Part Three

She kept looking at him out of the corner of her eye, glancing at him like she might suddenly decide to pounce, which was ridiculous because she was just a little human and didn’t know how.

Scotch hadn’t been around a lot of humans. To be exact, he’d had two conversations with them that involved more than, "Hello," "Thank you," "Please," or "You’re welcome."

He went into cities infrequently because they made him nervous. No one in the village left too often, and although he and Thursy watched a lot of television – including the Olympics – they always viewed it with a certain detachment. That glass-eyed box was a window into a world they chose not to participate in, where fragile creatures walked in their make-shift worlds.

He didn’t know what to say to this human girl now. She was a few feet away, walking hunched over and gracelessly as she search for her keys. She spoke so goddamn fast and he could tell from her expression that nothing he said to her was making any sense. Also, it appeared she had very poor hearing, which he was hoping would shield her from the fact that he had forgotten her name.

"You’re sure you dropped them?" he asked. She glanced his way and then back at the ground.

"I threw them at you. They’ve got to be around here somewhere."

So that’s what she had pitched at him. He hadn’t been sure.

He wondered if it would be appropriate to say something. She was reacting with embarrassment more than shock, which was better than screaming and at the same time useless. If she was going to be all casual, he would have to be blunt.

"You saw me change just now."

She stole another peek at him. Her eyes were a dark, molten brown and her hair was very light blond. She had a funny mouth, small and bow-shaped, and most of her expression came from it.

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

"Get my keys, drive home, and pretend like nothing happened," she answered without hesitation.

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

"Because…" He fumbled for the expression he wanted. "I have people."

She paused, and then reached with exaggerated calm to brush a few leaves off the ground. "You don’t have to kill me, Scotch. This would be a cool story, but not that cool. I can keep quiet."

He believed her. "Thanks."

"Thanks?" The corner of her mouth twitched upward. "Shouldn’t I be the one thanking you?"

Had he bungled again or was she teasing him? He honestly didn’t know, and he'd already made a fool of himself with that gravity boot thing. He should never have believed Yared when he said humans really wore them. "You’re welcome."

She accepted that without comment. "Do you live around here?"

"Yes."

"Both." Had she been making fun of him? "What about you?"

"I live in Kensey. It’s about sixty-five miles south."

Scotch wasn’t sure he ever been sixty-five miles from the village. "How did you end up here?"

"It’s a long story, involving a statistics project, a forgetful professor, and an upside down map. You don’t want to know."

Humans were baffling.

"Oh."

He walked back to the edge of the hole – how ironic was it that she had caught him ‘shifting after falling into a booby trap he had dug? – and found his own paw prints. The keys had flown over his right shoulder, missing him by only a few inches.

He checked the area immediately behind him and found nothing nearby. A few feet further back, though, there was a cluster of small rocks with cracks between them…

"I’ve found them," he called, wondering again what her name was. He was thinking Coal, but that was for lamia, not humans.

"Really?"

He glanced at his hand. There were no locks in the village, but he was sure these were keys. "Yes, really."

She straightened up and picked her way through the broken branches and chunks of broken mountain like a bird peeking for seeds. There was something all together a little birdish about her, in an enchanting way.

She stopped three feet away, reminding Scotch again that humans didn’t like to stand too closely to one another. He didn’t know why not—she smelled pleasantly of strawberries and hole-dirt.

He held out the keys and she reached for them and—

They fell.

There was a moment of complete emptiness in his mind, when nothing happened and nothing grew and nothing fought to be heard. He was warm and comfortable inside his floating body.

He stopped falling when he smashed back into the present.

His eyes flew open. Coalise Hastings Edison – he knew her name now – was on her knees a few feet away, staring up at him with her huge brown human eyes. She was still holding out her limp hand.

He must have jerked away. Without thinking, her grabbed her wrist again and–

Flew. This time he flew downward, deep, and Coalise’s mind hit his like a tornado wrapping itself around him. He saw her parents – her mother was a lawyer, her stepfather made custom-lampshades – and her brothers – Addison was three, Greco was two – and the school she went to – with Krista, her best friend, and Cleo, who was barely her friend at all anymore, and Mike, who wouldn’t stop hitting on her, and Adam, who wouldn’t start hitting on her.

The images and the feelings she connected with them came at him like slaps to the face. Cleo’s dog, Addison’s cereal, the way her locker smelled and her bedroom felt and the way the refrigerator light shone on the tile floor in the middle of the night.

Funny things happened to her all the time. He didn't understand at first glance - from his point of view, her misadventures were remarkably similar to those the characters on Seinfeld had, and weren't those normal for humans? - but he felt her sigh at the remembrance.

