Cooper yelped, jumping up from his chair, the licorice dropping from his mouth. If his monitor was on fire, that was his whole life going up in flames.
But the smoke was coming from the floor, not his computer. And it wasn’t the color of ordinary smoke, anyway. And Cooper could swear he could hear high-pitched giggling coming from somewhere.
So this was it—Cooper was losing his mind. It hadn’t been an AI marketing thing at all. Cooper was just hallucinating nonsense.
The smoke began to clear, and Cooper nodded like a demented puppet at what it revealed.
Yep, he was definitely losing his marbles.
Because there was a man in Cooper’s workroom. Or something vaguely resembling a man, if one was willing to discount the…accessories.
He was close to Cooper’s height but leaner, with elfin features that included little pointed ears. Small, black feathered wings were extended behind him, and something resembling a lion’s tail was flicking out from behind his legs. The hair curling around his ears was…blue? No, purple. Green? It kept changing.
And his eyes.
“You have a fox’s eyes,” Cooper said dumbly, the words coming out slurred as his vision dimmed around the edges. His knees were no longer doing what knees were supposed to do either—mainly, keep him standing.
And then everything went black.
3
Cooper
Cooper woke up on the hard ground. Or, not ground, but hardwood floor? Either way, it was unusual for him. Not that this would be the first time he’d fallen asleep out of his bed, but he usually at least managed to pass out in his computer chair.
He needed to take better care of himself, didn’t he? This was definitely a sign.
He blinked up at the ceiling for another few moments, eyeing a water mark he’d never noticed before, then turned his head to the left.
There was a fox looking back at him.
Except that wasn’t right. It was a man with fox eyes—yellow-gold irises and vertical black pupils—both of them rimmed by sooty lashes. So strange. But pretty, if Cooper ignored the uncanny aspect of them.
“You’re awake.”
With a bit of effort, Cooper managed to respond with a garbled “Guh.”
The little man who’d appeared in Cooper’s living room cocked his head. (Technically, Cooper wasn’t sure he should be calling him little—he wasn’t much smaller than Cooper himself. But Cooper’s perspective on size had probably been skewed by spending so much time with mobsters.) “Not awake for long, though, I don’t think.”
Was that supposed to be some kind of threat? Cooper should be afraid, maybe, but he already knew what was going on here, so it was hard to be too alarmed.
The little man wasn’t real. Neither were his freaky fox eyes.
Cooper was clearly having a psychotic break.
The sleeping at all hours, staring at screens for days on end, overdoing the caffeine and sugar—all the things his father had once warned him about—were catching up to him. He wasn’t sure why they were catching up to him likethis, exactly—an imaginary man (or maybe monster? What with the wings and the tail and all) whose face looked like a little elf but whose aura held an unmistakable air of “Beware! Danger here!”
But Cooper supposed one didn’t get to choose one’s hallucinations, did they? And maybe he should be more concerned that he was losing his mind, but it was an actionable thing. He didn’t have any family history of mental illness he was aware of. He probably just needed to take himself to the hospital and let the doctors fix him. Maybe all it would take was some IV hydration and a short run on antipsychotics to tide him over until his brain rewired.
This was all fine. Totally fine.
“Your eyes are different colors,” the little man-monster told him.
Oh, come on. Even his hallucinations had to comment on his heterochromia? Was his brain really that unoriginal?
“A very auspicious sign.”
Cooper blinked. Well, okay, that was new. He’d never been called auspicious before.
