexpected headlights. The air crackled with static discharge, and the air was thick with the smell of scorched grass. The spot beneath the old tree where they had lain a moment before was blackened and smoldering, a black scar that exposed the soil.
Alex managed to speak first.
“Edward?”
“Edward Krylov? But, he’s dead! We confirmed it. He’s Etheric Signature went out. How can he be in Central?”
“I have no idea. But someone used his key card fifteen minutes ago to access Alex’s dormitory building, and then at the main academic building a few minutes after that.”
“Shouldn’t that card be deactivated?”
“I have never been able to bring myself to disable a deceased student’s account. It is a personal failing.”
“Getting sentimental in your old age, Gaul?”
“Getting tired of burying children.”
Somehow, Gaul managed to sound grim even through the unemotional, machine-assisted telepathic uplink. It was a gift, Rebecca decided.
“Alright,” Rebecca said gritting her teeth. “No more fucking around.”
She came to a halt gratefully on the sidewalk, not too far from the gym she had just finished searching, and paused long enough to stop wheezing. Then she closed her eyes and reached out to the world around her.
Empathy normally requires line of sight to work, at the very least, and touch is necessary for all but the most basic operations. However, Rebecca was in a place that was familiar to her, and surrounded by students and faculty who had all done sessions with her, so she knew each individual Etheric Signature. Together, they made a web of signposts and waypoints, empathic telemetry radiating out from where she stood, a map of an invisible country that she was intimately familiar with. She was looking for one of the few emotions that stood out with the intensity of burning magnesium, radiant as white phosphorous. Distance was not an issue. Lust, particularly teenage lust, was the emotional equivalent of wildfire, and Alex and Eerie shone like beacons from a clearing not too far from her.
She could barely see the thing in poor Edward’s body that was approaching them. It radiated only the faintest traces of emotion, far less than anything else she had ever encountered. Even the savage Ghouls, who were barely sentient on an individual level, had a greater degree of consciousness and autonomy then this abomination.
There was no two ways about it. Whatever it was, it was dead. Dead and walking.
That gave Rebecca all sorts of unpleasant ideas.
Rebecca did something that she reserved for emergencies. She ran.
Alex helped Eerie back up to her feet, trying to keep himself between her and what could not possibly be Edward, while simultaneously keeping an eye on it, whatever it was. He managed, but it probably could have gone better. Still, there was a smoking hole in the ground next to them, rather than through them, so he didn’t figure on many complaints.
“Eerie,” he said, trying to calm down enough so that he could remember how to activate the protocol he hadn’t used since October. “Do you happen to know what kind of protocol Edward used to operate? What it does?”
Eerie pointed at the scar burnt along the grassy hillside.
“It does that,” she offered, appearing confused, but not at all frightened.
“That’s very helpful.”
Edward had looked better. His whole body his hideous wounded, with teeth marks ravaging his arms and neck, and his scalp hanging loosely to the side, connected to his head by a thin strand of tissue. His face had a strange, wet sheen to it, and his color was off; a vile greenish-grey below the surface of his skin that had worked its way into his straw blond hair like mildew. His eyes were uniformly black, twin pools of tar, leering out of a face that wouldn’t cooperate, too rubbery to allow for a normal range of expression. His jaw hung open comically, and his overall posture was slack and clumsy, as if his limbs were unfamiliar.
“Holy shit. Edward, are you a zombie? Eerie, are there real zombies?”
“I–I don’t think so, but I’m kind of… well, failing, so…”
“I think we should run. Because, if he is a zombie, he’ll be really slow, right?”
“Enough stupidity,” Edward slurred, black goo leaking from his distended jaw. “I’m not a zombie, Alexander Warner.”
Edward hadn’t talked that much when he was alive, but that was definitely not his voice. It was harsh, vaguely feminine, and had an accent that Alex couldn’t place, and was utterly vile coming from the mouth of corpse. Alex shrunk back a bit, and felt Eerie do the same behind him, but it wasn’t anything that Edward said. It was the voice, grating and harsh and inhuman, something that hit him right in the base of his stomach and made his own throat protest in sympathy. He didn’t remember the Horror’s scream, but he did remember his reaction to it, the instinctual drive to purge and divest from its influence, a reflexive and primal horror. This wasn’t as extreme, but it was a similarly upsetting sensation.
“I liked you better when you didn’t talk,” Alex said cautiously. “What kind of a thing are you now? Wait. Are you a werewolf? Do people become werewolves when they get bit by — ?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Edward spat, thick black fluid dribbling down his chin and across his chest. “Do I look like a damn Weir?”
“This is why I don’t ask many questions,” Alex said, urging Eerie away from Edward, edging toward the brush. “What the fuck is that stuff, anyway? Are you filled with like, oil or something?”
