The morning light was doing its best to pierce through Ezume's half-closed shutters, striping the ceiling in thin lines of pale gold that wavered every time the wind stirred the branches outside. He lay on his futon, still tangled in the same blanket he'd hauled up to his chin the night before, staring at those familiar stripes of light as if they might suddenly rearrange themselves into an explanation for what had happened to him. An answer. A revelation. Something that would make the pieces click together and form a coherent picture instead of the jumbled, terrifying mess currently occupying his skull.

They didn't.

He hadn't slept well. That much was obvious from the way his eyes felt gritty, his limbs heavy, his brain wrapped in a fog that refused to burn off no matter how many times he blinked at the ceiling. Every time he'd closed his eyes, he'd seen her. Blonde hair spilling across her shoulders. Blue eyes, that impossible shade of pale, catching the light from the window. The smirk. The way her mouth had been wide open, teeth glinting, ready to bite down. The ghost of her breath still warm on his cheek.

So. Checking me out ?

He groaned and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyelids until stars burst across the darkness. When he opened his eyes again, the stripes of light were still there. The world had not rearranged itself to accommodate the fact that a girl had climbed through his window and tried to bite him.

It hadn't been a dream. He was sure of it. He'd pinched himself twice, just to be certain - once in the immediate aftermath, still pressed against the wall with the talisman clutched in his fist and his heart trying to punch its way out of his chest, and once around four in the morning, when he'd woken from a fitful doze with the phantom sensation of breath on his cheek and the echo of her laugh ringing in his ears. Both had left small, reddening marks on his forearm that he was now staring at with the intensity of a detective examining forensic evidence. Real marks. Real pain. Ergo, not a dream.

A real girl. A real, actual girl, who had climbed through his window, in the middle of the night, and tried to bite him. And then talked about hickeys. And then called herself a girl looking for a good time. And then leapt out the window like an Olympic gymnast when he screamed.

Ezume sat up. The blanket pooled around his waist. He stared at the wall, at the shadows of branches still dancing their usual morning dance, at the omamori lying useless on the tatami. The most powerful protection charm in his collection, bought at a temple in Kyoto for 800 yen, and it had done nothing. She hadn't even flinched at it. She'd been scared of the scream. Not the sacred object, not the threat of spiritual retribution. Just the volume.

"Either I'm losing my mind," he said to the empty room, "or that was a real, actual boogeywoman."

He'd been preparing for this his whole life. The forums. The YouTube videos. The conspiracy theories, the talismans, the aluminum-wrapped soda cans, the omamori on his belt. The hours spent cataloguing every possible supernatural threat, every weakness, every telltale sign. Vampires couldn't enter without invitation, but she'd come through the window - was a window an invitation? Werewolves transformed under the full moon, but last night had been a waxing crescent. Ghosts were intangible, but she'd been solid, real, warm - he'd felt her breath. Boogeymen fed on dreams, and he'd been half-asleep, his mind drifting, his defenses down. It fit. It all fit.

He'd trained himself to recognize the signs, to catalogue the evidence, to believe when everyone else dismissed. And now, finally, proof had climbed through his window. Literally. A real, actual, undeniable encounter with the supernatural.

And what had he done ? He'd screamed like a child, and she'd run away, and he hadn't even gotten a photo.

"Idiot," he muttered, swinging his legs off the futon and planting his feet on the tatami. "You complete, utter, irredeemable idiot."

He grabbed his phone from the nightstand. The screen was dark. He thumbed it open and stared at the camera roll with the hollow despair of a man who had been handed the discovery of a lifetime and dropped it down a flight of stairs. No photo. No evidence. Just a blurry, incomprehensible shot of the window frame that he must have taken by accident while panicking. The image was so dark and so smeared with motion blur that it could have been anything. A curtain. A shadow. A ghost. A smudge on the lens. Useless.

He scrolled through the rest of his photos anyway, as if some hidden, miraculous snapshot might have materialized while he slept. Nothing. Just screenshots of forum posts, a picture of a weird-shaped cloud he'd sent to Sato last week, and a photo of his own thumb.

He needed to tell someone. Someone who would believe him. Or at least someone who would tell him he wasn't crazy. Someone who could help him figure out what to do next, because he couldn't just sit here and let the most important event of his life fade into an unverifiable anecdote.

