Electric Butterfly - 002

Greeting me at the door was a kitsune barely taller than myself. That isn’t saying much. For a woman, I’m quite tall. He wore a t-shirt with some abstract design on it, a fur-lined coat, loose fitting jeans and plain, dark brown shoes. His golden hair slicked up and back in a pompadour fashion, and he exuded overconfidence even in the simplest of interactions. This was Zein, my boss, a man who indulged in the basest desires while shirking the work of owning an exorcist organization onto me. He was 28, 8 years older than myself. The typical, conceited grin that graced his lips changed as his eyes widened in what looked to me as a combination of surprise and amusement. The silence between us lasted all but a couple seconds as he ushered me inside and up the steps of the skinny office building that doubled as his apartment. He blurted out a series of excited questions as I carried the boy up the steps, as well as several remarks I couldn’t bother listening to in between the questioning. Honestly, he was so full of words I was surprised he hadn’t burst from containing them all.

As I laid the small fennec boy in my arms on the soft, cotton sheets of the guest bed, Zein yelped and glared at me in a combination of shock and disgust.

“Not on the guest bed! People sleep in that, man!” he exclaimed. The blood was already seeping through the sheets as I held on to Sam, staring back at my employer with a look of irritation and tiredness.

“Honestly, half the time your ‘guests’ are sleeping in your bed, Zein” I replied rather dryly. I slid my paws out from underneath the fennec boy, finally releasing him �" and as soon as I did, I realized why I hadn’t noticed any echoes related changes.

Years ago, I had acquired an echoes ability myself. My Echoes ability is called ‘Excision’. I can absorb all energy that comes into contact with me as long as I touch it with my hands. If lightning struck through my hand, I would absorb it all and not feel a thing. If we lived in a sci-fi world where ray guns existed, theoretically I could absorb the energy without even noticing, so long as it touched my hand. Well, absorb is kind of an incorrect word for it. That would imply I take the energy into my body, but in reality, I haven’t the faintest idea where it goes. I never felt anything when ‘Excision’ was used.

As soon as I removed my hands from the boy’s body, an arc of light sprung forward from him, colliding with a small lamp next to the bed, shattering it and sending shards of glass all over the floor. Zein yelped in surprise, sounding more like a child than a grown man, stumbling backward and nearly tripping over a chair. I threw myself forward before more electricity could damage the house, grabbing the fennec in my arms and holding him to me. He was completely unconscious, but his wounds looked slightly better. If the state he was in when he fell from the sky was at the beginning of an echoes transformation, I could only imagine what he looked like at first. I would be stuck holding this boy on the guest bed of Zein’s apartment-slash-office for quite some time.

“You should’ve told me he was an echoes user, dude…” Zein muttered, regaining his composure and taking a seat at the edge of the bed, eyeing the fennec boy and I. “What even happened with you two? Date night go wrong or something?”

“He fell from the roof of some apartment building. Literally right into my arms.” I replied, matter-of-factly. “I didn’t even know he was an echoes user until I took my paws off him �" you might want to clean up that lamp by the way.”

“Ah, s**t… yeah” he said, standing up and heading to the closet to grab a broom. “So, you don’t know anything about this kid, huh?”

I fished through the fennec boy’s pockets, finding his wallet and opening it with one hand as I held him against me with the other. As I dug through the contents of his wallet, I noticed the healing process had appeared to accelerate and he was no longer bleeding. This was the first time I would read a name that became so much more familiar to me over the course of 2 years.

“It looks like his name is Samuel Perri. He’s…twenty-two?” I looked at the ID with bewilderment. “Twenty-two years old…”

“He looks like he’s twelve,” Zein said, chuckling as he strolled back into the room to clean up the mess the kid �" er, man �" had made in his unconscious state. “Are you sure that ID says twenty-two?”

“Yeah, twenty-two years old, five foot four, male, one hundred and twenty-three pounds.” I read out all the information on his ID that I could find. I fiddled around with the wallet, but there really wasn’t too much that could tell me about the boy in it. There were no photos of any loved ones, only one credit card and some kind of trading card with what looked like a navy officer riding a monstrous seahorse.

“So, what do you think we should do with him?”

“Honestly, I’m not quite sure. He’s clearly undergone an echoes transformation, so it’s not like we can drop him off at the hospital and let them try to diagnose it.” Hospitals were bad at dealing with echoes users. Combining medicine and the supernatural simply didn’t work out very well for any of the parties involved.

“So he’s got nowhere to go…” A pause. Zein’s eyes lit up at this point. He dropped the broom and slid over to me, leaning in with a huge grin unfurling across that vulpine muzzle. Oh no.  He wasn’t going to suggest �" “We hire him. As soon as he wakes up we hire him”

He did suggest it.

“Zein we can’t just hire someone to be a ghost buster” I replied, refusing to entertain this idea. “We should just explain this whole echoes thing and let him go home”

“But Kim,” he said, leaning a little closer. I batted at his face with my free hand and he hopped away, giggling like a school-boy �" And he questioned Sam’s age?

Honestly.

“Kim Kim Kim! There are only three of us working for Divine Territory �" wouldn’t it be nice to have a partner?”

“No”

“Yes it would, you can’t lie to me, sweets!” he teased, rubbing his hands together and bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Besides, do you know how many echoes users there are in Boston? Six, to anyone’s knowledge! And five of them work for some other organization, Kim. Who’s he going to go to? Only you, the resident echoes user, and me, the man who’s been studying this phenomenon since high school, can make sure that he leads a normal life! And look at him, the pinnacle of normalcy! He could only benefit from our guidance.”

“Zein, we don’t need this.” There was no convincing him otherwise, but I still argued. I knew he really just wanted another person in the office. We never talked, and Jason was his roommate. It was obvious that he was just looking for another companion on his adventures and trying to capitalize on the Fennec �" Sam’s �" misfortune.

“But we do!” he contested, trotting over to me and leaning forward again, resting his hands behind his back as his tail wagged from side to side with renewed excitement. “This boy, this Fennec boy this Sam �" he’s got such a cool echoes ability, Kim. He just shoots off electricity, imagine that in the field. Instant victory, living Taser! He just �" he just zaps, Kim. He a zap boy”.

He ran to the kitchen, and within a few seconds ran back, a beer in each paw.

“Let’s celebrate the zappy boy.” he said, thrusting one into my face. Yuengling. I guess.

I popped open the bottle, raising it to my lips as I watched him bound around like a child who just opened an early Christmas present.

“I don’t approve of this.” I said, taking a sip of the beer and squinting at him. “But you do make a good point. We’re likely the only people knowledgeable in echoes that he knows.”

“So we can keep him?”

“If he chooses to sign on with us, then yes”

“But what if he doesn’t?”

“Then we have to send him home, Zein.”

“I guess we have to make him say yes!” he exclaimed, taking another gulp of his beer.

“I’m not sure that bullying someone into saying yes really counts as a yes…”

Zein was about ready to argue that point with me, but the boy in my arms was starting to stir. He grunted and squirmed about, rolling to his side and stretching out with a loud yawn before looking up at me through half open eyes.

A long pause. His eyes fluttered open and he stared up at me in disbelief. Looked to the left. Looked to the right. Attempted to sit up before immediately falling back down. Then, he let out one of the most terrified shrieks I’d ever heard from a person in my entire life.