“Nobody thinks clearly on an empty stomach. You’ll feel better too.”

  “Oh, really? I’ll feel better about my friend blowing her brains out if I eat a po’boy? Jesus fucking Christ, where were you last week? Or the week before that? I really could have used some great fucking advice like this.”

  Dag sighed and got out of the car.

  “You can’t just leave me out here,” I screamed after him.

  “The windows are down.”

  “I’m not a fucking dog.”

  He muttered something that sounded like, “Yeah, I like dogs.”

  I stalled for five minutes after he went into the restaurant, getting angrier and angrier, revving myself up. Then I headed into Taverne Grise. It consisted of a single, large dining room, with one wall painted lilac, picture windows looking out onto the street, and a bar. Dag was sitting at the bar, a drink, maybe whisky, in front of him while he did something with his phone.

  Sliding onto the stool next to him, I said, “Where the fuck do you get off?”

  “I told you: I don’t like being talked to that way.”

  “I’ll talk to you however I—”

  “Please don’t talk to me like that.”

  It was the tone, more than the words, that stopped me: he sounded like a kid. I forgot what I’d been about to say. His dark eyes flitted over my face, and then he looked back at his phone.

  I squirmed on the stool, pressed hands to my flushed cheeks, and took a few breaths.

  “Maybe some food would help,” I said.

  He swiped at something on his phone.

  “I guess I got out of control again,” I said.

  He swiped again. I tried to look over his shoulder, but he angled the phone away. I wondered if he was on Grindr.

  “I shouldn’t have talked to you like that.”

  Dag held up two fingers.

  “I know, I know. It was the second time. Strike two.”

  “No, Elien.” He swiped at his phone again. “Jesus. Two words. You’ve got to say two words.”

  “Two words?”

  “Two magic words.”

  “Oh, right. Those two magic words.” The bartender, a pretty young woman with a mountain of brown curls, came toward us. “Rum and Coke,” I said to her. “Bacardi. And what kind of salads—”

  “I already ordered you a po’boy,” Dag said.

  “No, that’s too much bread.”

  Looking up from his phone, Dag caught the bartender’s eye and said, “He’s still having the po’boy.”

  She smirked. She was still smirking when she brought back my rum and Coke.

  “Two words,” I said. “Two magic words.”

  Dag waved two fingers again, his attention still on his phone.

  “Fuck me,” I said.

  A slight shake of his head.

  “Do me.”

  Another.

  “Bone me.”

  “This is boring, Elien.”

  “Doggy style.”

  I thought I detected the first signs of a grin.

  “Bend over,” I said.

  He actually looked away from the phone that time and met my gaze.

  “Spread ’em,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Blow job.”

  “You have a one-track mind,” Dag said, already turning back to his phone.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s ok,” he said, pocketing the phone, and giving me a smile. “Thank you for saying that.”

  And the worst part was that he sounded like he meant it.

  When the bartender came back, she had two po’boys plated with French fries. I stared at the concoction in front of me: fried shrimp, lettuce, tomato, pickles, and mayo, all of it on what was basically the equivalent of a loaf of bread. My stomach growled.

  “So,” I said, picking out a fried shrimp and eating. “You don’t ever get in fights? Not with anybody?”

  “I mean, I guess I do.”

  “When was the last time you were in a fight?”

  “I don’t know. Mason liked to give me shit. I probably got mad at him for something.” Dag picked up his sandwich and took a huge bite. Around a mouthful of food, he said, “Probably about a boy.”

  “Mason liked guys too?”

  Dag swallowed, took a drink, and shook his head. “No, but he liked to give me shit about them, and I can get sensitive.”

  “You?”

  He shrugged and took another bite.

  “I can’t even get you to tell me to shut up.”

  “Try your sandwich,” he said.

  “You just politely disengage and leave me screaming mad.”

  Wiping his mouth with a napkin, he smiled again and said, “I think you’ll like the sandwich.”

