The air just before dawn was crisp, the last vestiges of chilly mornings still holding on despite the fact that the weather said it would be pushing 70 by the end of the day. Jackie and I were sitting on Alpha’s hood, smoking and staring out over Sharon from the top of West Hill, when we heard a car approach. We both turned and watched as the car parked and Bob and Charles got out. They both walked over and leaned against the car, looking toward the eastern horizon.

“I was afraid you’d be here,” Charles said.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because if you’re here, now, then Rick is really gone.” There was a cold silence for a little while after that.

“We’re trying to find him,” Jackie finally said.

“Not in the woods, I suppose.”

“What are you getting at?” I asked.

“I want to know the truth.”

“Charles.”

“I mean it, John!” He pushed off from the car and stepped directly in front of me. “He was my best friend for as long as I can remember. I’ve been on too many stupid ghost hunts to be fooled by your stupid fucking story. What happened to Rick? Was he really taken?”

“Yes.”

“By who?”

I sighed. “That red spiral cult.”

He threw his arms in the air and stormed off, then turned around and stormed right back. “This is your fault, you know!”

“Charles, wait,” Bob said, reaching for him. Charles shoved his hands out of the way and jammed his finger in my face.

“You got him into all this shit, you got the attention of that fucking cult, you dragged him into whatever mess was going on out there in the woods, and now he’s gone and it’s all your fucking fault! Is he even alive?”

“As far as we know,” I said, softly.

“As far as you know. Great. That’s comforting.” He put his hands on his side and turned his back to me, fuming quietly for a minute or two. “How many others?”

“What?”

“How many others?” He spun around. “How many other people have been hurt by the shit you get involved in, huh? What happened to Lori, or Alice? Do you know anything about Mark’s mysterious car accident?”

“Charles, please,” Bob said, but he sounded less committed than he did the last time.

“I want to fucking know!”

“Lori was possessed,” I said. Bob stopped and turned to me. “The ghost wanted something from me and was trying to use Lori to get it. I don’t know what happened to Mark.”

“But it might have been related?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know what, fine. Don’t tell me. But don’t you fucking tell me anything else either, got it?” Charles demanded, then pointed at Jackie. “If you find Rick, you tell me. But other than that? I don’t want to see or hear from either of you ever again! I don’t want any more of this shit in my life!” He stormed off toward the other car, but Bob hesitated.

“How long have you known?” he asked, softly, after Charles was in the car.

“About Lori?”

“Yeah.”

“Not long enough, I’m afraid.”

He stood there for a moment, then nodded. “Right. Fuck off, Matteson.” With that, he walked to the car, and then they drove away.

“I don’t think it was your fault,” Jackie said, after they were gone.

“How could it not be?” I asked.

“That portal, it took a lot of effort to keep it open. It probably just closed because the Barzai wasn’t focused on it anymore.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I don’t know.”

We didn’t say anything else after that. Just sat on the hood of Alpha, waiting for the sun to rise again.

Volume Three begins August 1, 2022. In the meantime, join us on Discord for updates, discussion, and a (soon-to-be-ready) Tall Tales roleplay!
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It was instinct that drove me to try and catch Rick, and I hadn’t even registered what that would do to the portal until it was too late. It exploded, and I jumped up onto the altar and reached out, hoping somehow, maybe, he was still there. But it was just empty air.

I stood silent for a while, trying to process what had just happened. I slowly turned to look at the rest of the clearing. Alice was laying on the ground crying. There were five people laying around the clearing, and it was hard to tell from where I was, but they didn’t look like they were breathing or moving at all. Any other cultists that were able to move had already disappeared into the trees. Jackie was approaching the altar, visibly trying to hold back tears.

“I need you to move,” she said. I nodded and stepped down, then ran over to Alice. I tried to comfort her, but there was nothing I could find to say. So I just sat next to her rubbing her back, and she cried into my lap.

Jackie was trying desperately to reverse-engineer the spell that opened the portal, but it wasn’t working. We stayed there a while watching her try over and over again, growing more and more angry the whole time, until finally she collapsed on the altar and wept. Alice had stopped by this point, so I helped her up and we both went over and gave Jackie a hand off the altar. I could barely move at that point, with the knife still in my side, so we all leaned on each other the whole way back to the cabin. We agreed on a story as we went; strangers in masks had invaded the cabin and kidnapped us, we fought back, Rick had a gun, we ultimately managed to escape somewhere in the woods but they disappeared with Rick. No mention of the portal.

