“So which way are the pharmaceuticals?” Holt asked in a low voice as they emerged from the stairwell.
“This way,” Ernie replied, hooking a finger to the left. “Down past the offices and on the right.”
The two men moved as quietly as they could down the hall, past empty offices and blood-streaked doors, until they came to a corridor veering off to the right. While the first- through third-floor wings of the building were used for patient rooms, therapy rooms, and bathrooms, the fourth-floor wings beyond the administrative offices were set aside for medical and pharmaceutical storage, labs, and maintenance. They had once housed the isolation ward before the restructuring of the hospital, and those rooms that couldn’t easily be converted to accommodate the modern changes were either used for file storage or left empty. Ernie never liked being in those fourth-floor wings if he could help it; there was something not right about them. Maybe it was age or neglect that clung like shadows to the walls, and made folks jumpy, but Ernie didn’t think so.
The door to the pharmaceutical and medical supplies storage room was unmarked, other than a yellow and green sticker by the room number, to keep any patients who might be wandering where they shouldn’t from accessing medications. It was always kept locked, as the small sign on it indicated, for the same reason. He’d had no reason over the years to ever unlock the door, other than to assist the occasional scatterbrained orderly who had locked himself out and/or the keys in. His boss, however, had granted him keys to every locked spot in the hospital, and he’d marked the key to that door with the same colors. Ernie wondered briefly if Wensler would show up and give him grief about him and Holt breaking into the hospital’s supplies. Years on the job had trained him to be leery of such things. Given the state of the hospital just then, though, he supposed Wensler showing up and firing him over stolen drugs and scalpels was the least of his worries.
He found the key quickly on his big jingling key ring and let himself and Holt inside.
Metal shelves had been erected under the fluorescent light, which came on as soon as they crossed the threshold. Hundreds of white and nearly translucent orange bottles lined the shelves, many of which had long chemical names he couldn’t pronounce, even if he could see the labels clearly without his reading glasses.
“Any idea where the sleeping pills are, friend?” Holt asked, throwing up his hands at the sheer volume to look through.
“Not a clue,” Ernie said.
“Looks like the shelves are marked, at least by drug type. Let’s see here…opiates, anticonvulsants…” Holt peered at the shelves’ different labels.
“Look for benzodiazepines, then,” Ernie said, “or NB hypnotics.”
Holt gave him a questioning look.
“It’s not whatever you’re thinking, boss. The orderlies call them benzos and NBs. Short for benzodiazepines and non-benzodiazepines, they told me. Words just stuck in my head.”
Holt shrugged. “Okay. Benzos and non-benzos it is, then.” He found the benzodiazepines two shelves over and one up from the bottom, in boxes marked Klonopin, Valium, Restoril, Xanax, and Ativan.
“These…aren’t these anti-anxiety meds?” Holt asked.
“I guess so. Grab a couple of boxes of those and a couple of NBs. One or the other has to be right.”
Holt grabbed a box of Xanax and another of Restoril, tore them open, and shoved the bottles into the pockets of his trench coat, then turned to the shelf of non-benzodiazepines below it. “Oh, hey—Lunesta. I’ve heard of that stuff. That’s the moth stuff, right? From the commercial, the glowing moth?”
“I think so.” Ernie was starting to feel very anxious in that supplies room, and not because of Wensler and his policies. The room had gotten smaller somehow, like the shelves were pressing in, and the low hum of the fluorescent lights was starting to unnerve him.
Holt grabbed two boxes of Lunesta, tore those open, and shoved those into his pocket as well, then straightened up again. “Think we can grab a scalpel from here?”
They moved through the shrinking shelves toward the sterile medical supplies and found a scalpel still in its packaging. Ernie grabbed it and stuffed it into his pocket.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I have a bad feel—”
“Help me!” a man’s voice called from down the hall. It sounded furtive, desperate, as if whoever it wanted help from could return at any minute.
Ernie and Holt exchanged glances.
“I thought nobody was housed in the isolation rooms anymore,” Holt said.
“Nobody is,” Ernie said. He grabbed another scalpel package and ripped it open with his teeth.
The two threaded their way through the shelves until they got to the door. Ernie had a strange sensation that they had somehow gone the wrong way, that the doorway in front of them was a different door, the wrong one, but he shook off the feeling. There was only one door in or out of the room, the one with the yellow and green sticker above the room number and the sign reminding people to always keep it locked. The feeling persisted, though, as they brought their gathered supplies into the hallway, so Ernie glanced at the wall. The room number was there, and it was the right one—456.
