I wouldn’t have time to get back to my original spot. And I would only get one chance at a surprise. I tucked the knife into my waistband, covered it with my shirt, and slumped on the tile. The air warped again, and I heard Muriel shriek. She came around the counter in the elongated form of the hashok.

  Her slender claws gripped my ankles, cutting through the jeans and into my flesh as she dragged me across the tile. I screamed. The claws biting into my flesh hurt, but worse was the pain in my back as I was dragged across the kitchen. Then the pain seemed to hit some sort of threshold, and my mind switched off for a moment.

  When I came back, my vision was full of pinpricks again. I heard the soft, padding steps of the loafers. Then a slap. Then another.

  “Elien, dear.” Slap. “Wake up.” Slap. “Time to finish what we started.”

  My sight cleared. I blinked up into Muriel’s oily, hashok eyes. She had no lips, and her mouth was a slash exposing razor teeth, but she grinned when she saw me looking at her. She batted at me once, the tips of her claws slicing my thigh. I screamed in spite of myself, jerking upright. Her grin got bigger as she pinned me to the tile, her nails driving easily into the fleshy part of my shoulder. Arteries, a panicked voice was saying. Did she get an artery? I couldn’t see the wounds in my thigh, but I kept thinking femoral artery, femoral artery. I could feel the wet heat soaking my jeans, spreading under me.

  “Stay still, Deputy LeBlanc,” Richard said. “You’re not going anywhere, and Muriel has the ugly habit of playing with her food. Better not encourage her.”

  Behind me, Elien groaned and mumbled something.

  Another slap, this one louder and harder.

  Elien cried out.

  “That’s right, dear,” Richard said. “Welcome back.”

  ELIEN (7)

  For a while, I was floating, and then little islands of reality poked up through the fog: the grit of the tile under my cheek, the smell of wine, the stinging in my neck. As my vision cleared, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. Shards of glass from the broken bottle. The corkscrew. Directly in my line of sight, the hashok—Muriel—stood over Dag. Dag was breathing harshly; he was covered in blood.

  Then a hand covered my mouth, and a weight settled on top of me.

  “Is this how it was?” Richard asked in my ear.

  His hand smelled like fried catfish; his weight bore down on me. Richard, who liked an extra big slice of cake. Richard, who joked about getting more exercise. Richard, who probably weighed fifty pounds more than me. And he was strong, too, his fingers biting into my jaw, his other arm around my neck, a loose hold that he could tighten if he needed to.

  “I asked you a question,” he said, pulling hard with his arm and cutting off my air. “I’ve enjoyed a taste here or there, of course. But I’ve been wondering for so long. Is this what it was like with him on top of you? Is this what it was like, when you couldn’t move, when you couldn’t do anything but lie there, while I sent your brother from room to room with a gun in his hand? When I saw him the first time, I knew he’d be perfect, but you—you were a bonus.”

  He held me until stars spun in my vision, and then he loosened his grip. I sucked in air through my nose, every breath with that fried catfish smell. Tears stung my eyes. I hadn’t known, I wanted to say. I hadn’t known. I hadn’t known what Gard was doing, I hadn’t known what was happening. I hadn’t known anything. It didn’t matter, though. Since the minute I’d walked out of my bedroom and found them, since the minute I’d learned what had happened while some bozo I’d picked up at the club fucked me, it had been my fault. I’d heard a weird noise, hadn’t I? I’d heard that noise, and I hadn’t gone to check, hadn’t gone to see what was happening. I’d been too fucking selfish. Literally.

  “That’s right,” Richard said, mouthing along my neck between words. “God, you’re delicious. All that self-hate. All that guilt.” He bit directly over where he’d injected me, and his teeth broke skin, the mark of his mouth cold and burning. His tongue laved blood from my neck. “You heard a noise,” he whispered. “You could have gone and looked. You could have checked. Maybe you couldn’t have saved all of them, but you might have saved one.”

