Dave lay still in the corner of the elevator, winded by his long sprint and more than a little stunned from being slammed against the wall. He had no idea what had thrown him, and was pretty sure he didn’t want to find out. The blond was laughing her ass off, gasping and wheezing almost to the point of tears — and worse, the two disembodied male voices were laughing right along with her.

  He rubbed the back of his skull, feeling a slight lump of swelling beneath his shaggy hair. “This isn’t funny!” he snapped, glaring at Charis and the empty spaces where invisible creatures were getting their jollies at his expense. “I don’t know what you’re laughing about, you crazy woman! You’re haunted by invisible body-snatchers, and if you don’t give that necklace back you’re going to have trouble with a lot more!”

  Charis wound down, daintily dabbing a tear of mirth from beneath one perfectly made-up eye. “Don’t worry, Dave. The amulet is inert. The charge that was in it has transferred into your body. I’m not going to ‘get’ anything.” she giggled. “And my guys wouldn’t even try to snatch my body, or we’d have a serious talk.”

  Dave wasn’t sure what to say to that. He gave her body—a very nice body—a long dubious look. If he were a body snatcher that would be prime snatching territory. His eyes snagged on the unbuttoned V of her blouse, exposing the delicate edge of her collar bones and the hint of a boisterous cleavage. Hell, he was human and he wanted to snatch.

  Down, boy. Bad Dave. She consorted with the enemy, she’d stolen his artifact, and she still hadn’t answered a single one of his questions to his satisfaction. Until things changed, he had to think of her as an enemy. No matter how low she unbuttoned that blouse.

  Charis snapped her fingers at the corner of the elevator beside her, jerking his attention away from paradise. “Guys, up your amperage. Let’s see if this guy can get a look at you.”

  Two large, humanoid figures faded slowly to visibility beside her, at first composed of bright white flickering cores with translucent outlines. Before Dave had time to protest the lights solidified into two men.

  The one closer to Charis looked normal, a sun-bronzed beach boy with long blond hair and a Ninja Turtles tee shirt. In every respect he looked like a healthy, handsome human, without a single flaw. Dave could have passed him on the street and never given him a second glance. Which was weird, because Dave had never seen one of their kind who wasn’t creepy or mutated or both.

  The guy next to him, however, was anything but normal. Tall, slender, with skin a deep bluish-gray like an overcast sky at twilight. Eyes that were pure blue so vivid they seemed to glow, without so much as a pupil or hint of white. Alien bone structure with broad cheeks and a sharp chin, and narrow pointed ears. If all that wasn’t enough, he had fangs. Bright white canines, upper and lower, like a vampire toothpaste commercial. Those teeth were now displayed in a wide grin.

  Oh yeah, that wasn’t human. Not even close.

  “Shit. They’re from the Moon! I thought the aliens were all dead!” Dave grunted with instinctive protest, pressing his back even closer to the wall. Holy shit, the elevator was filling with aliens, ones that could become physical without stealing a body. And they looked cheerful, which had to be a really, really bad sign.

  “Dave,” Charis waved her hand toward the men. “– meet Mike and Indigo.” She looked smug, crossing her arms over her chest and gave him a smile that dared him to deny her invisible friends were real.

  They were real all right; the question was whether they were controlling her the way the monsters had controlled animals and lowlifes in every town he’d hit between LA and San Francisco. She didn’t look possessed, but what the hell did Dave know?

  Before he could fire off his first frantic questions about them, the elevator doors opened, revealing a wide gray-carpeted hall sided by four oak office doors. Charis turned on her heel, breezing out of the elevator without a backward glance. The two man-shaped alien thing creatures who could turn invisible followed her, Mike motioning for Dave to do likewise. “This way,” the smiling surfer dude monster said, even as he began to fade into transparency once again.

  “No way in hell.” Dave’s voice felt rough in his tight throat. His heart was still hammering and he was pretty sure he was somewhere between the frying pan and the fire. If invisible people wanted him to go somewhere, then he wanted to be on the opposite end of town. “I don’t feel like having my cranium drilled or my anus probed, thanks anyway.”

