“Who’s there?” I shouted, touching my pistol and aiming my light at his head.

              I caught a glimpse of a ghoulish face, white as the corpse at my feet, and rolling, crimson eyes. A black, gaping mouth opened, revealing a row of razor-sharp teeth.

              With a hair-raising shriek, he flew at us.

              “Shit!” I braced myself.

              Sugita rammed me with his shoulder, knocking me off balance. I dropped my flashlight, and it went out. Gunfire boomed, followed by another inhuman scream.

              A shadow streaked by.

              “Stop!” I wheeled that direction. “There’s nowhere to go!”

              Snarling and wheezing, the man leapt up to catch onto the elevator cable and began to climb, hand over hand. In a matter of moments, he’d vanished from sight.

              Absolutely crazy.

              Sugita snagged my tie, dragging me back toward the stairs. “This way!”

              I tore after him, taking two steps at a time. We nearly collided as we burst back through the narrow doorway. Immediately, Sugita’s light found the shape of the man, just as he sprang out into the parking lot.

              “Dammit!” Sugita broke into a sprint. “We can’t let it get away!”

              I dove out on his heels.

              Skittering on loose gravel, he slammed to a stop, turning one way, and then the other.

              I wove around him. “Where is he?” The sky had gotten dark, and freezing rain fell in sheets. To the left, the man vanished around the corner of the building.

              Gun in hand, Sugita launched after him.

              If I let him get even a few steps ahead, his long legs would carry him out of sight. I had to sprint to keep up.

              Side by side, we rounded the corner, into another, short alley, and then back onto the street. Halfway down the block, the man tore his way through the crowd with freakish speed.

              “Shit, what is he on?”

              “Stay here, Handa.” My partner dove into the flow of passersby without giving me a chance to argue.

              “Yeah right,” I grunted anyway, and plunged into the crowd.

              Even at this late hour, in the sucky weather, there were enough dawdling night-lifers to block me in on all sides.

              Sugita blazed through them, unapologetically. At the sight of his pistol, people screamed and sprang to the side. One woman dropped her umbrella, and I nearly tripped over it, losing some ground.

              “Police!” I shouted. “Everyone out of the way!”

              Lightning crackled over my head, and the stinging rain blinded me, but the wind gusted against my back, propelling me forward. Just down the block, our suspect shot into another alleyway.

              Sugita stopped hard there, shoulders heaving. As I trotted up next to him, he faced me.

              “What are you doing?” I skipped around him. “He’s getting away!”

              Roughly, he seized my shirtfront, shoving me back. “I said stay, Handa.”

              “I’m not a dog! We—”

              “Do it!” he roared, and then ran into the alley. In a moment, he’d become a black silhouette, fading into the rainfall.

              I lingered, scrambling to decide. He had some reason to keep me out of it—I should trust him. That freak was dangerous—Sugita had to have back up.

              I leapt over a puddle, rushing after him.

              He could be as angry as he wanted, just as long as he stayed safe. No matter if he transferred, no matter if our friendship failed, no matter if the squad railroaded us both, I was not going through life wondering if I might have been able to save him.

              As I ran, the air turned eerily still. The alley wasn’t very long, but it was tight, cluttered with transformers and garbage bins. At the end, I nearly crashed into Sugita, where he stood turning his flashlight this way and that, gun raised.

              He spun on me, jerking when he recognized me.

              “Did he get away?” I checked all four directions, but we’d come to a dead end.

              “Dammit, Handa! I almost shot you!”

              Off to the side, something clattered. I whipped toward it.

              A shadow flew out of the darkness and slammed against me, knocking me onto the pavement. Heavily, the figure landed on me, clawing at my shoulders, heaving and snarling. Red eyes burned. Putrid breath spilled over my face. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

              I swung at him. My knuckles cracked across his jaw, and he swayed to one side. I rolled on top of him, but he flipped me immediately, cramming me back into the icy ground with one hideously powerful hand.

              “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!” The horrifying mouth was right at my ear, screaming in it.

              I struggled to shove him off. Vice-like fingers cinched my wrists, and his legs straddled my hips, dropping all his weight on me.

              Icy lips touched my neck, followed by a slimy tongue.

              “Sick!” I twisted against the ground, helpless to even escape from the moist feeling of his fetid mouth.

              Like shards of glass, teeth broke the skin and sank into my muscle. A cold trickle of blood raced down to my collar, and as his slick tongue lapped at it, the deranged screaming quieted, giving into desperate gasps and moans.

              “Fucker!” My body bucked, but I was paralyzed by the pain and pleasure of his sick mouth ripping and sucking my bleeding throat. Already I felt woozy and weak. I loosened my fists.

              A shot rang out. The freak jerked hard and froze. His body slumped over me, lips still clinging to my neck. Rain beat my face, and I lay panting, staring at the inky sky.

              “Hideki!” Ken appeared over me. He seized the man by the back of the shirt, tossing him like a doll, and knelt at my side. His hand pressed against my throat.

              “What, were you waiting for permission?” I wheezed, rolling to my side and struggling to rise. My elbows buckled and my knees quivered, but he caught me around the waist, lifting me up with ease.

              “I was trying not to shoot you. I told you not to come down here!”

“Oh. I didn’t hear you.” My wet collar stuck against my skin. With a shaking hand, I rubbed my neck, horrified to find it torn open and gushing blood. My stomach turned and my head felt hot, not like it was on fire, though. More like someone was holding it under boiling water. I was floating.

I must be losing a lot of blood.

One arm still around me, Ken half-carried me to the wall. Darkness gathered at the periphery of my vision as I slid to the damp ground. He crouched beside me. “Shit, shit.”

