Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Margaret
“Trick or treat?”
“Perfect.”
“Trick or treat?”
My lips twitch. “Baby, it’s still perfect.”
“But is it right?” Mitry Hellstone stands in the middle of the kitchen in an orange pumpkin costume.
There’s a hole cut in the back for her tail and two holes cut in the top for her horns.
She gazes up at me with the enormous solemnity of a four-year-old who has been preparing for this for eight diurnals. “Kari says you have to say it loud.”
“Kari’s not wrong.”
She raises her voice. “Trick or treat?”
“Oh, that’s the one.”
She beams and runs off to say it at her father.
Avery comes down the stairs with Sela on her hip.
The baby is dressed as a very small fire beast. She’s so cute I can’t handle the cute. There are felt horns, a felt hump and a stubby felt tail sewn onto the back of a onesie. The whole thing is objectively ridiculous, and yet absolutely perfect at the same time.
Avery bounces her. “Say hi to Aunt Margaret.”
Sela regards me from her mother’s hip with Avery’s exact expression and then puts her whole fist in her drooling mouth.
Dagr comes down last, with a fourteen-year-old’s swagger.
He is technically much too old for this trick-or-treating nonsense and has said so twice. But he is going anyway, because his sister asked him to walk with her, and because he has been grounded for eight diurnals and for tonight only, he is allowed freedom.
He’s wearing a length of pale cloth wrapped around him with a hood, and his face is powdered a chalky gray-white.
“Okay,” I say. “What are you dressed as?”
“A human.”
I stare at him.
“Kari and Loge are going as humans too,” he says. “It’s the scariest thing we could think of.”
A laugh-snort escapes my lips. “Dagr. Are you kidding me with this?”
“No fangs, horns, claws, or flame.” He shrugs, entirely straight-faced. “You come out at night, you take offspring away and nobody sees you coming because you don’t glow in the dark.”
I put my hands on my hips. “That’s genuinely upsetting.”
“Thank you.”
Hannibal stomps in from the vehicle bay in tactical gear.
No costume. A comm unit is at his shoulder and a Molten Lava field tablet in one claw.
He’s still bare-chested but with dark belts attaching his gear.
He stops in the middle of his own kitchen, looks at his four-year-old in a pumpkin costume and over at his infant dressed as a fire beast and smiles wide and toothy. “You are magnificent,” he tells Mitry.
“Trick or treat?”
“That is exactly correct.”
“Okay,” Avery says, turning toward me. “Margaret. Time for your costume.”
I give a curt nod and retire to my room for a moment for a quick change.
I’m still wearing my Tarvos uniform, which is the tube top, shorts and flip flops.
I love how, on this planet, I can wear these clothes morning, noon and night.
Yes, to perfect this costume I should be wearing a suit and high heels, but who has time for that nonsense?
My short hair is styled a little more serious and less poofy.
I apply more makeup to be seen at night.
Then I slide my arms into the dark trench coat and check myself in the mirror.
It’s not a great costume. It’s a trench coat and a notepad and a pin I made with a borrowed marker that has the word Believe on it.
But if you know, you know.
“Okay,” I say, coming back out. “Guess.”
Avery looks at me for exactly one second. “What the heck?” She actually has to hand the baby to Hannibal. “Margaret. Are you a—”
“I’m an FBI agent,” I confirm, “from that very old, black market New Earth show we used to watch, The X-Files. Remember how it was about a male who believed in absolutely everything and a female who was the scientific skeptic who believed in absolutely nothing? They worked every single case together for eleven years and never once agreed about anything.”
“You’re Mulder? You’re the believer one?”
“Yep.” I tap the pin. “Mulder had this word on his wall. Nobody ever took him seriously and he was right about basically all of it.”
“Oh my gosh,” Avery chuckles. “You are dressed as an alien conspiracy theorist, on a planet that is alien to us, to go and hunt an alien conspiracy?”
“Yes,” I answer brightly.
She gasps and points at me. “And this means that Vidar is Scully.”
“Yes, he and I are doing a role reversal, aren’t we?”
Hannibal looks at the pin. Then at me and his bound. “I do not understand,” he says.
I pat his shoulder. “You’re not supposed to.”
I have not seen Vidar since the hallway last night.
He didn’t have breakfast with us and he’s been at the wall since midday.
I don’t go and knock on his door or message him because I figure he’s avoiding me simply because he’s super busy and also he needs to keep his head on straight.
