Tristan's shoulders screamed as they dragged the leech-thing's body out into the woods beyond the churchyard, leaving a strange yellow smear across the snow.

  "Just leave it here," he panted, heaving it into a ditch and kicking some decaying leaves over the remains. "Hopefully no one will find it before... I don't know, spring?"

  “It will be gone in a day," Yesa said, already turning back toward the churchyard.

  “A day?” Tristan stared at the heap of tentacle arms. “What do you mean?” But she was already gone.

  He scanned the forest, then looked back at the corpse. Somewhere in the distance, leaves rustled, and he tensed. Was that the wind? Probably… What if it wasn’t?

  He froze, listening for any other noise. Nothing. Then the wind picked up, whispering through the trees on all sides. Someone braver might investigate. That was not Tristan.

  “Hey, wait up!” he shouted, almost stumbling over an exposed tree root in his haste to catch up. By the time he reached her, she was already halfway down the hill, limping toward the stone circle.

  “Are you sure you’re ok?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just you seem to be–”

  “I am fine.” The tone had an edge that suggested any further questions would see his death ruled a suicide, with a footnote reading: He had it coming.

  They reached the stone circle; streaks of now almost fluorescent yellow blood stained the ground around the corpse of the creature Yesa had dealt with.

  “This place looks like a murder scene. We should do something about the…” he said, walking over to the body.

  It seemed to be more… wet than Tristan remembered. It looked like it was melting. The smell was awful, a rotten acidic tang that caught at the back of his throat and made it burn.

  Tristan covered his face with a sleeve. “Oh, god. That's worse than before!”

  “Yes. They do that.”

  “What?”

  “Dissolve.”

  “These things… dissolve? It's only been dead for an hour or two at most!”

  “They all do.”

  Could they just leave the thing here? Maybe, but… probably not. “We need to dump this somewhere…”

  “Drag it over there then,” she said, pointing at a copse of gorse bushes nearby.

  “Me?” Tristan asked, looking at the oozing remains. The only response was a subtle shift of her hand to her hip, which gave him his answer.

  Tristan grimaced but gingerly grasped it by its stubby tail; his fingers sank into the flesh, and it squeezed through his fingers like a sausage skin filled with jelly. He retched but kept going, dragging it across the snow toward the bushes, then hauling it into the cover.

  “Oh god, that was horrible.” He wiped his hands on the clean snow and tried to get the smell of the thing out of his mouth.

  Yesa had already set off again, wordlessly heading back down the hill toward the house. Not wanting to be left alone, especially near the creepy stone circle, he followed.

  By the time they reached the lane that led toward his house, the limp was gone, and she was moving more easily. Not that Tristan was paying much attention. The tall walls and trees covering the lane suddenly made it feel claustrophobic and sinister.

  He kept glancing up, expecting to see something between the skeletal branches.

  As his pace quickened, the sight of the roof gave him an almost dizzying sense of relief. He fumbled with his keys, trying to find the right one, the desperate urge to be inside making him clumsier than usual.

  Finally he found the right one, pushed the door open, and almost ran inside. Yesa trotted in behind him.

  He nearly slammed it shut behind her and let out a deep sigh.

  “Right, so…” he said, turning to her—then stopped and frowned. The cut on her lip had vanished. Not scabbed over, not healing. Gone. She still had the smear of blood but otherwise…

  She caught him staring and raised an eyebrow. “It’s just the…” He tapped his own lip.

  Yesa stared at him. “Yes.”

  He'd just have to add that to the growing list of things to have a mental break about later.

  Yesa was still spattered with creature gore. The idea of her tracking it through the house made his skin crawl. He winced as she stepped onto the carpet, leaving a faint yellow print.

  “Right, just don’t… touch anything.”

  She paused. “Why?”

  “You’re all grubby.”

  “So?”

  “Follow me, carefully. Please?”

  With exaggerated care, she stepped through the house after him—wide, deliberate strides, shoulders raised, head ducked low. She looked almost cartoonish.

  He was almost certain she was mocking him.

  “Ok, just—”

  She froze instantly, eyes locked on him, one foot still lifted, perfectly balanced.

  “Just. Do it normally.”

  She relaxed at once, dropping back into her usual loose prowl.

  He led her to the bathroom as carefully as he could manage. “You can have a shower. Clean off.”

  “What is a shower?” she asked, staring around the tiny room from the doorway. He turned it on, the sound of falling water immediately filling the room.

