In my eyes the questionable cryptid flipped the pancake with a scowl after some struggle of prying it from the base of the old frying pan.

  The black dog's recorded reflection showed it pawing at the spatula, somehow flipping the pancake. The dissonance made my brain wobble within its bony confines. I sent the vid to my Polish friend.

  [AshLawd ?_?]: check dis

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: lmao sticking to the haunted kitchen bit? looks sick. post it to r/Paranormal lol

  Shady thunked the spatula down. “I told you, I am not a cook. This pan’s older than Prohibition and hates me.”

  “You’re flipping pancakes, not forging a sword.”

  “It keeps tearing,” she complained, ears flattening. “Princesses do decrees, not batter!”

  “Decree them unburnt.”

  She tried. The pancake came up half-melted, half-charred, folding over like a defeated jellyfish when she slapped it onto a pink flowery plate exhumed from a drawer. Smoke curled.

  The smoke alarm overhead gave a single weak chirp.

  Shady’s hackles rose at the chirp like it had insulted her regal bloodline. She hissed at the white circle in the ceiling.

  “Yes, good. Keep menacing the alarm. Try to unscrew it.”

  “I’m not unscrewing shit.” She angrily stuffed the pancake into her mouth. “I’m seriously freaking starving over here.”

  “Why?”

  “I… skipped dinner last night. Ah man, this pan’s all sticky now and smells burned as fuck. There’s no way I can make another pancake on this damn thing. Can we not go buy some less outdated cutlery? Don’t you people have non-stick pans?”

  “We people?”

  “Humans.”

  The tablet buzzed, the Telegram message flashing above the recording app.

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: Anton says “cheap fishing line + AI warp.” Mila says - ‘cute doggo. careful w gas stoves tho’.

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: ur stove gas?

  [AshLawd ?_?]: yes. stop diagnosing my haunting w fishing line.

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: It do look fishy lol k i gtg ttyl sis wants 2 walk to gas station

  “Ughhh, this tastes expired as shit,” the cryptid girl blanched.

  “How expired?”

  “Very fucking expired,” she poured some water from the sink into her cup and rinsed her mouth and then chugged a few water cups. “You trying to poison me? Feh.”

  “Do cryptids get tummy aches?” I asked, pausing the recording to play it back.

  “Yes. I’m way tougher than a human though, so this is fine. Just tastes wrong. Sour.”

  The vid was peak surrealism, the dog somehow holding a cup and pawing the old rusty tap to produce a stream of water.

  "Blah. Gotta get this horrid flava outta my mouth," she complained and then grabbed me by the shoulders.

  Before I could say anything, she leaned down and licked my entire face, messing up my hair.

  “Better. Now, let’s get takeout,” she declared.

  “No. I have about five dollars and a half-roll of quarters in savings." I wiped my face with a dish towel, shuddering.

  “You have a credit card and a car in the driveway.”

  “A credit card that I have to pay off next month and student debt that I also gotta pay off.”

  “Just get another credit card and pay off the debt with it. Then pay off THAT credit with the first card. Infinite money hax.”

  “It’s not infinite money,” I huffed. “There’s a credit limit per card. Also, I’m not going to attempt some kind of credit card scam per suggestion of my imaginary friend.”

  “I’m plenty real,” she said. “Your money on the other hand is very imaginary, not backed by fuck all. I saw a gotube vid that your government just makes up numbers and prints infinite cash. You're basically reducing your own currency value down to zero.”

  “Oh? Aren't you a financially educated cryptid. Does your magical kingdom use gold coins or something, princess?”

  “Better,” Shady grinned. “We use favors. Hard currency backed by menace and obligation. Much stabler than your presidential Monopoly money.”

  “So… Venmo, but with threats.”

  “Exactly. Threatmo.”

  “Yeah, I’m not buying breakfast with Threatmo.”

  I looked at her shit-eating grin, vaguely recalling that my imaginary best friend constantly made up funny, albeit narratively nonsensical tall tales about Omnithornia. “You’re fucking with me.”

