‘Monday, 9:36 am. I seem to have picked up a stalker of some kind.’

  Charis Gades wrote quickly in her notebook, then looked up at him. He instantly looked away, obviously embarrassed. She pressed her copper-glitter glossy lips together in a knowing smirk, and went back to her writing.

  ‘No sign of mazik influence, but he looks like shit. That means he’s scared, running from something. Probably in trouble. He sought me out for some reason; very rare. Seems to be able to sense odyllis. Very interesting, might be a specimen for the School. Will attempt to make contact.’

  She shut the notebook and dropped it back into her purse, snatching the cigarette from her lips to blow out a long stream of smoke. Rain drizzled down, shifting through the San Francisco fog. She stared at one side of the courtyard while he stared at the other side. It seemed as if their standoff could go on forever, both unwilling to admit that they wanted to talk.

  Charis watched him through her long dark-tinted eyelashes. There was a strange, brilliant blood-red energy hiding within him that she could feel even from fifty feet away. Every knocker and gremlin in the peninsula could probably sense this man walking around, like a beacon, like a tremble in the atmosphere, drawn to the source of power like a wasp to a picnic. But aside from the red glow, his personal aura was pretty average. He wasn’t an elogic.

  Weird. Very weird. If his personal drivadic potential was normal, what in the hell was that red source of power?

  This could only mean one thing: trouble. If she didn’t find out where he’d gotten that power and what it was before the enemy had him pinned down, he could endanger not only himself but everyone in the city. People like him were the reason people like her existed.

  She smiled. And she’d thought this was going to be a boring assignment.

  After about five minutes of total silence finally Charis couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Well?” she yelled toward him. “Are you going to come over here and have a smoke with me or what? Holy shit, what is taking you so long? Do you think I want to sit out here in the rain all day? Jeez!” She threw her blond hair with a flick of her head, exasperated.

  That had been the last thing the roamer had expected from her. He violently jerked as if something electrical had just shot up his spine, then looked around the courtyard with quick nervous glances to make sure she wasn’t addressing someone else… possibly someone she knew, someone she’d been waiting for. But there was no one, just the drizzling fog-rain dripping from the leaves of a stand of bamboo that grew over their heads along one side of the courtyard, sleek and too bright against the drab colors of the city.

  He returned his haunted, sleep-deprived eyes to her face again, incredulous, wincing as if squinting against a light as water dripped off his bangs. “I’m sorry?”

  She rolled her eyes. Some people were really slow on the uptake. But that was okay, Charis was nothing if not patient and compassionate. “You. Bum guy. You’ve been following me for six blocks. Don’t tell me you just like how I look in these slacks.” She tried not to smile at her own sarcasm.

  His eyes widened, because he probably did like how she looked in those slacks.

  “Are you going to get up here and talk to me or just sulk around in the corner all day? Because I’m a busy woman. I have things to do.” Charis took a long drag from the cigarette and blew it out in a thin stream toward him. The mysterious tendrils of the cloud mingled with the fog and the rain, swirling.

  “Um…” the ragged man climbed cautiously to his feet, feeling awkward and at the same time desperate enough to take an unsteady step toward her. “I didn’t mean to… I mean, I wasn’t really following you.” He stopped himself to scowl at the ground, perplexed that he’d just inadvertently confessed.

  “Oh really. Do you expect me…” she caught herself before she went off on a tirade and reminded herself that she was patient and compassionate. He wasn’t in any shape to be teased. This guy looked neck deep in trouble and sinking fast. She could sympathize; she'd been there once herself. “Sorry. I can see you’ve had a hard time. It’s just that I can tell instantly when someone is lying.” She looked him up and down once more. “I’m not going to bite, you can keep coming. And don’t worry, I’m not afraid of you. Even with that gun in the small of your back.”

