“You’re kidding, Jack. That’s what you want to do for our midterm project?”

Jack nodded his head, forgetting he was still attached to the test equipment, which meant his classmates – teammates – nodded as well. “Glad we’re in agreement,” he teased.

Paul groaned. “Really?”

Marco was the first to really be on board with the idea. “Actually,” he said, his slight Italian accent softening the other student’s name, “Zhack may be on to something. The women’s team – they used a Ouija board for their first round.”

“They were debunking it, though,” Kazuo pointed out. “They were proving that the planchette is controlled by the group’s ideomotor response and not the work of ghosts or spirits.”

“Listen to Kaz,” Jack pleaded. “Kaz, don’t you think this is better than just moving objects or writing rude things on the blackboard?”

“Aww, c’mon,” Yuri piped up. “It’s our one chance to mock the prof and get away with it.”

“No,” Jack countered. “I mean yes, but it would be a cheap shot. This? This has an element of spectacle.”

The men, barely more than boys, really, continued to throw ideas back and forth – beach volleyball! Hot wheels! Making a sandwich! – but they eventually circled back to Jack’s original suggestion.

It took hours of practice, of course, out by the lake, out on the table rock in the college’s arboretum, and once in the dining hall to disastrous effects. And even so, they never managed to rotate the group target into a horizontal position.

Still, on presentation day it was agreed that the men’s team’s use of applied kinesiology to play the old party game “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” was both clever and innovative.

Jack made sure that they credited his little sister Amy for the idea.

And he never again grumbled about chaperoning her slumber parties.

Reginald had always known life would be interesting when he’d gone to live with his uncle. After all, Commodore Franklin Giles-Whitton was known for the adventure tales he’d written after leaving the navy.

They were wonderful books, full of fantastic creatures the Commodore claimed he’d encountered during his decades of service to Queen and country.

In the first one, a little boy named Ronald befriended a creature that was half-leopard and half-snowy owl, taming it by giving up bits of his breakfast bacon each morning. Of course, the creature had befriended the boy, ultimately protecting him from the Stone Knights that came to life, literally, once in a blue moon.

Reginald had always suspected that Ronald was based on him. Certainly, the ink boy shared his features and the stupid fussy clothes his mother made him wear. He was eleven! Surely, he was old enough for long trousers by now!

But his suspicion wasn’t confirmed until he’d been living with the Commodore and his wife for three months. He’d woken to a murky sky and rolling thunder had arrived just after breakfast. Confined to the house, Reginald (no one ever shortened his name) began exploring the back hallways of the ancient mansion.

He found a stray feather at the bottom of a steep stairway – an owl feather dotted with leopard spots – and took it as an invitation. He was halfway up to the top when a red ball came bouncing toward him. He caught it – he was a decent athlete despite the stupid clothes – and tossed back.

This game of catch continued until he reached the landing. To his right was a foggy window. To his left – he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t seen the light flooding out of what was obviously his uncle’s workroom – but the bright space beckoned.

Also beckoning was – well, Reginald thought it was a bat at first – and it DID have wings – but the red, rubber ball in its mouth and the way its furry body wriggled with joy reminded him of his friend Anne-Elise’s Yorkshire terrier.

“Hey there, little one,” he addressed the animal. “Can I have the ball?”

And so, the game continued, and with each round, the bat-dog-thing drew Reginald further into the workroom until, finally –

“It’s about time you joined us, m’boy!” The Commodore’s booming voice preceded the big man’s appearance. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

And that’s when Reginald realized. All the creatures from his uncle’s books were REAL. All were in cages or on perches around the room – the white leopard-owl had a raised bed right near the old man’s desk.

“But… this… how?”

The Commodore laughed. “I had a feeling it was Tiberius here who would find you. Every boy needs a dog. And every man needs someone to follow in his footsteps, as it were. I’m drawing the new Ronald book’s first frame… care to watch?”

Reginald’s eyes were wide as saucers, but his voice had gone missing. He could only offer an enthusiastic nod.

