I blinked.

  One would think that death would be more... final. More conclusive. The kind of experience you don't walk away from thinking "huh, that was neat."

  Instead, I sat in a Books and Nooks café booth, alive and breathing, watching a theatrical vampire girl in vintage red and black lace lecture hostages about the coming age of crystalloid supremacy.

  The gunshot still echoed in my memory. Nexxali's amber eyes, empty and obedient. The barrel aimed at my head. The squeeze of the trigger.

  Darkness.

  Except that happened to someone else. To a fabricated meat puppet in a forest clearing miles away connected to me via an alien neural interface tech mod Kawathra cooked up.

  The Emperor of Earth had just taken a bullet for his excellent performance of standing around like an idiot.

  Meanwhile, Ashcroft Clifford aka Constantine Belthys sat perfectly alive beside his dragon date, processing the cognitive dissonance of experiencing death secondhand.

  My plan ticked forward. Inevitable. Mechanical. Unstoppable. Beautiful in its terrible precision.

  Count Chocula paced between the cafe tables, gesturing grandly with one pale hand. Her vintage red and black dress swished with each movement, red ribbons in her braids bouncing.

  "You see, my dear captives," she announced, "this is merely the beginning! Today, Cascade. Tomorrow, Seattle. Within the month, the entire Pacific Northwest will bow before the crystalloid collective! We will push back the Wendigo scum, take what belongs to us!"

  I stared. Galateya stared harder.

  "We are the future," Count Chocula continued. "Eternal! Unchanging! Superior to your fragile meat-bodies with their ridiculous need for oxygen and bathroom breaks!"

  One of the thralls nodded solemnly from his position by the door.

  "No more will we hide in the shadows, scurrying like rats! No more will we pretend to be your equals! The Wendigo invaders forced our hand, forced us to come out into the open, and left us no choice but to act!" She spun dramatically, dress flaring. "We are BETTER! We are EVOLVED! We are the next step in species evolution! Also, we have excellent dental plans!"

  I raised my hand.

  “Yes?” Count Chocula asked, staring at me with glowing, blood-red and silver eyes.

  “Why does a vampire need… a dental plan?" I asked. “Aren’t you guys perfect and immortal or something?”

  "IRRELEVANT!" she shrieked. "The point is we HAVE one! Which is more than your primitive human society offers!"

  Ash, why are you antagonizing the crazy vampires? Galateya’s expression stated.

  Marya's knuckles had gone white on the counter edge, her face looking awfully pale. Unnaturally pale like… wet bone.

  "Furthermore," Count Chocula proclaimed, "we shall establish a new order starting with Cascade, with this cafe! A crystalloid empire spanning—"

  "What the SHIT?" Marya's far too loud voice cut through the monologue like a chainsaw through butter. "No, NO, NO! What the FUCK, you fucking backstabbing FUCKS! This wasn't part of our deal!"

  The cafe went silent.

  Count Chocula's head swiveled toward the barista. "Deal? I don't recall making any deals with food."

  "FOOD?!" Marya's voice pitched up several octaves. "You crystalline cunt, this cafe is OUR territory! OURS!”

  Count Chocula blinked slowly. "What?”

  "Agripiux!" Marya snarled. "We had a deal with Agripiux Noxxagam!"

  The vampire girl's glowing eyes narrowed. "Who? What deal?”

  “Agripiux Noxxagam, you crystalline brainlet! Your grandfather! The deal not to fuck with each other’s business in Cascade!”

  “Thrall Seven," Count Chocula interrupted, gesturing lazily to one of her gunmen. "Please tape up this crazy meatsickle. I don't have time for insane food service workers. I have a dramatic monologue to conclude!”

  The thrall moved toward Marya, pulling a roll of silver duct tape from his pocket.

  Marya's lips pulled back from her teeth in a snarl. "You really shouldn't have done that."

  That's when things got properly weird.

  Marya's face contorted. Not in fear or anger, but wrong. Horribly wrong. Her jaw dislocated with a wet crack. Bones shifted beneath skin, reshaping, restructuring. Her body began to unfold.

  That's the only word for it. Unfold. Like origami in reverse, each fold revealing layers that shouldn't exist within human anatomy.