We called 911 as soon as Jackie had reception, and there was an ambulance arriving at the cabin for me when we emerged from the forest. The police ran over to check on the girls and collect their stories, and I was rushed to the hospital. There, while confirming my identity, a nurse asked my birth date. I told her, and she looked at the time and date on the computer.

“Oh, honey,” she said, “I’m so sorry you have to spend it like this.”

“It’s not your fault,” I told her, before I was wheeled in for surgery to remove the knife and stitch up whatever damage it, and my continuing to move and fight with it in me, had done.

“John!” Rick called. I paused and held my hand to my side, discovering the knife was still there. I thought maybe I should leave it there. When I looked back to him, though, he was pointing. I turned away from the cultist I’d just laid out to the portal. It was still there. I didn’t know why. If their chanting had been holding it open, and we’d already silenced over half of them, why wasn’t it closing? Jackie said it would take a lot of cultists, or a lot of…

I looked at the blood on my hands.

I looked around at the clearing around me.

There was blood everywhere.

I looked back up at the portal and finally saw what Rick must’ve seen better from his angle. There was something starting to reach through the portal. It was grayish, with splotches of black and deep red over it. It wouldn’t be wrong to call it a tentacle, but it certainly wouldn’t be right, either. It was smooth and thick like one, and even had some shapes on one side that kinda resembled one? But there was a clawed, three-fingered hand at the end, just starting to grasp the altar. They were succeeding. Something was coming through! I turned back to Rick to tell him to concentrate whatever shots he had left on that…thing, whatever it was, but he wasn’t there. I turned back and found that lead priest standing in front of the altar. With one arm he was holding Rick against himself, and with the other he was holding a knife to Rick’s throat. His back was to the portal and he was staring at me.

“Do you see, Omen!” he cried out, over the rumbling sound of whatever was dragging itself closer to the portal. “Do you see how you are the key to our victory? You delivered this into our hands today!”

“Like hell I will,” I answered, stepping toward him. He pressed the blade against Rick’s neck.

“One more step, and his blood joins ours! We’re so close. Do you really think you can close this portal before your friend’s blood brings the ritual to completion?” There wasn’t time. I knew that. I was still too far away. I saw Jackie emerge from the trees out of the corner of my eye. Maybe she could do something. Maybe she could help. I resisted the urge to look at her and see what she was planning, and instead stood tall and put my hands on my head. I had to trust the others now. Just as long as his attention was focused on me, maybe it would work.

As soon as I saw that Rick and Alice were the sacrifice, any plans went out the window. I don’t even really remember starting to move. One moment I was talking to Jackie about how we were going to handle the scene, and the next I was on my feet and breaking the tree line. One cultist stepped slightly in my way, and I punched them directly in the face without slowing down. I barely even registered the sound of them hitting the ground behind me before I was gone again, making a bee line for the three robed figures holding Rick and Alice. I didn’t notice one of them had a gun until my left shoulder erupted in pain.

I’ve since read that people don’t fall when they’re shot because the shot actually knocks them down. It happens, sure, but that’s usually only the case when the shot kills them. Mostly people fall when shot because of a combination of shock and a cultural understanding that that’s what happens to people when a bullet hits them. I don’t know how much truth there is to that, but I wasn’t thinking about cultural expectations and certainly didn’t have time for shock. I kept going, and the shooter made the mistake of hesitating when they didn’t see me drop. They scrambled to make a second shot, but it was too late. I had the wrist of their shooting arm by the time they pulled the trigger again, and I felt their arm snap in my hands when I went to disarm them. They dropped the gun and fell backward, screaming and holding their arm, and I kicked the next cultist away. I grabbed the third and threw them at the second, and then turned my attention to untying Alice.

“Holy shit, dude,” Rick said, looking around. “I didn’t know you could do that!” A cultist was running at us with a knife, but was stopped when they ran into an invisible barrier about ten feet away. The others drew weapons and approached more slowly, continuing to chant. I got the ropes off Alice, and she started to run toward where I knew Jackie was waiting. I turned to Rick and focused on his hands, a bit less gently. As soon as his hands were free, he dove over and grabbed the gun.

