Not Very Nice People - Chapter 11/11: Mike's Choice free porn video

NOT VERY NICE PEOPLE by Crazy Baron Chapter 11: Mike's Choice Synopsis: The moment of truth has arrived for Michael Caldwell. He must choose between two different paths, but neither is free of troubles and challenges. Perhaps destiny or higher powers just cannot be fooled, regardless of what you do. ***** I was filled with a cold horror that threatened to disable my mental faculties altogether as I witnessed how a creature out of the most outlandish nightmare I could possibly imagine was rushing through the woods. It was carrying Dawn, formerly my male cousin Scott, away on its shoulder. The being should not have existed. It was roughly humanoid in shape, a hulking mass of muscle and gray scaly skin. It grunted and snorted as it made its way forward in a stooped posture. A panicked Dawn screamed and thrashed with all her might, but the monster held her firmly in place with just one thick arm wrapped around her. She was like a rag doll in the being's clutch. Her weight didn't bother or slow down the monster in the slightest, hinting at its enormous physical strength. Perhaps it was my sheer desperation and fear for the person who had once been my male cousin that forced me to act, or perhaps my Buffy instincts kicked in. At any rate, I suddenly regained my ability to move and think to the extent that I ran after the demon. The only thing that mattered to me there and then was saving Dawn at any cost. The monster had a considerable head start and was running fast, albeit a little clumsily, but I caught it with a short burst of my best possible speed on the next small clearing. It turned its head to take one quick look at me, but it didn't stop, apparently anxious to escape with its victim rather than fight. "Buffy!" Dawn screamed again. "Help me! Buffy!" "Hang on!" I yelled. "I'm coming!" Helping her was easier said than done. I had no weapon of any kind on hand, and I knew all too well that I would be no match to a being bigger than a heavyweight wrestling champion in a straight contest of strength. So I attempted the first thing that came to my mind: I took hold of Dawn's hand and tried to pull her down. The demon let out a loud snort of anger and shoved me with its free hand, sending me flying backwards. I landed on my back in the grass, grimaced--and realized to my amazement I had felt virtually no pain at all, even though I definitely should have. I sprung to my feet again and charged at the demon. I directed a hard kick at its calf in the hope that it would lose balance and drop Dawn. The kick did hit its mark and the being stumbled and roared, this time in obvious pain, but it stayed on its feet. It turned towards me, and I was treated to the full extent of its indescribable ugliness. It had large, ragged ears, a face that looked like a haphazard mass of wrinkled and torn skin full of lesions and boils, a gaping mouth with no teeth, and three glowing, piercing red eyes; the middle one was a bit above the other two in the being's forehead. Four long claws, like scythe blades, projected from each of its hands. I had no choice but to finish the fight I had started. I was consciously aware that such a move should have been far beyond my ability, but some outside influence was guiding me and telling me to perform a flying kick in the demon's head. My target was at the height of six or seven feet, certainly out of reach for me in my own body, or Cindy's. But my fear for Dawn's life and my own drove me headlong into attempting the impossible. When I took three running steps and leaped into the air, it was almost as though I could fly. My timing was perfect, as was my aim. My boot struck the demon squarely where the nose of a human being would be, between the eyes and the mouth. Drops of a dark blue liquid sprinkled out, and the abomination stumbled again and howled. I fell down to the ground by its feet but got up before it could retaliate by stomping or kicking me. "Buffy!" Dawn cried out again in an anguished and weepy voice. If I had needed more motivation to press home my next attack, her pleas of help would have been more than sufficient. The demon swung its arm at me. Its claws made a swooshing sound as they went past my head, but the strike missed by a comfortable margin, and then it was my turn. I gave the demon two hard kicks in the lower torso and followed them with a series of punches that sunk deep into its bulk. It had nothing visibly resembling genitals in its crotch, so I had no option of delivering a hard hit in an assuredly sensitive region, but the kicks and punches were enough to make it stumble backwards again. Dawn screamed and fell down from its shoulder, but I didn't see or hear her