Fang.
My best friend. Perhaps even more than a friend. My mentor. His advice had been crucial. His guidance had been invaluable. It was safe to say that I might have - just might have - gone batshit crazy without his help.
No pun intended.
That he had stalked me and fallen in love with me were different matters entirely. That he had been a friend when I needed a friend the most was what I would always remember.
I was sitting across from him now in his small, one-bedroom apartment located at the edge of Fullerton, in a shabby complex where the great Philip K. Dick had once lived. Fang was lying on his couch in the fetal position, shaking violently. I was certain that he was not aware of me.
I was certain, in fact, that he was dying.
According to Fang, this was the very complex where Dick - the author of Blade Runner , Total Recall, and Minority Report, to name a few of his more popular titles - had his reality-shattering religious and visionary experiences.
Except now, as I watched Fang curl tighter into the fetal position, I knew there was nothing religious or visionary going on here. What I was seeing was a man suffering horribly.
I knew the feeling; it wasn't nice.
What was going on here, I knew, was death. His body wasn't just changing into something out-of-this world. It was dying, pure and simple. And Fang wasn't just dying, I knew. He was being...
Replaced.
Something else would inhabit him. Something dark and sinister - and looking for a foothold into this world.
Jesus.
The energy around Fang was interesting, to say the least. The deep black halo that surrounded him was infused with particles of light. I had never seen that before. I was witnessing something extraordinary.
I had only been to Fang's apartment once, months ago. Back then, I was still on the fence with Fang, still open to the possibility of romance. He had served drinks and we had sat on this very same couch. He had played music and I knew his intention was to seduce me. There were some benefits to reading the guy's thoughts, after all. But we never got very far. From the moment he put his arm around me, I had known that this was wrong. I had stood and told him that I was sorry but I had to leave.
Fang had looked mortally wounded, but had given me a sweet kiss on the cheek and told me to drive safely.
And now I was back, and watching him writhe and sweat and pant on the couch. That is, until I heard the sound at the door.
Detective Hanner of the Fullerton Police Department was standing in the entrance, watching me carefully. How she got in without me hearing her was disturbing. We stared at each other some more. My shoulders tensed. I was ready to move quickly if I had to.
But I didn't have to. She nodded to me after a moment, then turned and quietly shut the door. Once done, she tossed her coat over the back of a dining chair and walked toward me. Her eyes didn't exactly glow, not like Kingsley's, but I could see what appeared to be tiny flickers of flames just behind her pupils.
"Good evening, Samantha Moon," she said evenly. When she spoke to me alone, she always spoke differently, reverting to a slightly formal way of speech, tinged with a hint of an Eastern European accent. Perhaps it was her natural dialect from wherever it was she hailed.
My inner alarm began ringing. I watched her carefully, aware that there was also movement in the shadows to my right. The movement, I knew, was not from a physical form. Something had, I was certain, materialized within the shadows. A shadow within a shadow. My alarm grew louder. Now I saw it from the corner of my eye, creeping away from the far wall.
A living shadow.
Hanner, as far as I could tell, was unaware of the shadow. Or chose not to acknowledge it. "I would strongly advise you, sister," she said, "that you not disrupt the changing."
Outside of a creepy book that had once called out to me, I had never been referred to as sister before. I didn't like it. It made my skin crawl. It made me feel less than human.