  “Oh my Christ, what is it with you and this po’boy?” I grabbed it, took a bite, and groaned. I chewed as fast as I could and said, “That’s good.”

  “Uh huh.”

  I had three more bites before I put it down. “That’s really good,” I said.

  Dag was halfway through his, and he was staring at me, at the po’boy on my plate.

  I said, “Yeah, I’m not really hungry.”

  “Oh,” he said and took another huge bite.

  I shrugged. “Honestly.”

  “Ok.”

  “Actually, I am hungry,” I said.

  His chewing slowed, and he watched me.

  “I want to eat this whole thing because it’s delicious, and I never have bread, and fried shrimp is one of my top five favorite foods, and I haven’t really eaten anything today. But I know if I do eat it, I’ll feel terrible in five minutes, and I’ll end up in the bathroom with my finger down my throat. I don’t even know if I really have an eating disorder or if I just do it to piss Richard off. So, there. I guess that’s the real answer.”

  After some more chewing, Dag ran the back of his hand across his mouth, picking up some extra mayonnaise.

  “Kind of more than you wanted to hear, right?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I like learning about you.”

  “Yeah, well, you just cracked the lid on a barrel of really fucked-up stuff.”

  “I don’t think you’re fucked up. A little rude sometimes. Definitely spoiled. But you’re actually really sweet. I don’t think anybody else could have talked to Kenny the way you did. He was right on the edge, and somehow you helped him come back down. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I wish I knew how to do that. Every day, I talk to people, and I try to get them to come down like that. You did it without even trying. That’s some powerful stuff.”

  Taking a drink of my rum and Coke, I looked away, staring at the bottles at the back of the bar. When I pulled the glass away, I ran my thumb along its base and studied the ice, the wedge of lime, the glint of light under my fingers.

  “Spoiled,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, definitely. Let me guess: only child.”

  I shook my head.

  “Youngest.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “How many siblings do you have?”

  “Have? Zero. My brother is dead.”

  “Oh damn. I’m sorry.”

  “Here we go,” I said, “just to get it all out of the way: he killed my parents and then himself.”

  I kept my gaze on the glass. It blurred and doubled and the light on the rim turned into a white crescent when I tilted it at the right angle.

  “Elien, I am so sorry.” Dag touched my shoulder, and I realized he was pulling me into a hug. For a moment, I pulled back, not sure what was happening. Then my face was against his neck, and I smelled his deodorant and his hair and the detergent on his shirt, and he squeezed me tight, and I started crying.

  “It’s the rum,” I said, pulling away and wiping my eyes. “Jesus, it was over a year ago, and I don’t cry about it anymore, but I haven’t had a drink in a long time. It’s hitting me pretty hard right now.”

  “You can cry about it,” Dag said. “Come here, I want to hug you again.”

  And he did. This time, he squeezed so hard I grunted and had to tap out.

  “Ok,” I croaked, and I drew in a huge breath. “Ok, so, now I realize you are a murderously compassionate teddy bear. Any more sympathy hugs and I’m going to have punctured lungs.”

  Then I started crying again, but not as hard, and I finished the rum and Coke and started eating my sandwich so I wouldn’t have to talk. I had another drink, and even though Dag objected, I had a third, and I finished my sandwich and all my fries.

  Dag had to help me out to the car. He got me stretched out in the backseat. The sun felt good on me, and the breeze when he drove, and I smelled clover and sorghum and the cool, damp places under trees, dead leaves and the shadowy greenness of Spanish moss. I wasn’t sure if I slept, but when my head was clearer, I sat up and realized the car had stopped moving.

  “I have to pee,” I said.

  “Pick a tree,” Dag said.

  I staggered out of the car, put a few of the old oaks between me and the car, and peed. I took in my surroundings and guessed we were in a state park: lots of oaks, a few magnolia trees along the gravel road, Spanish moss and ferns and a thick layer of wet leaves that was spongy when I walked on it. Water glistened to my right, and I guessed that was Lake Pontchartrain.

