Trying to condense down how many works I have on the masterlist, but that means longer multiple scene posts. Do y'all prefer more shorter snippet posts, or fewer posts with longer/more scenes?
Masterlist
~~~
“I’ve been out of the game too long.” Myra slumps in the passenger seat of the car, rubbing her head. “I’d forgotten how utterly useless informants are.”
Harriet hums from the backseat. She’s got her laptop open, the soft glow illuminating her face. Milo is sitting on the opposite side in the dark, staring out the window.
Bird has her gaze fixed on the road. Most roads would be empty at this hour of the night, but there was still a good amount of traffic around here. Most of the clubs in this area were owned by the Torchlights, a cell notorious for holding the most egregious parties behind the club curtains at all hours of every day.
“He knows who we’re looking for,” Bird mutters. “He said she wants us to ‘figure it out for ourselves’. The fake-out said something similar at the Blood Jacker’s pit.”
“Yeah, but who is she?” Myra grumbles. She pulls her mask down and frowns at Bird. “After that letter and the dumb informant, it’s obvious-”
Myra’s complaints are interrupted by the ringing of a phone. Bird picks it up and glances at it. It’s not their personal phones, but the encrypted one.
Unknown Number
“Hare, track it?” Bird says as she swipes answer. Only a very few people outside of the team had the encrypted number, and they were all saved in the phone.
The line is silent at first. The car waits in anticipatory silence. Then, just as Bird moves her thumb to the end call button, there’s static.
The sound of a crowd builds like a steady wave.
Cheering, roaring, chanting, voices echoing like a thousand feet marching.
Trial of blood! Trial of blood! Trial of blood!
The sounds grows and grows until it’s almost unbearable. West and Myra have their hands clasped over their ears. Harriet is frantically typing, trying to push through the sound. Bird pulls the car over into a parking lot and stares at the phone in disbelief.
Her hands are tight around the wheel, but her palms are slick with sweat. Trial of Blood. The same trial the informant had mentioned? Something else?
The line goes dead, and the car is left in ear-ringing silence. Only the low growl of the car engine and the occasional passing of traffic.
“Message received,” Milo says dryly. Bird can hear his foot tapping against the mat, contrasting the unbothered expression she sees in the mirror.
Bird drops the phone into the cupholder and leans her head back against the head rest. Harriet is still typing in the back. The sound of the keyboard felt too loud, now.
Harriet’s typing is sharp and fast, but it’s only a moment before she slams the laptop shut with a huff of frustration. “That shouldn’t be possible. No one should be able to cut us off, not like that.”
The leader pushes the phone down and closes the cupholder, like that would cut off the lingering weight of the call.
Myra turns in her seat to look at her. “But someone did. And we don’t know who.” She rubs her forehead harder, like the sound had burrowed itself into her brain.
Bird puts the car back in gear and makes the turn onto the main road. Her chest is tight, the city lights ahead hazy in the windshield. Whoever she was, she knew their number. Their signals. Potentially their names, if she wanted.
This was someone more unpredictable and dangerous than anyone Bird had faced with the team yet.
~~~
“I’m just saying-”
“-You’ve been ‘just saying’ for the past hour,” Myra snaps. “We get it!”
Bird’s eyelid is twitching. The tension in the room is thick, like something lodged deep in the throat. She can hear the eye roll Laura gives Myra.
She rolls her shoulders, before turning to face the room.
“Alright, let’s just start over,” she says, waving her hand. A couple people mutter protests, but no one speaks up to be heard. “We’re getting nowhere with this. Let’s talk about the phone call.”
“Talk?” Jake asks. He leans forward, arms folded tight across his chest. “Bird, that was a direct threat. They know our numbers, how to get past our encryption. Maybe even our location. We should be moving bases tonight.”
“Paranoid much?” Milo drawls, slouched so far down in his chair he looks boneless. “It was noise and theater. Scare tactics. Relax.”
Ridge sets his elbow on the table and leans his head into his hand. “You can never be too paranoid, Milo. I can’t tell you how many paranoid people used to walk into my hospital because they felt the smallest bit of pain, and found out something major was wrong with them.”
Milo shoots a glare across the table, but a few are nodding in silent agreement.
Bird sets both hands on the table and purses her lips. She glances around the room. Maybe it was a smart idea to move bases tonight, but to where? They didn’t have any sort of backups available. And moving would leave them vulnerable, anyways.
Piper, who’s perched on the edge of her chair, raises her hand. “Sorry if I’m like, the only one not following here, but what trial? Like, a pit fight? A test? Are we the trial?”
The room goes still at that. Only Harriet continues without pause. She’s got an earbud in and hasn’t said anything the entire meeting, Bird isn’t sure if she’s even listening or not.
“Good question,” Harriet replies. Her reading glasses reflect a dozen open tabs. “I’ve been running cross-checks since I got the signal un-jammed. There are whispers in older Blood Jacker chatter. Phrases like ‘champions of blood’ and ‘witch trials’. Always tied to Red Ring pit fights.”
Bird doesn’t like the sound of any of it. Piper made a good point. They very well could be the trial. The phone call had seemed like a summons, of sorts. Myra had taken the letter-the invitation, as it was described-and it had only been a day before they got the phone call.
Raya picks up a pen and taps it on the notebook in front of her. “It’s like pouring boiling water down an ant hill,” she says softly. “They’re trying to put pressure on us and flush us out. I think we should stay, for the time being.”
“I agree,” Myra says with a nod. “But we should probably have a backup ready, just in case. Anyone opposed?”
No one speaks up. Even Jake seems somewhat agreeable with the decision. Bird looks over at a map of the city hung on the wall.
Every spot that was a known pit was marked with a red pin. Clubs were marked with blue, gang and cell territories were circled and marked in black pen. There’s still a corner of the map unmarked, the top right. They hadn’t had time to send a recon team out there yet, as it was fenced off and heavily guarded from every angle.
“I just think,” Nate begins, pulling her from her thoughts, “That if we want to find anything, we outta get our hands dirty.”
“He’s got a point,” Laura says over the sighs and groans. “To know how the pits work, we gotta be in the pits.”
Will shakes his head quickly. “Nope. Absolutely not. You want a big red target on your back, that’s how you get one.”
Nate punches his hand into his fist, grinning. “You just have no love for the game, Willy.”
“I want to be on the front lines as much as the rest of you,” Jake growls, “But even I don’t agree with joining the pits. We’d be stooping to their level.”
The room splits in two. Nate leans forward, elbows on his knees, practically vibrating with the idea. Laura mirrors him, that wild light in her eyes. On the other side, Will’s jaw is locked, his arms crossed like stone, while Jake looms in the middle, caught between the fire and the frost.
Bird pulls her chair over and sits down. Sometimes, it was better to let the wick burn a bit before snuffing it out. Something productive usually came out of it, if you knew how to listen.
Ridge speaks up again. “The pits will chew you up. We’ve seen enough bodies to prove it.”
“Yeah, yeah, doom and gloom,” Piper says, propping her feet up on the table. “But admit it—you’re all a little curious. What’re they hiding down there that we haven’t already seen?”
Harriet doesn’t look up from her laptop. “Statistically speaking, you’d have a better chance of surviving a plane crash than lasting in a pit fight. I’m not recommending it.”
“Not recommending?” Nate smirks. “So you’re not saying no.”
Bird’s fingers drum against the armrest of her chair, a steady rhythm. When the bickering reaches its loudest point, she stands once again.