  White bone-flesh erupted through her clothes. Her spine extended, vertebrae multiplying, creating a towering form. Brown fur sprouted in patches, mixing with exposed bone that gleamed like wet ivory. Her arms elongated, fingers fusing and separating into blade configurations.

  Where Marya the barista had stood a second ago, a massive, inside-out wolf-thing now towered. Seven feet of horrid, wet bone, inverted muscle, and brown mane. Her face stretched into something between canine and human, jaw filled with teeth that looked designed for maximum carnage. One arm ended in a sword of bone.

  “Freeze!” She barked with a resonant voice.

  The patrons inhabiting the cafe froze, their eyes turning glassy. The order pounded against my head, making the Frontend of my mind obediently freeze. The Backend went berserk.

  Fuck. Fucking fuck!

  Every plan has variables. Contingencies you can't predict. Factors that exist outside your careful calculations. Things that suddenly go tits up.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Of course Cascade had more magical bullshit lurking in its population. What else should I have expected?

  A Wendigo under my bed? Vampires in my driveway? An alien fleet cutting up the moon? A cat girl and then a dragon invading my house? The pattern was established. I should have expected this exact, dastardly twist of the universe kicking me in the balls.

  Obviously, the local coffee shop would be run by some kind of supernatural entity.

  Obviously, the nice, pretty girl I hung out with at my grandfather's funeral was a fleshy wolf thing. I even joked about her being a werewolf like an idiot a few days ago.

  Fan-freaking-tastic.

  The prize for amazing intuition and also for being the biggest idiot goes to Ash, the Emperor of Earth.

  The inverted wolf-thing moved with a speed that turned motion into abstraction. One moment she stood behind the counter. The next she'd crossed the cafe floor and her bone-blade arm punched clean through Count Chocula's chest.

  Count Chocula looked down at the sword protruding from her sternum in disappointment.

  My expression probably matched how she felt.

  I was supposed to stop the vampires and appear as a hero to the Legate but my thunder was stolen by… an unexpected magical creature.

  Chocula didn't die, flailing and clawing at the sword like a bug pinned to a display wall by a metal needle, her pretty dress torn.

  I mentally groaned.

  I should have staged the whole vampire hostage situation in Costco instead. Costco never disappoints. Surely the local Costco wasn’t being run by fucking… oh I don’t know. Sexy Slenderman or something?

  The inverted-wolf-thing growled, an unnervingly deep sound that vibrated through my chest cavity. She transformed her other arm into an oversized hammer made from bone.

  The hammer configuration came down on Count Chocula's skull with the force of a freight train.

  The vampire girl’s head crumpled. Marya-thing didn't stop. She pounded again. Again. Each impact compacted, obliterated her target, sent blood and guts flying everywhere.

  "Crystalline fucks," the wolf-creature snarled in a voice that retained small traces of Marya's cadence.

  "What the shit is she?” I breathed out.

  "Skinwalker!" Galateya whisper-hissed, her human hand digging into mine. “She's a Skinwalker Omnid!”

  The thralls reacted slowly as they were designed to. Six tommy guns lifted. Aimed.

  The guns had no bullets. Like their vampire leader, the thralls were completely harmless, scary only to a clueless outside observer. Fake just like the bomb…

  I looked through the window. Another massive, wet, skeletal monstrosity… err Skinwalker was there. In a blink, it had torn through the thralls in the moving truck and ripped apart my lovely, theatrical bomb.

  Marya-wolf grabbed Count Chocula’s remains by an ankle, swung her like a baseball bat, and smashed her through the nearest thrall, then the other.

  This was fine. Everything was fine. My meticulously planned fake hostage situation had merely been intercepted by a territorial coffee-slinging Skinwalker. Totally salvageable.

  The thralls crumpled under her assault, spraying juices. They were weak gun units filled with ground down, rotting, expired meat from Yumland courtesy of North and were designed to break specifically by my gigachad fists.

  Under the table, Keiy's black metal body hummed ever so slightly. Recording. Every embarrassing moment of my disaster-date getting transmitted directly to Legate Ixthia's personal files.

  I should have just taken Galateya to the beach. Yep. A nice… secluded beach… hostage situation.

  The second Skinwalker casually entered through the front door.

  This one wore a different form, shorter but equally nightmare-inducing. Brown fur mixed with exposed bone structure. His glistening, horrid face-skull was something like a bear fused to a porcupine. Many pointy bits.