hit the ground. I had no opportunity to check on her. The demon had both of its hands free now, and it went on the offensive immediately. It growled and flailed its long arms furiously, and I had to bend down to evade its blows and retreat. By ducking at lightning speed, I barely avoided a lethal slash of a claw, and keeping my head down I got closer and punched the monster in its gut three times with all my might. It emitted another furious growl, but then one of its hands took a hold of the front of my jacket and sweater and lifted me up. Its fingers pressed painfully into my flesh through the clothes. It shook me and then threw me back; I screamed as I flew across half the clearing and slammed into the ground several yards away. My muscles hurt and my lungs felt like they were about to burst. The only thought in my head was to attack again, draw the demon's attention away from Dawn and hope for a miracle to save us. Even if I actually had Buffy's abilities, the monster would certainly win this fight otherwise. Just then, as I was rolling onto my side in order to climb back to my feet, my hand landed on a fallen tree branch. My first reaction was to ignore it as an insignificant part of my surroundings, but something-- perhaps desperation once more--made me take a second look at it. It was relatively long, straight, springy and of the right weight to be easy to handle for me. I picked it up and saw that the thick end was actually sharpened, with tool marks visible. Someone had cut the branch deliberately and then left it lying on the ground. As feeble as this weapon was, it would have to do. I felt the balance and weight of the tree branch in my hand and moved it around. The demon was now slowly advancing towards me, so the time had come to put the makeshift spear to use. I let out a war cry, mostly to prop up my own fighting spirit, and the demon replied with a howl of its own; then I started advancing too, holding the sharp end of the branch up. The demon swung its arms again, trying either to hit me or to knock the stick out of my hand, but its movements were fortunately cumbersome enough that I stayed one step ahead. One more close swipe of its claws followed, and then yet another, as I danced around the monster, looking for an opening to use the branch. Overcoming my fear was an achievement in itself there and then, but maintaining concentration and outmaneuvering the beast were required for the smallest chance to survive. All of a sudden the monster stopped flailing, and it lifted its arms up behind its head, probably intending to deliver an extremely hard blow with both fists. It flashed across my mind that my opportunity, a fleeting and meager chance to win, had come. I thrust my spear forward with as much force as I could bring to bear, and the tip struck the demon's middle eye, precisely where I had aimed. A dreadful, ear-shattering scream escaped the being's mouth as its eye was crushed. Purple sticky fluid gushed out of the wound, and with a sickening crunching sound the branch penetrated deep into the skull of the demon. Its movements stopped for a second, the howl of agony died away, and then it collapsed on the ground right next to me. I barely had the time to move aside and avoid being trapped underneath its bulk. The colossal, unsightly body rattled briefly in its death throes, shook all over and then went rigid with one last spasm, the branch still sticking out of its destroyed eye. "Jesus Christ," I mumbled and breathed heavily. My knees were so weak that I almost fell down next to the slain demon, and there was an acidic taste in my mouth. I had trouble forming coherent thoughts. "How... how could this be? Oh shit..." Thin wisps of gray smoke appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and I smelled something burning. My first reaction was to assume that there was a bonfire nearby, but as I laid my eyes on the carcass of the demon, I realized the smoke was coming from it. As I was watching, it burst into blue and green flames and began to emit so much heat that I had to step back. "Mike!" Willow's voice called. "Mike! Where are you?" "Over here," I replied wearily. "I'm over here. It's alright." "Holy fuck," Jake exclaimed as he emerged from a thicket and ran to me. "What was that? What just happened? Are you okay?" "Yeah. I'm fine." "You're bleeding!" he pointed out in a distressed tone. "You've got a wound in your forehead." "It's nothing. Just a little scratch. I don't even feel it." "What was that thing, anyway?" "A demon," I said and pointed at the burning body. "It was a demon. I slew it." "Like... for real? What the hell?" "I don't know," I sighed. "Don't ask me. It snatched Dawn, and I slew it. I killed it with a tree branch into