  Charis allowed herself the tiniest smirk of satisfaction as he made a choking noise and a quickly aborted the dodge of his hand toward the gun. Guilt and alarm darkened his face, creased and dirty from days and nights of hell. How many she didn’t know, but on closer inspection she could see that he’d once been a decently normal looking fellow, once upon a time. Well, not entirely normal-looking. He was sort of cute… in a scruffy, dirty, worn-out, bum sort of way. Or would be, with a little care. Younger than she’d first thought, too.

  Quickly the shabby wanderer made his defense. “Look, don’t call the cops. I mean, I’m not a sicko or anything. Really.”

  She rolled her eyes, suppressing a smile and a laugh. It had been over a decade since pipsqueaks like sickos and criminals could alarm her. That ship had sailed. She couldn’t care less about his gun, what concerned her was the unexplained red glow, and the hair-trigger desperation and hopelessness that had been rolling off him in waves ever since she’d first noticed him on the street. That kind of emotional cocktail had a story behind it, which was great, since she was bored silly wandering around the streets like a tourist and her friends wouldn't arrive in town until tomorrow.

  “Whatever. Look, when’s the last time you had a decent meal? There’s a soup joint around the corner.” She hurried to finish her cigarette, her eyes fixed on his.

  “Soup?” The man blinked several times in stunned silence, as if unable to comprehend the idea that a strange woman would want to buy him a meal. Then his stomach rumbled. “Uh… actually…” a pause, then a grimace. “Okay. But… I don’t have any cash.” He looked embarrassed by that, further proof that not long ago he’d been a normal citizen.

  “Good!” Charis swung her legs down from the planter, stubbed out the cigarette in the dirt behind her and tossed the butt like you aren’t supposed to do in California. She didn’t seem to care where it landed. Oddly enough when Dave glanced at it he couldn’t find it, as if it had vanished into thin air.

  “Come on.” Charis swung right back into her best city-stride, sweeping past the man with a flurry of soft suede and the hint of perfume. He fell in beside her.

  They made an odd couple, the fashion-plate and the tramp. As soon as they left the courtyard she thrust her hand toward him, slender pale fingers tipped in long coppery claws. “Gades. Charis Gades. And you are…?”

  “Dave Tolin.” He shook her hand, briefly but firmly.

  Charis spared him another appraising glance as they headed downtown along the cracked sidewalks and off-smelling corners of the city by the sea. The tiniest smile teased at the corner of her lips, which made him tug self-consciously on his wrinkled Transformers t-shirt and try not to blush. He kept his attention on his old scuffed black shoes—loafers, something a math nerd or a professor would wear. He had a dark blazer on under his long gray overcoat and wrinkle resistant slacks that had long ago stopped being either wrinkle or stain resistant. He looked like an escapee from Chem Lab.

  “You a student?” she guessed.

  His eyes snapped up immediately to meet hers, amazed. “UCLA.”

  “What major?”

  “Linguistics. Well, Ancient Languages. Technically ‘Classical Civilizations’.”

  She could see his relief to be talking about something normal. She made an impressed sound, raising her brows, and added, “Long way from L.A., aren’t you?”

  Again that troubled expression, the furtive glances around at the other people in the street, then one terrified look at the sky just as a stringer flew by overhead with a loud metallic snapping sound. “Yah, I guess.”

  She glanced at the sky as well, making mental note that Dave seemed to be able to see the Veil world with open eyes. Very, very unusual. That little fact raised her concern by several more notches, but she paid it no more heed for the moment, focusing instead on the store-fronts and the soup shop three doors down.

  Dave’s eyes returned again to Charis’s forehead, drawn by the flicker of something that should have been invisible. He leaned forward to get a better look, squinting.

  “What?” she demanded defensively, faltering in her forward charge.

  “Is that…?” he began, paused, went on, “is that like a groupie thing?” He gestured to his own forehead.

  Charis stopped walking to stare at him blankly, having totally forgotten what was on her forehead. Then memory triumphed over her fit of blond vacancy, and she slapped her hand over the invisible Veil-mark between her brows. “Oh!... Wait. You’re kidding. You can actually see this?”