  When I got back to the car, Dag had hand sanitizer and a bottle of water.

  “You’re a regular mother hen,” I said.

  He just smiled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You’re going to be sorrier if you don’t drink all that water. You said you haven’t had a drink lately, but you put those rum and Cokes back pretty fast.”

  So I drank the bottle of water, and we leaned against the car, the heat of his body brighter than the sunlight.

  “This is a nice place,” I said.

  “My dad used to take me camping here.”

  “Do you have siblings?”

  “No, just me and my parents.”

  “And they’re insane about you.”

  “They’re definitely insane,” he said with a smile.

  I set the cap on the empty bottle and spun it closed, open, closed. “My parents loved me, I guess. But they were just kind of . . . quiet about it. I don’t know. They freaked out when I told them I was gay, and then they tried to be nice about it, but it was like this huge gap that never really closed. It’s not like they kicked me out or anything. I just couldn’t talk to them. Gard, that’s my brother, he and I were really close when we were young, but it got harder and harder. I mean, now I know he was really ill. But at the time, I just thought he was strange. He spent more and more time in his room. He wouldn’t talk to my parents, then he wouldn’t even talk to me, and I thought maybe he had really good friends online.”

  Dag put his arm over my shoulders and pulled me against him.

  “I know it’s not my fault,” I said. “I know, I know, I know.”

  He made a noise low in his chest.

  “I was in the other room getting fucked, if you want the whole picture,” I said. “My first time. I’d done other stuff, you know, but that was my first time getting fucked. You think I’m fucked up? There’s one more piece of the puzzle.”

  “I don’t think you’re fucked up.”

  “You’re not the first person I’ve told this. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. I told Zahra; she’s my shrink. I told Richard.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” he said. “Thanks for trusting me.”

  “I wasn’t always such a brat, by the way. It’s just . . . I don’t know. Richard puts up with it. And I know I can get away with it. That’s a bad reason. But I didn’t . . . I didn’t used to act like this.”

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Dag said.

  I let my head rest on his shoulder.

  “The longest I ever had a boyfriend was close to six months,” Dag said. “I’m just telling you to make a point. And when he left, he just left. He stopped answering my calls. Cut me off completely without a word. And I am not, um, very good with money. So it was two more months before I realized he had stolen my debit card, and my rent checks had been bouncing, my tuition check bounced, and he’d emptied my savings, and I was so embarrassed because I’m a deputy that I didn’t even file charges. I moved back in with my parents when I got evicted, and then I just stayed, I guess. I couldn’t figure out why I should move out again.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I will go cut that bitch.”

  Dag laughed. His hand slid to the back of my neck, and he ran his thumb over two vertebrae before turning so he could look at me.

  “Can I ask you something serious?”

  “My story about my dead brother and parents wasn’t serious enough?”

  “Do you know who this guy is?”

  He displayed his phone. On the screen was a picture of David, pacing the sidewalk opposite Tamika’s building. He was wearing his winter gloves, the way he always did. The picture had obviously been taken today: I recognized the fire truck parked across the street and the police cruisers.

  “Why’d you take this?”

  And then Dag explained his thoughts about cattle and feeding, an irregular cycle of hibernation or maybe something had gone wrong, and the idea that the hashok might like to see the results of its work.

  “You think David is the hashok?”

  “Well, he was there, which was weird, and he was laughing, which was weird, and—”

  “David could have been there for a lot of reasons. It could have been coincidence. And the laughing is weird, but it’s not . . . I mean, he’s always done it.”

  But I remembered Suzette telling me, It feeds on human lives, especially on pain, and I remembered David laughing at the strangest times, laughing at the worst, most painful parts of people’s stories. Nerves, I had always said. Or just not processing emotions properly. But something twisted in my gut as I looked at the picture on Dag’s phone.

