I awoke with a start, sitting bolt upright and balancing on my left hand.
My brain short-circuited as it tried to process what it was feeling, and I immediately looked down to where my hand was touching the gas station floor. It may have been more like two or three, but my heart for sure missed at least one solid beat as I tried and failed to process what I was seeing and feeling.
I had two hands again. Only they were no longer a matching set.
Righty was still the same as always. Old reliable. Human flesh.
Lefty was…well, it had three fingers and a giant thumb, each with jet black claws protruding from the fingernail, and my entire arm was covered in black scales. It looked like the Carnisaur’s hand, but I could feel the cool floor beneath its palm, and it was sprouting from my arm. It was my hand alright.
A mechanical click like the firing hammer of a pistol drawing back drew me out of my silent reverie and made me lift my eyes up to the werewolf leaning up against the back wall of the gas station. Her eyes were trained on me, unblinking and unmoving. She had a strange, otherworldly-looking pistol in her hand that she was toying with, but aside from her thumb spinning the cylinder over and over she made no motion whatsoever.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked, choosing to ignore the edge in her gaze and the gun in her hands and seeking clarity.
She pushed off the back wall and let her eyes narrow suspiciously. “Actually, I was hoping you could tell me the answer to that very same question. I’ve worked with the Bureau for nine years and I’ve never seen anything like this. How are you doing this? Were either of your parents out of pocket?”
I rose to my feet, slowly, so as not to alarm the woman holding a firearm. “Uh, my dad could certainly say some pretty off the cuff things, sure, but something tells me that’s not what you meant.”
“No. ‘Out of pocket,’ meaning not from this dimension, but from a pocket dimension like the World of Monsters or the World of Magic. Whenever things start going weird, well weirder than usual, it’s usually one of those two who’s responsible. So which is it? Were one of your parents a witch or a primal, how are you doing this?”
I held up my mismatched hands to forestall her questions.
“Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about. As far as I know both of my parents were human. Until this guy,” I pointed down at the dead dino-man, “showed up and killed Derek, I didn’t even know there was anything non-human living in Eastport!”
The girl’s stoic mask broke as a grin crossed her face. “You thought everyone living in Eastport was human? Yikes, dude, you’re even dumber than you look.”
I grimaced. ‘Dumber than you look’ was the sort of thing Hannah used to say to me all the time. They were both speaking the truth. I guess I did look like a brawny, stupid jock of a human being—even before I got a roided-out dinosaur arm bolted to me—but that wasn’t my fault. People saw my height and my muscles and made assumptions. Nobody but Hannah, and I guess Derek, bothered to look any deeper than that. Back before the accident I would let people make their assumptions and be done with it. It was easier than trying to prove that I was just as intelligent as the scrawny kids with asthma and glasses, so I stayed in the lane I was assigned and made sure to read my science fiction books when no one else was looking.
Hannah was the first person who ever saw that there was more to me than being a big dumb brute. When she said that I was ‘dumber than (I) looked’ she always said it sweetly, chastising me for some silly mistake I made, never cruelly.
Of course, after the accident people stopped seeing me as some brawny moron anymore. Their eyes took on the shine of pity and I became ‘poor Ryan’ instead. Ryan the cripple. Ryan the guy with one hand and no girl. Ryan who pissed away his scholarship to go work at Hilltop instead of doing something with his life.
Well, I had both hands again, but it sure felt like this she-wolf, stunningly gorgeous though she was, was looking at me and only seeing that big dumb brute. That felt like one step forward and about sixty steps in the wrong direction.
“Right. Silly me, thinking all the people living in a human city were humans. Look. I think we got off on the wrong foot. Do you have a name, or shall I just refer to you as werewolf with a gun?”
Werewolf-with-a-gun paused, pursing her lips in consideration for a moment.
“You can call me Tabitha. And you’re right, we did start off on the wrong foot. This is your first day in your new reality so I’ll take it easy. Ask me any three questions and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability. When you’re done with that it’s my turn, sound fair?”