  “Well… yah. It’s kind of obvious. What is that… glued on or something?” He touched his own forehead, unconsciously tracing the design as he stared at hers.

  She opened her mouth, shut it, then gave him a tight-lipped little smile. “No.” She kept walking.

  He stepped back to let her pass, holding up both hands in a surrender. “Right. Nevermind. Don’t criticize a chick and her fashion, I get it.” He followed her a few paces behind, hands shoved into his pockets and his eyes on the ground.

  Holy shit he could see her Nythian Veil mark? This was serious…

  Charis took command of the soup shop’s counter like arriving nobility. “One beef and barley large, one onion potato medium, and two roast-beef cheddar rolls,” she declared to the tall dark-haired man of indeterminate nationality who owned and ran the place. She noticed out of the corner of her eye David’s surprise that she’d ordered exactly what he preferred.

  As she paid for the food with a mysteriously all-black credit card, Charis kept her attention on her new project. She noticed that he was always glancing toward the street, toward the back shadows and corners of the room, furtively wincing at any Veil movement or flicker that passed. Yah, he could definitely see the other realm. With a spirit as common as every other blind Normal. Absolutely impossible.

  She took one tray and left him to take the other when it was presented, striding to the side of the narrow hole-in-the-wall eating area where a table for two afforded a glimpse through the front glass door and large window.

  Dave came along as meekly as a lamb in her wake. He thought she didn’t notice when he gave his armpit a fast, examining sniff. When he sat down across the table from her, she noticed him tugging on wrinkled clothing and attempting to straighten himself out a bit. Men… adorable really… no matter that he was on the run for his life, looked like the floor of a movie theater after opening night, and out of his mind with panic, he was still going to try his darndest to impress the pretty blond. Even though it was a hopeless attempt.

  She gave him a slight smile, and bit into her beef roll.

  “So…” he struggled with how to say it, then just tossed it out there in his most conversational tone, “do you, uh, go to church around here?” Piercing aqua blue eyes searched her face with far more seriousness than his tone had implied.

  She snickered, straightening the fashionably exaggerated collar on her designer white cotton blouse so that it pulled the unfastened top three buttons open a bit more. “Church?” She pitched her voice lower, sexier. “Do I look like a church girl?”

  That was all it took to make Dave forget all about his beef roll… or maybe not. It took him over four heartbeats to stop staring at her neckline and remember what he was here for. “What?” he blurted, looked back up at her face and blushed hot pink, then stumbled on quickly. “Oh… well… I don’t know. Do you?”

  Charis smiled at him while she wound her damp hair up into a knot, and stabbed a hair pin through it that looked something like a single black lacquer chop stick. By the time she was done she was completely dry. Not a hint of water remained, and her artfully messy hair was now restored to its curling glory as if she’d just stepped out of a salon. Which was impossible, but it had happened right in front of his eyes. “Let’s start with you. What the hell are you running from?” Her tone was serious and professional. She really wanted to know. She leaned forward, propping her chin up on her fist with a concerned expression.

  David didn’t answer, pulling his eyes away from her neckline again to squirm in his seat. He was fidgeting and twitching like someone who was strung a little too tight. “What says I’m running?”

  She pointed at the food and said with her mouth full, “Don’t let that get cold.”

  Dave grabbed his roll, bit off fully half of it, and chewed in mute bliss.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  She watched his starvation speak for itself. Sarcastically she muttered, “uh-huh,” and kept eating. Sure. Right. Who says he was running? He only looked like a bum who was starving to death.

  “Shanksh,” he slurred through the roast beef, “Eb goob.” He tried to give her a little smile and instantly stopped when the food tried to escape.

  She sighed as she watched him, pausing her own lunch. “Look. Consider me a sucker for hard-luck cases, okay? It’s pretty obvious to me you aren’t used to the streets; your shoes are all wrong. It looks like you’ve been running for what…” she squinted her eyes, considering the length of his hair and stubble, “two months? Three?”

