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I saw no sign of Henry, something that worried me for a long moment. Sometimes specters suffered traumatic anchoring when they possessed a person—or monster—that died while they remained inside the body. Phil moaned, pulling my frazzled thoughts from the logger to my boyfriend.

“You know how…I told you I was okay?” Phil ground out, his hand over his upper arm. Blood oozed through his fingers. “I sort of lied.”

“I sort of figured that out,” I softly replied and peeled off my hoodie. “We’ll wrap it up and get you back in the cabin so I can walk to the road for help.”

“Not leaving you…alone out here,” he ground out, his face sallow and slack.

“You’ll do as I say, big man,” I said firmly and got a cocked brow. “You know I’m the bossy top.” That made him snicker before his eyelids fluttered shut. Fuck me. If he bled out over this stupid camp project, I would track his father down and shove a ghost so far up his tight ass he’d—

A rumbling sound rolled over us. Cradling Phil in my arms, I watched an old VW van the color of a rotted lime trundle toward us, the headlights leaping up and down as it ran into and out of potholes. When it stalled and Klinger exited the van, I nearly cried with relief. Even though my love for Phil Kestrel was strong, there was no way I could tote him to the main road, and there was no way I was leaving his side. Stupid cryptids. I was going to charge double the next time someone came to me with a legendary creature to deal with. Fuck that. I was charging triple.

The motel manager gawked at us. “Damn, you boys run into them geese I warned you about, didn’t you?”

“Something like that,” I replied as my boyfriend mumbled about a minge. Quiet and the lingering smell of roasted monster were all that remained. And a camera on the porch, which had covered it all for Senator Doubting Kestrel. “We wrecked our truck.”

“Yep, seen it sitting all lopsided. We’ll call Willamina at the garage for a tow when we get back to town. Maybe take you two to the walk-in clinic for them goose bites.” He sniffed the air. “You been cooking wienies?”

“We’ve been roasting cryptids.”

“Oh, never had me one of them.”

“You’ll want to pass if anyone ever offers you one,” I said before the arduous task of getting my beefy boyfriend into a rattletrap van for a rough ride to medical care. The hoodie I’d cinched around his arm was already wet with his blood and not exactly sanitary, but one used what one had when one was stuck in the woods with a monster.

After grabbing our gear, I ran to the van, crawled into the back where there was a funky old mattress Phil was lying on, his eyes drifting over to me as I closed the sliding door with a sound slam.

“You’re so pretty,” he mumbled with a little sigh.

“So are you, baby, so are you.” I sat down, lifted his head and placed it on my lap for the ride to Bloodroot Ridge. That was the absolute truth. Even covered in mud, blood, and fine cryptid ash, I’d never seen a more beautiful soul in my life. “I love you, Phil.”

“Minge,” he whispered and giggle/snorted before snuggling his nose into my belly. “Love you too, Arch.”

Chapter Ten

As I had stated earlier some macho guys made terrible patients.

Phil was not happy about his trip to the walk-in clinic in town. They’d been incredibly nice people. The nurse had been kind, the physician’s assistant pleasant and informative. They’d put twenty-two stitches in his bicep with care and gentleness. Then, because he’d been in a tussle with a mangy bear—we couldn’t very well say we’d been fighting a cryptid or they’d be sending us for a psych evaluation—he got what would be the first of four rabies shots. He winced dramatically at the injection then softly complained to me about how tight the wrap around his arm felt and how he was now going to be sidelined from baseball for even longer.

Klinger, the sweet old soul, trundled us back to the motel. Phil was battling off sleep as we sat in the back of the van, his rump on the mattress, his good arm resting around my shoulders. I was pretty well done in as well but wanted to clear up something with Klinger.

“Klinger, what brought you out to the camp?” I asked over the squeaks and groans of what surely was a deceased suspension system.

“Well, you never did come back with food, so I ate some tuna and chalked it up to Generation XYZ being irresponsible. When morning come and your truck wasn’t parked in the lot, I got to worrying. Thought maybe you ran off to that campground after all and run into them geese. Seems I was right!”

“To be fair to the geese, we never saw a goose. Just a hairless bear that jumped us,” I lied as my sight moved from the back of Klinger’s head to our equipment bag. Inside it lay what we hoped was pretty solid evidence of our encounter with the hidebehind. We’d check as soon as we got into our room and had some privacy. We’d have time. My call to Yeye while Phil was getting sutures had been a sheepish one. I hated to call him home, but we did need a way home. If we called Roxie or Candy or any of our friends, they’d ask questions we couldn’t answer. Roxie would want footage to share on the livestream since we’d not had a new show in months. Seemed like we’d have to find some other haunting to give us some ratings. At least we didn’t have to worry about cash anymore. The senator’s deposit would keep Yeye and the shop we also called home out of the red for years.

“Never seen one of them hairless bears. Saw a hairless cat once on the internet,” Klinger said and launched into a long talk about cats with no fur. Phil was dozing beside me, cradling his arm that he had sworn up and down didn’t hurt at all. I nodded in and out of slumber as well until we arrived at the motel. The engine coughed like a gun blast and woke us both up instantly.

“Here we are. You two head to bed now. I got to return this van to Preston over at the Moose. I’ll grab us some of their dinners. Add it to your tab. Maybe a shower too? You two reek of booze and ash.”

“Does ash even stink?” Phil asked as we limped our way to our room, our feet dragging heavily along the uneven walk. Klinger disappeared from sight. Too tired to ponder how upset Yeye had been to hear about the truck wrecking, I fell face first onto the bed with a moan. Phil joined me a moment later, the mattress bouncing slightly as he flopped down beside me with a hiss of pain. “Stupid stitches.”

“Be careful,” I warned, pushing the last of my meager energy into just rolling to my side to stare at his profile. “If you rip them open, they’ll have to redo them.”

“Gah, I hope our next case is far from a campground. And monsters. No more monsters for a while, okay?”

“M’kay,” I murmured as I snuggled into his side to rest my head on his unscathed bicep. I knew nothing after that since sleep not only rode up on me, but it rode over me. I woke up sometime later, the sound of humming pulling me from the black void of exhausted sleep. Moving to my back, the humming ceased momentarily then resumed. My eyelids were pasted shut, but after a vigorous rubbing, they finally peeled open enough for me to see the sun was just coming up and a ghostly maid was dusting the air conditioning unit. Ah, so that was who was humming.

“Morning,” I whispered. She spun to face me, feather duster in hand, and stared at me openly for several seconds with wide dark eyes. “I see you’re a hard worker.” Phil snored beside me, bandaged arm flung up over his grimy blond head. “My name is Archimedes Kee. What’s yours?”