Dang. That took more out of him than I anticipated. I watched him for a minute, but it was hard to make out hues with how faint the glow was.
I made a quiet breakfast. It was weird to sit there at the kitchen table, just cereal and me. Syrin still hadn’t woken when I finished, so I snuggled up with a blanket on the couch. For the first few moments, I just stared at the wall. Things had been go, go, go, and now I was just… here. I didn’t even have work anymore. Just Syrin.
I glanced down the hallway, then pulled out my phone. After two full videos and a couple of reels, a notification popped up: text from Sarah.
Dang. I hadn’t even told her I quit. Too much had happened, but she’d moved on to another restaurant a couple weeks ago, so this wasn’t about switching shifts.
I clicked. It was just a link and a quick message: “Crazy! Isn’t this by your house?”
I blinked. What? It opened to a video. The beginning was just someone looking at shirts on a clearance rack. Then the person filming swore. They started walking.
I stopped breathing as a fitting room came into view. Target. In the men’s section. I watched in horror as a flash of light emanated from the fitting room. Then the person shifted, zooming in on a mirror. The angle was weird and hard to make out, but a person was visible. A glowing person. A glowing man with brown hair and a gray T-shirt.
No. No, no, no.
The person filming swore again. “Is that burning?” they muttered. Then the video ended. I clicked the details. The title: WTF glowing guy in fitting room hallway???
Then there were the comments:
“this is so fake”
“they said it was burning tho?? maybe a fire??”
“a fire that makes his face GLOW?? be serious”
“Probably AI”
I looked at the views. Ten thousand and counting. I groaned. This video was one thing. You could barely see Syrin’s face, and fortunately I was behind him, basically completely blocked. I watched it again. You could see just the edges of my pants at a couple points.
I scrolled through the comments. Someone else had noticed that too.
“Someone behind him. They probably have a lamp or something.”
“But why? doesn’t seem like a publicity stunt?”
“bro i work at that Target. that door’s legit scorched ??”
“ok that part’s kinda sus actually.”
I checked the tags. Target in Clairemont, San Diego. Great. Still, I doubted someone could track us down from that. And I’d worked retail jobs. The door hadn’t been that bad. Target wasn’t going to be going through footage. They had bigger things to worry about than a slightly singed door. Unless some employee got way too curious, we were safe.
But what about next time? What if it was outside? What if there were more shadow creatures? What if we couldn’t hide it or someone else got hurt?
The screen dimmed as my phone locked, my reflection staring back at me in the black glass. I set it face-down on the couch and just sat there, listening to my heartbeat.
A soft sound broke the quiet, water running from Mom’s room. Someone in the bathroom. Syrin.
I took a deep breath, trying to calm my nerves. He didn’t need to know. It would just stress him out, and he’d feel guilty when it wasn’t his fault at all.
A minute later, Syrin appeared, feet bare, his hair a tangled mess and one sleeve of his T-shirt pushed up wrong. The faintest shimmer of gold clung to his skin, like light that hadn’t decided whether to leave him yet.
“You’re awake,” I said, voice tighter than I meant.
He rubbed at his eyes. “Somewhat.”
“Hungry?”
He nodded. I extracted myself from the blanket and slipped into the kitchen.
Syrin joined me, padding in silently. “Can we have ice cream?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Yesterday, you said we could have ice cream.”
I choked on a laugh. “That’s not usually a breakfast thing.”
He tilted his head. “Breakfast thing… so there are some foods that are not acceptable to eat in the morning? Why?”
Uh. That was a good question. I’d say because it was dessert, but pancakes and things were practically dessert anyway. I shrugged at him. “I don’t know, we just don’t usually do that. It’s sort of a cultural thing.”
“So, there’s no real reason that I can’t have ice cream?”
I laughed. That was the first time he’d really asked for something for himself. Ice cream wasn’t the best breakfast, but somehow I couldn’t say no with the way he was looking at me.
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“Guess there’s no real reason you can’t,” I said, caving. “You should probably eat something else too. Ice cream is like sugar and milk basically, but if you really want to try it, I’ll give you ice cream.”
