Sentinel Green 2.6

Wisteria 2.6

From the backseat I try not to make overt eye contact with either of the girls for too long. Hannah is peering at me from the rearview frequently and Amy is looking out the window, the back of her blonde head to me. I do catch her eying me in the reflection on the glass, though, and I turn to look out my own window as the scenery flashes by.

Hannah pulls the Jeep up and parks it, and then the show is mine. Suddenly I find myself full of questions. Should we get out of the Jeep? If I touch all three girls to bring them to my apartment, but am also touching the Jeep, will it be brought with me? Is it something I can will to stay behind? How the hell does my magical apartment power work!?

Trying not to get too ahead of myself, I decide better safe than sorry. “Okay… um, let’s line up behind the Jeep.” The girls pile out of the car and join me at the back of the vehicle, and I’m faced with the difficulty of having to lay hands on three people when I only have two hands. “Um. Hands in,” I say. “Like we’re about to shout go sports team!” It’s a weak stab at a joke, and Hannah doesn’t seem amused, but Amy gives me a small smile. We toss our hands in the middle of our circle of bodies and I close my eyes.

Okay, no performance anxiety, please—just take us to the apartment. All four of us.

It takes its usual crawling ten seconds, and I can practically feel Hannah’s and Amy’s trepidation as the seconds snail by—but then we are gone.

There’s a little rush of displaced air that ruffles through my hair as I open my eyes. We’re all standing in the same position we left in, grouped in the middle of my living room. I pull my hands back and clear my throat. “So. Here we are,” I say unnecessarily.

Amy peers around, looking up at the ceiling, then turning around to examine the rest of the place. Hannah is looking at me with new eyes, clearly impressed that I wasn’t making this up. “Not bad,” she says. “You’re sure this place is secure?”

“There’s no door, so no one else can get in… so, yeah, pretty sure.”

Maeve speaks up as the other girls look around. “Hannah, this is where he took me after I got trashed by the thing in the valley. We didn’t make it much more than a mile away. If it wasn’t at least secure from monsters, I’d be dead.” I appreciate the vote of confidence from Maeve more than I can say and try to catch her eyes so I can give her a smile.

Hannah doesn’t look too happy, but she nods and sits on my bed. Amy looks like she wants to say something, but then she locks eyes with me. I don’t know what she means by it, but I try to look as genuinely unthreatening as I can, and it seems to work. She closes her mouth and opts to sit by Hannah’s feet, foregoing the chair. Maeve seems to opt to stand as well. Still, I don’t feel much like sitting myself, so I remain standing closer to the closed bathroom door, not at all sure what to do with my hands. I settle for stuffing them in the pockets of my jeans. An uncomfortable, but brief pause takes the room before Maeve speaks up.

“Okay, I guess I’m the one who’s going to talk the most.” We turn our attentions to her and I don’t envy her position right now. “I don’t know how much I have to say is valuable, and how much isn’t, so Hannah, Amy, stop me and ask questions if you need to. Do either of you remember what it looked like?”

Hannah looks, if possible, even more cross. “No. I just heard the noise it made.”

Amy nods, looking a lot more shaken than her counterpart. “It was big, and it had some kind of light spots on it, and a flashlight or something. I didn’t get a real good look at it, but I could tell it wasn’t human and I tried to signal you guys without shouting.”

I frown at that. Flashlight? Now I’m picturing some sort of MacGyvered creation, complete with duct tape and cable ties.

Maeve seems to understand, though. “I’m kinda surprised you didn’t have some kind of signal pre-planned or anything. You’ve been doing this for a while, so I expected a little more… coordination?” I wonder how they’re going to handle this assessment, but what I see isn’t anything like what I expected. I’d assumed they would be annoyed, maybe resentful or offended. That isn’t it at all.

Amy curls up on herself, hugging her knees to her chest, biting her lip. She looks on the verge of tears. Hannah reaches out to put a hand on her shoulder, and there is a pause before she speaks.

