“Ronan I’m not saying that I don’t believe you.”

His eyes rolled almost violently as Gus prepared to justify that lie.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, kid.”

His mentor’s voice, gruff as it was, still carried an edge of affectionate playfulness despite the absurdity of his claims and her clear concern for his sanity. “I’m not saying that I don’t believe you, I’m saying that there might be a logical explanation for what happened.”


“There is. It was a monster.” Ronan’s voice was flat as he spoke. Occam’s Razor. Except this time the simplest answer was that every ancient civilization was right and monsters were real.


“And the girl?”


“I don’t know what she was.” The concession was a strange one. The woman certainly looked human but as far as he knew humans couldn’t do that. Or maybe they could and he’d just missed it. Somehow.


“They could have been performance artists. Or some crap from a new reality show. Those things are getting weirder every day.” Ronan suspected that she was biting back a speech on modern trends in entertainment and thanked whatever higher power gave her the strength to keep it inside.


“I couldn’t breathe. I know what you’re going to say and it wasn’t a panic attack. I know what a panic attack feels like and this wasn’t that. And there was lightning. Out of nowhere. Not even out of nowhere, out of harpies. There were bird women. I don’t even think there were clouds and if there were they weren’t thunderclouds.” He was aware that his expression was probably sullen by this point, at least sullen enough that Gus would notice.


Good.
Let her. He wanted her to talk him out of what he knew.


Gus looked at him, brown eyes intense under her short, iron grey curls.

“OK, Ronan. Well, what do you want to do about it?”


“What?”


“What do you want to do about it? If monsters are real, what do you want to do about it?”


“I don’t know. What am I supposed to do about it?” He wondered if she hoped that making him consider something so bizarre was a ploy to get him to see that he was being completely irrational and go work it out in the psych ward.


“What is this going to change for you? What are you going to change because of this?”


Ronan grunted in acknowledgment as he pondered her questions. There wasn’t much he could actually do. Unless he suddenly got the power to summon mythical creatures and lightning and whatever else came with that. It would be a convenient way to make them go away if they showed up again but he knew for a fact that he wouldn’t exactly seek them out if he had a choice in the matter.


“I don’t know, maybe I’ll just. I don’t know. I guess I could get some pepper spray.”


“You're going to pepper spray a monster?”


He wasn’t sure if the one he’d seen had even had a face. No mucus membranes, no capsaicin vulnerability. The idea of physically attacking one would have been comical if it still seemed like a distant possibility.


“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”