says, and pops it in his mouth. It is so soft that some of it squirts onto his lip.
“What?”
“Decay concentrates the sweetness,” he says.
She’s staring at him in disbelief. He grins, and it’s the smile she remembers from the photos. Rapacious. Unappeasable. It makes her smile, too.
“It’s gross, I know,” he says. “I’m just so hungry. And it’s not like I’m drinking my own piss.”
She holds up the box of fried rice. “It’s yours if you want it. My treat.”
He takes the box from her, unfolding the paper and cupping rice in his palm. He shovels it into his mouth as she watches him.
Then, abruptly, he spits something out. It hits the floor hard, like a rock, and she can see that it’s a small gold earring, wrapped with a wisp of hair. “Ugh,” he says wiping his mouth.
Agatha bends down and picks up the earring. She rolls it in her fingers, hardly able to believe what’s happening. There’s a tiny piece of what looks like skin attached; she hopes he doesn’t notice.
She has made a terrible mistake.
“I don’t know how that got in there,” she says quickly. “It must belong to one of the cooks.”
Colin is watching her with a strange expression.
“I better take it back to the restaurant,” she says.
“We should call the police.” He sits down on his couch, not looking at her. He reaches for his cell phone, but he doesn’t dial.
“It’s just an earring.” Agatha holds it up to her own ear and lets it dangle. She feels guilty, but keeps talking. She has to convince him not to make any calls. “Let me at least go back and see if someone lost it. Then we can call the police.”
He nods. “Leave the earring here, okay?”
She sets it down carefully on the coffee table, brushing off what’s attached to it. She looks over at him, not sure what she’s hoping to see, but his face is blank.
Out the window, he watches her go, watches her head in the wrong direction for the restaurant.
He goes to the kitchen and pokes through the box of food with a single chopstick. Then he leans down to smell it. There’s a lot of thick, brown sauce and underneath that, a strange rich smell. Almost sweet. Rot.
All the next day, Agatha doesn’t go over to Colin’s apartment, not even when he calls the restaurant and asks for her specifically, although that does get her a lot of teasing.
Even worse, John catches Agatha eating a piece of maggoty pork from the trash in the alley behind the restaurant.
He drops the plastic bags he was dragging. “Are you crazy? You can’t put that in your mouth!”
Unprepared, she just gapes at him. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she says finally. He fires her anyway and— she’s pretty sure—lies to his parents about the reason.
By the time Agatha enters the graveyard, she is hungry and tired and sad. She wants to curl up in inside one of the crypts, but she knows she has to be careful. Nesting near graves is stupid.
But as her sharp little teeth rend gray flesh, she thinks of the great ghoul city her mother told stories about when Agatha was little—its walls wet with silt, its spires sparkling with the reflected light of lichen deep beneath the earth. In that mythical place, all the ghouls of the world could cool themselves in the city’s shadow and no one had to be careful.
Sometimes Agatha imagines that ghoul city aboveground—here—where meat would spoil fast in the hot sun. In that dream, she doesn’t have to keep moving. There is no series of jobs or haphazard nests. And she doesn’t have to make a choice between Colin dying or hating her.
An abrupt movement near the gate is enough to snap her out of her reverie and make her move, locking the crypt and sticking to shadows. She hears footsteps, but they are receding.
She pauses at the stone wall at the edge of the graveyard, where dirt and lime and ink and blood marks tell the story of all the ghouls who have passed through.
She is pushing her bike home, lethargic with satiation, when she sees a woman who looks familiar getting out of a Mercedes. For a moment, Agatha freezes, unable to figure how someone she knows is here, when she realizes that she doesn’t know the woman at all.
She’s Nancy, Colin’s wife. She’s famous.
Another woman has gotten out of the driver’s side. She is in a tailored navy suit and slinging the strap of a soft leather briefcase over her shoulder.
Agatha follows them down the long dark street, matching her stride to theirs, staying close to the shadows. The carrion in her belly makes her feel strong, and her fingers flex restlessly.
The women stop in front of the apartment and press the buzzer. Then they wait, more impatient by the moment. Nancy flips open her cell phone and presses a few buttons with her thumb. Then her friend says something and she laughs, harshly.
Agatha watches them and her heart starts to speed faster, like her body has already decided on something.
“What were you doing?” Colin comes out of the shadows behind Agatha, forcing her into the light. He smells of vomit and his gaze locks on her. Accusing.
“I didn’t…” Agatha starts, but doesn’t know how to finish. She doesn’t know how to deny doing what she was thinking without admitting she was thinking it.
“There you are,” Nancy says to Colin. “Are you using again? You look awful.”
“This is Agatha,” Colin says stiffly. “And this is Nancy and Whitney.”
Agatha lifts her hand in a half wave.
“I’m the lawyer,” Whitney says. Agatha wonders what Nancy needs a lawyer for now, here. They are already divorced.
“Is she a fan?” Nancy says.
“I never asked. I don’t even know if she likes music,” says Colin, which sounds sordid and isn’t even true, but Agatha doesn’t correct him. “Let’s go up.”
“I should probably let you guys have your meeting or whatever,” Agatha says.
Colin shakes his head, his fingers closing around her arm. “We need to talk.”
She lets him lead her toward the elevator; one look at his face and it is clear that he knows something. But what he knows or what he thinks or what he can guess is so unclear that all she can do is stare at the floor of the elevator and panic.
“Were you sick?” Whitney asks Colin as the smell of vomit is unmistakable in that small space.
“I am sick,” he says, and no one speaks into the uncomfortable silence.
Nancy walks around the room, stopping to stand by the windows. “You should hire someone to come here and finish the renovation. A healthy environment puts you in a healthy frame of mind.”
“What’s the point?” he says.
Nancy throws up her hands and looks at Whitney.
“You know how stubborn he can be,” Whitney says, and the way she and Colin exchange smiles seems weirdly intimate. Agatha is suddenly sure that Colin has slept with both of the other women in the room.
“I’m sorry,” Colin says suddenly. “Agatha and I are going to go and see what we can rustle up in the kitchen. Right, Agatha?”
Because there is nothing else for her to do, Agatha answers, “Right.”
The room reels around him, and he holds on to the wooden joist in the door frame. The sickness has mostly passed, and what he feels, most of all, is hunger deep in his belly. A kind of hunger that reminds him uncomfortably of the beginnings of withdrawal.
“Let me smell your breath,” he says, leaning toward her.
She frowns, ducking her head, but smiling. “What? Why? Do you think I’m drunk?”