“Krystal was the one who planned and passed messages between us.”

I keep quiet, eyes tracking from face to face. Something’s happened here, and recently, from the looks of it. I know that asking for clarification is going to make this more awkward and painful, but if someone’s dead… and it sure sounds like someone’s dead… I likely need to know how it happened. I’m not eager to meet the same fate.

“What… happened?” I ask, softly. I hope it won’t set anyone off, and as much as I want to tack on a disclaimer, a don’t feel like you have to talk if you don’t want to, I don’t.

Amy confides in me, and I find myself blindingly grateful to her for it. “Krystal is… was the third of our team. She was smart and really fast, and knew all kinds of ways to fight monsters. She…” She pauses for a second, gathers herself. “Died a couple nights ago.”

I let my gaze fall to the floor for a moment. What to say? I’m sorry? It seems wholly ineffectual. Before I can figure out what to do, Maeve is talking.

“Car accident. She ran right out into the road and I saw her get hit - it was messy.” She seems to gather herself for a moment. Her voice is different when she speaks next, a deadly, low tone of anger lacing it. “It shouldn't have happened.” I’m trying to figure this out when Maeve finishes her thought, and that cements it in place. “It’s why I’m so new. I’m her replacement.”

I feel something go sideways inside me. It’s an inevitable, irresistible diagonal shift, and I know before I can stop myself that my shock and horror shows all over my face. No. No way. How is this possible?

My eyes fix on Maeve’s face during her explanation, and somewhere, dimly, I wonder if she’ll think I’m just horrified at the idea of seeing a person get hit by a car. But I know better, now. What happened to me, happened to her.

I manage to grapple the stricken, slightly sick look from my face, but it’s hard. Another layer of dread washes over me as I realize the thin ice we’re skating on, here. If Maeve is Krystal’s replacement, that means Puchuu saw Maeve as directly responsible for Krystal’s death—the same way I was when I mowed down my own magical girl. It wasn’t her fault, but at the end of the day, Maeve was driving the car that killed Krystal—and Amy and Hannah have no idea.

I swallow around an uncomfortably dry throat. Say something. “No… it shouldn’t have,” I manage. “But people are going to keep suffering as long as that thing is roaming around.”

What am I saying? It sounds dangerously close to a rallying speech. I don’t want to go fight monsters, special powers or no.

Do I?

But my gaze locks on Hannah’s hand on Amy’s shoulder. It’s a small anchor for her friend, an attempt to comfort her in the face of such sudden, violent loss.

And I can’t help but wonder if the girl I killed had a team. She had to have had friends, or family. I’d been avoiding thinking about it, but now that is all but impossible. And, yeah. Maybe I do want to do something about this.

Hannah locks eyes with me, and they are steely and masking some kind of hard emotion very poorly. I can’t tell if she’s still upset or not—but then it hits me in a wave of understanding. I’ve said the right thing—I can feel that she’s starting to respect me, beginning to wonder if maybe she can rely on me to end this thing that took her friend away.

“He’s right,” she says, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “That sort of answers my next question, which would have been: can we count on you to back us up?”

I nod with no hesitation, which only peripherally surprises me. I’m not a violent or aggressive person by nature, and I’ve never even been in a proper fist fight. I don’t know if it’s just the face of loss before me that’s made this feel more real, or if it’s more—maybe something deep in my genetics has altered and now I want to fight monsters? Either way, I want a part of this. But something flags my attention and I turn to Maeve. “Are you feeling pretty alright?” She may heal fast, but that doesn’t change the fact that just yesterday she looked like she was on death’s door.

Maeve looks as exhausted as I’ve ever seen her. She’d looked a little off a few times when we were regrouping, when she’d retreat into her head. But it’s nothing compared to this. “Yes... and no. I’m okay to fight, but I’m not happy about this whole thing.”

