“Well, undead horde, nothing we haven’t handled before,” Lee said.

“Wait, what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Harley said. “Follow us.”

Harley grabbed Himiko by the wrist and pulled her away from the encroaching horde of thralls. They collectively tried to ignore the sheer number of shambling footsteps pursuing them. And focused on workable facts.

“Yo Vasili, on a scale of Zombie to Lich, how much individual free will is left in a vampire thrall?” Harley asked.

“Uh, it’s complicated,” Vasili said. “They’re basically robots as long as the vampire in charge is alive. If the connection breaks, though, they’re pretty much back to their old selves.”

Vell looked over his shoulder, and then at Kim. He didn’t know why, but he felt compelled to check on her in that moment. The hordes had yet to catch up with them, though.

“Okay, so we’re no go on killing anybody,” Harley said. While they occasionally had to put down former classmates that had been turned into zombies, or had their brains removed and been converted into cranio-drones, the loopers drew the line at killing anything that retained free will. Or at least most of them did.

“What?” Derek said. “Why not?”

“Because we’re not fucking murderers, Derek,” Harley snapped.

“It won’t matter anyway!”

“Okay, hold on,” Himiko said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Harley repeated, more insistently this time. “We don’t kill anything sapient if we can help it.”

“We just need to take out Dragoslav -which is a very vampire-y name, by the way,” Vell said.

“Yeah, I think he’s faking,” Vasili said. “His name’s probably Jeremy or something.”

“Right,” Vell said. “Anyway, we get him to stop and then everything’s back to normal. And we find out how he turned the sun off and stop that.”

“Or we could put a stake in his heart,” Derek suggested.

The loopers and their company ducked into a dorm building and slammed the door shut behind them. Vasili grabbed the metal doorknob and snapped it off as easily as one might break a toothpick. Lee led the way to an unoccupied dorm room and they hunkered down inside, with Lee dousing her light to obscure them even further. It was a brief moment of safety, but they took advantage of it to the best of their ability.

“Derek, there will be no staking, no silver, no holy symbols, no exposure to sunlight, no garlic,” Lee said. “Nothing fatal. We do not kill.”

“Garlic is on the table, actually,” Vasili said. “It’s not fatal, just makes us break out in hives. Apparently the first vampire was allergic to garlic and we all just inherited that.”

“Good to know. I have some garlic bread in my freezer,” Harley said.

“I imagine actual cloves would be more effective,” Lee said. “I have some in my dorm...which is several buildings away.”

Nobody was particularly eager to return to the darkened world outside, and face all the vampire thralls that lurked in the shadows.

“Maybe we can just knock down doors and raid people’s kitchens,” Hawke suggested.

“Oh, so stealing is okay but staking one dude isn’t?”

“Yes, Derek, stealing is cool sometimes,” Harley said.

“Like pirating Disney movies,” Himiko said.

“Yes, Himiko, but that’s besides the point,” Harley said. “Also, the point isn’t very pointy. I think we want to do more than make Drago itchy.”

“It’s more of a burning rash,” Vasili said.

“Ew. The point stands. We need something bigger than an allergic reaction.”

“We could-”

“But smaller than murder,” Harley insisted. Derek never finished his sentence.

“Okay, shot in the dark here. No pun intended,” Himiko said. She turned to Vasili. “Can you turn us all into vampires and then we gang up on Drago with our vampire powers?”

“I possibly could, but that’s a big choice to make,” Vasili mumbled.

“Bigger than letting all light stay perpetually extinguished?”

“Good point. But, follow up problem, it takes like forty hours for the transformation to really kick in.”

“That’s off the table, then,” Lee said. The loop always reset had midnight, so they only had about twelve hours before they were all flung back to this morning. If worst came to worst, they could just wait out Dragoslav and his army of thralls, but a proactive approach usually fared better. The more they knew, the more easily they could prevent the apocalypse on the second loop.

“Maybe we can focus on turning the sun back on, for now,” Hawke said. “I’d be a lot more productive if I could see anything further than ten feet away from Lee.”

“You may be on to something,” Lee said. “Sunlight helps us and hurts him. We’d have to figure out how to disrupt his ritual one way or another. We may as well do it first.”

Preventing whatever Drago had done to the sun would have to be their first priority on the second loop anyway, so it made sense to make that their focus on the first loop.

“Are you going to be fine with that, Vasili?”

