Chapter Text
Riz Gukgak doesn’t mean to send a thirty slide Power Point deck to the Bad Kids group chat.
It’s just that he hasn’t slept in forty-eight hours, probably needs a shower, forgot to eat, and now his adventuring party of three years is razzing him about things like… eating, sleeping, and showering. Just… absolutely bullseye nailing him in his weakened state. A fully rested, watered, and less caffeinated version of Riz might have made some allowance that, perhaps, being gently ribbed by his closest friends was nothing but reassurance that they are thinking of him.
Feral Riz, however, is a dipshit who starts text-walling facts about how, actually, goblins require less sleep than the average small humanoid. There’s research (not racist stuff!) that backs him up. Five clinical studies indicate goblin-folk participants tended to benefit more from quick highly efficient power naps OR a longer rest period at night AND they can swap between the different cycles without suffering nearly the cognitive decline that most—
The groupchat thread on his crystal starts to chime as he’s typing.
K1: Riz. No. Come back to us, bro.
JorJugHits: this attachment is too big for my crystal
OracularFrog: He’s gone. It’s too late. Here comes part 4 of 7.
SickFig: Im breaking into yur house and uninstalling power point
Riz texts furiously: READ THE SLIDES!
Fabian’s chat icon, in response to all these notifications, go briefly active… then immediately inactive. Withdrawing from the crossfire without comment.
Riz typically keeps his Power Points in a file called ‘PROOF I AM RIGHT’ along with eighty-seven other Power Points on topics Riz will one day be allowed to unleash in person on his fellow Bad Kids… or the AV Club, or the Apiary Club, or the Soil Club, or one of the other school-year extracurricular cohorts he’s currently free from for just a few months of summer vacation.
The point is that that he doesn’t need to sleep, dammit, stop texting about it!
Riz has this thought at about the same time that he realizes he’s been muttering aloud to himself as he angrily backspaces a large paragraph on his crystal. He opts, instead, to send a poop emoji and go inactive on the Bad Kid’s group chat. Bubbles of active texting ellipses spawn up at the bottom of the screen, but Riz tosses his crystal to the paper-covered coffee table.
“Stupid,” he says.
“Hon, the powernap sleep cycle only works for us if you actually, you know, take naps during the day,” says a voice, suddenly, from nowhere.
Riz alert-hisses a little before his brain catches up and he realizes his mom is standing in the cramped kitchenette behind him, having clearly come in while he was tunnel-visioned on his crystal.
Sklonda Gukgak – dressed in a rumpled button down, dress slacks, and battered work boots – is leaning against the peeling Formica kitchen island, arms crossed, looking tiredly bemused from a position she has clearly occupied for a while. She’s got a chunky hair clip that’s not fully keeping her shoulder-length bob out of her pale green face. If she looks tired, the reality is Riz struggles a lot to remember a time when his mother didn’t look that way.
“I nap!” Riz says, far too fast and far too defensively. Then adds, more normally, “Hi, mom.”
“Never in your life.” She winks at him. “Hi, sweetie.”
“That’s not the point!” Riz jumps back in immediately. “That’s not the point! I’m just saying it’s not necessarily bad that I’m not doing the same sleep cycle as everyone else—”
“I think,” Sklonda interjects, picking up a mug of tea from the counter, “your friends’ concern, and mine, is that there is no sleep cycle at all. And you also, I assume, didn’t mention that constantly swapping from a short to long sleep cycle isn’t great for us even if our brains don’t liquify as quickly as other people.”
Riz hisses, but quietly, sinking below the back of the couch, flipping his ears back so he can glare at his mom with just his eyes over the top of the couch. This elicits a crack of a smile from the exhausted former detective and now lawyer, so he continues his argument from this position, like he’s still ten years old and too small to see over the top of the couch.
“You don’t get to lecture me! You don’t sleep either!”
“I’m a grizzled middle-aged working professional. You are seventeen.”
“Eighteen rounding up!”
“Oh? Is that a thing?” Sklonda bobs her head back and forth, rolling her voice in a mocking singsong. “Rounding up for age? Does that sound legally binding—” At this point the conversation simply does become familial goblinoid hissing, hackles up, and tails lashing.
Sklonda eventually crosses the room to grab Riz and haul him into one of those hugs that is partially a headlock, which he only resists a little before snuggling in. He doesn’t have to stand on the couch anymore to match her height. In fact, holding her now, kneeling on the couch, he can feel that that his mom is barely taller than he is and that churns something in his stomach.
“Stop arguing to grow up faster,” she says, rubbing her cheek into the top of his head a bit. She kisses his temple. Sklonda’s voice sounds squashed as she murmurs, “College is right around the corner, you know.”
Riz has nothing to say to that, to his mom’s soft apprehension and wonder – marveling over a son old enough for college. Turning his face into her shoulder, Riz tries to live inside this moment where he is wrapped in a hug that smells of burnt coffee and rosewater perfume. There aren’t so many of them available as he thought – the moments where his mom is still bigger than him and the only adult in the room.
“Fine,” he mumbles. “I guess I’m seventeen or whatever.”
“Thanks, kiddo.” There’s a quiet beat. Then, “C’mon. Why don’t you show me the case you’ve been working on. Talk me through it.”
“It’s a good one, mom.” Riz separates from her, brain already starting to buzz. “Your office might want it. I think I have a lead on a witness in Bastion City. I found the guy who was intimidating her and he’s in jail now because I caught him dealing snuff to kids. Loser. So now that he’s gone, I think I can—"
Sklonda interrupts smoothly, “It’s another missing person’s cold case, right? The Gripnicks girl?”
“Yeah!” Riz springs off the couch to snap his briefcase open on the coffee table, pulling a fat manilla folder absolutely bristling with colored sticky tabs, from the extraplanar interior. “I think it might be, maybe, I dunno, linked to some other cold cases from five years ago? I asked around. Really similar MO, victim profile, and timing. Really obvious too. I think, uh, cuz the Gripnicks didn’t, um, get—“
“I remember the Gripnicks’ case, Riz.” Sklonda says it gently. “You can say the department ignored them because they’re first-generation goblin-folk.”
Riz fiddles uncomfortably with his tabs.
“Well, yeah, pretty much.” A beat. “Mom. Mom, it’s so obvious.” He comes around the couch, flopping the file open on the kitchen table. “When I show you— when I show you, it’s gonna jump right out. There’s a pattern to the kidnappings and—” he flips through a few pages— “I wanted to ask you—”
“Honey? Honey.” Sklonda closes the file and turns him around. “Before you hit full momentum? Look at me. Riz. You with me?” She presses her fingertips together, looking directly into his eyes. “You are going to shower. We are going to eat pizza while we work. You are going to eat the pizza. No coffee. I will work with you on this until 2am. Then I’m cutting you off and you’re gonna go to bed. Do we have a deal?”