“We’re not stepping into the pits.” Her voice cuts through everything, calm but firm. “Not yet. If this mystery person wants blood, she’s not getting ours. We play smarter than that.”
The silence that follows is thick—half frustrated, half relieved. No one argues, but she knows better by now than to not expect someone to follow up this meeting with a stupid decision.
The council voted to ban it in public areas and deem it a tobacco product, which I don't understand," Keller said. "The FDA, the federal government, the ATF, the state of Colorado — none of them have deemed it a tobacco product. Some of these things only have water and flavoring in them, and probably half our customers don't even use the nicotine ones
Nate Keller owner of Game Trader in downtown Brighton
Rex scowled heavily at the other man, stepping back as he pushed him. God, he was acting like a little bitch. Stubborn people were the most annoying ones he knew. Given the absolute bullheadedness in his Kith, or whatever Nic claimed they were called, he should maybe have picked up a few skills for dealing with them, but instead Rex just called them names and rolled his eyes a lot. But this man was outright lying to him, and it was starting to get really grating. “Fine,” he snapped. “Fine. If that’s what you’re going to go with, explain why the fuck your fucking apartment is lit up like a fucking beacon. I could feel the soul you have hiding here from outside the city limits. And since it didn’t fuck off the moment I got here, it’s a good fucking bet that you have it anchored in some way.” He shot the man an absolutely infuriated look. “That makes you a witch. Or… something. I don’t know what the fuck you are, but it’s not okay. Get it?”
He gritted his teeth. “You can’t just fuck around with this stuff! Maybe it looked cool to you when I dragged you to the Other, but when you let a bodiless soul just fucking lurk around near you to gather power, it could get more powerful than you. Do you wanna get fucking possessed, have your own soul crushed into nothing by the dead person who’s taken you over until it vanishes?” Rex threw his hands up in the air. “I don’t know what the fuck even happens to souls that get crowded out by an intruder. You might never fucking exist again. Is that what you want? I’d fucking leave you to it, except this is my job, so I can’t. Now that we’re clear on that, can you stop acting like I’m some fucking moron? You’rethe one who can’t fucking sense what’s in here, not me.”
Rex threw himself down into a chair, glaring at the other man. Despite the fact that they were about the same height, he looked far smaller. Where Rex spread out, knees apart and hands splayed irritably, leaning back, he tucked himself up into a ball. His legs were drawn up to his chest and he looked away like a kid, like Marie the last time he’d talked to her, before she fucking killed herself. Her son must be about seven now. Damn. Rex hadn’t seen him since he faked his own death, hadn’t felt a shred of guilt over it. That kid – Blue, or whatever the fuck his name was – was just as fucked as they all were. It ran in the blood. Just figured that he’d run up against someone like that too. Exactly what Rex needed.
“If that’s what you fucking want.” He had to restrain himself from yelling at the other man. By nature, Rex did not like strong displays of emotion. Yelling, snarling, hitting, none of it was any fun for him at all. It just made him tense, feel as though something dark and unpleasant had curled up in his stomach and was dragging on him. Rex hated it. But god, was he pissed off. “If you won’t tell me your name and you’re not gonna tell me what you’ve been doing, I’ll start at the fucking beginning.” He raised an eyebrow at him, taking a conscious deep breath the way he’d been told to do when someone was irritating him. That just made him more irritated, usually. But when Rex spoke again, his voice was more level, surer. “Tell me when you get bored.”
It didn’t matter that “fuckwit,” or whatever the fuck his name was, wasn’t looking at Rex. Honestly, Rex didn’t care. He couldn’t leave until he got this sorted out, so they both might as well make the best of it. If the other man wanted to act like a sulky child, he fucking could, but Rex would ignore him. “So you know what the Other is. You’ve been there. It’s where people go after they die. The things you saw, giant fucking guards? Look like the mutant babies of rhinoceruses and monster trucks? They’ve always been in the Other. They’re not dead people. The other things, they are dead people. Souls don’t look like you did in life. Not necessarily. The more fucking shitty stuff you do, the more you’re warped by it. Killers, rapists, people who beat their kids – they don’t fucking look human and they never will again. Dreamers might grow fucking wings. It depends. Those are most of the people in the Other, but they have to be tagged before they can be let go, because it’s a fucking bureaucracy in there. Like the DMV but a million times worse. Don’t do bad shit while you’re alive because when you die, you’ll be a fucking mutant.” Rex shrugged, snorting. “At least you won’t go to hell.
“Most souls can get to the Other on their own. Or at least half of them. I don’t fucking know. I know that I have some to pick up every day, and that I only take care of a quarter of the world. There are different points where the divide is weaker than others. Lost souls are drawn to those. But if they spend too long on the planet, they get too fucking strong. They start to cross back. You know all that horror movie shit?” Rex looked back at him, raising his eyebrows. “That stuff happens. Bleeding cuts or walls or whatever the fuck ever, shit moving, possession. They’re trying to come back. That’s why whatever you’re fucking with needs to go to the Other. It’ll be fucking bad if it doesn’t.” Rex stared at him for a moment, mouth twisted. “I don’t even fucking know how you got it here. I’ve never heard of a human being able to talk to or summon the dead. Of course, I’ve never heard of a human getting tugged over to the fucking Other either. But just ‘cause I showed you the fucking dead doesn’t mean you need to be fucking with them.” He leaned back, scowling. “Can you stop pretending you don’t know what the fuck’s going on now?”
Nate had been accused of a lot of things in his lifetime. From the time he was old enough to understand, he had been accused of being a slut and a liar, someone who twisted the truth and reality or attention, someone who wanted and needed and demanded they be the center of attention. He had been accused of hating his father. He had been accused of trying to hurt his mother. He had been called frigid and icy, flighty and a tease. He had never been accused of being a witch before.
“I’m bored now,” he said the moment Rex shut the fuck up. Nate had always considered himself a patient person, but he was done. He was done with being accused and talked down to by someone that was far more fucked up than he had ever been. He still wasn’t entirely sure of anything since the week before, but he did know that he didn’t want any part of it. What he had seen had felt like the time before he had medication to help him through the darker times, when everything would eclipse and he couldn’t breathe around the shadows on the walls with faces. Nate had grown used to them over time, become less afraid, but after years of having them shoved down and kept in a little box, it was like being a kid again. And he really didn’t like it.
Pushing a hand through his hair, he forced himself to shift and look at Rex. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I honestly have no idea what the hell you’re talking about, but you’re either too stubborn or too fucking stupid to listen to me. I’m not a witch or a – a whatever you think I am, okay?” Nate dropped his hand from his hair and settled his palm onto his knee. Tired and achy, all he wanted to do was climb back into bed and sleep until he had enough energy to even leave the apartment, but instead he was sitting with a man who could materialize inside rooms where doors weren’t close by. He couldn’t believe his crappy luck. He must have been Hitler in a past life, or even Gengis Khan. Someone who did something very naughty and deserved to suffer through all his lives. “I’m a normal guy. I didn’t even believe in ghosts or ghouls or evenGod until last week. Do you understand that? Is it getting through your massively thick skull? Has that fucking registered with your pea-sized fucking brain?”
