by Amy Star
Melissa nodded slowly before she sighed. “Right. Great. Thanks, Harry.”
He tapped her with the broom handle. “Not a problem. See you at work in a couple days.”
Melissa groaned and nodded again, dropping her face down into her hands as she did. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her job. It was quite the opposite, in fact; she loved her job. But considering her boss already knew exactly what had happened, she had decided that Melissa was taking two days off just to make sure she was alright. And Melissa knew it was coming from a good place --she loved her boss -- but she was very bad at being inactive. Inactivity led to dumb projects and dumb ideas.
She stewed over it as she drove back to her house, occasionally grumbling to herself as she did. Already, just the knowledge that she wasn’t supposed to be doing anything was making her antsier, as if knowing that she was supposed to be taking it easy was boosting her energy to
unknown heights. She was pretty sure it was entirely psychosomatic, but that knowledge wasn’t helping her just then.
Maybe she could clean the house and attempt to convince herself that it counted as being active. Or at least active enough, at any rate.
She was halfway home and stopped at a red light when an idea occurred to her. It was probably
a supremely dumb idea, but that was more or less par for the course in her current mindset.
But she remembered the bear that had led her out of the smoke yesterday turning into a
firefighter. Or at least, she remembered it wandering away behind a truck, and then seeing a
very naked man getting dressed in firefighting gear behind that same truck, even if she hadn’t
witnessed the actual changing of shape. She had seen enough to intuit that it had happened.
Granted, there was still the possibility that she had hallucinated. She had been a little stressed out and loopy at the time, and an attractive, shirtless man was not the weirdest thing she had ever heard of someone hallucinating.
But she had to know.
Not that she planned on just coming out and asking. If she had hallucinated it, she was going to look insane. She needed to handle it a bit more tactfully than that. She wasn’t sure how, but she had already turned her truck towards the fire department, so she could just figure it out as she went.
*
It took only a moment of awkwardly loitering around the fire department before a woman built like a brick house asked if she needed any help.
“Ah, not exactly,” Melissa replied. “Well, sort of.” She could already see the woman getting exasperated. “See, I was stuck in the woods yesterday, during the fire, and I wanted to thank the firefighter who helped me out,” she explained in a rush. “About…ye tall?” she guessed, holding one hand up a considerable distance over her head. “Kind of tan? With reddish, brownish hair?”
Something like recognition dawned in the woman’s expression, and she turned to holler over her shoulder, “HEY, MITCH!”
Melissa nearly leapt out of her skin. The woman certainly had an impressive set of lungs. Far more impressive than Melissa’s were at that point.
The woman was already wandering off again, just as a man -- Mitch, presumably -- was making his bemused way over. Melissa hadn’t seen his face the day before, but she was pretty sure he was the right guy. He had the right skin tone and the right hair color, and he looked like he had the right build.
Mitch already looked confused by the time he was standing in front of Melissa, and he asked slowly, “Did you need something?”
Melissa linked her hands together behind her back and looked up (and up and up) at him. “I just wanted to thank you for yesterday,” she replied, and for a moment, there was something like well-hidden dread in the man’s expression. Instantly, Melissa was intrigued. “You helped me out of the fire. Considering you’ve got a, um…very unique skill set, I’m not sure I would have been able to get out without you.” Which wasn’t strictly true; she knew for a fact she wouldn’t have been able to get out without him. She had been wandering in senseless circles, too stubborn to simply admit it.
Slowly, Mitch sighed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “You saw something,” he guessed.
Melissa nodded quickly.
Mitch groaned and let his head tip forward, until his chin nearly met his chest. He folded his arms and let his weight shift to one side, lifting his head to instead let it fall back as he looked at the sky, as if he was praying to some unknown entity for patience. When he looked at her again, it was to ask sharply, “What do you want?”
Melissa blinked at him slowly, until he demanded, more impatiently, “Well?”
“You…might need to clarify?” Melissa tried.
“What do you want?” Mitch enunciated clearly. “You know, to keep quiet about what you saw.”
Realization dawned, and for a moment, Melissa was almost offended. “What—you’re asking if I want hush money?” she asked, and she laughed before she could help it. It was an unpleasant, mirthless sound, joyless and bitter. “Oh, hon,” she cooed, and she reached up to pat his shoulder delicately. “If you want to hide, that’s your business. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, and to thank whoever led me out of the fire. I could give less than a single brick of shit if anyone else knows, and it’s not like anyone would believe me if I ever felt inclined to go public.”
