Calico
The condominium felt empty to Calico despite the presence of the seed mimic somewhere close by. Long hours had passed since the man who he had come to see had made the quiet leap from the world of the living to the realm of the eternally stiff. The haunted blackness of night was just beginning to show signs of the bleak gray of first dawn, little more than a bleeding of sour light around the fringes of the horizon. The futile illumination was enough to make the difference though.
Both Calico and the, as of yet unseen, lurking astral parasite knew that time was growing short. Only a small window of opportunity existed for the ministrations of the mimic to take full affect, and the longer the host form was allowed to decay, the more unlikely the chances that the mimic would regain entrance to this plane. Calico was a patient man. Crazy patient some would say, but he had more experience hunting the barrier breakers than any who had passed this way in countless seasons. So sitting silently and unmoving near the recently dead was child’s play to the thin whip of a man.
This particular nasty had forced Calico to sit on deathwatch thirty-two times so far. He would never admit it to anyone other than his deeper, true self, but he was beginning to admire the patience and tenacity of his current adversary. Many such entities had crossed his path in the decade that he had been serving on barrier watch, but few had known the cunning of the beast he currently stalked. Dangle a piece of meat in front of a hungry monster, eventually it will revert to primal instincts and take the offered bait. All beings make mistakes given time. The defining difference is being able to cultivate the weaknesses of your opponent so that the endgame decisions are made much more quickly.
The host figure that Calico had chosen for this sitting very likely held special allure for the intangible predator. Fleshy and strong, the man’s corpse lay sprawled on the laminate flooring in a recumbent pose of puppet-like flimsy. Eyes still bulged slightly, unseeing, from the grimacing face, and the blue of the puffed lips matched the blue of the man’s swollen neck where Calico had squeezed the life out of him hours before.
Now with the first spears of dawn leeching through the haze, Calico could sense the creature preparing to make its move. The arcane tension in the atmosphere was stifling along with the sweltering moisture from the streets outside. Temperatures hadn’t dipped below 22 tempura bars in the last cycle and a half, not even during the stark second darkness.
Calico’s eyes shifted to a thin ripple in reality where the spirit shard was trying to penetrate the barrier. A thin smile formed in his mind when he realized that his quarry was getting sloppy, becoming impatient. The skin of the world bowed as the psychic force poked away at the resilient nature of the protective shell that existed between worlds. The understanding of the barrier’s attributes was still a fledgling science, and the initial events that precipitated the creation of the barrier patrol were the stuff of infamy. Suffice it to say, that when sufficiently enormous psychic energy was channeled at a focused point in the barrier, an astral entity was capable of punching through the wall and slipping into this world through the rift.
Just such an occurrence was developing several meters away from Calico’s watch station, and the beast was gaining steam, soon summoning potent enough energies to activate a launch. The hunter coiled himself, preparing to lash out at the astral projection the moment it attempted to cross into his existence. So focused was his will, that he failed to see a second ripple in the weave of reality several feet behind him and almost directly opposite from the initial spirit shard.
Calico’s misperception was certainly understandable, for in all the recorded sightings and interactions with astral phenomenon, never before had there been two such events so closely related either in time or location, let alone both. Each previous encounter, including the myriad of documented cases set down by Calico himself, was always indicative of a single infiltrator attempting to punch through the barrier for the nearest host target with little or no deviation in tactical approach.
This dual occurrence was groundbreaking discovery and was suggestive of two possibilities. First, that the two events were evolving out of a coincidental circumstance that was eventually bound to occur as the number of sightings and events continued to increase. Or second, and an entirely more threatening consideration, that the two entities were working in unison, were collaborating their efforts on penetrating the barrier. The ramifications for such an event were astounding and could pose a serious risk to all lifekind.