“How many more shots you got?” I asked, catching my breath as the cultists drew closer. I counted about ten moving toward us, and then noticed the asshole with the burned face and snake eyes next to the altar.

“Six, I think.”

“You think?”

“I was under a spell for a while there, you know!”

“Fine. Six. You ready?” I asked, clenching my fists. He raised his gun.

“I’m good. You gonna be okay with that shoulder wound?”

“Let’s do this.” I ran forward at some cultists, and heard shots fired as I did. I dodged an attack from the first person and drove my knee into their gut before tossing them aside, and felt a knife stab into my side. I spun around and drove my elbow into the head of the cultist behind me, throwing them to the ground. When I looked up, the apparent leader was already gone. I grumbled and made for the next person in line as I saw a cultist to my right catch fire. The cultist ahead charged at me, and I let them get close before I stepped aside and kicked them in the ribs. I heard multiple cracks as they hit the ground and rolled away. I glanced over and saw that the portal was shrinking and growing more unstable. I smiled and charged the next robe I saw.

We had the light off by the time we left the trail, and came within view of the clearing around 11:30. We didn’t know which way the cultists would be using to get to the clearing, as there was no obvious trail leading into it, so we moved around it to ensure we didn’t have our backs to the trail. Just in case doing so put us directly in the path of the people attending the ritual.

It appeared they were already at the altar, however, once we got close enough to see more clearly. I expressed this to Jackie, but she wasn’t so sure. She pointed out that, if they were doing the same type of thing they’d been trying to do at the warehouse where we first met them, they’d need either more people or some blood sacrifice. I remembered the bodies we’d found at the last site and decided not to argue. One of these days I really should ask her how she can calculate the amount of blood needed for a ritual on the fly like that, though.

We continued to watch, and only rarely whisper to one another, as they continued preparations. She said it looked like they were going to try opening a portal and then summoning something through it, and sure enough, around midnight they began the ritual in earnest and after a couple minutes of chanting and dancing around, the stone altar began to glow and a hole in reality opened above it. I went to move forward until I felt Jackie’s hand on my shoulder.

“They need blood,” she whispered.

“And?”

“And we haven’t seen the victims yet. We don’t know if they’re sacrificing people in the cult or volunteers or people they kidnapped.”

“And you think if we scare them off now, and they have people kidnapped, we won’t be able to help them.”

She nodded, and I grumbled softly but knelt back down in the weeds with her. It didn’t seem they’d noticed my movement, and they continued on while we waited.

There was very little preparation we could do the next day. Alice can’t practice magic she can’t access, my ability to stifle magic seems more a matter of will than anything, Jackie could spend some time meditating but there was very little else available to her in the cabin, and Rick…well, it wouldn’t take Rick long to load his gun. So part of our plan involved spending today the way we were already planning. Alice and I drove down to the reservoir for the day.

She did the driving, and tolerated Alpha’s quirks for about two miles before she turned back and asked Rick if we could borrow his car instead. Then it was down to Kinzua Beach, where we spent some time swimming and hiking and had a picnic lunch. It was getting later in the afternoon,  shortly before we were to head back, when she finally decided to say what I now suspect was on her mind the whole time.

“Is there an end to this?”

“To what?” I asked. “I mean, we’re only here for a few days.”

“No, I mean, the cult thing.”

“Benedict and Akshainie are actively hunting down ways to ensure there is.”

“But they’re here, John. The cult is here, and we don’t know what they want, and where are Benedict and Akshainie? Did we even reach out to them for help?”

“I did call, actually. Got his voicemail, didn’t even ring. I don’t know where they are, but the fact that he hasn’t called back suggests he doesn’t have reception. But it’s okay. We just have to find their ritual and stop it, and then we can tell them what we learned and let them deal with it. The Vatican’s footing the bill for that.”

“And what happens next time? Or the time after?”

“What makes you think there’s going to be a next time?”

“I’m getting the impression there’s always a next time. With the cult, with Hecate, with ghosts and spirits and ravens and God knows what else. Is there an end? Is there something you want out of all of this, is there something you’re trying to make happen?”