The sticker was gone, though. There wasn’t even that grimy-looking little residue left behind. Frowning, Ernie closed the door. It was blank from top to bottom. No sign.
“What? What is it?” Holt asked, puzzled.
“Something’s wrong,” Ernie replied.
“Hey! Hey, you down there! Please, help me! I locked myself in!” The voice was indeed coming from one of the old, unused isolation rooms, down at the end of the hall. Ernie thought he recognized the voice, too, but that made him feel more rather than less suspicious of it. The owner of that voice shouldn’t have been there.
“Who are you?” Holt asked.
“Myers! Larry Myers! I’m an orderly here. Please, let me out before those things come back!”
Ernie nodded with grim satisfaction.
Holt started down the hall but Ernie put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Myers only works day shifts,” he said in a low voice.
Holt nodded.
“Please,” Myers said. “I’ve been stuck in here since three this afternoon and I have to piss like a racehorse.”’
“How’d you get locked in there?” Holt asked.
“I ran in here to hide from one of those, whatever the fuck they are, those glowing cloud things. When I pulled the door closed, it locked. Look, I’m not one of those things. Are you going to let me out or what?”
Holt looked to Ernie, who shrugged. “Your call, boss,” he said to Holt.
The detective led the way past the isolation rooms. The glass windows on those doors were barred, and the doors were made of metal. They required special keys; Ernie kept them on a separate ring attached to the main key ring and was fairly sure he’d never used them, nor had the guy before him.
Holt pressed as close as he could to the dust-streaked glass, trying to peer through, but seemed to have no luck. Myers pounded on the door. Both men jumped, and Holt backed away from the window.
“For God’s sake, let me outta here!” Myers cried. “Please! I don’t want them to do to me what they did to Joe. Oh God!”
“Let him out,” Holt said to Ernie. He looked almost apologetic. “We can’t leave him in there.”
“If that’s a ‘him’ at all,” Ernie muttered. Holt didn’t answer, but he drew his gun. Ernie searched the jangling mess of keys and found the smaller ring with the isolation room keys on it.
He let out a breath. “Here goes,” he said, and unlocked the door.
It squealed loudly as Holt pulled it open, the sound disproportionately loud, its echo ping-ponging longer and farther than it should have. A musty smell of sedentary stone and stale air wafted out to them on a puff of dust that Ernie waved to clear away. Then the two men looked into the gloom inside.
The isolation rooms had no proper windows, but there was a tiny, heavily barred slit near the top of the high ceiling. It was no wonder the medical community had discontinued use of the rooms in the name of humanitarian progress; the little cell in front of Ernie struck him as a questionable step up from a medieval dungeon. If there was a man in there, then the gloom had already begun to stick to him like sweat.
“Myers?” Holt called into the room.
“Yeah,” the shaky voice replied, sounding relieved. “I’m here. I’m here.”
A figure stumbled out of the darkness. It certainly looked like Larry Myers—curly black hair cut short to minimize the contrast of his receding hairline, the beginnings of a paunch just starting to hang over his belt, hairy arms ending in hairy knuckles, and bright, earnest green eyes. His scrubs were torn across the chest. A cloudy bruise was forming over the outer corner of one eye, and a thin stream of dried blood had left a crusty trail from his left nostril to his upper lip.
Holt put his gun away to help Myers into the hallway, but Ernie caught a look from him that seemed to say keep an eye on him and keep the scalpel handy. Ernie did; he watched the orderly as the man panted, his wild-eyed gaze darting up and down the hallway.
“Where are they?” he asked in a near whisper. “Those things, those cloud things—where did they go?”
“Haven’t seen them up here, buddy,” Holt replied gently. “Haven’t seen or heard anything on this floor but you.”
“Are they gone?” Myers asked.
“Looks that way, son,” Ernie said. “How about we get you out of here?”
Myers turned to Ernie, and the bright fear in them dulled to confusion. “What are they? What the hell are they?”
“It’s a long story, Mr. Myers. Let’s get you out of here first.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Myers said.
“Okay. Let’s take care of that.” Holt led the man, with Ernie in tow, to the far end of the hall. A sign for the men’s room indicated a door on the left, and Holt drew his gun.