“Catbird got your tongue?” The old man’s tone was full of amused affection. “No worries, lad. Take a seat over there. Tiberius likes his ears scratched, and his shoulders at the wing-roots, too.”

He knew a command when he heard one. Reginald went to the indicated chair and sat in it, and the bat-dog, Tiberius, landed on his lap. Dropping the ball, the furry creature darted out a rough tongue and licked the boy’s hand, then looked up at him expectantly.

Reginald understood that sort of command, also, and immediately began giving the animal the attention it was demanding.

Many more rainy days were spent in the workroom, often with Tiberius resting atop Reginald’s shoulders while the boy watched his uncle draw and write. He didn’t mind, except when the animal put its paws across the boy’s mouth. The tiny claws made his skin itchy.

On sunny days, the endless games of catch continued, in the house, in the gardens, and even outside the gates in the rolling hills. Their bond had been forged and was unbreakable.

Aunt Felicity worried and fussed over her nephew, but the Commodore brushed aside his wife’s concerns.

“He’s just a boy playing with his dog, my dear.”

“Yes, my love,” Felicity responded as the two gazed upon their sleeping nephew and the ball of wings and fur nestled at his side. “But the dog has wings.”

“That’s true, my love,” the Commodore said, guiding his wife from the room. “Then again, so do you.”

“Doggie!” My daughter cried as we entered the final wing of the pound. It was noisy, full of the sounds of clicking, whirring, and the occasional grinding of gears as the various cyberpets tried everything to get our attention.

“Actually, that one was originally a monkey / raptor hybrid.” The attendant seemed a little bit embarrassed. “He’s always been responsive, never harmed a staff member or another ‘pet, but…”

“But what?” I asked, as my daughter knelt in front of the creature’s cage. “Keep your hand flat,” I reminded her. “No poking fingers.”

“I know,” she said, with all the impatience a four-year-old could muster.

“You’d probably be better off with one of the actual dogs from alpha wing,” the attendant suggested.

But something about this poor creature, primate head, exposed skull, cybernetic attachments as well as prosthetic limbs, reptilian (well, almost avian) claws and a furry, wagging tail, pulled at the heart strings. Made you feel sorry for it.

“The truth, please?” I asked softly. “Why is he still here. Hybrids have been forbidden since – “

“That’s part of it. He’s licensed. You don’t have to worry about that, but his skull reads ‘human’ to some. It’s why primate hybrids were the first to be banned.”

“I remember,” I said. After the alien attack, life on earth had changed. Not just our way of living, but life itself. Something about nanites in the water and soil recoding our DNA.

Animals, humans, all had begun being born with cybernetic parts. It had taken a decade to restore the original gene sequences. Meanwhile, adoption agencies were full of these Adapted children, some of whom would never find loving homes.

And the animal shelters were just as bad. It used to be that big black dogs were the ones to languish. Now it was the cyberpets.

But the hybrids… those were the most pitiful of all. They were the results of lab tests gone wrong, and most were put out of their misery on sight. Too bad, really. They were good pets, even if they were disturbing to look at.

“He was originally a service ‘pet for a politician’s little girl, if that helps,” the attendant said. “She went to college and couldn’t take him, and he missed her so much… he would climb up on the roof and gargoyle for days. Rain, snow, heat. It was really sad. Rehoming him was the humane choice.”

“Those claws though…”

“We’ve had him in the staff lounge lots of times. He’s never harmed the furniture.”

“Katie? Wouldn’t you rather have the retriever we saw earlier?” I was pretty certain my daughter had already chosen, but I had to ask.

My daughter shook her head, her hair swinging to reveal the cybernetic reinforcements in her neck. They reinforced her whole spine, but you couldn’t tell when she was wearing clothes. “Doggie,” she said firmly.

I sighed. “I guess we’ll take him. Does he have a name?”

“Pierre,” the attendant said. “Previous owner was certain all monkeys were French. Even hybrids. I’ll fetch a leash, and she can bond with him while we do the paperwork.