“I told you about this very early on, Alice. I don’t control it, I don’t go looking for it, it’s just part of my life.”

“But what are you doing with it? If it’s a part of your life, are you doing anything to shape what part it has? What your life will look like with it? Are you thinking about what your relationship with all this will look like in twenty years?”

I sat quiet for a long moment, thinking of the best way to answer. I finally realized I had only one real option. “I never thought about that.”

“Why not?”

“I just…it’s always been unavoidable, I guess I just assumed there was nothing I could do about it. And dad did all that work preparing me to keep up his fight, and I just…I suppose I’ve just gotten used to rolling with it.”

“But you haven’t taken up his fight.”

“No, I guess I haven’t.”

“Why not? What is it you wanted that stopped you?”

I stared out over the water. “When you first decided you wanted to go into biology, into conservation, did you immediately believe you had that option?”

“Of course.”

“That’s the thing. It isn’t an ‘of course.’ It makes sense to you because you come from a different world. Yeah, Pittsburgh lost the steel industry, too, but your family’s money isn’t in steel, is it?” I asked. She shook her head. “You grew up knowing that the world was available to you. That any hurdles you faced were of your own making. That if you just put in the effort and got the grades, you could go to school for whatever you wanted and graduate and find a job in your field and do what you love. And that’s great for you, I’m very happy you’ve been able to do that. But that’s you.” I sighed and got up and walked around a bit to keep my head clear. “I grew up with empty steel mills, surrounded by people whose lives were crushed by someone else’s greed. I come from a place where dreams rust and hopes all rely on finding some way out first. I live in a world where things happen to you because you just happen to be there and no one is coming to help, and no one will know what you’re going through, and people assume you chose it because they don’t know that even if you manage to sell your house you won’t make enough money to go anywhere else. I come from a world where there are no real options, no real solutions, just loss and decay and a life you see on tv but can’t ever imagine being real somewhere else. And on top of all of it, I live in a country that dismisses me for the color of my skin.”

“But, John—”

“Tell me. Tell me where in that you think I was supposed to pick up the lesson that I get to decide my own fate, that I get to make this life be what I want it to be, that I can do anything about great powers that want to give me hassle, other than shut them down when they show up and hope it doesn’t bite me too hard in the ass later?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“You know what I would love? You know what would be great? A shut-off switch. The ability to just get a little peace and quiet from all of it sometimes. To have little pockets of my life that don’t have spirits or ghosts or whatever hanging around in it. But I can’t. I can’t turn it off. I can’t get away from it. Even on vacation, it finds me. You know there’s a water spirit in that reservoir right now that wants to fuck me because she can smell my connection to a powerful river spirit and thinks getting entangled with me will make her stronger?”

“Is that why you got out of the water so quickly earlier?”

“Yes! And she’s still right there at the edge of the water, watching me and occasionally calling for my attention. And when we go back to the cabin, there’s the cult to deal with.” I sat down again, and she reached over and rubbed my shoulder.

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.” She pulled her hand up to my chin and gently turned my face toward her. “But, barring that. If you never find a way to turn it off. What would you want to do?” She watched me intently, waiting for an answer, and I had to think for a little bit about what that answer would be.

“You know, I do enjoy the investigation work I’m doing. Maybe I could do that. Start up my own practice when I have enough experience to get a license, take cases from humans and spirits, deal with real issues.”

“And interact with the spiritual world on your own terms, deciding for yourself whether or not to take a case.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Maybe we could explore that.”

I gave her hand a squeeze, and she smiled. We kissed, then packed up and headed back to the cabin.

My birthday was coming up, and Alice had made arrangements for the two of us, along with Jackie and Rick, to spend a few days at a cabin her family owned or had a timeshare on or something, I don’t remember, up in the Allegheny State Forest. It sounded nice, and she was very excited about the idea, and I liked the thought of getting out and doing something, especially something away from town, so we’d secured the days off. Alice stayed at my place the night before we were supposed to leave so we could all go up together first thing in the morning, but Rick had some appointment in Ohio that he couldn’t break so it was just the three of us who left on time. Rick swore up and down he’d go straight to the cabin from the appointment, and Jackie called to remind him in the morning to have his luggage in the car before he left.