“Yeah, I got my tricks,” Vasili said. He was an older vampire, more resistant to most of the weaknesses that plagued vampires. Between his age-borne endurance and a few spells he’d picked up during his long life, Vasili was able to navigate sunlight in small doses. Dragoslav, who was far younger and far stupider, had no such capability. “I’ve been going to this school for three years, I can handle myself in the sun.”

“Oh hey, wait, hold on,” Derek said.

“Here we go again,” Lee sighed, rolling her eyes as she spoke.

“If it’s totally cool that you’re a vampire, why do you need to keep it a secret?” Derek said. “What are you hiding?”

“Fraud,” Vasili said blankly. Derek almost replied with a “gotcha”, but paused for a moment.

“What?”

“Fraud. I lied on my student loan applications,” Vasili said. “If the bank found out I’m actually sixty-eight I’d owe like fifty-thousand more on my tuition.”

“Oh. Well- that’s still evil,” Derek said. Even he was aware he was grasping at straws at this point.

“No, I’m totally cool with defrauding student loan organizations,” Harley said.

“Same. Predatory lending practices are just cleverly legalized robbery,” Vell said. Kim nodded along in agreement with him, as she usually did.

“What’s not cool is your vampire racism,” Himiko said.

“Oh would you all stop trying to make this a racial allegory,” Lee snapped. “There are real people with real problems and they don’t need to be trivialized through inane fantasies. So help me god anyone who says Vampire Lives Matter is getting slapped. I mean it.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Himiko said. “Just making it clear it’s not cool. Let’s just ignore any and all awkward comparisons and focus on turning the sun back on.”

“Yes, let’s focus. If you’ll all give me a moment, I can determine if there’s any magic at play here,” Lee said. Before she’d even finished talkier, her fingers started to trace out the arcane symbols of magikinesis, as she cast a spell that would allow her to identify any powerful magic on the island. Kim watched every complex motion with something like envy written across her face.

“Can you cast and walk at the same time?” Hawke asked. “I’m starting to hear things.”

“I’m surprised you can hear anything over that heartbeat pounding,” Vasili said. He got several concerned stares before realizing his mistake. “Oh, right, you guys can’t hear that. Vampire thing.”

“Wait, are we not supposed to be able to hear that?” Kim asked. She looked nervous now.

Thankfully for Kim, nobody had time to ask questions before Lee’s spell finished in a burst of magic light. She pulled her fingers away from an unexpectedly intense magical kickback, narrowly avoiding scorched fingertips.

“Ouch. I’ll be damned, that was bigger than I expected,” Lee said. She turned very pointedly to Harley. “Don’t.”

“I wasn’t,” Harley said. Some fruit was so low-hanging even she wouldn’t go for it. “Aside from the bad innuendo, what’d you get?”

“There is in fact a spell blanketing the island to snuff out all light,” Lee said. “Unfortunately for us, the source of that spell appears to be right on top of an intense concentration of vampiric energy. Whatever it is, Drago’s sitting right on top of it.”

“And it’s apparently very powerful,” Hawke noted.

“Oh, no, er, that was something else,” Lee said, trying her best not to glance at Vell. “We should move on, make it harder for the thralls to find us. I’ll do a more thorough search for the source of Drago’s spell afterwards.”

“Sounds good,” Vasili said. “Drago’s thralls passed us by a while back, so we should be good to jump to another building. Light up and let’s go, Lee.”

“Understood. Vell, would you walk with me for a moment?”

With great reluctance, Vell pried himself away from Kim long enough to have a quick aside with Lee. She tried to keep her voice low. There were still a lot of things the new loopers didn’t know about Vell, and they both aimed to keep it that way.

“Vell, dear, did you by any chance get more magical over the summer?”

The rune on Vell’s back was possibly the single largest concentration of magic on the planet, but Lee knew that already. What she did not know was why it had apparently doubled in power since the last time she’d scanned it.

“I...I, uh, have no way of knowing,” Vell said. He was not in control of, or even aware of, the magical energy that had been engraved into his body just above his ass.

“Well, it was glowing rather brightly just now,” Lee said. “But we’ll have to put that down as a ‘later’ problem. I think I can hear Hawke’s teeth chattering.”

