Vagabonds

Chapter Thirteen: Where's the Pizza?

Eliza stepped into a cavern, vaulted and enormous and cluttered with so many things that her head started to spin as she took it all in. One corner was sloped and polished with a few discarded skateboards piled in the middle. Next to it was a cluster of gym equipment, dumbbells and heavily laden bars, ropes climbing the smooth stone walls like ivy and stretching toward the shadowed ceiling. Eliza's eyes scanned over the fitness area and into the carpeted half of the room, hemmed in by bookshelves and decorated with scattered TV's and monitors.

Moose scurried past her, toward two figures playing Mario Kart on an enormous screen, hunched over their controls and tilting back and forth as their characters spun out on the animated road.

"Guys! Hey guys! Hey, guess what!"

"No, no, no, no," muttered a voice even deeper and more sonorous than Aquila's.

Eliza glanced back, but Aquila wasn't looking at her. He was glaring at the ground again, ruffling his feathers uneasily. Eliza had the sinking feeling that he'd just realized what a bad idea this was and was debating how to get her out of there.

In a would-be casual step forward, Eliza slid out of his reach, squinting at the two figures. Her eyes were adjusting to the bright lights and she could feel her brain locking as it tried to make sense of the skin that didn't look like skin...

But something else caught her eye.

A head was tilting out from around a bookshelf with a complexion as dark as her own. It was another boy, hair buzzed, eyebrows pulled together. Eliza lifted an awkward hand to wave in greeting.

Then she realized that the boy's pupils were a milky, ghostly white.

"A-A-Aquila, what do I s-smell?"

Before Aquila could answer, Moose whistled, making everyone flinch.

"Guys, you're being rude to our guest."

"G-guest?" the black boy said, emerging from behind the bookshelf and revealing another set of magnificent wings sprouting from thinner, more bony shoulders. Eliza's mouth fell open as her eyes drank them in — leathery rather than feathered, seeped in shadow like something out of a fairy tale.

She jerked back involuntarily as Moose grabbed one of the gamers' heads, forcing it to turn. Her wide eyes shifted from the featherless wings to the face now looking at her. It belonged to a bald, textured body covered in spines, bristles curling over a hairless skull and into the neckline of a shirt like pale tattoos. Soft brown eyes found Eliza's.

The eyes from the clearing...

The other one spoke, back still turned as he drove his cartoon avatar off a cliff.

"Moose, where's the fucking pizza? We send you out with one order and —"

"Girl!"

The spiny boy's voice was strangled, rusty, as if he didn't use it much. But his shout froze in the air, made everything solidify. Moose rocked on his heels, wearing a huge grin beneath his goggles as the final brother turned to face Eliza.

Shimmery, opalescent skin, narrow eyes, dense muscles, and a shock of white hair almost as chaotic as Moose's.

"What... the fuck..."

Eliza fought the urge to scream or run or collapse into a ball and protect her neck.

I've always wanted the world to be stranger than it is, she told herself sternly as all of them stared at her like she was weird one.

"Creatures of the underworld," Moose said with an excited flourish, "meet Eliza."

"Aquila, what the shit?" said the one with glistening skin.