“Yup,” he agreed, running his thumbs down her thighs, leaving a string of Braille in their wake. “I said that an hour ago.”
“Yeah, you did.”
She pressed her lips together, watching him as he traced her. She’d never really looked at him before. You just didn’t look at your boyfriend’s best friend. Not like this. Framed in the V of her legs, his plaid shirt open, flat belly crunched in little folds as he leaned back against the seat. Muscle tightly bound under his smooth, dark skin.
His eyes were nearly closed as he watched his fingers move, lashes spread like paintbrushes on his cheeks, full lips making a near-perfect archer’s bow.
He was beautiful.
She leaned toward him again, her hand on the seat behind his head. He looked up and smiled a little, then pulled her in, and their mouths met, hers salty-wet with tears.
Then a sudden, bright beam of light raced around inside the car, and a sharp knock hit the glass.
Réal cursed, squinting at the light and ducking behind his lifted arm. Evie shrieked, grabbing for the blanket.
“Everything okay in there, Miss?” a man’s voice asked.
Evie shrank under the blanket. When she realized it was a cop, she said through the window, “I’m fine. We just ran out of gas.”
“Not what it looks like to me,” the cop said, laughing. “Need me to call a tow truck?”
“Nah.” Réal’s voice was muffled under the blanket. “It’s under control.”
“All right, then,” said the cop, flashing his beam around the car once more. “Better be gone before I come back around.”
“Right,” Ré said, tense. “I’m on it.”
“Sure looks that way.” The officer laughed as he walked back to his cruiser.
Evie pulled the blanket down. Ré looked so freaked out that she couldn’t help but laugh at him too.
“Oh, that’s nice,” he said. “Spit all over my face.”
“Sorry, it’s just…” She shook her head, mystified. “This is not at all what I thought would happen tonight.”
“Me neither, believe me,” Ré said. “But we should get out of here before he comes back.”
“Yeah,” she said, reality crashing in as he shifted away from her.
She slid off his lap, and he got out of the car, buttoning his shirt with his back to her while she searched in the dark for her clothes.
They cut through the woods toward the Mohawk gas station on Highway 9, leaving the car and the dirt road behind. He was quiet, marching slightly ahead of her with a stick he fanned back and forth so they didn’t walk into anything in the dark. He didn’t hold his hand out for her to take, like Shaun would have done.
She said, “Tell me about the Windigo.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Well…what does it look like?”
“They’re super tall and thin,” he said. “Like, skin and bones, with their lips all chewed to shit.” He said nothing for a while, crunching onward. Then he added quietly, “Sometimes they have antlers, like stags.”
“That’s what your uncle looked like?” she asked, surprised.
“Nah,” he said. “The spirit isn’t the same as the demon. It’s way worse.”
“How come?” She picked her way along behind him, trying to see in the dark. He didn’t seem to notice, or care, when she stumbled.
“’Cause,” he said bluntly, “it can get anyone. In your sleep, in dreams. It catches you, and then you’re infected. Then you become the demon.”
“And that’s what happened to your uncle? He ate his daughter because of a dream?”
“Pretty much,” Ré said. “And I mean it that it’s a secret, okay? It goes no further.” He sounded defensive now. Distant and hard, like whatever spell they’d just been under had completely worn off.
She watched the shadow of his back as he moved, hunched, irritated, and she felt that invisible space rise up between them again. The same space there’d always been. And she knew they were back to who they’d been when Shaun was still between them—strangers.
She let go of whatever tether had been pulling her along behind him through the woods and fell back. He moved away fast, and the night rose up around her, dark shapes and shadows of trees. Her heart thumped in her ears, and she breathed like she had in the lake, staring up at the stars.
Floating just above drowning.
Empty and monstrous at the same time.
Thinking of Shaun.
Seeing him leap from that stupid fire escape a hundred and one times.
She slowed to a stop, letting Réal dissolve into the shadows ahead, the last point of light as Shaun pulled her under.
She fell to her knees, damp earth soaking her jeans. She dug her fingers into the dirt, sticks and leaves crackling under her weight. Tears wet her face. She thought of Shaun’s rotten body. Smashed open and pulled apart, so much meat and bone. Not even human anymore.
Her skin crawled cold, the sweet memory of Réal’s touch replaced by that picture of Shaun.
Just let me disappear, she thought. Or let the Windigo come get me. That would be better than this.
Feeling nothing would be so much better than this.
7
R
Réal looks down at the leg bones in his hands. They are too long. Not human. He waves them back and forth in the dark, and they tap against the trees, making hollow tocks like wooden pipes. He can’t see which way to go—there is no light ahead, just the light that surrounds him, dim and gray.
He’s lost her somewhere. Swallowed by the black.
He tries to call out, but no sound comes from his throat. At least, not a sound that makes sense. And then he knows. It is one of those dreams. The ones he’s had since he was little—where he can’t move fast enough, where the Bad Thing has already got him.
He looks up from the bones in his hands. The trees shake snow off their boughs with a soft whoosh, and then they aren’t trees at all. They are deer standing upright, so that the greasy fur of their backs rounds up in matted spikes, their forelegs pointing together, with hooves
