Prologue: A Nice Afternoon. (Patreon)

An orchestra of jubilation echoed throughout the dormitory, carrying relief and expectation in equal measure. It was a chaotic mix of masculine and feminine voices celebrating their accomplishments. Savouring the sweet nectar of freedom after weeks of preparation for the final exams. Some would be coming back for another year, but most were finished with their studies.

Outside, the spring breeze billowed with a comforting warmth. The few trees left standing on the street rustled their leaves impatiently, as if they were old codgers reprimanding the youths drunkenly dancing beneath their canopies. I experienced all the revelries through the lounge room window on the second floor, practically tasting the tantalizing treats being served at nearby restaurants by their fragrance. Freshly cooked slices of pizza, baked apple tarts and pies, roasted chickens served with platters of stuffed peppers, prime ribs bathed in sauces, crabs and lobster drowned in thick tubs of butter and many, many more. Almost everyone was splurging whatever meager funds they still had on good food and strong drinks. Determined to make this a night to remember.

Even the sight of cleanup crews dismantling rift-spawn corpses and sweeping up shell casings barely registered with my fellows. Couples and clustered partygoers walked around the dried clumps of blackened blood and viscera without a care in the world. Blind to the enormity of the carcasses on display, as well as the damage they’d caused to the barricade separating the university grounds from the now-condemned Birchwood Park.

They were all enjoying the comforts of a mostly peaceful county, while Doris enjoyed the comforts of her funeral urn.

‘Though, I suppose there’s no harm in a little levity. No one they knew was seriously hurt and another layer of concrete covered in barbed wire is being deployed even now.’    

Ugly memories threatened to surface once more. Clawing their way from the pit I’d buried them in. The impotence. The lack of control. The inability to do anything when the situation had called for it.

I snuffed them out with practiced ease. Breathing in and out the way I’d been taught at the seminars. Invoking positive emotions to supress the negative ones. When that didn’t work, I indulged in another mouthful of beer. The spreading warmth gripped my insides and made my head spin.

‘You can’t control everything in your life.’ I reminded myself. ‘People who try end up worse for wear. Let it go.’

I reached out to put the empty can back on the stand and felt it slip through my clumsy fingers to clatter noisily on the floor. Sighing, I gripped the sides of the comfortable armchair to steady myself while rising. Even so, I almost fell forward after leaning down to pick up the can.

Each movement made the universe more tilted than before. So much so that I could swear the potted tulips and roses were giggling at me. Them and the ugly pinkish green wallpaper Vince found so amusing. The odd shapes twisting into grinning smiles before skittering away like a million little spiders.

I pushed myself harder. Now heading towards the bathroom. Sharpening my focus while cursing my lack of restraint.

‘That was stupid of me. I should be drinking less. Not more. Drinking won’t bring her back.’

“Hey man! Where are you going!? We haven’t even started partying!”

I barked out a dreary laugh, turning my head to face Henry. He was shirtless, sporting the same jeans he’d worn during our last exam. In his right hand was an amber bottle of rum. The liquid swirled as he staggered forward, his laughter so mirthful it threatened to sweep him off his feet. He remained standing though. Completely undeterred by the fire in his belly.

If anything, the sluggishness added an easy confidence to his already handsome countenance that made him feel invincible. Some people were just built differently.

“I think we’ve both partied plenty for tonight pal. I’m going to bed.”

“But the celebration!”

“Can wait until Huey’s party.” I finished for him. “His folks are loaded and his pantry is always full. I’m sure it’ll be grand.”

“Come on Sully! Huey’s all right. But he’s not one of the lads! Not like we are! This…”

He paused to hiccup in the manner of an old school cartoon character. Completing the motion with a disarming sway. Those big blue eyes became unfocused. Tracking the flowers instead of me.

‘He’s so wasted, he can hear them too.’ I reasoned.

Nevertheless, Henry persisted.

“This might be our final chance to party it up! All of us together under the same roof! Doesn’t that mean anything to you!?”

His words were slurred and clumsy. Transforming into incoherent sputtering towards the end. Yet his eyes were pleading. Filled with a deep and genuine sadness.

“It means everything to me. But I need to sleep and so do you. The rent’s been paid until the end of the month. We still have a good while to go out and have fun. Vince and Luigi will be back tomorrow morning, so we can go out then.”

“Ah shucks. You’re no fun anymore Sully! You sound like my mother!”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It ain’t…”

His slurred words were drowned out by a shriek coming from the street.

We both froze.

All traces of mirth having fled our minds as our brains processed the new stimuli. We darted to the window, fearful of what we might find.

Our heads poked out, trying to find the monsters, the rifts opening up, the first stages of a spreading chaos.