He was mad. He was more than mad. Nate had been patient, he hadn’t panicked or screamed when Rex had just popped into existence, and he thought that was more than Rex deserved. His entire personality was throwing off Nate’s balance. Hell, his entire existence was upsetting his own, and there was nothing that he could do, because apparently Rex didn’t care that Nate had zero understanding of what he was being accused of. Inhaling sharply, he tugged his legs closer to his chest, wrapping an arm loosely around them as he watched Rex suspiciously. He didn’t trust him and he didn’t trust that he wouldn’t pull something weird – like making the walls bleed or whatever. “That’s very nice and all for you, but I’m not doing whatever it is you keep blathering on about,” he said, tone even despite the urge he had to start yelling again. “All I know is I tripped last week, stumbled into you, ended up in some really fucked-up Hellmouth and then you told me to forget about it. I haven’t even touched that memory since we last saw each other. So just take a Goddamn breather and maybe process that bit of information so we can get on with this conversation.”
His fingers tightened on his knees, his nails biting into his leg as he watched him. This entire situation was getting completely out of hand. It wasn’t as if Nate considered himself an unreasonable person, and considering the circumstances, he thought he was doing pretty good. He hadn’t gone into another psychotic break and he hadn’t completely melted down because of Rex’s appearance in his life, even though he thought himself well within his rights to. Normal people weren’t supposed to handle monsters and creatures from B-Grade horror movies that looked a lot more real when up close and personal. Normal people weren’t supposed to be calm and collected and just accept horror stories. Nate had always considered himself a pretty normal person despite his mental illness, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Eyeing Rex distastefully, he shifted in his seat, watching him with caution. Maybe he would get lucky and Rex would just evaporate into thin air and leave him alone.
“Walls bleeding,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head and closing his eyes. He couldn’t believe that this was happening to him. There were things that he could take, but Nate had limits, and he was at his breaking point. His quota for shitty things that happened to him was filled for the rest of his life, even if hehad been Gengis Khan. Childhood trauma was one thing. Seeing things on the walls that weren’t really there was another. Fucking monsters was not part of his quota and it wouldn’t be. “Check the freaking apartment if you don’t believe me, but I’m not playing with anything. There’s nothing going on between me and the Other, all right?” Nate opened his eyes, keeping his eyes on Rex. “Are we clear on that yet?”
The entire conversation was at a standstill and Nate wasn’t willing to go any further until Rex accepted it. Witches and ghosts and things like that had never interested Nate, aside from the few thriller movies he’d seen over the years. He had enough terror to deal with on a daily basis, sometimes being incapable of even leaving his bedroom from the paranoia or locking himself in the bathroom and curling up in the tub, eyes screwed shut while he waited for his head to lock down and return to normal. He didn’t need anymore things to make him jump in the middle of the night. Every little thing that he thought he saw out of the corner of his eye was a potential hallucination, a potential delusion on the run. Even conspiracy theory movies set his teeth on edge, made his hands shake and teeth dig into his lip to steady himself. He’d had enough paranoid delusions to last a lifetime. The idea that someone was out to get him, that the men in black or whoever were after him, wasn’t something a normal person was equipped to deal with. Hot guys with tattoos and nice eyes and nicer arms weren’t exactly in the schedule.
Rex hadn’t felt this much like he was talking to someone who didn’t speak his language in years. Twenty-two of them, to be exact, and god, when the hell had he gotten old? He didn’t look it, never would, but if he was aging on the appropriate timeline he would be disgusting and wrinkled at this point, more unpleasant than he wanted to contemplate. He had no desire to get old, that was supposed to be the upside of this whole immortal kick, and he supposed it was. He could fuck whoever he wanted pretty much, attractive and cocky as he was. Older men wouldn’t turn down if he offered, and even the twinky little teenagers just coming into their adulthood as fags bit their lips when they looked at him. Rex’s gaze always skated right over those children. He wasn’t interested in kids. Youth and naïveté were no turn on for him – when he wanted to fuck someone into a mattress, he was far more interested in steady, sure hands and adult experience than someone who might cry when he came or attempt to touch Rex after sex was over. It didn’t change the fact that he’d been frozen while he was still young enough to appeal to them, old enough to be dangerous and commanding, young enough that the bad boy impression still worked for him.
So yeah, the sex was an upshot. The monotony of every day, the incessantly being careful in case someone realized that hey, this man isn’t aging, the absolutely horrifying dullness of picking up souls and dealing with them was the downside. And now this. No, it wasn’t the first time Rex wondered if the exchange had been worth it. He didn’t so much mind everyone he knew dying around him. What the hell was the point of them all anyway, when they just perpetuated the fuck upedness of his family and had fucking incestuous little brats? He did mind doing the same thing into the rest of forever. While this wasn’t the same, Rex didn’t want it any more than if it had been. His only interest in this man was in shoving him down and fucking him, maybe not letting him come so that he could wrap his mouth around his cock and get him off that way afterwards, if it was a nice one. But instead he had to put up with a lying witch or sorcerer or worse – a soul that had escaped detection so long it could feign human, though he doubted that was it. If it had been, he would have been unable to miss him last week, and then he’d only been an unwanted, idiot human who careened into Rex like he didn’t know what to do with his own feet. And now… now, Rex didn’t know. Didn’t know what he was, what he’d done, only that some sort of balance was probably very screwed up and he was never going to hear the end of it. And this guy wasn’t even helpful.
“Listen, fuckwit.” Rex leaned closer to him, until their faces had entirely too little distance and he didn’t even care, too incensed to see a problem with it. “You may think this is all just a little game, but you have no idea what the fuck you’re messing with. Or at least I fucking hope you do, because if you’re fucking getting into this on purpose, absolutely fucking nothing is going to help you and I’d suggest removing your fucking brain if you had one. You want me to give you directions? Here’s one: since you obviously didn’t even fucking try to forget, no matter what I said, remember.” Rex sneered, one lip curling, his fingertips digging into the wall he leaned against in frustration. “Is that better? Will you stop playing fucking dumb now?”
Apparently not. Groaning, Rex leaned away from him. He had too much extra energy. He’d never been the type to hit a person, never throwing the first punch or shoving another boy up against the lockers, though he was certainly tall enough to do so, if not quite so bulky as some of the serious athletes, he was neither skinny or twinky. If he’d been the type to hit people, though, this man would be the first on his list, because he was really trying Rex’s patience. Taking a few irritated steps, he whirled back on him. “You wanna talk about unwelcome? You think I fucking wanted to end up here? I step into the fucking Other after a soul and get you instead? You’re the one who fucking called me here, though I figure that wasn’t what you wanted.” Fuck, the feeling of a soul lingering wasn’t even going away. Normally they fled when they sensed him. Souls didn’t have nearly so much of a range as Rex did, couldn’t tell he was coming until he was practically on top of them, but the fighters, the ones that had gotten as strong as this one and wanted to break back through into life rather than surrendering to the inevitability of death should never have stuck around. If he’d managed to bind it into his body or something equally mind-numbingly stupid, it might be worth it to just break his traditional pacifism and kill him. It certainly wasn’t a moral value to avoid it, more just a personal preference, but that could be overcome for someone who made this much trouble, and was such a fucking pain in the ass about it too.
“You’ve seen me vanish into thin fucking air, appear out of it in your fucking living room, and you thinkI’m the crazy one?” Rex snorted. “News flash, you’re either fucking hallucinating – you’re not, or this is real – as you already fucking know. So will you stop pretending to be so fucking stupid and just work with me here?” They weren’t getting anywhere. Rex gave him a hard, unkind stare for a moment before reaching out to grab his wrist, hauling him none too gently back towards the living room. They could have this conversation in the bedroom, he supposed, but it would be intimate. He didn’t want intimacy. He wanted to sort this shit out, return whatever fucking soul was hanging around here to the other, and then shove someone down and fuck him until he was less pissed off. Rex shoved the man down on his couch, going for a random nearby chair and throwing himself in it, glaring. “Right. Let’s start from the beginning. What the fuck is your name?”
