by Lauren Esker
"What's weird?" the big guy said.
"I don't know. He's somehow managed to figure out how to hide his aura. I mean, it is him, it's gotta be. I'm never wrong. But—"
"Stay! Back!" Claudia half-screamed. She held her keys toward the first guy and her other hand, clutching her purse, toward Barney, like that would do anything, but then—
—then—
A wave of sudden, intense dizziness washed through her. As she staggered, the air in front of her wavered and then it did something that she could only think of as unzipping.
It was like there was a crack in the air in front of her, widening slowly. Instead of the dark, rainy street, she could see into her apartment's living room. There was the overstuffed couch, the kitchenette, the rug that had belonged to her grandparents—the whole thing outlined in vivid blue-purple, so bright it hurt her eyes.
Claudia was baffled, but not too baffled to recognize an escape when she saw one. She waved a hand in the violet-edged space in front of her, and felt warmth instead of cold rain. She lunged forward; her wet foot landed on the rug and skidded. She stumbled and caught herself on the arm of the couch.
"Get her!" Barney yelled. She looked back wildly. For the barest instant she glimpsed the rainy sidewalk she'd just left, the lights of businesses in the background—and then the rip in the air was gone. Completely and utterly gone, as if it had never been.
Claudia clung to the arm of the couch, draped over it. She was still dizzy, her hands shaking. After a moment, she slowly peeled herself off the couch and stood up.
"What," she said very quietly, "the hell."
She was in her apartment. She squeezed the back of the couch, poked a toe under the edge of the rug. Everything felt real. She left a trail of very real water on her way to the bathroom to get herself a towel. Warm, dry terrycloth on her face felt real too, and when she lowered the towel, her own confused face stared at her from the mirror.
Maybe she'd somehow blanked out on her commute home? Trauma could do that. She fumbled out her phone, dropping her keys on the floor, and checked the time. She hadn't paid close attention to when she'd left work, but she certainly hadn't lost the amount of time that it would have taken her to ride the bus home.
She was still shaking all over. Dropping the towel on the floor, she walked into the kitchen and just stood there for a moment, and then opened a cabinet and got out a half-empty bottle of red wine and poured a glass all the way full.
After a few gulps of the wine steadied her somewhat, she became aware that she was ragingly hungry—not a "past dinnertime" kind of hunger, but a "just ran a marathon and haven't eaten in a week" urgency. She opened the fridge and wolfed down a package of turkey lunch meat, two bagels, a carton of leftover pad Thai, and the slice of cheesecake she'd been saving for a special occasion, before she finally felt the gnawing hunger begin to ease.
As she put the takeout carton in the trash, she noticed her headache had gone away totally. She felt better than she had in days.
"What," she said plaintively to empty air, and took another gulp of wine.
Her head was starting to buzz, so she set the wine down. She didn't want to be drunk while trying to figure this out; she needed to be able to think.
Barney was a creep. First of all, she needed to call the security company and report him. But she hesitated, because the whole situation was just so weird. How was she going to explain this to the company? Barney acted like he'd mistaken her for someone else. He acted like he thought she was a man. But that made no sense at all.
And she had just pointed her fingers, and that rip in the air had opened ...
She started to raise a hand nervously, then dropped it back to her side. "Dry clothes," she said aloud. "I need dry clothes."
Ten minutes later, in an oversized sweatshirt with her bare feet shoved into flat-bottomed Keds and a scarf tied around her wet hair, she pushed the furniture in her pocket-sized living room against the walls to clear enough space to stand without bumping into things. Standing firmly with feet apart, she held out a hand and said in the most authoritative voice she could muster, "Open."
Nothing happened.
In fairness, this was the result she'd expected.
It might not even have been me. Maybe it was something those guys had done. Which ... was an even worse thought, come to think of it. She had to look over her shoulder in a sudden intense panic. If some creeper could open a friggin' portal into the middle of her apartment—
No, having done it herself was by far the better of two terrible options.