  He chewed with a frustrated look until he could finally fight the food down and swallow it. “I’m just on a bad streak of luck. Do you… ah, I mean, are you…” he tapped his fingers on the table. “Uh, do you do rituals? Or… um, religion?”

  She smiled minutely as she went for her soup. After sampling that she said demurely, “well, I have to say I’ve never heard that pick-up line used before.”

  He choked, turned a pretty color, and sank three inches into his chair. “I wasn’t trying to pick you up. Really. I’m not hitting on you… or, I mean, you’re attractive, but…” Dave’s expression became martyred. He gave up, grabbed his sandwich and shoved it into his big mouth.

  Charis smirked, and for a few moments there was silence as they ate and listened to the sounds of the street traffic and the soup man frying something.

  ‘David…’ said the whisper.

  David stood up so fast he banged his knee on the underside of the table and nearly knocked the food into Charis’s lap. With remarkable dexterity she caught it, looking right at the Thing which had spoken. Her hazel eyes blazed with intensity as David looked around in every direction, face gone white. “I have to… I have to… bathroom,” he stuttered, and made a break for the back of the cafeteria.

  She grabbed his jacket to stop him, and with the other hand pointed at the Thing which had spoken. “Out,” she said in a voice that booked no opposition. “NOW!”

  It shrieked, ‘He is ours, Nythian bitch!’

  Dave made a sweaty grab at his gun and brought it out, keeping it beneath his jacket with damp, shaking hands.

  Charis screamed “SCREW YOU!” at the top of her lungs, and with pure girly fury threw a ball of white energy at the Thing causing it to run for its life. She then looked around guiltily as she realized they’d made a scene. The soup guy stared at them from behind the counter, frozen in the midst of stirring. The old guy at the back of the shop stared at them as well.

  She smiled pleasantly and sat down with grace, pulling David back into his seat. He was still shaking, staring at the door. His eye caught the gaze of the guy behind the counter, and he offered a weak grin, sliding the gun back into its hiding place before anyone saw it.

  The store-owner just raised his eyebrows and kept stirring, turning his back on them. This was, after all, San Francisco.

  Charis rolled her eyes. “Anyway. Where were we…?”

  Dave grabbed one of her hands, leaning over the table to stare at her with raw excitement and hope. “You could see it?”

  She shuddered delicately, pulling her long suede coat closer. “I’m eating and it was ugly. And oozing. Can we not talk about that right now?” She picked up the sandwich.

  “But you could see it? How? Tell me how!”

  “It’ll get cold,” she pointed a claw at his sandwich in a mothering way.

  “I need to know!” he wailed, the pure unhappy cry of a man who is at his wits end.

  She sighed with exasperation and put her sandwich down. “Alright, but you have to promise to stop making a scene! Now sit down and be quiet, these people already think we’re freaks.”

  He instantly folded his hands together in his lap and plastered an innocent expression onto his face. His left eye twitched as he glanced at the guy behind the counter. The guy studiously ignored them, suddenly very busy cleaning his grill. “You’re glowing again,” he murmured under his breath. Just in case she didn’t know.

  Charis sighed, realizing that finishing her food might have to be put off until the end of the conversation. She put the sandwich down. “Alright. So you can see the Things, and you think I’m glowing, and you’re not on drugs, right?”

  “No. No drugs,” jerky shake of the head. “I’m just a little stressed out. And tired. And… uh… stuff.”

  She looked him up and down. “Obviously.”

  Dave slunk a few inches farther back from her, dipping his head to take another sneaky sniff toward his armpit. “Sorry.”

  “Tell me how it happened, because you are obviously not used to this kind of thing.”

  “How… what, exactly?”

  She laced her copper clawed fingers together and put on her best psychologist expression. “Start at the beginning, and just tell me when you started noticing the anomalies.”