To spare Hawke from undue terror, the two broke off their conversation and fell in step with the rest of the group, bringing Lee’s magic light with them. She was left with no answers about why Vell’s magic had doubled up. Vell didn’t think much about it, preferring to partner up with Kim once again.

----------------------------------------

“I feel like I should be asleep,” Hawke said

“Just because it’s dark? What are you, a chicken?”

“No, I’m a Hawke.”

No one laughed, and Hawke’s self-satisfied smile was lost in the pitch black. Lee’s rituals were taking a long time, and they hadn’t been attacked by vampire thralls to create any action, so everyone was getting a bit bored. It had been long enough that even Hawke’s mortal terror had worn off and he was now just annoyed by sitting around in the pitch black. Though he did experience a brief moment of heart-pounding terror when the light reappeared.

“There we are,” Lee said. With her ritual done, she could return her focus to providing light, illuminating a room of half-asleep survivors -albeit with two notable exceptions. “Where did Harley and Himiko- ah.”

“Yep.”

“Well, I’m glad they’re enjoying themselves, at least,” Lee said. Harley had a way of finding time for sex in the oddest situations. “Should we wait up, or-”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“We’ve been babysitting Botley,” Vell said. Harley’s robotic familiar had chosen to curl up in Kim’s lap, and she roused him ‘awake’. “He’ll let her know.”

“Taken care of,” Harley said, as she popped the door open. “We just went across the hall, you guys. Could’ve knocked.”

“I hope you at least washed your hands, dear,” Lee said.

“When have I ever neglected personal hygiene?” Harley asked. “We’ve been done for a while, Himiko’s just a cuddler.”

“Thank you for making sure everybody knows that,” Himiko grunted, giving Harley a not-so-gentle tap on the shoulder with her oversized prosthetic.

“Oh, come on. Did you really think people bought that ‘I got my big arm to scare off weird guys’ routine?” Harley said. “Everyone can tell you got it to give better hugs.”

“I’m going to hug your throat real good if you keep this up.”

“I am continually impressed by how quickly you can make people go from sleeping with you to threatening you, Harley,” Lee noted. “But please focus. I have a plan.”

Everyone sat down, circled up, and let Lee take the lead.

“The source of the darkness spell appears to be centered on the dining hall. Dragoslav has likely made that his lair.”

“Makes sense,” Derek grumbled. “Vampires are more powerful in their lairs.”

“No, that does not happen,” Vasili clarified. “That’s a Dungeons and Dragons thing. Do you actually know anything about vampires, or do you just hate what you imagine vampires to be?”

“I know things! You’re just trying to hide what you’re capable of, you-”

“Enough!”

An emphatic slam of Himiko’s heavy metal hand was more than enough to silence Derek. He kept his vampire bias bottled up for the time being.

“Thank you. As I was saying, now that we know where Dragoslav is, we have a chance to approach him on our terms. If we can distract him and his thralls somehow, I might be able to get into the dining hall and dispel whatever it is that’s sustaining his darkness magic.”

“That leaves us with the problem of the distraction,” Harley said. Nobody liked distraction duty.

“Maybe we can tempt him with some innocent maiden’s blood,” Derek said. He almost got slapped for that, but Vasili intercepted Harley’s hand before it made impact.

“I want to preface this by saying that, in general, vampires have no compulsion towards innocent maidens,” Vasili began. “However, Derek might have accidentally come up with something. If Drago really is as weird about women as you guys were guessing, he might be pretty easy to distract with, well, uh, women.”

All four women in the room looked at Vasili with mild to moderate disdain. Vell and Hawke weren’t thrilled either, though Derek was just excited he’d almost been right.

“What? It’d work. I think.”

“Unfortunately, you may be right,” Lee said.

“You’re just saying that because you’ll be busy dealing with the magic thingy,” Himiko snapped.

“I’d help if I could,” Lee said. “Though this is probably for the best. I doubt I’d make very appealing bait.”

“Oh shut up, you’re pretty,” Harley said. “But I’m also pretty, so I’ll be the bait.”

“Ugh. Not alone, you won’t,” Himiko said. “But you’re handling all the slutty stuff.”

“Oh, naturally. I’m the slut specialist.”

“I think I should go too,” Kim added. “Drago did seem fixated on me this morning. He’ll probably still find me very tempting.”

The tone of Kim’s voice made it clear she was thoroughly disgusted by the idea of being bait, but alternatives were in short supply. Lee needed to know what Dragoslav had done so she could prevent it on the second loop, and nobody else was coming up with any ideas, so bait was the play.