the brain." "What... Does this mean you really are Buffy Summers now? A-all slayer-y and stuff?" I chuckled to myself wryly. "'All slayer-y,' you say, Willow dearest." "I mean," he corrected himself abashedly and made an all too obviously forced attempt to sound like his masculine self, "that you have the actual powers of an imaginary character, do you?" "So it would seem, but we can worry about that later. Come on, we need to tend to Dawn. Scott." I had almost forgotten about her after the demon had dropped her, and guilt assaulted me as I remembered that she was most likely injured and needed our help. But there was no one else in sight aside from myself, Jake and the remains of the demon; Dawn had disappeared completely. The forest was deserted as far as we could see. It occurred to me that she could be lying down in a hole in the ground, unable to move and seriously hurt. I was about to start calling out her name when my eyes caught sight of something out of ordinary. As we would find out, the demon was not the only and not even the strangest manifestation of magic around. At first, it was just a bit of blur in my peripheral vision, not unlike the visual effects that a tiny speck of dirt in one's eye might cause. I blinked, assuming it would go away, but it didn't. About thirty yards away, on the other side of the clearing and in front of a modest outcropping of rock with an almost vertical face, there was a misty, thin, roughly circular ring of very faint white light, floating in the air. Its lowest point just touched the ground, while the top reached to seven or eight feet, well above our heads. The landscape behind it was visible but slightly distorted, as if seen through a thin layer of uneven clear glass or ice. The phenomenon, whatever it was, did not attract attention easily, as it was very subdued and even difficult to see unless I knew where to look, but once I had noticed it, I could not stop staring at it in awe. "What do you think that is, Mike?" Jake muttered. "I honestly have no clue." I felt as though my hair were standing on end as we approached the apparition together very slowly, ready to run away any second. It remained stationary, not like a reflection that would change its shape or disappear when seen from different angles, and completely silent. We stopped a few yards from it, not daring to go any closer until we knew what we were dealing with. "Like a glow stick suspended in the air," Jake commented. "No lines or other supports anywhere, though." "I'll check what it looks like from the opposite direction," I said and walked to the side. Abruptly the ring of light vanished from my eyes-- there was no longer anything there. "Did you see that?" I shouted out to Jake. "See what?" "It went out." "No, it didn't," Jake contradicted, with a surprised expression on his feminine face. "It's still right there!" I took a step back and, to my astonishment, the light circle reappeared. A step forward made it vanish again. "Oh, right," I said and returned to where Jake was standing. "It has no depth. You can't see it at all from the side or the back." "It's incredible," Jake said. He extended his arm and put the palm of his hand close to the light to feel if it radiated warmth or anything else that the human sense of touch might register. He was careful not to make direct contact, however. "Could it be a force field or something?" Just then, we heard a young woman's voice from behind us. "Nice work, guys! The demon's dead, the world's safe. For a while." We both spun around as fast as we could; 'alarmed' would have been a mild term to describe our reaction. I had recognized the speaker immediately, but that did little to lessen my surprise at meeting Leslie Simmons--or rather Faith the Vampire Slayer--again here, of all places. She had approached so quietly and we had been so engrossed in fighting the demon and then investigating the odd light phenomenon that we had been totally oblivious to her. "You!" Jake cried out, with his eyes wide. "Yeah, me," she said and came closer. "I was tracking that little friend of ours through the woods, but looks like you got to it first and saved me the trouble. It was the one that got away from me. Oh, and the portal's there too. That's good. Two birds, one stone." Just like the demon, whose carcass was still burning on the ground some distance away, Faith seemed precisely as though she had stepped out of an episode of the Buffy show. Her mannerisms, speaking style, makeup and clothes were perfectly in character. Her lips were coated with dark red lipstick, and a hefty dose of mascara shadowed her eyes. To complete her carefully calculated bad girl image, she was wearing a jacket made of shiny black leather over a dark blue