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"Cass, look in the kitchen."

She looks.

And she sees the creature hanging in the air three feet off my floor, half here, mouth open, eyes moving, and I watch her go the color of the wall.

"What’s that?"

"It's stuck."

"In what?"

“I’m not sure. I closed a door on it," I say. "It was halfway through."

Cass drags herself up the wall until she's sitting. She doesn't take her eyes off it.

"Can you finish it?"

"I don't know."

"Can you let it out?"

"I don't know that either." My voice comes out perfectly level. "I don't want to find out with you on the floor."

The thing in my kitchen turns its head, slowly, toward the sound of me talking about it.

Cass gets her good hand around my wrist. Not to hold on. To check something. Her fingers press down over my pulse and stay there for four or five seconds while she works out whether the woman sitting next to her is the safest thing in this room or the worst one.

I let her.

That's when the light comes through the front window and slides up the wall.

Headlights, fast, taking the corner off the road too hard, throwing the shadow of the porch rail across the ceiling in a long stripe.

Then a second set behind it.

Cass's hand tightens on my wrist.

"Only one of those is his," she says.

28

GAGE

STILL FIVE DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN

Cass calls me at six thirty-one and says one word, and I walk out of my own vote.

The barn sits eleven miles from my road. I make it in seven minutes with the back end of the truck coming loose on every corner. The whole way there's a second set of headlights in my mirror that never once drops back.

Ansel drives the way he votes. Steady. Patient. Right behind you.

Ours. Ours. Now.

I know.

I come off the road into my own yard and the first thing my lights find is Neal.

He's twenty feet inside the tree line, on his side in the wet leaves. He's breathing. When I get my hands under him he swears at me, which is better than most of what I braced for on the drive.