“Vasili, Vell, the two of you should be ready to deal with Drago if things get out of hand,” Lee said.

“Hey, what about me? I want to fight a vampire.”

“No, Derek,” Lee said. “I’ll need people watching my back in case the vampire thralls try anything. You and Hawke will be with me.”

“But-”

“That’s an order, Derek,” Lee insisted. Harley and Vell looked at each other with surprise. Lee had been in charge for a long time, and never pulled rank that hard. Derek must have struck a nerve. “Now if you’re quite done, let’s split into our respective teams and talk tactics.”

***

“This is degrading,” Himiko muttered.

“How? You haven’t even changed your outfit,” Harley said. “We’re just walking somewhere.”

“Somewhere we’ll be degraded!”

“Degraded: treated or regarded with contempt or disrespect,” Kim said. “Is that what we’re doing?”

“We’re going to whore ourselves out to a sex-starved vampire jackass,” Himiko said. “Yes! It’s degrading.”

“Well, for starters, we’re only pretending to whore ourselves out to him,” Harley said. “And secondly, this is a volunteer mission. You’re free to back out any time.”

“I might, but Lee only gave us one light,” Himiko said. “Not a fan of wandering around in the dark with an angry vampire.”

“Is it any better to walk right towards him?” Kim asked.

“At least I can see him in the light,” Himiko said. “If I can see him, I can punch him.”

“A mantra we should all live by. And keep very much in mind. I think that’s the dining hall up ahead.”

The dining hall’s glass facade reflected the purple light of Lee’s spell right back at them, shimmering with veins of lavender in the blackness. It would’ve been beautiful if it wasn’t also a sign of impeding vampire. Harley told her friends to stay put, then walked up to the edge of the light.

“Hey, vampire dude! We want to talk!”

The sound of breaking glass gave Harley just enough time to take a step back. She was getting a response much faster than expected, apparently. And in person.

In retrospect, Harley regretted standing at the very edge of the purple light, since that meant Drago could lurk at the edges of the shadow. He stood tall and terrifying at the edges of the light, a violet shadow cast against pure darkness.

“Hi there! Excellent work on the looming, by the way, very ominous,” Harley said. She actually meant it, but it was hard to make a compliment on looming ability seem sincere. “Anyway, my friends and I were hoping to discuss a compromise where you don’t murder us or turn us into weird mindless thralls.”

Two eyes glowing the in the darkness narrowed, and focused on Harley, but only briefly. Soon the vampire gaze shifted towards Kim.

“You again.”

“Oh, hello,” Kim said sheepishly. She’d been hoping that Drago’s magical scheme would’ve made him too busy to remember her. “Sorry, again, that I was rude the first time we met. And that you got kicked in the penis the second time we met.”

Harley began to think that they should’ve left Kim behind. Drago stopped looming and started lurking, gradually shifting his shadowy bulk in Kim’s direction.

“So what is it this time? Do you want to humiliate me again?” He asked, with all the bitterness of a man who’d been humiliated more than once. Probably several times. A day.

“No, I don’t,” Kim said. “I want to understand you.”

Drago’s malevolent lurking stopped for a moment. Understanding was in short supply in his life. Few people understood him, mostly because he made no effort to understand them.

“I don’t need you to understand me,” Drago snapped. “I don’t need anything! I’m in control here! I can do whatever I want!”

What Drago wanted to do now, specifically, was make a dramatic point. He took a moment to flare his cape (because of course he was wearing a cape) and then lunged in Kim’s direction, fangs bared. Moving with vampire speed, he struck before anyone could react and sank his teeth into Kim’s neck. Then he stayed there for a second, and even nibbled on her neck like a puppy chewing on a bone, before drawing back.

The violet light made it hard to discern color, but Harley could tell there wasn’t a single drop of crimson blood on Drago’s fangs. Or anywhere else.

“What the fuck?”

A good question that Drago never got an answer for. What he did get was a face full of metal knuckles. Himiko’s prosthetic slammed into his face hard enough to knock even a vampire off their feet, and he hit the ground hard, unmoving.

The three women stared at him for a while just to be safe.

“Did- did that work?” Himiko said. “Can punches knock out vampires?”

