Shadow turned to Henry, as the hungry plants rustled around them. These were quiescent, as if the defeat of their fellows had some effect. Maybe it did. Maybe there was some survival-line instinct, like the flinch of a sensitive plant that had these terrible, glorious vines retreat. Or maybe it was just Henry, and his dream. Or it could have been the fire. It was probably the fire.

  “You said your favorite place growing up was Yankee Stadium?” His unfamiliarity with the words was clear; they sat in his mouth like bad teeth.

  “Yes. I loved it. The noise. The excitement. The smells of food and sticky and people.”

  “Sticky?” Hawk said.

  “There isn’t a better way to describe it. Drinks and cotton candy and caramel corn. Cracker jacks.” He grinned, and hummed a couple bars of Take me Out to the Ball Game. “It’s sticky. Any time I feel something a certain kind of tacky I think of that smell.”

  Hawk’s memory of baseball stadiums began and ended with one adventure when she was very young and her biological father was still trying. She remembered a cooler filled with melted ice, beers, and spilled gummy bears. They’d swollen in the water and lost their flavor. “I’m not going to be much help.”

  “Neither of us need to be, if you’re right. Take Henry’s hand. I’ll take the other. Alright. Now, we should all close our eyes and think…well, we won’t be helpful there. Try to clear your mind, Hawk.”

  She tried, her hands laced together with Henry’s and the Shadow’s. But her mind kept going back to the slick, soggy gel of those gummy bears. So she focused on that. The slosh of soggy gummy bears in water. Her father’s silver bullet beers soaking in the cool liquid. She’d reached in and touched them, the forbidden nectar. She imagined it tasting wonderful, tasting like starlight, because her father drank so much of it that it had to be good. And the memory unfolded gentle as paper. The crack of bat against ball, laugher, loud screaming. The Wave. Her father raising her to his shoulders so she could watch the fifth inning, holding her as she fell asleep on the eighth. He’d smelled of beer and Chaps and safe. She didn’t remember when that feeling of safe, of family, of Dad, went away. It was shortly before he left for good, when families dissolve into screaming and throwing things and sobbing long into the night. But that day had been good, one of the last good days. And of course it was. It was the gesture of a man who knew his capacity for good days was running out, and he was trying, even as the time to try, and the forgiveness to fail, were both running out through his fingers.

  Slowly she became aware that the crack of baseball bats wasn’t entirely in her mind. She opened her eyes and found herself standing in the vestibule of a stadium. She had a sense of walls rising higher than her, of movement and excitement, but the hall she stood in was empty. Not even a container of empty popcorn there to capture the imagination.

  “God,” She whispered, as the other two opened their eyes. “It’s so…barren.”

  “Of course it is,” Henry said. He sounded offended. “It’s my fantasy. I always wanted to be here between games. So I could climb over the chairs and hide in the dugouts and maybe meet the team.”

  And oh, the glory in those words. Meet the Team. It came with a dream of pressing flesh, getting signatures and handshakes, and maybe a signed baseball, a pennant for the wall as proof. It was the dream of a little boy with a stomach full of crackerjacks and a mouth full of Bazooka gum. There was a halcyon promise in those words that adulthood would later sour with practicalities and politeness. It took a child’s eagerness and entitlement to turn a team into a pantheon, and these were the gods that had earned Henry’s votive.

  “So,” Shadow said, in a very odd voice. “Where would little Henry hide?”

  “Right behind home plate,” He said, immediately, and didn’t wait for the others. “Come on. Lemme show you.” He said, and was off. Hawk started to keep pace, then realized that the Shadow was lagging behind.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  She chose to match her pace to his. “What’s wrong?”

  “I…I…” he started to say, and looked around with wild eyes. “I know this place. But it’s not the way Henry knows it. Like here—” he pointed at the turnstiles. “I see this and I think it’s a good place to find a victim. Only it’s…it’s not like that. It’s—”

  “It’s a good place to find a mark,” She said, and tried to consider it from an Alex West—or better yet, a Baylor West point of view. Alex’s daddy Baylor had been a hot mess of criminality, a con-artist who could two-time well enough to keep himself out of jail and his son in one piece, at least long enough for that boy to become his partner. Yeah, she thought, maybe the turnstiles made a good barrier. How they handle the frustration and dizzying excitement right before a game, that’d tell you a lot about a person. You’d want the overwhelmed, the distracted, the overexcited. Maybe with two or three kids attached.