“Are you fucking insane?” Nate snapped, putting all his energy into shoving at his chest again, jaw set in defiance and anger as he glared at Rex. He was about as tall as Rex was, but he had more muscle on him, which meant that if they got into a physical fight – and, dammit, was he really losing his mind? — he would probably be the one to lose. Nate had never been one for being physical and even in high school when he got shoved against the lockers he hadn’t retaliated. Fighting and ending up bruised and battered, worse for wear, wasn’t something that Nate wanted to deal with when he had been trying to skate by as the weird kid who was two years younger than everyone else. It had stuck with him through his years. “I still have no idea what the fucking you’re going on about!”
Nate tipped his jaw up, glaring at him. He didn’t want this. In fact, this hadn’t even come close to being something that he had thought would happen to him this week. He had just wanted to get out this sickness that was dragging him down and making it harder for him to concentrate on anything aside from sleeping, maybe get a few sketches in if he were feeling up to it, and then go about his life as if he hadn’t been dragged to some greyscale world where the monsters his brain conjured up in his sleep looked oh-so-real. Logically, he knew that he wouldn’t be forgetting about it any time soon, but Nate had hopes that maybe it would seep out of his head as the time passed on, that maybe he would forget about it the way he forgot about most trauma. Then again, he was usually triggered by something stupid, like a noise or a scent, and then it would just become a mix up of anger, hurt and confusion. And he could heap the blame entirely on Rex without feeling an ounce of guilt. If there was one thing that Nate had learned in his decade-plus years in therapy, it was that sometimes he wasn’t at fault for things. This was definitely one of those times.
The distinct urge to strike out against Rex was swelling in his chest, building in every breath that he took in with slow precision. He had always thought himself to be a very patient person, but Rex was seriously trying him. Everything that he was saying was pointing the blame in Nate’s direction, and he refused to have it. This was most certainly not Nate’s fault, given that he had no clue what he was still ranting on about.“When will you get it through your thick skull?” he demanded, forcing himself to draw on energy that he didn’t truly have as he straightened his spine. “I have no clue what you’re talking about! At all! I’m playing dumb with you, because I actually have no fucking idea what the hell is going on here! I stumble into you last week, I end up in some really fucking weird place that I’m almost sure you called the Other, then I get dragged out of it and you tell me to forget about. So I do what any normal and sane person would do – I fucking rationalize it as a one-off and forget about it. Then you show up in my apartment like you fucking own the place and call me a witch.”
His lips pressed into a thin line as he refused to back down. He didn’t care what Rex was or wasn’t, because he had already classified him as a definite non-hallucination. There was a man standing in his living room that wasn’t of this world. Nate was sure of it. And if he wasn’t…well, there were always different medications that he could try, maybe one of those new antipsycotic injections that his psychiatrist had suggested just a month ago. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about regulating his doses if he went in once a week to be shot up with antipsychotics to keep his brain from working overtime and drawing up things that weren’t there. Nate’s mouth opened to spout off something close to indignation when he felt Rex’s hand wrap around his wrist and tug him along. He yanked back automatically to get away, but either he was weaker than he had thought or the sickness clinging to his skin was bringing him to an all time low. Scowling, he stumbled forward, trying to pick up the pace in his legs so not to be dragged by Rex and his stupid fucking ideas of what a witch was.
Shoved onto the couch, Nate sprawled back, digging his elbows into the cushy backing and glaring at Rex. His head hurt more than it had a minute ago, and all he wanted to do was climb into his bed and sleep off whatever virus had infected him. It was like a leech attached to his lifeline, sucking the will to even be awake from him. Nate shot him a baneful glare. “Is fuckwit not a satisfying enough name for you?” he asked, drawing his legs up and tucking them against his chest, pointedly looking away from Rex. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to do anything that involved being in Rex’s presence for another second. Nate hated being pushed around and told what to do, treated like he was an invalid, and everything that Rex had done to him thus far had made him feel actual hate blossom in his head. Nathaniel Keller didn’t hate people. He didn’t even hate his own father, and although he had every right to, he couldn’t find it in himself to actually do it. But Rex, whoever and whatever he was, was someone that Nate could hate in a mere moment.
He didn’t want to answer him. He didn’t want to be in the same breathing space as him. Glancing off to the side and at the wall, where a blank canvas was leaning against the table with his cellphone on it was his way of giving Rex a pointed fuck off without having to say anything to him. Childish, he knew, but Nate wanted nothing more than to call his mother and ask her to come and fix this problem for him. He wasn’t equipped to deal with the real world, and whatever witchcraft Rex was going on about was definitelysomething that he wasn’t capable of dealing with.
Rex scowled. Of course he chose now to be slow on the uptake. When his life was in danger, he was perfectly capable of focusing, which had admittedly been helpful, but when he was on the brink of fucking up absolutely everything about Rex’s life, he was as fucking stupid as the college football – or whatever sport – player Rex had fucked in a bathroom last week. Great ass, but couldn’t string a sentence together if his life depended on it. And Rex hadn’t been trying to explain anything to him, which made this agonizing. He could no more shut his new problem up by shoving him onto the bed than he could have told the sport player about the Other without being treated as if he was a lunatic. He gritted his teeth. “Of all the things you could fucking care about right now, you want to know my name?” He couldn’t fucking deal with this shit right now. Or ever. Never dealing with it would also work spectacularly. “Rex. So if you’re done with the fucking stupid points, can you try and be at all helpful?” From his perspective, the guy ought to have picked up at least some of it by now. Souls, phase shifting, Other. It wasn’t fucking rocket science or anything. In fact, Rex was pretty certain that it wasn’t any kind of science at all, but rather magic of a kind more akin to a horror movie element than Harry Potter. Either way, he’d seen proof enough in the guards that it was real and not some elaborate prank, so Rex needed him to be a lot quicker on the uptake.
Instead, he was acting like the one who had the right to be pissed off, which was supremely wrong, considering that he was the kink in the plans here, not Rex. Rex had been at his job for twelve years. He knew full well what he was doing by now, and it might fucking suck, but it was his and it was predictable and it did not include people like this guy. In fact, the only people in his world were the other four: Nic, Weston, Anabel, and Jade, plus anyone he decided to fuck. Encountering a stranger twice was coincidence, one he hadn’t fucked and probably wouldn’t was just unfortunate, but related to his job it downright pissed him off. Rex had better things to do than babysitting confused or lying power whores, or whatever this guy was.
“People don’t fucking forget about shit, don’t play fucking dumb with me.” Rex leaned slightly closer to him, scowling. It’s not like he was some straight guy who was going to get distracted by a hair toss, or whatever the fuck he was doing. Well. Maybe it was slightly distracting, but he’d been so pissed off he hadn’t bothered finding a stranger to fuck, as even the minimal courting involved before he could bend someone over required too much social commitment for his level of anger. In any other situation, he would willingly get distracted by this guy and the sharpness of his cheekbones, the way he was all hard angles in a way Rex liked. But he wasn’t eighteen and he could go without sex for a week and sure, fucking this guy might make him feel better about everything, including him, but more than that he needed to clear up this fucking mess, the press of soul all around him that was going off like a goddamn alarm. “No one fucking forgets things they’re told to forget unless they’re retards and you obviously fucking haven’t so don’t act like you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. Christ.”