I pulled out the container of cookies-and-cream from the freezer, scooped a few spoonfuls into a bowl, and handed it to him.
“It’s cold,” he said, startled.
I leaned back against the cabinets. “That’s why ice is in the name.”
“I’ve just never eaten anything frozen.” His eyes flickered faintly. “Will it… make me sick?”
I grinned. “We eat cold stuff all the time. You’ll be fine. Just don’t eat too much too fast or you’ll get a brain freeze.”
He stiffened. “It will freeze my brain?” The glow became visible again, flashing white. “Is that not worse than being sick?”
“Not actually freeze your brain,” I said, laughing. “It just feels cold. It’s worth it. Promise.”
He eyed the spoon suspiciously, then took a tentative bite. For a moment nothing happened, then his glow brightened—a warm gold. He shivered.
“That’s…” he paused, searching for a word. “Wonderful. Strange, but wonderful.”
“Told you that you’d like it,” I said with a smile.
He ate another spoonful, and I had to laugh at the expression on his face, almost reverent, like ice cream was a holy experience. I grabbed a slice of bread, popped it into the toaster, and handed him a banana.
“You should probably eat this too. You can put the banana in the ice cream if you want. Some people like it. It’s called a banana split.”
He glanced between the bowl and the fruit, frowning faintly. “You split the banana first? Or the ice cream?”
“Neither. That’s just the name.”
“Strange name,” he muttered.
I rolled my eyes. “Because you don’t have strange names in Kirath? I don’t know about Crithnon, but in Talnor there’s literally some dessert called goblin’s toes.”
Syrin tapped the spoon against the bowl, thinking. “That’s… it’s made with nuts and honey?”
My expression turned gleeful. “So, you do have it! See, Mr. Literal? Kirath has weird food names too.”
He let out a soft laugh. “Maybe.”
“So, you going to try it?”
He didn’t answer, just sat down at the table and sliced some of the banana into the ice cream with the spoon. The gold glow flickered back into existence again as he tried it. Why was that so satisfying?
I gave him the toast on a napkin, with butter and jam on the table if he wanted. Then I sat at the table. His glow flickered gold again, and this time my thoughts couldn’t help but jump back to that video.
What if something else piggybacked on his magic? What were we supposed to do if it happened again? I didn’t want to live constantly waiting for some shadow thing to crawl out of nowhere. There had to be a way to stop it.
I pulled up my phone, trying to decide if I should text Mom and see if she’d had any ideas. Had she seen the video? Probably not.
Syrin pursed his lips. “You seem… stressed. Did something happen?”
I stared at him. “Other than yesterday?”
He just watched me for a few seconds, calm and unreadable. “You aren’t joking as much as before,” he said finally. “Something happened.”
“I made a joke!” I protested. “Did I not just call you Mr. Literal?”
He hesitated, biting his lip. “You did. It’s just… it feels different. I don’t know. Are you hiding something?”
“No.” I wasn’t hiding it exactly. He didn’t need to know. My thoughts flashed back to the conversation with Mom last night. He wasn’t telling me everything either. I forced a smile. “Maybe I just don’t joke as much in the morning.”
Syrin frowned. “Maybe,” he admitted.
His eyes didn’t leave me, like he was waiting.
The video wasn’t that big a deal. Was it? But… if I wanted him to open up, then maybe hiding it wasn’t such a good idea. I needed him to trust me, but this was just going to stress him out. Was that better?
My eyes flicked to my phone. Show him or no?
He followed the look. “You’re hiding something about your… small box.”
The laugh came before I could stop it. “It’s called a phone.”
He frowned. “You mentioned that word before. You said it was dead, but now it’s… alive again? Or are you mourning its death? That’s why you're stressed?”
That did it. I broke down in a helpless fit of giggling laughter. That was exactly what I needed to deal with the stress.
Syrin blushed. “Is it… is it not alive like the car? But then how can it die?”
I finally got a hold of myself. “The battery was dead—its power source. That’s just what we say when we need to put more power in it.”