“Just die, kid,” Edward snarled, stretching out his arm, moving with fluidity that belied the awkwardness of his stance. A blue flash left Alex half-blind, and then there was a rapid sequence of loud snapping sounds. He actually saw the lightning arc first into the ground, then stretching toward them. He felt Eerie’s hand on the back of his neck, and he was certain that she said something in her musical voice, but he couldn’t be make out any of the words over the sound of the Black Door opening with a shrieking protest.
With the sound of ice fracturing, the world gave way. He could feel the tremendous mass of the Ether, pressing against the walls of reality, the delicate balance of forces that underlay the whole of the universe like a skeleton. There was a change in his perceptions that was at once subtle and dizzyingly profound.
He could see the lightning crawling through the air as if it moved through clear, heavy syrup. Beneath that, there was the underlying electromagnetic disturbance, the rough progression of the energetic waveform. There was no need, Alex realized, for something as crude as the massive vacuum effect he had used before. The Absolute Protocol operated with ludicrous ease, as automatic as lifting his arms or crossing his legs. Alex simply vented the lightning into the Ether discretely, disturbing nothing else, without the fuss and bother of opening anything more than a microscopic breach in the walls of reality. Edward raised his hand a second time and again he felt the nascent gathering of electromagnetic force, but that was even easier to shunt into the Ether before it fully manifested, allowing Alex to get Eerie to the tree line, while Edward was still staring accusatorily at his hand as if he expected it to answer for his protocol’s failure.
“At some point we need to have a talk about how you did that,” Alex said reassuringly, gently pushing Eerie into the woods. “Right now, though, I need you to find somebody, preferably Miss Aoki or Miss Gallow or someone like that, and bring them back here. Fast. Like, before I die. Please.”
Eerie nodded seriously and charged off through the brush. Alex turned to find Edward leering at him, as best he could with his distended jaw.
“I let her go, you know. Makes it easier,” he said, in his sickly, shrill voice. “Without your little girlfriend, you’re as good as dead.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you don’t know how to operate your protocol,” Edward said, putting both arms up, palms to the sky. “Once more with feeling, Alex?”
He didn’t see the arc this time. He felt it surging through him instead, for a bare instant, hot at the point of contact near the center his chest; and equally as hot, for some reason, in his left foot. There was stabbing, brilliant pain, the whole of his nervous system crying out simultaneously. Then his legs gave way beneath him, and he went crashing helplessly to the ground. He could see a trail of smoke rising from his ruined, partially melted sneaker, and found it strangely hard to look away.
“I told you,” the thing that used to be Edward croaked. “You should’ve had the girl stick around. She was all that was keeping you alive.”
Alex managed to roll over, but he couldn’t speak. His chest and diaphragm had seized up, and he was having terrible trouble breathing. He fought off panic and forced himself to inhale slowly, willing his lungs back into service. He managed one shallow, shaky breath, and then another. Edward lifted Alex by a handful of his shirt, pulling him up as if he weighed nothing, while Alex’s arms hung at his sides, numb and unresponsive.
“I thought you deserved an answer, you ignorant shit. Edward is gone. They brought me his body, and hollowed him out and poured myself inside, like a worm in an apple. Exactly like I’m going to do to you, as soon as you stop breathing. It shouldn’t bother you much. I know it won’t bother your girlfriend.”
Alex tried to say Eerie’s name, but all he managed was a strange noise. He still counted it as progress. Edward let him drop back to the ground unceremoniously, chuckling.
“You really haven’t noticed? Do you even know what a Changeling is? That girl is like a cuckoo. A doppelganger.”
“I have no idea what you just said. A cuckoo? You mean she’s crazy?”
Alex managed to sit up. He didn’t know why, but he felt that was a moral victory.
“You really are dumb. You had better take a close look at that girl before you get too excited, boy. You can’t think so much with your balls, or every woman you meet is going to lead you around by them. Of course, you won’t have a chance to use the advice,” Edward gloated.
“That’s a shame,” Katya opinioned, giving Alex a friendly pat on the back that startled him. “It was such good advice, too.”
Edward howled and clutched at his face and neck, batting at invisible insects, fending off a private fire.
“I’ve perforated a number of cerebral arteries, and caused hemorrhaging all through your brain,” Katya said unhappily, as if Edward were a profound disappointment to her. “You really should have the common courtesy to die. What are you, exactly?”
“This was Edward. He died, but now I think he’s become some sort of lightning-zombie,” Alex explained, gradually picking himself up off the ground.
“What kind of school is this?” Edward hissed, his face hidden behind his hands. “Don’t they teach you brats anything?”
