Jezromiah sat at Dorothey's bedside with his back turned to her. He had changed his armor and donned his denim shirt over a t-shirt with wide-legged trousers and low-cut boots with Cuban heels and zipped sides.

He stared out of the window. He remembered his best friend, and their falling out. He imagined his face in the reflection of his in the window. Jezromiah spent only eight months in the Vietnam War. "You're an idiot, Jez, letting a chick save you. Your fellow men need you here. You're going to abandon us for a chick? Any other day, I'd probably say right on, man. But not today, not when we don't know if we're ever going to make it out of this alive." Very shortly after, he was dying after he said those words to Jezromiah.

Jezromiah remembered the sound of enemy fire and the firing back of his allies. He flinched at the sound ringing in his skull and ears, reliving it as if it were happening in that moment. His heart beat so fast he felt like it was ripping through his chest to get out. To be free of the madness inside him.

Jezromiah had mistaken Dorothey for a Valkyrie. He had seen many of them on the battlefield. So despite his delirium and closeness to death, it was understandable. It was her wings that held him tight. Her body that gave him comfort when he believed there was no longer any. Her voice chased the insanity away, if only for those moments between rage and serenity.

Dorothey pulled the oxygen mask from her face. She put her hand on Jezromiah's shoulder. She weakly sat up supporting herself by her hand on his shoulder. He still stared out of the window still stuck in the portal in his mind, in the place never absent from even his most quiet or busiest of thoughts. She laid her forehead on his neck. Her wings had folded behind her. She brushed her lips there on the skin making it blush there. "Kiss me. Kiss me like we're the only thing that's happening." She whispered. He turned and looked at her. His lips met hers with one soft kiss after another.

"How are you feeling, sugar?" Jezromiah asked, helping her to lie back down.

"I feel weak. My joints still hurt a lot. My stomach's a little swollen and tender." She pressed her hands to her abdomen. She grimaced. "But I don't want western medicine too many side effects wipe out my powers. The nurses and doctors refuse to let me pick my own kind of medicine."

"What kind do you want?" Jezromiah asked.

"It's who. Get me Eltchie Waberson. She was once a high-priestess in the medicine world," Dorothey said looking at both Jezromiah and Sailil studying their faces for confirmation of resolution.

"Dorothey, she's a High-General. I don't have that kind of power," Jezromiah said with a brooding look on his face.

"But I know who does. Apatt," Sailil interjected Jezromiah's mutual train of thought when she entered Dorothey's hospital room and went to her opposite bedside. She wore a Mary Quant miniskirt with a red, blue and green vertical stripe on the left side and white Go-Go boots. She wore bold-colored drop earrings. She drank her bottle of water with salt in it. Her fishtail retracted as she drank it all. She crushed the plastic bottle in her hand and tossed it in the trash can in the corner of the room. "But he has fire coming out of his ears right now, since our last rap. He might rip you apart Jezromiah if you ask him for a favor. I'll go. You stay here with Dorothey." She smiled at Dorothey and brushed her cheek with the base of her knuckles.

Dorothey smiled back weakly. She swallowed hard. "The creature is not a creature. It's a child, a child who's been cursed."

"That thing's a kid?" Jezromiah said his brows furrowed almost knitting together.

"The creature's mother gave birth to it in the cryptozoology sanctuary, in captivity. There's no way unless the mother had been cursed," Sailil said her eyes widened.

"No, the mother wasn't cursed. The mother was a creature but the child she bore was not. I witnessed the soul of a child, a human child."

"Man, that's gnarly," Jezromiah rubbed his finger along his chin, his brows furrowed. "That's why you told us to back off during the mission."

Dorothey nodded. She gasped and winced. The air left her lungs from the heaviness of the fatigue pressing down on her torso. She opened her mouth forcing a struggling sigh. She tried to let out relief trying to inhale and exhale. Her breath was ragged and became barely a whisper then nothing at all. Jezromiah helped her put her oxygen mask back on. Since the pain and weakness in her joints made it debilitating to do so.

Thirteen-year-old, Popi Aseena lay on the sofa watching t.v. eating a box of Cracker Jack.

"Yeah, I could be one of the original dancers on American Bandstand. Top 40 songs are the best songs to listen and dance to. They have such calming colors." Popi groaned when she finished nearly half the box of Cracker Jack and found the heart-shaped ring inside. She studied the shape of the ring. "Romance, mmm...always smells like chocolate. But the colors are always too bright and loud." She slipped the ring on her finger.

Popi was a Djinni-Fairy-Fury. She had synesthesia, a rare neurological condition in which the stimulation of one or more of the senses triggers an automatic, involuntary experience in one or two of the five senses where the sufferer perceives sounds, tasting, smelling words, letters, numbers, sensations, emotions or feeling a sensation on the skin when smelling certain scents. Popi had red, black and blonde hair, in a long bob with a full fringe hairstyle.

