Enter Shelby

POV: Shelby Chen

In the heart of Los Angeles, 2025.

I'd always believed the city had two faces.

The one everyone saw. Neon lights, billboards, and bussling streets thrumming with life.

And the one underneath, shadows where the whispers lived.

That was the part I listened to. That was why became an occult researcher. Partly.

Some people chased fortune. Others chased science. I chased what didn’t make sense.

That night, though, I hadn’t been expecting anything strange. I was walking home, my notebook heavy in my bag, boots clicking against cracked pavement. That's when I saw him.

A man sat barefoot on the curb, shirtless, with nothing but ragged pants clinging to him. Like he had just stepped out of another world. His black hair hung in tangled strands, his skin pale, but his eyes… his eyes didn’t belong there.

People walked by without even glancing at him.

Typical L.A.

You could collapse in the street and no one would notice. But I stopped. Maybe because something about him didn’t seem like the rest of the city.

“Rough night?” I asked, stopping at a safe distance.

He turned his head. His eyes locked onto me like I was the first thing that had made sense in an hour.

“What year is it?” he asked.

Okay. So we were opening with that.

“Why, you miss a few?” I joked. “Twenty-twenty-five.”

He looked past me, up at the towers, like the number didn’t make any sense. “…Modern,” he said.

“All right, time traveler. Did you need a shirt, or were you trying to get arrested for public indecency?”

“That depends,” he said, voice scraped raw. “On whether being arrested meant… food.”

Oh. He wasn’t kidding. I clocked the shivers, the way his shoulders held like he didn’t trust gravity. My curious instincts started waving flags.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Naga.” 

“Cool. I’m Shelby.” I held out a hand, remembered the barefoot thing, and then pivoted back slightly. “There’s a diner two blocks over. They sell pancakes big enough to shame a pizza. We can talk shirts afterward.”

He didn’t move.

I pointed at myself. “Occult researcher. Not a cop, not a cult. I can get you food, and if you're having some sort of… episode, I can try to get you home.”

He stood careful before following.

“Do you live here?” he asked as we walked, voice low like the city might hear and object.

“In this hellscape of a city? Yeah.” I flashed him a smile over my shoulder. “Born and raised. Don’t worry, you'll get used to the screaming metal whales. We call them cars.”

We crossed with the crowds, he flinched when headlights panned over us like searchlights. I leaned in. “Tip one: the big red hand means don’t go. The little white guy means do.”

We slipped into the diner, filled with the smell of burnt coffee and maple syrup.

I pointed him into a booth, slid in across, and handed him a menu. He tilted it and stared.

“Okay,” I said, gentle for once. “Two rules. One: you eat. Two: you don’t say anything that’d make me call an ambulance.”

He nodded. It was an odd nod, formally polite, but not quite.

A waitress arrived with a pen. “What can I get you, sweetheart?”

He frowned, as if searching a language he was still unpacking. “Eggs. And bread. And… sugar.”

“French toast with eggs and a side of more sugar,” I translated. “Two coffees, one water, keep the syrup coming.”

She left. He watched her go, then said, “People don't look at each other here.”

“Eye contact in L.A. is a micro-aggression,” I said. “Also, you looked like you lost a fight with a museum exhibit.”

“What's a museum?” he asked, dead serious.

“I’ll circle back.” I folded my arms on the table. “You asked for the year. You looked at buildings like they insulted you. And you said ‘modern’ like it was a slur. Did you want to tell me how hard you hit your head, or did you want to tell me the interesting version?”

He held my stare for a long beat. I was good at silence. People filled it, but he didn’t try to. He just said, “I'm looking for someone, her name was Haneul.”

“Girlfriend, friend, enemy?”

“None,” he said. Then, softer, “All.”

There had been so much ache in the word it sat on the table like a third person.

“Okay,” I said, and my voice came out less sarcastic than usual. “We’d put a pin in the relationship status. Start at the top. Where did you come from?”

