The world came back into focus in shattered bits and pieces. I saw the bright red and blue flashes of ambulance sirens. I caught sight of my coworkers wearing their navy blue uniforms and gleaming badges as they swarmed about the ruined club with crime scene tape and squad cars. I saw the EMTs in the ambulance, I could hear them talking to me but I couldn't respond past basic yes or no answers. Shock and grief had numbed me more than any amount of painkillers ever could.

Yuki was dead. I'd watched my fellow first responders lay her in a body bag and zip it over her face. Uncle Enemi and my mother were going to be hear any moment and hear the news themselves. I could already hear their screams. My throat was still raw from my own.

Yuki was dead. My best friend was dead. My cousin and the closest thing I'd ever had to a sister was laying in the morgue, waiting to be looked at by a medical examiner. I tried to shut my eyes, lose myself in the medication the nurse's had administered and just stop thinking. Stop being. Stop feeling every damn thing but it was pointless. Everything was like a broken record. The blue monster and his ice spikes, the unknown woman who'd vanished into thin air as soon as the sirens were visible, Yuki sprawled out on the floor, a three foot spike protruding from her chest, her hand in mine, telling me it was okay when nothing would ever be okay again.

Yuki was dead and monsters were real. Nothing could be okay as long as either of those things were true.

The tiny ER room blurred as tears welled in my eyes and there was a rattle of a curtain rod as it was pulled aside. A white nurse in pale yellow scrubs smiled warmly at me and began explaining that she needed to clean out the scraps and scratches on my body. I nodded, mute. It didn't matter. I barely felt the sting of the peroxide tinged cotton ball across my face. How could anything hurt again when I was faced with a loss like this?

"Sorry honey," the nurse said, mistaking my clenched jaw and tears for pain. "I'm almost done."

"It's fine," I muttered, a reflex response but nothing was fine. Nothing would ever be fine again. There were monsters out there. Real monsters. Not just the kind that looked like humans but were evil on the inside, but monsters with powers no one on Earth could hope to match. I'd never be able to sleep at night knowing how truly helpless I and every other person was in the face of these creatures. I'd never have peace knowing the creature that murdered my best friend was alive. The clerk's words in that store had stuck with me. She hadn't said the orb I'd thrown would kill it, whatever it was, she'd only said it would get sent away. Sent away didn't mean death, it meant displacement. My hands began to shake as those unnatural red eyes stared back at me through my memory. I felt the bite of cold against my skin though I was still in the store, facing the inexplicable and certain death.

I was supposed to be dead. And I wasn't. I was alive, the worst injury a two inch slash on my collar. At least the worse physical injury anyways. Yuki's loss had broken my heart. The heart that already had cracks in it from when Dad died. My eyes burned again, hot tears welling in my eyes but I couldn't shed them. Some part of me was still in shock and couldn't break down because of it.

"Excuse me, Miss Hamada?" An familiar accent reached my ears and I looked up and I could hear the blood rush out of my face. The clerk who'd been in the store was standing just outside the curtain, the navy blue of an officer's uniform and gleaming badge putting me on edge. She wasn't part of the force; I was one of very few females in the department and as a byproduct, we all knew each other. And the color of her badge was wrong, we wore silver badges, not gold.

I regarded her coolly. "Let me guess, you need to ask me if I'm up to answering a few questions?"

The woman nodded. "Yes."

"Ask."

She smiled at me though I didn't return it. The nurse scurried away, off to check other patients and the woman and I were alone. She tugged the curtain shut and her smile dropped instantly. "I'm so sorry," she said, her brown eyes shining.

"Thank you, so am I." I sighed. "Why are you here?" Despite the apparent magic she possessed I had a feeling it couldn't bring back the dead.

"I wanted to make sure you were alright. You understand, I feared the Jotunn might not be alone and I didn't wish to draw anymore to the area."

"Jotunn?" I repeated, the foreign word was clunky on my lips. "What does that mean?"

"It's what attacked us."

"I figured as much but what is it?"

The woman frowned a moment. "Forgive me," she said at last. "This is not my mother tongue. I think you might call them frost giants."

The words should've shocked me but they didn't. Nothing seemed out of the realm of possibility anymore. "And what was it doing here?"

"The same thing they always do when they stumble into other worlds, create conflict and panic."

"Lovely," my words dripped with sarcasm. "And who are you?" She frowned at me and I was a good enough people-reader to know she wasn't sure she wanted to answer that question. "Look I'd be dead if it weren't for you and I know you tried to save," I flattered, I couldn't say her name. "You tried to save us and I'm thankful for it. You don't owe me anything but I need to know what's going on. Even if you don't give me information I'm going to find out one way or another."

The woman's mouth twitched. If I hadn't known better I thought she might've smiled. "My name is Sif."

"Sif?" The word was still foreign but familiar too. I'd heard it somewhere before though I had no idea where or how it had come up.

"Yes, I know it's unusual."

"Not really," I said with a shrug. If I had to guess, I figured she just had an family name like I did. I'd been named after my great grandmother who'd immigrated from Japan to the United States back in the nineteen-fifties.

"I know you have more questions, but I cannot answer them for you, not right now. The police are going to be here soon and I need to know what you intend to say to them."

Even if I wanted to tell the truth, I didn't have the words to express it. "I won't mention you if that's what you're worried about."

She smiled at me for the first time. The gesture really made her round cheekbones and chin stand out. "Thank you."

"And by the way, the badge is gold, not silver. Nice try though."

She looked down at the badge and smiled again. "My mistake. I'll be seeing you again, Suzume." And with no further word, her image began to shimmer, like I was looking at her over a bed of coals rather than empty space. I blinked, thinking the exhaustion was finally breaking through but then, the shimmer was gone and so was she.

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New chapter! So Suzume has met Sif (though she's not fully aware of what that entails yet!) Any thoughts on where it's going next? I'd love to hear it!

Write on! :)