Long streams of sunlight cascaded between long blue drapes to pool across the bed. It felt warm compared to the cool, dry air of the room.

  There were twisted sheets tangled around his legs. Dave drifted awake slowly, luxuriating in the smell of clean linen, the soft expanse of a real mattress below him, and the quiet which was so unlike crowded hostels and public parks where he’d spent most of his recent nights. It was the jarring difference between those hostels and the inexplicable comfort he lounged in now which snapped him fully awake.

  David Tolin sat up, blinking the sleep out of his grainy eyes as he looked around. He was in an empty hotel room identical to every other nice hotel room in the country. Two double beds, bland carpet and wall colors, uninspired blue pastel abstract print framed on the wall. The blue bed comforters matched, as did the blue drapes across the bank of windows.

  He had no memory of the room or how he’d gotten there, and he knew perfectly well that he didn’t have enough money to pay for this kind of lodging. The last thing he remembered was drinking coffee with Charis.

  “Damn it.”

  This was the blonde’s doing! She must have drugged him, transported him while he was unconscious, and dumped him in a hotel room. He wasn’t sure if it was a kindness or a kidnapping. Only one thing was clear: she was through with him.

  Dave struggled out of bed, kicking the sheet away and realizing he was undressed. He wore a clean white tee shirt and a pair of black boxers that he’d never seen before. They both looked and felt brand new, which was some comfort. At least he wasn’t wearing Bat Boy’s underwear, although it was obvious somebody had stripped him naked while he was out.

  He hesitated, remembering Charis’ sly-smiled promise to give him a sponge bath.

  “No.” he shook his head with disbelief. “She didn’t. She wouldn’t.”

  Or maybe she had. The evidence suggested it. He ran a hand over the thin cotton tee shirt, his fingers stumbling across a thin lump against his breast bone. The amulet. Jim Cragley’s artifact, safe and sound. Running a hand over his head told him his hair was clean (but still long), his neck shaved, and his several week’s growth of stubble trimmed neatly into a respectable short beard.

  He could smell the lingering scent of coffee in the air, along with something his empty stomach recognized as food. He followed the smells to a covered dish sitting on the little table beside the window. The clock nearby told him it was 7:42 A.M., which meant he’d been sleeping for almost twenty hours. He wasn’t sure if that was due to the potency of the drugs he’d been given, or the fact that he hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in weeks. Probably both.

  Dave uncovered the food, seeing a plate of scrambled eggs, toast, and sausage getting cold beside a small pot of lukewarm coffee. His stomach rumbled.

  “Psychological torture,” he grumbled. As if he would eat anything provided by Blondie and her Alien Friends, after what the coffee had done to him. He covered the dish again and looked around the anonymous room.

  Was the blond somehow associated with the Space Force? Was she an enemy of humanity, harboring secret aliens here in San Francisco? The aliens from Rune were definitely hostiles…

  But then again, he couldn’t help wondering if the bizarre things he’d seen before passing out the day before had been real or imagined. Maybe she’d drugged him back in the café, and the invisible men, the cat man, and the talking plant had just been hallucinations. It could be drugs combined with too much stress and sleep deprivation. He could have been a raving lunatic yesterday, seeing and reacting to things that weren’t even there.

  Now that was a reassuring thought.

  That would also beg the question of what kind of woman Charis was to take a defenseless man and drug him for no apparent reason, do God knew what with him, and then abandon him in a hotel somewhere. Unless Charis was a hallucination too. That would be a crying shame. She was hot, and she’d wanted to give him a sponge bath.

  Then again, considering his dating life, that was probably proof she was a figment of his imagination.

  “Damn.”

  But that didn’t explain what he was doing in a nice hotel room he could not afford to check into. He stepped toward the window to get a look at the street, but stopped a heartbeat later when he felt a strange vibration in the air near the glass. It felt… electrical. Eerily similar to the doorway of that office Charis had led him to.

  With a sinking feeling of dread, Dave waved his hand around the area until he located where the vibration was coming from. It was a little naked copper wire running along the top of the baseboard, which ran under the window, around the corner of the room, behind the bed…

  Dave paced the walls of the room, following the wire, discovering that it looped around the entire room. His dread transformed into something closer to paranoia as he followed it, bent double, into the bathroom. It went behind the toilet, it even ran around the inside of the shower. And it was definitely giving off the office-of-doom vibe.

  “Shit. Shit! Dave… get a grip.” He got on hands and knees to check behind the toilet, then on impulse lifted the toilet seat up. On the bottom of the lid cryptic symbols were traced, which glowed an eerie blue, as if they’d been drawn with radioactive paint. But it was not there in the real world… only in that Other realm only he could see.

  “Shit!” he barked, dropping the toilet seat and scuttling backwards out of the bathroom.

