Wouldn’t you know it, where before I’d found trouble without looking for it, now I couldn’t find any.

Night and Day

part 8 of 12

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. Thanks to Morpheus, epain, and Karen Lockhart for reading and commenting on earlier drafts.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The summer solstice passed, and the days finally started getting a little shorter. But it would still be another couple of months until Jasmine’s bedtime would be before sunset, and I missed the little squirt. Once in a while she’d wake up from a nightmare in the middle of the night, and she’d come find me instead of Mom since I was awake. I worried that she’d wake up from a nightmare sometime when I was out walking, but though I cut my walks shorter, I didn’t stop going out. Being able to blind my attackers while simultaneously improving my night vision made me feel pretty confident — overconfident, really — that I could handle whatever our neighborhood might throw at me, and I’d started exploring less well-lit side-streets that I’d previously avoided. I’d avoided any more fights, turning on my power whenever I thought someone was probably following me and keeping it on until I zigzagged around a couple of corners.

Then one night when I woke up, I remembered a dream. I hurried into the apartment, said a distracted hi to Mom and Jared, and found one of my school notebooks (by now Jamie and I each had our own), where I wrote down everything I could remember.

“I was out in the woods, and the full moon was high in the sky. There were some other girls with me: Wanda, the girl from upstairs, and a couple of girls I knew from school, and some other girls I don’t know in real life, but they were my friends in the dream. And we had bows and arrows and we were hunting. We shot a deer, and then a wolf, and then we came on a man who had grabbed a woman by her hair and was threatening to rape her. We shot him, too, and the woman joined us and we gave her a bow and arrows.”

After a few moments' thought, I tore that page out, folded it up, and hid it under my panties in the top drawer of the dresser in Jasmine’s room. I didn’t think Mom or Jamie or Jared would snoop through my school notebooks, but Mr. Martin might look at them, and I didn’t want anyone to know I dreamed about killing people, even people who deserved it.

I think it was after that dream that I really started looking for trouble. I went out almost every night — except when Mom fell asleep on the sofa, and would see I wasn’t there if she woke up during the night and dragged herself back to bed. And I’d go looking for the kind of guys who’d attacked me twice before.

Wouldn’t you know it, where before I’d found trouble without looking for it, now I couldn’t find any. I spent an hour or two each night walking along the least well-lit streets in the neighborhood and found almost nobody around, and those few minding their own business. It took me over two weeks to find someone like that again. I knew I’d found them when they started following me. I led them into an alleyway even less well-lit than the street we’d been on, and turned on my power.

I turned around and saw them hesitate near the entrance to the alley. “She went in here, didn’t she?” the taller one said.

“Yeah. Could be out the other end by now... come on.”

The advanced toward me, but slowly, and then stopped.

“I can’t see a thing in here,” said the taller one.

“Yeah, so you’re afraid of the dark now?”

“The streetlights behind us just got real dim, nitwit. This ain’t natural.” (Dr. Darrington had figured out that my power’s effect didn’t have a sharp edge; the light seemed to get dimmer at its edges, and completely dark as you got closer to me, as more and more of the light was shifted into the infrared.)

“Come on,” said the shorter one, barging ahead blindly. I tiptoed toward him a few yards, then held myself flush against a wall while he blundered past; his friend was still hanging back, groping around, and finally touching the wall of a building. Once the other guy was ahead of me, I walked up behind him and kicked him in the back of the knee.

He fell, yelling. “What’s wrong?” his friend asked, sounding panicky. He had been groping along the wall toward the street, but when his friend yelled, give him some credit, he started back the other way, toward me.

“Something hit me in the leg,” the guy I’d kicked said.

“You mean you tripped over something.”

“No, it hit me from behind, I tell you.” He struggled to get up, but I’d apparently hurt him more than I expected, because he was having trouble.

Just then I kicked the other guy in the back of the leg. He fell, screaming. “They kicked me too,” he said, and as soon as he sat up, pulled a knife out of his belt and waved it blindly in front of him. I backed away a little, wondering if I should retreat. Instead I tiptoed around him and over toward his friend, who had just gotten to his feet and had pulled his own knife. I carefully circled around him and kicked him in the back of the other knee.

“Who are you?” he yelled while he was picking himself up. “Don’t mess with us.”

There was warm stiff dripping from his arm — he’d cut himself when he fell. I kicked him again while he was down, and he waved the knife in my direction, but since he was blind I was able to dodge it pretty easily. I backed away, making more noise this time because I was in a hurry, and the guy waved the knife at me again. I walked over to the other guy and around him and his waving knife, picked up a broken piece of wood — probably the leg of a chair or table, there were several things like that in the alley — and hit him in the back of the head. He spun around and waved his knife, but I was already out of his reach.