But could she do it again?
She held out her hand. "Open."
Nothing.
She tried gesturing. Maybe she'd moved her fingers somehow? She went through a variety of swoops and swirls gleaned from magicians on paranormal TV shows and David Copperfield specials, and achieved nothing other than making her arm tired.
Okay. She had been holding her keys at the time. Maybe metal was important somehow. She gripped her keys the same way she'd been holding them before, in a self-defense grip with the keys jutting out between her fingers, and held her fist out.
That felt ... odd. Different. She didn't think it was the keys; it was more that gripping them in her fist, and standing the same way, put her back in the same mindset. She could almost feel the rain on her skin, the desperate fear clenching her stomach.
And for a moment, there was almost something there. A subtle sense of connection, that she couldn't quite get hold of.
And then it was gone again.
She dropped her hand, fingers curled loosely around the keys. "So much for that," she murmured. Maybe she really did experience some kind of psychotic break; maybe she'd taken the bus home and had simply forgotten about it.
The sound of footsteps in the hallway nearly made her jump out of her skin.
It was just a neighbor, coming home. The walls were thin here. She could hear people going up and down the stairs all the time.
Please. That's all it is. Just a neighbor.
Except it seemed as if the steps had paused outside her door.
She held very still.
Then her door exploded inward, cracking off its hinges as the person on the other side hurled themselves against it. It was the big guy in the trench coat, stumbling into her apartment. He'd knocked his hat off and his scarf was askew, revealing leopard-spotted fur and cat ears.
Claudia was too shocked to do anything for the first, critical seconds. Then she dropped her keys and dived for her phone, only be scooped up in Cat Guy's powerful arms.
Barney came in after him, brushing rainwater off the shoulders of his damp security guard's uniform. He took in the scene—the door half off its hinges, Claudia kicking and struggling in her captor's arms—and leveled a look of withering scorn at both of them.
"Subtle," he said. "Very subtle."
The cat-guy muttered something under his breath as Claudia tried to kick him in the nuts and then in the kneecaps. "How do you stop him from opening a portal?" he demanded.
"Why do you think I'm an expert on it all of a sudden?" Barney retorted.
"I can just stun him."
"No!" Barney snapped. "We don't know how that'll affect the symbiont."
Claudia finally had the presence of mind to open her mouth and scream at the top of her lungs. Cat-guy clapped a hand over her mouth. She continued trying to scream through the hand, then tried to bite him.
"Listen, listen!" Barney held out his hands in a calming gesture. "I'm Iustran, okay? Like you. You should be able to tell—no, maybe you can't. Look."
His face started to darken from its normal "indoorsy white dude in Seattle" pallor, taking on a mauve-ish tint. Hair began to sprout from his bald head, rising from his skin like a time-lapse video of growing plants, twisting into thick curls. It was dark blue.
Claudia stopped trying to scream, and simply stared in utter shock.
The transformation accelerated. Barney's chest expanded under his beige s
ecurity guard uniform, straining at the buttons, while his shoulders dropped as he shrank in height. The dark blue hair kept growing rapidly, falling down his back in thick waves.
And he was no longer a "he." Where Barney had stood, there was now a woman about Claudia's height, still wearing the ill-fitting guard's uniform. She had light purple skin, traced with what looked like pale tattoos or body paint.
"See?" the woman said, smiling. "I'm Iustran, like I said."
Claudia screamed again, through the cat-guy's relaxing fingers. The hand tightened hastily, and he said over her head, "Good plan. Great plan. Can I stun him now?"
Panic turned Claudia's knees to water. She just wanted to be somewhere safe.
This time she was aware of a wrenching sensation that started at the base of her spine and spread through her body. And a violet-edged portal opened under her feet.
Her captor was trying to stop her from going forward, not down. Claudia dropped out of his arms, and she just had time to hear the purple woman yell, "Not again!" before her feet thumped into wet grass and she caught herself on something wooden as the portal winked out above her.