  "Mare," the male Skinwalker said. "We have a problem."

  "No shit, Fennel," Marya demolished the last thrall with her bone-hammer. “Fucking vamps went back on our deal.”

  "Not that problem." Fennel held up a chunk of the bomb casing. "This is fake. The whole setup. This isn’t a real bomb, it’s an old, half disassembled clock from Radioshack with a bunch of exposed wires. The barrels in the van are empty. Their guns are empty too. No bullets.”

  The inside-out-bear lifted a Tommy gun and pulled the trigger. A click.

  And I would have gotten away with it if too, it wasn’t for meddling Skinwalkers!

  “What?” Marya blinked.

  Her wet bone skull turned slowly toward the frozen patrons. Scanning. Searching.

  Glowing, orange eyes locked onto me and Galateya.

  "You," she said.

  I pretended to be paralyzed, thinking about how to get out of this situation. I needed to know more about the local Skinwalkers to act.

  “Me?” Galateya asked.

  “You’re a Taniwha,” Mariya said accusingly.

  “Yes, yes I am,” Galateya let go of her human form, rapidly blossoming back to an extra tall, extra curvy dragon. “And you’re Skinwalkers.”

  She pulled Keiy from under the table.

  "A gun unit," Fennel observed. "Frontenachii military hardware. A rather interesting accessory for a couple on a date."

  “Your boy-toy smells like a gun too,” Mare sniffed. “Half human, half gun? You into that sorta freaky shit, huh?”

  I felt my carefully constructed plan metaphorically crumbling like wet cardboard.

  The vampires were supposed to attack. Count Chocula was supposed to hold up a fake trigger, monologuing for twenty minutes. I was supposed to bravely grab the trigger, crush it with my manly fists and punch her head off. Teya was supposed to use Keiy to shoot the remaining thralls.

  Instead, I had angry Skinwalkers. Hooray.

  “Why are you here, dragon? Speak up!” Mare growled, her words dimensionally-sheared, featuring a pitch of Charmchain magic.

  “I’m on a date,” Galateya said simply, glancing at me with a look of pure, unconcealed disappointment.

  Sorry Teya. You were supposed to declare yourself as an Omnid Knight and help me save everyone in the cafe and collect vampire bits to rise in rank in Division 881. Your Legate great-grandma was supposed to watch the live recording and be impressed. The local news channel was supposed to showcase humans and aliens working together to solve a vampire hostage situation. Keiy's broadcast was supposed to show that I definitely wasn't the Emperor of Earth working with the disobedient Princess.

  The Frontend of my mind submitted to the order. The back of my mind formulated the necessary words.

  “Yes. A lovely date,” I said. “We just came here for coffee and a nice quiet morning.”

  "Quiet morning." Marya-wolf laughed. "Right. That's why you're wearing a gun-unit hexasuit frame and your date walked in as a full dragon. Super low-key. Seriously, what’s with the overly-muscular hexasuit?”

  "The hexasuit is medical," I lied. "Old injury. Helps with my back."

  "Your back."

  "Yes. Very painful. Chronic. Doctors said I needed support."

  "Uh-huh." Marya waved her serrated blade-arm. "And I suppose the dragon girlfriend is also medical? Emotional support Omnid?"

  "She's very supportive," I agreed. “She made me a delicious breakfast this morning.”

  Galateya kicked my shin under the table. I spared her a glance. She looked extra-mad.

  The Bear-Skinwalker paced beside us. "Here's what I think happened. I think you set up this fake attack. Made fake vampires, dressed them in vintage clothes, gave them prop guns. Created a scenario where you could expose us."

  "I had no idea that you people were Skinwalkers" I said.

  Galateya nodded. “We came here for a date,” she repeated. “I… like books.”

  "Yea right. This is exactly the kind of thing a clever Omnid would do. Create a false threat. Swoop in to save the day. Make the locals grateful for alien protection." Mare hissed.

  "I'm not an Omnid," I protested.

  "No, but she is." The bone-blade pointed at Galateya. "And you're clearly her kobold, her pet human. Her propaganda tool."

  "I am not a propaganda tool!"

  "Then explain the fake bomb. Explain the empty guns."

  I couldn't. Not without revealing the plan. Not with Keiy recording every word.

  Ugh. What a mess I got myself into.