Page 2 of Night Shift

Watch out for the ghosts.

They're romantics.

CHAPTER 1

EREBUS

Eternity is profoundly overrated.

I reach this conclusion on a Monday night, when streetlights flicker and the fog over Blackthorn Bay hangs low enough to bend the glow into halos. My boots scrape along the sidewalk with a deliberation I feel no obligation to justify, my hands in my pockets, my mind as untroubled as the graveyard shore.

This is what passes for leisure when you are, for all practical purposes, the metaphysical principle of Night incarnate: you walk, you look, and you remember to blink every so often so as not to alarm pedestrians with your unlidded stare.

Blackthorn Bay, they told me, would be different. Nobody told me why; nobody ever does. It is a place monsters come because they wish to stop pretending, which appealed to me on a conceptual level. Millennia as the cosmic custodian of darkness has made me partial to places where people understand that a little night is not always a disaster.

So I walk, and I take in the rare spectacle of creatures less ancient than myself attempting normalcy.

A goblin locks up a dry-cleaning shop, her hands deft as she works the key. A werewolf walks an ornery spaniel mix that pulls at the leash while the wolf follows with the resignation of someone accustomed to this nightly ritual. Somewhere overhead, in an apartment above an abandoned optometrist's office, a sprite flickers blue and gold in the window, tapping at a phone with impossible speed.

Most peculiar of all, not a single person looks at me as though I am an oddity.

They see me, of course. At my height, I am difficult to miss, and the cold starfield of my eyes has inspired everything from poetry to panic over the centuries. Here, however, there is no alarm and certainly no cowering. I receive a polite nod from one passerby and bland indifference from another.

I find both surprisingly pleasant.

I walk until the cold begins to amuse me. I have never truly felt it; I can only catalog its sensory variables the same way I remember the heat of Egyptian sand or the peculiar humidity of Venetian springs. These are collectibles for me now, accumulated over an existence too long to properly measure.

It is while I am cataloging the exact density of the mist that I smell something I have only ever experienced secondhand.

Coffee.

Coffee is, to me, something of a myth. I have seen the drink in action, watched whole civilizations reorient themselves around small cups of bitterness and observed otherwise reasonable people become intolerable until they consumed one in the morning. I once watched a philosopher become so enamored with the original Turkish preparation that he declared it proof of the divine.

But to put the stuff to my own lips?

It never seemed necessary.

I do not require stimulation. I am Night, and Night is, by definition, neither awake nor asleep.

Still, I follow the smell.

I do not know why.

No, that is a lie.

I am curious.

Boredom, the most elegant herald of disaster.

The source is a storefront with a purple neon sign proclaiming GHOULISH GRINDS. Beneath it, painted in smaller letters across the window, are the words BLACKTHORN'S SUPERNATURAL COFFEEHOUSE.

The interior is nearly empty. The seating is a mishmash of battered couches and antique tables, the sort of curated thrift that passes for fashionable in coastal towns. A single customer, something lizardlike in a flannel shirt, is dozing in a beanbag chair in the corner.

Behind the counter, a woman is cleaning an espresso machine with the solemnity of a priest tending an altar.

Her name tag reads CALLIOPE in careful block letters.

I enter.