“Just in case,” he told Myers, whose empty stare was fixed on the weapon. He pushed open the door and they slipped inside.
Holt checked the stalls while Myers fidgeted impatiently by the sinks. When he gave the okay that the place was clear and holstered his gun, Myers ran to the nearest urinal. While he was relieving himself, Holt sidled up to Ernie and said in a low, confidential voice, “So, is it him?”
“Larry Myers?” Ernie responded in the same tone. “Don’t know the man all that well, but I…I think so. Seems like him. No little, you know, quirks, like with George.”
“If we turn him loose at the front door, he’ll never make it off the property. Look at him.”
“Take him back downstairs, then?”
“That’s my thinking.”
Myers zipped up and went to the sink. The water took a moment, then spurted suddenly from the faucet, as if the pipes had been turned off and on again. Myers flinched when the water hit the porcelain but managed to do a serviceable job of washing his hands.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, now what?”
“Now you come with us.”
“Where? Are we leaving now?”
“We can’t do that just yet, Larry. You’re gonna have to trust us, okay?” Ernie clapped a hand on the orderly’s shoulder.
“What? Why? That’s crazy! We have to get out of here, we—” His eyes grew wide. “What was that?”
Ernie hadn’t heard anything. He turned to Holt, who shrugged.
“What was what, Mr. Myers?” Holt asked.
“It’s one of them,” Myers whispered. “Can’t you hear it? It just—there, it just said my name again.”
“We don’t hear anything,” Ernie said. Under normal circumstances, that might have made a man feel better; he could chalk up Myers’s voices to delusion. After what he’d seen lately, though, all it meant was that Ernie was at a disadvantage. He was essentially deaf to whatever was threatening Larry Myers.
“Let’s go,” Holt said, evidently thinking the same thing. He drew his gun and led the trio out of the bathroom. “Which way is the voice coming from, Mr. Myers?”
Myers pointed down the corridor from which they’d come.
“Good,” Holt said, gesturing for them to follow in the opposite direction. “Stairs are this way.”
Their passage down the corridor was tense and mostly silent; Ernie’s joints creaked so badly he could almost hear them inside his head, but the rest of him held it together. Larry Myers flinched from time to time, stopping short in front of him, and Ernie had to nudge him to keep him going. Holt drew his gun on shadows. Ernie was relieved when they reached the corner.
They turned onto a lightless void, an end of the earth into which the rest of the hospital seemed to have fallen. That’s what it looked like to Ernie’s tired old eyes, just for a moment, before he realized that the lights had gone out.
“Fuck,” Holt said. “What happened to the lights?”
“They like the dark,” Myers whispered. His whole body was trembling noticeably now.
Holt ignored him. He rummaged through the inner pockets of his trench coat until he pulled out a very old cell phone. He flipped it open and brought up the flashlight app, then shined it down the hallway. It did little good; the beam of light was too thin to make out anything more than shapes, and it didn’t reach too far.
“Come on,” he grunted, leading them into the blackness. Myers snatched at Holt’s trench coat like a child, and Ernie held on to his shoulder, an uneasy train rolling slowly through a dark tunnel that groaned and mewed all around them. Just like on George’s street, he felt things watching him, jostling with each other to get closer, grazing close enough to him to just miss touching the raised hairs on his arms and the back of his neck before gliding back into the black again. When the little red digital elevator sign proclaiming the fourth floor came into view, Ernie relaxed, but just a little. That meant the stairs were close by.
He was about to point that out to Myers and Holt when something passed in front of that number four for a moment, and the train stopped short. Ernie bumped into Holt, who he could now make out as a silhouette with a reddish halo.
“You okay?” Holt asked.
“Yeah, but…” Ernie frowned. Holt’s was the only silhouette in front of him. He was sure he’d never let go of Myers’s shoulder, but the middle man was gone.
“But what?”
“Myers. He’s gone.”
“What? How?” Holt sounded genuinely perplexed. “Where could he have gone?”
They heard Myers laughing from somewhere beyond the light, although he sounded hysterical enough that he could have been crying, too. A few seconds later, it was joined by more lunatic laughter, as if every crazy person in the whole damned hospital was laughing with Myers.
“Larry?” he called above the laughter. “Larry, where’d you go, son?”
