When he was little, his mother’s sisters had told him the story. How, in the dead of winter, Black Chuck had eaten his only daughter. The knives he’d used to carve her up. Soft parts boiling in a black pot. Fire simmering fat and flesh. Mouth sucking at the old clay bowl.
His aunties’ words had dug under his skin like little ticks. Made him afraid to fall asleep. Sleep only brought dreams, like a door left ajar.
And when sleep did catch him, he always woke screaming, clawing anyone who tried to comfort him, fearing Chuck’s hands on his skinny arms, making a meal of him next.
He’d grown up ashamed of himself, pissing the bed over some stupid story that probably wasn’t even true. Just some old boogeyman his silly aunties had made up to scare him.
But still.
There was something real in Chuck’s black-and-white eyes. Something wild and scared, just the same as Ré’s after waking.
He should have known. You can’t outrun the things you dream for.
Ré sat in his car, seat pushed nearly flat back, arms crossed over his chest. He looked out at the dark, empty field, the wedge of night sky above, with eyes that only opened halfway. He’d thought those dreams had ended a long time ago, when he’d decided to just be a man about it. When he’d buried all those fears deep inside.
But ever since Shaun, since their fight, they’d come again.
He knew well what it was. He didn’t need a Midewikwe to tell him that. It had been coming for him all his life. He was almost glad it was finally here. He just prayed that Mark could tell him how to stop it before anyone else got hurt.
A ticking clock. No, that wasn’t it. A tapping. Ré opened his eyes one at a time and blinked through the darkened window. Evie stood beside his car, brown hair tipped toward the glass, shading her face. Ré groaned at the sight of her. More dreams, he thought. He pressed his eyes closed again, squeezing his arms tighter against his chest.
“Ré!” she said.
And he was awake.
“Câlisse,” he muttered, sucking air and sitting up. “What are you doing out here?”
“Uh, really?” she said, stepping back and rolling her eyes. “I live here, obviously. What are you doing out here?”
“I saw the lights off,” he said. “I thought you were asleep.”
He snapped the driver’s seat upright. He nearly reached for the keys dangling from the ignition, but then he stopped. He was already opening the car door before the words were out of his mouth. “Evie, what happened to you?”
The Buick’s interior light shone a pale little pool over her. She looked down, turning her leg to see the thin red lines snaking down to her ankle.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “I cut myself climbing.”
“The fuck were you climbing, girl? A pile of glass?”
“No, just that stone wall at the cemetery.” She gestured behind her vaguely.
He lifted a foot out of the car and raised his hand as if he meant to grab her, but she took another step away.
“Come on, let me look at it,” he said.
She stared at him for a second, then stepped into his reach. He tucked his fingers lightly into the cove behind her knee and rubbed his thumb over her skin. It was a dry and jagged cut, at least an hour old, and her shoes were filthy with mud.
“Ostie,” he hissed. “Where have you been, Evie?”
She shrugged. “I was out with Sunny, and then I went to see Shaun.”
He lifted his fingers without a word. His brain was reaching for the keys, but his body wouldn’t move, half in, half out of the car.
“Seriously, Ré, what are you doing here?”
He stared at her filthy shoes. He had a hundred million things to say, but none that he could speak out loud. “I couldn’t sleep,” he finally said, because it was true. “I thought maybe it would be easier here.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. “Do you want to come in?”
“No!” he answered, a little too fast. And then, “I mean, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
He glanced up, catching the look in her eye—curious, confused.
Then she started walking backward again, and he thought for one second, No, not yet! as all his insides reached for her. But she was only going around the back end of the Buick to climb in on the passenger side, which was maybe just as bad as leaving.
She sat and stared at him for a long time, big blue eyes, blood-red mouth. He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he just said, “Nice lipstick,” and she smiled.
“It tastes like cake,” she said.
Fuck.
He looked away, out the windshield, teeth working on his bottom lip, breath caught at the very top of his lungs.
Then he looked back at her and, despite all the sense God gave him, said, “Cake, huh?”
And she just smiled some more.
He wanted to fold himself up into origami. He wanted to press his thumbs to her bleeding skin. He wanted to slide across the damn seat and shake her into little pieces.
His breath burst from his lungs. “Goddammit, Evie Hawley, you are a suffering demon.”
She just laughed, pleased with herself, no doubt, and looked away at last.
After a while she said, “Réal?”
“Yeah, Ev?”
“Is something going on with you and Sunny?”
And the floor fell right out of the Buick, Ré’s ass hitting gravel. He gaped at her, but she was still out in that empty field somewhere.
A zillion answers to her question flew through his head, but none both good and true. He looked down at where his thumbs hooked onto the steering wheel and said, “I can’t answer that right now, Evie.”
She said