Alice and I took the master bedroom, and Jackie set off to pick one of the two other rooms for her and Rick. I asked Alice if it would be weird for us to have sex in the bed her parents usually used on their family camping trips, and she said “only if you fucking talk about it,” so I dropped the subject. There was a large living room, with a small balcony overlooking it that served as the place for the stairs and the upstairs hallway to meet. The rooms Jackie was looking at, and a bathroom, were up there. Honestly, the place was way larger than I expected, and I was convinced it was only considered a ‘cabin’ because it was made mostly of logs.

“I’m pretty sure this place is as big as my actual house,” I’d commented.

“Well, yeah, it’s meant to house a family,” Alice had answered.

“It’s meant to be a vacation home for a family. I feel like that’s different. Like it should be smaller.”

“Yeah. It is smaller than my family home.” I couldn’t really argue with that.

I cooked us some lunch on a grill on the back porch. Well, she called it a porch. It was a deck. I had friends in Sharon whose entire backyards were the size of this deck. But she’d corrected me when I called it the deck, and I decided I was not going to spend my birthday weekend fighting about rich people semantics with my amazing girlfriend who brought me to a beautiful spot in the woods, so apparently it’s a porch. And it was beautiful. The yard, which had been mowed by someone, sloped down away from the house which ensured that the trees at the end of it were low enough not to block the sight of the rolling hills off in the distance. There were some hiking trails in those woods, Alice said, and an outlook spot down one of them that gave an amazing view of a nearby river. We’d all agreed to check that out tomorrow.

True to his word, Rick showed up a couple hours later. By then we were all out on the porch drinking, and he jumped right in on that. He’d brought some weed, too, and was certain he had enough that we could enjoy a blunt right away and still smoke me up on my actual birthday. Well, we weren’t about to turn that down. So we spent a little while smoking and drinking and carrying on, and I cooked us some burgers on the grill, and we rolled into the cabin a little after dusk and disappeared into our respective rooms.

I was only half awake a few hours later, with Alice asleep and half laying on me, when I was startled by some noises in the woods. I listened for a minute, and thought they didn’t sound natural, so I jumped out of the bed and made my way to the window. I couldn’t see anything in the dark out there.

“Are you okay?” Alice asked, barely coherent.

“I thought I heard something.”

“There’s always noises. It’s a forest.”

“But this sounded different.”

“Everything sounds different in the forest. Come back to bed.”

I looked around again, but the sound had stopped and was definitely distant to begin with, and I had to admit that Alice spent a lot more time in the woods at night than I had. I slipped back into the bed and fell asleep.

I hesitated, put out my cigarette, and leaned forward.

“Lori is…she’s this girl I met, two years ago. We dated most of that year, but it turns out she was being controlled, so Jackie and I had to break her free from that and then she promptly skipped town.” I wrung my hands for a moment, thinking about what to say next, then looked over to Alice. “Jackie told me after her trip to Chicago that she saw Hecate was behind the whole thing, but it didn’t seem like a big deal, you know?”

“No, John, I absolutely do not know,” Alice said, crossing her arms. “Maybe you should enlighten me on why I shouldn’t be concerned about a goddess manipulating people around you in some elaborate power play that she hasn’t given up on.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should be a bit concerned, but. Look, Jackie, she’s been under Hecate’s teaching for a long time. She thinks the world of her, and primarily sees her in the context of being a source of power and information. But that’s not that big a deal! I know how to deal with spirits, I know how to deal with magic. She only has as much power in my life as I give her.”

“But that isn’t true. Did you give her power to manipulate Lori?”

“Yes, dammit!” I pounded my fist on my knee and Alice jumped. We both sat silent for a moment as I rubbed my face. “I didn’t stop it. I didn’t see. I should have seen she was possessed, I know how to do that now, but I didn’t ever think to do it then. I left an opening in my knowledge and she used it.” I leaned back and lit a cigarette. “I failed her, Alice. I failed her, and I played along with what Alethea was doing to her, and I didn’t do anything to help her until it was already so bad. So much worse than it ever should have been.”

“Who’s Alethea?” she asked, softly. “What happened?”

