CHAPTER 7

“You are, all of you, going to run for it,” Kree said. “I will take care of the gulfhound.” She spoke calmly and with authority, like it was all entirely reasonable. I’d never heard of a gulfhound before, and I suspected that Kree was the only one in the whole of Stonestead who knew the term.

“There is much to explain,” Kree continued, “and no time to explain it. I will find you again in seven days. Prepare yourselves.”

“Prepare ourselves?” I asked, spluttering. “Prepare ourselves for what?”

Kree’s attention was on the thing she called a gulfhound. “Synergize,” she intoned.

Her shadow twitched. Something emerged from within, behind, and around Kree. Like a shadow given substance—black, inky, and impossibly weighty. Too consistent to be a liquid, yet too fluid and malleable to be solid. She spread her arms, as if welcoming it, and in a second—just a split second—it overtook her, covering her from head to toe. I knew what it reminded me of.

The gulfhound’s eyeless visage twisted in Kree’s direction. She glanced at us. When she spoke, I couldn’t see her lips moving. “Go,” she said, in two voices. “Now.” Her whole face was covered in that black substance, like a second skin.

She strode to meet the beast, stars erupting against the depths of her black carapace, or perhaps somewhere within it. Sparks and fireflies spreading and solidifying into planes and surfaces—a suit of resplendent golden armor. Nothing like metal, perhaps not even solid. It glimmered like glass, within which smoke was trapped. Like light itself given form.

The gulfhound leapt at Kree, slavering. Kree moved, sliding to the left, and I would’ve sworn she was too slow to dodge—but the gulfhound was slower still. Out of step with time itself, Kree spun her left arm three times, and then hammered the beast with a cross to the side of its head. The impact was a crack of thunder that shattered every single window in the diner, hurling the gulfhound to the floor mid-leap and sending it sliding into one of the far booths, toppling tables and chairs.

“Holy shit,” Max said. I might’ve said the same thing.

“It’s not dead, idiots,” Kree called, still in that weird stereo. “RUN!”

The gulfhound rose up. Emma tugged at my shoulder. “Caleb,” she hissed. “Caleb! Come on, let’s go! This way, the back door!”

We went—we ran for it. The gulfhound shook its head, its tongue writhing and lashing in the air, fully longer than I was tall. It hissed.

“C’mon, creature,” Kree said. “I’ll have that trophy—one more off the list, let’s get this done.”

Impacts again, Kree and the gulfhound locked in battle. As we ducked behind the counter, I caught a glimpse of the fight: the gulfhound with Kree’s arm in its jaws, shaking her like a rag doll.

I’m pretty sure she was laughing.

We burst out of the back door of Hogsfather’s at something close to a mad sprint. I slipped going through the doorway, fell hard, and scrabbled to pick myself up. It looked like everyone else had already run for it.

“Car,” I said. “Car, car, car!”

“Working on it,” Emma snapped, fishing for her keys.

We piled into her truck. Emma threw Ironhide into reverse, backed out of the parking space, and floored it out past the diner itself. We’d almost made it, when something slammed into the hood of the truck, slewing it to the left and into a light post.

Kree, atop the hood, was struggling with the gulfhound—her hands on its jaws, stopping it from tearing out her throat. The black carapace had been torn from her face and left arm, running like oil, evaporating into ash and smokey particles. Underneath, her skin was a warm shade of green.

She caught the gulfhound with a hook, something black and glittering splattered against the windshield. An uppercut to its jaw, snapping loose fangs and teeth, and then with a thundercrack kick, she sent the beast out into the street. The gulfhound rolled and thrashed atop the asphalt.

“My brother’s going to fucking kill me,” Emma said, turning the key again and again. It occurred to me that the truck had stalled out. “Come on, come on...”

The gulfhound’s tongue lashed out, Kree twisting right, so it did little more than send up sparks from the truck’s hood. As she swung back, dodging the second stab of the creature’s tongue, stars danced around Kree’s right hand—and she drew a sword as if from the air itself.

This time, she was ready. The tongue stabbed out again, wrapped Kree’s left arm from wrist to shoulder. With a shout, she brought her sword down on the organ, the edge burning golden-bright, and severed it. The gulfhound stumbled, but only for a moment. Kree hurled her sword like a thunderbolt, the weapon spinning end over end, and buried it to the hilt, squarely in the middle of the gulfhound’s forehead.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Was that,” Max began, sounding numb. “Was that a sword?”

Kree staggered over to the dead beast. At least, I hoped it was dead. She looked at it, gripped her sword, gave it a solid twist, and then pulled it free. The gulfhound shattered slowly, from the outside in, and evaporated. Then, without so much as a goodbye or a sorry about the truck or even a glance back at us, Kree vaulted away into the sky.

We sat there for a time. Eventually, Emma got the truck going again.

“Okay,” Max said. “Does anyone want to tell me what the fuck just happened?”

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“So, there was a fight here,” Fletcher says, back to skepticism. “Between Kree the space knight and some kind of alien dog-beast from beyond the stars.”

“The correct term,” I reply, “is Incarnate. And it was a gulfhound. But yes, that’s basically it.”

“Oh, I see, I see. So, this gulfhound—what was it? An alien, a cryptid? A relative of the mothman, maybe the chupacabra?”

“Neither. But we’ll get to all that.”

