Flashes of light made the dark bedroom into a eerie dream world. Cars rushed by outside the flat. The room was cold outside of the warm embrace of the covers.

I was awake before I knew what had awakened me. The faint beeping of a pager in the dark brought me back from the brightly colored world of my dreams. I shifted, adjusting my body so the spring that was digging into my hip was beside it again. The television had been muted, but the hockey commentary was still playing, so I must not have been asleep long.

The man beneath me was already awake, his hands folded back behind his head as he listened to the muffled sound of his pager. His chest hair rustled beneath my cheek as he drew in a breath.

"That'll be another monster from the past," he whispered, breaking the quiet contemplativeness of the night. "He has to call at bloody midnight."

Tom Ryan's British accent and the smelled of his toothpaste awakened me fully. I hugged him closer.

"Do you have to go?" I whispered.

"Duty calls. And it has teeth." He joked about possible death the same way I joked about possible injury. Easily. As if he thought it was no big deal, just part of the job. It was.

He rolled over and sat on the edge of the double bed, reaching for his underwear. I sat up on my side of the bed, pulling the sheets tighter around me to fend off the cold. I watched him dress in the ambient light of the television.

"Can I make you some coffee?"

"There's probably not time. I'll get some tea when I'm done." I closed my eyes, crumpling up my cheeks. Stupid American, I scolded myself. He was buckling on the various SAS instruments when I climbed out of bed. Running a comb through my hair as I pulled on my underwear, I looked on the chair where my suitcase rested for something to wear.

The Canucks jersey and jeans weren't the cleanest things in the suitcase, but they were the only thing I was willing to wear at twelve o'clock in the morning.

I grabbed his keys before he could get there and threw a smile over my shoulder. "I'll drive you there an bring you over some tea," I told him, closing the door to the flat behind me.

As soon as I arrived in the street, I realized I should have grabbed a more substantial sweater than the hockey jersey. My legs, stiff from a late practice, protested the use so soon after the cessation of movement.

I hopped in Tom's car (it was always weird driving on the wrong side of the road) and started the engine. He arrived just as the heater had begun to push off the last vestiges of cold. It was a good heater.

He read me off the address and I concentrated on driving the weird English way until we arrived at the scene. They had tea there.

"Thanks," Tom, er, Captain Ryan, told me, holding back a goodbye kiss as his men joined him for a briefing. He shut the door behind him. I rested my head against the steering wheel, closing eyes that burned with more than tiredness. I figured I would just wait here. I hadn't brought a book or anything, so I might as well just sleep. Hockey wasn't typically on the radio here in England, so I just turned the car off.

After a while, I began to get quite cold. Rather than restart the car, I climbed out and went to grab some tea myself. I would have preferred coffee, but the beautiful government brunette beaconed me over just as I was considering heading to a café or something.

"We've got coffee too," she commented, handing me a cup as came over. The silence stretched, becoming awkward.

"What kind of anomaly is it this time?" I ventured, curious and eager to break the silence.

"We're not sure," she replied, mindful of secrets, but just as eager to banish the awkwardness. "We think it's contemporary, actually. Some sort of tropical climate."

"That's interesting," I muttered. And that was all heck broke loose.