“Alethea was a ghost. She died while she was pregnant and she was obsessive about bringing that baby to term. That was her goal with Lori, to use a body to produce a child. And when…” I hesitated again, took a few more drags, and felt a few tears on my cheeks. “When she lost the baby,” I said, quietly, “she snapped. Tried to kill me. Her grip on Lori weakened and that was when I learned she was there.”

“Oh my God.”

“I’m never letting it happen again. I promise, I learned from what happened. I learned how to never let it happen again. And now that I know Hecate was behind it…I don’t care what she wants from me, Alice.” I turned to face her. “I will never let her have it. I don’t care what she is, I don’t care what I have to do to stop her. No one does that and gets what they want from me out of it.”

“Is this why Jackie is so afraid of her trying to contact you?”

“It’s a lot harder for Jackie to stand against her than it is for me.”

Neither of us said anything for a long while, and then she got up and went downstairs. I waited, because I didn’t know what she was doing, for about a half hour.

By the time Alice woke me, she was fully dressed and had breakfast from Dunkin sitting on my nightstand. She was sitting next to me, drinking her coffee, and poking me until I rolled over.

“What time is it?” I muttered. She looked over at the clock on my dresser.

“Almost noon,” she said. I groaned and pulled myself up to sit against the wall, and she handed me a chai and a bag. “Today is a workout day for you, right?”

“Uh, yeah, why?”

“I want to try something. Tell me, have you ever worked out with someone else? Like at a gym or something?”

“Jackie has hung out and chatted while I was lifting,” I answered, fishing out some hashbrowns from the bag.

“No, I mean, where they were also working out and you could tell how much weight they were lifting. Have you ever spotted someone?”

“Oh. No. Why, you want to get in on it?”

“No, I was just wondering if you had a frame of reference for what people your size and weight generally can lift.”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

“I have!” She hopped off the bed, set the coffee down, and rested her hands on her hips. “You know those tables you moved in the Hudson library normally take two men with some equipment to lift and move?” I shook my head. “I have a theory about this, but I need actual numbers.”

“And that means you need to monitor my workout routine?”

“Not just your workout routine. I need you to push yourself. I need your actual limits. You think you’re up for that today?”

“I’m not up for much of anything until I’ve eaten this sandwich.”

“You and I both know that’s not true,” she said with a wry smile. I chuckled.

“Okay, well. I’m not up for anything outside of this bed until I’ve had my breakfast.” She sat back down and grabbed a second bag, from which she produced another sandwich for herself.

“That’s fine. When you’re ready, we’ll head downstairs. I already have a clipboard with my notes on it waiting there.”

“How long have you been up?”

“Just eat your food.”

It was the weirdest workout I’ve ever had. Dad had, of course, been present when he was teaching me how to do it, and Alice herself sometimes hung around and occasionally her and Jackie would trade commentary, but this was the first time anyone actively checked every single thing I did and checked my heart rate between things and wrote stuff down and sometimes made thoughtful noises without telling me what the hell she was doing. Jackie found the whole thing fascinating, and made a point to hang around and occasionally look over Alice’s shoulder and whisper something to her, which sometimes elicited another thoughtful noise from Alice and more notes. It was, frankly, hard to concentrate with all that going on. I did what she asked, and pushed myself on certain exercises to see where my limit was, and when I was finally done she told me she needed to check and finalize her notes while I got a shower and we could talk afterward. So I went to do that, and when I was done she and Jackie were sitting in the living room waiting for me.

“So,” I said, sitting down and lighting a smoke, “what’s the verdict?”

“Okay, so first off, you lift way more than you should be able to,” Alice said. “I mean, okay, so this isn’t my specialty within biology, but I’ve been looking up numbers for comparison. And there are different classes of ability one can have in weightlifting, so I’m using the ‘advanced’ numbers for you since you’ve been at this for a while.”

“Uh huh. And?”

“And you’re generally lifting much higher weights than those numbers! Your normal routine is almost twice as heavy as the standard for an advanced weightlifter of your size, and your limits are similar.”

“This was all related to a theory, I thought you said.”

“Yes! Okay, so I don’t know if I can account for it physically. I’d have to do a whole battery of tests to be certain about that, but your muscles aren’t more defined and don’t seem more dense than someone with more standard numbers.”