  He rocked into me slightly. His tongue ran over the wound, the cold blaze burning brighter. Venom, I thought from a distance. Maybe it would burn all the way through me. Maybe I could die like this, not feeling anything except polar fire.

  “Go ahead,” he said, and for a moment, I thought he was giving me permission. Then Muriel bent and slashed her claws along Dag’s leg.

  He screamed.

  I couldn’t help it: I bucked, trying to throw off Richard, kicking wildly, hands sliding through the puddled wine. With that same irresistible strength, he yanked my head back and bore down until fireworks exploded across my vision and I went limp.

  Static hissed in my ears.

  Then the static faded. My vision cleared.

  “Good,” he said. “You’re back. Was it like that? Is it the same?”

  I could hear my own breathing—I was trying to suck air through my nose, but I couldn’t seem to get enough. Catfish. Fried catfish. The weight on top of me. The hand over my mouth. The pressure at my neck. The pressure building in my head. His weight as he rocked against me. He wasn’t fucking me, not yet, but he was hard. I thought that would come later. Some clear-thinking part of me understood that would come at the end, when they made me watch Dag die.

  Richard bit hard where my neck joined my shoulder. This time, the cold fire was worse, spreading through my shoulder and chest. I shouted, struggling again, and this time he let me squirm and thrash. His tongue lapped at the blood.

  “Again,” Richard said.

  Muriel dragged her claws down Dag’s arm, and he howled and tried to move, but I saw now that she had pinned him to the tile, her other set of claws transfixing his shoulder. Suddenly he jerked and went still.

  This time, I almost got Richard off me. I bucked and rolled. My hands splashed across the tile. My fingertips brushed something and sent it rolling. I got an elbow in Richard’s side, and he growled as he yanked back again, and my vision imploded.

  The next time I came back, I heard sirens.

  Richard was breathing rapidly. I knew the sound. I knew the jingle of his belt buckle. Then one hand was at my jeans, fiddling, and I tried to get free again, but he had me pinned.

  If Dag was dead because of me.

  “That’s right,” Richard said, desire making his voice rough. His teeth punctured my other shoulder this time; the venom, if that’s what it was, made my chest feel like it was locking up. “You’re going to watch him die. Helpless. Held down. Fucked. And you can’t do anything about it. You couldn’t do anything about it then, either. If you’d been stronger.” He yanked my jeans down. “If you’d been smarter.” He yanked my underwear down. “If you hadn’t been so fucking selfish.”

  They were my own words. I’d been hearing them since that night.

  Richard pressed against me; he was naked and hard.

  And then I heard Dag talking about college: Should have, would have, could have. Nothing good at the end of that road.

  My hand swept out across the tile, closed over the handle of the corkscrew, and I brought it up and back. I felt it connect and sink into something soft that gave with a slight pop.

  Richard screamed.

  I kept pushing. He was flopped off me, trying to get away, but I rolled with him, driving the corkscrew with all the strength I had. We tumbled around until I was on top of him, shoving the corkscrew into the socket of his ruined eye, punching it into his brain. His hands raked at me, long claws that weren’t quite human, and I realized he was trying to shift his shape—or perhaps had simply lost control. I was beyond pain, beyond everything. Bone crunched, and then the handle of the corkscrew caught up against his forehead and wouldn’t go any deeper.

  I scrambled back and watched him, his back arching, his half-transformed claws scratching the tile. He flopped in the wine like a fish. And then I realized he couldn’t do anything else. He couldn’t die, but he couldn’t change, couldn’t control his body anymore. He’d stay like that until I ripped the corkscrew loose.

  Or until I burned the motherfucker to ash.

  A shriek made me turn, and too late I remembered Muriel. She ripped her claws out of Dag, freeing him from the floor, and reared back. Then she charged toward me.

  DAG (8)

  One moment I was lying on the ground, pinned there by the hashok’s claws, being tortured—sliced to pieces, listening to Elien scream. The next moment, I was free. The hashok shrieked, rearing back, its claw coming free from my shoulder. My first instinct was to curl up into a ball, but I forced myself to lie there. Play possum. The hashok was still screeching. Whatever had just happened, it had pissed off Muriel fiercely. I could hear Elien struggling behind me, and I realized that somehow, impossibly, Elien had gotten free.