He might have moved back then, if the other man hadn’t pushed him. It was a decent shove, moving him slightly away, but he had the advantage of leaning forward, his hands braced against the wall so that his weight was on his side. With a snarl, Rex moved back into place, palms slamming against the wall in irritation. Physical violence wasn’t particularly his thing, Rex more preferred to swear until he got the attention he was going for or the person in question left, but he liked being shoved as little as the next guy. “Listen, you fucking idiot,” Rex snapped. “I hope you get fucking killed, because that’s what’s going to happen if I fucking leave you here. Either you don’t know about souls in which case shut the fuck up and listen or you do in which case you’re so fucking over your head that if you’re trying to keep it from me the world is probably better without you. Got it?”
With an exasperated noise, Rex pulled away from him a bit. “Okay. Death for idiots. That place you followed me was the Other. That’s where people go when they die. Sometimes people get lost, especially shitty ones because their souls are so fucked up they don’t have the capacity for rational thought anymore. So I have to fucking take these souls back to the Other so they don’t run around here. The longer they spend on earth the stronger they get. Ones as strong as the one in your apartment could fucking kill you. So if you think you’re a fucking conjurer or soul bait or going to live for-fucking-ever or something, don’t. You’re going to get yourself killed.” He crossed his arms. “Get it?” Fuck this guy if he didn’t. There was responsible for a mess that wasn’t even his, and then there was fighting with a blockhead. If Nic had a problem, she could come deal with it. Yet it was mostly thought of Nic that made him stay. She wasn’t particularly into punishment, but when she thought it was necessary, it could be far less than pleasant. Better to take care of this bullshit himself, before it got completely out of hand.
The man was clearly off his damn rocker. Nate continued to stare at him, a frown creasing his face as he leaned back against the wall for support. His space was being invaded, and the shove that he’d managed to muster against his chest seemed to just piss him off. Nate wasn’t prone to panic attacks anymore. It was a thing that he’d lucked out on through medication and therapy, years of it breaking down walls and actions until he could breathe around it, but it didn’t mean that he felt no panic. Some nutjob had justmaterialized in his apartment like it was nothing and had the audacity to get mad at him. Like he had been the one to drag said nutjob to alternative world or whatever it was, and that he’d been the one to slight him. It wasn’t like Nate had meant to stumble into him, but when people just randomly materialized out of nowhere, things happened. And it wasn’t like he had done anything that the man – Rex, he reminded himself – was babbling on about, but he was pretty sure that any claims that he wasn’t a witch would be brushed off in favour of shouting some more.
Nate forced himself to steel his gaze, lip curling back as he watched him. “Me be helpful? You’re the one acting like I’ve just broken some major taboo, and I have no idea what the hell you’re even going on about!”he snapped, fingers curling into his palms, the uncut nails digging into the flesh. He was exhausted and every part of him ached, as if he’d been pulled through the wringer for the past week. Depending on how one looked at it, it was possible to say that he had. Nate had never done well when he was sick, but with the addition of the tattooed asshole showing up twice, he felt as though he couldn’t handle anything at all. From his experience, Rex only brought him to a bad place that made him cringe and want to crawl under his sheets until it went away. Not exactly the most manly or adult, but he had never cared much for that part of life. The creepy things he’d seen, the dulled-down world that he’d been in for a short period of time that had felt like forever – all of it had been things that he had decided to ignore until he was feeling better. Physical illness tended to mess with his head.
“Listen, you asshole,” he said, sighing heavily and bringing up a had to rub at his eyes, “you’re acting like I just kicked your puppy. You told me to forget. You told me to pretend like it hadn’t happened, and now you’re mad that I did what you wanted? You’re a fucking hypocrite, for one, and for another, you’re very fucking unwelcome here.” Nate dropped emphasize on the last few words, shoving a hand through his hair and pushing his curls out of his face. He needed haircut. Shaking his head in disgust at himself for getting sidetracked, he curled his fingers into his hair for a moment, pulling at the strands until a burst of pain ate at his nerve endings. It anchored him for a moment, brought him back to reality, and it was so much better than clawing the skin off his forearms. Flicking his gaze back up to Rex, he took the time to look him over for the first time. Tattoos covered his skin and he was about the same height as Nate himself, but he was thicker with muscle, like he could do actual damage to him if he wanted to. Nate had always been completely non-violent, unable to really bring himself to hit someone for any reason other than self-defence.
He stuffed down the urge to actually throttle the guy in front of him. Everything about Rex at the moment made him want to snap and punch him, tell him to get out and leave him alone. When Rex was around, weird shit happened. That was just a fact. Nate had been able to deal with some people’s weird quirks and oddities, but this was just beyond his ability to deal. He understood the laws of physics and understood what happened in real life. Even with his disability, he could distinguish reality from fiction when he was in the right state of mind. Monsters always had explanations. The Loch Ness Monster was a piece of driftwood, crop circles were hoaxes created by bored kids, that alien autopsy film by Ray Santilli was lie, bananadine was a laugh and the Ompax spatuloides was a great kick to read about. Things always had an explanation. And religion was just a thing to comfort people on the cusp of death, to give them hope and quell their fears. But this – whatever this was – was entirely too much like a low-grade sci-fic movie.
Sucking in a short breath, Nate let out a biting laugh, tasting bitter on his tongue. “You think I’m a witch? Is that what you’re saying? Because as far as I can tell, you’ve an escaped mental patient in desperate need of his fucking medication. Do you realize how fucking crazy you sound?” Nate demanded, notching his chin defiantly as he glares. “I have no fucking idea why you’re here, okay? I didn’t – whatever it is that you said I did. Conjure, or whatever. I did not do that at all. I’ve been laying in fucking bed for the past week, sick with the freaking flu, okay? No ghosts or spirits or apparitions or whatever it is that you’re going on about. Just me, my bed and chicken noodle soup. So unless you’re about to tell me that soup is how you make whatever it is that you’re talking about appear, then you can kindly take your crazy somewhere else.”
Rex couldn’t tell whether the other man was stupid or just sort of annoying, but either way there was a significant part of him that wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Just a bit: not enough to damage him or anything. Hurting people was not particularly Rex’s idea of a good time. Sure, if they came at him first, he’d hit back, but until they did that, he’d never really had the requisite interest in punching people that seemed to go with male adolescence. Or maybe he’d just grown past that. He didn’t look it, but he was old now. It was easier to forget that time had passed when Rex looked in the mirror and saw only the same person that he ever did. Over a decade went by and he still looked and felt exactly the same. More bored, yeah, and at least half the time he wished he’d kept telling Nic where she could shove her crazy ideas until she gave up on them, but other than that, nothing had changed. This life was even more routine than a human life with a human job was. And this guy was fucking with it.
“Are you fucking stupid?” Rex gaped. “What the fuck do you mean, how are you supposed to know what I’m doing in your apartment?” He jammed his voice into a mocking, higher register as he parroted the other man, unable to believe that this was actually happening to him. “My fucking job. If you summoned me here with fucking witchcraft or something…” Rex threw his hands up in the air. More things in heaven and earth, Horatio, not that he remembered what that meant. It was one of those little fragments that stuck with him from the one day he’d paid attention in high school. In this situation, it seemed to apply to just because you’ve never seen a witch doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and aren’t hot but fucking useless men instead of twittering teenage girls.
