Chapter Six

Aliens, Monsters, & Mayhem

“Aliens?” Danny said. He was skeptical. “Are you serious? Like, from another planet?”

“Well, now,” Mr. Murray said, “those words conjure up visions of space ships and little green men. This isn’t that simple.”

“Simple?” Danny echoed, eyebrows raised.

“There are other worlds,” Mr. Murray said, “that you can get to, and come from, without flying through space.” He pointed to the wall. “Just on the other side of that wall, perhaps.”

“I don’t get it,” Danny said.

“I never did, either,” Ali said. “We think that’s why Gaten Wildwood told all this stuff to Silas, because he does seem to understand it.”

“I get it,” Miss Grace said. “I just don’t like thinking about it. It’s unnerving. Parallel universes, other dimensions, folding space and time.”

Danny looked down at the drawing again. It did look awfully familiar. Maybe he had dreamed it. He traced the trees with his finger.

“Are you ready for a story?” asked Mr. Murray.

“Is it a true story?” asked Danny.

“I have no idea,” Mr. Murray said.

Ali and Miss Grace backed this up with dual shrugs.

“All we know is what we were told,” Miss Grace said. “A lot of your family history comes across like a fairy tale, passed down from generation to generation. Scribbled out in those books, a lot of it written down long after the fact. Who knows what the truth is?”

“S-o-o-o,” Danny said, “what’s the fairy tale?”

Mr. Murray smiled. They all looked at each other, then back at Danny. Mr. Murray cleared his throat, folded his hands, and began.

“Very long ago, no one agrees on exactly how long ago, your ancestors arrived here, on this very land, where Gnomewood Home now stands.”

“Which ancestors?” Danny asked. “Wildwood or Hallow?”

“Both,” Mr. Murray answered.

They washed up from a distant shore, a world with two suns and many moons. Through a portal they created, an opening in space and time, they escaped a catastrophic cataclysm, an epic disaster in their own world by creating a way to cross dimensionsional realities, a bridge between worlds. They called this The Arrival.

“There were eight groups,” Mr. Murray said. “Sometimes they refer to them as Families, sometimes Clans, but whatever words they use in the histories they all agree that there were eight very different groups of beings. Similar, but different species. They were human-like, but very different from people like us.”

Six Families settled and stayed on this earth, while two others continued traveling through the portal. No one knows what happened to them, Mr. Murray explained, and their Clan or Family names and all information about them were either lost or erased.

“Maybe they're still traveling. Maybe they'll end up right back here someday.” The man shrugged. “Maybe they already came back and we don’t know.”

“Why didn’t they stay?” Danny asked.

“Most of the stories say it was because they didn’t play well with others,” Ali said.

“Those six Families who stayed here,” Mr. Murray ticked the names off on his fingers, “were Wildwood, Hallow, Bast, Valk, Seaberry, and Coriel.”

“Those weren’t the original names,” Miss Grace said. “That’s what they’ve turned into, over time.”

The six Families originally settled together in what is now called New England, to a land rich with natural beauty and bounty. They all lived together in peace, or so they now claim. They built a small civilization of their own, reminiscent of what they'd left behind. They kept to themselves and managed to survive without bothering or encroaching on the people who already lived there.

“Native Americans,” Danny said.

“Yes,” Mr. Murray said. “Which places the Arrival at less than fifteen-thousand years ago, because that’s when the first Americans arrived here over the land bridge across the Bering Sea.”

“Gaten thought that the Arrival was only about eight hundred years ago,” Miss Grace said, “though the Family Council likes to claim it was much longer.”

”Family Council?” Danny inquired.

“I’m getting to that,” Mr. Murray said, holding up a hand.

Their harmony with this land, its people, and each other was eventually disrupted by the arrival of others. Colonists began to come in waves from across the seas of this world, seeking riches or fleeing persecution and poverty in other lands.

The Families dealt with this by pretending they'd just arrived, too. They hid their towns, their culture, their strangeness. They tried to blend in.

“They’d intermarried with the indiginous people over the years,” Mr. Murray said, “and when the newcomers began to settle, the Families brought them into the gene pool as well.”

“It helped to camouflage them, the integration,” Miss Grace said. “They had to be careful, you see. The indiginous peoples had never had a quarrel with the Families and their differences, but most of the Europeans turned out to be very fearful of those differences.” She shook her head. “There will always be those people.”

