She found herself walking beneath more stars than she ever imagined could exist.

  There may have been white wisps of clouds here and there, but they blended with the fields and fields of the eyes of the ancestors and it was hard to see them. Snaking trails and pools of darkness in the sky around the horizon marked the canopies of the sparse trees her people walked amongst.

  The Left Eye of the Great One was not in the sky. She was sleeping.

  And yet, still, her people persisted in pursuit of their hunters, who had found a sizable and weakened prey.

  It would take days to wear out the beast and bring it down, but they could all walk, and so they did. The caretakers and artisans, the old and the children, and herself were taking their time and being careful, letting their hunters lead the pursuit and harry their prey into exhausting itself. It was the way they did things, and it worked.

  But in this moment, she found herself without a care or concern, and could simply wonder at the sky as they trekked beneath it.

  Everyone else was taking care of themselves or each other, and she could simply be.

  She’d been having nightmares tely, and terrible ones at that, so it was a relief to spend some time at night not sleeping, pushing her way through the grasses and looking up at all of her ancestors watching her in return.

  Perhaps they could help.

  This would be a good time to talk to them.

  So, with each step, she sent up a little prayer. She muttered her words and gazed up at them as she carefully felt her way through the grasses with her feet. Walking in the footsteps of others made it safer to do this.

  “What must I do to ease my nightmares?” she asked in a nguage that part of her realized wasn't English. “How can these malicious spirits be lifted from my soul?”

  Two questions, spoken several times each, in alternation. She found herself looking back down at the darkened ground as her words became part of her hiking, a rhythm that carried her on.

  But her ancestors didn't answer, of course.

  They never did by voice. The best she could expect was a thought in her own mind. Maybe, if she was lucky, a fully formed one that seemed to come from somewhere else. But often it was just an impulse at the right time, and the sense that she’d done right if she’d followed it.

  But even that was not forthcoming as the night's journey wore on, and she began to feel discouraged.

  She even addressed her great grandmother by name, but to no response.

  She would have taken her nightmares to her living elders, her mother and her aunts, but she was ashamed of her visions. They involved her taking actions against her children she’d never purposefully dream of doing.

  In her nightmares, she was the monster, and she didn’t know what to do about it.

  Her heart sank as she realized she might be cursed.

  But, also, her attempts to entreat her ancestors for wisdom reminded her of her other nightmares, when she'd go searching for a safe pce to pee and find danger behind every bush. It often seemed that in dreams, it was impossible to get what you wanted or needed. And maybe that was a lesson for life.

  But no, that was magical thinking, Cassy thought. Confirmation bias as trauma, warping her dreams. Ultimately meaningless. Life itself wasn't really like that.

  But she liked this dream, despite its frustrations. It felt powerful to be someone else, and it felt special to get a vision of what it might have been like to be an early homonid. One of her own ancestors.

  And, just as she was thinking that, marveling at how vivid this walk through an equatorial savanna felt, and how gorgeous and detailed the night sky was, wondering at how her brain had concocted these full sensory visions, something bck and gangly like a lemur or orangutan came rushing perfectly silent from one of the trees and collided with her in a whoosh of tingly chills and muscle spasms.

  “I'll eat your nightmare demons,” a strange voice said in her mind. “I'll protect you and bring you happiness.”

  And then she found herself thinking it was lucky she'd found someone so full of parasites. She’d nearly starved to disincorporation while clinging to that tree after the death of her st host.

  The coarse wood grains of the dining room table reflected her body heat as they pressed against her cheek. And the next thing she became aware of was the embarrassing pool of saliva that had collected under the corner of her mouth.

  There was cool but harsh sunlight striking her closed eyelids, and when she curled her fingers she discovered where her hands were. Her right one was in her p, and her left y on the table in front of her face.

  She’d fallen asleep at the table and couldn't remember how she got there, let alone what had happened or how long it had been since her visit with Synthia in her domain the night after the storm.

  “Oh, hey,” a soft but familiar voice said. “You were snoring so quietly, but the table kind of amplified it. It was cool. You're awake now, right?”

  She didn't quite feel like opening her eyes and sitting upright yet, but that was Ayden talking. Why was he here?

  She knew from the temperature of the room, the familiar texture of the table top, and the shape of the chair beneath her, that she was in her own home. And from the angle of the sun on her eyes, she guessed it was te morning.

  “I'm pretty sure she's awake,” Ayden said to someone else.

  She tapped her fingers and cwed at the table as a way of confirming his suspicions and expressing an emotion. Then she lifted her head and turned it the other way, away from the sun, and brought her right hand up onto the table. And groaned.

  She’d hoped she could make a nice snarling growl, but it didn't come out that way. It was just a little moaning goan.

  “Yeah,” Ayden agreed with her. “I get ya. Take your time.”

  “Coffee?” Susan, her housemate asked.

  Cassy repeated her groan.

  “Yes,” Ayden said. “For both of us, please. We had a long and bad night.”

  “I think most of us did,” Susan replied from her way into the kitchen. “But getting fired like that sucks extra hard.”

  Oh, so it hadn’t been that long.

  Cassy opened her eyes to spy her slumped silhouette cast against the far wall of the dining room, right between the theatrical sized Frozen poster and the hand painted “We’re here, we're queer, get used to it!” sign taped to the wall.