sweater, jeans of the same color with a metal keychain, and black boots. Even the devilish smirk on her face was indisputably Faith's. "We really ought to give you a good beating for what you did to us," Jake said through gritted teeth, narrowing his eyes. "You can try," she commented nonchalantly and pretended to study her black-painted fingernails, "but you'd better take one little thing into account. Slayer powers. You could get hurt pretty bad if we roughed it up, Willow." "He's not alone," I reminded her. "Okay, B," she said in a more serious tone, "timeout. I'm not here to fight you guys. We're on the same side, and there are things that need to get done." "Leslie," I spoke up emphatically, "I think---" "Faith," she corrected me. "---it's high time we got some answers from you," I continued. "What's more, I want them straight and simple. No more riddles or obscure allusions. After what you did, I believe we're entitled to the facts." "Fine," she conceded, "but don't go overboard with the questionnaire. The clock's ticking." "Are you actually real?" I asked her point blank. "I know a time and place where you never existed, or at the very least we never met or went to school together there. Who are you, and what are you? Where are you from?" She let out a chuckle. "I think I've already shown you how real I am, so that point's taken care of. Round Four and all that. As for school, we most definitely did meet there and you guys did ruin my junior year at Greensville High. You could be thinking of some other timeline where that didn't happen, but it did happen here." "Other timeline?" Jake repeated in astonishment. "What the hell are you people talking about?" "Like I've said before," Faith went on, ignoring Jake's interruption, "this is wicked big. There's a war on, the Old Ones against The Powers That Be, and we're part of it. I'm real, you're real, and the war is real." "How do I know that?" I questioned her. "The skinsuits, the demons and even you could be nothing but figments of my imagination. Maybe I'm in a psychosis and hallucinating everything." "Goddammit, Buffy!" she exclaimed in exasperation. "Look around you and think about all the freaky stuff going on. That's Angronok and his buddies trying to break into our world. What more proof do you need?" "It's not necessarily proof of anything if it's not objectively real," I argued. "Besides, don't call me Buffy. I'm not her." "Oh yeah, sure," she laughed. "You only look like her, sound like her, act like her, have her powers and slayed a demon five minutes ago. Right, you're so not Buffy. I must be confusing you with some other blond Slayer." "Who are you working for?" Jake asked Faith in his turn, before I could offer her a suitable comeback. "In the big picture, the good guys; or would be, if you weren't holding me up with all this talk." "Do you know what that thing is, then?" he continued and pointed at the circle of light. "You said something about a portal." "Yeah, it's a portal," Faith replied as if we were discussing an everyday matter comparable to buying a loaf of bread at a grocery store. "A gateway between two worlds. It's a smaller version of what Angronok wants his underlings to open for him." "Where does it lead?" "You both know that perfectly well," she said. "On the other end, there's a happy little town that's a Slayer short right now--or two Slayers and a Wiccan witch, to be more accurate. Which incidentally brings us to my point with respect to you two." "What's that?" I queried. "You basically have a choice here," Faith declared. "I take it the bottle lying on the ground a hundred yards or so thataway has some skin symbiont killer in it." "Shit!" Jake cursed. "I dropped it and forgot all about it! Was it still intact?" "Seemed to be." "How did you guess what was in the bottle, Faith? We tried to keep the whole thing a secret." "I know the stuff when I see it, and it's the perfect reason for you to go on a road trip like this. But back to the topic, girls. You can get the poison, go home and try removing your symbionts with it, but you should be aware that it's very risky. You could end up dead, and I'm not just saying this to scare you. The skins are an unremovable part of you now, so the potion will probably either do jack shit or kill you outright because the skins' memory of your old bodies is long gone by now, most likely. It may work, but then again, it may not. But if you want to go with that option, it's fine by me. I won't stop you." "What's the other option?" Jake asked. "You forget about that damn concoction and lose your childish attitude towards your new bodies, go through the portal with me and help stop Angronok. We find the talisman, destroy it and close the portal for good so no