“Mr. Myers? Mr.—ah, fuck it. Let’s go, Ernie.” Holt grabbed Ernie’s leave and ushered him to the stairwell.
Suddenly, the red glow behind them got much brighter, and the stairwell door started melting around the edges. It fused to the doorframe, sagging at an odd angle but effectively blocking the way.
“I’m a-f-fraid I c-can’t let you leave,” a voice from behind said.
The men turned to find Edgar leaning against the wall by the elevator doors, his one eye socket glowing brightly and casting a bloody tint to his face and neck.
Holt gave the boy a bone-weary sigh. “We ain’t about to let you stop us, kid.”
Edgar considered that a moment, then said, “Sounds like an impasse, huh?”
“It does indeed.”
“Guess we’ll have to fight it out,” Edgar said with an almost wistful smile.
“Guess so,” Holt replied, and he and Edgar charged each other.
* * * *
Orrin grinned at her, and that double set of fangs pressed into his bottom lip. As he sauntered closer, he dragged his wrist blade against the wall, leaving a deep furrow that, having pierced the skinlike paint, split the wall open to reveal alien flesh and muscle underneath. The way he was looking at her reminded her so much of Toby that it made her skin crawl.
“But damn, do I ever want to cut you…”
And Orrin would cut her, too, if given a chance. To get close enough to use the artifact on him meant getting close enough to get cut.
Again.
She unzipped the backpack.
“Where’s Maisie?” she asked, stalling.
Orrin shrugged. “Who knows? Maisie does her own thing.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“We all do.”
“Now, on that point, I’ve heard differently.”
“Oh?” Orrin paused.
“I heard you and your brother don’t take a proverbial piss without Maisie or the Viper signing off on it.”
Orrin’s grin faded, but he said nothing.
“Sounds to me like Maisie and the Viper are running the whole show,” she said, pulling the artifact out of the backpack. “She must trust him an awful lot to give him so much power over the rest of you…expendable types. Maybe she’d got a thing for him, or—”
Orrin suddenly slashed out at her, his wintery eyes flashing. She lunged backward, managing to dodge his wrist blade by mere inches. Evidently, she’d hit a nerve. He glared at her and dove at her again, but she knocked his incoming arm away from her face.
She shoved the artifact at his face, but this time, he was ready for her defensive strike. He tilted his head out of the way and backed off, but just a little.
“Your toys are a joke,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’m going to carve you up so bad even your crazy butcher of a brother won’t recognize the pieces.”
“Oh, that’s good,” she replied tersely. “That’s a good one. Did you come up with that on your own, or do you still get all your thoughts from Henry?”
“This is all me, bitch,” he said, and plunged one of the wrist knives into her shoulder.
The pain was staggering. It knocked the wind out of her, and for several seconds she just held on to his arm. He was pressed close to her, so close that she could see ice storms swirling through his irises and an uncontrolled hate in the depth of his pupils. He smelled like nothing, felt almost like nothing, and though his face was inches from hers, he had no breath. She observed and held on to these things to keep from passing out. She clutched his elbow to keep from sinking to the ground. And with her other hand, the one holding the artifact, she reached around him as if to give him a hug and plunged the artifact into his back.
“You…you…” The ice storms in his eyes suddenly stopped moving, but that hate grew fathoms deeper. There was something else there, too, swallowing the hate like a black hole. Kathy thought it might have been fear.
Orrin opened his mouth either to say something or to scream, but no sound came out. Instead, the opening that was widening in his back like a vortex started to pull at his insides. His tongue and then his teeth were sucked down his throat and he seemed to be getting shorter. His face distorted and then crumpled in on itself. Just before the eyes were vacuumed up inside the head, they grew wide, that frozen ice storm splintering into a million tiny pieces of despair.
Then the whole of the creature that was Orrin folded in on itself and disappeared. The artifact clanked to the floor. She scooped it up, put it in the backpack, and tossed the strap over her good shoulder.
A moment later, a sharp cry from the adjacent room sent her running. As she burst into Henry’s room clutching her injured shoulder, she saw the young man on the floor. Toby leaned over him, not quite able to get to him on the floor with his injuries. It looked like he was trying to prod Henry’s shoulder with his crutch.
“What did you do?” she yelled, tossing the backpack to her brother. She rushed to Henry and crouched beside him.
