I grabbed his gloved hand. It was bone dry, while my clothes were soaked with sweat. “This way,” I said. “Quickly.”
Dale struck my hand away. He was stronger and faster than he seemed. “You’re the one who hurt him! Get out! Get the fuck out!”
“I’m the only one who knows what’s going on!” I shouted, surprising myself with my sudden anger. My face was in pain and felt swollen. Not to mention, I was trying to help a guy who had been beating the crap out of me a minute earlier.
“This is my place!” Dale shouted, and he was angry enough to let a Georgia accent show. “Mine!”
“Stop fighting,” Ty said, “and do something about this leech.”
Dale and I looked at each other. I waited for him to lay out a plan, but it was pretty obvious he had nothing. After a couple of seconds, I turned to Ty.
“All right, asshole,” I said. “That thing on you is starving.”
“Jesus, shit!” Ty said, as the blood welled up around his little scratch and vanished. “It’s
“It won’t be satisfied with your blood. It wants your skin and your guts and all the thoughts in your head, too. It wants everything, and like I said, it’s starving. Now, it can’t feed on you while Wally’s spell is in place, but—”
“But it’s taking the parts that come out of me. I’m not stupid.”
I led the two of them into the other room, fighting very hard against the urge to tell him just how incredibly stupid he was. It was hard to raise my left arm, and my upper left incisor felt loose in my mouth. Ty parked himself on a chair at the little dining room table. Dale said he was going to the bathroom for bandages and disinfectant. I went into the kitchen, set a small cast-iron skillet on the stove, and turned the gas under it as high as it would go.
“Ray.” Ty’s voice came from the other room. I didn’t think he could see what I was doing, because I don’t think he could have been so calm. “I’m sorry.”
I told him what he could do with himself.
“Then why are you helping me?”
There were gel packs in the freezer. I took two, pinning one against my ribs with my elbow and laying the other on the side of my face. “Because you may be a selfish, self-justifying asshole who thinks he can buy his way out of this mess, but that thing on you is worse.”
“It’s really alive, isn’t it? It’s a monster.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. Predators killed people, and so did I. “It’s an animal,” I said. “And it’s probably a person, too. I think it’s smart—maybe as smart as a human, but in a different way.” The dry skillet had begun to smoke faintly.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Listen, if it’s hungry, and it can’t eat me, can’t I get it to go to someone else? You know? Agh!” He paused while the drape worked on him. “Why can’t I just, I don’t know, transfer it?”
The packs were too cold. I tossed them into the sink on top of a pair of tiny bowls. “We don’t do that,” I said as I went into the other room.
Dale returned with a roll of bandages and a squeeze tube of disinfectant. He crouched in front of Ty and tried to squeeze gel onto the cuts. Ty looked me in the eyes, and for the first time I saw desperation there. “Ray, there’s got to be a way.”
I looked directly at Dale. “Ty, who do you have in mind?”
“No,” Ty said. “There has to be someone else. Some bum off the street maybe. Somebody worthless.” He winced and clutched at his shoulder. “Hey! There’s a guy at the gym who smacks his wife around sometimes. He’s the one.”
“Even if I knew a way, I wouldn’t do it,” I said.
“Why not?” Ty demanded, as Dale flung the squeeze tube onto the table with an annoyed hiss. The drape was not letting him put the disinfectant on. “Why does it have to be me? If this thing is going to kill somebody, why can’t it be him? Why me?”
I thought about the rape souvenir Lenard kept in the locker at the Bigfoot Room, and Maria’s endless talk about finding a job, and Ty himself holding me down while he was hitting me. Why do any of us do anything? It’s not like we put a lot of rational thought into things. “You two have slept together in the last few days, right? I mean, in the same bed.”
Ty saw what I was saying immediately. “Shit.”
Dale laid a bandage over Ty’s shoulder and placed some tape on it. Then he looked back at me. “What?”
“This thing’s been on him for days, waiting for the chance to feed. If it was going to jump to another unprotected victim, it would have done that already while you were sleeping. Wally didn’t put a mark on you, did he?”
“I don’t know any Wally.”
I turned my attention back to Ty. “It has a meal and it’s not letting go. Ever.”
“Goddammit!” Dale said. The bandage had slid to the side and bunched up, and the tape had peeled away. He started to lay another one in place, and Ty helped him hold it still.
I went into the kitchen. The skillet was smoking hot now, and slightly grayish at the center. I wrapped an oven pad around the handle and picked it up.
“What’s that smell?” Dale asked as I came back into the room. I shoved him aside and jammed the hot metal against Ty’s wound.