He looked at the window, where the city churned like a mouth full of neon teeth. “A garden.” A pause. “A prison. Somewhere far from here.”

My heart did that irritating thing where it sprinted. A garden... And a prison. “Garden? Like the Garden of Eden?” It was the only thing I could think of.

Please don't tell me he's the devil.

His eyes flicked to me. “If I said it, would you believe me?”

God, he might be the devil.

“Believe? No. But am I still curious? Absolutely.” 

The food arrived. He stared at the French toast like it was a trap before I pushed the syrup at him.
“Eat. Please don’t make me be your first ambulance call.”

He copied me, awkward at first, then faster. He ate with ruthless efficiency until his hands shook less. I poured him water, and he drank like someone who hadn’t had a choice about thirst in a while. We didn’t talk until his plate was a crime scene.

Finally: “Thank you,” he said, and meant it.

“Don’t thank me yet. The bill's mine, the questions are mine, but the answers are yours.” I leaned back. “So. A garden-prison. Haneul. The year upset you. You know nothing about cars or museums but speak English. You were either very concussed, very dramatic, or very not from here.”

“I told you,” he said, quiet. “I came from a place far away.”

“Hypothetically,” I said, “if you are telling the truth, why are you here now?”

He lowered his gaze. For the first time, he looked young… my age, really. “Because she kissed me,” he said, and even my cynicism sat down for that one. “And it broke. The seal. The rules. Everything turned to dust. And then…” He gestured at the window. “This.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. “You know how bizarre that sounds.”

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

“Cool.” I drummed my fingers. “So we had three options. One: you're an excellent liar. Two: you're having the most elegant psychotic break I've ever seen. Three: you're telling the truth.”

“Which do you choose?” he asked.

“Three. Obviously.” I flashed a grin. “It's more interesting.”

A slow, baffled smile ghosted across his face. It wrecked me a little. I cleared my throat and got practical before I could start to notice he was kind of cute.

“Right. Clothes. Shoes. A shower. And not getting arrested for indecency. We could hit the thrift store two doors down.” I stood and slid out of the booth. “You good to walk?”

“Yeah.” He stood too fast, wobbled, caught himself with a hand on the table. His forearm was all tendon and stubbornness.

Outside, the night sky began to rain. He squinted up at a billboard like it was a deity making poor choices. “Was that a person the size of a building?” he asked.

“Just an ad.”

He nodded like he understood. I didn’t think he did.

Thrift store. I steered him to the men’s section and played personal shopper, because letting him pick might put us in a Victorian shirt with pirate sleeves.

“Arms through here,” I said, helping him into a white singlet. Dangerous. “Jeans. Socks. Boots.” I threw a leather jacket in for good behavior. He moved like he wasn’t used to being so… clothed.

At the register, I paid. He watched money change hands like a ritual. Outside, he flexed his toes in the boots, testing the weight, the friction.

“This is… better,” he admitted.

“Welcome to society,” I said. “Don’t lick any poles.”

A corner of his mouth tilted. Progress.

We walked. He tracked everything. Traffic lights, snippets of arguments, a drunk guy singing at a bus stop. A stray dog looked at him and decided, correctly, not today. I kept up a running commentary, because silence felt like letting him drown.

“You could crash at my place,” I said before my brain caught up with my mouth.

He stopped. “Why?”

Because you look like a question I've been waiting to ask.

“Because I didn’t like leaving strays in the rain,” I said instead. “Also because it was my job to see if you were telling the truth.”

He considered that. “You're… very human,” he said, and somehow it wasn’t an insult.

We cut down an alley to shave time off the walk. The city’s sound dimmed. The air changed into something warmer, sour with old oil. Halfway down, Naga halted so abruptly I almost collided with him.

“What?” I said, palm already on the pepper spray in my pocket. “Am I not seeing something?”

He lifted his head slightly, nostrils flaring. “Something… wrong,” he said. “Sweet. Metal.” His voice went thinner, like memory had a finger around his throat. “The scent of an angel. Haneul.”

An angel? Is that who he was looking for?

