Night People

by J L Aarne

  Silas wiped sweat off his upper lip with the back of his hand and grinned. “If you can get past all of that, it’s kind of fun.”

  “No,” Wyatt said.

  Silas laughed a little, it was rasping and dry, but it was genuine and for some reason that made Wyatt smile. Then Silas started coughing.

  “You need medicine and bed rest and probably soup,” Wyatt said.

  They reached the apartments and Silas parked in front of Wyatt’s building. “Soup?” he asked.

  “People eat soup when they’re sick,” Wyatt said defensively.

  “I’m not sick,” Silas said, getting out of the truck.

  “Okay,” Wyatt said. He got out his keys as they went up the walk, Silas falling into step behind him. “Never mind then.”

  “You can still make me soup if you want,” Silas said.

  “Sure, if you—”

  He turned as he was speaking and saw Silas’s eyes roll back to white in his head. Wyatt didn’t even think, he just moved. The only thing in his mind was a picture of Silas’s head colliding with the concrete walkway outside if he fell backward, the corner of the little table inside the door if he fell forward or the hard floor beneath him if he went straight down. That could not happen because even though Wyatt wasn’t remotely close to sure he believed half of what Silas had told him, at some point, either the night before or that morning while sitting in jail or an hour earlier while listening to Silas’s crazy story about heroes not being heroes and monsters and night people, Wyatt had changed his mind about it being okay for Silas to go ahead and die. That was not okay anymore, so he moved with every intention of stopping it from happening and he was completely surprised when he caught him.

  Silas was, as Wyatt himself had pointed out to him, quite a lot bigger than Wyatt so they both nearly ended up on the floor inside the door, but Wyatt managed sit him down on the floor with his back against the wall without that happening. Then he closed the door and stood there looking down at Silas’s unconscious form, wondering what to do with him. Moving him to the sofa without any help was out of the question unless Wyatt wanted to drag him.

  He sat down on the floor in front of Silas and decided to think about it while he waited for him to wake up.

  When Silas came to a few minutes later the only thing Wyatt had thought of was either dousing him with ice water or poking his fingertips with pins. He didn’t think Silas would appreciate either of those things, so he was glad when he woke up on his own and opened his eyes.

  “What happened?” Silas asked.

  “You fainted,” Wyatt said simply.

  Silas frowned. “I did not faint.”

  “Yes, you did,” Wyatt said. “Your eyes rolled back, and you just fell. More like a crumple though, not like a tree or anything, but you still fainted. That’s exactly what happened. I caught you. Sort of.”

  Silas listened to him babble with his eyebrows creeping up. Then he sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. “All right, I fainted. Help me over to the sofa, will you?”

  Wyatt didn’t think he was the man for that particular job, but since there was no one else, he tried his best. Silas used Wyatt to hold himself up and his hand on the wall to stand, but halfway across the floor, he let Wyatt go and walked on his own. He was hurting, that was plain, but he could still walk, which Wyatt hoped meant he was okay.

  On the sofa, Silas pulled his shirt off over his head and the bandages around his torso were soaked through with blood. The only reason Wyatt hadn’t noticed it was that his shirt and pants were black and the blood didn’t show, but once he knew it was there he could smell it. It smelled like sweaty pennies and slaughterhouse floors and Wyatt started to reconsider how okay he truly was.

  “You need to lay down. Why did you leave the apartment at all?” Wyatt asked.

  He went to help Silas lie down but Silas gestured him away, already picking at the bloody gauze wrappings.

  “And you drove. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? What if you’d passed out behind the wheel? What if—”

  “Are you always like this?” Silas asked.

  He slowly peeled the bandage away from his body. The wrapping got more and more red the closer he got to his skin and Wyatt found himself remembering, a touch hysterically, the old Tootsie Pops commercial with the owl. How many licks does it take to get to the center of the…?

  “Oh, God,” Wyatt said faintly.

  “Don’t faint,” Silas said.

  “I’m okay,” Wyatt said, hand over his mouth.

  “You gonna just stand there?”