Riz offers her an overly officious handshake.
“You drive a hard bargain, Counselor Gukgak.”
Sklonda grins back, takes his hand… and uses the handshake to pull him into another hug and an innumerable onslaught of kisses that he, of course, complains loudly of while doing nothing to escape.
Riz wakes up in the dark and something is wrong.
First, he can’t see and that’s not right because he can always see, even in the dark, but right now everything in his vision looks cramped and black at the edges and blurry in the middle. It’s a panicky eternity to realize he’s crying; his vision is blurred with tears. His face feels wet, like he’s been weeping for a while before he woke up.
The sheets under his hands are shredded, bits of comforter cotton caught under his un-trimmed claws, but his arms lay unmoving at his sides.
Like he’s being held down in his bed by an invisible attacker.
Riz tries to shout, in case it is an invisible attacker, but the muscles in his throat simple do not move. His jaw remains shut and the noise that comes out of him is a strangled sound buried in the back of his throat. Hearing his own voice like that – animal and scared in the dead silence – lances his nervous system with panic. Riz’ heart, already straining in his chest, goes into overdrive.
He tries to thrash again in earnest. Growling, realizing with building terror that he’s paralyzed.
Frantic, Riz spins the roulette wheel of possibilities in his brain and lands on the conclusion that Kalina is back. Sitting invisible on his chest, watching him lose it before she reaches down and slits his– no, no, no! Kristen burned Kalina’s curse out of his blood with divine magic. She smoked her out like a fever, cauterizing Kalina out of Riz’s DNA down to the soul of him.
If Kalina is alive, she’s on the run from gods, not bothering with him.
It can’t be her—
Something moves on the edge of his vision.
Riz freezes.
Silence. Not even his own breathing. Just the click of the old ceiling fan feebly rotating overhead, stripes of moonlight across the news clippings that paper the far wall of his bedroom. Riz lies frozen of his own accord within his paralysis, blinking frantically to clear tears from his eyes.
And as his vision finally comes together, Riz Gukgak watches a section of shadow fully separate itself from the silhouette of dirty laundry at the end of his bed. He watches – gut-clenching, skin gone cold – as something tabaxi-shaped but wrong peels itself like a corpse from a grave to stand at the foot of his bed. Then it just stares silently down at him.
Something, maybe the edge of his sanity, chips like a cheap plate in the back of Riz’s head… then the thing begins to crawl onto the mattress with him.
It’s not real, part of his brain reasons frantically. It’s not real.
Then it lays a hand on Riz’s knee and grips it.
Riz starts screaming in the back of his throat again. His dad’s old arquebus hangs in a holster hung from his headboard, but the paralysis holds even against Riz’s animal terror. He twitches and squirms with all the effort he’d put into a life-or-death battle, but he can’t move.
The skeletal thing begins to pull itself up his unresisting body. Its legs drag like a cat struck by traffic. It fits a bony hand to the slight jut of his hip and, using his waist as a handhold, pulls itself fully on top of him. Riz keeps trying to scream but the sound of his own voice is so fucking scared and small in his own ears that it only ratchets his heart into the back of his throat.
He hears himself whimper as a taxidermy tabaxi skull, stripped of all flesh, pulls into line of sight directly over his face. He can’t look away. Its empty sockets are hollow, the hinge of the lower mandible hanging loose from the top of the skull in a crooked, dead-thing scream.
Then it slowly, almost indulgently, bends it gaping maw toward the arch of his throat.
Riz can feel himself coming apart in panic, feel blood-warm wetness run from his eyes, every nerve in his body electrified with anticipation because he knows how it feels to die, and he doesn’t want it. He can’t breathe. He can’t move. He’s going to die. (Again.) He’s alone. No one will bring him back this time. Fig or Kristen or someone, anyone, please—
There’s a click as his bedroom door swings open and Sklonda flips the lights on.
“Riz?”
The thing on top of him is gone. Like she turned hell off with a switch.
“Oh my god! Riz? Sweetie!?”
His mom is on the bed immediately, her weight dipping the mattress properly (wait, did the monster move the mattress before? Did it have weight?) as she takes his face between her palms and studies his eyes in earnest. The relief is so insane, so total, it feels like ice water to face as his mother frets over him in his empty bedroom. He wants it to be over so badly, but no part of him will trust that it is.
His eyes dart around the room.
It’s empty but he can’t believe it.
Riz tries to say something, but all that comes out is, “Mmmmm!”
Sklonda’s expression splinters in a new configuration – some complex architecture of grief and horror, realizing her teenaged son is trying and failing to say ‘mom’ through a locked jaw. She bends over him, one hand on his cheek, the other stroking his hair and smoothing the sweep of his right ear back against his head.
All the while she says things like, “Hey, you’re okay. You’re okay, sweetie. You’re having a night terror. Okay? Look at me.”
He does, but only being able to move his eyes and nothing else sets a new dread spinning in his chest. His fingertips shake at his sides as he, again, instinctively tries to move.
“Hey. It’s okay. Calm down. Just take a deep breath for me. In.” She inhales. Riz inhales. “Out.” She exhales. Riz exhales; sees his mom control her reaction when he chokes on a sob. She maintains a smile, saying, calmly, “Good. It’s just sleep paralysis, kiddo. Okay? You’re okay. Your dad had these sometimes. I’m gonna help you. Now, focus on your trigger finger. Just your finger. Try to move it.”
Riz focuses on his hand, his index finger. It’s so strange. How relaxed his arms are when every fiber inside him is hot and screaming. He narrows focus to his index finger, his trigger finger, on the infinitely familiar muscle memory of curling it closed and—
His finger twitches.
“Good. Good, kiddo.” Sklonda kisses him on the forehead, her thumb running reassuringly along his cheekbone. “Okay. Now make a fist. Focus. It’ll pass. Your brain is just stuck between sleeping and waking. It’s okay. I’m right here.”
Riz feels new tears running down his temple, but he does what he’s told because if he doesn’t focus, he’s going to spiral imagining all the possible ways his mom is not alone in a room. Where there is something invisible and merciless and hungry hiding in the room and it’s going to make him watch, helplessly, as it attacks her from behind or—
Riz moves his middle and ring finger. He curls his hand into a fist. Sklonda murmurs encouragement, soft non-verbal throat-noises specific to goblin speech while Riz carefully, muscle-group by muscle-group regains control of his arm and all at once – like a being released from the grip of a cruel hand – Riz falls out of his waking rigor mortis.
He sucks air, hard, raggedly and immediately bursts into furious tears. He curls himself from head to tail around his mom and lets her hold him and rock him in her arms like he’s a little kid again.
“You’re okay,” she keeps saying. “You’re okay, sweetie.”
