“Give me five minutes?” I ask, and Bob nudges me with his nose. “I need to give this guy his happy pill.”
I push up on the latch to the heavy barn door, ramming my shoulder to get the thing to budge. The door groans open, and I step into the cavernous space.
The left side looks normal enough—black rubber mats, dumbbells against the wall, the kind of setup you’d see in any gym. But the right side is where things get medieval, or like something in one of those post-apocalyptic movies where the people fight zombies with baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire. Punching bags and human-shaped dummies hang from chains attached to the ceiling beams, swaying slightly in the breeze from industrial heaters positioned in the corners. Taking up the entire back wall is an arsenal of crowbars, fire pokers, and baseball bats mounted on pegboard hooks.
Griffin curls a resistance band near the weight racks. He’s ditched his shirt somewhere between the kitchen and here. I’ve only known the guy for a day, but I’m still not surprised. I have to force myself to look at his face instead of the defined muscles of his shoulders and chest, but my face feels warm anyway, which is annoying because even with the heaters, it’s cold in here.
“Thought maybe you went back to bed,” he says.
“Unfortunately not.”
“That’s the spirit.” He hangs up the band and turns around, giving me an appraising once-over. “So. What kind of shape are you in?”
“I’ve been working construction for the last six months,” I say. “But I only have my gym membership to use the showers.”
He nods, arms crossing over his bare chest in a way that makes the muscles in his shoulders shift. “Cardio?”
“I outrun most mall security guards.”
“Do I want to know why that’s your benchmark?”
“Probably not.”
“Right,” he says. “Have youeverdone a structured workout before?”
The honest answer sits on my tongue before I can think better of it. “I try to avoid working out because physical exercise makes me wish I were dead.”
Griffin’s face does this micro-cringe, and I immediately want to grab the words back and shove them down my throat.
“I just meant I’m not a gym person,” I clarify.
But the damage is done because Griffin’s glee has disappeared.
“You need to get stronger,” he says. “When an entity possesses a person, it overrides their body’s natural safety mechanisms. You know how sometimes you hear about a mom lifting a car to save her kid?”
I nod, focusing on his words instead of the embarrassment still burning my face.
“That’s not superhuman strength,” he continues. “That’s just what happens when adrenaline shuts off all the limiters your brain normally puts on your muscles. Entities do the same thing. They’ll make a ninety-year-old woman they’re possessing punch through a brick wall. They don’t care if she breaks every bone in her hand.”
Even picturing it makes me wince. “Here I thought regular people were scary enough without supernatural performance-enhancing drugs.”
Griffin crosses to the corner where a treadmill sits against the wall, flipping a switch that makes the display light up.
“Point is, if you’re going up against something that can make a grandma intoTheTerminator, you need to handle more than just mall security.”
He steps onto the belt to adjust the settings, and I notice something about the way he’s standing that triggers a memory.
“Were you in the military?” I ask.
Griffin’s hands pause on the console, and he glances over at me. “I served two years as a combat engineer. How’d you know?”
“My dad was an Army Ranger.” I reach under my shirt and pull out Dad’s dog tags, letting them rest against my sternum where Griffin can see them. “You’ve got the same… I don’t know. You carry yourself the same way he did.”
It sounds stupid when I say it out loud, like I’m reaching for something that isn’t there, but it’s true. Griffin has that same quality Dad had—right now, he’s positioned himself on the treadmill where he can see both me and the barn entrance. Dad used to do that in restaurants, insisting on the seat facing the door. Mom would tease him about it, call him paranoid, but he’d say ‘Old habits die hard.’ I didn’t understand what she meant until he was gone and I started noticing all the small ways he’d been watching out for us.
Griffin steps away from the treadmill, lifting his prosthetic exaggeratedly high to not snag it on the lip. “I heard what happened to your family. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want pity,” I say.