  “Besides the shadow under the bed when I was six, right?” It was a weak attempt at humor.

  She raised a golden eyebrow.

  ___

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  ___

  “Well, a few weeks ago… I don’t know what happened, exactly. I’m a student at UCLA. I mean… I was. Until a couple weeks… months ago.”

  Charis took out her notebook and started writing in it.

  “When I left,” Dave fiddled with his spoon, “something was wrong with Dr. Cragley. One of my professors, I help out sometimes. I don’t know what, but one night he asked me to take care of something for him; just to hold on to it. I didn’t think anything of it, I mean… the professor is a kind of strange guy. The kind of guy who experiments with sleep cycles and stays up 24 hours a day. You know, the kind who invites his students to his house to hang out in his rooftop jacuzzi and gives them beers.”

  She had to nod at this point to get him to go on. He was so tired that he was rambling and not making much sense.

  “Then the next day he didn’t come to class, and the cops showed up, asking people about him. I thought… maybe, whatever happened to him, it might have to do with the thing.” His hand crept up to finger something under his shirt.

  While he talked, Charis stuck her finger into her mouth and whistled as if getting someone’s attention outside. She made a few communicative hand-gestures, telling the invisible someone to come to the door, but there was nobody in the street. Then she went back to listening intently. “A thing. Yes, go on.”

  Dave paused to stare between the street and the girl, blankly. “What?”

  She grinned, brilliant white teeth perfect. She had to have gone to a dentist for them to look that good. “Hm? Me? Did I say something?”

  “Did you?” Dave looked confused. He glared mistrustfully at the street, then finally shook his head and kept talking. “I didn’t know if I should talk to the cops or not. I was kind of freaked out, you know? So I decided to wait. I mean, if someone hurt James to get to the artifact… I didn’t want them coming after me. But then it got complicated. The… Things… started appearing everywhere.”

  Charis became aware that the owner of the restaurant might be listening, and looked at the phone on the wall behind the grill intently until it rang. The man behind the counter picked up, listened for a while, then started jabbering in Italian. She looked satisfied, sure that nobody else could overhear. “A thing, huh?” She scanned the interior of the restaurant and the street to be sure they were secure.

  Dave didn’t notice her strange behavior and kept talking in an exhausted monotone. “I thought I was going crazy, but… it was real. And I thought maybe the thing James gave me might be causing me to see them, so I tried to put it somewhere else. I buried it.” He ran his fingers through his greasy, disheveled hair in exasperation. “It didn’t help. They were still there. Every night. Following me.”

  “Maybe I can help. Do you have it with you? The thing he gave you?”

  “Yeah. I went back and dug it up the night I decided to leave town.” He dragged a necklace out from under his dirty shirt. A long leather thong with an old, worn bronze medallion on it.

  Her eyes fixed on it intensely. “Can I see it?”

  He tightened his fist around it, glancing between her and the street. “First… do you know that you glow?”

  “Yes. But only when I use odyllis.” She thrust out her hand expectantly.

  He held his fist with the medallion above his head, out of her reach. “How? Is it like… a church thing? Or a meditation thing? Do you light candles or something?”

  She blew out a huff of air in exasperation. Then she was right back into her semi-pro serious expression and pose. “Let’s put it this way: I’m a supernatural investigator. You ever see ghost busters? Like that.”

  “Ghost busters?” he echoed faintly, too tired to think straight. “Really? You bust ghosts?”

  Charis looked disgusted by his credulity, then changed her mind and brightened. “Actually, sort of.”

  He handed her the necklace. At this point he was willing to believe anything. “Do you know how to get rid of them without killing the host? Without one of these?” he lifted the gun just high enough to be seen over the table, then shoved it back behind him with a nervous glance toward the guy behind the counter.

  Her expression was startled as she whispered, “Killing the host? Don’t tell me that’s why there’s only one bullet left in your gun!”

  “I met a dog,” he explained, straight-faced.