  He retreated quickly to the bed, searching for his clothes, his gun. It didn’t take long to find the Berretta, placed neatly on the bedside table beside a Gideon Bible. It was still loaded with one bullet.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, holding the gun between his knees as he tried to calm down and think through the situation… whether the blond babe had been real, which he was pretty positive she was. Whether that meant he really had been kidnapped by talking plants. The talking plants part was bad, but Charis being real definitely made him feel better, which was stupid, since he didn’t know whose side she was on. Then again, if she was definitely real then his memories were real and since he was clean and half naked that would mean…

  He grinned despite himself.

  “Stop it, Dave.”

  He didn’t have time to fantasize. He ran to the door, unlocking it and throwing it open. Beyond, an empty beige and gray-blue hotel hallway confronted him. No guards, no kidnappers, no creepy lion-men. And no plants.

  Good.

  “Just get out of town.. San Francisco is obviously bad for you,” he told himself, closing the door and returning to the little oak dresser opposite the bed. He opened drawers. Brand new gray slacks and a button down white shirt were folded on the top, both in his size. His gray trench coat—drycleaned—was draped over the back of the chair beside the cold food tray, and his shoes were on the floor beside it.

  Dave wasted no time dressing. He couldn’t worry about what had happened to his old clothes; they’d been wrecked anyway. Although he was kind of sad about the loss of his vintage Transformers t-shirt. With his new shirt half buttoned and everything else in place, he shoved the gun into the back of his pants beneath the untucked shirt, and slipped back out into the hall. It was still quiet and empty as he made his way toward the elevators at the far end.

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  Not seeing anyone didn’t really comfort him. Charis had invisible friends that even he couldn’t see, unless they wanted him to. “You better not be following me.” he told the air around him, just in case the fin-eared guy or the other one, Mike, were lurking nearby. “If you’re there, just stay the hell away from me.”

  The hall remained silent.

  He waited impatiently for the elevator, the hurried inside the moment the doors opened, hamming the lobby button and the command for the doors to close. He didn’t want to give invisible stalkers any time to join him inside.

  Everything in the Lobby appeared normal. Business as usual, normal human people doing normal things, checking in, moving luggage, waiting on the curb for a taxi. Still Dave avoided every single parlor palm as he made his way past the desk and out the revolving glass doors into the cool San Francisco morning. Immediately Dave looked at the sky; but Rune was nowhere to be seen. It would rise tonight, near sunset. He noticed that if he looked around… all the other humans. Everyone, once they stepped outside, always looked up with a hunted look on their face. To see if that damn moon was there. It was habit.

  Unnoticed across the lobby, standing invisible by the windows, Indigo muttered into a cellphone. “The monkey is in daycare. Repeat, the monkey is in daycare.”

  Free at last on the morning shadow-draped sidewalks of the city, Dave turned up the collar of his coat and started walking. The streets around him were vaguely familiar. When he was a kid, his uncle (not Uncle Rob) had lived in San Francisco and he remembered walking around the city with his relatives. He looked to be a couple streets down from Union Square; a nice clean area with a straight shot to the Embarcadero. He knew enough about the transit lines to be confident he could catch a bus at the Ferry Building, which could get him out of town. He still had a few bucks, if the blond hadn’t taken his cash when she sponged him down.

  God, in a fair world he would remember that.

  But this was not a fair world. That fact was made blindingly obvious when he glanced up and saw a shaggy, hairy, manly Thing covered in wiry black fur wearing a short pink dress. It’s hideous face looked like it belonged to a vampire bat, except for the hot pink oversized lips. It’s little pink high heels didn’t help any, either. From the way regular pedestrians walked right past it, he was quite sure nobody except himself could see it.

  Dave winced, moving to the far side of the sidewalk to get around the beastly barbie monster. Obviously a good night’s sleep hadn’t cured him. If he lifted his gaze from the cement beneath his feet he could see the creatures, some free roaming, most attached to or bonded with oblivious human hosts. Something that looked like something between a kid’s puppet and a movie alien thing was riding a business woman’s shoulders piggy back, whispering and giggling in her ear. It looked up at Dave as they drew close, and a second later the business woman looked at him as well, her eyes glassy and confused as she focused on him.

  He swayed left to give them a wider berth, watched his feet, and walked faster.

  Five blocks later he reached the waterfront, coming to a stop in front of the steepled Ferry building with its soaring clock tower. Around one side he could see the bus stops, complete with plastic shelters built over benches. It didn’t take him long to find a sign that listed which bus lines stopped here, and he quickly chose a route that would take him across the Bay Bridge and into Oakland.

  East was good. Maybe he’d head for Nevada. Once he was safely moving and out of this city, he could take time to think about what he’d learned from Charis. About there being two sides in the invisible world. Angels and… demons, he assumed. Although he had never heard of an angel cat man, or a blue one with bat ears. Weren’t angels supposed to be big blond men in white robes with wings? The closest to that he’d seen was Mike, who looked like a guy who should be rubbing sex wax on a surf board. Mike didn’t have a white robe or wings; just a ninja turtle tee shirt, jeans, and birkensandals. Not a feather in sight.

  Plus Indigo looked WAY too much like the Rune aliens. They were called Enshi, and they had attacked Earth without provocation… before all of them just fell over dead for no apparent reason, leaving the human race wrecked and with serious complexes to work out.