“Something was on my chest!” Riz gets the words out, but hoarse. “It crawled up my bed! It looked like Kalina! Mom, I gotta call Kristen! I gotta—"
“Riz, baby, slow down. I believe you.” She hesitates, her hand on his back rubbing a circle between his shoulder blades, her other hand tensing against his scalp. Stress in her fingertips. “Honey, I have to say it once: Sleep paralysis can make you see and feel things that aren’t there sometimes.”
“No!” Riz jerks back, panicked. “I felt it!”
“Okay, hey, we’ll get you checked out.” Sklonda is so calm, so pragmatic it soothes the spinning steel wool scrape of panic that’s been grinding his heart raw. “We can go right now if you want. See a cleric, make sure it’s nothing magical, okay? Riz, breathe. I’ve got you. I hear you.”
Riz lets it happen as his mom pulls him into another hug, leaning his weight against her while she gets her crystal out and starts looking for 24-hour clinics that might accept their shitty insurance. His mom’s benefits from the police force have long since expired and she’s still on early probation at her new law office job. Riz sits there for a while, listening to his mother’s fingers on the crystal screen, her claws clicking as she scrolls a little too anxiously over his shoulder.
“I’m okay,” Riz says, eventually, into her shoulder. “It’s okay. I don’t need a cleric.”
“I can take you to a clinic, Riz. You don’t have to—”
“No. Maybe…”
He rolls over and grabs his Gregori necktie and his crystal from his nightstand. Sklonda watches him quietly activate the little arcane eye in the knot, aiming it around the room while watching the feed on his crystal. He toggles the magic detection and planar-entity detection settings a few times (more times than he wants to admit) then shuts both down.
“There’s nothing there,” he says quietly. “It’s not… if there was magic or something else here it’s… it’s not picking it up.” He thumbs the edge of his crystal in his hands for a moment, not looking at his mom whose face he knows will be wrinkled with worry. He clears his throat and says, “You— you said dad got sleep paralysis too?”
“Yeah. Bad sleep habits run in the family and that’s kind of what triggers it, kiddo.”
“And he saw stuff too?”
“Yes. Sometimes.” She’s so matter of fact it’s comforting in its dispassion. “When you sleep normally, your brain turns off a lot of muscle movement in your body. Sleep paralysis is you waking up before your brain realizes you’re awake and doesn’t turn movement back on. Then, because your brain still thinks you’re sleeping, it makes up a reason why you can’t move, usually a scary reason. Like something is on your chest or holding you down.” She tilts her head, asks gently, but deliberately, “Did that happen to you?”
Riz, in the warm glow of the crappy overhead light and the ugly popcorn ceiling, feels a bit sheepish. He sits back cross-legged, swinging his tail up over his lap to worry it lightly with his fingers. “Yeah it… it kinda came out of the laundry pile.”
“Okay.” Sklonda offers a little smile. “Another great reason to do your damn laundry.” Her tone levels. “You think, maybe, what you saw might have started to look like Kalina because being unable to move just felt… familiar?”
“Maybe.” He rubs a shoulder, ears flat to his skull. “Yeah.”
“We can still get you checked out, Riz.”
He turns his face away, hotly embarrassed now. “No. I… I guess it was just a nightmare.”
“Sleep paralysis is well beyond a nightmare. It’s disordered sleeping, kiddo.” Her voice gets really flat. “You know, like, maybe main-lining espresso, energy-drinks, and never resting is finally hitting your mission-readiness, kid.”
Riz fidgets a little. “Well, we don’t know that for suuuure. It’s just one time…”
Sklonda gives him a look.
“We need more data points,” he protests.
“I,” she says, looming now, almost nose to nose with him, “don’t want another data point if that data point is you having a skin-crawling nightmare scared for your life because your little brain is frying itself in your skull.” She taps a finger on his forehead for emphasis. “Let’s get you checked out, make sure it really is just a good old fashioned sleep disorder, then we can figure out the rest. Okay?”
Riz deflates a little under his mom’s incredible and unstoppable reasonableness.
“Okay.”
“You want to sleep?” Gorgug says, baffled.
“Who are you and what did you do with Riz?” adds Kristen.
They’re eating burgers and fries in the parking lot by the drive-in theatre, seated on top of the Hangvan, watching the sun set along the foothills beyond Elmville. The breeze smells vaguely of lake water some distance away, popcorn, hot concrete, the motor oil on Gorgug’s jeans and the fading sunscreen on Kristen’s shoulders.
The Hangvan is playing Kristen’s ‘Chill Vibez’ playlist through the speakers.
“Yeah. Can I… I just want to sleep a few nights in the Hangvan,” Riz elaborates, trying to sound casual as he physically can while his heart’s started to pound. “I’m just, you know, I’m trying to fix my sleep schedule. Or whatever.”
Kristen squints at him. Gorgug tilts his head.
Riz sweats.
“You,” Kristen repeats, wrinkling her nose, “are fixing your sleep schedule?”
“It’s not that implausible that I might—"
Kristen grabs him by his shoulders and shakes him, yowling while grinning, “Are you possessed? LEAVE MY FRIEND’S TINY ANGELIC BODY! I KNOW YOU’RE NOT HIM!”
“Stoooop!” Riz swats at her, laughing, until she lets go, man-handing him just long enough to muss up his hair before separating. “Fine. I’m just paranoid and running an experiment.”
“Okay.” Gorgug points a finger. “That sounds way more like you.” He tilts his head the other way, like a big, moppy-headed golden retriever in a love-worn sweatshirt. He says, “Why though? I read your Power Point about the sleep cycle thing, so I thought you, like, had all the proof you needed about refusing to ever sleep so—”
Riz suddenly emotional and distracted, breathes, “You read my Power Point?”
Kristen, softly, groans.
“Of course,” Gorgug says, puzzled that not reading it was even option. “You sent it to the group chat so—”
“ANYWAY,” Kristen butts in, a little desperately, “you’re sleeping in the Hangvan to prove what exactly?”
Riz sweats a bit more, limbs twinging with the memory of bony hands holding him down, of feeling like a rabbit under the paw of a predator.
“I had some weird dreams recently and… like… I dunno, I want to make sure it’s normal. That I’m not getting Kalina-ed again.”
“You’re sure it’s not the espresso energy drink cocktail shots?” Kristen asks, turning her hand up as if to offer a more reasonable explanation. “I took one of them for a pre-workout and vibrated for like an hour and not in a fun way. You’re basically half my size and doing six a day. I mean, at this point, just do cocaine—”
“I,” Riz interjects loudly, “just want to eliminate some variables. The Hangvan is hallowed. I’ll know I’m not being messed with if I’m sleeping there.”
Gorgug takes a bite of burger, chewing. “Is your mom cool with it? She’ll text me if you disappear—”
Riz, face blazing, says, “I’m not disappearing!”
Gorgug grins. “Okay. Let’s have a sleep over.”