“Nothing!” Toby protested. “One minute he was fine and then he grabbed his head and screamed and fell over like that. I didn’t do anything to him.”
Kathy looked up into his eyes and saw he was telling the truth—or at least as much of the truth as Toby was able to tell. He hadn’t done anything to Henry…
…she had. The thought dawned on her with awful clarity. The tulpas weren’t entirely removed from their connection to Henry, not yet. It was possible that hurting one of them might hurt their creator as well.
“What happened to your shoulder, Kat?” Toby shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“Orrin happened. It’s fine. It’s not that deep. Henry, are you okay?”
“He’s gone,” Henry whispered, shaken, as Kathy helped him sit up. He looked up at her with frightened eyes. “Orrin…what did you do to him?”
“I…I think I undid him,” Kathy said. Truthfully, she really wasn’t sure what happened. She hadn’t thought the artifact would kill Orrin, only slow him down. She still didn’t think it would affect the tulpas with greater power, like Maisie or the one Henry called the Viper, but if it could be used to thin out their army some, she was all for it.
“How?” Toby asked. “I don’t understand. You shouldn’t have just been able to—wait.” Toby thought about it for a moment, and a small smile crept over his face. “That sneaky little bitch,” he said finally.
“What?” Kathy asked. “What are you talking about?”
“The spell she did to keep them here, it has certain…clauses that can be finessed. In the event, let’s say, that you summon a number of entities to fight, and you give them each a certain degree of staying power, you can include a part that allows the most powerful entity to siphon off strength and substance from lesser entities around it to ensure victory. It’s only a little bit from each, not enough for any of them to notice, but given the number of things out there…” He shook his head. “That artifact should only have hurt this tulpa, Orrin. But she pulled just enough of the ground out from under his feet without him noticing that it dispelled him entirely. Chances are, that artifact there will work on any tulpa of Orrin’s strength or less. Maisie, though, clever little minx that she is, will be a much tougher problem.”
“The Viper, too,” Henry muttered.
“What?” Toby looked at him as if just remembering he was there.
“The Viper, too. He’s not…like the rest of them. He was never a friend of mine—he’s a friend of theirs.”
Kathy and Toby exchanged glances. She wasn’t sure what that meant, and from the look on Toby’s face, he didn’t seem to, either.
“Viper controls the Wraiths, both kinds, and the Others. Orrin always thought he and Edgar controlled the Others, but they didn’t. They just wrangled them, like wild animals, you know?” Henry spoke softly, his eyes seeing somewhere distant and unreachable now. “The Viper was the only one who controlled anything, except Maisie. The Viper does whatever she says. He’s…I think he’s the one who killed those kids. He and Maisie.” He began to shiver violently, but Toby waved behind his back that it was okay. In a moment, Henry regained control of himself.
“If I try to stop them, they’ll kill me, won’t they?” he asked Kathy.
“My honest opinion? They’ll do whatever it takes to be free. If this final part of the spell needs to be done at twelve midnight, they’ll come gunning for you at twelve-oh-one.”
To Toby, he said, “And you can make them stop? It’ll work?”
Toby was about to answer when a shout came from the hallway.
“Wait here,” Kathy said to them. Her shoulder ached, and she tried to pull her sleeve out of the wound but the blood there was already drying, making it stick to her skin.
“Wouldn’t dream of leaving your side,” Toby said with a snide gesture at his swollen, purple ankles.
Kathy grabbed the backpack out of his hand, unzipped it, and took the artifact. Toby didn’t argue. He simply watched her until she walked out with it. Even with her back turned, he could feel his eyes on her. She didn’t think she’d ever get used to his stare again.
Another shout sent her down the hall and around the corner toward the elevator and stairs. It didn’t sound to her like something inhuman; rather, it sounded like a man, and she had this panicked feeling that it was either Holt or Ernie, that they had met with trouble.
What she found instead was a pudgy, unremarkable man with fuzzy black hair entangled in that glowing blue ivy she’d seen outside the building. The ivy had him strung up a foot or so off the ground, plastered to the wall next to the elevator doors. All about him was a stomach-turning stench of vomit and burnt hair. From the tiny trickles of blood and the indentations in his skin and clothes from where leaves and vines touched him, it appeared that the ivy had tiny teeth.
“Help me,” he croaked when he saw her. “Don’t let them kill me!”