“What are you basing that on?”

“I know what your body feels like, dear. But the point is, and I’d have to check some other factors to be certain, but I was talking to Jackie about the ontological gap, and I think what’s happening is that your spiritual aspect is so closely infused with your physical aspect that it grants you additional physical power. I’d like to compare these numbers to Benedict some time, since he should have more of his spiritual nature infused into his physical nature—”

“And Akshainie?”

“Well, no. I don’t know if Akshainie follows the same rules. She’s a naga, her physical form is generated by her own magic, so it wouldn’t necessarily follow the same biological structures, you know?”

“Nope.”

“Okay well I don’t think her results would help me understand the matter more because she’s fundamentally not human, even when she looks human.”

“Okay.”

“Well!” Jackie said, slapping her knees and then standing. “It’s about time for me to head to work. You two have fun! I’d love to hear more about this when you have more data!” And then she was gone, and Alice was putting her notes aside.

“So what now?”

“Oh, nothing,” Alice said. “I’ll have to determine my testing parameters and what specifically I need to do to see if my theory is correct, which I’m not going to do now.”

“Oh, alright. You wanna go out or something, then?”

“No.” She leaned back, crossed her legs, and rested her hands on her knee. “I want you to tell me about Lori and Hecate.”

I finished my shower and spent a little time checking my hair at the mirror before wrapping the towel around myself and heading down the hall to my room. When I passed the top of the stairs, I could hear Jackie and Alice chatting downstairs. I didn’t know Alice was here already, and made a mental note to hurry up a bit instead of leaving her waiting. She’d been a bit tense ever since England, and I was looking forward to taking her out to the St. Pat’s celebrations downtown with some friends. Hopefully a night of not thinking would help put her at ease. I entered my room and closed the door to find the woman from the alley island, naked, sprawled out on my bed.

“Didn’t you try this already?” I asked, walking past her to open my closet and look for a suitably green shirt.

“I was curious if it was really that useless. Maybe if circumstances were different, if you would react differently.”

“Hecate, was it?” I asked, grabbing a shirt and tossing it beside her on the bed as I went to my dresser. “If that was your goal, you should have tried it when my girlfriend wasn’t sitting downstairs waiting for me.”

“You know full well I can give us all the time in the world,” she said, standing up as a robe materialized on her. “Which I have done, by the way.” I looked at her for a moment, then out the window, where I saw a bird frozen in mid-flight.

“You like recycling your tricks.”

“I like not being rushed by mortals who think their agendas are more important than the will of a god.”

“I guess I could see where you’d get that.” I dropped the towel and grabbed a pair of boxers from the dresser. Hecate straightened up and took a sharp breath. “Oh don’t play coy now,” I groaned, pulling on the underwear and kneeling down to grab some pants from the lowest drawer.

“Is my presence such little concern for you?”

“I am a mortal with an agenda, remember.”

“John Matteson, I would remind you that I am offering you incredible power—”

“Yeah, yeah, power to stand even against gods.” I put on an undershirt and tucked it in before securing my pants. “I decided to start with you.” I brushed past her to grab my shirt, and she grabbed my shoulder and squeezed. It stung, but I refused to show that to her.

“You do not want me as an enemy, Anchor. I can make your life very painful.”

“Why? You think you have some right to boss me around?”

“I have every right!” she screamed, spinning me to face her. I met her gaze and silently slipped my shirt on as she continued. “I am the goddess of liminal beings! You are under my purview, your very existence hinges on my favor, and you dare question what authority I have to command your use of my gifts?”

“If you can take my power away, then do it.” I stood with my arms out, waiting, as she glared at me. “No?” I finally asked. She growled. “I think this story’s a bit more complicated than you want me to believe. And I think you need me more than I need you. Now, as for tonight?” I brought my hands together in a loud clap, focusing all my energy on it, and heard it ripple through the house. Hecate’s robe blew as if in a wind, and the air crackled, and the bird outside my window resumed its flight. “I have somewhere to be.” I turned away from her and reached for the door.

“Mark my words. You will have me, John Matteson, or you will have no one.”

“Next time, you should try something new. I’d be curious what you have to offer besides sex and parlor tricks.” I opened the door and headed downstairs.