              I winced in the beam of his flashlight, while he brusquely, but not harshly, cocked my head up to one side so he could examine the wound, still uttering curses.

              “Is it bleeding a lot?” I fought down a gag.

              “No,” he choked.

              “You’re a bad liar, Ken.”

              “Shh.” He laid his free hand over it, firmly. “Try to relax.”

              “Did you already call an ambulance?”

              Instead of answering, Sugita shut his eyes. A shallow wrinkle appeared between his eyebrows, and he set his mouth in a straight line.

              “Ken, I’m bleeding.”

              “Shh. Just relax for a second.” His voice had fallen, quiet as drifting snowflakes, and he kept his eyes shut.

              It might be bleeding so bad the ambulance wouldn’t be able to help anyway, but that didn’t match my partner’s response. I just needed to keep pressure on the wound while he made the phone call.

              My body jerked and wouldn’t move. “Sugita...”

              Lightly squeezing my neck, his hand felt strangely hot now, and he stayed completely still, forehead ribbed with concentration.

              The heat radiating from his hand intensified, like being wrapped in a hot towel, and gradually spread down into my torso until I hardly noticed the rain. It didn’t hurt, and I was close to him. The tension I’d been feeling in my shoulders all day ebbed away, and my eyelids grew heavy. Mesmerized, I watched his long lashes flutter.

              “Hey,” I murmured, clenching his sleeve. “I want to go home.”

              At last, his eyes opened, looking unusually golden, and he lifted his hand to inspect the wound again. “Better?”

              The sharp pain had dulled without my hardly noticing, reduced to a mild, itchy sting, and when I touched the spot, I felt blood and raised flesh, but no torn muscle. “What did you do?” I wondered, still oddly relaxed.

              “I fixed it.” Ken pulled a rag from his pocket to wipe the blood, first from my neck, and then off his hand.

              “Fixed it?” Searching for any sign of the gaping holes that I had just been there, I rubbed and rubbed my throat.

              “Well.” He caught my wrist, pushing it down into my lap. “Not completely. You still shouldn’t mess with it. And you still need a doctor.”

              “Right. Who knows what that freak was carrying?” It started as a joke, but the alarming thought sharpened my senses, and I blinked out of my reverie. “Wait. I didn’t know you could… How did you do that?” Even though he’d told me not to, I ran my hand fingers all along the side of my neck, from jaw to collarbone and back up the jugular. “Am I dreaming?”

              His eyebrows etched upward with slight concern. “No. I’ve studied how to use chi.”

              “Chi.” Dumbfounded, I stared at him. “What do you mean chi?”

              “Chi.” He shrugged. “The body’s natural energy.”

              Between this revelation and the lunatic that had just attacked me, I wasn’t completely convinced any of this was real. It seemed much more likely I’d hit my head and gotten knocked out.

              “Well… Anyway.” Strong hands ran along my limbs and torso, searching for more damage, the way we’d been trained, so I sat back, allowing the soothing but real sensation of his touch to draw me out of the fog. “Does anything else hurt?”

              Dazed, I shook my head. “What do you mean you use chi?”

              “Look. This isn’t the best time to get into it.” He gazed toward the mouth of the alley, where a crowd of silhouettes had already started to gather, muttering amongst themselves. In a low voice, he explained, “I used my energy to accelerate the healing process.”

              That’s impossible, my mind insisted, but, as I touched my neck again, I couldn’t deny he’d done something to make the gaping holes I’d felt close instantaneously.

              “I’ll explain more later, but right now, we’ve got a different problem.”

              I glanced at the corpse, chilled by the sight of its ghastly face. I’d never seen anything like it, so distorted and crazed, those eyes still gaping at the sky, candy apple red, mouth full of piranha teeth unhinged, tongue lolling from the side, still dripping my blood. I’d come across my share of tweakers, but no one had ever made my skin crawl like this guy before. Even if some of the things he’d done could be explained by PCP or cocaine, it wasn’t enough to help me dismiss his physical deformities.

              I asked, quietly, “What was it with this psycho? He acted like he was barely human.”

              Sugita’s brow furrowed again, and then he pulled out his phone, the same ancient brick he’d gotten as a high school graduation present. “I’d better let the chief know about this.”

              “What do you want to bother Chief for? Let’s just radio for a team.”

              A long time passed of him simply staring me in the eyes. “You really don’t know, huh? I was hoping you’d guess.”

              “You’re saying you do?” I scoffed. “If you want a guess, he was on drugs. Or maybe he’s some escaped mental patient.”

              Sugita continued to gawk at me, as if waiting for me to realize the truth on my own and spare him the explanation.

              “Unless he really was some reincarnation of Ed Gein,” I joked.

              He came to life again, squaring his shoulders with resolve. “He wasn’t human, Hideki.”

              “Oh, yeah, I forgot. We’re after aliens now.” I laughed, but Sugita’s face didn’t show even a faint trace of humor.

              “What are you talking about?” I demanded, finally lighting a cigarette. In the last two minutes, I’d faced a near-death experience, felt a man die on top of me, had my partner heal my injuries using chi, and now this disquieting news. I really needed to settle my nerves.

              Maybe Sugita could tell, because he adapted his kindest voice out of nowhere. “Hideki-kun, just take a break while I call Chief Kobayashi, okay?”

              “Hideki-kun my ass,” I growled. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

              “I think you’d take it a lot better if Chief explains it.”

              Obviously, he had no idea how much I trusted him. No way Ken would say something wild like that just to fuck with me, and with the proof crumpled up in front of me like a dead spider, it wasn’t so hard to believe he meant exactly what he’d said. “By all means,” I muttered, unhappily. “Call him.”