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“Can… can I tell others about us?”
“If you trust them.” I don’t know the rules of my kind, if I have a kind, but I know I believe in Astra.
“Good.” She smiles brightly. “Because Glynnes is going to lose her mind. She has this… like, magic sixth sense about her, and she practically guessed you existed. Well, her first guess was the Mothman, but—wait,do witches exist?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.” I laugh, pulling her warm body tighter to mine. I press a tender kiss on the remnants of the cut at her hairline. It’s fading quickly. “Maybe.”
“We’ll find out together,” she says softly, lifting her lips to meet mine.
* * *
After a day of fucking on the rooftops of the city, Astra goes back to work in her pottery studio. For the first time, I can join her.
The studio has a high enough ceiling that once I pass through the door, I can watch her comfortably without needing to make my body smaller or twisting into some unnatural shape. She throws pieces for her residency submission. They are brutally abstract in their forms yet punctuated with moments of stillness and sweeping beauty. I realize that this is how she sees me: complex and surprising, energetic and stable.
Astra offers to teach me hand building techniques. I decline for the moment. Watching her work, knowing that I’m finally, fully being seen and getting to see her, is enough for now.
Epilogue
LOS ANGELES - OCTOBER 31ST
ASTRA
“It’s a drone,” says a twenty-something-year-old man in a hastily put-together zombie costume. The freshly applied green goo on his face and in his hair drips onto the sidewalk, creating a small puddle at his feet, but the street is packed with costumed humans, and no one else seems to notice the mess he’s making.
“It’s not a drone. It’s a kite,” corrects a man dressed in what appears to be a child’s pumpkin costume, cut and stretched to fit over a black spandex bodysuit. “Someone is flying one of those giant kites.”
“No one is flying a kite on Halloween night. It’s a drone.” The Zombie shakes his head incredulously.
The men are loud, and it’s impossible not to overhear them as I wait for my order at the food truck—two apple ciders, both with whipped cream, caramel drizzle, and brown sugar sprinkles. It may be in the high seventies, way too hot for warm drinks, but I want to at least pretend to get in the seasonal spirit of things. A fellow potter at the Los Angeles Museum of Ceramic Arts, also from the East Coast, suggested I go to Santa Monica’s Halloween Street Fair if I wanted to get my autumnal fix. So, here I am, having made surprisingly good time from my residency at the museum to the street fair, dressed up in a golden-yellow princess dress, complete with red rose details, hoop skirt, and an itchy brown wig.
“You’re both wrong,” says the final man in the group, dressed as a vampire and sweating through his white face paint. “It’s one of those inflatable bat decorations people put out on their lawns, and it got loose. We’re just looking at it from a weird angle.”
“Two apple ciders for Astra,” the server calls from the food truck’s window. “Two apple ciders for Astra.”
The men’s voices get louder as I head for the food truck’s pickup window.
“See the wings? The wind makes it look like they’re actually flapping,” the Vampire points out.
“If it’s a bat, then why does it have a tail?” the Pumpkin pushes back.
My hands freeze on the steaming cups of cider at the mention of a tail and moving wings.
“That’s strange,” the Zombie adds, drawing out the last word as he squints up at the night sky.
I jerk my gaze upwards at the word “strange” just in time to see the distinct shape of jagged, bat-like wings, sharply pointed horns, and a long, thick tail fly across the glowing full moon.
Shit. Colossus is early.
Since moving across the country a month ago, Colossus likes to fly over different areas of the city just after sunset. He is getting the lay of the land, he said, scoping out the city for fellow Strange creatures, though he’s yet to make contact. I was coming directly from the museum tonight, so we planned to meet here, but that wasn’t for another twenty minutes or so.
Several other humans are now staring up into the sky, along with the group of men. Murmured whispers build into small arguments that break out among the surrounding attendees over whether the flying gargoyle is a drone, kite, inflatable, or, as I hear a small child loudly suggest, a witch on a broomstick.
The whole point of Colossus joining me at the street fair is so we’d be able to enjoy a date night without worrying about humans freaking out over a giant stone monster in their midst. Alas, incognito doesn’t quite work if humans actually witness him flying through the sky.
His appearance can be explained as special effect makeup and costuming. The flying—not so much.
“Thank you,” I hastily spit out to the food truck worker.