Edward raised his hand skyward, but there was no lightning, instead he shrieked again and clutched the arm. It took Alex a moment to work out that the flashes of silver he kept seeing were a handful of long, thin needles that had run through Edward’s arm in several different places. Alex shuddered when he put it together.
“Tell me the truth,” Katya said, advancing with a handful of long needles. “Are you a student here? Because I don’t want to get in trouble for killing another student…”
Alex didn’t bother to try to stand up, even though he thought he might be capable of it. He didn’t think trying to punch Edward would do any good. However, that didn’t mean he was going to sit there and watch Katya fight, either. It wasn’t as easy this time, opening the Black Door, not with Edward’s words buzzing in his head, but he pushed them aside with an effort, and reached for the frost-covered handle in the back of his mind. There was no finesse this time around, no careful siphoning of energies. Instead, he tore blindly at the fabric that separated the world and the Ether, creating breaches all around what used to be Edward, opening him and the world around him to the void. Edward examined the sheen of frost that covered him in disbelief, and then turned his jet eyes to Alex.
This time, Alex had a perfect view of her protocol in action. Katya didn’t throw the needles. She opened her hand as if she was letting the wind take seeds and the needles were gone, lodged in of Edward as suddenly as they had disappeared. One of them pierced him like a gag shop arrow, running from temple to temple, while the remaining two crossed each other, perforating his chest through the solar plexus. Edward stumbled backwards and coughed wretchedly.
“Would you mind telling me where you keep your vitals?” Katya asked, circling away while she dug another handful of smaller needles from the lining of her blue surplus coat. “I’m all out of the acupuncture needles, but I still have a whole bunch of sewing needles. If you don’t speak up, I’ll keep on trying till I figure it out.”
Alex decided he preferred not to watch. This thought was followed by a series of ghastly squishing noises that reinforced his decision to look away. A moment later, Katya made a dissatisfied noise and then the sounds repeated themselves. Alex found, to his relief that the holes he’d torn to the Ether mended quickly enough when the Black Door closed.
“You are such a baby,” Katya said contemptuously. “I saved you, already. Are you ever going to stand up?”
“And you are a terrible bodyguard,” Alex countered angrily. “Where were you when the dead guy showed up? He could have killed me, like, three times before you got here!”
Against all expectation, Katya reddened and turned away.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” she muttered. “I wasn’t really watching all that closely, to be honest.”
“You were watching us?” Alex asked in disbelief.
“I already told you,” Katya shouted, “that I wasn’t! I left as soon as you guys starting making out, okay? I didn’t want to watch that shit. I only came back when I saw the flash.”
Alex levered himself slowly to his feet, inspecting the burn marks on his t-shirt and the melted sole on his shoe grimly.
“You really suck, you know that?” Alex said, his hands shaking furiously. “Not only did you watch us from the bushes, but then you show up late to bail me out? At least have the decency to save me immediately if you insist on stalking me!”
Katya swore, crossed her arms, and then looked away.
“You told me to stay away,” Katya said sternly, staring off in the opposite direction. “Anastasia told me to watch you. Who do you expect me to listen to? You’re right — I suck at this. I don’t know fuck-all about protecting people, but you aren’t exactly making it easy. I didn’t want to watch you make out with your stupid girlfriend. I tried not to intrude.”
“Don’t think I’m ungrateful for your help. I’m… well, uh, I guess I’m not sure. I guess I’m ungrateful, actually.”
“Seems that way,” Katya confirmed. “I did save you, you know.”
“Are you sure he’s dead?” Alex asked, leaning against a nearby tree for support, his legs wobbly and unreliable. “I thought he was when the Weir dragged him off in San Francisco, but then he showed up here…”
“Oh, he’s dead,” Katya assured him. “Whatever possessed him, it had to use his automatic nervous system, right? And that is full of sewing needles.”
“Good to know,” Alex said, sickened at the thought.
“Would have been nice to know about five minutes ago, smart ass. Say, was that you, with the mild chill a minute ago? Was that some sort of attempt to defend yourself? Or were you just sitting there looking pretty?”
“No,” Alex said slowly. “No, that was me.”
“Very helpful,” Katya sniffed, tossing her hair. “What a useless protocol. You couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag if they gave you the month lead-up you need to use that thing. No wonder Anastasia thinks you need a babysitter.”
Alex opened his mouth to reply, probably to say some more things he would end up regretting later. Instead, he found himself standing there with his mouth open, staring. It would have been embarrassing, and possibly have inspired another hostile observation from Katya, but she was doing the same thing. At the other end of the clearing, Rebecca stood, leaning on one of the trees, gasping, panting, and so red in the face that Alex wondered if she was having some sort of attack.
“Don’t tell me that I ran all this way,” Rebecca wheezed, “for nothing.”