Fletcher nods. He looks around the diner again, as if seeing it for the first time. I don’t know what he’s looking for, what he expects to find. They’d closed the place for a month after the incident, the repairs had been remarkable. So, he’s probably thinking: look, I know what I heard, what people were saying, but there’s no way there was some kind of alien deathmatch here.

“It’s just very hard to believe,” he says.

I shrug. “They closed Hogfather’s for a month. If you want, you can go and check out the windows. They’re all new glass. You could probably even track down the company that did the installation.”

“I did, actually,” he says.

“And if you want, you can go look at the streetlight out there. There’s still black paint from where Emma hit it. This is even the booth in which the three of us met Kree.”

“And the truck?”

“Chris was pretty pissed, but it got fixed up.”

“Convenient.”

I watch one of the waitresses walk past. “Y’know what’s interesting, Agent. Not a single person working here today was working here when it happened. In fact, none of the current staff of Hogfather’s were employees before then. The employees on shift that day, they all moved away. So did the patrons, I imagine.”

“True. And the ones I spoke to never mentioned anything about this ‘gulfhound.’”

“But that’s the thing. ‘The ones you spoke to.’ A lot of them didn’t want to talk about it, right? And the ones who did—they couldn’t explain what happened clearly, could they?”

Fletcher nods. “The police said it was a rabid wolf and a case of mass hysteria.”

“That’s how this works. There’s things out there that are outside the conventional realm of human experience. Not impossible to understand, but not something that fits into our standard view of the world. So, we rationalize it—we can’t be wrong, right? The human mind is very good at lying to itself. Your brain is just engaging in acts of pattern recognition. You have a very good idea of what reality is, so, you just toss aside anything that might drive a crack into it. Agent, do you know of the Necker cube?”

He shakes his head. I pick up the salt shaker and spill some out onto the table. I sculpt it into a simple three-dimensional wireframe of a cube with Forces 2. Fletcher looks down at it and doesn’t say anything.

“Depending on how you look at it, the front of the cube will shift between two of the faces—forward or back, A or B. But in truth, neither of those options is correct. Yet your brain is going to pick one anyway. Because it’s simpler than understanding that it’s both and neither. How much of everything we understand and know is because our brains prefer what’s simple? That might be great for surviving, but it’s bad for accuracy. Evolution didn’t equip us for truth.”

“So, what’s better? What gives us truth, Caleb?”

“The Pax.”

Fletcher nods slowly. “Which I imagine you’re going to tell me about now.”

“Soon,” I say. “Very soon. From this point on, everything is going to get much weirder. But I just want you to keep something in the back of your mind, Bill—when you’re not looking at the Necker cube, when it ceases to exist for all intents and purposes,” and I obliterate the wireframe with a wave of my hand, the pattern reduced to individual crystals, “which face is the front—A or B?”

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The next week passed in a homecoming haze. Max and I went back to Stonestead High, and Emma went back to her school on the other side of town. We didn’t talk about it. About any of it. I hung out with Vince and Brit and, for a time, managed to forget it. If not for the dreams of dark places and the gaps between them, the things that hid there, and the in the shadows of subatomic particles, I might have succeeded.

On the Thursday before our reunion with Kree, Max and I met up at lunch on the bleachers to watch cheerleader practice. Not something I could’ve gotten away with before this week. I was still an outsider, but Max was still popular, and we were bound together now much to the confusion of Stonestead High’s social hierarchy. We weren’t there for the practice, though, but for cover. We had a mission: just who was this Kree Johnson-Smith?

“We didn’t turn anything up,” Max said. “No one I know has heard of her. No one even recognizes her description. Mom and Dad say there’s no such family anywhere near Stonestead.”

“Same here,” Emma said, voice buzzing from Max’s phone. “Total mystery girl. Wish someone could’ve told me homeschooling would have given me superpowers. Then I wouldn’t have to wear this dorky skirt and tie everyday.”

“Dorky?” Max asked, laughing. “There’re a lot of words I’d think to use about your fancy-ass uniform, Emmers, but not dorky. Right, Caleb?” He nudged me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I guess.”

I didn’t know why I couldn’t be more confident. I’d held Emma’s corpse. We’d watched some kind of space knight kill some kind of space monster. That was the sort of thing that made people more confident in stories, as if by magic. But it just didn’t.

“Don’t corrupt him, Max,” Emma said. “Caleb’s a good boy.”

“So, what do you think she is?” Max asked, after a moment. “Some kind of superhero?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. But I wasn’t sure how else to describe her, either.

“Space alien,” Emma said.

Max muttered, “I know I saw her nail that freakin’ alien dog with that sword.”

“Yeah,” Emma replied. “Would’ve been nice if she’d fixed the truck with her magic powers, though!”

“How’d Chris take it?” I asked. I only knew of her brother vaguely.

“Let’s just say we won’t be rolling out with Ironhide any time soon,” Emma replied.

I frowned. It’d been my fault, hadn’t it?

“Sorry about that, Em.”

“It’s fine. The damage wasn’t major. The real problem was that I couldn’t, like, tell him what’d done it.”

“Big dog,” Max said. “Big alien dog.”

“Yeah,” I put in. “With no eyes.”

That made us all quiet. After a moment, Max said: “Maybe we’ll get some answers in forty-eight hours.”

“Maybe,” Emma replied. “Wonder how she’ll find us.”

“Somehow,” I said, “I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”