I scanned the alley. Trash. A busted pallet. “Welcome to L.A.,” I said. “Everything smells wrong.”

“No,” he said, certain. “This was different.” He stepped forward, then stopped, as if an invisible border grazed his ribs. “It's gone.”

I'd heard whispers of a network underneath the city trading in the kind of supernatural things he might be searching for, but I wanted to confirm it before I scared him with it.

“File it under ‘ominous foreshadowing,’” I joked lightly, and tugged his sleeve. “Come on. We’ll chase your angel in the morning.”

We reached my building, made from old brick, new locks, a stairwell that smelled like history and paint thinner. Inside my apartment: organized chaos. Books stacked like towers, corkboard spiderwebbed with red thread, two mugs, three candles, and a few artifacts I didn’t technically believe in but kept anyway.

I waved him in. “Shoes off, bathroom’s down the hall.”

He toed off the boots and kind of hesitated. “This is… yours.”

“Yeah. Don’t judge the mess.” I grabbed a blanket, tossed it toward the couch. “Water? Tea? Coffee?”

“Water,” he said. The lines in his face eased. He looked around, reading my life: the notes, the maps, the newspaper clippings about weird unsolveds. His eyes landed on a corner of the corkboard, where a rumor had been pinned for months: Mr. Specter.

If anyone knows anything about this city, it was him.

“You know someone,” he said quietly. Not a question.

“I know rumors.” I put the glass down. “There's a man who's supposed to know everything that moves in this city, Mr. Specter. I've never met him. But maybe he could help you find who you were looking for.”

He considered that. “Mr. Specter,” he said, almost testing the word.

“Don’t get excited,” I warned. “He's notorious for being hard to deal with.”

He sat, blanket gathered like armor. For the first time, the exhaustion caught him. It dropped over his shoulders and dragged his head a fraction lower. I flipped off the overhead and clicked on a lamp; the room softened at the edges. He looked smaller in lamplight. Less apocalypse and more person.

“You aren’t asking me if I'm lying,” he said into the quiet.

“Oh, I assume everyone was lying,” I said. “Some people just lie in more interesting directions.”

“And me?”

“You?” I met his eyes. “I'm not sure yet.”

He studied me like I was new. “Then why help me?”

“Because I'm an idiot,” I said. “Because you said her name like it was a prayer, and I'm not built to walk away from that.”

He breathed in, then out, like he was testing how much of the air he was allowed. I tossed him a towel and pointed at the bathroom. “Hot water is a miracle we invented. Go try it. I’ll text someone about getting you help.”

He stood, hesitated at the hallway and then went. The door clicked before pipes chattered.

I leaned against the kitchen counter and let my hands shake now. My head was a mess of threads: a garden-prison, funky alleyway smells, a man named after a snake who looked like a fallen statue just might be the devil.

Through the door, muffled, he called out. “Shelby.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you, again.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” I called back. “Tomorrow I'm making you wear socks.”

A soft huff, laughter, maybe. I grinned at my reflection in the dark window. Outside, the city kept chewing. Inside, my apartment learned the shape of a new secret.

I texted a contact and typed words I thought I’d never use: Need Mr. Specter info.

When Naga emerged, hair damp, singlet on, he looked almost ordinary. The kind of ordinary that fooled nobody. He hovered, then sprawled onto the couch and lay back, eyes glaring at the ceiling fan like it was magic.

“You won’t sleep,” I said.

“No.”

“Cool. Same.” I dropped into the armchair, swung my legs over the side, and let the snark turn down one notch. “We’ll find her.”

His eyes flicked to me. “You don't know that.”

“Sure I do,” I said. “I'm very annoying when I want something.”

“Good,” he said, so quiet I almost missed it.

The city hummed. Somewhere, a siren threaded between buildings. I felt the shape of the next chapter pressing on the windows, impatient. Tomorrow, I’d chase a ghost. Tomorrow, I’d knock on a door with no address and call a name that might not answer.

Tonight, the devil sleeps on my couch.