  “No… I… No, I’ll get you, um…”

  “Get me a clean washrag and some hot water. And don’t forget to breathe.”

  “I’m… breathing.”

  “Wyatt.” Silas looked up from his examination of his wounds and stared at him. “Go on now,” he said.

  Wyatt hurried out of the living room to the kitchen. He felt like he was going to either vomit or cry. Possibly both.

  Instead of breaking down and weeping, he did as Silas said and reminded himself to breathe. He timed them and tried not to think about Silas maybe dying in the other room. He had seemed so calm about it, so maybe he wasn’t dying, but then Silas had seemed pretty calm since he’d met him, which was a bit weird for a guy chasing monsters through the dark armed with a sword. That seemed like the sort of thing a person would generally get worked up about.

  He got Silas the washcloth and hot water he had asked for then left him to clean the wound himself and returned to the kitchen to open a can of Campbell’s soup. When it was ready, he poured some into a bowl and took it into the living room to Silas.

  Silas had rebandaged his own wounds in Wyatt’s absence and was smoking a cigarette while Hedges purred in his lap. He looked up when Wyatt put the soup down on the coffee table near him. “Is that soup?” he asked.

  “Yes. Chicken noodle,” Wyatt said.

  Silas blinked. “You made me soup?”

  “Ah… yes?” Wyatt said.

  Silas smiled and shook his head, but he sat forward and picked up the spoon. “I can’t believe you actually made me soup,” he muttered.

  As he started to eat, Wyatt sat down in one of the soft chairs across from him and tried not to fidget. He failed, but Silas didn’t seem to mind. “Can I ask you something?” Wyatt asked eventually.

  “Yeah,” Silas said. He blew on a spoonful of soup and ate it.

  “The sword,” Wyatt said.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, it’s a sword for one thing.”

  “I know.”

  “Why do you have a sword?”

  “Because I need one.”

  “But why do you need one?”

  “It’s really one of the best tools for the job.”

  Wyatt tapped his fingers on his knee and thought about that. “But it’s a sword. I mean… you have to get kind of close to things to kill them with a sword. Then you have to know how to use a sword. Not to mention, it’s a big sword. Really, really heavy. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just… you know… shoot things?”

  “Yeah, if bullets could kill them, that would be great,” Silas said.

  Wyatt’s eyes widened as that sank in. “Are you really telling me that bullets can’t kill them? Shit, that’s—I’m going to die. That’s it. I’m just… I’m dead. I mean, what the hell kind of thing is impervious to bullets?”

  “Some of them,” Silas said, unruffled by Wyatt’s fear. “Some things will die if you shoot them, but even then, you have to know what to shoot them with because sometimes lead won’t kill them, sometimes it’s silver, sometimes it’s gold, sometimes you have to use an earthly weapon and I’m not real fond of slingshots. I suppose David had himself a mean swing with one of those, but to me they just seem like more work than they’re worth to get good with it, and then if you miss you’ll be picking your own intestines out of the dirt with bloody fingers.”

  “But the sword is..
. what, some kind of super weapon?”

  Silas shrugged and picked up the bowl of broth to finish it. When he set it back down he said, “Guess you could call it that.”

  “Because it’s a magic sword and it kills everything?”

  “It’s a blessed sword—more or less—and it kills most everything.”

  “So, it doesn’t kill everything.”

  “There are maybe five or six things out there it won’t kill.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’ve never encountered any of them.”

  “Well… that’s good.”

  Silas returned his hand to Hedges’s back and petted her while she started purring again in her sleep. “Thank you for the soup.”

  “You’re welcome,” Wyatt said. That felt somewhat inadequate, so he added, “Thank you for getting me out of jail.”

  Silas’s lips twitched up in a wry smile. “You’re welcome.”

  Something scratched at the front door and they both turned toward the sound. Wyatt didn’t move and waited for the scratching to come again, hoping that it would just go away. Sounds like that happened all the time, it didn’t mean something scary was out there scratching at his door. It could be children playing, a dog sniffing around for a place to take a dump, a bird doing whatever birds did. Then the scratching came again, more insistent.