“Oh! Um, no, could I… could I sleep on my own in the Hangvan? If that’s okay?” Then, panicked, Riz blurts again, “It’s for science! Gotta eliminate variables! It’s not because I don’t want to sleep over!”
Gorgug, unfazed and unoffended, says, “Sure. I’ll tell mom and dad you’re gonna be camping out. Unless it’s secret? No? Not secret. Cool. Mom’ll make pancakes in the morning, I bet. Also, you left your Time Scramble game at my house. Don’t let me forget to give it back.”
Kristen picks up her burger wrapper and holds it out to him. “You want my pickles, Riz?”
“Yeah, like, of course, I want your pickles.” Riz pretends his eyes aren’t burning a little over something as stupid as pickles and Power Points. “What is even the question here?”
Riz wakes up and he can’t move.
He’s lying in the Hangvan, the glow of Fig and Adaine’s decorative paper lanterns and fairy lights all casting gentle shades of muted red and yellow across the interior of the interdimensional vehicle. There are stickers on the ceiling. Photobooth strips of himself and the other Bad Kids taped to walls, a smiling and grimacing collage of fast food and chaos.
The radio is on, set to a random late-night channel so the dead silence of the van doesn’t continually jolt Riz awake because it’s ‘too quiet’. It smells like popcorn. The glow of hallow runes flicker softly along the doors and window. All that to say: It’s the safest and most protected place he could possibly wake up as an adventurer and security-conscious private eye.
And Riz is terrified.
He’s lying on his back in the pile of blankets on the floor of the van (the bunkbeds were too comfy) with a stuffed animal behind his head as a pillow, his arms at his sides, and he can’t move. Every muscle in his body has been rendered dead weight holding him down. He’s alone. He knows it down to his bones. No one is going to get him out of here.
That was, of course, the point. To do this privately.
But in the moment, his heart spasming in the back of his throat, Riz really wishes there was someone here and for a while Riz succumbs to terror. He lies gasping on the floor for what feels like hours but must only be minutes with his eyes closed, reminding himself over and over he’s in a hallowed space. He’s in Gorgug’s backyard. He’s okay. He’s okay.
Then, finally, he tries to move his trigger finger.
It’s so much harder without his mom stroking his hair and reminding him to breathe. But he does it. Slowly, finger by finger, until he can move his arm up to grab a nearby stuffed shrimp plushie and something about that – the squish in his fingers and the feeling of his claws sinking into knitted wool – snaps the paralysis off him. Riz rolls with a heaving gasp to his flank and curls on the floor of the Hangvan, pulling the shrimp stuffy into his abdomen and squeezing it until the urge to scream drains out of him.
He lies there, crying softly, privately, for a while.
The radio snaps off. From the speaker a vaguely concerned surfer-dude voice emanates, saying, “Heeeey, bud. Rizzo. My man. Are you, like, good?”
“I’m fine Zaphriel.” Riz says this with his face fully smooshed into the blankets on the floor. He gives a thumbs up, flicking his left ear. “Alllllll good.”
“Hey, whatever you need, I’m here to provide, good buddy. Do you need some tunes? Want me to roll down the window?”
“Uuuh, uh, can you turn the radio back on?”
“Ten-four, bud.”
The celestial who lives in the van promptly clicks the radio back on and an evening radio host speaks warmly through the speakers, faraway and unaware. Riz rolls over and pulls a small day planner from his briefcase. He sniffs, wiping his nose and eyes with his forearm. He swallows wetly and he flips the planner open to the day’s date and marks off a fifth attempt.
He notes ‘no visuals’ and ‘no tactile’.
Then he turns on the lights, dries his face, and starts re-reading one of his case files.
Riz finds his witness holed up in a crumbling motel in Bastion City.
Gorgug did him the massive favor of loaning him the Hangvan so he can chase leads down at speeds more appropriate for a brain that pinballs the way Riz’s brain tends to. (So Riz can sleep on the road.) Riz can admit he has two modes: Working and dead. Tearing around like a goblin with a rocket on his wrist. As he parks his car five blocks away from his target building for an on-foot approach, he wonders if his dad ever operated that way.
He glances at his wristwatch.
The way it works with heaven is heaven calls you, not the other way around. Ostensibly, Pok Gukgak can only dial his son up on matters of business but just knowing the line is there relaxes something tense in Riz’s chest. He checks his weapon, his equipment, and hops out of the Hangvan, locking it behind him as he makes his way up the cracked sidewalk toward the motel.
The High Hill Motel has a swimming pool but no water, save the stagnant sludge in the bottom of the cracked tile basin. Sun’s starting to set and Riz can feel tiredness warring with adrenaline as he flits across the parking lot, past a busted ice machine, and up the second floor to find room 27. He knocks.
There is a shuffle. The door opens.
Riz, already holding up his PI license for inspecting, says, “Hi. I’m Riz Gukgak. We talked on the phone?”
Vika Gripnick, twenty-eight, a Southern Range goblin woman, with a dozen piercings along the edges of her long ears, looks him up and down with wide yellow eyes. Her complexion is darker than Riz, almost emerald in the dusk light. He maintains a professional and quizzical expression and lets her settle into the reality of a seventeen-year-old private eye.
“Oh, wow. They told me, but…” Her High Mountain accent is strong on the goblinoid sub-vocals, but he can understand it. “You really are a kid.”
“I’m licensed,” he reminds her, swapping to goblin-cant for her. Riz clocks how her shoulders relax immediately when he does and if she thinks his Solesian accent is soft-tongued on the vowels, she doesn’t show it. He pockets his wallet. “Can we still talk?”
Vika cracks the door open a little more. “It was you that put Mollymell in jail?”
“Bastion City PD did that.” Riz shrugs. “I just gave them, like, fifty photos of him breaking—” he makes a show of counting on his fingers— “seven different local and inter-county laws. So, yeaaaaah, he’s suuuuper in jail.” A beat. “Ten-year minimum for inter-dimensional weapons possession. If you’re worried—”
The door cracks open further. “That’s… you did all that because of B’vell?”
Riz nods.
“Why?”
Riz blinks. “Cuz she’s missing.”
“She’s dead. You know that right?” Vita’s expression goes cold. “After two years. She’s— she can’t come back.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“Then why—?”
“No one caught who did it.” Riz maintains his focus on Vita’s face. “No one even looked. I want to know what happened to your cousin.” He drops his chin slightly. “I want to know if there’s anyone left who had anything to do with it.”
Vita recovers from her surprise and re-examines him. “You… you’re in that adventuring party? Right? That one who—”
“Yup.”
“But you’re on your own?”
“Investigating is my thing.” He shrugs. “And unless it turns out to be demons or something, my friends are… a lot of property damage first, clues later? If that makes sense?”
“You don’t live in Bastion City. If you did, you’d know it’s dangerous to ask questions.” She’s half hiding behind the door. Her ears flip back with a soft chime of earring chains, her tail wrapping around her own leg to self-soothe. “I don’t know anything. I can only tell you what B’vell was doing, what she was saying before she disappeared. I don’t want any trouble.”