She was outside. It was night, and the air was warm and humid, full of smells that went straight to the back of her brain and said, Home. Safety.
Still, it took her a few dazed moments of looking around to figure out where she was. She was standing with her hand on the side of a wooden shed in the backyard of the house that had been her childhood home when her family lived in Louisiana.
It was the last place she'd really thought of as home, before her parents divorced. She and Naomi had ended up shuttling through a series of moves and custody battles and occasional stays with relatives, only to eventually end up as far from Louisiana as they could get. But first there had been this house, and this yard.
She hadn't been here since she was ten.
It was more overgrown than she remembered, and the shed that used to be their childhood playhouse was now half lost in a tangle of honeysuckle and kudzu. Just as well she hadn't come out in the shed itself; it would have been pitch dark inside, and probably full of snakes and spiders.
Not like twenty years ago, when this had been her and Naomi's refuge from their parents' arguments. They'd spent endless hours out here with their mismatched play tea set composed of cracked china salvaged from trash bins and garage sales. Here they'd played board games, plotted their inevitable running away (that never happened), and giggled over the "novel" they were co-writing on a pad of wide-lined school paper.
She could see why this shed had been the place of safety and refuge her subconscious had conjured for her.
Except it wasn't anymore. Thinking nervously of snakes, and very glad she'd at least been wearing slip-on Keds rather than barefoot, Claudia groped her way around to the front of the house. She had thought at first, from the state of the backyard, that it had been abandoned. But the porch light was on, and there were kids' toys—a tipped-over tricycle, a little girl's plastic bake-oven set—vanishing into the grass and weeds of the overgrown lawn.
She stood staring at the sagging gutters, the peeling paint, trying to reconcile it with the neatly kept house with the flowerbeds that she remembered. Trying, also, to wrap her mind around the idea that she was in her childhood hometown outside Baton Rouge, when moments earlier she'd been 3000 miles away. In her apartment. Being attacked by shape-changing ... demons? Aliens?
What the hell.
She was just trying to decide whether to knock on the door and ask for help when a dog stood up suddenly on the porch, a scrawny hound with a ragged tail and a rope tied around its neck. It flattened its ears and gave a low bark.
"Sorry!" Claudia gasped.
The dog growled and began to descend the sagging stairs, only to be jerked up short by the rope. Snarling loudly, it strained against the rope, which looked frayed and none too strong.
"Nice dog," Claudia murmured, backing down the driveway.
She turned and fled out to the road.
It was even darker here, as soon as the trees hid the house, and utterly deserted. Moist dirt sucked at her shoes as she stood on the shoulder, looking down the road toward the scattered lights of other houses and the far-distant city glow of Baton Rouge.
As she stood staring at the city lights in a daze, it slowly sank in that her purse was back in her apartment. And with it, her phone, her wallet, her ID, and everything else she owned. She was in Louisiana with nothing on her except the clothes she was wearing.
Claudia raised a shaky hand. "Open?" she said tentatively.
Nothing happened.
"Open. Open. Open."
Nothing.
Maybe she could only do it in moments of desperation. And anyway, where was she going to go? It wasn't like she could go back to her apartment right now. Not with those people there, whoever or whatever they were.
A wave of shivering rocked her. She covered her face with her hands and took some deep breaths, until she realized there was a vivid purple glow behind her closed eyelids.
That had to just be her eyes. Right?
She pulled up her sleeve. No. It wasn't her eyes. There were faint glimmers of violet-colored light flickering under the light brown skin of her wrist and palm.
It died away an instant later. She kept staring at her arm, flexed her hand, turned it over. It just looked normal now.
What the actual fuck.
Her life had been perfectly normal for 27 years. No dreams about aliens, no magical mystery people following her around, no mysterious portaling powers, what the fuck. There was only one thing that had changed right before all this weirdness fell on her head.