Stuff like this just happens to me, she told him.

She hadn't even been truly shocked when she saw him shift. She had long ago accepted that none of the usual rules applied to her life.

Then came the biggest shock of all:

She was just like him.

Her intellect—slower but just as deep. Her range of emotions—equally complex. Her morals—possibly more conflicted than his own.

She loved her family. She took care of her friends. She worried about making a fool of herself and having enough money and treating people fairly and getting everything done.

She was his equal.

They were standing in a dark place, they were down the hole, a hundred, two hundred feet from the surface where the light fell apart and settled over them like the finest dust. He couldn’t see her face, only the outline on her hair and her shoulders. They weren’t touching, but her warmth extended around him.

What’s going on? she asked. Her tone wasn’t modified for a stranger’s ears—she spoke to him as one of her own.

You’re pack, he told her.

With a wave of her ethereal hand, her life spread out in a great hola hope around them. Each memory moved on itself own. The characters danced into the next scene as their own played out.

No pack. No Night World. No fear.

Do you hear something? she asked.

Scotch couldn’t look away from her, couldn’t hear anything but her mind rushing in his ears, but she reached out and turned his face to the side, and he hit the ground so hard that when he opened his eyes he was staring at tree roots.

Coalise was on her side next to him. Her hand was on his shoulder but she was looking intently past him.

"Scotch!" The voice came from only a few dozen yards away.

Their eyes met. "Oh, god," Coalise said. "That’s Thursy. She’s going to freak out if she finds out about this."

He realized with a start, as she pulled him to his feet, that she had seen as deeply into him as he had into her.

"Keys, keys, where the hell did the keys land?"

His eyes scanned the ground where they’d fallen together. "I don’t see them."

"Scotch!" Thursy called again.

"Never mind," Coalise said quickly. "I’ll walk. Get out of here."

She turned away and he grabbed her hand. "Wait."

"No, Scotch, let go." When he didn’t, she said, "You don’t want to loose her. I understood, it’s fine."

She did understand. Thursy was the best thing in his life. But…

"I’ll come back," he told her. "There’s a cave, if you go past that boulder there and up the path. Wait for me there, I’ll come back."

Coalise shook her head. "Scotch-"

He kissed her. Her lips were soft and faintly slick with vanilla chapstick and her hand when it closed around the back of his neck was tender. He had to force himself to be gentle with her fragile spine when he wrapped his arms around her.

"Scotch!"

Coalise put her hand on his chest and pushed him away. Her breath was shaking and he could see fear and love and panic warring behind her eyes.

"I’ll wait," she said. "Promise you’ll come back?"

"Yes."

She nodded and dragged herself out of his arms. He watched her scramble toward the path and shook himself.

He thought it would be impossible to look at Thursy then. He thought he would feel guilty and trapped and – worst of all – that the love he felt for her would simply have vanished, leaving only a cold, empty place inside him.

But he burst out of the trees to see her standing on top of a pile of rocks to get a better view of the area, and nothing had changed. Coalise had torn something open inside him, but Thursy was still Thursy, and his heart still beat hard when he saw her.

She cried his name and leapt the ten-feet down to the ground. Her auburn hair floated out behind her. "Are you okay?" she asked, throwing her arms around him.

He hugged her as hard as he liked. He didn’t have to worry about crushing her. "I got caught in a landslide."

"I know. I wasn’t paying a bit of attention and when I got back to the village Kiria said she thought she’d heard an avalanche. You look all right."

Her fingers were running lightly over his scull, checking for bumps or craters or punctures, while her green eyes – darkened with worry – glanced over his mussed clothes.

"It was a very small landslide," he told her. "It just caught me off guard."

"I bet. Yared told me not to worry, but I came anyway. In case you were unconscious and bleeding."

He smiled, his hands still clasped around her back. "I’m glad you came," he told her.

She heard his voice tremble. "Scotch?"

Suddenly his entire body was shaking. "Oh, gods," she said, "what’s wrong?"

He buried his face in her shoulder, smelling the fern leaves she decorated her dresser with. "Nothing’s wrong," he whispered, but he couldn’t make himself let go of her.

She didn’t push. She kissed his temple and held onto him fiercely until his knees grew steady, and then she said, "Come on, let’s go home."

He nodded. Back at the house, he could tell her he wanted to nap and then head back out to the cave.

Taking a firm hold on her hand, he started walking back toward the village. "There’s something I have to talk to you about," he said.

"What’s that?"

"I know how you should vote on the Daybreak/Nightworld issue."

Part Four

Tales From the Scarecrow