He needed to find her again. He needed proof. Real, undeniable proof. Something he could show the world, or at least show Sato, to prove that everything he'd believed in since childhood was real.

He called Sato.

Sato picked up on the fourth ring, which meant he'd either been asleep or actively avoiding something. Given that it was 9:30 on a Saturday morning, both were equally likely. There was a long, muffled pause, then the sound of something that might have been a yawn being swallowed, then a voice thick with sleep and mild irritation.

"Mmgh. Hello?"

"Sato. It's me."

"Ezume." Another pause, longer. The rustle of fabric. Sato was probably sitting up in bed, shoving hair out of his face, squinting at the wall in that way he did when his brain hadn't quite finished booting up. "Dude. It's Saturday. It's not even ten. This had better be good."

"It's good. It's- it's not good. It's insane. Something happened last night."

A heavier rustle. Sato was definitely sitting up now. "Define 'something.'"

Ezume took a breath. He hadn't figured out how to say this. He'd been rehearsing the words in his head for the past five minutes, but none of the versions he'd come up with sounded remotely sane. A boogeyman broke into my room and tried to bite me and then asked if I wanted a hickey. There was no way to phrase that without sounding like he'd lost his mind entirely.

"After I got home," he said, forcing the words out one at a time, "the girl from the bar. She— she broke into my apartment. Climbed through the window. I heard it open, thought it was a burglar, then a vampire, turned around, and she was right there, mouth open, about to bite me. Pointed teeth. Glowing eyes. I asked what she was doing and she said she was trying to give me a hickey. I screamed and she jumped out the window like gravity was optional."

Silence. Then: "She what?"

"You heard me."

"The super hot blonde from the bar climbed through your window and tried to bite you. And your conclusion is ?"

"She's a boogeywoman ! I asked her straight up, 'Are you a yokai?' and she laughed, Sato. Right in my face. Then she said she was just a girl looking for a good time, leaned in so close I could smell her—"

"Wait, wait, wait." Sato's voice sharpened with the precision of someone who'd spent years learning how to interrupt Ezume mid-rant. "Back up. She said she was looking for a good time?"

"Yes !"

"And she was in your room. At midnight. And when you asked what she was doing, she asked if you wanted a hickey."

"...Yes."

The silence that followed was so complete that Ezume thought for a moment the call had dropped. "Sato ?"

"I'm here. I'm trying to figure out if you're messing with me."

"I'm not !"

"So let me get this straight." Sato spoke with the deliberate, exaggerated patience of someone explaining basic arithmetic to a toddler. "A super hot girl followed you home. Climbed through your window. Got into your bedroom at midnight. Leaned over you while you were in bed. And when you asked what she was doing, she said she wanted to give you a hickey."

"...Yes."

"And your conclusion from this series of events— from a girl literally breaking into your apartment to put her mouth on your neck— is that she's a mythical monster."

"She had pointed teeth !"

"Ezume. Ezume, my brother. My oldest, dumbest, most paranoid friend. Has it occurred to you, even for a single, fleeting second, that this girl might just be really, really into you ?"

Ezume opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. The words that came out were not the ones he'd intended. "That's- no. That's not- the teeth, Sato. She had predator teeth. They were sharp. And her eyes were glowing."

"Glowing."

"In the dark. They were glowing. I saw them."

"Ezume." Sato's voice shifted into a register that was almost gentle. "You wrap your soda in aluminum foil because you think cell phone waves change the taste of bubbles. You carry three talismans on your belt, including one for road safety, which has never once prevented a car from existing. You have a forum post about werewolves breeding in Aomori bookmarked on your phone right now, don't you?"

Ezume said nothing. His silence was louder than any confession.

"You do. Dude. I love you like a brother, but you have got to consider the possibility- just the possibility- that a girl broke into your apartment because she's obsessed with you, not because she's a creature from Japanese folklore with a dietary requirement for human necks."

"But the rules-"

"What rules ?"

"The boogeymen rules !" Ezume was on his feet now, pacing the length of his cramped bedroom, gesturing wildly with his free hand even though no one could see him. "I've been researching this for years. They feed on dreams. They can't be seen by humans. If a human sees them, they have to kill the witness. It's all documented. I have files. Actual, organized files with subheadings and cross-references."