  “Dave. No one wants to probe your anus.” Charis sounded amused and impatient. She held up his amulet and wiggled it invitingly. “Come on!”

  There she went again, telling him what to do! She probably wouldn’t give him a straight answer if her life depended on it, and it was really beginning to piss Dave off. “Who the hell are you people? And what the hell are those… things! Do you work for the Space Force? Do you work for the government??!”

  “I’ll tell you inside,” she flicked a copper-painted claw toward an office door. “We shouldn’t talk out here. Too many nasty fraggles roaming around.”

  “Fraggles?!” he choked. If she tried to convince him Fraggles were real, so help him God, he was going to shoot somebody. His insanity limit had just been reached; there was only just so much bullshit he could deal with, and Fraggles went beyond the pale. Instantly he was furious and found himself shouting. “What the fuck are you talking about! There is no such thing as Fraggles! It’s not fucking funny! They’re just Jim Henson puppets, for Christ’s sake!”

  Charis cocked a hip out, propping one fist on it. She leveled an unimpressed stare at him. “Get a grip, Dave. Now, would you get off the floor and get in the office, or do you have to have a breakdown in a public hallway?”

  Actually, he’d like to have a breakdown in the hallway. But she had a point. Rolling around on the floor screaming about fraggles would probably have someone calling the cops.

  He took a deep breath and forced himself to think calm, sane thoughts as he levered himself up off the floor. Standing on the threshold of the elevator, holding its doors open with his shoulder, he tried to speak quietly.

  “I want to know what those things are. Mike and Indigo. Because one of them is obviously an alien, but they told us all the aliens from the Moon were dead. And I want to know who you are, and why you glow, and don’t give me crap about being a Ghostbuster! You keep saying you’ll explain, but you don’t. You’re manipulating me, you’re forcing me to go places I don’t want to go, you’re hanging out with monsters, you’re helping Them…”

  “All of ‘Them’ aren’t evil, okay? Some of ‘Them’ are nice people.” Charis glared, her wide green and hazel eyes angry.

  “…And you stole my thingie!” he shouted, temper fraying all over again. A moment later he realized how stupid that sounded, but he was too frustrated to care.

  Charis looked like she was just about at the end of her patience. “What is it with you and public scenes! Look, these other three doors are normal businesses and their secretaries are probably listening to you through the door right now wondering if they should pick up the phone and dial security. And this was supposed to be a secret hideout. Do you want me to get Mike to pick you up and carry you? Fine. All right, okay, you win. All right? Fine!” she yelled, throwing up her hands. “They’re what you’d call angels, okay?”

  “Angels! Are you on crack?!” Dave pointed stiff armed toward where the blue fin-earred guy had last been visible. “HE LOOKS LIKE A B-MOVIE MONSTER! That thing is DEFINITELY some kind of alien from the Moon, he looks like an Enshi—”

  She seemed vaguely insulted. “No he doesn’t. Believe me, no B-movie ever had make-up that good, and the Enshi all had black skin.” With one last parting glare, she turned on her heel and jerked open the door of an anonymous office, storming through. Dave was left behind in a bare, empty hall.

  “I want my thing back!” he shouted after her.

  “Come and get it!” Charis yelled from somewhere beyond the door.

  Dave stood in the empty lobby and ground his teeth, hating how helpless he was. If this were a normal, human problem he would know what to do. If he were being harassed and hunted by the mob, or Colombian drug lords, or terrorists, he would have some way of handling it. He could call the cops. He could get help from authorities. At the very least, he could buy a lot of bullets and shoot the bad guys when they came after him.

  How was a guy supposed to deal with invisible monsters nobody else could see? Monsters that looked like the aliens which had poured off of Rune the day it had arrived, killing people and blowing shit up looking for something they never found, aliens that had all fallen over dead two weeks later and to this day nobody knew why. Monsters that attacked by mentally and emotionally wearing a man down until he broke, and then tried to claw their way into his body by wriggling into his mouth while he slept? He couldn’t call the cops. He couldn’t get help from the authorities. He couldn’t shoot them unless they were in a stolen body, and he didn’t want to shoot some hapless bystander who was just as much their victim as he was.