When he turned back to him, search of the apartment effectively complete, Rex found that he wasn’t even standing right, his hand splayed on the wall like he needed a crutch to keep himself up. That was just fucking great, wasn’t it? He got the retarded invalid. Fucking excellent. The only thing that could make this would be if he found out something he absolutely couldn’t keep from Nic. She’d be about as understanding as this guy, but in her case the lack of compromise would have nothing to do with incomprehension.
“Fucking-“ Rex ran a hand through his hair, gripping momentarily at the strands as though he could use that to ground himself. Either he really was slower than a turtle, or he was being a smartass.Given that he’d managed to survive the Other, however briefly, Rex was going to go with door number two. “Okay, now you need to fucking remember again, since you’re the one who fucking summoned me here.” He spread his hands, gesturing to the bedroom around him. “Do you think I’d be here for fun?” Admittedly, yes, he would be, but not like this. He didn’t materialize in the homes of guys he fucked. Trying to explain the concept of a Phase Shift would put a serious hold on sex, and seeing as that was the only thing Rex wanted from them, he wouldn’t put up with that. “I followed a fucking soul signature here, and guess fucking what? Nothing. Your fucking apartment’s practically fucking vibrating and there’s nothing here, so what the fuck did you do?!”
Christ, he was going to rip the entire High Court a new one when he saw them next, never mind that he was supposed to be respectful, because immortality didn’t apply when your killers hadn’t been alive for a long time, if ever, apparently. They’d warned that he could be hurt by souls, warned about the consequences of getting into human fights, even warned about the rise of a new Kith, though after killing the last one, Rex felt he had a pretty good understanding of how that worked and how little he wanted it. No one said that humans could capture spiritual energy and wave it around like a bright fucking beacon. When Rex said he was bored and done, this hadn’t been what he wanted.
“How the fuck did you even know how to call me anyway?” Rex moved over to him, placing his hands on either side of his face and staring intently into his eyes, looking for some sort of calculating serpentine flash, something that would give him away as less than human. All he saw were blue irises, infuriatingly pretty and surrounding completely normal pupils. There was nothing about them that suggested a touch of the other, but then again, he looked totally human, no matter how closely you examined him, too. Even the tattoos on his palms that had been gifted to him, rather than acquired by his own choice, looked completely normal and human, not like they’d been branded onto him with a single touch. “That’s not something they fucking teach in school, last I checked.”
None of the pieces made sense. He felt like he was trying to make a picture out of completely disjointed elements. This man had acted like he didn’t know what the Other was, made a pretty convincing picture of terror at the guards, and yet was questioning the existence of souls when his home was radiating the essence of one like a fucking homing beacon? He had to be lying about something, but Rex didn’t know what or why, just that he really didn’t like it. His previous week had been ruined by this shit, and it appeared this one was heading in the same direction.
Nate stared at the man. He’d taken his medication today, something he’d done the moment he’d stumbled from his bedroom and waited until he’d woken up enough to remember that he needed clean towels for a shower. He’d taken them the day before, too, with a quick meal of leftover pizza and ginger-lemon tea to settle him down. He was certain that he’d even taken them the day before, so there was no way that his mind had gone into a complete meltdown without him realizing it and he’d started hallucinating again. Usually the paranoia kicked in first, anyways, and considering he had the subtype of paranoid schizophrenia, he supposed the show fit really damn well.
This was an entirely different situation. Despite the fact that his head tended to play tricks on him because of messed up chemicals reacting and going off, Nate had always thought he’d had a good grip on what was right in front of him. When he was in the middle of an episode, it was an entirely different story, but he knew for a fact that he’d been taking his medication regularly and that nothing out of the ordinary – save for the flu that had hit him like a rock – was going on in his life. His mother would have pointed it out long ago, or even his shrink. He trusted his gut instincts in most things. This – whatever this was – was entirely out of his element, because he was fairly certain that a tattooed man had just showed up in his apartment without climbing in the window or using the door.
“I…” Nate continued to stare, a frown ceasing brackets along his mouth as his eyebrows drew together. “I have no idea what you’re spouting off about.” He shook his head sharply, trying to focus his thoughts. This entire situation was completely surreal. People didn’t just materialize in front of others, but apparently that was what had happened. Whatever he was rambling on about made no sense to Nate, which was really just the icing on the cake. “Or who the hell you are.”
The situation from the week before had been put on hold when Nate had been knocked on his ass by the flu, or whatever it was he was sick with. He’d felt too drained to put any real thought into exactly what had happened, and on the night that he’d been apparently dragged into a grey-scale world, he’d been too freaked out to think about it. He’d swallowed down his medication as soon as he was home and crawled under his blankets, pretending like nothing had happened. Nate could deal with shadows on the walls in the middle of the day, the ones with gaping mouths and silhouettes of teeth that followed him along, but whatever it was he’d seen had been something entirely different. Monstrous-looking beings that only haunted Nate in his nightmares and never when he was awake and his head was playing tricks on him, he’d shoved their faces out of his mind and pretended as if it had never happened. He would gladly deal with it when he was feeling better.
Crowding himself back against the wall as the man moved forward, his arms locking him into place unless Nate felt like brushing against him to escape, he looked him over. He was hot-as-hell, tattooed and exactly the kind of guy that Nate would flash a look at and invite back to his apartment. Except, he reminded himself numbly, he hadn’t been invited and he had zero intentions of getting his clothes of within the next five minutes.
Letting out a short breath, he leaned his head back against the wall, watching him carefully. He felt too tired to raise his voice and tell him to bugger off; none of his threats to hit him would hold any substance due to the exhaustion creeping along his neck and arms. He probably wouldn’t even make him bleed if he hauled off and punched him in the face. Maybe bruise him at the most, but he’d probably just end up pissing him off than making him go away.
“Listen,” he said, sighing and carding his fingers through his hair, pushing the cowlicks away from his eyes,“I have no idea who you are, buddy, and I have no damn idea what you want. The last thing you told me to do was to forget about it. I forgot about it. And now you just pop from out of nowhere to yell at me.” Mustering all the energy in his body, he shoved his palms against the man’s chest – hard. It was like wringing out an almost-dry towel, squeezing the last of himself into the movement. He slumped back against the wall, glaring at him. Even that seemed to take so much of himself. “I don’t care for whatever the fuck it is you’re rambling about, okay? I did what you fucking told me to. So just shut the fuck up about this soul shit and just get the fuck out. I don’t know what the fuck you want from me, okay?”
The last sentence even sounded like a plea to him. Which, of course, was stupid. Nate just wanted to be left alone, and not have hot, tattooed men materialize inside his apartment without his say so. He wanted to get better and then deal with his new level of Hell in a therapeutic way, where he wasn’t pretty sure he’d just stooped to a new level of real-life insanity. Maybe he could call his therapist and tell her that he was having a psychotic break again.
For a moment - entirely too long, in Rex’s opinion - he just looked at him. As though he was an alien. His sluggish responses pissed Rex off. He’d already seen him disappear once, hadn’t he? Fucking hit him first too. Little cunt. As strange things to happen went, the Other about took first prize, and everything after that had to seem a least somewhat normal. So Rex had walked into his apartment? So fucking what? He’d just found out that there was another world he’d never known existed and that the things that lived there were disgusting versions of humans, mutated and strange, some of them barely anthropomorphic. Compared to that, he ought to be able to deal with a little appearing and disappearing. Rex’s ability to step through dimensions wasn’t going to kill him, especially as Rex had no intention of ever dragging him back through the gaps in reality. Once was enough. Humans didn’t belong in the Other. He’d learned that lesson just now.
