“Jain Shin Hallow, answer this and answer honestly. What do you see when you see me?”

  Oh shit. I did not want to answer this question.

  “Can you be a little more specific?” I asked innocently.

  The Intellect Transit opened her wings a shade, chancing me with fleeting pale-pink skin of freshborn chicks on her bulging stomach. “Gaze upon me, Jain Hallow. What do you see?”

  Was this some sick monster reenactment of the traditional ‘Do I look fat?’ between girlfriend and boyfriend? In that scenario, was I the boyfriend? I really didn’t like that imagery.

  More so, my brain reeled at the focus I placed on her. My Third Eye retched in response, hinting at a deeper sickness that would take root if I continued to stare. Already, parts of her were ingrained in my memories, pounding on my strained psyche. I closed my eyes and blocked it out.

  This had to be a trap. “Riddles were not part of the deal. You were supposed to tell me your story.”

  “Oh, but she is,” Rosefinch said. “This has every bit to do with the story.”

  “Fine,” I snarled, desperately trying to think of anything but the Intellect Transit. “When I look at you, Intellect Transit, I see something that could be a little girl. Maybe a pigeon. But you are neither and both. You’ve crossed over, and I can list off the beings that I think you could be: a harpy, a siren, maybe some variant of a sphinx if you're so set on me answering riddles.”

  “The Russian Sirin, the Korean Inmyeonjo,” Wol added. “Any of those could fit the bill.”

  The Intellect Transit’s head bobbed in acquiescence. “Indeed. But you have not said what I am.”

  “Because you don’t look like any of them and I can’t look at you without going mad,” I said and tried not to look nervous. “Because there’s a bottomless depth about your presence and it’s hurting me.”

  The vast silence of perhaps two of the most influential and powerful supernatural beings in New York was nerve wracking.

  “Yes, he will suffice,” the Intellect Transit said. “He sees the truth.”

  “Well, never let it be said that the Intellect Transit does not have an eye for people.” Rosefinch dipped her fingers into the wine glass again. After suckling from them, she added, “Or a dozen.”

  I was getting a little tired of them talking like I wasn’t here. “What truth?”

  “Practitioner, you are right. There is madness within me. And it wasn’t always so,” the Intellect Transit began. “My earliest memories are of being in the tunnels. A woman whom I presume to be my human birth mother –her hands, her scent, the color of her eyes– I remember it all. She left me on the subway tracks, amidst the filth of the rats and the pigeons. She kissed me on the forehead and she was gone."

  “Jesus, I”m sorry,” I said out of reflex.

  “There is no need for you to apologize, for I find no distaste or displeasure at the memory. Only what was. I lay there, waiting in the subway darkness. Only the woman never came.” One of the wings moved, revealing a disgusting nest of rats sitting near her feet. They squeaked once, and her wing covered them again. “I do not remember what happened after. Only that a long time passed. Days, weeks, months. I became aware of myself, and found that I was suckling from the teats of what would become the first of my children.”

  “Wait, it sounds like you’re saying you drank rat milk instead of baby formula,” I shook my head. “Babies don’t just… you can’t just–”

  “Jain, she’s describing how she crossed over,” Wol urged. “Don’t use common sense. Understand it as a Practitioner does.”

  “Thy familiar is wise,” the Wickerman said, reminding me of his presence.

  “When I could crawl, my children led me through the abandoned tunnels. When my teeth grew in, they would bring me cockroaches. Grasshoppers. Worms. Anything that they could find,” the Intellect Transit said. “Soon, I found that I could call others that the humans referred to as vermin. Pigeons at first, then raccoons. Opposums. The more I grew, the more I could call.”

  I frowned. “Wait, first rats; then pigeons that people refer to as rats with wings. Is there a connection there?”

  “Yes, I imagine so. I was abandoned in the subway tunnels, unwanted, because I was a parasite to my birth mother. A drain on her resources. Filthy and useless, a being that she did not want to see; one that elicited negative emotions. I imagine that there is a connection to my children, perhaps that is what catalyzed my crossing over.”

  I blinked and tried to think of something cheery to say. Something uplifting to change the mood. But I missed the timing and the Intellect Transit continued her story.

  “More years passed, and I became one of the beings you mentioned. A Harpy, a Inmyeonjo, a Sirin, but more. I could call my children, see through their eyes. I could also feel a connection between other humans that were similar to me; those who rummage through trash and are regarded as no better than my own children,” She said. “I could hear what they heard, knew what they saw. The first of your kind came to me nearly sixty years ago, seeking knowledge of where his woman disappeared to every eighth day. Then more came. They called me the Intellect Transit and I was not averse to the name. I took it, and made it my own. Since then, I’ve been known as such.”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “But to me, you are Inty,” Rosefinch proclaimed proudly.

  “Yes, Rosefinch. You are what I would call a friend.”

