Her eyes were bright green. Not just green—bright. They caught the overhead fluorescent light and held it, glowing with an internal luminosity that was startling.
And then, he saw them.
Her ears.
They weren't round. They were long, tapered, and undeniably pointed. They poked out through her golden hair, twitching slightly as she listened to the room, picking up sounds he couldn't hear. They were too smooth to be latex prosthetics, too mobile to be a prop.
The younger one was a smaller echo of the first—same pointed ears, same cascading blonde hair, same pale, porcelain skin. She wore a brown leather vest over a white blouse with puffy sleeves, and a long skirt that swished around boots that belonged at a Renaissance Faire, not on a linoleum floor in Texas.
Both stood frozen, vibrating with tension, looking like they were one wrong move away from bolting back out the door, but terrified of what lay outside.
Marcus blinked once. Then again. He pinched his own thigh through his jeans just to make sure he hadn't fallen asleep in the back office.
"…Uh," he managed, his voice coming out rough and rusty from disuse. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Welcome to The Slipgate."
No response.
No hello. No nod. Just wide eyes sweeping the room, cataloging every detail—the ketchup bottles, the napkin dispensers, the ceiling fans—like they might attack at any moment.
He cleared his throat again, stepping fully behind the bar to put a barrier between them, trying to appear non-threatening.
"You can sit," he said, gesturing with an open hand. "Booth's clean. Take your pick."
He pointed to a booth along the wall where the morning sunlight pooled in a warm, dusty rectangle.
The women watched his hand, then the booth, as if they were decoding a complex military signal. Finally, the older one touched the younger one's wrist—a protective, guiding gesture—and nudged her forward.
They moved with a strange, gliding gait, sliding into the bench seats carefully, perched on the edge like people who had never sat in a diner booth before in their lives.
Marcus exhaled a breath he didn't know he'd been holding.
Step one: seated.
He grabbed two laminated menus, walked over, and set one in front of each woman.
"Menu," he said, keeping his words simple. "Food. I cook. You pick."
The younger one reached out and nudged the edge of the plastic menu with one fingertip, flinching back slightly as if it might bite her.
Neither of them opened the menus.
Marcus retreated to the safety of the bar. He pretended to adjust the stack of clean glasses, using the mirror behind the liquor shelf to watch them without staring.
They didn't talk. They didn't whisper. They didn't fidget with their phones or look bored the way normal customers did.
They studied everything. They looked at the light fixtures with awe. They stared at the ceiling tiles as if mapping a battlefield.
The older one's gaze kept drifting back to the front window, scanning the parking lot with a hunter's intensity. The younger one's gaze kept snagging on him.
Something about them was familiar. Not their faces—he had never seen anyone who looked like that. It was the fear.
He'd seen that specific flavor of fear before. Overseas. On refugees. On villagers caught in the crossfire. On people who had been chased enough times to know exactly how it ended if they got caught.
The part of him the Marines had wired to spot trouble before anyone else stirred like an old scar tissue warming up.
He also remembered another woman. Raina. Another bar, another night where he'd stepped in and thought he was saving someone, only to find out he was the one in the trap.
His jaw tightened, the muscles jumping.
He couldn't ask, "Are you from the other side like Raina?" without sounding clinically insane. He couldn't even be sure the universe was cruel enough to send him another damsel in distress to ruin his life.
So he did the one thing he understood. The one thing a diner owner was supposed to do.
He fed them.
Start simple. Non-threatening. That was the doctrine for winning hearts and minds, or at least for not getting shot by terrified locals.
Toast.
Marcus stood in the sterile, stainless-steel silence of the kitchen, his hands trembling slightly as he dropped four slices of white bread into the industrial toaster. He needed the routine. He needed the mechanical clunk of the lever and the rising scent of yeast and heat to ground him.
When the bread popped, golden and crisp, he buttered it with practiced efficiency, the knife scraping rhythmically against the crust. He cut them diagonally—corner to corner. His mother had sworn food felt kinder when it was cut on the bias, a bit of domestic superstition that stuck with him through wars and peace alike. He added two glasses of ice water, the cubes cracking as the liquid hit them, and a couple of plastic jam cups.
He loaded it all onto a tray and took a breath.
"Round one," he muttered to the empty kitchen.
He walked out, keeping his movements slow and televised. He set the tray down on their table with a soft clack.
The reaction was immediate and visceral. The older woman stiffened, her spine snapping straight against the red vinyl booth. Her knuckles went white where she gripped the edge of the table. The younger one flinched violently at the clink of glass on laminate, her shoulders hunching as if expecting a blow.
"Toast," Marcus said gently, keeping his voice pitched low, the way one spoke to a spooked horse. He pointed to his mouth and mimed a chewing motion. "Food. Eat. It's safe."
They stared at the plate as if it contained a live grenade.
The butter shone under the fluorescent lights, melting into the golden pores of the bread. The jam glistened red. Condensation beaded on the water glasses, sliding down in slow, erratic trails.
No one moved.
The silence in the diner stretched, heavy and suffocating. The older woman's gaze kept drifting past him to the window, scanning the parking lot with a thousand-yard stare that Marcus recognized intimately. It was the look of someone waiting for the next mortar round.
The younger girl finally moved. She reached out a trembling hand, poking one corner of a toast triangle with a single fingertip. When the bread didn't explode or bite back, she snatched her hand away instantly, tucking it back into her lap.
"It's okay," Marcus said, forcing a smile he didn't feel. "It won't bite."
They didn't get the words. He could see the confusion in their eyes. Maybe it was the tone they didn't trust.
They did not take a bite.
After a long, agonizing minute, Marcus exhaled through his nose. He collected the tray again, the ice rattling in the glasses, and retreated to the kitchen with what little dignity he could salvage.
"Alright," he muttered, leaning his hip against the prep counter. "Round one: toasted failure."
He ate a slice himself, chewing methodically while he thought. Maybe crunchy was wrong. Maybe their stomachs were wrecked from adrenaline. Maybe triangles were a war crime where they came from.
He pivoted. Soft comfort.
He pulled a canister of oats from the shelf and stirred up a small bowl of oatmeal. He dressed it up—brown sugar melting into dark ribbons, a dash of cinnamon, a freshly sliced banana arranged in a circle. It smelled like before-school mornings. It smelled like safety.
He walked back out. A quiet swap. He placed the steaming bowl in the center of the table.
"Try this," he said, mostly to himself.
The younger girl leaned in, unable to help herself. She inhaled deeply, her nostrils flaring. Her eyes fluttered closed for half a second, and a look of pure, desperate hunger crossed her face. She looked like someone smelling a bakery after weeks of surviving on ration bars and dirt.
But her hands stayed locked in her lap.
The older sister wasn't looking at the food. She was watching Marcus. Her green eyes were dissecting him, studying his hands, his posture, the pulse in his neck. She was assessing him as the unknown variable in a very dangerous equation.
Marcus tried again. He mimed eating—hand to bowl, imaginary spoon to mouth, chew, swallow, smile.
Their eyes tracked his fingers with intense suspicion.
Nothing.
He slid the bowl back onto his tray, frustration warring with pity in his chest.
"Tough crowd," he sighed.
Round two, down.
He had just turned his back to retreat to the kitchen when the scream tore through the diner.
It was sharp, startled, and cut off in the middle, followed instantly by the sound of a violent scuffle. Marcus spun around, abandoning the tray on the nearest table, the bowl rattling dangerously.
The booth was chaos.