“It’s a cold case,” Riz reassures her. “I’ve asked seven other families the same questions I’m asking you. I think the culprit is lazy. Never had someone hunt them back and doesn’t expect anyone to ever do it.” Riz thinks for a moment, gambling on the right thing to say before stating, “I’m not scared of people who kidnap girls and rely on no one caring to cover their tracks. In my experience, they don’t hold up very well to my methods.”
Vita stares at him. Then she opens her door completely.
“Come in, Riz Gukgak. Do you drink tea? Coffee?”
“I promised my mom I’d lay off coffee,” he sighs. Then he remembers professional and steely-eyed investigators don’t mention their mothers while on the case and fumbles, “I mean, um—”
“Your mother must be very proud,” Vita allows, smiling.
And she tells Riz Gukgak a story.
Riz wakes up and he can’t move.
Light filters through the Hangvan’s windshield, the yellow electric color from the truck-stop streetlights illuminating the interior. He was too tired to drive home and pulled over for the night. Better to nap in the van before making his way back to Elmville. It’s quiet outside the van. Inside the van, there’s the white noise of a small arcane fan, blowing air and filling the silence.
The fear that hits him is chemical. (He’s starting to recognize the difference. Manufactured fear versus the real deal.)
Riz doesn’t panic this time.
At least, he only panics for a few seconds before quickly closing his eyes and forcing himself to breathe. He orients himself closely with smell of popcorn and the pine tree air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. He catalogs where his hands are laid on the mattress at his sides, the feeling of a half dozen magical rings and wrist bands; the fact he need only move his fingers a little to get some of them active.
Riz, after weeks of trial and error, knows better than to open his eyes.
But Riz, detective at heart that he is, cracks one eye open anyway.
Kalina, crouched directly over him, says, “Hey, kid.”
She looks like she always does – a black tabaxi woman in dark leathers, her fur dark as her battle leathers. She greets him almost fondly, unbothered by the missing upper right side of her skull, blown apart to a mass of bone and exposed brain matter. One bright yellow-green eye dangles against her dark cheek – a partially mulched fruit swinging on a rotten nerve.
Riz closes his eyes immediately, reminding himself it’s not real. None of it’s real. It’s just the sleep paralysis telling a story and when he feels pressure build on his chest, like a hand on his sternum pressing down, he keeps breathing. He breathes even when he feels something brush his face, like an adult scrubbing a thumb over a child’s cheek to rub dirt off.
“Hey.” The hand on his chest shakes him gently. “Don’t be like that. You were so quippy when you blew my head open. Let’s keep that energy going.”
Focus. It’s not real.
“Riz. Of course I’m not real. I was never ‘real’. I’m in your head.” Her laugh, smoky and slow as a long drive down a dark road, makes his stomach roll with vertigo. “And, really,” she says, her voice getting nearer, “if I’m all up in there—” Riz feels breath on his face— “what’s the functional difference?”
Riz feels his eyes get hot behind his eyelids, tears filling the seams between his eyelashes. The fingers that touched his cheek come back, this time, taking his chin between a silky thumb and forefinger. He’s shaking, the back of his eyes swimming with little lights from how hard he’s squeezing them shut. But he keeps breathing. He doesn’t choke or sob.
“Why don’t you go ahead and open your eyes.”
Riz keeps breathing. He focuses on his hand.
“Oh, kid, do me the courtesy, at least. I’ve always been so civil with you.” There’s a tickle of whiskers at his temple, like someone has their muzzle pressed against the coiled shell of his inner ear. “I could have done so much worse than break your arm in Leviathan.” He can’t explain how, but he can feel her smile drop before she opens her mouth and hisses, “Look at me, Riz!”
He can’t help it; he flinches.
“God, you’re twitchy.” Another laugh, ricocheting through his cochlear nerve and into the rest of his skittering sensorium. “Like a mouse.”
Riz moves his right trigger finger.
“How about I’ll give you something to squeak about.”
Riz moves his fist.
His chest muscles unravel from paralysis and Riz growls as he levers himself up right and the hand on his ribs melts like vapor from his nerves. Silence. He opens his eyes cautiously to an empty interior, winking with fairy lights and glow-in-the-dark stickers. Nothing touches him. Riz sits there sweating in the dark, perspiration dripping from his chin but despite it, he grins and wipes it away with his forearm.
“Not real,” he says, giddy with triumph. “I can work with this.”
“Okay,” Adaine says, her fingers knit together on the table in front of her. She peers intently at Riz, blue eyes like a series of microscopic lenses all flipping down to take in his details. “So, you’ve been sleeping in Gorgug’s van for two weeks and the data all seems to suggest that you’re experiencing a thirty to forty percent occurrence of sleep paralysis now as a matter of course.”
They’re sitting at a table in a community space in downtown Elmsville. The happy babble of people walking, shopping, and talking around them does a lot to soothe his anxiety about this conversation. It can’t possibly be so dramatic, so world-ending, when there are kids with balloons or popcorn skipping past them or moms in yoga pants on their way to group workout classes.
“Please don’t tell anyone.” Riz can hear himself gritting his teeth and tries to relax. His voice then takes on a kind of whine which is incredibly uncool as he adds, gripping the edge of the table, “I just want to vent. It’s messing up my work schedule. Having to solve this and solve a case? It’s awful.”
“Okay,” Adaine says, keeping her voice even in a way that’s probably her being patient with him. “First of all, thank you for telling me. I love it when we have secrets. I feel very special.”
“Nerd Club,” he says softly.
“Nerd Club. But you know everyone else would be cool about it, Riz. We all know your sleep habits are jacked up—“’
“It’s just weird. Okay? It’s weirder than I already am weird with sleep? I just—"
“Okay, okay. Let’s put a pin in that and also your obsessive summer workaholic nonsense when you should be resting. Honestly, Riz, I think you need to talk to a sleep specialist. I don’t think there is a pill you can take to just… make sleep paralysis go away. It sounds like, forgive me, sleeping, eating right, and resting on a regular basis might be the solution.”
Riz horrified, says, “I can’t do that!”
“Do you hear the things you say out loud?”
“I have too much work to do,” Riz goes on. “I’m so close on this case. The real solution—"
“No,” says Adaine.
“—is to just sleep less,” Riz finishes.
Adaine, face in her hands, lifts her head eventually. “Again, what do you hear when you start talking with your mouth?”
“Do you think,” Riz says, ignoring her, “there’s a spell to replace sleeping, like, just poof so I can avoid the whole thing? Just for a little while! I know there are potions, but they’re crazy expensive and—”
Adaine reaches across the table and catches Riz’s waving hands, pulling them down and squeezing them gently in her soft spell-workers’ fingers, so very unlike his hands – crosshatched with scars and callouses. She smiles, arresting in that way high elves can sometimes be when they want to. Riz squirms at the prolonged handholding since that’s not usually an Adaine move.
