“Well,Ididn’t! I’ve never seen ours do that.” She made a frustrated gesture with her hand. “Notours, but the ones in our crew. You know what I mean. Anyway, one of them came to get me out of the car and lead me here. This was when you were talking to Austin and Jessie. I thought it was one from our crew, so I didn’t think anything of it. Halfway hereit disappeared!”
She looked up at him with that expression again. She seemed scandalized.
“For a moment I thought I was hallucinating, you know?” she went on. “Did I accidentally take some ‘shrooms and not know it? That sort of thing.” She pushed out a breath as she shook her head. “But no, I was there, in the woods, suddenlyby myself. Worse, I’d turned around in confusion and didn’t know which direction I’d come from. I didn’t know where the car was! So, then I started running and calling for Jessie or Ulric or anyone to come save me.”
“Why?” he asked in confusion.
“I don’t know. I get a little crazy in the woods. They mess with my head. That’s why I wanted to stay in the car. Well, finally one of the basajunk?—“
“Are you saying basajunk?”
“Yeah. Basajunk. Isn’t that what they’re called?”
He wasn’t into practical jokes, no, but that was too funny to correct. He nodded sagely.
“Well, one turned visible, and then a whole bunch of them did, and they were all laughing.” She pulled up her knees and hugged her arms around them. “I gave a chuckle. You don’t wantpractical jokers to know you hate practical jokes because then they do them to you all the time. So, I gave a chuckle, thought about telling Niamh to claim vengeance on my behalf, and they finally led me here. I’m hoping, since you don’t like practical jokes, that maybe you can lead me to the next destination and not get lost until I can get out of this Godforsaken place.”
Laughter bubbled up out of nowhere. He hadn’t laughed in years. It overflowed until it consumed him, coming out in big body-shaking guffaws.
She chuckled without humor, and it was probably the same sort of laughter she’d given the basajunk.
He laughed harder. Everyone looked their way. Jessie had a lopsided grin on her face, probably wondering what the joke was.
Why was it so damn funny?
After some time when he was able to finally calm down, he wiped his eyes and resumed staring off at the camp.
“So will you do it?” the woman asked, utterly serious.
That set him off again.
“Yes,” he finally managed, re-wiping his eyes. “I will, yes. I’ll make sure you don’t get lost.”
“You don’t go invisible, right?”
“Ha-ha-ha, no,” he wheezed. “I don’t go invisible, no.”
“Okay, good. I’m Fred, by the way.”
“Fred?”
“Yeah. I’m a Dick.”
That sobered him somewhat, trying to understand again. “Do you mean a Jane? A non-magical woman?”
“A non-magical woman, yes, but not a Jane, and I’ll tell you why. While my pronounsareshe, her and they, I have recently learned that there is a limit to my tolerance of a person’s niceness. If they are too nice, I stop liking them. Like, I don’t enjoy very sweet people who only want to do the best for me andwish me well. Which is not great. I know this. I’ve had to really look inward, and I’ve realized that I cannot call myself a Jane when I am so very obviously a dick.”
That set him off again, and he still didn’t know why. It really shouldn’t be this funny. First that vampire and now her, two very different walks of life, and here they were. Misfits indeed.
“Hello, Fred-the-dick,” he said. “I’m John.”
“John? You don’t look like a John.”
“No? And what do I look like? A dick?”
She thought for a moment, ignoring the joke, looking up at him with squinted eyes. “Steve.”
“Why Steve?”
