by Jim Butcher
“No one likes you,” the haunt repeated. “You’re weird. You’re different.”
I felt Mouse gathering himself, but I couldn’t let him act. As far as everyone standing around us knew, it would look like an absolutely giant dog attacking a little girl when she hadn’t done anything to provoke it. That would be bad. So I put my foot on his head and pushed down as hard as I could. It barely made him move, but I felt him relax. Mouse is a pretty good dog.
“You’re losing your mind,” the haunt said. “No one wants to be your friend. No one wants to play with you. No one even wants to say your name.”
I put more salt on my fries. Quite a bit of it, actually. Some of it fell into my other hand.
“You should be alone. Then no one would have to put up with you,” said the haunt.
I looked up into its empty eyes and said, “I know what you are. I’m going to give you this one chance to go away and bother someone else. After that, things will get ugly.”
“Don’t you think you should be somewhere safe?” the haunt asked in a calm voice. “Somewhere you can’t hurt yourself when you have a f—”
I interrupted it by throwing salt into its black, empty eyes.
Creeps in general don’t like salt. Don’t ask me why. That’s how it is.
The haunt flinched back so hard that it fell out of the chair. It didn’t make any sound, but the body it was occupying twitched and jerked randomly, the muscles all tight. I felt bad about that, a little. It wasn’t this other girl’s fault that the creeps got her. She probably didn’t even know why she was doing and saying the things she was.
“You should wash your eyes out,” I advised the haunt. “Someplace else.”
The creep stood up, tears streaming down its expressionless face. It stared at me for a moment, eyes all red around the black, then hurried into the café’s ladies’ room.
Mouse let out another growl and rose, pacing restlessly around my chair.
“Hey,” I said. “Settle. It’s okay. They’re in the Book. I know how to handle them.”
Mouse made an unhappy noise. He’d read the Book, too. Molly had started it, back before she’d become a grown-up and forgotten it all, and her little brothers and sisters had added to it. Harry Carpenter, who was kind of my big brother, had passed it on to me when the underhide had come into the house.
Mouse knew what I had to do as well as I did. He just didn’t like it.
“Maybe they’ll leave me alone now,” I said. “Come on. We need mustard.”
I got mustard, which is the best, for my fries. We started eating them, and Mouse settled down a little. He has a very practical attitude about worry—he doesn’t, when there is good food with people you love.
My dad came back in a couple minutes later, looking … older. He didn’t seem like he was angry anymore, just really, really tired. He tried to smile at me but it wasn’t a real smile.
“What was it?” I asked him.
Behind my dad, the door to the bathroom opened. The girl haunt came out, her face dripping with water she hadn’t dried off. She gave me a dirty look, and the power of it brought up a smell, something from my darkest dreams. Kind of rotten and metallic, and I suddenly felt my stomach do swirly loops even though I was standing still.
Then the haunt walked out and just stood there, facing away from me.
The others began to drift closer to her, in ones and twos, until they all stood silently together in a circle, facing one another. Nobody talked. Maybe haunts just think at each other or something.
I ignored them and looked up at my dad, who looked thoughtful. “A warlock,” he said quietly after a moment. “A young wizard whose power is not in control. Dangerous.”
Miss Molly had told me about warlocks. They were awful. “Did you fight it?”
“Him,” my dad said. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because most of the time, they never meant to do anything bad,” he said. He didn’t talk to me in a kid voice, like some grown-ups did. They sound different when they talk to children. My dad sounded like he did when he talked to anyone else. “They don’t even understand what’s happening to them. No one has warned them what will happen if they break the rules.”
“That’s not fair,” I said.
“No,” he answered, and he made the word sound sad. “But that doesn’t make them any less dangerous.”
“Can’t you help?”
“Sometimes,” he said very quietly. “I’m not sure.”
I shared a French fry with Mouse, thinking. My dad always helped warlocks if he could. Miss Molly had been a warlock and my dad had helped her. I figured he’d be running to help this one, but …
“But I’m here,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “And you’re more important to me.”
That made me feel warm all over, hearing him say that. “They just get powers?”
He nodded. “Born to it, yeah.”
Just like my dad and Miss Molly. And maybe me, someday. Or that’s what Miss Molly told me. “Am I going to get powers?”
“Maybe,” he said. “There’s no way to know for sure.” He sounded honest, like a teacher talking about George Washington. I tried to imagine him teaching a class, only maybe wearing like a teacher outfit. In my head, it was kind of easy to see him doing it, really.
“Weird,” I said. I passed a fry to Mouse, who snapped it up, and got the next one. “If I do, will you teach me stuff? So no one gets hurt?”
“If you want me to,” he said.
Which wasn’t the same thing as if he said that he wanted to teach me. But he probably just meant that he wouldn’t if I didn’t want to learn. Like that would happen. Only maybe it could happen. That thought made my tummy flip and turn some more. “If … something happens to you, who is going to teach me?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” he said.
“It could,” I told him quietly. Because it could. His work was dangerous. “And maybe there wouldn’t be anyone. Maybe I’d be a warlock.”
