“I told you: I’ve already got enough people in my life trying to take care of me. I don’t need you to take care of me. I need you to help me.”

  Dag wiped his hands on his pajama bottoms.

  “Here,” I said, passing him my croissant. “You look like you could use this.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re skin and bones.”

  “Ha ha.”

  He cocked his head like he didn’t get the joke.

  “Half,” he finally said.

  So I split it.

  Dag worked a flake of the croissant loose and balanced it on one finger. “If it is this thing, the grass thing, what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I asked this woman who seemed to know about it, and she said it feeds on human lives, on pain and suffering. She said it would try to kill anyone that had seen it, which includes both of us. We saw it at Ray’s. We saw it with Mason. And we saw it last night. I don’t think leaving it alone is an option, Dag. I think we have to find a way to get rid of it.” I touched the bag at my feet. “I found a book that might tell us more, but, um, I need help. I’m not a very good reader. It looks like you are.”

  “If it’s about whales,” Dag said, licking almond filling from the side of his hand, “I’m aces.”

  “Aces? Oh God, what kind of nerd am I teaming up with?”

  Dag just had another of those shy smiles as an answer.

  “Maybe we could work on it together?” I said.

  “Yeah. And the faster, the better.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not going to force myself on you again.”

  He must have inhaled some pastry because he coughed and turned bright red. When he’d cleared his throat, he said, “No, I mean, because it’s looking for us. It’s going to eliminate us.”

  My phone began to buzz. I pulled it out and saw Kenny’s name on the screen.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I need to take this.”

  “I wonder what it’s feeding cycle is like,” Dag said, breaking the croissant into smaller pieces. “Does it need to feed every day? Every week? Every full moon?”

  “Kenny? Hey, what’s up?”

  “If Ray and Mason were meals,” Dag said, still talking to himself, “how soon will it need to feed again?”

  “It’s Tamika,” Kenny said, his voice ragged. “She killed herself.”

  DAG (10)

  We drove across town in the Escort, and the whole drive, Elien was pale and restless.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said for what felt like the hundredth time.

  “Tamika wouldn’t kill herself.”

  I nodded.

  “This is that . . . that thing again. The hashok.”

  Ahead of us, Fogmile transitioned into Moulinbas; Creole townhouses replaced the shotgun-style clapboard homes. The October day was mellow, and with the windows down, I could smell beignets frying and, now that I was paying attention, Elien: anise and something peppery, a licoricey kind of heat that curled up in my lungs. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it in my bedroom. Or the night before, when he’d sat on my lap. I was definitely noticing now.

  “Well, say something,” Elien snapped.

  “You smell nice.”

  His hand came up to his blowout hair, and he said, “I’m trying to pick a fight, Jesus Christ.”

  “Why do you want to pick a fight?”

  “You think I’m wrong. You think Tamika killed herself.”

  “I don’t think anything. I don’t even know her.”

  “You are no fucking help.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  “I don’t know, Dag. Any fucking thing would be great right about now.”

  Pumping the brakes, I pulled the Escort to the curb. We were parked in front of Madeleine’s Kiddie Kurls and Kuts; on the other side of the plate glass, a woman, probably Madeleine, was settling a cape over a little boy in a salon chair.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  I flexed my fingers, palms balanced on the wheel. “I don’t like people talking to me like that.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake. Will you drive the fucking car?”

  “Elien, stop.”

  “Jesus Christ. Are you being serious right now? A woman just died, and you’re going to stop the car because your feelings are hurt? This is fucking bullshit. Drive the car.”

  “Don’t—”

  “Drive the fucking car.”

  This time, I blew out a breath. Then I turned off the car, took the keys, and got out. Down the block, a Texaco had a spinning sign, and I started walking.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Elien screamed.

  When a truck blew past me, the air from its passing threw up a flattened foam cup, and it smacked my shoe and fluttered away.

  Inside the Texaco’s convenience store, I bought two Cokes and a bag of Sun Chips. The girl behind the counter smiled as she gave me my change, and I smiled back. Then I went back outside and sat on the curb. The sun was warm. The breeze, when it picked up, was nice. I’d never told anyone, but I’d always liked the smell of gasoline, although it didn’t go with the Sun Chips very well.

  Behind me, the convenience store door opened, and the girl poked her head out.

  “You need to use the phone?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You need a ride?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure, sweetie?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  Back at the Escort, Elien was getting out of the car. He slammed the door. He had a really prissy angry walk, but he moved a mile a minute.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said when he reached me.

  “I don’t like conflict.” I fished another chip out of the bag. “You’re making me uncomfortable.”

  He ran his hands through his hair again. He paced back and forth. Finally, he came to a stop in front of me.

  “I shouldn’t have acted that way,” he said. “I’m still dealing with a lot of stuff from my own life. Things like this, they trigger me, and I don’t think rationally.”

  I crunched a chip.

  “Can we go now, please?”

  I held up a Coke.

