Panic shot through Bing’s body as he leaped forward to grab Walter’s hands. “Don’t do that!” His breath was coming fast, and his gaze hopped around, searching for the damned little sprites. Fortunately he didn’t see anything.
“Whoa,” Walter said, his tone and his expression suddenly soothing. “Sorry, sorry. It was just a joke.”
“Fairies aren’t a joke.” He tried to suppress his shudder, but it went through him anyway. And of course Walter felt it.
“So Tinker Bell—”
“Don’t even say a name.”
Walter nodded. “The little winged you-know-whats are real, then?”
Bing nodded and tried to force himself to relax. It didn’t work, though he did manage to release Walter’s wrists. “They’re horrible creatures.”
“Sounds like a story.”
Bing shot him a hard glare. “It wasn’t a story. It was real. And it was….”
“Horrible?”
“Like the original Grimm fairy tales horrible.” A year ago he and Walter had made a game of reading the original Brothers Grimm fairy tales before watching the Disney movies of the same story. They’d started with “Briar Rose,” then watchedSleeping Beauty, then kept going with other tales through a month’s worth of movie nights. The two versions were like night and day. Grimm was horror. The other was Disney.
“You’re going to have to talk about it.”
Bing jerked backward. “It’s not a story. It happened!”
Walter held up his hands in surrender. When Bing didn’t relax, he touched Bing’s tight shoulder. “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant you should talk to someone about, you know, whatever happened to you.”
Bing swallowed, forcibly bringing his attention back to the present. “I’ll tell you,” he rasped. And he would. Because Walter was right—he did need to talk about it, and he couldn’t imagine sharing it with anyone else. Not even the people who had lived through it with him, because they were just as haunted as he was.
“Bing?”
“Not today, okay? One disaster at a time.”
“Deal.” Walter looked around. “And I’ll tell you how humiliating it was to come here every morning and bow before a big egg on a plastic flower pedestal.”
Bing grimaced. “That must have sucked.”
“It did.” He looked at the now-scattered mound of plastic. “You’re saying now that my belief is what made Monkey real?”
Bing shook his head. “Did you believe it?”
“Hell no. I believed I was making my aunt happy. But she believed. Is that enough?”
Bing shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not usually. Otherwise the world would be filled with flying saucers and—”
“Spaghetti monster gods.”
Bing smiled, but a moment later his smile faded. “For all I know, it is.”
“Is what?” Walter asked as he began moving systematically through the trailer. He looked in cabinets, checked underneath chairs and behind the couch. Bing had no idea what the man was looking for, but he decided it was as good a start as anything.
“Filled with flying saucers and spaghetti gods. I don’t know. There are thousands of werewolves. More if you count all the different types of shifters.”
Walter’s head snapped up. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Huh.” I took Walter a moment, but in the end he grinned. “Cool. Though, uh, I suppose maybe not if it’s a surprise. If you didn’t choose it.” He looked questioningly at Bing. “Does it suck?”