  "Fine, you got me. We use the barter system," she said. "Mostly mushrooms and shiny rocks. Very sophisticated economy. Also, I can trade my antler shavings for premium forest berries."

  "Antler shavings?"

  "They grow back." She grinned. "Supply and demand, baby."

  "Stop making stuff up, damn it."

  “Love to, but can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Jokes throw off the scruts.”

  “What’s a scrut?” I stared at her. The smoke alarm gave another warning chirp. Shady hissed at it again. I pulled the smoking pan off the stove and shoved it into the sink.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  “Uhhh… it’s like a gnome thing. A garden gnome with a magnifying lens. Yeah, that’s it.”

  "Right." I rubbed my temples. The caffeine hadn't kicked in yet, and my brain felt like it was running on dial-up. "Look, I need to use the bathroom. Stay here. Don't break anything."

  "What am I, a toddler?"

  "The jury's still out on that one, dog."

  “Not a dog either.”

  I rapidly headed upstairs. The bathroom was one of the few rooms I'd actually unpacked properly. It featured a Chicago Skyline shower curtain, a few toiletries, plus a white towel that didn't smell like mothballs.

  I flushed the toilet and turned on the shower waiting for hot water to kick in. The distinctive click of claws on hardwood sounded, followed by the creak of the bathroom door opening.

  "Occupied," I called out.

  "I know," came Shady's voice from directly behind me.

  I spun around. She slid into the doorway, tail swishing innocently, silver eyes looking left and right.

  "Why are you in here?"

  "Bathroom stuff."

  "I’m not done."

  “Gonna shower?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cool, cool,” she stepped into the bathtub, the spray splashing across her antlers.

  I looked at her.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Mind what?”

  “Not being here while I shower?”

  "Why? We used to take baths together when we were kids," she pointed out. “I need someone to wash my antlers from the back. Got like 9000 cobwebs on ‘em from being under yo bed. Come on, be a good human attendant.”

  She squatted in the bath, nearly taking up the entire space. The water sleaked her black fur, making it stick to her body and outlining her curves even more.

  “First of all, nobody asked you to crawl under my bed,” I said, trying not to stare at her chest. “Secondly, I don't recall signing up as your attendant.”

  "Actually," she said, tilting her skull-face head so water cascaded off her antlers in little streams, "you did sign up. Remember the blood pact we made when we were seven?"

  The memory came up, tasting of sunshine and strawberries.

  "You cut our hands with your claw and then made me read some stupid stuff from a notepad about us being blood-bound. That's not—"

  "Lifetime attendant duties were clearly stipulated in subsection C."

  "What?”

  "Right after the part about sharing noms and before the bit about defending your liege from monsters."

  “I don’t…”

  “Don’t remember all of the deets I outlined with pink crayon? Human memory is rather sadge then.” She reached out to grab my shampoo and liberally squirted it atop of her black, feathery mane. “Just because you don’t remember the contract doesn’t mean that it’s not real.”

  "I'm pretty sure seven-year-old me didn't have the legal capacity to enter into indentured servitude contracts."

  "There’s no such thing as magical consent," she said matter-of-factly, working the shampoo into a lather. "Also, it wasn't indentured servitude. I’m not that mean. It was a mutually beneficial dragon and kobold agreement with clearly defined roles and responsibilities."

  "Such as?"

  "You provide snacks, local aid and grooming services. I provide my premium noble companionship and establish a hoard space for you to fill with hoard and beast hearts."

  "Sounds like a one-sided deal,” I stated. “Hang on. What about the part where you disappeared for thirteen years? Where was your ‘companionship’ and ‘hoard’ then?"

  "You relocated without providing the new address. I had grounds to sue, but I'm magnanimous. Hoard setup begins when we're both free and of age to do so. Ugh, so many cobwebs, Slayer.” She began applying the shampoo to the base sections of her antlers, shuddering slightly whenever her hands encountered another spider web.

  I attempted to find a hole in her logic. "Show me this contract. I’d like to review the detail in greater scrutiny.”