  “Do you have any idea how many calories are in that? Can we please just go?”

  “I do not like people talking to me like that,” I said. “The way you did in the car.”

  “I told you, I’m dealing with—”

  “Elien, everybody’s dealing with something, ok? I just watched my best friend die. I might have killed him. I don’t sleep most nights because I think I did. But I don’t cuss you out and call you every bad name in the dictionary.”

  “It’s not my fault,” he said stiffly. “I’m not responsible when I’m panicking like that.”

  “Did Richard tell you that?”

  “Richard understands me. Richard is patient with me.”

  “Oh, sure. I bet you treat him just like dog shit sometimes. And he lets you get away with it.”

  Elien’s mouth dropped open, and for another minute, he paced back and forth. Then he pointed a finger at me. “I thought you were sweet. I thought you were this nice, sweet guy.”

  “I’m pretty nice. I don’t know about sweet, but my mom thinks I am, so I guess that’s something.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Elien said.

  “Do you want this Coke or not?”

  “No. I don’t know.” And then he took it and spun off the cap. Dropping onto the curb next to me, he took a long drink. He wiped his mouth and said, “Honest to God, I don’t know when the last time was I had this much processed sugar. First the croissant, now this.”

  I poked his arm. “You could use a little more meat on you.”

  Color ran under his light brown skin. “If I’m not allowed to talk to you like that, then you’re not allowed to make jokes about my weight.”

  “What jokes?”

  “I know how I look, Dag. I don’t need you making fun of me.”

  “I wasn’t trying to make fun, but I hear you: no more comments about your weight.”

  An eighteen-wheeler blew past the Texaco, the hot wave of exhaust battering us.

  “I’m sorry,” Elien said, studying the cap from the Coke.

  “It’s ok.”

  He shook his head and took another drink.

  “Elien?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If anybody ever tells you it’s not your fault or you’re not responsible, and I’m just talking about what you do, that kind of thing, well, I don’t think they’re helping you.”

  “Will you please drive me to Tamika’s apartment?” he asked.

  I nodded, stood, and gave him a hand.

  The apartment building was only another mile or so down the road. We parked halfway up the next block; a fire truck, an ambulance, and a pair of Bragg police cruisers sat out front. Elien took the lead, and I followed. On the sidewalk outside the building, a skinny black man with locs was talking into a phone. When he saw Elien, he disconnected and turned toward us.

  “Shit,” he said, and then he started to cry. Elien pulled him into a hug, and for a long time they just stood there, holding each other.

  I jogged down to the cruisers; a guy about my age was leaning against one of the cars, and he was wearing the Bragg uniform.

  “Dag LeBlanc,” I said. “Deputy with the county. Any chance you can tell me what’s going on?”

  “Suicide,” the guy said. “Blew her head off.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “That’s what the tranny says.”

  I glanced back at Kenny, who was wiping his face and listening to Elien. I remembered Mason calling him St. Elien. It was hard to match what I was seeing here, the way Kenny poured out his grief to Elien, the way Elien took that grief and gave back something better for Kenny to hold on to, with the selfish asshole who’d been riding shotgun just ten minutes earlier.

  “Say that word again,” I said, “and I’ll have every newspaper in the country printing your name and badge number. It’s the twenty-first fucking century.”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  I headed back to Elien and Kenny.

  “—can handle this, Kenny,” Elien was saying, his hand on Kenny’s shoulder. “You know you can. You’ve been through worse, and you came out the other side.”

  “I know, man, but I was right there. I was right there, and I couldn’t do anything.”

  Elien glanced at me as I approached, and Kenny followed his gaze.

  “This is Mason’s friend,” Elien said.

  “I remember you,” Kenny said, shaking my hand. Then he went back to wiping away tears. “I’m sorry about Mason, man. Nobody . . . nobody can believe what happened. And now Tamika. Aw, fuck, man. This is so fucked up.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, “but I need to ask you a few questions.”

  Kenny glanced at Elien, and Elien nodded.

  “Questions about what? About Tamika?”

  “You were with her before she died?”

  Sniffling, Kenny nodded.

  “Did you see anything strange?”

  “She blew her fucking head off, man. I was standing right there. How strange can it get?”

  “Kenny,” Elien said. “This is important. Did she look different? Act different? Say anything that didn’t make sense?”

  Kenny shook his head. But when he spoke, his words were slow. “We’d been . . . we’d been seeing each other, you know. Outside the group. We understood each other. I thought we did. We’d started, you know, staying over. Things like that. I didn’t even know she had a gun. She’d been acting kind of nasty since Tuesday. I thought she was just having a bad week, with Mason, and Ray just before. Today, though. Today she was just being cruel. Slapped me a few times.” Kenny touched his cheek. “Called me some bad shit. She was on something, I think, because her eyes were different. Shiny. Sometimes she’d move her head too fast and I’d swear they were blue. I told her I wasn’t going to stick around for her to treat me like that. She grabbed the gun, put it right here,” he touched his temple, “and said, ‘Please stop me, please stop me, please Kenny, oh Christ, please stop me.’ And then she did it, man.” Kenny started to cry again. “And I didn’t stop her, man. I couldn’t even move.”