Kathy approached the vines slowly, drawing out the pocket knife she always kept in her pocket. It only had a three-inch blade, but it had come in handy countless times on countless cases.
“Hold still,” she told him. “I’m going to try to cut you loose.”
She plunged the little knife into the vine wrapped around his wrist and heard a tiny scream like the hissing of steam through a teakettle. The opening smoked and oozed a purple gel with an almost overpowering smell of ammonia. It didn’t seem to affect the knife blade, but it dripped on the man’s scrubs and he began to scream and wiggle violently.
“Knock it off!” she shouted at him, and when he stopped struggling, added more softly, “Don’t make this thing tighten its grip on you. I think I can cut you free, but we have to be very careful.”
“Okay. Okay.” The man sounded grateful. “Whatever you need to do. Just hurry up.”
Kathy found little spots between the teeth to hold down the vine while she sawed into it with the knife. She could feel it vibrate and let out its little steam hiss beneath her fingers every time she did. Its smoking purple blood pattered to the floor and sizzled there.
She managed to get an arm and both legs free and was working on the chest when one of the vines suddenly forced its way down into the man’s throat. His eyes got big and he began to make gagging sounds. Afraid that cutting it would only allow it to wedge farther down the man’s throat, Kathy pulled on it instead. It was hard to get a good grip on the thing without pressing her palm down on those tiny razor-wire teeth, but she pulled anyway.
The man’s face was changing from a flustered pink to an angry red. His eyes were watering. The worst part was the little gagging sound in his throat, the tiny death rattle.
“I’m trying,” she told him. “I’m sorry, I’m trying, but—”
Suddenly, the ivy withdrew. It pulled out of the man’s throat, and he erupted in a series of coughing fits and spitting. It recoiled from his arms and legs and unwrapped itself from around his chest. The man fell to the floor, his skin bloody from a hundred tiny holes, his scrubs smoking. When his coughing subsided and his gasps for air evened out toward regular breathing, he said, “Thank you. Thank you, oh God, thank you. I’m Larry Myers.”
“Mr. Myers, I—”
“Larry, for pretty ladies like you.” He smiled up at her weakly.
“Larry, then,” she said with the faintest touch of impatience. “You’ll need to come with me. I can get you someplace relatively safe.”
Larry gave her a weak, thin laugh. “Lady, I don’t think any place in this whole goddamn hospital is even remotely safe.” He let Kathy help him to his feet and leaned on her as she walked him back toward the inmate bedrooms. She had almost reached the corner when Larry’s whole body shivered and then went rigid. His eyes grew wide and blood bubbled up from his throat, spilling over his lips. She looked down to see something that looked like a tree branch made from black smoke jutting out from the man’s chest. Blood and bits of an organ, probably his heart or a lung where the branch had torn through, hung from the little wispy twigs.
Kathy pulled away from Myers and turned to see a shadow figure made entirely of black smoke. Henry had mentioned something about Wraiths, and Kathy supposed this was one of those. It turned faintly glowing eyes on her and withdrew the tree branch, which reformed into a human-shaped arm and hand. Tiny droplets of blood sprayed in its wake, and Larry Myers fell to the ground. The Wraith looked at Larry, and Kathy heard a horrible crunch like a thousand teeth grinding at once. Larry’s body crumpled then, as if an invisible hand was wadding up paper, and when it straightened out again, it looked all wrong. The shoulders had shifted too far down along his ribs, and his legs bent the wrong way. His neck had contorted in such a way that the head, with its wide, glazing eyes and swollen, bloody tongue, hung between his shoulder blades.
When the mangled thing spoke to her, the mouth didn’t move, but a number of voices all braided together still came out of it. “Lady, I don’t think any place in this whole goddamn hospital is even remotely safe.”
“Let him die,” Kathy whispered. She clutched the artifact.
The voices replied, “Oh, Kat. Silly, stupid Kat. You should have stayed out of my room.”
Kathy considered plunging the artifact into Larry’s back, just to take away the Wraith’s vehicle of communication, but a tendril of mist had coiled around the body’s ankle without her noticing. It yanked Larry back toward the Wraith before letting go and melding into the creature’s abdomen.
“I’ve thought about it, you know…stab you to pieces and drag whatever’s left of you out into the woods. I’d hide you better than the others. Dad would neeeever find you. No one would ever find you.”
Kathy turned and ran.