I laugh. “You do not want me to hop unless you want me to faceplant.” I step carefully up onto the platform. It’s made of light, and if I wasn’t currently seeing him standing on it like it’s a solid surface, I’d expect to fall through, but the thing holds up just fine under my weight.
Now that we’re on the same level I realize the guy is super short—less than five feet tall—and he’s also old as fuck. He doesn’t look old, really, but he’s just got that vibe, like he’s older than he looks. Like an old soul, but he’s not just an old soul. He’s one of those people who doesn’t look their age at all. He offers me a hand. “Darcy Hellspinner.”
I take his hand, shaking it. “Elijah Penn.”
Darcy has a knife in the other hand, and he hesitates zero seconds before using it to cut my forearm.
I try to jerk my hand out of his, but his grip on me is a vise, and he bends, licking at the wound.
“I might faint,” I warn him as little stars start dancing in my vision.
“Why’re so many people afraid of a little blood,” Darcy questions, taking his knife, rubbing it into an open and actively bleeding wound in his arm, and then pressing it into the one he just gave me.
My stomach churns. “I did not consent to a blood exchange with you,” I choke out, swallowing the excess saliva in my mouth to stop myself from puking all over us.
Darcy snorts. “You’re currently in the possession of a baby flink. If they don’t give up their claim on you when we get them back to their parents, you’re gonna find yourself in an impossible situation. I’m making sure you can’t be lost. Trust me, you want me to be able to find you anywhere the flink takes you, especially if they suddenly decide they don’t want to bring you home again. You hear me?”
“You could have asked,” I point out.
“I could do a lot of things I ain’t gonna do.”
“Pretty sure that’s true for everyone, but consent matters.” I’m going to die on this hill as I bleed out from the wound he put in my arm “Can I have my arm back now?
Darcy rolls his eyes, says something in a language I don’t recognize, and then he leans over and licks my wound again.
It tingles, and suddenly it doesn’t exist anymore. I’m not saying it healed, because there isn’t a scar; it’s like he never cut me at all.
“That’s a neat trick.”
“I don’t do tricks,” he grunts, releasing me back into my own custody. Or I guess it’s the baby flink’s custody. “Do not puke on my shoes. I will make you clean them up if you do or possibly replace them.” He scans me head to toe. “Somehow I don’t think you’d be able to afford ten thousand dollar shoes.”
“You’re right about that,” I agree.
“College student?” he questions as the platform starts moving through the roof.
I don’t scream, and I’m pretty proud of myself for that. “Yeah. Sports medicine—I think I’d make an excellent PT.”
He thinks about that for a moment. “Physical therapist?”
I nod, looking around as the things around us blur for a moment. It’s like we pass through some kind of foggy barrier. On the other side of the barrier is a planet that looks like Earth, and since the signage is in English, I’m going to assume we made it back to our home planet. We don’t stop going up, though. We just keep heading upwards at a dizzying speed. “So, where’re we headed?”
“Space station,” Darcy responds.
I take that in with a nod. “Awesome. I’ve always wondered what the ISS was like.”
“Not the human space station.”
“Right, why would we go to the human space station? We’re obviously going to the alien space station.”
“Obviously,” Darcy agrees, giving me a look that makes me think he’s either annoyed or confused. Maybe both.
I shrug. “That’ll be interesting to see.”
“Is your last name Butcher by any chance?”
That’s an out of the blue question. “No, it’s Penn,” I remind him.
Darcy shakes his head. “No one in your family’s named Butcher?”