  “Did you notice—” I began.

  Elien jerked his head at me, folding Kenny into an embrace.

  “I think I need to stay with Kenny,” Elien said quietly. “Thanks for driving me over.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Elien, I’ll stay.”

  I gave them space, and after a while they sat together, their backs to the painted brick of the apartment building, holding hands. I went back to the Escort and got my Coke and perched on the trunk. The late morning smelled like cigarette smoke and garbage heating in the sun.

  Part of my brain was turning this over and over. Kenny hadn’t said anything about blue lights. What he’d described could have been an ordinary suicide—if any suicide could be ordinary. It was a tragedy, yes, but it didn’t match what Elien and I had seen.

  But I didn’t believe it was ordinary. First Ray. Then Mason. Elien had been attacked in the woods outside his house. And now Tamika. Four people who were part of the same support group. That wasn’t a coincidence.

  It feeds on human lives, especially on pain.

  Well, for a creature that fed on pain, a PTSD support group would be a banquet.

  Two thoughts came to me. First, this thing, the hashok, was going through its . . . cattle, for lack of a better word, fast. Too fast, it seemed to me. Which meant that either its feeding wasn’t on the kind of regular schedule I had imagined—perhaps it had active and inactive periods, or something like hibernation—or something was wrong.

  My second thought came because of the cigarette smoke. The smell of something burning made me look at the fire truck slanted across the street, and the fire truck made me think of arsonists. The thing about arsonists, a lot of them anyway, was that they got picked up pretty easily because they hung around the scene of the crime, or they came back, or they kept coming back. They liked to see their handiwork.

  Could the hashok be like that? It had lingered after Ray’s death. Did it stay to watch the fallout from its feeding?

  A crowd had gathered, and I searched the faces, snapping pictures with my phone to try to record all of them. I watched one man in particular: he wore winter gloves, and he walked up and down the sidewalk opposite Tamika’s building, laughing.

  ELIEN (11)

  The helplessness was almost as bad as the grief itself. Outside Tamika’s building, I hugged Kenny, I talked to the cops, I called Zahra and let her know what had happened. But I couldn’t really do anything—not anything that mattered. Kenny still blamed himself, no matter what I said. The cops wouldn’t tell me anything because I wasn’t family. And Zahra told me to take care of myself.

  “Richard and I have a conference tonight,” she said, “and I don’t want you to be alone.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Frankly, Elien, I don’t think any of us are going to be fine for quite a while. You’ve heard of suicide clusters? Well, we’re right in the middle of one, and if we don’t take care of ourselves, it’s going to get worse.” On the phone, she sounded flat, almost distracted, as though she were finishing up dinner and couldn’t manage to get me off the phone. “I’m telling you as your doctor, I don’t want you to be alone tonight. Who can you call? Go to a friend’s house. Go out and have dinner, see a movie, do something until Richard’s on his way home. I’ll tell him to call you. I think you and I should meet as soon as we can. How about Monday?”

  “What’s the conference?” I said.

  “The Louisiana Mental Health Professionals Network. I’m serious about having a session together, Elien. You missed the support group this week.”

  “Well, funny story: someone tried to shoot me last week.”

  “Elien.”

  “I’d really hate for Richard to have to miss his fucking conference.”

  I disconnected and glanced up the block. Dag was still sitting on the trunk of his piece of shit car, and he gave me a wave. He’d been there for hours now; it was early afternoon, and the coroner’s office had already come and taken Tamika. Kenny was gone, and the firetruck had left a while before. The cops were packing up too.

  When I got to the Ford, Dag hopped off the trunk. “How are you?”

  “I want to pick a fight.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “I want to break some of Richard’s expensive shit.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I want to scream.”

  “You can scream. Screaming is allowed.”

  I cocked my head, studying him.

  He gave back an uncertain grin.

  “One time,” he said, “I stepped on a canebrake rattlesnake. It was just a baby, and it zipped off as fast as it could. I screamed so loud I hurt my throat.”

  “No,” I finally said. “It’s no fun if it doesn’t bother you.”

  “Can I give you a ride somewhere?”

  “Home, I guess. Please.”

  So we got in the car, and thankfully the windows were down, because on the drive over I was sure I had smelled a Big Mac lurking in the back seat. Dag pulled away from the curb, and we looped north and then east, following the edge of Moulinbas toward the state highway.

  Then Dag pulled into a small parking lot; the building ahead of us looked like the rest of Moulinbas, a Creole townhouse with ancient panes of glass, the wrought-iron balcony pulling away from the brick in places. A sign proclaimed this place Taverne Grise.

  “They’ve got good po’boys,” Dag said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You had half a croissant and some coffee.”

  “And about a million calories of Coke.”