“I’m sure you’ve heard all about witch trials and so forth,” Mr. Murray said.

“The witches were my ancestors?” Danny said, horrified.

“Only a couple of the slower ones,” Ali said. “The rest were just plain old people, murdered by hysteria.”

“But they paid attention to those witch trials, and they took warning,” Mr. Murray said. “They walked a fine line between blending in and staying separate.”

“Why, though?” Danny asked. “Were they so obviously weird?” Like me, he silently added.

“Danny,” Mr. Murray said, “your people can do some very unusual things. The Wildwoods especially have some startling abilities that us mere humans lack. It looked like magic to people back then, and to some people all magic is bad.”

“When their abilities were revealed, they were hunted,” Ali explained. “The ones who were caught sacrificed themselves to save the others. Any organized push back would have started a war.”

“Then they should have started a war,” Danny said, crossing his arms and frowning. “Not cool to just hide and let people die like that.”

“The Hallows agreed with you,” Mr. Murray said. “That’s why they left. Soon, most of the others followed. They no longer found this place hospitable.”

The Basts went in search of a warmer climate in the desert. The Coriels went to Western Europe. The Seaberrys, who’d always had the hardest time blending in with humans, went off and found a hidden island to live on and made a home there. The Hallows left for a location undisclosed to all but a few of the others, and all that was well known was that it was in the far north.

“They call it the Northern Fortress,” Mr. Murray said. “Hardly anyone is privy to the exact location of it.”

The Valks went to Eastern Europe, splitting up into two separate clans. The Valkuvai and the Valkucek.

“A couple of the Valkucek still live around here,” Mr. Murray said.

“The man at the will reading,” Danny said. Fox, he thought, and the disapproving Wolf.

“Yes,” Mr. Murray said. “Bradley and his sister Maren.”

“Bradley was your Uncle’s best friend,” Ali explained. “He sits on the Council for the Valk, and your Uncle Enoch was the representative for the Wildwoods.”

“But what is the Council?” Danny asked again.

“One member of every Family is appointed to the Council,” Miss Grace said. “Those six people keep tabs on Family business. They oversee things. They communicate about important events.”

“We used to call them the Best People in the World Club,” Ali said, winking.

“Are they?” Danny asked.

“No, but they sure think they are.” Ali laughed.

“So who’s the Wildwood on the Council now?” Danny asked.

“There isn’t one,” Mr. Murray said sadly. “There may never be one again.”

“How come?” Danny asked.

“There aren’t any more Wildwoods,” Mr. Murray answered simply. “Unless your mother shows up.”

“She never was interested in the Council position,” Miss Grace said.

“And this is a big problem, because the Wildwoods have always been considered very important.” Mr. Murray looked troubled.”They influence the Council a great deal.”

“Because?” Danny asked.

“Because of the significance of Gnomewood, and Eddystone,” Mr. Murray answered.

The Wildwoods built Gnomewood four hundred years ago, and the grounds she stood on were near the site of the Arrival, and the original settlements of the Families. The house stood guard, in a way, over their history. It marked the place where the Families had first arrived, a connection to their Old World, and the Wildwoods were respected for being its creators and guardians.

The energy it had taken to open an interdimensional portal had forever changed the place. The grounds around Gnomewood had always been charged with a strange power because of this. Odd things tended to happen there, and all around the town of Eddystone as well.

The Wildwoods dedicated themselves to preserving their heritage and keeping all inexplicable occurrences under control and out of sight. Often, they would make human friends who were in the know, and those friends would help with these efforts in the Management of Bizarre Happenings.

“Like you?” Danny said.

“Yes, like us,” said Mr. Murray. “We helped put out a few fires in our day.”

“Sometimes literally,” Miss Grace said.

In spite of any differences between them or historical bad blood, the Families always checked in with each other. They'd have occasional reunions at Gnomewood. It was the official meeting place for the Family Council. Even when they weren't getting along, even when there was a world war and they were fighting on opposite sides, this was a place of peace. Fighting with each other was forbidden on Gnomewood's grounds.

This peace was kept by the Wildwoods, by their status and their power. The other Families respected them, and listened to them.

“No one is really sure what’s going to happen with no Wildwood on the Council,” Mr. Murray said. “Things could get messy.”

“Can’t I do it?” Danny asked. “When I’m grown up, I mean?