  Muriel leaped over me.

  I reacted without thinking, reaching up and catching her by one pale, elongated leg. She crashed into the tile; the house shook from the impact. She kicked at me, and she swiped back, trying to get loose. But Muriel and Richard had been dealing with prey too long. It had made them sloppy, and sloppy had made them careless. She must have expected that I’d pull back, trying to avoid her claws, and maybe let her loose. Instead, I dragged her closer, climbing up her body, knocking the claws away.

  Shock was on my side; the dark, oily eyes were full of it, as though she couldn’t believe anyone—anything—would dare to fight back. She was so shocked that she let me knock her claws aside, let me move closer. She probably couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  Then the moment of advantage ended, and she surged back toward me. Her lipless mouth gaped open; rows of razor-sharp teeth moved toward my face. Her breath stank of rotten meat and fetid waters that had stood still too long.

  During all that torture, she’d never cut up my chest, never sliced open my shirt. I yanked out the hidden hunting knife and lunged to meet her. Surprise again. At the last instant before we connected, a hint of doubt showed on that monstrous face, the possibility that she had made a mistake. Then the fixed blade of the knife was shearing through the soft palate at the back of her mouth, and I drove it up into her brain.

  She dropped back, her long, pale limbs kicking and jerking like she’d grabbed an electric line. I stared at her as she did that helpless dance across the tile. Spasms twisted Richard around in the same way. Elien had driven a corkscrew into his eye. He had lost most of his hair, and his face was lipless and too long; Elien had caught him in the middle of a transformation.

  Elien stood with his back to the refrigerator, a chef’s knife in one hand, the blade trembling. Blood soaked the front of him, and I could see bite marks, puffy and inflamed, across his neck and shoulders, exposed where his shirt was pulled askew. Then his eyes cut to me.

  “They’re not—” My words came in short bursts; it was hard to breathe. “Why aren’t they. Doing anything?”

  “Fire kills them,” Elien said. “Isn’t that what you told me? They can’t die this way, but their brains are broken. Short circuited. Something like that.”

  Nodding, I circled around the two thrashing monsters and grabbed another knife from the block. The only sound were their limbs slapping the wet tiles, the rustle of Richard’s clothing, the weak grunts they released. Then I picked out the sirens in the distance.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “What are the police going to do?”

  “I don’t know. We have to get out of here.” I took a step, and then dizziness rolled over me, and I had to grab the counter. I still couldn’t seem to get a full breath; when I opened my eyes, I could see that my fingertips were blue.

  “We’re ending this,” Elien said. “Today. I’m not letting them hurt anyone else.”

  I nodded. After a moment, I opened my eyes and said, “What’s in the garage?”

  It only took him a moment. “I’ll check.”

  I leaned against the counter, listening to the monsters mewl and scrabble, while the sirens came closer. After a minute, Elien jogged back with a five-gallon can of gasoline in one hand and a can of paint thinner in the other.

  “Gasoline on the stairs,” I said, “and then all over the place upstairs. Curtains, bedding, that kind of stuff. Give me the paint thinner.”

  Picking a path around the hashoks, Elien handed me the can.

  “Dag, are you—”

  “Gotta be fast.”

  He nodded and sprinted to the stairs; the gasoline fumes wafted back to me. I opened the can of paint thinner and began dumping it on Muriel and Richard. It was easy with Muriel. It was less easy with Richard. He still looked human, kind of. The thought of him pinning Elien to the floor made it easier.

  When they were both drenched, I staggered to the windows, soaking the curtains and blinds, and then I started on the furniture. I saved a little to make a trail from Muriel and Richard to the front door, which I opened, and then I sagged against the jamb, panting. The night air came in sweet with the smell of grass and trees and the wet clay banks of the Okhlili.

  Elien took the stairs down two at a time, and he shook the empty gas can in demonstration.