  “What sort of things do you think about, here?”

  “How to be small. How to pretend to be broken. Baylor…” And he stopped dead. “Who is that? Who is Baylor W…west. Baylor West. I remember that name. I remember the man. He’s looming over me, bigger than any human has a right to be…no. No, I’m a child. And I’m sitting on the floor cradling my leg, trying to pretend like it’s strained even though I’m fine.”

  Henry, pausing in the middle of his personal tabernacle, said, “What’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure,” Hawk said, though that was her own fear of hope talking. “Keep going.”

  “He’s my father, Hawk. I can remember my father. We lived in places like this…no, we preyed on places like this. Lurking in the shadows, waiting for the unwary. It felt wrong, but…I had a child’s faith. How could our fathers be wrong?”

  A cooler full of water-logged sweets echoed in Hawk’s own memories, as did the fight that followed. “Easily,” She said, dryly. She supposed her mother hadn’t known that her father was taking her to a baseball game. Where had it been? Not Yankee Stadium. She’d never been here before in her life. She tried to remember and came up with only the impression of bricks and green.

  “How am I remembering this? I’ve had centuries to remember anything of my mortal life, and I never even suspected such a thing until I met you.”

  The way Hawk had only remembered the gummy bears, until she was here, and began to work at the memory. It was everything about these halls and walls. The smells Henry remembered had jogged her memory, or maybe the echoes of footsteps off walls, or maybe it was just the spirit of a stadium, almost singing with the memory of every game, every crowd, every full throated cheer or cry of despair.

  “Maybe you’ve never had a reason to remember,” Henry said. They both turned to him.

  Shadow scowled. “I would think I’d have every reason to remember. It would have been freeing, knowing I was not…always what I am. That I did have a whole life.”

  Henry dismissed this with a motion. “I don’t mean that you didn’t want it. I mean that…look, memory is tied to the senses. Sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. Sometimes you need a familiar thing to stimulate a memory. Like when you want to remember a lost loved one, you grab their shirt or a vial of their perfume. Or you try to remember a dinner conversation and you focus on the taste of food because that brings the words back. We build memory on connections, and all of yours were severed. Maybe by your transformation. More likely, by those SOBs when they ate you.

  “Holia is a hole. No sunlight. That alone takes sight out of the equation. How can you remember when the light is always different? They developed their own culture, their own dishes and traditions, their own textures and incenses. Which is great, don’t get me wrong, but when the smells and tastes and foods aren’t what they should be, how are you supposed to find those connections? If the memory of a stadium is connected to popcorn, you’d need one to remember the other. What do you do when they’re both gone?” Henry grinned, suddenly. “I’d bet you money, if we got a big ol’ bag of popcorn, you’d suddenly remember half the movies you ever watched.”

  Hawk got it. “This is the first time, really, that you’ve been around Earthside things. General Mulligan’s HQ doesn’t count. That’s completely alien to me, too. But places like this, things like popcorn and tennis shoes and badly mixed Kool-aid on a back porch.”

  “God, I loved it when Mom screwed up the mix,” Henry was grinning. “You’d get that crust of sugar on the bottom of the glass. That was the best part.”

  “What we’re trying to say is…you are remembering real things.” And she realized she was about to cry.

  Shadow, stood considering for a few moments. Each one felt frail and trembling, like a droplet of time on a spider’s web. Then he shook his head, breaking whatever spell of memory he’d been drowning in. “It doesn’t matter. We’re here for Mattias, not myself. There will be time enough for memory later.” And his alien eyes met Hawk’s. She knew what he was thinking of; the vial of Mentaphen. An abrupt and easy way to regain what he had lost. “Lead on, Henry. Take us to your refuge.”

  And Hawk, steaming, had no choice but to follow.