  He’d tried everything he could think of over the past couple weeks. Holy water. Crosses. Blessed candles. Sacred symbols. Running like hell in random directions to shake them off his trail. When he’d confessed his problem to a Priest in Santa Cruz and begged for help, or at least advice, the man had referred him to a psychologist before asking him to leave. Nothing helped, nothing worked. Everybody thought he was crazy.

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  Until now. Charis Grades had seen the monster in the sandwich shop when it called his name. Charis Grades had made it go away. Right before she revealed that she worked with more invisible monsters — monsters who looked like the aliens from Rune — then stole his amulet.

  Well, that was one problem he refused to just live with.

  Straightening his shoulders, Dave stalked toward the office she’d gone into. He opened the heavy oak door with a furious heft and strode past the threshold. He only noticed at the last instant that the open doorway was shimmering with a near-invisible light. His entire body tingled as he passed through, as if he’d touched high voltage and miraculously come out unscathed.

  “Ah!” he gasped as he stumbled into a small carpeted reception area and came face to face with a big, muscle bound man seated in a chair across from the door. This guy was absolutely and unapologetically alien, but nothing like the Moon ones. He seemed to be human with golden-brown skin and feline features, honey gold fur on his arms, and massive hooked claws at the end of each short, blunt finger. But he wasn’t human: his entire form was overshadowed by an eight foot tall transparent leonine shadow sitting in the exact same position, with glowing green eyes. He wasn’t sure if the cat-man was inside the lion-creature shadow, or the other way around. The human form seemed to be its disguise. Or maybe the body that it had snatched.

  “AHH!” Dave shouted again, leveling his gun at the lion-man so fast he almost dropped it.

  This was nothing like the monsters, or Charis’ glowing friends. This thing was physical in all its sweat and furry glory, breathing the same air as he was, flexing its wrestler muscles. It took him a few seconds longer to realize the thing — man — lion — was wearing a neatly pressed and buttoned security uniform, complete with a black company base ball cap and a radio clipped to its belt.

  Beyond the Lion, Charis stood beside a high reception desk behind which sat a middle aged African woman with neatly coiffed hair and that same strange gold symbol stuck to her forehead. After giving Dave a long, bland once-over, the receptionist turned to Charis.

  “…and him?”

  Dave couldn’t take his eyes off the living, breathing cat-man in front of him. “What is it! Is he… is he possessed or something?!”

  “Oh, he’s with me.” Charis told the receptionist as she signed into the guest book, totally ignoring Dave. “He’s an Asset.”

  Dave hoped to God the thing was human under all that… fur. “Can you hear me, man? You’re possessed and it’s mutating you! Push it out! Don’t let it take you! Can you hear me??”

  Lion-man just stared blandly at him.

  “Mmm hmm,” the receptionist raised her eyebrow, gave Dave one last unimpressed glance, and returned to work. The sound of typing as her long red nails flew over her keyboard.

  The security… cat… lifted one thin lip to expose a two inch ivory fang. It might have been a smile, or a sneer. A rumble vibrated like a diesel engine in its chest. Was it growling??

  “Shit!” Dave yelped, jumping backwards, only to trip over a shiny parlor palm beside the door.

  “Hey, watch it!” a tiny, Bostonian accented voice barked from inside the plant.

  Dave screamed. He couldn’t help it. “AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  His voice was probably pitched so shrill that the sound echoed for blocks. It wasn’t manly, but goddamn, even the plants were talking. Nobody could be expected to deal with this.

  Scrambling away from the aliens, the women, and the evil talking parlor palm, Dave found himself wedged once again in a corner beside the high-voltage office door. He pointed his gun at everyone in the room, feeling a cold sweat trickle down his back and armpits, knowing he probably looked about as composed as a six year old girl watching a horror movie. He was beyond caring. “I just want my thing!” he yelled at them all. “Give it back, and I won’t hurt you!”