  She looked at him for a moment deadpan, then moved along with the investigation. She flipped her little book open to the front, which was crammed full of very cryptic looking notes, and pulled out a small magnifying glass from her purse to look at both the amulet and the book. “Right. Get rid of them? Sure.” She closed her fist around the amulet. For a moment she shut her eyes, concentrated, then opened her hand and slapped her other palm down on top of it immediately, repeating the procedure, making ‘hmm’ sounds. After all that, she squinted at the inscriptions. “Ancient Ordai I think… a shoddy replacement…”

  He gazed at the medallion as well. “It’s Enshi. From the moon, from Rune.”

  “Clearly.” She didn’t even look at him.

  “They give us stuff. The governm— um I’m not supposed to tell—” he stopped and struggled with the onus of secrecy that he’d been sworn to, then discarded it. He had bigger problems. “The University works with the government. They send us artifacts to study and decode… you know, the Space Force. Cragley was one of the only guys who had pretty much learned the alien language. Could decipher about anything. He’s cracked thousands of artifacts.

  “But this one… it doesn’t say anything on it. Just a bunch of random glyphs and all these geometric scribbles. Looks like junk. We didn’t think it was very important. At first it was in a box. A little ebony box, I think. But I was afraid whoever James was scared of would recognize the box, so I hid it, and wore the necklace, until… until They started coming after me.”

  “Well,” she said, “this looks like ancient Ordai, but it’s been purposefully made to look like your basic magician’s amulet. Nothing really spectacular about that, except if you notice,” she pointed to a nick in the side that had been recently made, “the bronze is actually covering another metal that looks like gold. Why would they cover up gold with old bronze, hmm? Maybe they were trying to disguise something more powerful as a normal old magician’s amulet?” She looked smug.

  “Magician’s amulet, like a normal Earth archaeological magician’s amulet? Like something we’d dig up in Persia or some shit?”

  “Yah. That kind of magician’s amulet. None of these runes make sense—”

  “I think I already mentioned that,” the linguistics major said with sarcasm.

  “—but the design is the same. Every culture in the universe evidently makes stupid supposedly magical items covered in ‘good luck’ runes and nonsense. Mostly as a scam to swindle naive people and make money of course.”

  “So why would the… Them… want this one?” Dave scowled at the lack of logic there.

  “That’s the question. Because the creeps you’re dealing with only fear real power. Now, I can’t tell very much about your condition by the artifact in its current state, except that it confirms my suspicions. Just tell me what you see every day. What has it enabled you to do. Be specific.” She poised her pen over her notebook.

  He looked a little sick as he glanced toward the big floor to ceiling glass window at the front of the tiny shotgun shop. “Well, I see and hear things that other people don’t. Gross things. Whole mobs of gross things. They’re everywhere. And don’t tell me I sound like that kid from that ghost movie. They aren’t dead people, they are not ghosts. They’re not human. I don’t know what they are. Some are insects, and some are like hairy little monkeys, but all of them are… are mutated. Mutant things. I know that sounds nuts…”

  “Oh, I believe you. Trust me. So you can just see and hear them? How clear are they to you?”

  “Very. They almost look real. Like, physical. Some of them look like dead things, living dead things. Or men with parts missing, or extra parts. Or mummies… mummified alien things, but almost all of them are black like tar. Most of them stick to people. They’re clearest at night. Or when they’re stuck on something alive. When they don’t borrow a body they’re more like shadows. Sometimes their eyes glow. It’s like a fucking bad movie.”

  “Did you see the one that came to the doorway just now? The one I got rid of?”

  “No but I heard him. He sneaks around, goes invisible a lot. He’s been following me since the beginning. He calls my name.”

  “Hmmm.” she narrowed her eyes, looking at the doorway. “Do you see anything in the doorway now?”

  He looked in that direction, worried. “No?” Dave squirmed in the hard plastic chair. “Are you saying there’s something there?”