He looked at me and took a deep breath. He was wondering about whether he should tell me the kid-safe version of the truth. “Maybe,” he said, finally.
“That could be me.” In the corner of my eye, I watched the circle of haunts regard one another, then turn as one to stare at me. Ugh. It just felt icky.
This warlock boy needed help. And I needed to deal with the haunts before they hurt me again, or maybe hurt someone else, like my dad. That was the right thing. Even though it would be really scary.
It’s what my dad would do. I think. I mean, we’d just met, really.
“I can eat more French fries,” I told him. “Mouse will keep me company.”
He blinked at me as if surprised. “You sure?” he asked. “It could … cut today kind of short.”
“If someone needs your help, you help them,” I said. “Even when it’s really hard. Miss Molly told me that about you.”
Because what if Miss Molly had told me the kid-safe version of the truth about my dad? What if he wasn’t as good as she said he was? What if he didn’t want to take care of a daughter who had issues? Who was really hard to be around?
But he looked at me and then he smiled, and I suddenly felt warm inside, like I’d had all the hot French fries in the world.
“Yeah,” he said, winking at me and rapping a fist cheerfully on the table. “Yeah. That’s right.”
MY DAD LEFT, and I told Mouse, “You know I have to do it like this. You can’t come all the way.”
He made a soft, distressed sound, and kissed my face with his big, sloppy tongue.
“Yick,” I said, and rubbed my face in his fur. “I love you, too, Mouse.”
He made a rumbling sound in his chest and sighed. He felt tense, his weight shifting, as though he was eager to go somewhere and do something. He wanted to help, but he couldn’t.
I got up from the table and walked out of the café and straight up to the waiting haunts. I addressed the girl dir
ectly. “Hey, you. Space Face.”
The haunts all stared at me with their empty eyes, and for a second it was like there were shadows writhing everywhere, people in pain. I ignored those images because otherwise I would have gotten really scared. Instead, I made eye contact with every haunt and then said, “You guys are the worst. Let’s get this over with.”
And I turned and started walking, Mouse at my side.
There was a confused moment of silence, and then the haunts started following me.
The Book is pretty specific about haunts. They feed on fear. That’s why they dig up all the scary things from your past. It’s like their mustard. They want you to marinate in fear, and then, when you’re soaked and dripping in it, they move in and start eating you like some kind of gross bug. All the kids these haunts had taken? The invaders would eat them up from the inside, taking bites out of their minds, keeping them focused on fear. When they ate their fill, they would start looking for someone else to move into. The kid would wake up, like from a bad dream, but the Book said that the kids the haunts had gotten wouldn’t ever be right again.
There were a dozen black-eyed kids walking along behind me. I wondered what it would be like to get chewed on by a dozen haunts at once.
Probably really scary. Like a nightmare you couldn’t wake up from.
Anyway, the Book says that there’s only one way to deal with fear, and only one way to deal with creatures who thrive on it.
You face them.
You go, alone, to the darkest and scariest place around, and you face them. It has to be alone, nothing but you and yourself facing the fear. It has to be scary, because you have to face the fear on its own ground.
Otherwise, the haunts just … follow you. Endlessly. Nibbling at you until you just collapse on the ground making bibbly noises.
Mouse walked alongside me, his head turned to face the haunts, the mane around his neck and shoulders bristling. He didn’t growl, and his body language had changed to something grim and very serious.
It’s never really hard to find a scary place; they’re everywhere—it’s just that grown-ups don’t pay much attention to them. I found one right there in the zoo, and I had to go through only two gates marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY to get there. By sheer coincidence, they’d been left unlocked.
Good boy, Mouse.
So it took me only a couple of minutes to walk down a utility staircase into the basement of the big cat exhibit, and from there to open the door to an old, old, old staircase made of stone and slick with water that went into the building’s unlit subbasement.
At the top of the stairs, I turned to Mouse and said, “Don’t be afraid. I got this.”
I was kind of lying. Maybe I didn’t have it. Maybe the Book was wrong. Maybe I’d have an attack. Maybe the haunts would just beat me up. There were enough of them.
Mouse seemed to sense my uncertainty. His expression shifted and he whirled to face the haunts following me, baring his teeth and letting out the kind of rumble you hear only from really old cars and maybe tractors.
The haunts drew up short. Their leader, the girl with the tear-streaked face, faced him and sneered.
“Guardian,” she said. “You know the Law. We are within our rights.”
Mouse growled lower and took slow steps forward, until he stood before the haunt, almost eye to eye. His fur did that thing where light comes from it, silvery blue sparkles that glitter across the very tips of the hairs.
If the haunt was impressed, it didn’t show it. “I know the Law. As should you.” It pointed a finger past him, at me. “That is my prey. Stand aside.”
I really needed Mouse not to get involved. If he did, I couldn’t break the haunt’s empty-eyed pursuit.
“It’s okay, boy,” I said. “I got this.”
Mouse looked at me, falling silent. Then he bowed his head down low to the ground for me. He prowled past the haunts—bumping a couple of them with his massive shoulders, enough to make them stagger—to the entrance we’d just come in, and settled down with an attitude of patience.
All the eyes turned toward me.