  Charis sighed, walking to the center of the room to face him. She planted her fists on her hips. “Go ahead and shoot.”

  Dave stared at her beyond the wobbling barrel of his pistol, seeing her clean white blouse and all-American good looks. After a brief hesitation, he swung the gun away from her to point back at the lion man. “No, you’re human. And a girl. I’ll shoot THEM.”

  The secretary and the security guard exchanged a wry glance.

  Dave kept sputtering, trying to talk himself through the crisis and make sense of a world gone insane. “They brainwashed you, didn’t they? You look like a nice girl, they had to. You wouldn’t be with these people if you had a choice. They probably kidnapped you. They’re probably the ones who took Professor Cragley! Did they use you for bait, to get the amulet from me?”

  Charis sighed, then tossed him the amulet. “Fine. Take it. But if you want to know what the monsters are, and why I have invisible guys, and why Milo looks like a cat, I’m going to be in the conference room getting coffee. Feel free to join me when you calm down.” With a flick of her long golden hair, she turned around and sauntered through a door beside the reception desk.

  With a complete lack of regard for his gun, the receptionist returned to typing on her computer and the security lion fished a magazine off the table beside him. He flipped it open, idly perusing a home decorating article.

  Dave nervously aimed the gun at one after another; the lion, the receptionist, the parlor palm. The lion again. His hand was getting slippery from sweat, and he had no idea what to do. With a half glance spared for the bronze medallion in his hand, he shoved it into his pants pocket and tried to consider his options.

  He could leave. Move through the high voltage doorway and exit the Building of Madness. But he would be leaving answers behind, and he’d be abandoning a nice human girl to the mercies of mutant cat boy and the sentient plant. Not to mention the invisible guys. Could he take her away with him? Should he?

  She seemed pretty happy here. But maybe she just didn’t know any better. Maybe she was brainwashed.

  The security guard-cat flipped a page, examining pictures of throw rugs.

  Dave decided to take a chance. He eased a half step toward the center of the room, keeping his gun pointed at the mutant cat who totally ignored him. “Hey! Hey, girl! Get out while you can, come with me! You don’t want to be here with these things, they aren’t human!”

  There was a distant sound like a cabinet door closing. “I’m making café mocha!” Charis called, a moment before the distinct burbling of a coffee maker began to percolate.

  Now that was just playing dirty. He hadn’t had coffee in weeks. The scent of fresh grounds perfumed the air.

  “Grace, you want coffee?” Charis asked. “Milo?”

  The secretary didn’t even glance up from her computer screen. “Sure, hun.”

  The cat-man only grunted.

  Dave stared at the security guard, creeping another half step toward the center of the room. He was in dangerous territory, directly between cat boy and talking plant. A practical kill zone, and the only path to reach Charis and the coffee.

  The lion looked up at him from the magazine’s glossy page, unblinking eyes slit and utterly feline. It stared at him eye to eye, as if the gun didn’t exist.

  “I’ve got a silver bullet in here,” Dave lied.

  The lion slowly crossed it’s arms over its massive chest, the move exaggerating its enormous muscles, as if to say ‘try it’.

  “Just stay there.” Dave told it, sidestepping around it, turning his back to the plant. It had to be a lesser evil, it didn’t have muscles and fangs. “Don’t move. I mean it. I shot a dog last night. You could be next, get it?”

  A sound suspiciously like a snort came from the direction of the receptionist.

  Dave kept sidestepping, his eyes glued to Furball. “I just want the girl.”

  Lion man didn’t even blink. He stared Dave in the eye until the man was finally across the hall, backing through the conference room door. Once he was safely inside the new space Dave grabbed the door and slammed it closed, spun around, grabbed a folding chair set at a table a few feet away and braced it under the door knob to wedge it shut. Theoretically. At least it worked in movies.

  There wasn’t much else in the room besides a long brown folding table, a half dozen other chairs, four old windows overlooking a badly paved street, and a counter along the far wall. Charis stood there pulling two mugs out of an upper cabinet as fresh coffee spat and steamed inside a coffee pot.