Mr. Murray smiled tightly. “That would never be allowed,” he said.

Danny felt his face burn. He thought of the way Wolf had looked at him, some of the things she’d said.

“Because I’m not a real Wildwood or something like that?” he asked. “Is it because I’m half Hallow?”

Mr. Murray folded his hands and bent his head, as if he were praying. Miss Grace and Ali went very quiet. Danny did not like this at all.

They had something bad to tell him, something worse or weirder than being an alien, or having a creature living inside of him. He started to think maybe he didn’t want to know the whole truth, after all.

“Is it?” he asked timidly.

“The Families intermarry sometimes,” Mr. Murray said. “Your Grandmother Eliphalet was a Coriel, full-blooded. I’ve heard there’s an interesting little cadre of Seaberry-Basts living somewhere in Australia.”

“It’s often encouraged,” said Miss Grace. “Especially when the union is advantageous. For instance, your grandfather’s marriage was arranged by the Council.”

“Bad match,” Ali muttered into his coffee. “Poor Gaten. That woman was such a bi-”

“Wildwoods and Hallows, however,” Mr. Murray interrupted, “are strongly discouraged from marrying by Council Law.”

Danny sat back slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me why.”

“They are strictly forbidden from having children together,” Mr. Murray said. “If they do, well…”

“Well?” Danny said.

“As we told you, most of the time even if children are conceived, they don’t live long past birth.”

“When they do live,” Ali said, “sometimes there are problems.”

“Problems,” Danny echoed. “Like, you mean, how small I am, or how I can’t do anything right?” He started to feel a little angry, and scared for reasons he couldn’t explain. “Am I genetically defective or something?”

“The Hallows kept to themselves,” Mr. Murray said. “They had no interest in the other Families, but then, about a hundred years ago, a very important Hallow woman fell in love with one of the Wildwoods, and though both families had reservations, they were married.”

“And they had several children,” Miss Grace said. “All died but for two, twin boys.”

“They seemed alright until they were about fourteen, and then,” Mr. Murray looked helpless, “they, um…”

“They went on a murderous rampage and killed several hundred people,” Miss Grace said flatly. “It was brutal, and by all reports the boys were absolutely merciless.”

“They were stopped, eventually.” Mr. Murray said, “Killed, of course, they couldn’t take them alive. They were autopsied afterward…do you know what I mean by that Danny?”

“Do you-” Danny’s throat was bone dry, and he had to clear it to continue, “the kind of movies I like to watch, do you really think I don’t know what an autopsy is?”

“Of course, silly me,” Mr. Murray said. “Well, they discovered many physical anomalies in the boys, especially their witchbones.”

“Three times the normal size,” Ali said.

The Hallows were physically as strong as iron, preternaturally fast, difficult to injure or kill. The Wildwoods were gifted with unusual mental strength and psionic abilities enhanced by their witchbones. The mix had created monsters, something strong, wild, and uncontrollable.

“Those boys went insane,” Mr. Murray said, “and they were nearly unstoppable.”

“It was decided,” Miss Grace said, “that Wildwoods and Hallows were never to have children together, ever again. It was outlawed by the council.”

“But, time passes,” Mr. Murray said, “and people forget things, and sure enough, it happened again around 1940.”

“A girl, this time,” Miss Grace said. “Her parents tried to hide her parentage, they were young and unmarried, you see. They didn’t believe the same tragedy would repeat itself. They loved their child, and ignored all the signs of madness as she grew older.”

“She destroyed an entire town at the age of sixteen,” Ali said. “She died pulling down a mill building with nothing but the power of her mind. She was crushed inside, along with all of the millworkers.”

“Afterward, her parents admitted what she was,” Miss Grace said. “They told the Council everything. That she’d become paranoid, hearing voices, and behaving strangely.”

“But time passes, and people forget,” Mr. Murray said, “and your Great-Uncle Enoch, Gaten’s brother, decided to marry Saro Hallow.”

“Now that was a good match,” Ali said. “I liked them.”

“Yes, so did I,” Mr. Murray said.

“No one had a problem with that?” Danny asked weakly. “Like, this Council? They let this happen?”

“Everyone loved your Great-Uncle Enoch,” Mr. Murray said. “He was the sweetest, kindest person I’ve ever known. Handsome. A smile that could light up a whole city.”