“While not a traditional weakness of vampires, I think a suckerpunch from a hundred pound metal fist would knock out most things,” Harley said. She kicked Dragoslav lightly to see if he’d react, but he didn’t. “I’d say check for a pulse, but…”

“Hey, Vasili,” Himiko shouted into the darkness. “How do you keep an unconscious vampire down?”

“Did you seriously knock him out? How?”

“Well I just punched him real hard when he got distracted by Kim-”

“I did a thing,” Kim frantically interrupted. “How do we keep him down, what do we do?”

“Oh, yeah, put a coin in his mouth,” Vasili said. “And don’t tell anyone I told you that. The other vampires don’t like people knowing they can be immobilized by pocket change.”

“Okay, cool, thanks,” Harley said. She felt that this was all severely lacking in panache, but she wouldn’t object to less hostile vampires in her life. She dug a quarter out of her pocket, shoved it into Dragoslav’s mouth, and then turned her attention back to Kim. There were still two tiny, bloodless holes in her neck.

“Speaking of not talking about things…”

“Please don’t tell anyone,” Kim pleaded.

“Okay, but, just for clarity, what exactly am I not telling people?” Harley said. “I’ve seen you bleed before, Kim. What the fuck is going on with you?”

Kim tugged at her collar and then rubbed the two holes in her neck nervously. Harley knew stalling when she saw it, and was just about to call Kim out on it when the stalling began to work.

The return of light to the world happened all at once in a solar-scale flashbang, and Harley was temporarily blinded by the sudden return of the sun. When she rubbed her eyes clear and could finally see again, Kim was already long gone.

“Oh boy.”

----------------------------------------

While Kim somehow managed to evade Harley for the remainder of the first loop, she had no such luck on the second. Lee called a meeting to discuss their plan of attack, and Harley kept a close eye on Kim the entire time.

“All in all it should be a fairly simple ritual to disrupt, but the sooner the better,” Lee said, finishing her summation. “Shall we go knock some sense into Dragoslav?”

“You guys go on ahead,” Harley said. “Me and Kim need to have a quick chat.”

Kim started to look nervous, but did not protest, or try to run again. Lee simply shrugged her shoulders.

“Alright then. Derek, as you were, in fact, right about it being a vampire, you take the lead,” Lee said. “You can find Drago in the basement under the school’s auditorium. The rest of us will reinforce you soon.”

“About fucking time we took this vampire seriously,” Derek said, as he clenched his fists. “I’ll try to save a piece for you.”

He then flexed, for some reason, and departed. Lee clapped her hands together as soon as Derek was out of the room.

“Alright, and now that he’s out of the way, the rest of us can go to where Drago actually is,” Lee said. He was in the basement under the dining hall, very very far away from the auditorium. “You two enjoy your chat.”

There was a very low chance of that, by any reckoning. The room emptied, leaving Harley and Kim to stare at each other in tense silence.

“So, Kim. What’s going on with your whole blood situation?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, my blood’s completely normal,” Kim spat. “See, look!”

With unsettling speed, Kim withdrew a small pen knife and stabbed the end of her thumb, drawing a small rivulet of blood.

“You must’ve just been imagining things!”

“Kim?”

“Yes.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Harley punctuated that sentence by retrieving a bandage from the first aid kit and putting it on Kim’s self-inflicted cut. Kim froze in place the minute Harley touched her.

“Listen, I don’t need to know what’s going on with you,” Harley said. “It’s your life to live, your secrets to keep. But trust me when I say that keeping secrets tends to bite you in the ass. Especially when you’re keeping them from the people you care about.”

Harley finished up with the bandage and returned to her seat.

“In case I’m being too subtle: you need to tell Vell,” Harley said. Relying on nuance had not ended well for her in the past. “Like, doubly so. Dude’s been through a lot.”

“I- I will. Of course I’ll tell him. Eventually,” Kim stuttered. “There’s just- I need to think. Bye!”

Kim’s resolve gave out, and she fled once again, leaving Harley alone. After taking a moment for a long, deep sigh, she summoned Botley, her robotic familiar. The diminutive android plopped onto the table and looked up at Harley with blank eyes while she patted his head.

“Is this just what my life is like now, Botley?” She said. He didn’t answer, since he was incapable of speech, or complex thought. “Am I just the weirdo babysitter?”

Botley rolled over and fell off the edge of the table, into Harley’s lap, where he curled up like a cat.