  “You made it rain. In your house?” Her ear twitched. Was that an almost imperceptible smile? Tristan had the distinct impression she found this hilarious.

  “Try it,” he said.

  She stepped forward and slowly, cautiously reached out to touch the water. “Hmm… warm?” she murmured, letting the water fall over her hand and trickle through her fingers.

  “You can change the temperature if you want?” Tristan said.

  “No.” She was transfixed by the falling water.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  The mauve dressing gown hanging on the back of the door caught his attention. It had been there, undisturbed, for some time. He reached for it, pausing for a moment. No one else was going to use it. It was just a dressing gown.

  He pulled it from the hook and handed it to Yesa.

  “Just… wear this after and dump all your dirty stuff in here.” He pushed a laundry basket toward her with his foot. “I’ll wash it, or… incinerate it, depending on how bad it is.”

  She nodded.

  “Right, I’m going to go scream continuously into a pillow for twenty minutes. I seem to have acquired a considerable amount of new emotional trauma in the past five hours; I can’t imagine why.”

  “Good. The screaming will be less audible,” she said, closing the door.

  He stared at the door a moment before listlessly taking the stairs down to the kitchen; without any real objective, he felt adrift, unsure what to do with himself.

  He glanced toward the window. Did he really want to do this? He forced himself over to it, angling his view slightly as he scanned the distant fields. He shivered as he caught sight of the ring of stones, easy to spot, right there. Where they’d always been.

  Well, if they’d always been there, why hadn’t he seen them? He had, obviously. They weren’t invisible. That would be stupid. He’d just… forgotten about them. Every time he saw them.

  What else did he not remember seeing?

  Nervously scanning the kitchen, he concluded that everything was where it should be… although would he know if it wasn’t?

  Don’t think about it. Concentrate on something else. Something normal… like the tick of the electricity meter. It was a good distraction; he hadn’t really said anything about shower length. On the other hand, he wasn’t about to go and tell her now.

  It made him feel better thinking about his electricity bill. That was a monster he could understand.

  Grabbing some of the plates from that morning from the table, he began tidying. The mundanity felt reassuring and safe. But every so often he’d feel the pull to check the window again, just to be sure. Each time they were there.

  He was staring at the distant ring of stones again, for the umpteenth time, when a voice made him jump.

  “I like showers.”

  She had reappeared at the kitchen door. Her hair was still wet, darkening the mauve fabric at the shoulders. “Have you completed your screaming?”

  He felt a pang of regret at letting her wear it. But what was he supposed to do—ask her to take it off?

  “All screamed out. Thanks for asking.”

  “Do you have food?”

  Tristan nodded. “I’m sure I can find something to eat. Why don’t you wait in the other room?” he said.

  She wandered off, and he busied himself sorting out some actual food for her. Usually he just ate whatever was easiest—cereal, crisps, maybe a sandwich if he was feeling particularly adventurous; sometimes he even put something in the sandwich.

  He had to admit he’d rather given up looking after himself—but this wasn’t for him.

  He managed to find some frozen pizza at the back of the freezer. You probably couldn’t die from anything on a pizza, regardless of how long it had been frozen.

  He left that cooking and walked into the sitting room. Yesa was just sitting on the edge of the sofa staring into the distance.

  He leaned against the doorframe and watched her. Her armour had been a mess… She'd been thrown across the church and yet seemed completely unaffected. “You know when the leech-thing—”

  “Sanguivore.”

  “Right, Sanguivore, when it hit you…?”

  An ear swivelled in his direction, and she turned to regard him. “Yes.”

  “You’re not hurt,” he said slowly. “Is that… normal for you?”

  “Yes.” She turned away.

  “Are all your people like that?”

  “My mother was the same.” She paused. “I did not know any others.”

  She glanced towards him.

  Tristan frowned. “You never met anyone like you except your mother? Is she…?”

  “Dead.”

  “I’m… sorry to hear that. How long since…”

  Yesa shrugged. “I do not count. Perhaps more than a thousand sleeps ago.”

  Assuming she slept once a day, that was almost three years. Though, with her, that assumption felt dangerously optimistic. She’d been alone—hunting things from the darkest recesses of his nightmares in a place she had described as ‘bad’—for over three years?

  How bad was bad? She’d called that thing with the wasp-like face 'annoyance', which suggested her baseline needed some serious recalibration.

  He struggled to conceptualise what living that life would feel like. Would he even be sane? Probably not; he’d be dead.