  “Well, it’s actually the gloves that make me worried.” Dag reached into the car and pulled out the book from the library. Raising New Orleans and La Louisiane: Chorography, Ethnography, and the Native Episteme, he said, “Have you read the part about the hashok in here?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s not called that. It’s called—here it is, ‘A Native Vampirum of Lake Pontchartrain,’ and a lot of the article is this ethnographer talking about how he interviewed an old Choctaw woman who lived in a log house right by the lake, and he goes on and on about how she gathered wood and how she built a fire and how she made her tea and the different uses she had for moss. I mean, kind of your typical ethnography.”

  “Right,” I said. “Just your typical ethnography.”

  “But when he gets into the folklore, it’s like . . . uncanny. She tells him about the hashok, although he keeps calling it a vampirum. She talks about people hurting themselves, about people killing themselves.” Dag took a breath. “People killing their loved ones.”

  I remembered the dream, and the blue fire in Gard’s dead eyes.

  “It’s like this chain reaction,” Dag said. “Somehow, it gets into a population, and it just goes wild. One person does something terrible, and then someone else is affected by it, and they do something terrible, and they affect two people, maybe, or three, and they do something terrible.”

  “And more and more people suffer,” I said. “And the hashok has more and more to eat.”

  “Yes. Up to a point. And then it stops. It reaches critical mass, or its sated, or it hibernates. Or something. Until it starts all over again.” Dag paged through the book. “She talks about blue fire; she’s says the hashok can be invisible except for its heart, which is like a firefly. Glowing, I guess. The ethnographer guy takes it as an opportunity to give a whole lecture on cultural similarities to the English will o’ the wisp, and it does kind of sound similar.”

  “Leads people astray, right? That’s what a will o’ the wisp does. Leads them off the path. Leads them to their death.”

  “That’s what this ethnographer goes on and on about,” Dag said. “But that’s not what the woman says. She says it leads them in circles. I think she’s talking about these . . . these cycles, I guess. People getting caught in these horrible tragedies.”

  “That’s a pretty common metaphor for PTSD,” I said. “Stuck in a loop. Repeating the same thing over and over again.”

  Dag nodded.

  “Suzette said other cultures had the same thing. She said another word for it was vampire, and that it feeds on human lives, on pain.”

  “Vampire,” Dag said. “A kind of vampire, I guess. It’s definitely feeding on people. The pain and suffering are part of it, but these people are dead, physically dead. Feeding on human lives sounds literal to me.”

  “So,” I said, “it’s feeding on the support group. And there are these ripples, so Ray dies, and it affects Mason, and Mason affects Tamika. Is that it?”

  “Maybe. I think . . . I think it might go deeper than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if it is a vampire, or like a vampire, there’s a lot of folklore about them. They can pass for human in some circumstances. They can change shape—bats and wolves, but in some stories they can become fog or mist. You know, kind of like how this thing becomes a firefly. They’re fast and strong, like this thing. They’re hard to kill, like this thing. They can raise the dead, I guess, when they make them into their vampire servants.”

  “Ok. Vampires. Spooky, scary, lots of abilities. So why are you focused on David’s gloves?”

  “Oh, right. So this Choctaw woman, she tells him that the hashok puts a thorn in the hand of sleeping hunters. Hand or foot, actually. And it makes them capable of evil. So the ethnographer goes off on this long tangent about the aetiology of evil—”

  “Right, everybody knows about the aetiology of evil.”

  “—and takes it as another piece of folklore. But we know the blue fire is real. We know the hashok is real. We saw it. Why wouldn’t the thorn be real? In lots of stories, vampires have the ability to dominate the will of other creatures, even humans. They turn some of them into servants, like Renfield in the Dracula stories. And sometimes this ability is linked to physical wounds that the vampire gives—bite marks, right? But here, it’s a thorn in the hand.”