“No need,” I said.

The attendant released Pierre from his cage and the creature went right to my daughter’s left side. She extended her hand, hovering it over the ‘pet’s back, and a cable snaked out of her palm, connecting to Pierre’s linkport.

I smiled looking at the two of them. Just a little girl and her monkey/raptor/thing.

Just as it should be.

I cry.

You fill my great waters with your cast-off plastic, my streams and rivers with toxic chemicals.

You complain that the water is no longer fit to drink.

You wonder why the fish are scarce and the grasses withered and brown.

I bleed.

I shed my heart’s blood for the animals left homeless and undernourished, the starving polar bears, the treeless birds, the hooved and pawed beasts cut off from their homes and food sources by barbed wire, burning highways, electric fences, and projectile weapons.

I express my rage.

I send hurricanes, blizzards and the occasional volcano eruption.

I whisper my truths into the inner ears of those who would protect me.

They understand: to protect me, is to protect yourselves.

You forget, you see.

You oh-so-conveniently forget that I was here before you, and I will remain long after.

You might not recognize my evolving form.

You might resent the changes I must make to ensure my own survival.

You might shiver in fear at what I’m likely to become.

And yet, you do nothing to stop me.

I am the flood and the fire.

I am the coppery blood of all things, living and dead.

I am the earth.

And I can be maternal.

But I can also be a mother.

She’d always thought of herself as a city girl, or at least suburban, picking her living spaces as much for their distance from a good café – anything over half a mile was too far – as for the state of the kitchen, the size of the bathtub, and the amount and quality of natural light.

Still, she loved her husband – was still madly in love with him after twenty-three years, so when he asked her to spend a week in a cabin in the woods with him, she couldn’t refuse. After all, he’d been on innumerable trips to the beach for her.

On the drive up, she made the requisite jokes about the dark forest being the perfect setting for a murder mystery or horror movie. “You’re not planning to chop me into pieces and hide them under a carpet of pine needles, are you?”

“Of course not,” he’d replied, blue eyes twinkling at her when their gazes met in the rear-view mirror. “For one thing, this isn’t a pine forest.”

“So. Not. Reassuring.” She sing-songed the words.

Their first two days were sodden with rain, but her husband kept a fire burning in the Franklin stove and lulled her into a good mood with endless cups of gourmet coffee and the soft strumming of his acoustic guitar, classical music alternated with folk – her favorites.

On the morning of the third day at the cabin, she woke before him, and set the coffee to brew. The rain had finally stopped, and the first rays of sun were beginning to penetrate the morning fog. She brought her mug of coffee with her to the deck that surrounded the cabin and lost herself in the view.

Birds called to each other in the trees and she glimpsed a couple of squirrels playing on a nearby branch, making her smile, but it was the light on the trees that really entranced her. The play of sun and fog, brightness and shadow. She almost believed that if she could just stretch far enough she could catch a piece of morning mist on the end of her finger, like cotton candy at the firemen’s fair.

She didn’t hear him come up behind her, but she knew he was there even before his rusty-voiced “Morning, babe,” tickled her right ear.

He slipped his arms around her from behind, and she leaned back against his chest. “The rain stopped,” she said, as if he couldn’t tell.

“And?”

“It’s not the beach…” she began.

“No, it’s not the beach.”

“But it’s kind of magical in its own way.”

He didn’t respond, not with words. Instead he squeezed her just a little tighter, and then released.

Together, they watched as the forest fully embraced the new day.

“Where have all the faeries gone?”

It’s an innocent question, tumbling from the lips of your child.

“Faeries live in a special place called our imagination,” you say, looking over the child’s head so that you aren’t looking into those luminous eyes, the ones as-yet-untainted by harsh reality and hard truths. “You can enter that place whenever you’re playing, or dreaming, and the faeries will sing you their songs and teach you their games.”

“Do you sing with the faeries?” Your child asks this and a thousand other similar questions.

Finally, you provide a half-truth because you can’t bear another lie. “When you grow up, your imagination changes, and faeries don’t visit it anymore.”