More importantly, what the fuck was he doing here? Were souls attracted to this guy or something? Rex had never heard of a soul magnet or anything of the sort, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. Before Nic had come to him with an absolutely insane story about a world beyond death, Rex hadn’t believed in souls either. To be fair, when she first suggested it to him he called her a fucking lunatic and snapped that of all people who might get poisoned by their family, he’d never thought she’d be one of them. She’d persisted, and he ended up here. Realizing early on but far too late that forever fucking sucked, chasing souls around like lost dogs. They weren’t usually difficult to find though. By now, he should have seen some sign of the one he’d tracked to this apartment. The sense of a spirit nearby hadn’t lessened, which meant one ought to have rattled into view. While nowhere near as strong as the pull they had on Rex, souls were slightly drawn to him too, instinctively gravitating towards something that came from the world they were supposed to be in. Unless this one was particularly clever - and fuck both it and this guy, seeing as he’d probably pulled it in, if it was - it should have shown its face by now. Yet the only face Rex saw was that of the admittedly attractive and distinctly human man in front of him.
Under different circumstances, he wouldn’t have minded being in this guy’s apartment with him. For example, it would have been far preferable if he’d actually chosen to come here, rather than finding himself appearing in front of another person (rookie mistake, one he was annoyed that he’d made) and without a soul in sight. If he wasn’t working, he’d absolutely fuck him. He was hot, if somewhat useless, and at least he didn’t talk too much, though Rex had found ways of dealing with that. In any other situation, ending up here probably would have been a good thing. This, however, was the exact opposite of that. Rex couldn’t think of a single upside to looking for an errant soul and finding his mistake instead.
"Okay." Rex looked at him flatly. At least it wasn’t someone else’s apartment? He thought he could count that as a small win. If there was another incident of exposure, he might just take them both to the Other and dump them there, fuck the consequences. One guy he could deal with. Two was pushing it. "What the fuck am I doing in your fucking apartment?" Souls didn’t often come indoors. He couldn’t find one. He had no idea what these factors added up to, but either way he was absolutely certain he didn’t like it. "Do you just pull in Other energy like a fucking death magnet or something?"
Even as he spoke, Rex stalked off without invitation, venturing further into his apartment. If there was soul energy here, there had to be a soul. He yanked open doors indiscriminately, storming into rooms and slamming them behind him when there was nothing there to find, the intensity of the energy not changing even a fragment. With every failed attempt to find a target, Rex grew more and more frustrated, until finally, after prowling around his bedroom with all the grace of a tornado, he rounded on him, snarling "Are you hiding a soul in your fucking pocket or something?”
Nate wouldn’t call his life normal. It had never exactly been normal but, despite that, he managed on okay. He took his medication and he went to his therapy sessions. He did his art, made social obligations every once in a while to appease everyone and generally just drifted on through life. It was normal enough for him, and that was all that really mattered.
What wasn’t normal was the man standing in his living room, looking more angry than Nate felt. Pressing his fingertips beneath the delicate hollows of his eyes, pressing into the skin and trying to get a grip on the reality. There was a random man standing in his living room, and he appeared to be upset by being in said living room. Why this was happening to Nate, he didn’t know. He was a good enough person, made nice with everyone he met, didn’t start petty arguments with his neighbours even though they left their dog locked in their apartment for eight hours at a time. And yet it seemed as if that didn’t matter to the universe and whoever was pulling the strings, because shit just kept being thrown at him as if he could handle it all.
Nate stared at him, lips parting as a look of disbelief crossed over his face. “How the fuck am I supposed to know what you are doing in my apartment?” he asked, dropping his hand from his face as he felt a headache begin to blossom in his temple. The entire past week had just been a mess for him and this was just the topping on the cake. Pushing up from his seat, Nate wobbled on his legs for a moment, reaching an arm back to hold himself steady on the arm of the couch. Steadied once more, Nate turned his attention back on the man. Already he was moving through his apartment like he owned the place. He couldn’t even muster the energy to be angry at him, too confused by his words to start yelling at him. This had been the man whom he’d stumbled into and had somehow been moved to a different dimension. That alone was insane enough for Nate to consider locking himself away in the nut house, but he’d dealt with weird shit before. He’d figured that he could just get over his flu and forget about this.
Apparently that wasn’t going to happen. Trailing after the man, Nate frowned, keeping a hand on the wall to steady himself every time he felt his knees give a little shake. Collapsing in front of the guy wouldn’t help his cause; he needed to stay upright and conscious, maybe even demand a few answers from him. “What are you even talking about?” Nate demanded, stopping at the end of the hallway and leaning on the door frame to his bedroom, shoulder tucked against the frame to keep him upright. Everything out of this man’s mouth just made him feel more and more confused, like he’d turned on the TV program in the middle of the show and had yet to catch up. He knew the basics of everything, but the details were lost on him. The man’s words about The Other had been echoing in his head for the past week while he’d laid in bed, trying to get a grip on himself.
“This may come as a complete shock to you,” he said, curling his hand on the door and watching him, frowning still, “but I have no idea who you are or what you’re talking about. Souls? No idea what you’re babbling on about. The last time I saw you, you told me to forget about what I saw, what had happened. And I did that.” Nate gave him a peeved look, making a noise of irritation in his throat. “I have no idea what you’re looking for. I have no idea how the fuck you ended up in my place, either. Now what the hell do you want?”he demanded, fingers digging into the door. He felt like his space was being invaded completely. Few people were ever invited into his room; most of his one night stands ended up fucking him over the back of his couch, and that was the way Nate preferred it. His bedroom was one of those places that was personal and his, something that he wanted to keep safe and to himself. Whoever this man was, he was completely throwing Nate’s world upside down.
His head was throbbing and his body felt tired. Mind still sluggish from the sickness in his body, he leaned his shoulder against the door once more, letting out a soft sigh of air. The past week hadn’t gone according to plan, and from everything that Nate could gather, it was this man’s fault. Sure, he was attractive enough, but apparently he was also a completely asshole who could materialize into his apartment. That didn’t exactly give him room for comfort. What Nate wanted to do was get some answers and then tell the guy to fuck off. Maybe inch towards the cell phone sitting on the side table and call the police to come cart the crazy off to a psychiatric ward.
A week later, and the incident with his unintended stowaway still bothered Rex. Not a person known for caution, he’d taken more care than ever before in his phase shifts, going out of his way to herd errant souls away from living people. Time and time again, Rex had complained to Nic and even under his breath to the Other court about the uncooperativeness of spirits. There was nothing left for them on earth. Misshapen, incorporeal ghouls, they had no way to interact with the world around them. Even though they’d get stronger if they hung about long enough, to the point where hauntings and even a return to physical reality were possible, they didn’t have to worry about that. The Other was a world designed for them, where they could touch and eat and even interact with each other, if their soul wasn’t a warped and slavering thing. Yet they invariably fought him.
With the irrational ones, Rex could at least understand why they rebelled. Shittiness might not be an objective way to measure people, but something somewhere had a defined set of rules as far as what was acceptable. It didn’t matter what someone’s mind had been like in life. Minds and souls, Rex had discovered, were nothing like the same. The wholeness of a soul and the ability of one to act more or less human was directly linked to how they behaved and the choices they made in life. Anyone who’d been enough enough of a cunt to become a monster after dying couldn’t be expected to behave well anyway. But when they held a relatively normal form, usually a human or mostly human one, the continued tendency to fucking run drove Rex insane. Some could even talk to him but fought back instead. And people wondered why Rex didn’t like them. Even the dead sucked, and they demanded far less of him than living people did.