  “You!” Dave pointed at her. “You need to be rescued! What the hell are you doing with these things? You’re a nice girl! You’re cute and… and blond! And you glow! You don’t belong here!”

  “Oh. Right.” Charis shot an amused glance over her shoulder. “And you — Mr. bum on the run — are going to do the rescuing? It looks like you’re the one who needs to be rescued, bub.” She poured coffee into the mugs.

  “At least I’m human!”

  “Oh!” Charis spun around to face him, the blush of a temper burning in her cheeks. “And I’m not?”

  “I – Yes! Yes, you are, which is why you need to come with me, right now. There’s some sort of invisible-mutant-shadow-man bodysnatcher conspiracy going on, and you’re right in the middle of it!”

  She gave him a very wry appraisal, taking in every disheveled, dirty inch of him. After a few moments she pursed her lips, sipped her coffee, and finally shrugged. “You know what? You need to shave your neck.” She handed him the second mug of coffee. “I like your beard, though. And you should keep your hair long like that, it’s sexy.”

  Dave felt his eyes nearly bug out with disbelief. Only a woman, he thought. Only a woman would talk about grooming at a time like this. “That’s all you’re going to say? I need to shave my neck?” He waved his gun energetically toward the braced door. “There’s a talking plant out there!”

  “Shut up and drink your coffee.” Charis ignored him in favor of her own beverage.

  He was a man. He was strong. He wouldn’t gurgle with frustration, no matter how much he wanted to.

  “You know what? I think I’m going to tuck you in for a nap,” she added thoughtfully.

  Dave gurgled with frustration, then managed to roar. “I DON’T WANT A NAP!”

  “You could use a nap. You have to admit you’re blowing this way out of proportion because you’re overtired. And a shower. Do you mind if I give you a sponge bath?”

  Dave’s gurgle turned into a full-fledged choke. He was fairly sure he swallowed his tongue. After a moment he managed to wheeze out his disbelief. “What?”

  “Sponge bath,” she repeated frankly, sipping her coffee again as she wandered to the window. “You know, because frankly right now you aren’t the freshest flower in the vase. Oh, what size shoe do you wear? Ten? Eleven?”

  Dave stared. Several minutes passed in silence as he stood, steaming coffee forgotten in one hand, gun hanging limply in the other, as he tried to process what she was talking about. His mind was stuck on one thing, and the images it roused. “You want to give me a sponge bath?”

  “Well someone has to, and I assume you’d rather it not be Mike.” She flicked a hand at his coffee. “Drink up or it’ll get cold. Do you always let your food get cold?”

  He finally managed to drag his eyes away from her, and her cleavage, to blink stupidly at the coffee in his hand. Visions of Charis giving him a sponge bath were still dancing in his head, like X-rated sugar plum fairies. He took several gulps of the coffee to steady his nerves. The beverage shot through him like hundred proof tequila, burning a hot streak into his gut. A second later his head seemed to disconnect from his body and begin floating, and his eyes crossed.

  “Uh…” Dave’s tongue felt heavy and clumsy in his mouth. “I need to… uh…” he blinked at Charis, seeing her lovely figure separate into twins before his eyes. Both Charis’ smiled at him. Off balance, he began to stumble toward her, his own personal sugar plum fairy, who now came in duplicate. She had to like him a lot. That was great. “You’re really… nice…” he slurred.

  Charis fluttered her eyelashes flirtatiously. “Thanks! And you’ll look much better when we’re done with you. By the way, do you have a religious preference?”

  He didn’t understand a word she was saying. He was drunk, giddy, and couldn’t think beyond sponge baths. With a goofy, delighted grin on his face he tripped over his own feet and crashed to his knees in front of her, making a clumsy grab for her pretty hand. Just when he registered the success of having actually caught it, the lights dimmed, and he crashed unconscious to the floor.

  An invisible hand caught Dave’s coffee mug before it hit the carpet, saving most of its contents. Mike materialized a moment later holding the cup, shaking his head as he stared down at the snoring pile of human.

  “Well,” he said, casting Charis an amused look. “That went well.”

  Charis drank her coffee with satisfaction.