  She nodded sagely, and gave a hand signal to the doorway. Dave heard a man’s voice say, “what?”and he jumped half a foot in alarm, once again knocking the table and almost dumping her drink in her lap.

  “I don’t know,” she replied to the invisible man, “say something.”

  “I just did,” the disembodied voice said.

  Dave jumped out of his seat and put his back against the wall, facing the doorway. “Stay back!” he yelled at the door, gripping his gun but keeping it behind him.

  Charis stood up just as the store owner started to look in their direction. She pointed toward him. Suddenly the man became totally disinterested in what was going on at the table by the window and looked away, not noticing anything.

  Dave noticed what she’d done, and realized the pretty girl had some kind of unnatural powers. But he tabled that for later and instead yelled at the disembodied voice: “If you try to possess me, so help me God, I’ll… I’ll…”

  “Calm down!” Charis ordered Dave. “He’s with me. His name is Mike. He’s a good guy.”

  “…I’ll kick your transparent body-humping ass!” he screamed at the door.

  He heard a chuckle. “Dude,” said the invisible guy, “I think maybe I should take a walk around the block while you talk to this guy Charis. He’s wired.”

  “Stay where you are, Mike,” she ordered, sitting down. “And keep those creepy crawlers off the sidewalk.”

  “Indigo is on the other side of the street,” ‘Mike’ said.

  “Keep walking, asshole!” Dave yelled, voice almost breaking. “Don’t turn around until you hit China!”

  “Would you sit DOWN??” Charis yelled at Dave, furious that he was going ape and wasn’t listening to her superior female rationale.

  He thrust a pointed finger toward the door with raised eyebrows. “There’s a THING out there!”

  The store keeper, weirdly enough, kept ignoring them. It was like he’d forgotten they were even there… no matter how loud or crazy they got.

  “That ‘Thing’ you’re freaking out about is my partner, Mike! Okay? He’s fine! He’s a nice guy! He likes nachos! He plays video games! He’s fine!”

  “Your partner?! You’re partners with one of THEM?” his voice climbed to near soprano levels. Then he immediately dodged around her and hurried for the back door. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted glowing chicks! I’m out of here!”

  Charis huffed with anger, then called, “Hold on! I have your thingie!” She held the amulet up like a hostage.

  He swung back around and lunged for it. “Give it to me!”

  She squealed like a girl having fun and ran for the door. “Come on, Mike! Head for number four!”

  “GIVE IT BACK!” Dave charged after her.

  Abandoning the food in the small empty restaurant, Charis ran down the street laughing her head off.

  Dave was right on her heels, grasping and barring his teeth. “Give it to me or I’ll… I’ll kick your ass, and your invisible friend, too!”

  “Woo-hoo!”

  “I’ve got a gun!” he hollered.

  “It only has one bullet!”

  “There’s only one of you!”

  “Three! Three! One of me, and two invisible guys!” she was grinning like a loon as she yelled back over her shoulder.

  “I’ll Kill Them Later!”

  She dodged inside the glass-front lobby of a tall building only a couple of buildings down the street, yelling at the lobby receptionist, “floor six please!” Then she was in the elevator with a long dramatic skid across the shiny floor.

  Dave barreled through the lobby door shoulder-first, skidding after her, shoes squeaking across the waxed floor. “Thief!” He managed a baseball-player side into elevator as the doors closed, shoved his foot forward and one ankle caught between them. The doors opened again, Dave laying on the floor. He grabbed her leg, tugging her down, trying to climb her body. “Give it here! Give it!”

  She squealed and jumped up and away from his grasping hands. Dave suddenly felt a weird electric force repulse him away from her and slam him into the wall.

  “Ow.” He sat limply for a moment, stunned.

  “Not until we’ve been on at LEAST one date!” She yelled at the top of her lungs as the door shut them both in, and the lobby receptionist just raised his eyebrows. Then he went back to his newspaper.

  After all, this was San Francisco.