  “Rags,” I said. “And matches.”

  He took off again.

  “Toss the can over here.”

  He shot it back at me without looking.

  “And the stove, Elien.”

  That made him stop.

  “See if you can get one of the burners to leak gas without the starter igniting.”

  “Oh. Shit.”

  Then he was running again. When he came back, he had a kitchen towel and a box of matches. I listened for the hiss of gas but didn’t hear anything.

  “I tried,” Elien said. “But the sirens are getting close.”

  “Wipe the paint thinner down,” I said.

  “How do I hold it so I won’t get more prints on it?”

  “Your prints don’t matter. You live here.”

  “I lived here,” he corrected as he scrubbed the towel across the paint thinner.

  “Throw them back inside. Anywhere, doesn’t matter.”

  He did.

  “Now do me a favor,” I said, “since I’m having hard time breathing. If I bend over, I’m not sure I’ll get back up.” I offered him the box of matches. “Burn this fucker down.”

  Elien’s smile was hard and huge as he struck the first match, and then he hooked an arm around me, and we stumbled backward down the drive. Through the window, we watched the fire. The flames caught quickly, racing along the trail of paint thinner, dancing up the curtains, following an invisible path of accelerant into the kitchen. Then there was a flash of flame as the concentrated paint thinner that I’d dumped on Richard and Muriel caught. Until now, the hashoks had been silent. Now, they screamed. It was high, almost at the edge of hearing, and it was like a needle passing through my ears and into my brain.

  “There were two men,” I said to Elien. The sirens sang out; I could see the lights through the black oak and sugar maple that screened us from the road.

  He nodded.

  “They killed Richard and hurt us. They didn’t tell us what they wanted or why they picked us.”

  He nodded.

  “They were setting the fire, getting ready to destroy the evidence. I managed to get a knife into one of them, and we ran outside. The other guy set the fire and ran.”

  Biting his lip, Elien nodded again. Then he said, “Will they believe that?”

  “No, it’s total bullshit, and they’ll know it. But they’ll need some way of explaining what happened here, and when they find those bodies, and neither of them is human, I think they’ll want all the help they can get.”

  “You think they’ll just . . . they’ll just pretend it didn’t happen?”

  I didn’t answer; I was having a hard time standing on my own, and I realized distantly that Elien was supporting most of my weight.

  “You’re stronger than you look,” I mumbled.

  “Shit, Dag, you do not look good. Let’s get you down.”

  He helped me lie on my side. I was staring out at the road as the first DuPage Parish Sheriff’s car sped down the drive, lights whirling, siren blaring. A vinyl pumpkin decal clung to the side of the car. I started to laugh.

  “Are you ok?” Elien asked, touching the side of my face.

  I kissed his hand and said, “Happy Halloween.”

  ELIEN (9)

  Dag was in Bragg Memorial Hospital almost a week, and I was there too: half the time, as a patient myself, and the other half sitting in his room and picking at my bandages. We watched game shows, and Dag beat me at Jeopardy! every afternoon. At lunch and at dinner, I’d go out and get decent food for us, Dag issuing lengthy requests that included po’boys, beignets, a crawfish boil, and once, smoked alligator. I reminded him that there was no call for him to be a stereotype. He reminded me that he’d gotten stabbed through the lung. I brought him all the smoked alligator he wanted; a guy sold it out of a stand in the Quartier, making a killing off tourists who couldn’t wait to try the local delicacy.

  The first night I was released, I slept in the chair at the hospital. The next morning, Dag was so furious that he actually yelled at me.

  “You got hurt,” he shouted. “You need to sleep in a real bed.”

  “You probably shouldn’t shout,” I said. “Hole in your lung, remember?”

  “You are either going to a hotel or going to my parents’ house right now, and you’re going to get some good sleep, and you’re going to get some real food, and you’re going to get better.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  After a moment, he winced and pressed on his chest, and he shrank back against the pillows.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Just so we’re clear,” I said, “I don’t like people yelling at me.”