The words are supposed to sound tough, but my voice cracks halfway through. His eyes soften.
“You need to see a doctor,” he says.
“I need you to stay over there.” I pick up Bob and push myself onto my feet, staggering backward across the one empty parking space separating me from my car. Tall Guy steps forward, but I hold my arm out as if there’s even a chance I could hold off a guy who wrestled a grown man to the ground. “Just—what was that thing?”
“The man?” he asks, standing up. He’s got to be six-four, maybe six-five, and I have to tilt my head back to maintain eye contact, which I’m not used to doing for any guy.
“The thing that came out of his mouth.” I grip my temples, pressing in because saying I’m lightheaded doesn’t even begin to cover it. The parking lot is doing this slow spin, and my throat is telling me to shut up, each word scraping out like I’m paying for it in blood, but I need to know: “What was it?”
He exchanges a look with Old Man.
Old Man pulls his goggles onto his head, revealing matching suction rings around his eyes. “You saw the entity take form?”
I nod, confused.
“How long have you been able to see the dead?” Old Man asks.
“The dead?”
“Ghosts,” Old Man says. “Spirits.”
Ghosts aren’t real.I nearly say it, but that smoke-person was real. The weird substance was real. There’s still a glob of it on my boots.
Old Man’s eyes are bright with excitement, like I’m a bar of gold he just found lying on the side of the road. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me. It’s the same way journalists did when they’d ambush me outside my high school. At least I know what reporters see when they look at me: a good story. But this guy?
These cosplayers may have saved my life, but that doesn’t mean they’re good people, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean I should stick around to find out.
Old Man takes a step toward me. “Please, if you could simply?—”
“Thank you for saving my life,” I say, tripping over my feet away from them. “But I need to go.”
Old Man begins to say something else, but I’m already moving toward my car. I hold Bob with one arm as I scramble into the driver’s seat, ripping the covering from the windshield. I speed past them both, tear onto the road, and floor it until they become nothing but specks in my rear-view mirror.
CHAPTER 3
I take a corner so fast my tires squeal, only slowing down once I get a few blocks away. Bob trembles on my lap. I know it’s not safe for him to sit here while I’m driving, but right now, there’s no place I feel like he’ll be safer than pressed against my stomach.
I drive aimlessly, putting as much distance as possible between me and whatever just happened back there. Only when my heart stops trying topunchthrough myribcagedo I park in the busiest, most well-lit lot I can find: a 24-hour CVS with every single overhead light blazing like a beacon.
The engine ticks as it cools. I cut the headlights but leave the key in the ignition, then lift Bob onto the center console. He hovers his front leg above the textured plastic.
“You’re okay, buddy,” I say, then drop my voice to a whisper because it hurts less. At least I can still talk. “Let me look at you.”
Bob whimpers as I probe his tiny leg. I don’t know what I’m feeling for. Everything feels small and fragile.
He shouldn’t have bitten that guy. He had no chance of doing any damage, and he put himself in danger for me. I don’t deserve him, but knowing this tiny dog would go to bat for me makes me want to rip apart every human that was ever bad to him limb from limb.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, pressing my nose against the top of his head. “I’m so sorry.”
Pulling up the GPS, I find an emergency animal hospital fifteen minutes away. Bob curls into a ball on the passenger seat as I drive, and I keep one hand on him the entire way there.
It turns out to be a hairline fracture. The vet wraps Bob’s leg in a blue hard cast. He needs a follow-up in a couple of weeks and has to take pain meds once a day, but he’ll be okay after a lot of rest.
“He has to wear a cone of shame,” she says. “To keep him from chewing the cast.”
Bob looks at me with such profound betrayal as she fits the plastic cone around his neck that I almost laugh. Almost. My throat won’t let me.
“The silver lining of all this is you look very handsome,” I tell him.