She tilted her head back and yelled in fury, with no one to hear her except the dark forest, "Dwayne Johnson, you asshole!"
Three
Halfway across the galaxy, Skara guided his ship Discordia into the docking grapples of a mining outpost that his sensors told him was dead and airless, uninhabited and long abandoned except for the second ship docked to the opposite edge of its outer ring. Those were his buyers. He hoped.
His head was hurting again, a sharp stabbing pain behind his eyes. He rubbed his temples impatiently. Could he have picked up a virus on Earth? He hoped not. Iustrans almost never got sick. Their shapeshifting abilities also went along with an increased resistance to germs; their bodies rejected anything foreign. He even kept having to re-inject himself with the nanites that allowed him to use Galatean technology, because his body slowly but surely disabled them and flushed them out in sweat and urine.
I'm not getting sick, it's just changes in air pressure from being on a planet, or something. That's it, I'm staying in space for the foreseeable future. I can do all my shopping on space stations.
Like this, for example.
And he should have plenty of money to shop with, once today's business was one.
He was pleased that he had been able to find a buyer so quickly. But then, it wasn't hard to get takers when one was trying to sell one of the most coveted black-market items in the galaxy. Their advance payment had enabled him to fill his hold with the cargo he'd planned on, though it had also drained his bank account nearly dry. But that didn't matter. As soon as he completed this exchange and unloaded his case of pirated Earth DNA, he'd have enough credit to keep him in business for years, not to mention paying for a nice little party at the nearest station. Headache be damned: he was getting drunk tonight.
For this meeting, he'd chosen one of his more intimidating physical forms. It was tall, thick and broad, with horns on his head and spikes bristling in an offputting thorny hedge on his wide shoulders and down his arms. His new, fake face was heavyset and warty, with an overhanging brow ridge.
If anyone came into physical contact with him, however, they'd find out that he was much lighter than he looked. He could only change his shape, not his mass, so he could only achieve a large, imposing form like this one by spreading himself thin. He was bulked out with air bladders in the torso, and hi
s bones in this shape were relatively fragile.
He couldn't easily hold a new form unless he either had a good, clear image of his new shape that showed it from all sides, or he'd practiced that particular shape-change enough to know it inside and out. He was very proud of this shape. It was convincingly terrifying, but it wasn't a real species, just a fake that he'd made up back in childhood to scare his brothers and sisters. Since it wasn't real, witnesses could give all the descriptions they liked; it wouldn't ever add up to anything except confusion.
Skara rose from his pilot's chair and then had to catch himself on the back of the seat as a wave of dizziness swept over him. Okay, something was definitely wrong. Maybe after he got today's business done, he'd pay for a trip to a clinic and find himself a nice, pretty doctor to take a look at him.
A vision flitted through his mind's eye, of his own hands gently peeling a red dress off smooth brown shoulders ...
Stupid, he chided himself. He was never going to see the Earth woman again. He might as well forget about her.
Even if he could still feel her gentle lodestone tug, despite the great distance separating them. That was unusual. Even with the imprinting, he couldn't normally feel people from this far away. If he had wanted to find her, it seemed as if he could have found her from an entire galaxy away.
Of course, he knew exactly where she was even without the imprinting. She was on Earth, where she would stay. And he was out here in space, where he needed to sell what he'd come to sell, and then go deliver his other cargo.
He steadied himself and went into the back, grabbing a painkiller patch along the way. In the Galatean-controlled sectors of the galaxy, most people used wrist-mounted energy weapons, but he also slung a pulse rifle over his shoulder just for the intimidation factor. He patted himself down to be sure that all his knives and other little toys were where they should be, and then, with a mental command, he raised a shield around himself from the Galatean power cuffs at his wrists. He had a simple oxy-mask and an air pack on his belt in case he was on the station long enough to use up the air trapped inside the shield. More importantly, he was protected against any weapons that might end up pointed his way.