Ali leaned over, stage whispering, “Silas had a crush.”

“Freely admitted,” Mr. Murray said. “He was really something. Saro was well-liked as well, she was clever and funny, and your Grandfather was completely on board with their marriage, so no one dared say boo about it.”

Miss Grace laughed. “It took a brave soul to stand up to Gaten Wildwood, he was intimidating.”

Ali said, “Gaten and Enoch were, like, the Golden Boys, no one thought anything could go wrong for them.”

“So Enoch and Saro had children,” Mr. Murray said. “Atticus, and then Arnica two years later.”

Atticus had been handsome like his father, and clever like his mother. He doted on his little sister, who was beautiful and sweet.

“Your Grandfather adored Atticus,” Mr. Murray said. “He always said Atticus was his ‘real son’.” The man grimaced. “I don’t think Gaten really thought or cared about how that made his actual son feel.”

Miss Grace snorted. “Gaten never cared anything for his son Enoch, or Anthie, at all.”

“How come?” Danny asked, feeling a sudden pang of sympathy for his Uncle.

“He found them both to be disappointing,” Mr. Murray said. “He didn’t make any effort to hide it, either.”

Gaten and his brother were very close, so visits to Gnomewood by Enoch and his family were frequent.

“Gaten was always happiest when his brother and his family were in residence,” Miss Grace said. “When they weren’t here, honestly, this house could get a bit grim. We spent a lot of time playing outside.”

Danny’s mother Anthea and her cousin Arnica grew to be the best of friends, like sisters, so Arnica spent a lot of time with Anthie and her friends from school when she visited. Atticus, two years older, met and befriended Silas Murray, and they became the best of friends as well.

“That’s how we all met,” Ali said, laughing. “That’s how we all got drafted into this crazy Wildwood stuff.”

“Your Grandfather was a difficult man,” Mr. Murray said, “but he was always kind to me. I was born poor and Portuguese, and my mother had no patience for anything about me.” He smiled. “It was nice to find a place where I fit in.”

“Unfortunately,” Miss Grace said sadly, “your Uncle Enoch was always left out. He was just kind of…”

“Boring,” Ali said.

“Yes, I suppose that was it,” Miss Grace agreed. “He was boring. His only friends, as far as I know, were Bradley Valkucek and Jake Homing. Molly Homing, at the will reading, she was Jake’s little sister.”

They were putting something off, Danny could tell. Wandering all around memory lane. There was only one thing he wanted to know.

“What happened to Atticus and Arnica?” he asked.

“Well, Arnica was a lovely person,” Mr. Murray said. “Very stable, very patient. So much like her father.” He did that praying thing with his hands again. “We were all devastated when she went missing.”

“Missing?” Danny exclaimed.

“She was thirteen,” Miss Grace said. “She vanished into thin air.”

“That was the first thing,” Mr. Murray said. “The first time we all noticed Atticus behaving oddly. He and I were very close by then, and I’d seen him pick up some tics, say some disturbing things sometimes, but nothing too alarming.”

Atticus had loved his sister, but he barely reacted when she disappeared. He behaved as if nothing had happened. When anyone questioned him about her whereabouts, he got cagey. His behavior became erratic.

Arnica was never found, and certain people began to suspect that Atticus had something to do with it, that he’d killed her. Including Gaten, who began to pay a different kind of attention to his nephew.

“By the time Atticus and I were twenty, Gaten enlisted me as a spy,” Mr. Murray admitted. “I only agreed because I really thought that Atticus was innocent. I just thought he needed some mental help.”

“But didn’t you know?” Danny said. “About the others from a long time ago?”

“Nope,” Ali said.

“No one ever discussed it,” Mr. Murray said. “We had no idea, neither did most people. We found out much later.”

“So what happened?” Danny said. “Did you find something out?”

“Yes, I did,” Mr. Murray said. “He showed me something so disturbing that I’m not going to tell you what it was, and you’re not going to get it out of me, either.”

Ali turned a little green. “Yeah, you don’t need to know that.”

Mr. Murray, upset, had told Gaten this terrible thing. “I begged him to get Atticus some help,” he said. “I begged him.”

But Gaten hadn’t helped Atticus. He’d gone on a trip to investigate what his nephew had told Silas, and after he’d found what he was looking for, he’d contacted the Hallows and asked them to send help.