  Was she sane? Alien, certainly. But she didn’t seem unstable. If anything, she seemed eerily stable, unflappable, and stoic. Maybe that was insanity? Anyone who saw that thing at the church and immediately tried to kill it with their bare hands couldn’t be entirely normal.

  He cleared his throat. “So, was I the first person you’d spoken to since…?”

  “Yes. Never seen anything like you before. Not Carrion. But no ears. I do not hold that against you.”

  “Well, thanks, I think…”

  She nodded, accepting the thanks.

  Tristan bit his lip and desperately tried to think of something to say, something comforting or poignant. Fortunately, he was saved by the oven timer.

  “Oh, right, the pizza.” He returned a few minutes later with two plates, handing one to her. She stared at it and then picked up a slice and nibbled the end.

  A second later she stuffed the rest into her mouth, tomato sauce smearing across her lips.

  “You are allowed to chew, you know…”

  Tristan watched her finish her entire plate in minutes. He’d had a sneaking suspicion she might do that, so once she had finished, he offered her his untouched plate.

  “I’m not that hungry,” he explained, pushing it towards her.

  She gave him a quizzical look before slowly taking the plate as if she were unsure he might suddenly change his mind. She took slow, cautious bites while watching him carefully. The scrutiny and silence started to make him nervous.

  “How… about some TV?” he asked. He slumped onto the sofa next to her, wincing, and fumbled with the remote.

  Yesa’s ears and eyes immediately flicked to the screen the second it came on. Bathed in the colours, she put the plate to one side, hopped off the sofa and slowly approached the screen, looking behind it and then back at him.

  “It’s a magic window that shows pictures. No, I don’t know how it works.”

  “What pictures?” she said, backing away from it, still staring.

  “It’s entertainment; it tells you stories, shows you other places. This one is a competition. People make food. The best one wins.”

  “…When do they eat the food?”

  “I think they might try it to see whose is best.”

  “What is the point in making food if you are not going to eat it?” She looked genuinely annoyed.

  Tristan coughed to cover the laugh that was threatening to escape. “You’re right, it’s silly. I’ll put something else on.” He switched it over to the next channel, a cartoon.

  She perched on the other end of the sofa, her face lit up by the colours on screen as she slowly chewed on her pizza. After a moment she asked, “What creature is this?”

  Once again she’d managed to say words while eating, like she was doing some sort of voice-throwing trick. He was used to it by now. It barely fazed him.

  “A mouse, a rodent… a small creature.”

  “It is wearing clothes?”

  “Yes, it’s Danger Mouse. It’s supposed to be funny.”

  “Wearing clothes is funny?”

  “When it’s a mouse doing it. Because they don’t normally wear clothes.”

  “I see.”

  She sat back. A few minutes passed with just the sound of the cartoon filling the room. “The smaller mouse is ineffective. It cannot protect itself, and yet the Danger Mouse protects it.”

  She was looking directly at Tristan.

  He cleared his throat. “Penfold is a mole, actually, but that’s a fair assessment.”

  She leaned in toward him again, taking another bite of her pizza. “You are like Penfold.”

  “Ehhhh… I mean…”

  “But,” she continued, “they work together effectively. He is a good distraction.”

  Tristan wasn’t sure whether he should feel annoyed or pleased; he settled on pleased, which made him feel annoyed—but only with himself.

  She turned towards him, expression unreadable, but her ears flopped forward slightly.

  “You will come with me? Closing the doorways?”

  She wanted to scour the landscape for magical portals. Which sounded absurd. But she wasn’t human, and nor were the things she’d dispatched. That stone circle had made him want to go lie down in a dark room with a cold flannel over his face.

  It was madness… he’d have to be crazy…

  He closed his eyes. “We’ll go to the museum tomorrow; maybe it will have something on the stone circles. Failing that, we turn Father Tross’s office upside down until we find that book,” he said finally.

  Silence lingered for several minutes.

  “You have more honey?” she asked.

  “Yes, I suppose I did promise. I’ll order some—it’ll come tomorrow.”

  She frowned. “You do not need to hunt it?”

  “I can use my… magic box to get someone to bring me some in the morning.” He pulled out his phone and ordered as much honey as he could without looking unhinged.

  “They will bring you food… because you ask?”

  “Sort of.”

  Did supermarkets flag bulk orders? Paracetamol, sure, but honey?

  He should probably order actual food while he was at it. It had been a while since he’d bothered.