“That’s very sad. I’m sorry.”

Your child’s sweet sympathy burns like acid, because you know – you KNOW – that the faeries aren’t gone, they’re imprisoned. They’re stuck in the ground in so many lead-lined cement boxes, boxes with just enough tiny fissures, designed intentionally, to let faerie magic seep into the soil of the old forest.

You remember when you were told that It Was Time and you were Too Old to Believe, and you were forced to stuff your own faerie into one of those prisons (coffins) in a line of so many others, marching down the lane of the forest like stepping stones.

A part of you, the part that feels guilty for what your people have done, wants to end the cycle. Tell your child the truth. Take them to the row of boxes and help them unlock each one.

But you don’t. Because this is how it Is, and this is how it has Always Been. A child’s faerie comes into the world with their first bubble of laughter, and when the child reaches puberty, they make the ultimate betrayal. They stuff their faerie in a box and lose the last of their innocence.

“But why?” your child will ask, as they realize the horror of what they are doing.

“Because it is the Way. Without faerie magic the trees would not grow tall and the river would not run clear and sweet, and the air would taste like ash.”

“Can’t we just ask them to help with those things?” They will press on.

And for a moment you wonder if they would, just as you did when it was your faerie being locked into the darkness.

But you know the truth. It’s been too long. Too many generations. Too many years – decades – centuries – of betrayal.

And you will give the same non-answer your parents gave you: A sad shrug and a shake of your head.

But… those harder questions are years away yet. And you want to ease the trouble in your child’s eyes and smooth the worry from the tender, young brow.

“Sometimes,” you say. “I can almost catch a glimpse of my faerie, in my imagination.”

Your child studies your face, looks deeply into your eyes. You wonder what new old-young words will fall from those lips, still sticky from jam at breakfast.

But there is no response. The child re-focuses on the crayons and tablet on the table between you, and you finish your coffee in silence.

It’s only later that you realize what your child has drawn: The old forest, the lane of cut trees replaced by cubes of cement and lead.

In the back of your head, you hear your faerie laugh, but it’s not the sound of playful joy.

It’s a cackle, full of malice and revenge.

In the piney woods above the beach, when the moon was full, and the fog bent the beam from the lighthouse just so, Isabelle and Henry would relive the first and last dance of their wedding.

It had been ninety-three years since the old Goose and Turrets Hotel had burned to the ground. Some said it was the fault of a dry winter. Fallen pine needles and the casually discarded butt of a cigarillo invariably resulted in conflagration.

Others were certain it was arson, the hotelier’s last-ditch effort to avoid getting caught selling liquor. True, the law turned a blind eye to Society folk sipping champagne at parties, but it was known that Rick was moving more than the occasional bottle of bubbly through his wine cellars.

Either way, the place was ablaze before midnight, and the new day dawned on ash and rubble.

Henry had died inside, they said, rushing into the wood-framed structure again and again to help others get out.

And Isabelle?

She’d been seen wandering the beach early in the morning, barefoot, with the train of her silk-velvet bridal gown so laden with wet sand it was nearly the same color as the smoldering ruins.

They never found her body, but she’d been walking below the waterline, and the morning high tide hadn’t yet come to wash away the scattered shoes and bags of those who had escaped the island on boats.

And everyone knows that you shouldn’t wade while wearing velvet. It soaks up the water and drags you down to the bottom of the sea.

The cold, dark Atlantic is unforgiving that way.

Still…

Teenagers who go to the beach to make out in the moonlight claim that when the fog rolls in and the arc of the lighthouse beam swings leeward, you can see the outline of the old hotel, standing stalwart on the cliff, and you can hear the waltz music underneath the sound of the waves.

And folks who live in the cottages (mansions, really, but the pretense is maintained) tucked among the pine trees say they often catch a glimpse of a bride in white velvet, seaweed in her hair, and a skeletal partner gently leading the form of a waltz.

It’s Isabelle and Henry, they whisper, for fear a loud voice will disturb the timeless lovers. It’s Henry and Isabelle having one last dance.