“He found Atticus’ place in the mountains, the place where he'd been going to…do things,” Mr. Murray said. “He knew he’d need the Hallow’s help to contain Atticus at that point.”

Atticus had been hiding his madness, his growing power, and his disturbing new hobbies at that place in the White Mountains. Gaten headed home as fast as he could.

“I never saw him again,” Mr. Murray said.

There was a sad silence. Danny waited, chewing on his thumbnail.

“Do you want to know why you’re the only Wildwood to be found, Danny?” Mr. Murray asked.

Danny nodded, even though he was pretty sure he knew what the answer was.

“Atticus killed them all,” Mr. Murray said. “Every Wildwood. There weren’t a lot of them besides your mother’s family to begin with, but now they’re all gone. Atticus exterminated them.”

“Did you see any of this?” Danny asked.

“We were here at Gnomewood when Atticus came home,” Miss Grace said. “We had to fight Atticus as hard as we could, he intended to kill us all.”

“Your father showed up,” Ali said fondly. “He saved us. We were going to lose, trust me. Six against one, and we were all going to die.”

Danny turned that over. “Six?” he asked.

“Your mother, your uncle, the three of us, and Bradley Valkucek,” Ali explained. “Enzo was away. Sometimes I think the fact that he wasn’t a part of this is why we’re not so close to him any more.”

Mr. Murray had tried to shield the others, pleading with Atticus to stop, but at that point Atticus knew who he’d been betrayed by. His fury and power had been terrifying.

Nicodemus Hallow, the only Hallow willing to come from the Northern Fortress to help, had arrived in the middle of this melee and turned the tide, beating Atticus back to the point where he had fled.

“Then Atticus headed north,” Miss Grace said. “We thought he was headed for the Northern Fortress to start exterminating the Hallows. We all followed.”

Danny was trying to picture his Keepers tracking down a cold-blooded killer, but he was having trouble. These were the people who made him toast and fussed at him about muddy sneakers in the house.

Who were they, really? He wondered again.

They’d caught up with Atticus at his place in the mountains, where he’d been preparing to attack the Hallows.

“It was quite a fight,” Mr. Murray said.

“We always made a pretty good team,” Miss Grace said. “We’d be dead if it wasn’t for Nick, though.”

“Did he kill Atticus?” Danny asked.

“No,” said Ali.

“I did,” Mr. Murray said. His jaw was set, but his eyes were shiny. “I literally stabbed him in the back.”

“He sent Silas flying off the mountain with his last bit of energy,” Miss Grace said.

“Wheelchair,” was all Danny could bring himself to say.

Mr. Murray nodded. “That’s right. We all carried scars away from that fight in the mountains, physical and mental.” He rubbed his legs absently.

“That’s how my mom met my dad?” Danny asked. He was relieved when the Keepers laughed, breaking into their sadness just a shard.

“It’s a unique story, ain’t it?” Ali said.

Danny felt sick to his stomach, trying to take all of this in, what they were really telling him.

“But why did…” Danny stopped, taking a drink to stall. “Why did they have me?” he asked. “I don’t get it.”

“Oh, honey,” Mr. Murray said. He turned his teacup around and around.

“Why did they get married, why did they have kids?” Danny burst out. “How stupid was that?”

“They loved each other,” Miss Grace said firmly. “They really did, and it was a thing to behold, Danny, watching them fall for each other.”

“It was like magic,” Ali said.

Magic, schmagic, Danny thought. “But you can be married and not have kids,” Danny said. “You can adopt kids if you want them. You can-”

“They wanted their own child,” Miss Grace said.

“But,” Danny said, his face getting hot, “I’m going to go insane, right? I’m going to kill people!”

“No, no!” Mr. Murray said insistently. “I mean….not necessarily.”

“Not necessarily?” Danny shouted.

“They did not give us details,” Miss Grace said,” but your parents did tell us that they’d taken some steps, consulted some very smart people who know about the Families, about how to avoid the Hallow-plus-Wildwood problem.”

“What did they tell them to do?” Danny asked.

“We don’t know,” Mr. Murray said. “But have a little faith, Danny. Remember Arnica.”

“Arnie,” Ali said. “She never showed any signs of problems.”

“She was only thirteen when she got killed or whatever,” Danny said. “How do you know she wouldn’t have later?”