She had a long, beaded pendant necklace around her neck. She wore a collared jersey and flat shoes, part of the Beat Generation style. She had baby doll-like bluish-purple eyes with one black eyelash and one electric blue and a girly, lollipop-shaped frame. She was half-Nepalese-Senegalese and Serbian.

"Shomari how's Dorothey?" Dr. Apatt Raddlethorpe asked.

"Not so good. But I didn't stick around because I didn't want to be a drag," Shomari sighed hanging his long neck and head downward, kicking the ground in a sheepish way.

"Humans, Dorothey's age, and younger have a shorter life expectancy and higher early death rate, but she's immortal it's a nuisance but she'll pull through."

"Shine it on, if you want Apatt. But her powers and her body are breaking down. And she's not healing as fast or hardly at all. Spending the rest of her immortal life in a hospital bed is no life at all. If she were mortal, at least she'd be able to die in peace. I'll be in my habitat if you need me."

Popi came out of her lamp that was sitting on Dr. Raddlethorpe's bookshelf. The Djinn part of Popi's heritage had free will. She shapeshifted into her human form. Still suspended in flight she slowly dissipated the smokeless fire rolling foggily behind her, from the inside of her lamp. She let her fairy wings remain. Her second set of wings, her fury wings were almost smooth underneath her skin often resembling freckles on her epidermis.

Popi wasn't bound to her lamp like most Djinn because of her mixed supernatural heritage. She stayed in her lamp most of the time because of her synesthesia. The tasting, the color, the smelling of words, letters, numbers even emotions caused her to be quite agoraphobic at times when she'd experience sensory overload.

"Shomari's words were so blue. But when he talked about Dorothey, his words were also red. He really cares about her. Bummer. Dr. Raddlethorpe why didn't you tell him you've been working on a cure for Dorothey?"

"I don't want to get his hopes up, Popi. That's why."

"But you're ok with him thinking you have a funky attitude about it?" She nodded and sighed. "I understand."

"The creature's in stasis. Popi can you bring him out of it?"

"No, Teach. I have the power to cause paralyzing sleep, but I can't bring back consciousness unless I possess the creature's body. That could have traumatic effects during and after I leave the body. I could whisper to the creature's soul, paraphonetically?"

Before Apatt could say a word, Popi assembled a dark room on an astral plane where the cryptology lab, its animals and creatures in their habitats, Dr. Raddlethorpe and the rest of its contents transformed into a parallelogram-shaped album cover spinning on its axis on a broken record player. In the center of the room which had diagonal-shaped corners was the creature in its cage. A Fabergé constructed tunnel traveled up and down like a ride on a carousel keeping the cage nestled.

The creature inside the cage still in stasis didn't stir a bit. Popi flew with great speed like a zephyr and dropped lightly like a penny through a slot, into the tunnel. She morphed into her human form. She walked around the cage down below, her hands clasped behind her back. She spoke to the creature's soul so softly and hypnotically the dead themselves couldn't hear her. Her Djinn heritage gave her the power to whisper to one's soul. As she continued in this undertone, Popi became invisible.

Her power of invisibility which generated from her Djinn-Fury powers made it easier for her to walk through the cage without unlocking it or any other supernatural creatures, including Apatt from sensing her existence with his elemental powers. The creature's body started to descend by the sound of her voice. More and more her voice saturated the creature's soul, and this made the creature's body touch the floor of the cage. But, before its body completely alit Popi jolted out of the alternate reality she created.

She became corporeal again. Her fairy wings retracted. Her second set of wings, her Fury wings emerged. These wings had a sharp claw on each wing. Her Fury wings compared to her multi-colored fairy wings were a red and black color. Her pointed fairy ears folded in and disappeared underneath her skin and her Fury ears arose. Her ears long pointed with slightly curved longer horns at the tips stuck out from the crown of her head. The second set of horns curled at her cheekbones. Her feet and hands grew claws. She had red and black eyes in this form. She flew backward high in the air from the creature. The creature still in the cage ascended, in stasis.

"I saw...can't you see. Don't you see? No, you can't see..." Popi said to Apatt who froze from the dissonance of the effects of the alternate reality back to reality and her feral reaction to something.

He blinked, slowly trying to recover. He swallowed hard the dryness in his throat. "What? What the...Popi? Mellow out. What's got you jumping bad?"

Popi descended and ascended nervously through the air. She gulped. There's a soul behind the creature's soul, a child's soul. Inside the child's soul are the fossil fuel human remains of the child."

"You mean something or someone extracted the soul from a child and put said child's remains inside the child's own soul?" Dr. Raddlethorpe concluded.

"Yes, Teach. And they stuck it inside the creature. They placed it behind the creature's soul thinking no one would find it. This is so diabolical on so many levels. The Fury and the Djinn in me wants revenge so badly. How could anyone do this to a child?"

"I don't want to think this, but whoever they are, might've also fossilized the child," Dr. Raddlethorpe thought aloud. "This is sorcery of the most high."