I nodded. “Alright uh…this guy said he was a Carnisaur. You’re obviously a werewolf. You said something about witches. What else is there in this new world I’m a part of?”
Tabitha scoffed. “More than I even have names for, honestly. Monsters come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, they come from the aptly named World of Monsters and often wind up here with a big appetite and a bad attitude. Witches come from the World of Magic, and most of them are pretty chill honestly. It’s my job to hunt down the ones that can’t acclimate to the World of Mortals. Lately, it’s been a bigger job than usual.”
“So this is your job. Is it typical to send monsters to hunt down monsters?”
Tabitha’s expression darkened. “Exceedingly so, yes. Word to the wise? Be careful who you call monsters from now on. There is a key difference between those of us who look like monsters and those of us who are monsters.”
I lifted my newly-regrown left hand and sighed. “Looks like I’ll have plenty opportunity to learn the difference. This is a lot to process, I meant no offense. To be honest…I’m having trouble narrowing it down to just one question so let me try something. What else do you think I should know right now?”
One of Tabitha’s eyebrows quirked upwards curiously. “Good question. Alright, here’s the basics. We live in the mortal world which is mainly inhabited by humans, which you knew. What you did not know is that there are a whole host of monsters, magical creatures, and non-human sentients who have slipped through the dimensional barriers and are now living amongst us. Most of them try to blend in and maintain the status quo. Some don’t. My job is to track down and eliminate those that fall into the latter category. The agency I work for is called the Keeper’s Bureau and their mission to keep the peace between our world and all the others. All clear?”
I found myself nodding along with her words. A day ago I would have suggested she up her dose of whatever antipsychotics she was on. But a day ago I only had one hand, and today I had a monster hand. So I spared her my sarcasm for the time being and thanked her for explaining this new weird world I had apparently been living in all along.
“You’re welcome,” she said gently. Then she raised her pistol and pointed it at my head. “Now it’s my turn to ask some questions.”
Oh great. How come all the hot ones are fucking crazy?
“Okay, shoot. Wait, wait! Poor choice of words! I meant okay, ask away!”
I could not help but notice the way her lips started to curl into a smile before she reset her stoic expression and started rapid-fire asking me a series of increasingly bizarre questions. Starting off with things like my favorite foods and musical interests, detouring to questions about my education level and familiarity with firearms, and somehow winding up on my shoe size.
I answered every question as honestly as I could until she finally lowered her pistol.
“Alright, Ryan. Just three more questions and we can be done here.”
“Oh good, I was worried you were going to ask for my condom size next. Did you really need all that personal information?”
Tabitha nodded curtly. “It’s protocol. First question. How did you lose your hand?”
My face fell, and for a moment I lost sight of the wrecked gas station and just saw trees hurtling past a car window and that old bluesy song playing on the radio.
“It was a car accident. I’d rather not talk about the details.”
“Sorry to bring up a bad memory. All I need to know is if you were driving or not.”
I broke eye contact with her and looked off to my left. Derek’s frozen body was directly in my eye line if I turned that way, so I kept turning and found myself staring out at the six frozen cops outside.
After taking a second to collect myself I faced her again. “No. I wasn’t driving.”
Tabitha’s expression remained unchanged as she tilted her head to the side ever so slightly, a movement I could not help but associate with a dog expressing curiosity. “Thank you. We can move on to the next question now. This one might sound a little strange. Would you be willing to learn a little bit of primal magic?”
“You’re asking me if I want to learn magic,” I restated.
“Correct.”
“Oh, just checking. Let me think about that for a second,” I said in a sarcastic tone. Without missing a beat I immediately followed that up with, “Yes of fucking course I want to learn magic!”