  “Love to, but can’t,” she said. “The blood contract reader’s back in Cradlefall.”

  “How… convenient.”

  “Come on, you think I’m imaginary right? What’s the harm in helping your imaginary pal wash her antlers?”

  I stared at the cryptid currently monopolizing my shower. Wait… soap and water on the antlers.

  I grabbed my tablet from the counter, pointing it at her.

  “Ashy,” she said, voice dripping with the kind of deadly calm that precedes a hurricane, “are you filming me in the shower?”

  “This only shows that you’re a dog,” I said. “With… soap suds floating...”

  I zoomed in on the ghostly water drops and suds floating in the air. The water traced another figure in the air, far bigger than the dog. A curvy, tall, antlered monstrosity.

  One second she was sitting in the shower and then the air detonated with a whoosh. My tablet flew out of my hands, swatted in mid air. She loomed over me, pushing me into the black and white tiled wall, panting.

  “You know what?” She growled, clawed hands digging into my wrists. “I’m done being nice. You’re crossing a line.”

  “What line? Didn’t you just say that you’re imaginary?” I growled back, heart attempting to escape from my chest.

  I wasn’t scared of her. She... probably wasn’t real. The weight on my wrists felt real, physical, confining.

  Her grip loosened, silver eyes searching my face. Water dripped from her antlers onto my shirt, each drop a small shock against my skin. The bathroom suddenly felt too small, the walls pressing in around us, shadows wobbling eerily.

  "The line where you record my real form without asking," she uttered quietly, her voice losing its earlier playfulness. "That's not very nice, Ash. Just because I’ve nowhere else to go…”

  “You don’t have anywhere else to go?”

  “Not really.” She picked up the tablet and played the video with a frown. “See? You can sorta see me on this.”

  "I'm just trying to figure out what you are," I said, leaning back against the cold tile with a shudder. "This is all completely insane, Shady. You have to understand that. Cryptids aren’t real. If they were, someone would claim the million dollars by now.”

  “What million dollars?” She turned back to me.

  “The James Randi Foundation. Proof of supernatural beings,” I said. “That recording…”

  “Is getting deleted,” she tapped the screen and pressed the delete button. “There. The others too.”

  She flipped through the videos, deleting them.

  “I sent a couple of weird ones to my friends on Telegram,” I said.

  “You… what?” Her eye twitched. She tapped around the phone, eventually navigating to Telegram and scrolling up. Pursing her lips, she tapped out a new text.

  [AshLawd ?_?]: yeah, it’s just some card magician strings plus my new doggo. Looks too jank, gonna make a better one. Delete them from your end, kay?

  “What the fuck kind of a cryptid knows how to use Telegram?” I asked, looking at the tablet screen.

  “This kind.” She grabbed the only towel and rubbed it on her face.

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: k. ur fx skills do need work lmao needs more juicy plot for clicks

  "There. Crisis averted," she said.

  “What crisis?”

  “The kind where someone finds where I am and then chops you up into a flesh cube and stuffs you into a suitcase.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Consider me mildly annoyed at you. You’ve just lost your antler washing privileges.”

  She stepped back into the shower with the tablet. Thankfully it was waterproof. She sat the tablet down into the shampoo compartment and resumed washing herself.

  "Who’s gonna chop me up into cubes?" I asked.

  “Someone very bad.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “Love to but can’t.”

  "How long?" I asked exasperatedly, struggling to get one straight answer out of her.

  "How long what?"

  "How long have you been running?"

  "I'm not running," she said after a minute. "I'm... strategically relocating."

  "From… someone bad?"

  "From complications. This place is in the ass boonies of nowhere.”

  She fell silent and turned the shower handle all the way to “scalding.”

  Steam rolled, shampoo foamed, and she planted herself under the spray like a storm-fed elk goddess. The bathroom gradually turned into a sauna, the mirror fogging up and water drops collecting on the ceiling.

  “Hey,” I said. “You’re going to use up all the hot water—”

  "Good thing I got here first then," the femme cryptid said coldly.