There’s also the added bonus that he literally needs to keep me, the civilian, away from his scientific conclusions so as to not taint his evidence.
It’s sad but true.
This is why, as the first stars are blinking in the night sky, I’m stepping outside without Dr. Vidar Coalstone.
It’s too bad he can’t be there to see it because the change that’s been made to these streets for Halloween is amazing.
Riley and everyone else, did an outstanding job.
This is certainly a night I will never forget.
The community at dusk is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen and I am not being dramatic.
I go trick or treating with the Hellstone family. Hannibal, Avery, Dagr, Mitry and Sela. Hannibal strides at the front of our group with Skylo on leash. Avery pushes Sela in a stroller. Dagr walks with Mitry. And I’m in the midst of all of this, with a wide smile on my face.
There are gourds everywhere.
Every domicile. Every path. Down both sides of the drive that circles the lake, along the walls, on the steps, clustered around the community center, hundreds of them, carved with faces, all of them lit.
I stand in the middle of the drive and watch Skoll Strikestone walk down a row of eleven carved gourds and light each one with a short precise flame without breaking stride, the way another being might tick items off a list. I have to stop walking and watch in wonder.
“Yeah,” Avery says. “Wait till you see them do the ones on the water.”
Riley Touchstone is running the event like a military operation and enjoying herself more than any being I have ever met.
When we reach the Touchstone house I see she’s got a headset and she shows me the route map.
She’s recording live on her Intelgram account in short bursts and then dropping the tablet and shouting instructions at somebody.
A hundred and fifty million Hyrrokin are watching a gated community on Tarvos, which happens to have a large concentration of humans, celebrate the alignment by handing out candy in the dark.
“Margaret.” She grabs my arm as I pass. “Margaret, look at the feed—”
She shoves the tablet at me.
Comments are scrolling faster than I can read.
“Hyrrokin from four continents. Beings from three other planets. Somebody in the outer sectors is asking where they can buy a carved gourd. They love it,” Riley says.
Her eyes are bright. “There are four communities on the eastern side already committed to doing their own version of Halloween next year. Somebody in Fire Creek is already asking me for the route template.”
“Riley, this is wonderful. You’ve done an amazing job organizing this.”
“And you and Vidar are doing an amazing job of helping to keep the kids safe during the alignment. Thank you so much.” She squeezes my arm and is gone.
Chloe has a trick or treat station at the Heimdall Residence.
She’s set up in the foyer with the doors thrown open and the staircase glowing gold behind her. Both human and Hyrrokin children and their families are coming up under the fanned wings with their buckets out to be handed treats by a human female standing in the jaws of a monster.
Bergelmir is nearby, providing security.
I wave at Bestla and Grandma Narvi who have placed a bench on their own front porch. A small child approaches in a costume made of what appears to be sacking.
“What are you?” Grandma Narvi demands.
“A rock.”
Narvi looks at Bestla. Bestla looks at Narvi.
“That is a very good rock,” Narvi agrees and gives him extra candy.
And overhead, the whole time, the sky is changing colors.
The signs of the alignment are breathtaking.
Two moons are closing and I can actually see it happening, slowly, over hours.
The gap between them narrows while a hundred kids run around underneath with buckets.
All over the community, in the middle of walking, families stop and tip their heads back and look up at the phenomenon in the sky and then go back to whatever they were doing.
An older Hyrrokin male tells a small child that this is his second alignment.
I overhear Dagr explaining orbital mechanics to Kari and Loge Touchstone with enormous patience.
Mitry, from somewhere behind me, shouts at full volume, “Trick or treat.”
I turn a corner and see Vidar wandering on the walkway on the edge of the lake.
He’s so handsome, he again takes my breath away.
Never did I think I’d find a gruesome Hyrrokin, who in reality looks like a creature from hell, so attractive.
I want so badly to jump him and have sex with him all night long.
But it’s true. I love his flickering barbed tail.
The bald head with the thick black horns, it does it for me.
And the smoke that often wafts from the nostrils of his crooked nose is simply the best. Well, the acres of red skin and that bare chest and the bare feet, I love that too.
He wears dark trousers with filthy knees because he’s been in the mud, a smear of it up one forearm, and he has clearly been out there since midday because there is a whole diurnal of the jungle on him.
Vidar stops at the edge of the drive and he just stands there.