“I guess Hawke is normal. Mostly.”

----------------------------------------

Hawke was currently demonstrating his normalness by having an entirely normal reaction to being in a room with a hostile vampire. He kept his body close to the door and his hand close to a clove of garlic in his pocket while Vell and Lee took the lead. They’d brought Vasili along for some vampire support of their own, but they were still being very cautious around Dragoslav.

Except, of course, for Vell, who was trying to talk things out. Less out of a sense of sympathy and more out of a desire for him to leave without a fight. Any vampire bites that happened today would be permanent.

“Look, I know this all feels a little hostile-”

“You kicked down the door, blasted me with magic, and ruined my blood bucket!” Drago whined. Some of the blood was still spreading across the floor, coming dangerously close to Vell’s shoes.

“You can’t blame us for being a bit aggressive when you have a literal bucket of blood, sir,” Lee said.

“You asked me for a bucket of blood last week, Lee,” Vasili noted.

“Yes, dear, but we trust your blood to be ethically sourced,” Lee said. “I don’t extend the same assumption to someone trespassing on school grounds and setting up some dubious magic ritual.”

Vasili examined the mysterious sigil Dragoslav had carved into the floor and nodded. He wasn’t a magic guy, but it definitely didn’t look benevolent. Nothing with a pentagram in the middle did.

“I get we’re making some big assumptions here, you know, probably getting off on the wrong foot,” Vell said. “Maybe we can talk this over.”

“I think it’d be better if me and Drago had a private chat about this,” Vasili said. His clenched fists made it clear exactly what kind of “talk” it would be. “There’s more than a few little rules of our community being broken right now.”

“Let’s not make this a fight,” Vell said, turning to Vasili as he spoke. In doing so, he turned his back on Dragoslav, which, as one might guess, was a mistake.

“Won’t be much of a fight,” Drago mumbled under his breath. He lunged directly at Vell, fangs bared, intent on creating the first of many thralls. Vell didn’t even have time to turn around before he felt the fangs dig into his neck -and a loud “pop” sound burst right behind his ear. When he turned around to check on the curious popping noise, he saw a curious absence of Dragoslav.

“Huh. Where’d he go? Also, ow,” Vell said. He rubbed the two pinpricks on his neck as an afterthought.

“Oh, just a classic vampire defense,” Vasili said. “Something in your blood must’ve disagreed with him, so he just poofed right on back to his coffin.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Vell said. The rune on his back did give him a few strange properties, it made sense that extended to his blood. “Two birds, one stone, I guess.”

“Yeah, very convenient,” Vasili said. “You better go get some bandages on those, by the way. Me and Lee can clean up here.”

“We may have to start by prying Hawke off the walls,” Lee said. “Dear?”

“No, I’m good, I’ll just follow Vell out,” Hawke said, as if he wasn’t already halfway out the door, well ahead of Vell. “I’m not good with blood, bye!”

Shortly after Hawke’s hasty retreat, Vell said goodbye and wandered out in turn, leaving Lee to stare very intensely at Vasili.

“That wasn’t a normal vampire thing, was it?”

“Fuck no it wasn’t,” Vasili said, letting out all the panic he’d been restraining up to now. “Drago’s super dead! Like, the most dead I’ve ever seen anything die! What the fuck happened, Lee?”

“That is a complicated matter and delves very deeply in Vell’s private affairs,” Lee said. She knew Vell was positively brimming with magic, and something in Vell’s blood must have conflicted with Drago’s undead nature so violently he had instantly disintegrated. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to rely on your trust and discretion. In every direction, to be clear. Vell would be heartbroken if he found out he’d caused someone’s death, even indirectly.”

“Yeah, cool, great, I’ll be perfectly happy to never speak of this again,” Vasili sputtered. Lee knew the feeling.

----------------------------------------

As they often did, Lee and Harley met up for lunch around noon. It was usually an occasion for friendly chatter, but they knew each other well enough to recognize the strained look on each of their faces.

“So. Anything interesting happen with Vell?”

“Oh, nothing in particular,” Lee said. “How did your chat with Kim go? Talk about anything interesting?”

“Nothing in particular.”

Their tense gazes met for a moment in mutual recognition of how utterly bonkers their lives were.

“You want a drink as much as I do?”

“Harley, it’s noon.”

“And?”

“And...I have a bottle of wine I think you’ll like. Come on then.”