“He hit me in the head,” he told his partner. “It hurts, but it didn’t knock me out.”

By the time he’d said that, I’d circled around to his side, and whacked him on the knife hand. He yelped and swung the knife toward me, but I dodged to the side and toward his friend. He stumbled after me.

The shorter guy had gotten to his feet by now, though he was looking a little unsteady. Both guys were facing each other, waving their knives in front of them blindly — a recipe for an accident. I stayed out of their way, but tossed a piece of gravel over in between them. They moved toward each other.

“We need to get out of here,” said the guy I’d kicked first. “Can you tell which way is the street?”

“Keep moving in a straight line and we’ll either hit a wall or come out into the street. If you hit a wall, go left, keeping a hand on the wall.”

Smart guy. I kept watching, wondering if I should stay and mess with them some more, or clear out. I could keep my power going for seven or eight minutes by now, and I was pretty sure only a minute or two at most had passed since I turned it on; I decided to stay.

The two guys weren’t heading straight toward each other — they weren’t moving in straight lines, period, stumbling around in the dark — but after a little bit they came within range of the knives they had out, and one of them poked the other in the arm. Not very hard, unfortunately, but enough to make him yelp. He swung wildly with his knife and hit the other guy in the side, more effectively.

“He’s knifed me!” the guy yelled, and the other said: “Oh my God, was that you?” Then they were talking over each other and I couldn’t make out what they said. I gave a laugh, which I immediately realized was a mistake; both guys turned to face me, and one of them threw his knife. It missed me by a foot or two. I looked around, thinking to pick it up and keep the guy from getting it back, but I couldn’t see where it landed. It should have been warm from his hand and plainly visible, so it must have slid up under some of the broken furniture.

“That sounded like a girl,” said the guy who’d been stabbed, and was holding his hands to stanch the bleeding.

“She did this to us somehow,” said the guy who was bleeding from a self-inflected wound in the arm. “Blinded us and made us hit each other.” He was moving toward me. I could probably keep dodging around these guys until my power ran out, but I decided it was time to go. I tiptoed out of the alley around the corner onto the street, and then took off running. I turned off my power after turning another corner, and walked back to my apartment, keeping an eye out behind and around me as usual.

I’d gotten lucky; on some level I knew that. I could have gotten hit by the thrown knife, or when one of those guys was waving his knife at me. I could have bled to death in that alley, probably after being raped — I wasn’t sure if I could keep my power going after being stabbed, and didn’t want to find out. But though I knew intellectually that I’d been in serious danger — was in danger every time I went out, though less danger than a girl without my power would be in — I didn’t feel it. I felt like Artemis turning Actaeon into a stag and watching his dogs tear him to pieces; I felt good, and I wanted to do it again.

The next night, though, just as I was about to go out, Jasmine woke up and came into the living room, blinking sleepily.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I had another bad dream.” She sat down next to me on the sofa and hugged me, and I hugged her back.

“It’s over now,” I said. “And it won’t really hurt even if it’s kind of scary.”

“Will you tell me a story?” she said. “Jamie doesn’t tell stories as good as you.”

By rights Apollo should have been a better storyteller than Artemis. But I don’t think we knew that when we transformed, so that particular bit of mythology wouldn’t have had any effect on how we changed. I think Bobby just described Apollo as a musician, and not all songs are stories — probably fewer nowadays than when those myths were first made up or when they got written down.

“Go use the potty if you need to, then get back in bed, and I’ll tell you a story.”

So a few minutes later I sat on the edge of Jasmine’s bed and told her about Jason and the Argonauts, and made up a happy ending for Jason and Medea which neither of them really deserved. Jasmine was pretty sleepy by then, maybe already asleep, and I tiptoed out of the room and, a few minutes later, out of the apartment.

I didn’t find the trouble I was looking for that night, or the next, or the next. Almost a week later, I saw a guy was following me, lured him into an alleyway, blinded him, and whacked him in the crotch with a piece of wood I’d stashed in that alley a few nights earlier. He curled into a whimpering ball and I cleared out.

I kept doing that as the nights got shorter, finding some would-be predator and turning the tables on them a bit less than once a week on average. I think I’d beaten up five or six guys, counting those first two who’d stabbed each other (I didn’t have such good luck as that again), when it all went terribly wrong.

Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.