Tabitha snorted in amusement. “Alright. So, the monster we just fought was a member of the primal monster race, and they have magic which ties in with some of the fundamental magics of the world. Light and shadow, gravity and bone, and time. This guy’s speciality must have been creating Temporal Fractals, little bubbles of time where he can pause things. The spell he used is tied to his genetic code, and while I’m not certain about this it seems like when he attacked you he infected you with some of his DNA. Hence the pseudo-transformation. This is just a theory though. If I am correct, you should be able to undo his spell. Just follow my lead. I want you to say or think the phrase ‘time stops for no one’ and do as I do.” She repeated the phrase and raised her left hand, making a snapping gesture just like the one that the Carnisaur had used to freeze time when the cops showed up.
Mimicking her, I thought the phrase to myself and snapped the fingers of my dinosaur-hand. Nothing happened.
“Um. Did I do something wrong?”
Tabitha did not respond.
“Hello, Tabby? You there?”
No response. She just kept staring straight ahead, frozen in the same motion she had been making before I snapped. Mid-snap as she was she had a very sassy look to her that I could not help but admire.
Did I just freeze her?
I stepped a little closer to her and waved my hand in front of her face. Still nothing.
“Ah shit. Now what the fuck am I gonna do?”
I tried snapping again but nothing happened. For a horrible, terrifying moment I really thought that this was it for me. I was about to waste away in a single frozen second until I just decayed. Or worse, maybe the spell would not allow me to decay or die and I was just stay permanently alive, suspended in between moments permanently.
Right at the peak of my rising panic, as I was pacing back and forth just snapping my fingers like a one-man quartet, just before I started sliding into despair, Tabitha cracked up and started laughing her—admittedly very cute—little ass off.
“You should have seen your face!”
I was completely done. I just sat down on the front counter and waited for her to stop wheezing and cracking up so damn much. Apparently we had all the time in the world, anyway, so who cared, right?
Every time she started to compose herself she would look my way and find something utterly hilarious about my unamused expression, and she would just start laughing all over again. This went on for a while, but then again it also lasted under a second.
“Are you done? Because although you clearly think of yourself as a comedic genius I just have to say that this,” I gestured to her rolling-on-the-floor routine, “is a lot less amusing when I look over at the dead bodies on the floor.”
That sobered her up.
Tabitha composed herself and rose to her feet, purposely avoiding looking at me as she started to gesture over towards Derek. She snorted, ruining the moment as she struggled to maintain more laughter. “Sorry. I just, I can’t believe you fell for that! Oh, that was priceless.”
“Yes, yes, hilarious. Reminder. Dead bodies. One of them is both my coworker and my only friend. Not really seeing the humor in this situation.”
“Oh, right. As I was saying! He’s not dead.” She just floated that information out there while gesturing vaguely over towards Derek’s corpse. Or I guess, not his corpse.
“What? I saw him get stabbed. He’s dead.”
“You saw me get stabbed too, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but you’re a werewolf. I assumed you had some sort of healing factor.”
Tabitha nodded. “I do. Thanks for noticing. But your friend over there doesn’t. The second he stopped being an active participant in this little Temporal Fractal, he froze along with the rest of the world. Which means he has been stabbed, but he is not technically dead. Yet.”
I pushed myself off the counter and crossed to her, gripping her arm firmly. “You tell me how to keep him alive, and I’ll help you track down all the monsters you want. I’ll fucking kill a dozen Carnisaurs if you can keep him alive.”
Tabitha blinked. “Oh, well I guess that answers my last question. Here, I’ll show you how to alter the dimensions of the spell and keep him locked in Temporal Stasis. Altering a spell is actually easier than collapsing it. Which is good for me because I suck at spells. Luckily this one’s pretty simple and my witchy friend Bianca can help with the rest of it. C’mon I’ll show you how it’s done.” She started explaining something complicated about the difference between hexes and jinxes but I wasn't really ready to pay attention just yet.
I stopped her. “Wait. What was your last question going to be?”
Tabitha smiled and reached under her armored vest to pull out a little badge shaped like a six-pointed star. “How would you like a new job?”