Mitch still didn’t quite look like he believed her, and Melissa rolled her eyes emphatically. She lifted both hands to hide her face for a moment, shoulders lifting and falling as she sighed slowly. Her hands fell away so she could cross her arms over her chest, offering him the most unimpressed look she could manage. “I was in the woods yesterday to pick up a pair of toads, for the zoo’s breeding program. They’re endangered. After yesterday, they’re probably even more endangered than they already were,” she explained slowly. “I don’t even want to know what other issues are going to spring up, considering how weird everything has been lately. I have more important things to worry about than trying to get strangers to believe me. Honestly, if I suddenly wake up and decide ‘I think I’ll extort someone!’ then I’m going for someone I can actually extort. A politician or someone with money. Not a suburban --verging on rural -- firefighter.”
She smiled up at him, beamingly brightly and almost sickeningly pleasantly. She offered a sprightly wave with one hand before she shoved both hands into her pockets, turned on her heel, and started towards her truck again. As soon as her back was to him, she rolled her eyes emphatically and the saccharine smile fell off of her face.
She made it about halfway back to her truck when Mitch suddenly called, “Hold on.”
Slowly, Melissa turned to look over her shoulder at him. “What?” she asked warily, the word coming out cautiously.
“I…could use your help with something,” he replied, and he already looked like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be saying it.
Melissa’s eyebrows rose towards her hairline. “My help,” she repeated dubiously. “You don’t know me,” she reminded him. “What could you possibly need my help with?”
Slowly, Mitch sighed, reaching up to drag one hand down his face. “It’s not exactly something I can get into right here,” he replied, glancing over his shoulder to where a few of his coworkers were gathered around a small television, a newscaster’s talking head taking up the vast majority of the screen. “So, please, just meet me later.”
Melissa’s eyes narrowed slightly before her expression took a turn for the unimpressed. “You turned into a bear and back again,” she stated slowly, not even doing anything to keep her voice low, “in pretty plain view, and you’re saying your coworkers don’t know?”
“It’s not that,” he groused in return. “Seriously, I’ll explain it later, if you’ll just agree to go along with it. You can call me crazy and storm out later after I’ve said what I want to say.”
Melissa groaned and dropped her face down into one hand, massaging her for
ehead with two
fingertips as she did. “Fine,” she groused, looking back up. To say her response sounded a bit unenthusiastic was being polite. “If only because now I’m curious,” she tacked on, rolling her eyes. “Where are we meeting? Because you’re not coming near my house, and I’d rather not go to yours.”
Mitch held his hands up in front of himself, as if in surrender. “There’s a restaurant in town -- Henry’s. It’s on the intersection of Maple and Brady. Rinky-dink little place. I’ll even pay.”
Melissa continued to eye him warily for a moment, but she supposed it was harmless enough. Even if the restaurant was small, there would still be other people there, and if he was paying, it wasn’t like she needed to worry about being out any money.
Besides, she couldn’t deny that she was curious about whatever it was that he seemed so eager to discuss with her. He didn’t know her. If she hadn’t sought him out, she doubted he would even remember her six days down the line. So, what could possibly be so important? She wasn’t just going to shrug and decide she didn’t need to know.
“Fine,” she finally replied, nodding her head once, decisively. “When?”
“Around seven?” Mitch suggested, making a flippant gesture with one hand, as if the actual time of the meeting was of little concern to him.
“Seven it is, then,” Melissa agreed. “So, can I, like, go, or are you going to spring something else on me out of the blue?”
With a sigh, Mitch ushered her along with one hand, and she began striding purposefully back towards her truck. Halfway there, though, she paused, glancing back at him over her shoulder just long enough to say, “I did mean it when I said thanks, though. Just so you know.”
Mitch offered her something like a crooked smile, and Melissa continued on her way to her car.
*
The rest of Mitch’s day after that was reasonably normal. To a certain degree, at any rate. He couldn’t deny, though, that his thoughts kept returning to…he hadn’t even gotten her name. He was meeting her for dinner—assuming she showed up and hadn’t just agreed to get him to leave her alone—and he didn’t even know her name.
He groaned and dragged a hand down his face. What a great way to get things started.
Regardless, his thoughts returned to her every so often, like a moth fluttering around a lamp. He couldn’t say that no one had ever figured out what he was before. On the whole, he wasn’t actually that secretive about it. He didn’t flaunt it, but he didn’t really go out of his way to hide it either. While she wasn’t the first one to simply trip over the realization, she had been the most casual about it. Most people who found out, be it on accident or because Mitch told them, tended to at least care.
And she had only cared because she wanted to make sure she hadn’t been imagining things.
Beyond that, she couldn’t give a shit.
There was something weirdly fascinating about her lack of fascination, and his thoughts kept drifting back to her until one of his coworkers bonked him lightly over the head with a helmet and asked him how the weather was around Pluto. With some effort, he dragged his thoughts back on track and pushed everything else to the background. He could worry about dinner at…well, dinner.