  “You want to go check that out?” Silas asked.

  The true answer to that question was no, but Wyatt found himself standing up and crossing the room to the door. Then he opened the door and let out a startled shout as he stumbled backward.

  It wasn’t the monstrous, Shetland pony-sized black wolf standing on his doorstep that made his blood run cold in his veins. It wasn’t the way the eyes in that dark, narrow face looking back at him seemed to know him and mark him. It wasn’t the teeth long as daggers gleaming in its mouth or the stars shining out of the blackness that seemed to be caught in the animal’s fur. No, what scared Wyatt so bad when he opened the door and saw the thing waiting for him beyond the threshold was that it was standing there in direct sunlight.

  Chapter 5

  Wyatt backed away from the door and kept right on backing until he tripped over Benson. The cat streaked by on his way to somewhere safe, yowling as he passed, and Wyatt backed up until his back came up against the coffee table and he couldn’t back anymore. He cringed away from the giant wolf and started to cry. He had been expecting it for hours, but when it finally happened it surprised him and there was nothing he could do to stop it. It wasn’t pretty, it was loud and messy and in the back of his mind he knew that if he gave himself time to have a little breakdown and a cry, he was probably going to die, but he couldn’t stop.

  He tried to tell Silas to run, that they were doomed, that the monsters were here, and this was the end. He may have even tried to tell him to save himself, but Silas didn’t understand more than a word here and there around his sobbing.

  “Wyatt don’t—”

  “Oh, my god, they’re crossing over!” Wyatt wailed.

  Silas paused and bit his lip. “Excuse me?”

  “The… the things! They’ve crossed the darkness-light barrier thing! They’re in the daylight now. Nowhere is safe, Silas!”

  “Uh. Wyatt, what do you think is happening right now?”

  “We’re going to die because that thing is just the first. They’re coming for us.”

  Silas scratched his jaw and looked between the giant animal watching them from the doorway and Wyatt curled up on the floor with his face hidden behind his knees. He said something in a guttural language and the big wolf’s tail thumped the concrete walk. Then it walked through the door toward them and Wyatt tried to crawl under the coffee table.

  “Now you’re being ridiculous. Come on, stop it,” Silas said.

  “It’s going to kill me,” Wyatt said. “You want to let it kill me?”

  “He is not going to kill you,” Silas said patiently. He took one of Wyatt’s arms and pulled him out from under the table. “You’re not going to fit under there anyway, that’s an awful hiding place. You’d be like that ostrich with its head in the sand.”

  “I don’t care!” Wyatt snapped. He shoved at Silas, blind from crying, and managed to make him let go but he fell back onto the floor.

  He immediately started to get up and run away, but the wolf was there in front of him and he screamed and scrambled backward until he collided with the sofa. He could sense the giant wolf above him, feel it staring down at him, smell its warm breath on his face. He was about to be eaten and Silas wasn’t going to do anything about it, not even run away. Maybe he was tired of living. Who knew what kinds of things he had seen doing what he did? Maybe he had just decided that it was his time to go.

  But that voice in the back of Wyatt’s mind that tried to make him see reason wouldn’t let him believe that, so he dared to peer up at the wolf through his fingers.

  The wolf put its massive head down and licked his face. Wyatt made a strained sound of terror between his teeth and his heart jumped up into his throat like a trapped bird bashing against the bars of a cage. Silas only sat there on the sofa watching it all, not doing much of anything, certainly not reaching for a weapon with which to defend him.

  “Is it tasting me?” Wyatt whispered.

  “My god, it must be so exhausting being you sometimes,” Silas said. He patted the enormous wolf’s side and the wolf leaned slightly against him. Silas didn’t seem to mind, in fact, he seemed content with it. “This is Amarok.”

  “What’s an amarok?” Wyatt asked. His voice didn’t seem to want to go much above a whisper. He cleared his throat and wiped at his still leaking eyes. “It’s not going to eat me then?”

  “He,” Silas said. “No, he prefers hamburger—raw. And chicken—also raw.”

  “Is he your pet?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why can I… I mean, why isn’t he afraid of the light?”