more demons can enter this world from the other side." "We can't leave Scott behind," I pointed out. "He's out here somewhere---" "No," Faith corrected me. "One, that's your sister Dawn you're talking about, and two, she's already over there. When the demon let go of her, she fell through the portal. You were too busy fighting the baddie to notice, but I saw the whole thing." Our conversation paused for a short while as I tried to come to terms with the situation. A million questions were burning in my mind, and I would have wanted to get answers to every single one of them, but no other thought or emotion could surpass the anxiety and worry I felt for Dawn. I was prepared to do anything and everything in my power to find her and bring her to safety, but I was also beginning to grasp the full implications of such a commitment. I would have to follow her to the other world to make sure she was alive and well. "And if we do go to Sunnydale?" I asked Faith. "What happens then?" "We deal with Angronok, you guys rescue Dawn together with your friends and live happily ever after as Buffy Summers and Willow Rosenberg," she said. "And before you start bitching and moaning about that, yeah, chances are you can't return to this dimension, but things don't exactly look promising if you stay, 'cause that means I'll have to attempt to save the Universe all by myself. It won't be easy, and if my plans go, like, really south, Angronok and the Old Ones will win, attack this world and every other one there is and tear the fabric of reality apart in the process. Bad news for everyone." "How do you know all this?" I inquired her. "I've got connections upstairs," she replied with a smug smile, "and you might too, if you paid a bit more attention to what your intuition and dreams are telling you. You really ought to be more in tune with your inner self, B." "I did have two strange dreams a while ago. Did you send those to me?" "So you admit you have visions. But anyway, no, I didn't send you anything. I was thinking about you and trying to come up with a way to send you a message that you're needed, so I guess there must be a sort of psychic link between us, but I don't have the power to put dreams into the heads of other people," she explained, going on to add, "It would be kinda cool if I did, though. Could come in handy at times." "There's this invention called the telephone," I pointed out. "You could have used that instead of some mystical mind links." "You wouldn't have answered," she retorted, "let alone believed a word I would've said." "She might be right about that," Jake commented to me. "How's it going to be, guys?" Faith prompted us again. "You need to make up your minds fast." Jake and I looked at each other. "We'll think about it," my friend managed to say after a silence of a few seconds. "Don't think too long," Faith responded. "There's a war to win. You can do what you want, but I'll be pulling my weight." She gave us a smirk that was something between a wry grin and an encouraging smile, walked calmly past us and straight into the light ring. A diffuse glow appeared to surround her for a brief moment when her body made physical contact with the surface inside the light. She stepped in and entered the portal confidently and casually, like a room through an ordinary open door. There were no bewildering sounds or visual effects; she simply disappeared from sight as soon as she was wholly inside the gateway, which showed no outward change or reaction to her passing through, and then Jake and I were alone once more. "That's not something you see every day," Jake remarked. I nodded in agreement but remained quiet, my eyes still fixed on the portal. What I had to do was now clear to me, and I had already made my decision, even though one part of me continued to hesitate and rebel against it. A ridiculous little idea had furtively grown into an overwhelming certainty that outweighed any other consideration. Doing the right thing would be painfully hard, but delaying it would only make it harder. "Okay, the show's over," my friend quipped. "Let's go home and get rid of these stupid girl suits at long last." "I'm not coming," I said. "What?" "She was correct," I explained in an even tone. "My place is not here. It's over there, on the other side. That's the only way we can hope to put a stop to all this madness and fix reality. The portal must be closed before half the demons in the Buffyverse swarm our world, and I have to save Dawn. She's my responsibility, whether we have an impending apocalypse or not." "Are you serious?" Jake shouted. "How can you be sure that tunnel leads to the Buffy universe? What if you end up in a black hole somewhere in another galaxy? And even if you do