  Dave had one regret: he was a little disappointed to leave behind the only person who seemed to have a clue what was happening to him, but it was probably for the best. She had drugged him. And abandoned him. Besides that, he knew from experience that the only way to stay safe was to keep moving; otherwise the thirty or forty monsters that had attacked him in LA would catch up.

  If they did, he would be in serious trouble. They were probably in the city already looking for him. The pack was never far behind the one that always called his name, the one that had attacked him with the dog in the park. Usually they’d be closing in within hours. In fact, it was a miracle they hadn’t surrounded him already.

  Dave huddled down at the nearest bus stop shelter, checking his coat pockets for his last six dollars in change and his crumpled pack of cigarettes. Instead, his fingers encountered a wad of crisp, clean bills. He pulled them out, staring in shock as he fanned out five twenty dollar bills.

  “Hallelujah and glory to the lord.” he breathed incredulously. “She took my clothes off and paid me for it.”

  A figure on the far side of the bench snorted a laugh. It was a woman in a long black trench coat, and when she lowered the newspaper she’d been reading, recognition shot through him like a jolt.

  Charis tipped down the rim of her oversized rose-colored sunglasses, batting long brown eyelashes at him. “So,” she smirked, looking for all the world like a Hollywood starlet with iron-straight blond hair and a fake mole drawn in beside her mouth. “You wanna come sightseeing with me?”

  Dave leapt to his feet, staring at her with wide eyes. “Christ! Where the hell did you come from?”

  “I’ve been here waiting.” she yawned delicately, covering her lips with a gloved hand. “God, it took you forever. How long did you sleep?”

  “I don’t know.” his brain was still tripping over her popping up out of nowhere. A hint of a smile flitted across his face as his thoughts turned in a slightly different direction. “Thanks for the sponge bath.”

  Her lips twitched. “Don’t mention it.”

  Dave grinned, his hard feelings evaporating in an instant. She really was a gorgeous woman.

  “So,” she ran one long sparkly purple fingernail down his knee. “Do you want to go out for breakfast, or have you eaten?”

  “Uh…” he stared at her wandering finger. She was flirting with him. Hallelujah all over again. Unfortunately that caress turned his brain off like a switch. “Uh… okay…”

  Charis grinned brilliantly, a thousand watt smile. “Then come on.” Without hesitation she bounced to her feet, folding up her newspaper briskly to tuck it under one arm. Tossing her long gold hair over her shoulder, she strode toward the nearest crosswalk.

  “I mean no.” Dave corrected himself, shaking his dazed brain back into gear. “Wait.” he chased her, grabbing one of her shoulders to spin her around. “Are you really working with… the aliens? Like, from Rune. I mean do you really have Harvey the invisible man as a partner? How much of what happened yesterday did I imagine?”

  She opened her mouth, hesitated, closed it, then tipped her head and asked, “Bagels?”

  Dave shook his head, wise to her tricks. “Answers.”

  She peered over the top of her glasses at him with large, hazel eyes. “I know this great bagel place. Near the water, over by the fountain.” She nodded toward the Embarcadero center across the street.

  Dave had to struggle not to be charmed by her damn female wiles. She wasn’t asking him on a date, he reminded himself, and it didn’t matter how cute she looked right then. “No. I want you to explain what’s going on with the Things before we go anywhere.”

  Charis made an exasperated sound and rolled her eyes. “Booooring. Come on, Dave, be a man. Let’s have a bagel.”

  “You expect me to eat with you? You drugged me!”

  “Yeah, and…?” Charis raised one slender eyebrow at him. “You were completely hysterical and waving a loaded gun around at the time. Or did you forget that part?”

  Damn it, she had a point.

  A man with a giant centipede wrapped around his head and down his spine stopped at the corner near them, making Dave wince and tug her a few feet away.

  “God, that’s disgusting. Look at that,” he pointed at the man, glaring at Charis. “And you work with things like that? Are you insane?”

  The light changed and the crosswalk began to chirp like a bird which was the San Francisco way of inviting them to cross. Charis shrugged out of his grip, wrapping her arm around his to drag him across the street. “Okay, look. I’ll give you answers but you have to stop freaking out. No yelling, no screaming, and no pointing your gun. Okay?”

  “I’m not freaking out. I’m a paranoid delusional. That’s different.”

  Charis patted his arm and smiled up at him. “But you’re a cute paranoid delusional.”

  Dave couldn’t help it. Pure male satisfaction painted a smug grin on his face. “You think I’m cute?”

  “Well…” she looked him over thoughtfully. “You do look a lot better with your neck shaved.”

  He ran a hand over his neck, still smirking at her. “Thanks for the shave. Was it as good for you as it was for me?”

  Charis snickered, slanting him a sly look. “Next time we’ll make sure you’re conscious.”

  “Absolutely.” He leered, admiring the deep V neck of her white shirt.

  She pranced a bit as she walked, obviously enjoying the attention.