Free Someplace to Be Flying by Charles De Lint

died,” she said.
    “I don’t read the papers, but it doesn’t surprise me. Lots of stuff doesn’t make the papers, but it still has a huge impact on people’s lives.”
    Lily nodded in agreement. A grandparent dying in their sleep. A new child born into a family. A daughter coming out to her parents. They weren’t big news stories, but they still changed the lives of the people who experienced them. Like what had happened to them the other night.
    She  regarded him for a long moment,  trying to understand what had brought him here to see her, what kind of a person he really was. Usually a good judge of character, she couldn’t get a take on him at all. The only thing she was relatively sure of was that he didn’t mean her any harm.
    “Why did you want to see me?” she asked.
    “A woman like you has to ask that?”
    He said it easily, not like a come-on.
    “No, really,” she said.
    “Really?”
    She nodded.
    “I have no idea.” He looked past her, out the window for a moment, then met her gaze. “This thing we experienced … on the one hand, it seems like a dream, like it never really happened. On the other, I can’t get it out of my mind. I’ve listened to Jack’s stories for years, but they were always just stories, something to fill up the empty space between nightfall and dawn. Something to take our minds off of the hard times, you know, if only for awhile. But now, knowing those animal people are real …”
    His voice trailed off.
    “It changes everything,” Lily said.

    “Yeah. And what I can’t figure out is, is it good or bad or …”
    “Just different.”
    “You’ve got it.”
    Only Lily could tell there was more to it, because whatever was haunting the back of his eyes made a trail of uneasy paw prints up her own spine.
    “Or more than different,” she added.
    “You feel it, too?” Hank asked. “It’s like we’ve, I don’t know, stumbled onto a secret and there’s no backing out of it now. It’s just going to keep pulling us deeper and deeper into foreign territory.”
    Lily nodded. That was exactly how it felt to her.
    “So what can we dor” she asked.
    “That’s the thing, isn’t it? We’re on unfamiliar ground. I was thinking w e could just let it slide, but I feel like a junkie, needing a fix. Not to get high, just not to feel sick, you know? To be well. I keep scaring up strange stories wherever I turn, like I’ve stepped around a corner and I’m someplace else. Everything looks the same, but it’s different now. Changed. And instead of backing off, I want to go deeper—I need to know more.”
    “Like where did they come from?” Lily said. “Those girls from the other night. Where are they now?”
    “And what else is out there?”
    All around them, the patrons of the café went about their business, but the murmur of their conversations, silverware tinkling against cutlery, the music from the overhead sound system, seemed separate from the two of them sitting here at their table, as though they were cocooned and unmoored—drifting farther and farther from familiar territory.
    Suddenly Lily wanted to get out of the place. But she didn’t want to be alone.
    “Do you want to go someplace and have some dinner?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m in the mood for restaurants or crowds right now. Even this place is way too busy.”
    Again, he was on the same wavelength.
    “We could go back to my place,” she said, surprising herself. “Have some soup or something.”
    He didn’t say anything.
    “Look,” she said. “It’s just something to eat in a quiet place.”
    He gave a slow nod. “Soup and some quiet would be good.”

10.
    It was closing in on midnight and Rory was about to go online when his phone rang. Turning the volume of the radio down, he picked up on the second ring and said hello.
    “You weren’t sleeping?” Lily asked.
    “You know me, Kit. I’m the original night owl. I was just about to go online.”
    “Oh.