Daria coughed, spat another stream of bilious froth into the sink, and staggered back a pace to sit on the side of the tub. She watched him rinse out the sink, thinking, ‘This is really going to bother me at some point very soon.’

The way his shirt/jacket/uniform moved over the bunching muscles of his broad back was hypnotic. The fabric, although black, had a luminescent quality. She didn’t think she’d ever seen anything like it, but the thought was beginning to lose its power to surprise her. She was starting to think she knew what was going on. She didn’t like it, and in fact, she really ought to be running screaming from the room if it were true, but she thought she was right all the same. She said, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“Ha.” Just that. As dry and flat as if it were written and not laughed out of him. “No, I am not.” Tagen turned back to her at last, looking long-suffering and pained with patience. “Now will you please return to the bedroom, Lin…Daria Cleavon?”

She felt a blush of heat between her legs and looked down to watch herself wet her pants. She hadn’t done that since she was eight. God, how very vaguely embarrassing.

Tagen sighed and soon his strong hands were pulling her to her feet and placing her inside the bathtub. He began to undress her.

As her shirt and jacket came away, fear finally flared up, dim and shaky perhaps, but there. She tried to push his hands away. “Cut it out.”

“I will not harm you,” he said, implacably stripping her to the waist. And then he was tugging at her jeans.

“No!” she screamed, and exploded in a slapping windmill of motion. “Let me go! Let go of me! Where am I? Don’t touch me! Dan! Dan!” She lost everything then, falling back into the wall and shrieking helplessness and horror.

Tagen caught her before she could fall. He held her firm, but did not fight her. His strength was god-like, impervious to her haphazard blows. He had only to wait for her to exhaust herself, and finally, she slumped against him, moaning and sick.

He patted her back with a perfunctory kind of comfort and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Mild, my ass.”

“Please go away,” Daria whispered.

“No.” He resumed undressing her, kneeling to work her feet free of her shoes, socks, and jeans. “We are going to speak more very soon, Daria Cleavon. But this is not the time.”

Daria closed her eyes, miserably accepting this, and listened as Tagen started up the shower. Apparently, he didn’t know about the hot water knob, but Daria didn’t want to show him. The cold was fine. It was too hot, she was too sick and drunk, and the cold was just fine. She took the towel he gave her when he was done, wrapped it around her shoulders, and went back to bed.

*

The second time Daria woke, it was dark.

She lay on her side in the bed, hugging the blankets to her neck and feeling the comforting weight of Grendel against her hip. ‘It was a dream,’ she thought, testing the idea for the ring of truth. ‘I dreamed it.’

Slowly, she reached out one arm and felt at the side of the bed. Her fingers touched damp terrycloth, and she withdrew to the safety of the bed as though burned.

‘Okay, so I got drunk and dreamed it. I got drunk, and I took a shower, but I did dream it.’

Daria sat up, dislodging Grendel, who mewled at her belligerently. She slid her feet onto the floor, biting her lip with the effort at keeping silent, and stood up.

She had no idea what to do next. Should she go downstairs and make good and sure she had hallucinated the creepy cop-guy, knowing she would feel silly the whole time? She was naked. If she put clothes on first, wasn’t that a subconscious admission that she knew there would be someone downstairs?

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she told herself, trying for sternness and falling short, even in her own mind. ‘No one is downstairs. You dreamed it.’

Daria inched across the floor and silently eased her panty drawer open. She took a pair at random and pulled them on, her ears straining futilely to try and hear something beyond the closed bedroom door.

Grendel was watching her with feline fascination. When she crawled into a t-shirt (Merry Christmas! Seventh Annual Sister’s Eggnog Celebration, it said), he decided she must be going down to fix him breakfast. He hopped off the bed with a deafening thump and went running to the door, miowing madly.

“Shut up!” Daria hissed, her heart cramping with completely unreasonable terror. She grabbed the cat around his ample middle and shoved him into her closet, then leaned against the door, trying to listen past his indignant pawing.

Nothing. What did she expect?

Daria moved toward the bedroom door, her heart thumping louder with every step she took. She was giving herself the heebie-jeebies, she knew, and she was doing it all for nothing, but that was fine. She’d laugh herself sick later. Right now…right now, she just had to be sure.

It took her a whole year to turn the doorknob quietly enough to open it. She cracked the door ajar and peeked into the hallway.

Nothing. Just the hallway and the stairs.

The TV was on. Law & Order was playing.

Daria’s stomach tried to swallow itself, and she had to hang on to the door with both hands to stay on her feet. She couldn’t feel any part of her body. She was a ghost.

‘You’re completely freaking out over nothing,’ she insisted silently. ‘You went out this morning. You got drunk. No, you don’t remember getting drunk, but you did. You came home and got all sappy over Dan and you watched Law & Order the way some other flaky chick would wear his old sweater. It’s only still on now because it’s always on, that show is the fucking vampire of basic cable and it is constantly walking the earth, you know that. You got drunk, that’s the important thing. You got drunk and you watched Law & Order and you took a shower and you went to bed and had a scary dream. You don’t even need to go downstairs to prove it.’

Except she did.

Leaving the monster-proof safety of her room felt like stepping out of a suit of armor. She felt horribly pink and exposed. Just why she should feel pink was a bizarre sort of mystery to her, but she did. It was an awful, clammy color pink, too.

‘See? Drunk! Sober people do not have thoughts like this!’

Step by silent, trembling step, Daria made it to the head of the stairs.

Her bills were still on the floor in the foyer. The TV was still on. Everything was horribly, horribly wrong.

She found herself keenly wishing she had a weapon in her hands. She could go back into her room and get the table lamp, but that was about it, and that only thing it was likely to break if she hit someone with it was itself. If this were the movies, she’d have a halberd collection or something mounted helpfully in the hallway, or she’d be a ninja who knew how to kill a man with a hard-boiled egg. God damn the movies!

She began to descend, agonizing over each step, trying to remember if she had ever noticed a squeak on the stairs, trying to think of what she should do when she got down to the foyer. Should she grab a knife from the kitchen and search the rest of the house? Should she call 911 and risk exposing her case of the megrims to the public eye? Should she split and run half-naked along the eighteen mile strip of road into the nearest town and call 911 from there? She kind of had the feeling that if she did that, she’d better by-God be sure there was someone in the house first or she was going to end up back in mandatory therapy and probably a rubber room besides.

The sound on the TV suddenly muted, and Daria stopped, shock-white and shivering, her hands pressed to her mouth. That was it. That removed all doubt. There really was someone in her house.