Instead, we found a woman, screaming her head off in the middle of the street. Her long and lustrous black hair falling from her shoulders in a messy tangle. Her eyes were wide as saucers and drool dripped down from her open mouth. A torn white sundress protected her body from the chilly breeze. She wore no shoes.

Partygoers were avoiding her like the plague. Inching further and further away with every passing second.

I couldn’t blame them. It was an eerie sight, to say the least.

“Hey, Henry. She looks really messed up. Maybe we should go help.”

No sooner had I finished speaking, than the woman began wailing once again.

“NIGHTMARES! NIGHTMARES ALL WEEK! COFFIN SPEAKS! DRAKE DANCES! BUTCHER BURNS! UNDER EARTH! UNDER SEA! UNDER BURNING SKIES!”

Henry grabbed my arm.

“Yeah. No. I don’t think so.”

“She sounds like she needs help.” I countered, despite my own rising misgivings.

“Oh, she definitely needs help. Totally agree with you on that.”

He rested his free hand on the windowsill in order to keep himself standing.

“But we can’t do anything for her right now. Or, any other time, I guess. Leave it to the spooks. They’ll handle it.”

I blinked at him. Not taking his meaning.

“What are they supposed to…?”

“She’s one of them.” He interrupted. Pointing a finger at the raving woman.

“That’s Cassandra. New in town. Here to study medicine. Recently graduated from the Toronto Hero Program.”

He paused. Sucking in a steadying breath.

“She’s also a B-Rank Telepath.”

My jaw dropped. Abject horror taking hold.

“And she’s been drinking!?”

“Apparently. Either that or indulging in other stuff. She’s obviously not well.”

He shook his head, as if to dispel some of the drunkenness with the motion.

It didn’t work. He burped again. Closing his eyes tightly before blinking as fast as he could before speaking again.

“My pint.” He paused for another breath. “Sorry, my point, is that she’s not our respuse…. Respas…. R-e-s-p-o-n-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y. Yes, that’s what I meant. She’s not our problem to deal with.”

“No kidding. What are her handlers doing?”

Henry shrugged.

“Maybe they’re sleeping off a bottle. Or they could be stuck in traffic. Who knows? Who cares? The important thing is that they are not here.”

“Are we in danger?”

“Don’t see why? We’re up here and she’s down there.”

I turned my head to look at him. Really look at him. With the most flabbergasted expression I could conjure.

“Henry! Bro! She’s a B-Ranker! Enhancers at that level can flick trucks around like they’re beer cans! She’s a Telepath and she’s right there! What’s her power!? What’s her range!?”

“I don’t know!”

“How do you not know!? You told me who she was!”

Henry looked taken aback.

“Okay, so I hit on her a couple of times. Maybe we…. Did some things. I don’t really know her.”

“Dammit Henry! Do you not have any sense of self-preservation?”

Henry was about to answer when his words were drowned out once more.

Cassandra had run into a light post, wrapping her thin arms around it to keep herself from falling. She was still sobbing hysterically. Utterly inconsolable in spite of some well-meaning bystanders who’d flocked to her position.

“He’s returns! He returns!” She wailed. “In the gingerbread house! Across the she-crow. He’s listening. He’s always listening. Deluded and deceived. His eyes are yet to open!”

She stumbled away from the post and shoved one of the nearby onlookers. Sending an older woman to the floor.

“The veil is slashed! He wakes! He comes! Drowning skies in fire!”

She was turning and turning, facing different sections of the crowd. Almost as if she was trying to find the source of her woes. To stem the flow of whatever cocktail was in her system.

“I see him! I feel him! There is no escape! None can run and none can hide from the Coffin or the Drake!”

She fell flat on her face and began using her hands to crawl along the ground. Perfectly mimicking the movements of a possessed victim in a horror movie.

“Fear false friends! Fear their honeyed words! Fear the gnomes! The gnomes! The gnomes!”

The crowd was rapidly dispersing. People going into nearby restaurants or making their way to other streets before the situation escalated.

“The fox hides among the penguins! The beetle seeks raw flesh! The dragon roars and bellows, burning down the mesh!”

She writhed on the ground. Hugging herself tightly. Not caring about the dirt accumulating on her pretty dress.

I winced, imagining what she must have been feeling at the moment.

“Come on.” Henry said, tugging at my arm. “Nothing good’s going to come from standing here. Let’s go out the back and go somewhere else.”

He was right.

Someone as strong as her could probably mind-control everyone within a few kilometres without us being able to do anything about it. If she lashed out in her current state, the result would grisly, to say the least.

“Tyranny! The Tyrant comes! The Tyrant wakes! Inescapable! Overwhelming! Inexorable! Calamitous!”

