Knowing it was locked, I tried the handle anyway. It did not give.

“Skalla!” My voice was choked through a throat tight with fear. I rattled the handle again, then started hitting the door. That is truly what I did. I wasn’t knocking. I was hitting it, slamming the side of my fist into the wood.

Still nothing.

I know he said something about not being immortal forever before but... He still is. Right? Right?

He’d been alive for hundreds of years. Surely he wasn’t going to just... expire in there. Alone in a fucking bathroom.

Horrified, I wondered if I’d somehow done something to him. He’d careened away from me last night and I’d gotten all butthurt about it, but what if he now actually was violently ill with something? Could immortal aliens capable of crossing the universe and manipulating matter with nothing but their minds get that sick just from humping a human?

My fingers scraped against my scalp, tugging backwards on my hair as my palms dug hard into my forehead. It was an unconscious movement, one I only became aware of when my scalp started to hurt. I hadn’t done it since Elvi was sick. Back then, I’d given myself a literal bald spot. Traction alopecia, my doctor had called it. How comforting that there was a nice, clean, clinical name for ripping out your own hair in anxious agony.

I am not going through that again.

I refused to sit here doing nothing but tearing out my own hair while someone I cared about suffered.

And like it or not, I cared about Skalla. Maybe even...

Maybe could even love him if I wasn’t well on my way to that already.

But I’d never get the chance to find out if he died alone on a goddamn alien toilet.

“I’ll be right back,” I shouted through the wood. “And when I am, I am going to break down this fucking door!”

I hadn’t exactly figured out just how I was going to do that. My hockey drills had gotten my strength and cardio systems back on track, but that wood was solid and thick, and it wasn’t like I had an axe or a hammer or anything that could break down a door.

But I knew someone who did.

And since she and her wife technically owned that door, it would probably be a good idea to inform them of my plan, anyway.

I ran to the balcony door, and only as I yanked it open remembered I was completely nude. Groaning in frustration, I went back for my robe, ignoring the crustiness of it, and put it on, belting it furiously as I hurtled outside.

“Zev! Jolakaia!” I shouted, careening down the stairs like a madwoman, robe flapping wildly. Zev was already outside in her workshop. She gaped at me, shock clear in her eyes. They probably knew me as a pretty calm, serene human. Quiet.

Not quiet now.

“I need help! Something’s wrong with Skalla and I can’t open the door. I need a hammer... Or an axe... Or a chainsaw!”

Zev was squinting at me, as if trying to see me through dense fog, and I realized that in my panic I’d resorted to speaking in my native tongue, Finnish words spilling from my mouth. My brain worked and got nowhere, my mouth opening and closing soundlessly. I couldn’t remember a single word of Bohnebregg. It was like the entire language, at least what I’d learned of it, had been erased from my brain. Distraught, I felt my fingers crawling back up to my hairline. I made fists and forced my hands down. I could feel hysteria rising inside me, about to sweep everything away and leave behind only a blubbering sort of uselessness. I couldn’t let that happen.

“What’s going on?” Jolakaia called from inside the house.

“No idea,” Zev said. “Maybe she needs to eat something.”

“No!” I cried, and by some miracle, it came out in Bohnebregg. Saying that one word unlocked the trove of language in my head. Not paying even the slightest attention to grammar, I told her what I could in bits and garbled pieces. When I’d finished speaking, Jolakaia emerged with a tray of food.

“Sorry. She is not actually hungry after all,” Zev said. “She says that Skalla’s sick or hurt. He has locked himself in the privy and will neither speak nor open the door.”

I nodded, though it was more like the frantic vibration of a shaken bobblehead doll than a normal human gesture.

“Yes!” I said. “I need...” I gestured at the wooden worktable beside the house, shaded by the balcony above and covered in tools. “Tool. To break... door. Something...”

Zev was on it, crossing to the table with one long stride and returning with what looked to be a massive sledgehammer.

Gratitude made tears prick in my eyes. She was going to break down the door in her house to help me. Absolutely no hesitation. I could have kissed her.

Zev had already gotten her foot onto the bottom step, the gigantic hammer balanced on her scaly shoulder, when Jolakaia stopped her.

“Beloved,” Jolakaia said, both affection and exasperation warming her gaze. “You forget we have a key.”

“Oh!” Zev said. “Right.” She looked at her hammer as if slightly disappointed she wouldn’t get to use it. “I had better bring this, though. As back up. Just in case.”

Jolakaia put down the tray and hurried into the house. I bounced anxiously on the balls of my feet, calves burning, wondering if we should just forget the stupid key and break the door down anyway.

But then Jolakaia was back, a metal shape gleaming in her claws, and the three of us sprinted up the stairs. Their legs were longer than mine, so they got up to the apartment a second before I did. Ever-efficient and no doubt wanting to get a look at the patient, Jolakaia didn’t bother knocking or calling Skalla’s name. She merely fitted the key to the groove of the door handle. Once unlocked, I thrust open the door.

I felt an instant spike of relief to see that Skalla wasn’t unconscious on the floor. But when my eyes did land on him in the bathtub, he didn’t look a whole lot better. He was lying with his shoulders and back against the side of the tub, his arms draped along its edges, his wings hanging behind him down towards the floor. His head was thrown back so all I could see of his head was the underside of his snout and his throat. His hair was a sodden, tangled mess, which was never a good sign for his state of mind. His glittering chest, daubed with water, rose and fell, so he was breathing, at least. And I doubted he could maintain that sort-of upright position if he were truly unconscious.

But any comfort I might have felt at the fact that, physically, he seemed mostly alright, was diminished by a whole new set of worries. A sense of wrongness twisted dark tentacles in my belly. Because Skalla, my Skalla, wouldn’t stay voluntarily locked in a room away from me all night. He barely ever let me out of his sight. He wouldn’t ignore my voice through the door.

It made the male before me feel like a stranger. The air was thick with something ominous, a warning not to get any closer to the sleeping monster in the water. The others must have felt it too, because even Jolakaia, the only one with any medical training, held back, peering uneasily into the room. Zev’s grip on her hammer tightened.

“Skalla?” I called tentatively from the doorway, reedy fear clear in my voice.

He didn’t move.

I took a step. Just one single step into the room, still gripping the door handle.

And it was as if that one hesitant step had electrocuted him.

His entire body spasmed, his scales rippling with the force of his muscles bunching and rolling beneath them. He groaned, and it was an ancient, terrible sound, the sound of a boulder being dragged from the stony place it had occupied for the last ten thousand years. That grinding sound emanating from his throat went on and on, finally petering out into two words I could recognize.

“Get. Out.”

“What?”

That was my eloquent reply. But it was all I could manage. I couldn’t make sense of this, any of this. I was completely bewildered faced with this new Skalla. This Skalla who, for some reason, didn’t want me with him.