  Silas grinned and thumped Amarok on the side. “Look at him. Why would he be afraid of anything?”

  Wyatt wiped at his face again and told himself that he had to stop crying like a baby. He was under a lot of stress, but that was no excuse. He had to keep it together.

  It didn’t help very much. Wyatt finally gave up the struggle to control himself and let it happen. He drew his knees up and buried his face against them and burst into tears.

  Silas stared at him in surprise. Amarok moved closer to Wyatt and nuzzled him, which Wyatt didn’t find comforting at all. Every time Amarok’s fur brushed him he made soft scared animal sounds in this throat. Silas finally shooed the wolf away from him and sat on the floor beside him.

  “He really scared you, huh?” he asked.

  Wyatt nodded without lifting his head.

  “I know he looks fierce, but he’s not that aggressive,” Silas said. He put his hand awkwardly on Wyatt’s back. “I am really very bad at this comforting… thing.”

  Wyatt turned toward him and buried his face in Silas’s shoulder. Silas tensed and lightly patted him, but Wyatt went on crying. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed into Silas’s shirt.

  “It’s okay,” Silas said.

  “I’m such a fucking baby sometimes,” Wyatt said. “Kat said that the other night. Only babies are scared of the dark. She’s right, too. I’m nothing but a baby. I’m so sorry.”

  “For crying?” Silas tried rubbing his back instead of patting.

  “For everything. But mostly the crying. Your shirt’s all wet.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Amarok yawned and lay down on the floor beside Silas to watch the two funny humans. The cats had both fled to parts unknown when he arrived, and Wyatt thought they were probably hiding under his bed with Thorn.

  “Wyatt, come on now, don’t do this to me. I don’t know anything about comforting people,” Silas said.

  Wyatt sat back and wiped at his eyes. “You never comforted people before?”

  “Not a lot, no.”

 
; “Not even when they’re dying or… really hurt?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not very comforting, I’ve been told.”

  “You don’t have a wife or kids or something like that?”

  “I had a wife a long time ago, but she didn’t require a lot of comforting.”

  Wyatt reached out and brushed at Silas’s shirt. There was dampness on his chest and Wyatt couldn’t meet his eyes when he wiped at it. He was too aware that Silas was literally holding him, albeit somewhat against his will, and too afraid of the way everything would become weird and more uncomfortable if he looked him in the eye.

  “I’m sorry I cried on you and probably got snot and things on you. It’s just been… too much. It’s too much for me. Now there are horrible monster wolf things walking around in broad daylight to scratch at my door. What else is waiting out there to swallow me whole?”

  Silas opened his mouth, but Wyatt reached up and put his hand over it and shushed him. “Don’t answer that.”

  Silas turned his head and shook off Wyatt’s hand. “Nothing’s going to swallow you,” he said. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

  Wyatt picked his head up and looked at Silas, frowning. “Why do you care? You don’t even know me.”

  “I think I understand what it’s like,” Silas said.

  “What what is like?”

  “Not knowing. Not understanding any of it. You go around pretending like you know, but you’re still running to your car at night with a flashlight. No one ever told you what you need to hear.”

  Wyatt’s eyes burned and felt red. He rubbed them again and looked up at Silas hopefully. He didn’t know what Silas meant, but if Silas knew some magic words to make it all better, he was listening.

  “What do you think I need to hear?” Wyatt asked.

  “You are not crazy,” Silas told him. “Everything you see out there is real. It’s really happening. You’re not insane. Someone should have told you that a long time ago.”

  Wyatt did need to hear that, but it didn’t make everything better. Wyatt understood what Silas was trying to do and he appreciated it, but it didn’t change the fact that he had a wolf the size of a small automobile sitting on his floor staring at him while he cried. The fact that he was not really crazy didn’t comfort him at all. As long as he had been able to tell himself that he was insane, he could always know deep down that none of it was real. Now Silas wanted him to admit to the reality of everything and find a way to be okay with it. Maybe he could be eventually, but right then he was so far from okay that he and “okay” were in different galaxies.