He’d been killed in a car accident, of all things. No monsters, no curses, nothing I could hunt or fight. Nothing but a distracted driver who missed a stop sign, and suddenly I was down one parent.
“We have a duty to protect the world,” said Ronnie. “We don’t get breaks.”
“Why don’t we all shut up and let Jenny speak?” Annette put a hand on Ronnie’s shoulder. It looked like a kind gesture, but Ronnie winced and nodded hard.
“It started when this kid, Eddie Azevedo, showed up to first period in his underwear,” I said. “Everyone thought he was on drugs. Three days later, a woman fell to her death. In the middle of church. Then the mayor had a heart attack after running through town, screaming that he was being chased.”
“Those sound like nightmares,” said Annette.
“Exactly, though I didn’t figure that out until I overheard a dentist talking to her husband at the ice cream parlor. She’d been working on a kid who claimed his teeth all just fell out of his mouth.”
“People have nightmares about that?” asked Ronnie.
“It’s pretty common. Especially if you’re under a lot of stress.” I ran my tongue over my teeth for reassurance. “I went back to Felipe for help. I got a long, boring lecture about duty and responsibility, along with a tip about the Book of Nightmares.”
Temple perked up. “Tell me you found it.”
“We did, yes. I got the Slay Team together and tracked the book to a creepy old librarian.” Alex had immediately dubbed the man “the Crypt Keeper.” I smiled at the memory. “He lived in a renovated school bus way outside of town. When we got there, he hit us with a bunch of nightmare creatures, including a shoggoth.”
“But you got it? The actual Book of Nightmares?” Temple sounded like a kid who’d just gotten an all-season pass to Disney World. And I was about to yank it away from him.
“Briefly.” I couldn’t meet his eyes. “I kind of...burned it.”
Temple made a pained choking sound.
“We spent days arguing about that book,” I said. “The Guardians Council wanted it for their library, but I didn’t trust them. I was starting to realize some of the Guardians were just as bad as the monsters I hunted. The only way I could think of to keep them—or anyone else—from getting their hands on that kind of evil was to destroy it. Hunting down the nightmares that escaped after we killed the Crypt Keeper was hard enough. I couldn’t risk more getting loose.”
I’d hunted carnivorous dream dogs and cruel mockeries of old teachers and, for some reason, an all-werewolf version of the Backstreet Boys. None were as disturbing as the shoggoth, though the werewolves’ dance number had come close.
“You burned it.” From the grief and betrayal and horror in Temple’s voice, I’d committed a sin on par with taking a chainsaw to his grandmother. “I’m never making you hot chocolate again.”
“Jenny runs a bookstore now,” Annette said to Temple. “That has to make up for destroying one book almost forty years ago.”
Temple sniffed but didn’t respond.
“Is it possible the shoggoth survived?” asked Ronnie. “Could it have followed you here?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “The shoggoth was the hardest nightmare to catch. After our first two fights went badly, we set a trap. We broke into the middle school and drained the pool. My friends filled it a foot deep with gasoline. I lured the shoggoth into the pool. Alex threw a Molotov cocktail. Poof. No more shoggoth. No more school, either.” I’d spent the next day in the hospital with smoke inhalation and minor burns.
“Jenny...” The sympathy in Annette’s voice somehow made it worse than if she’d just blurted out what we were both thinking.
“I know,” I said.
Ronnie looked back and forth. “What did I miss?”
I finished off my hot chocolate and whipped cream. “Annette was attacked by three kids carrying squirt guns loaded with holy water. My friends and I used that same tactic on demons back in my Hunter days.”
“You mean the Slay Team?” Ronnie asked.
I never should have told him our group’s name. “Then there’s the spell on the pills. That containment ring came straight out of Nabu-rihtu-usur’s spellbook. The same spellbook we took from the Bubba’s Chicks guy after fighting his scorpion-men. And the pills are full of shoggoth goo. Just like the one from the Book of Nightmares.”
“And they’re operating in Salem, where you live,” said Annette. “That’s unlikely to be a coincidence.”
I’d crossed the entire country to escape that part of my life.
“Oh, damn,” said Ronnie, finally making the connection. “You think this drug-dealing, shoggoth-summoning bad guy is one of your former Slay Team friends.”
I had no hard proof, but my gut knew the truth. It was the only answer that tied it all together. I felt sick. I’d tried to distance myself from my surviving friends, to let them rebuild their lives free of me and the damage I’d brought.
