Around 8 AM, while in the middle of the silent episode about Onion, with a quarter of a box of cereal left, Greg received a text message from Ayden, and he paused the show.

  “told chuck bt mnstrs,” the message said.

  Greg grunted and nodded, and then hit py again. A couple minutes and several antics passed before he got another message.

  “he blvs. i’m lucky.”

  “Yeah you are,” Greg said out loud, and then put his bowl down to use both hands on the phone while Onion was frozen on his ptop screen doing something questionable.

  “What say he bout Cass?” Greg sent back.

  “says we shd talk to hr lot mor,” Ayden replied. “liek lot lot. so she knos we care. listn, tlk, be firends, & do sht.”

  Greg sighed. Ayden really should slow down and just type full words, he thought to himself. Then he took the time to send, “So. Remind her what it means to be human. Right?”

  “yeh.”

  “And if it moves her to cut off Felicity somehow, good. And if she can’t, at least we have more memories with her,” he actually choked up a little bit writing that.

  It took a while for the response to come, and when it did it was a repeat of the st one, “yeh.”

  Greg had got a real kick out of working with Ayden, and considered him a pretty good friend at this point. But Cassiopeia Samaras had genuinely been his favorite coworker ever. Not so much because of how well she had meshed with the job and made the pce better in any practical sense. She wasn’t exceptional in that way, and he didn’t care about that so much.

  Just, every time he’d watched her go about her day, or just doing something small that required her momentary attention, he’d felt optimistic about life.

  She was a contradiction at times that really showed the intensity of her passions, too. She loved monsters, and talked about some of the most gruesome myths from around the world, relishing the absolute worst of them with a naughty glee that was rivaled only by murder mystery and true crime fans. And yet, she hated, hated, hated horror movies and T.V. shows. The slightest bit of blood on the screen and she’d turn away. And she was terrified of the jump scares, even when they didn’t happen.

  She was also so conscientious about the sensibilities of others that she wouldn’t talk about her favorite monsters with just anybody. If a stranger drew her into an infodump, or a hypeshare as she called it, she’d interrupt herself to check in. She’d ask them how much they wanted to hear, and expertly tailor her descriptions to fit.

  And always, there was some enamel or vinyl pin of some little cartoon monster on her person. Usually, it was something designed by an independent artist. Something so good that people would ask where it was from, and she’d just grin so big, leaning forward, eager to tell them about her rare find at a convention or free comic book day.

  He was also one of the very few people who knew that she’d been writing a series of stories she intended to put into a book, sort of strung together like a novel, but each one a little vignette of esoteric folk horror.

  It wasn’t like she was dying, really.

  Except that it was.

  Dying of her own special interest. And only a shift in a force of wills might save her.

  And if it was all real, she might, just might attain actual immortality of a sort.

  He hoped.

  He feared.

  It was a little like when his sister had volunteered to work at McMurdo in Antarctica, but so much worse.

  It was maybe like when his grandfather got Alzheimers and faded away nonsensically.

  He still couldn’t wrap his mind around it in any meaningful way.

  Charlie had stayed home from school that day to hang out with Ayden all day, and he appreciated it so much. They’d talked for a couple hours, and then drifted off to sleep on Ayden’s bed together for a bit, only to be woken up by sunrise at 7:14. And then they’d picked up their conversation pretty much where they’d left off.

  Poking at half a Dutch baby and some bacon, trying to blink itch from his eyes, Ayden had listened to his boyfriend talk about mental illness, spirituality, and what they’d all seen the day before. And then Charlie had segued back into what to do about Cassy.

  There was still a little kernel of fury and terror in his sor plexus, but he was feeling so much more calm and reasonable in the daylight, and figured he could probably get some decent sleep ter in the day, after they’d resolved this discussion. And Charlie’s presence and wisdom were no small part of all of that.

  Then, when it had seemed like Charlie had made his point, Ayden realized that Greg needed to be in on this, and had messaged him, and there’d been that short exchange of agreements.

  Greg’s observation had echoed Charlie’s, of course, but the way Greg had put it, making it shorter to fit into a text message even if he spelled everything out, had really seized that knot of anguish and wrenched it.

  He’d broken down sobbing, not so much for Cassy, whom he did care about, but for himself.

  He’d been a disappointment to his parents in almost every way, while Cassy was still pretty close to hers. He’d rejected their Catholicism before he’d turned twelve, and had to do it repeatedly after that. And now he was a gay grocery clerk, and not their precious little girl studying to become a doctor or something. About the only thing he’d done that they approved of was to get a boyfriend, but it was under the wrong circumstances and the wrong kind of boy, like he was himself.

  Shit, picking the name Ayden for himself, the most cliché of trans masc names that had actually genuinely felt right to him anyway, had been a bold sp in their faces. At least it made him giggle occasionally.

  In the vacuum left by his parents’ influences, their religion and supposed culture, he’d struggled to find something meaningful for himself.