May they rest in peace, when the song is done.

“Take this” she told the mission commander. “We offer it to you in remembrance of this visit.”

I tried to warn him. Tried to tell him that accepting living fire from an alien we hadn’t fully vetted was a bad idea. But did he listen?

No.

Caught up in the thrill of an (apparently) successful first contact scenario, he accepted their gift, brought it back aboard our ship, entrusted its care to me.

At first, I thought the fluctuations in the power grid were a result of the ion storm we’d passed through. Then I realized that the living fire was also fluctuating.

I took a couple of specialists down to the engine core, and that’s where we found them. An entire pod of the same chalk-white aliens.

Reynolds and Morris never knew what hit them. One minute they were flanking me, weapons drawn; the next they were dead, and the chalk people were sucking on their bones.

Me, they kept alive.

I’m not sure if it was because I’m a woman or because they’d never seen rainbow-colored hair before. Maybe both. But they made me their liaison.

Please if you get this message, do not let my ship approach your world. The chalk people use living fire as their portal. It’s how they conquer other races, how they spread their seed into the cosmos.

Our weapons have been destroyed. Our crew – what’s left of it – is being fattened for an Arrival Feast.

I beg you. Destroy our ship. Destroy it in orbit. Make sure it’s blasted to bits and then consign the debris into the sun.

Kill it.

Kill it with fire.

“Professor Shadingstone, I presume?”

The older woman raised her gray-haired head from her laptop and peered at the younger. “Good god, Lumley, must you use that tiresome greeting every day? It was mildly amusing once. Now, seventeen days from semester break, it’s lost the little charm it once had.” The professor paused, letting the other absorb her annoyance. “Now that you’ve interrupted my work, you might as well tell me why.”

Lumley stepped closer to the desk. “I was out in the Green Woods over the weekend. It started as a hike. Nuñez, the TA who works for Professor Clardin, invited me on a picnic and a hike. Only, he’s quite handsome, and we’re both applying for the Gossey Fellowship. And –

“Have I not asked you not to ma’am me?”

“- sorry, sir – “

“Lumley.” Professor Shadingstone never yelled when she was angry. Rather, her voice became quiet, dark, and full of warning. “Get. To. The. Point.”

Lumley handed over a photo-cube. “I’ve found it, ma – er – sir – er – Professor. I’ve found proof. The Caprican Catbird. It exists.”

The professor activated the photo cube and watched as digital images sprang up before her in holographic glory.

“This is a stray housecat, Lumley. Probably the one Dean Ferrington lost last fall.”

But Lumley held her ground. “No, Professor, it is not. It’s a Catbird. Watch.”

Shadingstone flipped through the collection of photos, her gnarled fingers flicking out as if she were catching flies. “Photoshopped,” she accused.

“I didn’t. I swear.”

“Tangible evidence?”

Lumley handed over a clump of black animal fur, something rather like a peacock’s tail feather, and a data flimsy with a lab report.

“The DNA in fur and feather is identical, si – ma – Professor.”

Shadingstone read the report once, then a second time. “Could you find the location again?”

“I set a beacon drone after it. One of the new dragonflies.”

“Which means the entire biology department will be swarming the Woods.”

“Never that. The beacon is set to your private channel. And it’s password protected.”

Shadingstone set the cube aside, letting the photos continue to cycle, tracking the newfound creature’s metamorphosis from black cat to peacock and back again. Centering her computer on the desk, she instructed it to locate the drone Lumley had indicated and receive video data.

“What’s the password, Lumley?”

The younger woman hung her head. “Only, I wanted it to be memorable, so it’s kind of silly.”

“Lumley…”

“It’s… ‘tomfowlery,’ Professor.”

“Tom… fowlery?”

Lumley’s reply was somewhat sheepish. “I’m afraid so.”

Shadingstone stared at the eager young woman, the biologist in training, and did something no student, and few faculty, members had ever witnessed.

She threw her head back.

And laughed.