“Ah. So, you aren’t concerned about its status. You’re concerned about something related to it and me?”
I froze. “It’s nothing. Not a big deal.”
“Trina,” he said softly. “Please tell me. You’re scaring me.”
I looked back at him. It was true, his glow was barely visible, but when it flickered it was a soft white.
It was disorienting to have him say it, for some reason—to have someone say that and be able to see exactly how honest they were being.
I gave up and grabbed my phone off the counter. “Okay, it’s not nothing, but it’s… not a crisis either. Just someone filmed us at the store yesterday. When you, uh, handled the shadow thing.”
He blinked at me. “Filmed?” he asked hesitantly.
“Like the TV. The people you saw there.”
“But you said those were far away? Just entertainment?”
Right. I hadn’t really explained video yet. Easiest just to show him. I unlocked my phone and flipped to the camera, then recorded a few seconds of him before handing it to him with the video rolling.
Syrin’s brow furrowed as he watched. “You… captured me somehow? My image? Like a portrait that moves.”
“Yeah. It remembers that pattern of light.”
Syrin’s eyes turned the gold threaded with green I’d seen before. Was that… curiosity? He held up his hand, and a little miniature vision of me appeared on his palm. “Like this but a machine?”
Oh wow. I guess his magic was light, but somehow I still hadn’t expected that. What else could he do? I shook myself. “Exactly like that.”
He smiled faintly, but it vanished just as quickly. “So someone made one of these memories of us yesterday?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound casual. “It’s hard to see. Your face isn’t clear, but it’s online now. Which means anyone with a phone can see it. Think of it like… gossip with pictures. Ten thousand views so far.”
He swallowed. “Show me.”
I handed him the phone. He watched the short clip twice in silence, jaw tightening a little more each time. When it ended, he set the phone down carefully, as if it might shatter from the weight of it.
“So… they know about my magic?” he said softly.
I shook my head. “No. Most people think it’s a prank. I mean, I’m sure someone believes, but most of the comments—things people can write about the video for others to see—say it’s fake. They think it’s a trick with lights or AI.”
He tilted his head. “AI?”
“It’s short for artificial intelligence. Kind of like… the phone trying to imagine things that never happened, using what it already knows.”
I wasn’t sure how to explain AI to someone who didn’t know about video one minute ago.
Syrin frowned, brow creasing. “They think the phone made a new version of me? But if it’s not alive, how does it do that? And… why would it want me to be different?”
“Well, someone tells it to,” I said. “Like this.”
I snapped another photo of him, then opened the edit feature on my phone and picked one of the AI tools that turned people into anime characters. It did an okay job, not the best I’d seen, but it still looked sort of like him.
I held up the screen, flipping between the original and the new one. “See? It turned you into a drawing.”
He raised an eyebrow. “It doesn’t look like a very good depiction of me.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not perfect. I don’t have access to the really talented AI. And this is a specific style. But that’s not the point. The point is, people think the computer made it.”
“So, they think it’s false magic.”
“Yes.”
His eyes shifted to silver, with gold bleeding in from the outer edges. Worry and relief battling for space, maybe?
“Then we are safe?” he asked quietly.
“For now,” I said. “But we should probably just stay home today. No shopping trips.”
That earned the tiniest flicker of copper amusement. “Understood.”
“Good. Now we just have to figure out what we want to do today.”
, a slow-burn that eventually gets spicy.
In the mood for something cozy, spicy, and otherworldly? Join Dr. Ryst Nova in the Andromeda Galaxy, 700 years from now. Ryst survives an attempt on her life, but now she's hearing voices she can't explain and dreaming of a man she's never met. When she goes looking for him, what does she uncover, and could she set in motion a string of events that will break reality itself? Find out in .
What to Expect:
- Female & male leads.
- LGBT male lead & cast.
- Neurodifferent and nonverbal characters.
- Slow burn romance that turns NSFW spicy.
- Telepathy, Tantra, & psychic phenomenon.
- Seven book series. For the stand-alone Comedy Space Operas, start in .