The Keepers looked uncomfortable.

“I guess we don’t,” Mr. Murray admitted.

This was terrible. Danny thought he was going to cry, and he was struggling mightily against it.

“Is that why those people were looking at me like that at the lawyer’s office?” he asked. “Do they know all that stuff?”

“Yes,” Miss Grace said. “And so does the Council.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Danny said.

Mr. Murray reached across the table and took Danny’s hands. He waited until Danny lifted his eyes to meet his own.

“You are nothing like Atticus,” Mr. Murray said. “I knew him very well. I loved him. I spent most of my young life with him, and you are nothing like him at all.”

“Awesome,” Danny said. “Nothing like him at all. He was smart, good looking. He sounded great until he went nuts and killed everyone.”

“There was always something off kilter about him,” Mr. Murray said. “I don’t see that in you at all.”

“And you’re pretty awesome too, kiddo,” Ali said, beeping Danny on the nose.

“Yeah, right,” Danny said. “Hallows are strong and smart, Wildwoods are like Professor X or something, and here I am, none of any of that.”

“There’s more to you than you see,” Mr. Murray said.

“I’m boring, like my uncle,” Danny said.

Miss Grace barked a short laugh. “Hardly,” she said. “I wish you were boring, you keep me on my toes.”

“Boring people don’t telepathically turn a bat colony on a gang of bullies,” Ali said.

Just tell me I’m not going to end up like that, Danny thought. That’s all I want, just tell me I won’t.

“We can’t promise you there won’t be problems,” Mr. Murray said, warm hands around Danny’s fingers, “but over the last eight hundred years those can’t have been the only Wildwood-Hallow hybrids. I suspect there were others who were perfectly fine, and we’ve only heard about the bad ones.”

“You think, or you know?” Danny said.

“I strongly suspect,” Mr. Murray said.

“Is that why my mom left?” Danny asked.

“No,” Miss Grace said. “After your father died, she was a mess, Danny. She couldn’t deal with anything. She had to go away.”

“She’ll come back someday,” Ali said.

Danny stood up from the table. “May I go to my room?”

“Absolutely,” Miss Grace said. “You have a lot to think about.”

Danny moved to leave. Ali reached out and grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him into a bear hug. He felt Miss Grace and Mr. Murrays arms around him too, the three of them hugging him with all of their hearts. Danny relaxed into it as Miss Grace stroked his hair and gave him a quick kiss to the top of the head.

“Everything is going to be alright,” she said.

“Okay,” Danny said, muffled.

They released him, and Danny stood back, pretending he wasn’t wiping his eyes on his sleeve. He went the long way around, through the front hall, stopping by the clock, feeling Gnomewood all around him.

It felt like the house was hugging him too. He didn’t think he was imagining it.

He went to his room and made sure Max was happy and alive. The little bat was still snoozing gently through the afternoon.

He plunked down on his bed, his bed now, his head spinning.

Aliens, monsters, psychopaths. He turned it all over in his head trying to convince himself it was shock he was feeling, that once he had it all straight in his mind it wouldn’t be so overwhelming.

He pulled out the albums and looked over the pictures, paying more attention this time. His uncle looked sad and lonely. His Grandfather and Grand-Uncle, the golden boys. The one photo of Atticus, no sign of anything aberrant in the clever face. All of them dead or missing.

He looked at the photos of his parents, his mother holding him in her arms, rocking him.

“Why did you do this to me?” he said. “You knew what could happen, and you made me, and then you just left me? How am I supposed to figure all this out by myself?”

Angrily, he pulled the photo of his mother out of the album.

“I hate you,” he said. “I hope you never come back, not ever!” He turned the photo and began to rip it in half, right down the middle.

He felt something hot in his ribcage, something icy-hot through his veins. A flash of blue fire erupted from his fingertips and the photo ignited, a blinding blue glow.

Danny dropped it in surprise, mouth open in shock.The floor smoldered. He jumped up and quickly stomped out the small fire, ashy pieces of the photo scattering like snowflakes. He stomped it until he was sure it was out, probably more stomping than was needed.

He put his hands to his head, then quickly pulled them away lest he set his own hair on fire by accident. He looked at them.

They were his own familiar hands, pale with long fingers. Nothing weird about them, no burns, no blue fire.

Something in his ribcage turned over gently.

“Oh, shit,” he swore to himself.