You have to celebrate the little things in life. So when the judge sentenced Thaddeus to life in prison, I thought I’d celebrate with a pint of ice cream and a movie in my new apartment.

I still lived on campus, but had switched apartments months ago. I’m not sure I’ll ever feel safe, but living next door to four friendly football players certainly helped. And knowing Thaddeus would never haunt me again also gave some measure of comfort.

I dropped my bags in shock when I stepped back inside my apartment. A trail of blood leaked in thin lines from something on the kitchen countertop. With shaking hands, I stepped towards the kitchen. “Hello?” I asked, gripping the stun gun in my hoodie pocket. “Thad?”

No answer.

Perhaps I should have fled and called the campus police. But Thaddeus’ work was impossible to ignore. Like a festering scab. I saw the source of the blood once I turned on the lights and moved towards it without thinking.

Sitting on the countertop was an origami heart. Not a Valentine’s day heart. But an anatomically correct one, made from sopping wet red paper. And like all of Thaddeus’ unnatural creations, the piece of origami moved. The paper heart pulsed as if alive, and each pump leaked more blood onto the countertop.

The blood was real. His blood.

I grabbed the dustpan with one hand and swiped the monstrosity into the trash bin. To my horror, some of the blood stuck to my shirt. One more thing he ruined, I thought.

But that wasn’t all. Underneath the heart, carved into the wooden countertop, were the words ‘Coming for you’.

I threw up inside the bin a second later from the smell of the blood and Thaddeus’ message. He’s never going to let me go, I said through fevered gasps. He’ll kill me, just like he did to the others.

***

Blood. It was what put life into Thaddeus’ origami. We had met over a year ago after a talent show his club had put on at the college theater. I never would have considered attending. But my English professor, the father of the club’s president, had offered to drop our lowest exam grade if we attended. Nearly everyone failed his last exam, myself included, so the theater was packed.

Most of the talent show acts were hit-or-miss. A graffiti artist kicked off the show with some decent spray paint art. It earned him a round of applause, and apparently a mop to clean up the paint after the show.

The next acts included a couple of somewhat-decent singers. Then there was an alleged comedian, whose stand-up routine quickly devolved into political rants. After a few minutes, more than a couple of audience members had balled up their event flyers and chucked them at him.

The lights blacked out after one of the theater workers escorted the comedian offstage. Some of us thought the show was over until a cool baritone voice from the stage asked us to wait in our seats. When the lights snapped back on, the balled-up flyers were gone. And a tall man wearing an old-fashioned suit stood in the center of the stage. Thaddeus.

Without another word, Thaddeus held up his hand to reveal one of the yellow event flyers. It was a crumpled mess no longer. The paper was smoothed into the sharp features of a hummingbird. He thrust his hands to the ceiling as if expecting the origami bird to take flight. And to everyone’s surprise, it did.

The paper hummingbird darted around the theater, just out of reach of the hundred or so undergrads below. “Must be some kind of robot,” I muttered to nobody in particular. Right?

After half a minute, the hummingbird returned to Thaddeus’ hand. The entire theater was speechless as he cleared his throat and began pacing around the stage. He explained how he was the descendant of both a psychic from Victorian England and from an origami master in pre-industrial Japan. His magic was the result of both sides of his heritage colliding, which gave him the power to give life to paper.

The rest of Thaddeus’ performance included more of what I thought were magic tricks. Naturally, he pulled a rabbit out of his top hat. But instead of fur, it was made entirely from white paper, and it hopped around the stage as if alive. A green snake appeared from under his vest and slithered into a coil in his palm. And cutest of all, a little origami sloth crawled from behind the curtains onto his pant leg, where it hung for his entire performance.

When Thaddeus tipped his hat and the animals disappeared into it, the audience stood and roared with approval. Before the crowds could block my exit, I leapt from my seat and sprinted outside to find the back entrance.

I had to meet Thad in person. As an avid tinkerer and computer science student, I needed to know how his ‘magic’ worked. Machines designed after animals, a field called biomimicry, had always fascinated me. But Thaddeus’ animals were far more intricate than anything I’d ever seen in a news article. And especially far beyond anything I’d ever built in the college robotics club.

Thaddeus sat outside the theater on a lamplit bench with his top hat next to him. He was scrolling through his phone like any other college student, as if he hadn’t put on a breathtaking performance only minutes ago.

Up close, he looked surprisingly normal. Attractive, with his well-groomed beard and silky hair, but not unapproachable. “May I join you?” I asked, and motioned at the empty space next to him on the bench.

“Of course. Did you enjoy the show?” he asked in the same smooth, baritone voice he used on stage.

I tensed up for a moment. “How did you know?” There was no way he could recognize me in the darkness of the auditorium.

“You’re holding one of the event flyers,” he replied.

“Oh, of course. And I loved your show! But I have to know: how did you program your animals to move? I know you’re using some kind of soft-robotics to keep the weight down, but I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to program the AI.”

Thaddeus’ eyes glinted, and he rubbed his chin with one finger. “A magician never reveals his secrets. But since you’re so interested, I could give you a little taste.”

He reached inside the top hat and pulled out the yellow hummingbird; the animal made from one of the event flyers. It was completely still now. I took it gingerly and spread its wings, but found no sign of any computer chip or mechanical limbs. Instead, the entire paper was covered in symbols written in some kind of red ink.

“It’s all in the paper,” Thaddeus said and held out his hand, as if the origami contained a barely hidden secret he didn’t want me to see.

“All in the paper?” I asked and held out my copy of the talent show flier. He was clearly messing with me. “Can you make this into an animal?”

Thaddeus raised an eyebrow. “I could. Over dinner this weekend, perhaps?”

I laughed at his words and quickly apologized so I didn’t sound rude. It wasn’t every day an insanely skilled magician/ programmer asked me on a date. “Dinner sounds amazing. How about Saturday?” I asked and wrote down my number on the back of my event flyer.

“I can hardly wait.” Thad pocketed my number and snapped his fingers. “Is your name Ellie, by any chance? I believe I remember your picture in last year’s yearbook.”

“Wow. You’re right,” I said. Thad seemed charming enough, but it was odd how he recognized me from a book of hundreds of students. Especially considering how I had changed my hair color since then. Just in case, I put a finger on my phone’s emergency button and took note of a couple of nearby students I could claim as waiting friends. “You must have an amazing memory,” I told him warily.

“I do. Nothing escapes me.”