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets. I’ll be honest, I was engrossed by the story. It was an origin story, quite literally, of how the Intellect Transit came to be. From an intellectual standpoint, it was interesting that she was human once and remembered being as such. It sounded like photographic memory –the one that’s portrayed in the media. Which brought up the interesting point of which came first.

  Did having such strange memory enable her to cross over, or did crossing over grant her the ability retrospectively?

  “Ok, I see an issue,” I said, understanding a little more. “The harpies in human books. The Inmyeonjo, they don’t look… like you. Did you look like them at one point?”

  Half the pigeon eyes blinked sadly. “Yes. I did.”

  “Something happened, didn’t it?” I asked quietly.

  “Yes, it did.” All the eyes closed, and they opened again. “Back before I moved to the surface, I lived deep within the earth. I flew above the subway rails, and explored every hidden tunnel dug out by my children. The Sewer Mistress had her sewers, and I had my children and their homes.”

  The beaks shrilled hatefully, “then I met it.”

  There was power in her words.

  A power completely different from the one I used for Conjuring and Abjuration. A power that was untamed, uncontrolled, and raw. It washed over me in a wave and set the hairs on my arm standing on end. I thought of reaching for my knife but resisted, instead taking a careful step back towards the barrel of fire.

  “Perhaps it’s better if I take over from here,” Rosefinch muttered.

  “Please do, Rosefinch Valstein.”

  “I have heard there are volumes of text favoured by your kind, Mageling. Have you read it?” Rosefinch asked.

  “A little,” I said. “Not all of it.”

  “Good. Then there is not much for you to fear. Inty encountered a Nameless being.”

  Wol stiffened.

  “Wol?” I asked.

  “Ah, you have an intelligent familiar. Tell me, cat,” Rosefinch said, “Do you know what a Nameless being is?”

  “They are just that. Nameless beings, because they’re not from our world. We have no names to describe them with.” Wol said, “That’s it. That’s all I know. I’ve never seen one before.”

  “Most beings never do,” Rosefinch said, “But one of you magelings dedicated his short little mortal life to the study of these things. He named them Eldritch gods.”

  “Hold on a second, you’re talking about Lovecraftian horror. The book. You’re telling me they’re real?” I asked.

  “As real as Inty’s story, as real as the Wickerman who sits behind you, little Mageling,” the Vampyr said. “Inty was not always like this. She was turned after her encounter with a Nameless being. The madness took root in her.”

  “You make it sound like a disease.” I said.

  “Of course mortals would liken it to a malady. How dreary of you, Mageling. Still, the description works because that is precisely what they are. They are a disease. A maddeningly persistent one at that.”

  I turned back to Inty. “You’re sick.”

  “Yes, Jain Shin Hallow. I am sick.”

  “Since when?”

  “Two dozen years ago,” the Intellect answered, “And it has progressed since.”

  “And that’s why you have… the extra features? On your face, I mean.” I had to be clear.

  “Yes,” The eyes closed, somehow sad, and her voice more so. “Yes.”

  “For more than twenty years now, Inty and I have been in search of a cure,” Rosefinch said. “Or even a clue regarding any nameless still left in this part of the world. Books, people, heirs of the original practitioner who studied this; we’ve tried everything to no avail.”

  “And I’m the answer?”

  “Thoust a portion of the remedy we seek,” the Wickerman said. The flame spirit began to whisper into his practitioners eyes again.

  It was obvious who was really in charge of this relationship. The human’s eyes were blank, with zero signs of awareness or intelligence behind them. Everytime the flame spirit whispered his guttural language, there was a lag before the practitioner translated it for the rest of us.

  “Sixty days past, three of my embers vanished. I found them extinguished, signs of madness burned into their bodies before death claimed them,” the Wickerman’s mouthpiece said. “Knowing of the Intellect’s affliction, I did seek her out.”

  “I sent my children to investigate. In the sky, in the tunnels, under the ground. Many came back with nothing. It took days before I learned of the missing gaps in my memory. Some of my children had simply disappeared,” Then the Intellect Transit opened her wing and a few of the rats scurried out, dragging something by their teeth. “That’s when they found this.”

  It was a dead pigeon with gaping maws all over its body.

  Mouths had grown into the body, and there were signs that they had attacked the host body. Half-plucked feather marks dotted every exposed piece of flesh, most of them having been done so violently, that blood stained the openings.

  I wanted to throw up.

  “This little birdie was brought back last moon,” Rosefinch said with a languid smile, “Since then, none of Inty’s babies have returned.”

  “A Nameless,” the Wickerman said.

  “I have sent champions, calling in favors and debts. Practitioners of Society, creatures of night who hunt, none of them returned,” the Intellect Transit waved her wing and the rats dragged the body back to her bosom. “That’s when you appeared.”

  Oh sweet baby Jesus.

  “It is not the same Nameless that I encountered, but it is the only clue I have found in all these years,” The Intellect’s eyes shone with eerie light, hate seething off every syllable, “Be my champion, Jain Shin Hallow. I wish for you to bind it, and bring it to me.”