"You have files. Of course you have files."

"This is serious !"

"Okay. Okay." Sato exhaled, a long, weary sound that seemed to carry the weight of a decade of putting up with Ezume's particular brand of madness. "Let's say, hypothetically, that you're right. She's a boogeyman. Why didn't she kill you ? You saw her. You looked her right in the face. According to your own research, your own files, your own cross-referenced subheadings, she should have murdered you on the spot. But she didn't. She ran away. Why ?"

Ezume stopped pacing. The question hit him square in the chest. It was the same question that had been gnawing at the back of his mind all night, a loose thread he couldn't stop pulling, a splinter he couldn't dig out. Why hadn't she killed him ? She'd had every opportunity. He was half-asleep, defenseless, flat on his back. She could have bitten him, clawed him, done whatever it was that boogeymen did to their victims. But she hadn't. She'd looked at him with those impossible blue eyes, and she'd panicked, and she'd fled.

"I don't know," he admitted quietly. "I don't know why."

"Because maybe she's not a boogeyman. Maybe she's just a weird girl with no sense of personal boundaries who thinks you're cute. Which, honestly, is statistically a lot more likely than the alternative, even by your own extremely generous standards of statistical likelihood."

"You didn't see her teeth."

"I didn't see her teeth because I wasn't in your bedroom at midnight watching a girl try to suck your neck. Which, by the way, is an experience most guys our age would pay actual money for."

"Sato !"

"I'm just saying ! From an outside perspective, this is hilarious. You've spent your entire life waiting for a monster to show up, and when a beautiful girl literally climbs into your bed, your first thought is 'this must be a monster.'"

"This isn't about that ! This is about evidence ! Proof ! I've been waiting my whole life for something like this, and it happened, and I don't have a single photo to show for it !"

"So you're not upset that a hot girl broke into your room. You're upset that you didn't get a picture."

"I'm upset that I finally have proof the supernatural is real and I can't prove it to anyone !"

There was a pause. When Sato spoke again, his voice had lost its teasing edge. "Ezume. I've known you since elementary school. You've been talking about aliens and ghosts and government cover-ups since middle school. I've never believed a word once. But I've also never seen you this worked up about something that happened to you. So I'm going to ask you one question. Just one. And I want you to answer honestly."

Ezume sat down on the edge of his futon. "Fine. What ?"

"Are you scared of her ?"

The question hung in the air. Ezume opened his mouth to say no. The word was right there, queued up and ready, the automatic response of someone who had spent years insisting he wasn't afraid of anything because fear was just a lack of preparation. But it didn't come out. Because the truth was more complicated than a simple yes or no. He had been scared. Terrified, even. The kind of fear that grabs your stomach and twists, that locks your muscles and freezes your breath. He'd felt it when the window opened, when the shadow crossed the floor, when he spun around and saw those teeth.

But somewhere beneath the fear, beneath the panic and the racing heart and the desperate grab for the talisman, there had been something else. Something that felt almost like... excitement. The thrill of finally being right. The exhilaration of having the world prove itself stranger and darker and more wonderful than anyone wanted to admit. For one brief, terrifying, exhilarating moment, he'd been face to face with the unknown. And the unknown had looked back at him with blue eyes and a smirk.

"I don't know," he said quietly. "Maybe. But I need to find her again. I need to know for sure. I can't just let this go, Sato. This is- this is everything I've been waiting for."

Sato was silent for a long moment. Then he sighed, a deep, resigned exhale that seemed to carry the weight of a decade-long friendship with a boy who believed in things that didn't exist.

"Fine. Fine ! We'll find your maybe-boogeyman girlfriend. But if she turns out to be just a normal girl with a thing for conspiracy theorists, you owe me ramen for a month. The good kind. Not the konbini stuff."

"Deal."

"And Ezume ?"

"Yeah ?"

"Next time a girl breaks into your room, try talking to her before you scream. You might learn something."

Sato hung up. Ezume stared at his phone for a long moment, then set it down gently on the nightstand. The morning light had shifted, the stripes on the ceiling now brighter, the shadows fainter. Somewhere outside, a bird was singing.

He was going to find her. He was going to prove, once and for all, that the world was exactly as strange and dark and wonderful as he'd always believed. This time, he'd have evidence. He wouldn't scream.