“Riz,” Adaine says, so warmly, so soberly, “I love you to death. You’re so smart. And such a hard worker. You never give up. And you have the biggest heart despite being the smallest person. And I love that about you. You’re amazing.”
Riz blushes so hot his entire body feels sunburnt.
“And I am so not giving you a spell to prevent you from sleeping. That’s fucking insane.”
Riz removes his hands from Adaine’s in disgust.
“Riz, that’s so dumb!”
Riz starts getting up from the table.
“How are you so smart and soooo dumb?!”
He tosses his hands up, pacing in a little circle. “I can’t just up-end my whole life and waste a bunch of time every day with— with—”
Adaine, eyes wide, head tilted, says, “Eating and sleeping and taking care for yourself?”
Riz snorts. “Okay, mom.”
“Stop acting like a baby I don’t have to mom-friend you!” She casts prestidigitation, a blast of vanilla-scented magic hitting him in the face as his hat flips off and his hair aggressively ruffles itself into a better configuration than trapped under a flap cap. She ignores his hiss and flail. “And stop wearing that hat! Hats are over! No hats!”
“I like the hat!”
“The hat is a coping mechanism. Now, let’s go to the movies and stop talking about ways to indirectly lobotomize yourself with magic, you dork.”
“But—!”
“No! And don’t try to ask Fig!”
Sitting in the movie theatre with Adaine does do a little work in relaxing him but emerging from the silver-screen dark of the theatre into the twilight of the coming evening – to the impending approach of summer night and the prospect sleep – re-winds every muscle that relaxed during the movie. He shares the last of his soda Slurpee with Adaine walking down the street back toward the suburbs.
“You’re quiet,” Adaine accuses after carrying the conversation for twenty minutes. She tosses the empty Freezee cup in a trash can as they cross the train tracks toward her neighborhood. She hikes her backpack a little higher on her narrow shoulder, where her oversized purple sweater is sliding down her right bicep. “I thought you’d have a whole rant about how obvious the twist was in the second act. Where is my Riz Rant?”
“I mean, it’s just a movie.”
Adaine eyeballs him. “Hold on.”
She pauses and takes a moment to crouch and sling her backpack to the ground. From the interior of the bag, a pair of giant gold and black frog eyes blink placidly up at her, utterly content from a round and adorable frog face. The magical familiar remains unbothered while his wizard mistress pats him and carefully slides her hands into the bag to tug Boggy The Froggy from his perfect fit. Adaine deposits the pleasantly round amphibian in Riz’s arms.
“Hold that.”
Riz feels his blood pressure physically drop.
This frog is so good, Riz thinks.
“Riz, you said you’ve been doing this for weeks. Sleep training. Whatever. Alone in Gorgug’s van.” She lets that settle before asking, gently, “When you wake up and you can’t move… how scary is the stuff you’re seeing?”
Somewhere in the distance, the sound of a train horn sounds, echoing over the city and they both turn to listen. The sound fades away as its source races along a lightning rail toward Bastion city, the diminishing horn harmonizing to the rest of the summer evening. Windchimes sound from half a dozen suburban porches. The rustle of wind through the leaves rises softly.
“It’s fine,” Riz says, not looking at Adaine. “None of it’s real.”
“Riz—”
“I have a case, Adaine.” He drops his face to Boggy’s head. “People are counting me.” He lifts his head to look at his friend, standing in the watery glow of a streetlight, the gold of her hair lit up like a halo around her head. The surge of fondness he feels over her worried expression is like a warm hand closing around his heart. He grins. “I promise, when I’ve closed this out, I’ll see someone. Deal?”
Adaine sighs like she wants to argue her position more aggressively, but simply says, “Do you want to stay over tonight? Ragh’s mom has some fresh chili and its literally life changing.” She pauses and says, “You don’t have to sleep if you don’t want.”
Riz does not sleep that night. But the chili is great.
Okay, so turns out Vita was right and the fuckers taking goblin girls off the streets are, in fact, dangerous. Dangerous warlocks, to be exact, and they don’t like it when gun-toting gumshoes show up to their place of business asking direct questions about why one of them was seen with B’vell at a gas station in outer Elmville two days before she was declared missing.
Luckily, Riz figured it might go this way and called some friends.
It’s possible they are… over-leveled for this. Most street-level gangsters aren’t trained adventurers who’ve fought dragons and gods. Riz ponders this as they are in pursuit, going eighty miles an hour down the freeway (again) while he hangs out the window of the Hangvan. Fig is in the passenger’s seat, gripping his belt to make sure he doesn’t go flying.
Fig Faeth, louder than any super bass as a default, roars, “GET HIS ASS, RIZ!”
“I don’t have a shot!” he shouts back, dropping aiming sight of his arquebus back to his side. He sticks his head back inside the car window. “Fig, can you—?”
She hooks an arm around his waist and immediately crowds him, shoving her upper body out the Hangvan passenger window as well, ignoring yells from both Riz, Fabian, and Gorgug as she almost immediately over-balances with Riz in her arms. Fabian, on the roof with his battle sheet hooked around the right-most roof-rack, swings down to grab Riz by the arm and sling him into a wall-run along the side of the van. Riz kicks off and climbs his bigger teammate like a tree, clambering around his torso to hang off his back.
“You almost dropped The Ball!” Fabian yells, indignant.
Riz drops to the flat of the roof with a wheeze, grabbing the roof-racks for purchase.
“EVERYONE STOP FALLING OFF MY VAN!” Gorgug yells, sounding about 50% of the way to barbarian rage in the driver’s seat.
Fig waves. “Sorry, Riz! Sorry, Gorgug!”
Her long black braid whipping in the wind, she raises a hand, gripping her wrist to steady it, one eye squeezed shut as she aims up the freeway ahead of her. A screaming bead of white-hot light ignites at her fingertip and when she cocks her thumb back, the spell rockets from her hand and detonates four car-lengths ahead of them, igniting their quarry in a mushroom cloud of flame.
“Yeesh,” says Fabian, as the target car goes flying off the overpass. He bangs the roof. “Gorgug! Pull over. Let’s see if anyone’s, like, alive in there.”
“Unlikely,” says Fig, sticking her head up so Riz and Fabian can see her blow on her fingertip like the barrel of a gun. She winks at Riz. “You’re not the only good shot on this team.”
Riz, flustered, yells over the wind, “I wanted to question those guys, Fig!”
Fig blinks at him. “Oooooh. Right. Shit. Sorry!”
Gorgug pulls the Hangvan over on the shoulder and all four Bad Kids peer over the edge of the overpass where, smoking below, are the mostly in-tact remains of a black sprinter van. They wait and, eventually, some very burnt and busted up gangsters emerge from the wreckage in various states of fucked up and doing real bad but mostly alive.