arrive where you're supposed to, what then? Are you prepared to take on and kill magical monsters for a living?" "I have to try," I said. "I've been there before, and I'm as good as certain you have too, although you might not remember it." "You're nuts!" he huffed. "Stark raving mad." "Maybe, but I must do this regardless." "And leave your family and friends behind?" "I can only protect them by crossing over," I argued and nearly choked on the words as I continued, "As long as I know they are safe and there's still a home waiting for me somewhere, I can survive anything and go through hell, literally, if it comes to that. What happens to me is not that important in comparison." His agitated expression turned into one of sadness, signaling his grudging acceptance of my decision. We both understood that I could not avoid my duty. It would haunt me endlessly if I attempted to run from it, even if others could stave off the end of the world without my help. "I want you to stay behind," I said to him. "You have to tell my family and the Andersons the news. I know it's a terrible task, and I hate to have to burden you with it, but there's no one else here who could do that. Make sure they understand the situation. If everything goes well and there is any way whatsoever for me to return home, I will." "Okay," he said quietly. "What about your car and the antidote?" "Drive the car back to my parents' house and leave it there. They'll look after it. As for the antidote, it's yours to do as you please. I probably won't be needing it anymore." "I guess this is a goodbye," he remarked. "Yeah, I think so," I said. "Take care, Jake, and do what you can to make this easier to my folks and Scott's. Maybe, just maybe, we'll see each other again when the whole mess is finally over." "Go already, if you're going, man," he exhorted with a rueful smile. "I can't hold it together much longer." I smiled back at him and felt my eyes moisten. It was for the best not to shake hands or to hug, I reasoned. We both would have broken down in tears, very likely, and then I might not have been able to leave after all. Mustering every last scrap of my willpower and deliberately ignoring the warnings and alarms sounded by my instincts as well as my rational side, I gave my reluctant body the order to move out. I went towards the shimmering circle of pale light, but unlike Faith, I didn't have the courage to march straight in. Instead I stopped in front of the portal, took a deep breath to steady my nerves and then slowly put my right leg through the hazy air in the middle of the ring. It met no resistance, but there was a kind of layer that hid the lowest part of my limb from my view completely; my leg seemed to end sharply at the knee as I was straddling the boundary of the gateway. I felt around with my foot but found nothing firm on the other side, only emptiness. Going into the portal would be uncomfortably like walking off a cliff, I realized and was beginning to waver until some impulse, no doubt originating with the Buffy part of me, coaxed me into taking the final remaining step. My right leg was resting on nothing, and as my left leg also lost contact with the ground, I lurched forward and down, and then came a stomach-turning sensation of falling. The portal swallowed me up. I had presumed I would see a dizzying display of colors and odd geometric shapes flashing past me, similar to how wormholes and other interdimensional pathways were often portrayed in fiction, but instead I was bathing in a blinding white brilliance that seemed to be coming from every direction, as though I had jumped inside an electric welding arc. A low buzzing sound filled my ears. This was not a place meant for a human being, I thought and closed my eyes, partially out of plain fear and partially because I couldn't see anything besides the light. I had time to regret my decision to leave the world where I belonged, but it was too late to turn back. My feet touched the ground a little later. The landing was gentle, actually surprisingly so, but I hadn't been able to anticipate it and had to restore my balance by taking a couple of fast steps forward as I opened my eyes. However, my vision needed a while to restore itself. I was once again standing on a firm surface--a lawn, to be more exact, and the blurry shapes in the distance morphed into large oak trees. The sun was setting and painting the sky with shades of red and yellow, as in the forest where I had been less than half a minute ago, but the air was markedly warmer. Instinctively I looked around to see the other end of the dimensional portal, but there were no signs of it anywhere, including directly above me. Going back home might be far more difficult than getting