Still, Rex had to chase the dead. He limited his interactions with the breathing, for the most part, to his immortal cohort and anyone he wanted to bend over and fuck. Even those strangers Rex didn’t pay much attention to overall. He ignored people around him. It frustrated him to need to stop and be cautious of pedestrians. For twelve years - twelve fucking years - Rex had done his work without any kind of human incident. And all of a sudden, some fucking moron stumbled into him while he was doing a phase shift and made a mess of everything. Looking over his shoulder all the time sucked, and he hadn’t even been doing it a full seven days. If Rex had even known who the other man was, he’d have liked to shove him again, both for the interruption to his life and the fact that he’d fucking punched him. This job was stupid enough on its own without constantly having to worry that some idiot on the street would touch him at the wrong moment.
At least before he found the soul he was tracking it didn’t matter what kind of shit went on around him. An entire circus could brush up against Rex and as much as it would piss him off, nobody would end up in danger of dying. They would, however, disrupt Rex’s ability to focus on the humming in the air that he followed to literal lost souls, and summarily get cussed out. Until he got close enough, he couldn’t phase shift to his destination with any accuracy. If he’d had to go all over the world, it would have been a nightmare of guessing and checking. Fortunately, there were specific places where the barrier between the Other and earth ran thin, and those places attracted the dead. Then, while they milled around the general area, trying and failing to interact with a world they were no longer part of, Rex had to hunt them down.
Today there’d been a particularly strong buzzing under his skin from the moment he woke up, the kind that came from a soul that got too strong lingering about under the radar. Rex hated hunting those ones. They tended to be more sentient, more likely to do violence, and far craftier. If this one figured out he was trying to avoid humans, it would become a bitch and a half in no time flat. Rex was not up for that. All he particularly wanted of the day was to close himself in his room and sketch, anything more than that was uninvited and unnecessary.
The only upside to the situation was that by the time he got into the city, the sense of the soul was strong enough that, after spinning in a full, fucking stupid looking circle to make sure that no one was close enough to see or touch him, Rex could just walk into the Other. When he was by himself, especially for something as short as a jump through space, the world paid no attention to him. Unlike a human, with their lurid colors and distinct pulses, Rex’s heart beat far too slowly, his brightness dimmed (but not vanished) in the Other. They had their own world going on. One man appearing, taking two steps, and vanishing again was barely worth the turn of the head, if that.
When Rex reappeared again, he was surprised to find himself inside a building. Some bodiless souls couldn’t even enter one, and those who could tended to prefer not to, unless they’d chosen a place not to move from. Even though it was the middle of the day and most people would be at work, this always opened up the possibility of a sick kid or someone who worked from home or some other bullshit to get in his way. He gritted his teeth and looked around for the spirit, hoping to get this over with soon. But instead of a pale, over-strong soul, Rex found his gaze caught by a frustratingly familiar face, one that he hadn’t been able to banish from his mind since the events of the previous week. "What the fuck are you doing here?” he demanded.
Nate had kept to his room since that stupid night when he was sure he’d lost his mind.
It wasn’t that he was back to his agoraphobic ways again, or that he was particularly scared of what had happened – or what he’d thought had happened, at least – but he’d felt as if he’d caught the tail ends of someone else’s flu since the morning afterwards. The idea that he was sick wasn’t something that he really took into account. He rarely got sick. It was just one of those quirks that he happened to have from his mother not stopping his from eating dirt as a child. When everyone at school would catch the annual winter flu or cold, Nate would be sitting in the front of the class with the teacher while everyone else was at home, nursing bile-slicked tongues. He had found it more amusing than anything else, how the world seemed to come to a full stop when people got sick; he was forever holding back one of his foster sister’s hair and patting their backs as they emptied their stomachs into the toilet. He hadn’t minded all that much back then, because they were sick, and what was he going to do – blame them for it?
He felt beyond sick now. It was like the life had been drained from him slowly over the past week, and although he kept telling himself that in a few days he’d feel better, he awoke each morning feeling worse than the day before. Even his mother had commented on his appearance when she’d come to visit the night before last, trying her best to convince him that going to see a doctor would be the best thing for him. Nate had tried to appease her by telling her that he’d make an appointment at the end of the week if he was still feeling down and out. She had given him a weary look but had accepted his response – it was the only thing that she could do. Nate hadn’t been a minor and under the care of a guardian in over seven years, and she couldn’t force him to go if he didn’t want to. And he really did not want to; there was something about doctor’s offices and hospitals that put him on edge, made him feel as though his teeth were going to burst from his gums and cake his tongue is blood. He felt as though he were always a moment away from shedding his skin and walking away in his bones when he was covered in the too-clean scent of clinical offices.
Days spent in bed had left Nate feeling weak and tired, like a small part of him had been sucked through his skin and leeched into the walls. Standing was an issue on its own, and stumbling to the bathroom or to order take out only happened when completely necessary. There was a pile up of dishes in his room that he really needed to clear out of his bedroom and there was clothing that needed cleaning, but Nate couldn’t seem to find the energy to crawl down to the bottom floor of his apartment building and stick around to put his laundry in the washing machine. It wasn’t that he seemed to have a fever or an infection or ever a cold; as far as Nate could see, he was perfectly healthy – except for the fact that he was unable to hold himself stable and was starting to match his blank canvases in skin tone. He felt fine, except for the fact that he was tired all the time and even when he managed to sleep for a fourteen-plus hours a night, he felt as though he’d barely managed a few minutes at best. His head felt clotted and thick with something fuzzy, and after nearly a week of barely moving from his bed, Nate finally forced himself to stumble to his shower and wake himself up.
Hair still damp and curling from the water, he felt better in the way that he felt clean, but not any better than he had the previous days. His head was still thick with a fuzziness he couldn’t place, but his skin felt clean and there was a pot of coffee brewing in his kitchen. Eating didn’t sound appealing, but he’d tossed onto of those frozen TV dinners into the oven and cranked it on, curling up on the couch and flicking on the TV. Nate hadn’t even bothered to put on jeans and a proper shirt. Picking up the first thing that was clean – a sweater with his old university’s logo stamped across the front and a pair of thick grey sweats – was his only route to normality, and he didn’t bother to try to tug on jeans. He didn’t think he had the energy for it.
Nate’s head jerked, eyes blinking slowly as he took in the body standing in his living room. For a moment he considered completely ignoring the person who had apparently materialized in front of him, but he doubted that would work. The week that he’d spent in bed had been wasted thinking over what had happened. Sure, Nate was a schizophrenic with paranoid tendencies, but he was on his medication and he made sure that even during his week of sickness to take them. No shadows crept along the walls and no images burst from his head, no voices followed him around and he didn’t feel like he was going insane, so Nate chalked up the incident as real. And that was as far as he was going with that subject, because the notion of what he’d seen was too much to deal with – so he took the stranger’s advice and tried to forget about it.
“…this is my apartment?” The words came out more as a question and Nate didn’t even bother wincing; whoever the fuck this guy was – the hot one with the tattoos – he was clearly in the wrong. Just showing up in Nate’s living room. And, damn, he hoped that he didn’t go into shock from everything.