Fabian makes a noise of annoyance, tugging his battle sheet from the roof rack, the silvery fabric whipping theatrically behind him in a way that Riz is pretty sure must be a magical effect because it absolutely matches Fabian’s movement when he tosses his silvery braids a bit and looks sidelong at Riz. He sets a hand on his hip and gestures to the mooks below.
“Can you, like, get ‘em? I don’t wanna get smoke on my shirt. It’s new. You understand, The Ball.”
Riz, already swapping his arquebus rounds to a net bullet clip, says, “Thanks, Fabian. I know you had dance camp.”
“Oh, well, I was utterly dominating the program anyway.” Fabian tosses his braids again, the other way, to maintain nonchalance. “Best I have a sick day and give the amateurs time to shine.” He sniffs, not looking at Riz directly. “And we haven’t had a chance to hang out much this summer.”
Riz grins.
“Well, it’s a long drive back. We could camp in the Hangvan overnight somewhere.”
“Road trip!” Fig enthuses, leaping from the overpass, her bass like an axe in her fist. She falls like a meteor. “Let’s collect these fuckers and goooo!”
As Riz had explained to Vita, coward-ass kidnappers of vulnerable young women don’t generally hold up to Gukgak-style interrogation and they definitely don’t hold up to Fig. They drop the mostly alive kidnappers with local authorities an hour later and realize it’s going to be a long drive home and worthy of road-side burgers, milkshakes, and driving with the windows down while the summer air rips past. The sound of Fig’s music on the radio sweeps away in the wind.
“You tryna grow up and be a superhero?” Fig laughs, slinging herself into one of bunk beds beside Riz.
Riz, already deep in his notes from the interrogation, says, “They’re still in the city, Fig. It’s a ship. Somewhere in the city.” He’s chewing a pen as he mutters. “The jerks who did this. The leaders? I’m just… I just know it…”
Fig snatches the pen and hugs him like a teddy bear.
“Super-secret, super-agent, super-PI, angel friend!” She chants this while nuzzling his shoulder until he wheezes. “I’m gonna write a song about it.” She takes his notebook and hauls him to his feet by the wrist toward the sunroof. Her hand around his arm is the only force in the universe allowed to take him away from casework as she shouts, “Gorgug! Turn that fuckin’ music up!”
Riz wakes up.
Fuck.
He glances toward the Hangvan’s dashboard; little digital read out tells him it’s about 5am. He can hear the other Bad Kids breathing slow and deep from the bunk beds around him. Fig is on the floor next to him, curled around a giant carnival-game-sized stuffed shrimp, snoring softly under a quilt and drooling slightly into the bend of her own arm. Riz can see that because he’s lying on his side, facing her, curled up slightly in a position that has his shoulder gone slightly numb.
Dammit.
He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Not with everyone else here. Damn.
Riz focuses on moving his trigger finger, too anxious about being weird in the Hangvan with everyone else to be afraid of, like, fake sleep demons tonight.
Then, because he dropped his guard of course, Riz feels a steel-sinewed hand close on the nape of his neck and wrap all the way around his throat like a collar synching shut from behind.
Riz stops breathing so hard he chokes. The hand around his neck tightens in response; soft, slightly fuzzy fingers curl cruelly inward, so the fingertips and thumb dig into his windpipe. Riz feels the prickle of claws unsheathing, scratching the thin skin over his pulse and the panic hits him like poison. Tears surge to the back of his eyes as he tries to focus.
He can’t see Kalina, but he knows it’s Kalina. (Not Kalina, a nightmare of Kalina).
A voice, low alto and amused: “Again, I was always a nightmare, kid.”
Riz feels a second hand settle over his mouth, clamping over the lower half of his face, over his nose, and suddenly he cannot fucking breath. That’s… new. Riz jerks instinctively, but his body ignores the reflex. He lies trapped inside himself as he starts to get hysterical. Fig, just two feet away from him, mumbles and shifts peacefully in her sleep, rolling away from him and wiggling contentedly. Riz would sob, but he doesn’t have the air.
“Shhh.” The hand tightens over his face, a thumb digging painfully into the hollow of his cheekbone. “Don’t make it a threesome. I like this – just you and me.”
It’s not real. This is bullshit. It’s not—
“Then breathe, baby boy. If I’m all bark—” he feels fangs graze his left ear— “and no bite.”
Riz shuts his eyes. He pulls his focus inward, to his hands, to something real. He holds his breath and tries to move his index finger. Just one finger. Like pulling the trigger on his dad’s gun, the muscles in his wrist, how they’ll move against the warm leather that straps the arcadian watch to his arm and how he’s not alone. He is not alone.
Move your hand. Just move your hand. Move—
Kalina lets go of his face, grips his jaw so he cannot move, then drags a wet sandpaper tongue along the back of his left ear like a cat grooming a kitten. When he freezes in shock, she does it again, slowly, licking from the nape of his neck, over the lobe, and along the soft outer curve of his ear. Nerves Riz largely tries to leave un-molested light up instantly, sending an over-sensitized jolt of neural electricity from the side of his head directly down his spine.
Growing up among goblins, pulling on ears is one of the first things you’re scolded for, second to pulling on tails. It’s a lot of sensitive cartilage and skin. A lot of nerves. It’s not appropriate, his mom had explained and then gone red when Riz asked why dad was allowed to bite her ear.
Here, now, held down while someone puts their mouth on him, it’s so horribly, skin-crawlingly, intimate and overwhelming – threatening something worse, and even more invasive – that Riz’s entire brain locks up. He’s sick and frozen, interior thoughts squalling in childish terror. Kalina purrs in his ear. Teeth graze delicate skin, sparking another riot of nerve and panic.
Riz starts hyperventilating. Hard. Ragged.
Weeks of sleep training go out the window. He tries to scream. He wants to puke.
All the muscles in his body seize up with the narrative. Riz still tries to move. Claw the floor. Anything. Something to distract himself from the jag of gibbering terror that’s uncoiling from the pit of stomach in a way he’s never experienced before. This new, bleeding fear birthing itself wholesale in his ribcage. His hands start to shake uncontrollably with the effort of trying to get the fuck away. To make it stop. Stop, stop—
There’s nothing here! It’s not real! She’s not here!
And Kalina briefly leans back to murmur, clear and comforting and condescending as a parent to a child, “Oh, Riz. Kiddo…”
Invisible arms wrap around him, hugging him tight. Made weak with fear, Riz feels a hysterical aneurysm-like burst gratitude that she’s stopped touching his ears. It feels so fucking stupid, but his skin is hot and cold with panic. He’s sweating, crying with relief. She squeezes him tight, pressing her chin into his shoulder exactly like his mom sometimes hugs him.
She says, “I’m gonna be with you, like this, your whole fucking life.”