  She was right at the edge of the table, her right pinky finger hanging off of it.

  She frowned and mumbled, “Who am I?”

  She cringed at how clichéd it sounded.

  “Ah, shit,” Ayden said.

  He was sitting across the table from her.

  But before she could reassure him or eborate, there was a heavy knock on the front door.

  “That’s gotta be Greg!” Ayden called to Susan. “Hang in there Cassy. You're surrounded by friends.”

  Susan called back, “Let him in. Does he do coffee?”

  “Yep!”

  Cassy heard Ayden push his chair back and start heading for the door, muttering something about texting like a human being instead of knocking like a monster.

  She lifted her head in time to watch him exit the room to reach the little foyer. It was more of a mud room, but they used the fancy word for it and called the house their manor, even though they just rented.

  She saw dust motes dancing in the harsh shallow sunlight, and thought she saw something else trailing behind Ayden’s head. Something like the streaming feathers of a bird of paradise, but rendered in the warping of space.

  She recognized what it was, but didn't know why.

  Emotional parasites. Dream eaters.

  Almost everyone had them.

  Though, they'd been sparse in Gresham tely.

  Oh shit.

  She sat up straight and looked back into the kitchen to see if she could catch a glimpse of Susan.

  Her housemate crossed her vision returning to the electric kettle from the sink, with water filter in hand. She had the parasites, too. A couple of bold ones, who had to be unaware of how visible they were to one such as she.

  Of course, she was better hidden than they were.

  What?

  “Hey, Greg,” Ayden said from the front door. “Come in. She's awake, but maybe confused.”

  “Dammit. OK. Thanks,” Greg said. “Oh, this is a nice little house.”

  “Isn't it?”

  “I love the decor.”

  She turned to see them both walk into the room, brow furrowed, and heard herself say, “I'm Cassy.” That felt right. That was her name. Well, her nickname. “Cassiopeia, actually. Yep, that's me. Good.”

  “Is Cass still good?” Greg asked, concern creasing his face under his beard as he pulled a chair out to sit in.

  He had a single parasite.

  Cassy lightly spped the table and looked at her hand. There was nothing unusual about it.

  “I might have to figure out what ‘good’ means again to answer that. But my migraine is all gone,” she answered.

  “So, what did Felicity do?” Ayden asked.

  She tilted her head when she looked at him, but couldn’t figure out how to answer that. “What do you mean?”

  Greg grunted, “Check your messages. Felicity used your phone earlier this morning, before I got a moving viotion.”

  “You got a ticket?”

  “First time, yeah.”

  She pulled the edges of her mouth down and pouted for him, and then reached for her phone, which was usually in her purse. But it was on the table, face down, not far from where her left hand had been.

  It looked like it might have a physics eater in it.

  “Ah,” she said and picked up her phone to turn it over.

  The physics eater immediately dashed for a wall socket.

  So her touch was what it took to alert them of her nature. Interesting. That could come in handy.

  The test messages were in the group chat, from Ayden and Greg, all in response to the st message sent from her phone. Felicity had told them to tell Synthia she was sorry.

  Sorry she’d fed herself to Cassy, she remembered.

  Oh.

  Oh, wow.

  Oh, holy shit.

  “I – she did it,” she muttered more to herself, but still loud enough for the others to hear. “She took your dare, Greg.”

  “She? Felicity? What dare?” he asked.

  Cassy blinked at him, realizing now that she remembered it more clearly than he did. And, she could remember so much more. Things were coming back to her that she’d never experienced.

  She reminded him, “To let me eat her up and give me all her memories and who and what she was. I, um. I remember… I remember the tactile sensations of my earliest host cracking open the bones of a scavenged carcass to eat the marrow…” She wanted to say more, but the memory of the unique and enticing taste of marrow and the feeling of its intense density of nutrients reaching her own blood was too distracting. And she found herself staring into a bnk spot on the wall.

  Ayden was subtly shaking his head in the corner of her vision. Then she saw movement near her elbow and turned to see Susan, who was putting a mug of coffee onto the table.

  “I wish I had time to py in your games,” Susan said. “You always have the best stories. But I just can’t stay up that te.”

  It took Cassy a second to realize what Susan was talking about, but when she did, it didn’t help her figure out how to respond.

  “Your coffees are coming, gentlemen,” Susan said to Greg and Ayden. “I’ve only got one pourover funnel.”

  “Oh, we’re fine with that. Thank you so much,” Ayden said.

  “I’m having tea,” Susan said. “But I’d love to join you all and hear about this one, if that’s OK.”

  “Huh,” Greg grunted again. “Sure, but, uh. You know that storm yesterday?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is about that, not any game. Some people saw more than just the cloud or, you know, the weird hallucinations that went with it.”

  “Oh?”

  “We three were in the middle of it. And Cassy was there the longest.”

  “Oh, holy shit, are you OK?” Susan asked Cassy in a sudden shift to over-performative but maybe also genuine concern.

  Finding herself surprisingly able to do so, Cassy looked Susan right in the eyes until her housemate looked uncomfortable about it, then said, “Monsters are real, Sue.”

  She idly wondered if she could look out of Susan’s eyes if she wanted to.

  Maybe after she got permission.

  theInmara