I took a deep breath and got my phone out of my pocket. I had it powered down, because I’d been hanging out with my dad, and wizards kill phones just by looking at them funny if they’ve got any electricity actually moving through them. Powered down, the phones seem to be okay. I turned it on, waited for the dumb little apple screen to go away, and then flipped on the light.
Then I walked down the stairs into the black, and the haunts came with me.
I got to a room at the bottom of the staircase. It was a big, open concrete space with a lot of dusty old machines. It smelled musty down there. It smelled awful. Shadows stretched everywhere, threatening. My light glittered off small eyes, close to the ground, outside of the actual area it lit. Rats, maybe.
The light was shaking a little. I was afraid.
That wasn’t a good sign. If I was afraid and they hadn’t even started on me, maybe I’d break. Maybe I’d just fall down and cry. Maybe they’d get me. Maybe I’d walk back up into the zoo with my eyes all black and my dad wouldn’t even be able to see it. I’d just start freaking out and everyone would just think, you know, that I had gotten worse. And they’d have to put me someplace safe.
I shivered.
Then I turned around and faced the lead haunt.
Tear Streaks stood, like, six inches behind me. As I watched, her mouth twitched into this bow of bared teeth that resembled a smile about as much as Sue the Dinosaur’s teeth at the museum. Her eyes gaped black, like a skull’s sockets.
The other haunts slowly walked around us, until they stood all around me in a circle, close enough to reach out and touch me. Their eyes got darker, got absolutely huge, and then …
And then—
—I was standing in the kitchen of a house I recognized without remembering.
TV was on. It was Sesame Street, but the language was Spanish, which I’d been brought up speaking. I still spoke it, though it took me time to make my brain understand it, like shifting gears on a bicycle. Elmo was talking about letters.
I looked up and saw a very kind lady with dark hair whose name I couldn’t remember. I’d been very little when I had lived with her. She was humming to herself and making cookies or something, and she paused to smile at me and tell me that I was a good girl.
Her husband came in, speaking in a tense voice. She dropped her spoon and then hurriedly set her mixing bowl aside and picked me up.
That was when the vampires came in. Shapes, not quite human, in black cloaks and coats and wrappings. They let out inhuman shrieks, bounding through the air, and I heard a gun go off just before the kind lady’s husband screamed, and the air went all thick with the smell of metal, and the kind lady screamed and pressed me against her.
“I know,” I said out loud in a firm voice. “The Red Court came for me. They killed the foster family who was taking care of me. It was awful.”
The kitchen vanished abruptly, and I was standing, half-bent over with my hands on my knees, breathing hard. The light from my phone showed me a lot of patent leather shoes.
I looked up, angry, and said, “I didn’t get hurt that day. Other people did. You’ll have to do better than that.”
Tear Streaks stared at me for a long moment and then said, “You’re going to lose this family, too. You always lose them.”
I started breathing harder. All my thoughts started going so fast that I couldn’t steer them.
Oh no.
Oh no, no. I was having an attack.
Tear Streaks stepped closer to me, something eager in the way her body curled toward me a little. “Your father means well. But he’s going to die. You’ve seen his scars. One day, he’ll get unlucky or he’ll be wrong, and he’ll die. You’ll be alone.”
My chest was clenching up. I couldn’t breathe. I heard myself making those stupid little-kid noises, and my eyes blurred over with tears. My heart felt like someone was hit
ting it with a hammer, wham, wham, wham.
“The Carpenters could die just like your first family. Horribly. Screaming. Because of you.”
“Stop,” I tried to say. I just heard sounds like, “Guk, guk, guk.”
The haunt leaned closer. I felt other kids putting their hands on my shoulders, fingers rigid and just wrong.
“Your mother died because of you,” the haunt said in that same tone. “Your father is going to die because of you.”
I had fallen to my knees. Tear Streaks came with me.
“You selfish little monster,” she said. “All those good people, dead because of you. You should just throw yourself into a hole. It would be better for them.”
In the dark and cold, when you’re tired and scared and can’t talk or breathe, with creeps all around you, words like that sound true. And if that was true, then there was no reason not to agree with them. There was no reason not to just lie down and let the monsters have me. For a second, I wanted it. I wanted to just lie down and stop. The words seemed right.
They really did. They sounded true. They felt true.
But feeling true isn’t the same as being true.
In fact, feelings don’t have very much to do with the truth at all.
Monsters had killed my foster family. That was true.
My mother died on the mission to save me. That was true.
But all those people were dead because monsters had come and killed them. And that was the only reason.
Monsters a lot worse than the ones who now surrounded me. Grown-up monsters. Monsters I had survived.
I made myself breathe as the others started to talk. They all said horrible things to me.
And then it hit me: The Book was right.
A dozen of these creatures, and they had dared to select the smallest kid with the scariest things in her past that they could find. They hadn’t tried to jump my dad or even a vanilla grown-up. They hadn’t tried to eat Mouse. They’d come after the littlest, most vulnerable person around.
Because they were afraid.
And if they were afraid, then maybe that meant they couldn’t be the scary ones.
“You know what I think?” I said suddenly and in a very clear voice.