*
He felt peculiarly anxious as dinner drew closer, as he pulled his station wagon to a halt in the restaurant’s tiny parking lot. Whether it was a nervous sort of anxiousness or an excited sort of anxiousness, he wasn’t even sure.
He leaned against the hood of his car as he waited, watching the parking lot entrance, though he couldn’t actually remember what sort of car she drove, so he supposed it wasn’t the most productive of activities. The parking lot was almost empty, though, so it wasn’t as if he needed to worry about checking how long the wait would be.
It was ten minutes past seven, and he was beginning to think she wasn’t going to show when a slightly ancient, beat-up pick-up truck pulled into the lot and parked. It had been a reddish, orange-ish color once upon a time, though its color had faded over the years until it was a strange, muted not-quite-pink color.
The woman of the hour threw open the driver’s side door and hopped out, shoving it closed again with a bang almost as soon as her feet hit the pavement.
Her gaze panned around the parking lot for only a moment before she looked right at him and made her way over. She fell into step beside him as Mitch shoved himself away from his car and began heading towards the restaurant’s front door.
They didn’t speak as they walked. They didn’t speak as they made their way inside. They didn’t speak as they sat down at the bar. Though they glanced at each other every so often, they didn’t actually speak to each other until after they had each ordered something to eat and drink.
“So,” she finally began, turning to sit sideways on the bar stool that left her feet dangling an
almost hysterical degree above the floor, “what was so important to talk to me about?” she wondered, leaning one elbow on the bar top and propping her chin up in one hand.
“Whatever’s been causing the fires probably isn’t natural,” Mitch replied, wasting no time in beating around the bush. He got the impression that if he tried to draw things out—if he tried to make nice or delve into pleasantries—then she wasn’t going to put up with it, and just getting her to agree to show up had been enough of a hassle.
“Arson?” she guessed, twisting back and forth on the stool slightly, though not enough that she had to pick her elbow up. “I kind of figured as much. The weather’s not exactly right for endless wildfires.”
“Sort of arson,” Mitch corrected, though he wasn’t actually sure if it did count as arson or not if something inhuman set the fire. It probably did. But that wasn’t the point just then. “I think the fires have been set by someone who isn’t actually human.”
Her eyebrows rose towards her hairline, and just like that, he knew she would agree to help him. In just a few words, he had guaranteed that she was all but ensnared in whatever was going on. “Someone inhuman,” she repeated slowly. “Like you?”
“Sort of like me,” he replied, and he made a bit of a face when he realized it sounded like he was repeating himself to be cute. “Not someone who turns into a bear,” he clarified. “Or any other normal animal.”
“There are people that turn into abnormal animals?” she asked, sitting up straighter, her curiosity piqued. “Like what?”
Mitch held up a hand to dissuade any further questions. “I still don’t even know if you’re going to help me,” he pointed out. “I’m not telling you anything until I actually know.”
She groaned and dragged a hand down her face. “Then why aren’t you just asking someone you work with? I mean, you seemed pretty content to turn into a bear and back again in basically plain view during the fire. I’m willing to assume they know something about the inhuman world.”
“My coworkers—most of them, at any rate—do know about me,” he agreed. “But most of them aren’t the…subtle type,” he replied, picking his words carefully, as if one of his coworkers was suddenly going to lunge out from behind the bar to take issue with what he was saying. “They’re more the ‘take an axe to the door’ type, rather than the ‘gathering information’ type, but if this isn’t handled carefully, then whoever has been trying to burn half the state down is going to hear about it and book it, and we’ll never catch them. I need someone with some sense of care to help with this.”
“You don’t know me,” she reminded him pointedly, once again swiveling slightly on her stool, arms folded across her chest and one elbow on the bar. “You don’t know anything about my
levels of care or my ability to be subtle.”
“I know you didn’t give a shit about me being a were-bear, and you didn’t blurt it out for the
entire county to hear,” he returned, “which is already a right side better than most of them.”
Finally, she rolled her eyes. “Fine. Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my ey
e, I will help you figure out who’s starting the wildfires and I will use all of my abilities towards not
being a blathering moron. So now, will you tell me what we might be dealing with?”
“First--” he paused as she groaned explosively, before he cleared his throat. “First, you need to tell me your name.”
She seemed to come up short after that, blinking up at him. “Melissa,” she offered after a
moment, and she gave off the impression that she was searching her memory, trying to figure out if she really had failed to introduce herself before that point. “Melissa Mun.”
“Nice to meet you, Melissa Mun,” Mitch offered wryly in return. “I’m Mitch McConnell.” She didn’t hold out a hand to shake, so he didn’t bother to either. “And I’m pretty sure we’re either dealing with a coterie of vampires or a were-dragon.”