  For a brief time in college, he’d pyed with studying Shintoism, but it really didn’t belong to him any more than Catholicism had. He ended up settling on a sort of metaphorical agnostic neo-animism he’d made up himself, where the ‘spirits’ of everyday objects and natural things were mental symbols of their history and meanings.

  He’d felt pretty comfortable with it at that point, even if it was a bit hollow. The ck of rituals and traditions actually appealed to him most, because they weren’t imposed on him by anyone else, and he could choose how to honor the world in his own way moment to moment.

  And his love of dinosaurs fit neatly into it, too! They were, after all, just ancient spirits held in the remains of long dead animals, speaking to humans through their accidentally preserved traces.

  But nobody really cared about this spirituality. There wasn’t anyone to talk to about it.

  Until he met Cassy. It resonated with her love of monsters in a fun way, and she just loved trading information with him.

  But now, he was facing the loss of his connection to Cassy through what appeared to be the real world marriage of something like animism and something like monsters. The embodiment of the combination of their two special interests was literally eating her alive, if he believed it.

  And how could he not after what happened to him yesterday?

  And it wasn’t just this that gutted him. It was just the test straw on his camel’s back. Being who he was, in the intersections of his identities, and those that had never fit him, in this particur world, was already devastatingly exhausting. And he was now having to deal with this while facing the need to find work.

  He’d just been fired, and for most people that was enough reason to break down over breakfast the next day. But he also had. All Of This.

  Charlie picked up his chair and brought it around to set it down closer to Ayden, and wrapped an arm around him quietly and let him cry.

  Around nine ‘o clock, he was eating the st cold bite of breakfast while rubbing a tear away when his phone buzzed with a message.

  It was from Cassy’s phone.

  It read, “I can’t reach Synthia. When you see her next, tell her I’m sorry. - Felicity”

  What. The. Fuck?

  Here’s what the dog saw.

  After having his attention drawn by the sound of hoofbeats, he looked to the West just in time to see a weird and fantastical horse leap full and clear over the fence on the far side of the property.

  This horse was brilliant, in that it glowed in his sight, with mane that flowed like fme. Its tail was long and thin, with another tuft of fme on the end of it. Streamers of steam, or something slightly more tangible, flew and trailed from its fred nostrils, and its teeth were as sharp as a wolf’s. And as it danced and pranced in the field where it found itself, a long sharp horn gleamed in the sun, jutting from its forehead.

  The dog really had no idea what it was nor the significance of its appearance, other than it really wasn’t supposed to be there. So he decided to let it know it should go away, and alerted his pack to its presence by getting up and barking a lot.

  He ran to the fence nearest himself, and dodged along it, toward the weird horse, until he found the best pce to scramble under it. And then he made a bee-line toward the intruder, hackles raised, tail wagging, ears back, snarling and hissing and barking and spraying spittle everywhere. He was glorious. At least half as glorious as the monster he faced.

  He was such a good dog.

  And the creature dodged away from him, and then circled him, and infuriatingly no one came to see.

  So he dutifully kept at it and followed when the horse decided to bolt toward the barn.

  Honestly, I’m pretty gd he kept his distance throughout it all. He was a smart dog, and I didn’t really need to worry about him. To the ranch, he was just a smart arm who knew how to take care of himself. To me, he was admirable, and I would have mourned his loss.

  Because, what happened next would have killed him if he’d been dodging between my feet.

  Smming my hooves into the barn doors took them down like they were cardboard, while he barked and barked and barked several yards behind me. And then I charged into the darkened theater of the building, where the stalls should have been.

  Instead, the pigs, or hogs – no, they were boars – big bristly boars with fucking huge bat wings were roaming free and ready to surround me.

  The building was way bigger on the inside and, aw shit, I’d barged right into someone’s domain.

  Chord received a message from Sewer Teeth. It was a simple communication using pure thought over arbitrary electromagnetic waves, just as emanants had been using since the dawn of time, but with a ‘tight beam’ as the humans liked to say in their T.V. shows. It was expertly aimed at him where he y waiting just within the horizon.

  Sewer Teeth said, “The livestock have her.”

  Chord was pleased. That was his favorite part of his trap. Synthia being stuck there first meant that Sewer Teeth would have no trouble with her afterward, if she survived that stage. He could always get more livestock, but Sewer Teeth was special.

  Well, the livestock were special now, too, but for a different, far more repeatable reason.

  “I can’t reach Synthia. When you see her next, tell her I’m sorry. - Felicity”

  Greg stared at the message, his brow aching from being held so tight for too long.

  He massaged it furiously.

  Did this message mean that Felicity had decided to take his dare? Or some kind of opposite of that?

  If he messaged back, would she see it first, or would Cassy?

  Fuck it.

  He furiously typed back, “What do you mean by that, you goddamn monster?”

  Ayden received a message from Greg saying, “We need to check on Cassy. In person. I’m on my way.”

  He gnced at Charlie and showed him the message.

  Charlie nodded.

  theInmara