Amy, at least, is ready to leap straight into the fray. She stands, but Maeve raises a hand to her. “Okay, I don’t want to derail the theme music moment here, but all of you still haven’t heard me tell you about what we’re fighting yet. And it’s important.”

I fix my attention on Maeve as she brings up this good point, and we all fall quiet as she takes the floor once more. She begins to pace the kitchen, and the sight of her this agitated has a profound effect on me. I want to do something, to comfort her, but this is not the time.

“It’s big. At least two feet taller than me—and way broader. It’s built like a gorilla—and it looks like it crawled out of the deepest part of the ocean. You’ve probably seen pictures of anglerfish and all those other ugly-looking deep sea fish.”

Oh—it makes sense now. The duct-tape-cable-tie-flashlight image in my head vanishes to be replaced by something a lot less goofy looking, and a lot scarier. I frown slightly and tense a muscle in my jaw.

Maeve continues, in particular addressing Amy. Perhaps she wants to drive the point home that this isn’t something we should dive recklessly into headfirst. “Just like those things, it has its own lights—spots on its body and a lamp in its chest. That’s the ‘flashlight’ beam you saw. And just like those things, it’s got disgusting black flesh covered in bony growths, and a huge set of jaws with translucent, jutting teeth.”

Well, shit. Maeve has a gift for painting a pretty terrifying image. I’m still in it, but with each passing piece of information the situation looks bleaker and bleaker. Plus, I have to remind myself… this thing is responsible for someone as durable as Maeve looking like she took a ride in a blender, though most of that damage was from colliding with my car.

“The important part is what it did to all of us—it made us afraid. It howled and I couldn’t feel anything except terror. It was nothing but the desire to run as far and as fast as possible to get away from something twisted and wrong.” I feel some kind of stirring question in my mind, but still it while she talks. “I managed to shrug it off after a moment or two, but you guys didn’t. And you fled.”

That has a profound effect on the girls. Hannah’s face goes blank, then hurt and angry, and Amy just raises her shoulders closer to her ears and fixes her gaze on the ground. A moment later, Maeve is back-tracking. “Look, guys. Not your fault. It was in your heads, and ‘RUN’ was all I could think initially too. It’s… not your fault I’m resistant or something.”

While Maeve speaks I watch the girls. They’re miserable, guilty… and I wonder what it is about this creature that made a tight-knit team fall apart when they heard it roar. Maeve admits to being afraid, to wanting to run blindly as well, but something was able to break through to her enough to make her stand and fight. I wonder how I’ll handle myself when we encounter it, next. Will I be able to resist it, like Maeve, or will I turn into a yammering wreck and bolt?

Bolt… in any direction, careless of where I’m going…

It hits me in the gut and I suck in a breath. “Guys,” I interject. “That’s—that’s got to be why. I mean, what happened to your friend.” And to the girl I killed, I think, but I don’t voice that aloud. “I can’t imagine any other reason someone that skilled would run straight into traffic. She had to have been fleeing from that thing, too scared to even realize where she was going.”

It shouldn’t, but the realization loosens some of the horrible knot of self-hatred and guilt I’ve been carrying around. I still hit and killed another human being—but there were other factors in play, and now I have something to focus on, a goal, and a place to look for at least partial blame.

“Son of a bitch,” Maeve breathes out. I can hear the slight tremor in her voice—that rage is back. “It makes too much sense. It hit Krystal with so much terror and she must have been too fast for it to catch, but she still ran right into a car.”

Maeve looks over to the girls, watches what they’re doing. They shout, Hannah punches my mattress, shouting, “Dammit!” But all I can do is watch Maeve.

It seems like a lifetime before I tear my gaze to the other girls, and Amy is standing now. She doesn’t look like the Amy I have come to know in the past hour or so—she is transformed, a girl possessed.

Her words send a chill of excitement up my spine and buoy me like nothing else.

”We’re going to go find that thing, and end it. Tonight.”