The dog was still barking. Billy groaned and rubbed his eyes. Sitting up, he blinked sluggishly into the dark until the layers of the room came into focus.
“Fucking dog,” he mumbled under his breath. It was always barking. It was a rotten something, the lady who owned it said, abig black-and-brown dog. Rotten seemed about right for waking him this early. It used to bark at him too, but Billy had snuck him food, if you could call peas food, jamming them through a hole in the fence. Eventually the dog, Mack, had become his friend. He would gallop up to the fence and slobber on Billy’s hand. Billy even snuck over there sometimes when the lady next door went to work and his mom was asleep on the couch or sitting at the kitchen table staring at it like it was a TV screen, smoke hanging out of her lips. She barely registered anything Billy said or did when she was like that.
Billy’s belly growled around the emptiness. His mom didn’t come home for dinner last night, and he and his sister had only had a peanut butter sandwich. He wasn’t allowed to use the stove because he was only eight and his sister, Lottie, was six. Not that there was anything to cook anyway.
He got up, took off his Superman pajamas and threw them on the floor. He opened the drawer and rifled through until he found a pair of shorts and a gray Superman t-shirt. Billy loved Superman. Sometimes at night, when he lay in bed, he dreamed his father was Superman and he would fly down and smile and say, “I’m so sorry, Billy, I didn’t know I had a child. I came for you as soon as I found out.” And he would take him, Lottie and his mom to a big, beautiful home, where he would have all the food he wanted.
Billy padded barefoot out to the hallway, walked to his sister’s room, and peered in. Her blonde hair fluffed out across her pillow, she was huddled under her pink comforter sound asleep. Billy walked past his mother’s room. He wasn’t allowed in there when the door was closed. He knew better than to open and look. He walked in once when he heard his mom moaning. He thought she was in pain. She had yelled and thrown a pillow at him.
The door to her room was open about an inch, so he paused, trying not to make a sound, and peeked in. The bed was unmade and empty.
Billy sighed; it was the second night in a row she didn’t come home. He wouldn’t be going to school again today.
He went to the kitchen and opened the cupboard door. They had four bits of bread left. He pulled the chair out from under the kitchen table, heaved it over to the cupboard, and stood up on it. Right at the top of the cabinet was an old coffee tin. His mom hid all sorts of things up there, and sometimes it had some change in it. He stood on his tippy-toes and reached in. Snagging the tin, he dragged it out, coins dinging against the side. Happy, Billy climbed down, grabbed a knife, and jacked it under the lid, carefully maneuvering it until the lid clicked up. He reached in, fumbled around, and pulled the coins out. He was pretty good at counting money. He pulled the coins across the bench, adding them up as he went, and worked out they had four dollars and thirty-five cents. He could buy a full loaf of bread with that. He slipped the money into his pocket and carefully put the tin back where he got it from so his mother wouldn’t know he had taken it. She would sometimes scratch her head and say, “I was sure there was a few bucks left. You didn’t take the money, did you, Billy?”
Billy would shake his head and with a straight face tell her no. She would mutter a cuss word under her breath.
Billy jumped down.
Next, he made two peanut butter sandwiches and turned on the TV to watch cartoons. Climbing up onto the old brown couch, he ate one, but he was still hungry; he stared at the remaining sandwich, trying to ignore the gnawing in his belly. The sandwich seemed to call his name. He bit his bottom lip. He could eat it, go to the store in the morning, and buy a loaf for Lottie. He reached for the sandwich. Then snapped his handback and sat on it just to be sure. Lottie would be hungry too when she got up.
If his mother didn’t come back by lunchtime, he would put a cartoon on for Lottie and sneak off to the corner store a few blocks away. He didn’t leave her unless he had to. People asked questions if they saw him out alone on a school day.
Questions usually led to them being removed and made to live with strangers, or his mother yelling at him, neither of which appealed to Billy.
Chapter 11
My Rock
The fire tickled around the edges of the logs, sending a warm glow across the room. Rain tapped on the windows, beading against the dying light. I folded my legs beneath me and sank into the soft leather couch, reading a romance book Ethan had bought for me before he left. I’d just read the part where the protagonist caught a woman riding her boyfriend like a bronco. She was shocked and furious. She didn’t run like I did. She didn’t even cry out. She body-slammed the bitch. I liked her more than I liked myself. If I added a glass of wine, I would consider this a perfect night. Usually.
We’d been here for sixteen days. Sixteen days of being unable to run, unable to see Ethan, or Jodie, or BJ, or Darcy.
Once, I would have given anything for Karson to invite me to his home, to ask me to stay with him. But when life seemed forced rather than an option, it took the shine away. I felt constrained.
“Georgie said you weren’t hungry.” Mary’s voice pulled my attention. She held a plate piled with vegetables and slipped it on the table in front of me. “I’m going to get concerned it’s my cooking.” The wrinkles around her eyes deepened as she smiled.
I unfolded my legs and placed the book on the side table. “It’s not your cooking. You’re the best cook. I don’t know how you do it. I struggle to make toast without burning it.”
Mary chuckled softly. “The secret is I put love into my meals when I’m cooking for people I care about.”
“Are you saying you care about two girls you barely know?”
“Your personality makes it tricky.” Mary’s grin widened. “But Georgie is sweet.”
I laughed as my hand went to my heart. “Ouch, I’m wounded.”
Mary laughed as she smoothed down a few loose gray strands that had escaped her bun and sat down on the couch opposite me. “From the moment I met you, Amy, I knew you must be special. Karson doesn’t bring women to his home.”
A warm glow filled my heart. “Oh,” I said, unsure how to respond. When Ethan took me in, he told me he didn’t invite women to his home either, but we were friends, not lovers. Maybe for vampires, their home was a sanctuary, a private space, a bat cave. “Well, now he has brought two home.”
“I think one is only for your benefit.”
I waved her comment off. “He’d protect her even without me.”
She looked down as she needled an arthritic bump on her finger, a nostalgic look on her face. “Perhaps he has a softer heart than he lets the world see.”
“How did you meet him?”