Riz manages (at last) to scream.
Fig wakes up instantly. She’s sleep-addled and confused for a moment, but the sight of Riz shuddering and choking on the floor snaps her to complete focus immediately. She kicks the quilts off her body, flailing, shoving her sweatshirt sleeves to her elbows she makes this animal noise of fear. She grabs him by the shoulders.
“Riz!” She shakes him. “Riz?!”
He can’t move. He still can’t move. He’s like a doll in his friend’s grip. But Fig rolls him onto his back and the feeling of a tabaxi-shaped horror curled around him falls apart under the reality of Fig’s hands and the feeling of the floor against his spine. Riz tries to get a grip, but screaming even through his closed jaw is all he wants to do.
Fabian is awake now. Gorgug is up. Fig is shouting and casting dispel magic, remove curse, a gamut of wasted spell energy breaking useless over Riz’s body because Riz can’t calm the fuck down.
Because it’s not magic that’s wrong with him.
It’s just him.
“What’s happening!?” Fabian’s voice cracks. “Fig! What’s happening! Help him! Do magic!”
“I don’t know! He’s having a seizure or something!” Fig is nearly in tears. “Healing’s not working!”
Gorgug scrambles off his bunk to the floor and grabs Fig’s hands.
“Stop!” His usually soft voice booms inside the Hangvan. “Stop casting! It’s a night terror! Stop!”
And in that moment, Riz manages to clench his fist.
Paralysis breaks and he sucks air like a drowning victim and, to his horror, starts full-chested little-kid crying in front of his friends. Not in the kind of ha-ha way that he does when he gets too excited, but ugly, brutal, almost gagging crying as he tries to get his breath, to get the relevant parts of his brain to stop embarrassing him.
He can feel the others staring at him, frozen, while he chokes and sputters.
“S-Sorry. I’m fine!” Riz manages the words, but like he’s spitting up blood. He can’t decide if he’s crying from relief or humiliation at this point. “I’m fine! Just a nightmare. I’m f—”
Gorgug ducks down and hugs him.
Riz doesn’t mean to immediately curl into the hug and cry harder, but he does do that. Being hugged by Gorgug is like being put in a strait jacket made of padded steel. In a nice way. A real way that reveals what was sick facsimile in his night terror. Gorgug’s sweatshirt smells like dust and metal and motor-oil and a bit like rage-sweat overpowering the body spray Gorgug uses to mask it. It’s sharp, almost burning in his nose, and that helps pull Riz back down to ground somehow.
“Are you okay?” Gorgug asks really quietly.
Riz, muffled, says, “Totally. I’m… so good, dude.”
And it’s such a stupid answer, Gorgug pauses for a full five seconds.
Then he says, “Um. I’m gonna, uh, call bullshit? Yeah. That’s… you’re not good.”
“Okay, maybe—” Riz swallows around the lump in his throat suddenly— “maybe I’m, um, I’m just a little—” Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. “Uh. Give me a second.”
“Sure, Riz.”
Gorgug shifts his weight slightly, moving to lean back against one of the bunkbeds, pulling Riz with him until they’re seated side-by-side, Gorgug’s arm heavy around his shoulder. He’s tense, his body curved a little toward his smaller friend with an anticipatory tension, on a hair-trigger to help, but there’s nothing to fix. Nothing he can weld or solder or calculate in order to stop the way Riz keeps shaking like engine with a hitch in it.
“Riz.” Fig speaks finally. She’s sitting so, so still in the middle of the floor. “You had a nightmare?”
Riz feels like he’s been punched by a spine devil, his guts pulverized to a compound slurry of disgust and a fresh terror that somehow, someway, his friends will know. They will know he had a weird, fucked up dream about Kalina doing weird stuff to him and he thinks, he’s sure, if one of them teases him about ‘hooking up’ with the Shadow Cat it will actually kill him.
He realizes too late that he’s started to hyperventilate again.
“Whoa! Whoa! It’s okay.” Fig extends her hands as if to slow his roll to vomit-ville. “I’ve… I’ve had some screaming bad nightmares too, man.” She scoots forward on her knees tucking stray hair behind her ear. “Like, I pissed myself once. For real. It was, like, a sophomore year pants pissing situation. So, like, you’re handling it waaaay better than me.”
Riz isn’t sure that a pants peeing confession is the comfort Fig thinks it is, but through his exhaustion, Riz feels something like a laugh paw at his lungs.
“You did not,” Riz whispers.
Fig, eyes alighting with success, expounds with a hair flip, “Look, you can make fun if you want, because I’m a rockstar and an arch devil and you cannot fuck with my cool, but… yeah. I did. I kept having nightmares about… uh—” Riz watches her regret in real time her choice to be honest and fight an instinct to stop talking. “I kept having nightmares about killing my, uh, friends.”
She glances at her nails, nervously, then back at Riz.
Riz, softly, says, “You don’t have to lie to make me feel better.”
“I’m not! I totally pissed myself. Bad.”
Riz covers his face with both hands, groaning. “Stooooop it.”
“I’m a piss devil, Riz.”
“Nooooo.”
“Okay, I’ll stop. But, fuck that dream.” Fig slaps her hand into her opposite palm. “It’s a shitty dream and it’s done now.”
Riz squeezes his eyes shut because all he can hear, immediately is, “I’m gonna be with you, like this, your whole fucking life.”
“The Ball.” Fabian is crouched suddenly on the floor beside him. “Riz.” Oh shit, Fabian’s using his legal name. This is bad. He says, “What if we just fucking forget sleeping and start driving, huh? I think, if we go right now, we can get to the top Cap Hill and watch the sun come up, eat trash breakfast burritos, and then? We can go get ice cream for brunch. Fuck it.”
Riz, from the depths of his humiliation and misery, admits aloud, “That sounds awesome.”
“Yes, it does.” Fabian elbows him, then leans in and says, “I’m going to drive so far over the speed limit.”
Riz looks up from his hands. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m gonna fuckin’ floor it,” Fabian insists, already standing up. “Like, a hundred miles an hour.”
“No.”
“Live mas, The Ball.”
“Stop it.” Riz scrambles up to race Fabian for the keys on the dashboard. “No!”
Gorgug ends up driving them a normal speed back to Elmville where they do catch the sunrise on Cap Hill but elect to get pancakes at a greasy spoon nearby. No one talks about it. No one talks about anything really. They just talk and talk dizzy sleep-deprived circles around Riz until their small talk insulates him like wool and somewhere between his third cup of coffee and his fourth pancake Riz wipes his eyes again.
“You good, The Ball?”
“Yeah.” He smiles into his plate and sniffs. “Uh, pass the ketchup.”
“Do you want my hash browns?” Fig asks, rattling her fork around her plate. “I’m full.”
Riz eats everyone’s leftovers.
He does not talk about it.
They all drive home.