She stood and faced the sky, her visage sending shivers down my spine. Her eyes were wide open and bloodshot. Crimson tears running down her face.

“Despot! Poet! Judge! Prophet! The purple halo shines! Wings spread out behind him! A crown of cobwebs on his brow! A week of nightmares! Under burning skies!”

Another noise cut through the ramblings.

Sirens.

Ambulances and police cars rushing to the now barren street below. There were other cars too. Black minivans with tinted windows that screamed government spook while not making a sound.

Cassandra found herself being encircled by two dozen men and women after that. Half of which were armed to the teeth with very heavy looking guns.

There was yelling back and forth. Everyone telling the Esper to lay down and surrender or to come to them for help.

I closed the window. Satisfied that the incident had been handled by someone in authority.

“Whoa. That was wild man. I didn’t know they were letting Telepaths wander around freely. I always thought they were supposed to be supervised around the clock like Shifters.”

Henry shrugged.

“Cass said that she was trusted. She seemed to think that the UM were about to start pushing for more Telepaths in subjugation missions.”

“Why?” I asked, not quite able to wrap my head around the concept. “Shifters I can understand. Its nice to have a healer on hand when fighting monsters, but Telepaths? What good would that do?”

“Plenty, apparently. Cass was saying that the response teams are being stretched very thin these days. Decent ammo is getting harder to make with material shortages and Espers aren’t being born fast enough to replace the ones that die fighting. It’s been in the works for some time, according to her.”

“You realize she just assaulted a woman in the middle of the day and had a mental breakdown not three metres away from our front door, right?”

“So? She looked sane enough when we were hanging out.”

I was skeptical. Very skeptical. Yet, there wasn’t anything I could say at that point. Some of what Henry had said was undeniably true, after all. The response teams had been spread thin and the more rural areas had to cope with monster-related deaths more often than not.

It was one of the main reasons that food prices had doubled again in the last year.

Just as I was about to enter the labour market. Well, it could be worse. At least rent was still cheap, what with all the people dying.

I deflated, feeling a wave of exhaustion washing over me.

“Whatever, that’s enough excitement for one day. I’m going to bed.”

“Whoa! Hold on. What about going back to the pub?”

“You can go if you want man. I needed to be in bed two hours ago.”

Henry was moving to say something else, but I managed to escape and lock the door behind me before he could start egging me on.

We all loved the guy to death, but no one else in our friend group had that supernatural stamina keeping them going.

No sir.

This was not the time to keep partying. Now was the time to take a relaxing shower and collapse on my bed.

The water felt like a gift from the heavens. So hot it was almost scalding. The inexorable torrent washing away the dizziness and the aching with gratifying speed. In their place came exhaustion. My own body’s reminder that I’d made the right choice. Tiny droplets of moisture clung to my hair as I left for my room. Staying with me as I laid down on the sheets and stretched my muscles.

It felt good to end the day like this, all wrapped up in blankets and blissfully aware that there would be no more assignments in my near future. No irksome responsibility to see me up at dawn.

The notion was liberating in a way that was difficult to put into words. It was made even sweeter by the recruitment offers I’d received. A guaranteed position at a nearby power plant or a distant oil rig as soon as I’d gotten my engineering degree. The latter paid more, but it would mean moving out of province and part of me wanted to explore my newfound financial independence on familiar territory. Somewhere close to my friends, so that we don’t grow apart right away. Perhaps, I could even find a place close to Mom and Dad. I could visit them more often then. Them, and Doris.

‘No. Not Doris. Let it go. You bloody fool. Dead is dead. It wasn’t your fault. She’d left you for Mason. You weren’t even there that night. Let it go.’

Mason had been with her instead of me. He’d killed the monsters, gotten nasty scars and a fine for bringing a civilian to an outbreak. Yet he was alive and she was dead and no amount of condemnation would change that.

‘Stop that, you idiot. It wasn’t your fault. Stop thinking about it. That’s done now. Left behind with all the exams and tests and papers.’  

It felt so good to be done with all of it. To be rid of the stress that university life had saddled me with. To be done with all the people I couldn’t stand. Tomorrow, I would face the world as a new man. One that wasn’t weighed down by grief, embarrassment or anxiety.

Having made up my mind, I released my grip on the waking world and allowed exhaustion to take me away into a deep dreamless sleep.

The only thing I was aware of was the sheer, otherworldly comfort of my bed. Time slipped past me like a gentle current, rejuvenating me whilst dragging my anxiety away. This soothing sensation made the following seconds even more jarring.

There was no warning for the sudden shift in scenery.

One moment I was stirring, waking up slowly and fighting my instinctual desire to keep myself covered in blankets.

For a brief, indulgent instant, temptation won.

I felt myself drifting off again, the warmth of the bed seducing me into torpor.