here had been, I surmised with a sinking feeling. Something else caught my attention, however. Long rows of tombstones stood on the lawn. In fact, I had come close to running into and tripping over one as I had arrived via the portal and struggled to stay on my feet. This was a cemetery, and if I really had ended up in Sunnydale, I would do well to leave the graveyard and seek the company of the living without further ado. As I walked speedily along the gravel path that led towards a gate in the stone wall surrounding the cemetery, I noticed that the portal had apparently changed more than my physical location. I was wearing a different set of clothes, similar to the one I had had on during the battle against the Sathir'na demons. The jacket and the pants were the same as then and clearly from Buffy's wardrobe, as were the boots. The cut in my forehead had started to sting slightly before I had stepped into the portal, but the pain was gone now, and I assumed that the wound had somehow healed during the teleportation. If that was the case, then perhaps whatever injuries Dawn had sustained had been mended as well. This was an encouraging thought, one of the few I had that night. Exiting the graveyard through the gate, I saw a familiar street junction ahead of me and recognized the spot. 1630 Revello Drive was only a couple of blocks from here, and I would get there in less than ten minutes. There was no danger of getting lost, and I arrived at the correct address without the smallest problem. The house was just as I remembered it, a welcoming home standing next to the street in the shade of the palm trees. A light was already on in a downstairs window as the last of the sun's rays were fading and the darkness was slowly settling in. A day or two ago (I was no longer sure how much time had actually elapsed in this universe or any other) I had slept the night there and then woken up in the morning to have breakfast with Joyce and Dawn. The next night had brought patrolling with Angel and a confrontation with the demons at the abandoned factory. That, I told myself, would be my routine and my life for the foreseeable future, whether I liked it or not. I walked up to the door and entered the house with much less hesitation than last time. While my previous reluctance for assuming Buffy's place still gnawed at me, I had made my choice and had no alternative but to go on. Joyce was at home. She appeared in the foyer as soon as I had closed the door behind me, holding a brown envelope in her hand. She had been doing paperwork of some kind. "Oh, hi, sweetie," she said to me with a smile. "Am I glad to see you, Buffy!" "What's wrong?" I asked. Her tone of voice and the expression on her face seemed to hint at minor apprehension, even though she was not openly anxious or distressed. "Nothing, as far as I know," she responded and smiled again. "It's just that Dawn is not home yet, and I always get a little jittery when either one of you is out of touch for more than a few hours." The news instantly made me far more alarmed than Joyce was. "What is it? Where is she?" "At Janelle's," she said. "Their class has an extra day off tomorrow, and she called earlier and asked if she could stay for another night. I gave her the okay, and we agreed that she'd call again, but she hasn't." "I'll get to the bottom of this," I promised emphatically. "And if she's in trouble, I'll sort it out and kick some demon ass along the way if necessary." "I don't think it'll come to that," Joyce commented with a soft chuckle. "She's hitting her teens and testing the limits a little bit. It's a normal part of growing up." I had my own suspicions but decided not to mention them to her. Perhaps the girl really was safe and sound after having crossed over to this reality. If she failed to turn up tomorrow, I would start my investigation into the matter, but in the meantime it was pointless to scare Joyce. She had her share of worries as it was. "Where were you, by the way?" she asked me. "You didn't come home yesterday, and I wondered what had happened." "I was... away, Mom," I replied. "But I'm back now--and I've got a job to do." TO BE CONCLUDED IN "FACE THE STRANGE" ***** Author's Note: If you read this story, please consider giving it a review. I greatly appreciate any comment and feedback, even when not everything a reader has to say is purely positive. Furthermore, I would love to know how much (if any) interest there is for the sequel, which is also slated to be the final part of the story arc. While "Face the Strange" is all but guaranteed to appear at some point, I will definitely put more effort into it and try to speed the writing process up if anyone out there is actually looking forward to it. --C.B.