“E!”

  Dag gripped my shoulder again, and this time, I threw him off me. He hit the ground hard, skidding and tearing up the perfect lawn, grass stains mixing with his scrapes and abrasion. He lay there for a moment. That same blue light fell on him, illuminating the worry lines around his mouth, casting a million shadows through the steel thatch of his hair. His eyes were huge and full of something I didn’t want to see.

  I dropped the post. My hands ached. I took a step backward.

  Dag dragged himself up into a sitting position; he had forgotten to cradle his injured arm, and I wanted to remind him, tell him he needed to be careful because I thought his shoulder had separated, but I couldn’t find the words.

  And then the fever-frost snapped, and I said, “Dag, oh my God!”

  I scrambled over to him, dropped onto my knees, and reached for his arm. He pulled away and flinched, the color dropping out of his face like someone switching off a TV.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry—”

  When I reached out again, he pushed my hand away. His eyes never left my face.

  “Dag,” I whispered. “It’s me.”

  He shook his head. It was almost nothing. Almost.

  A growl began behind me, and then it rose shrilly and broke off. I twisted around. Reb lay on the ground, unmoving, and Nelda Pie stood over him. She was smiling. One of her chimeras, a contorted, nightmare version of a centaur, scooped up Reb and galloped off into the night. Her smile growing, Nelda Pie wagged her little peashooter at us.

  “You’ll get one shot before I reach you,” I said.

  “When you’re ready,” she said, “Kalfu is waiting.”

  I flipped her the bird.

  She laughed, and, hitching up her short shorts, she turned and walked away. The sounds of slaughter continued around us, although they were fading now—a quick glance told me most of Joey’s men were already dead, and the few who remained didn’t look like they’d make it long. The chimeras slunk back into the trees, leaving Dag and me. Then, behind me, the carriage house door slammed shut, and I guessed at least one of Joey’s men had survived—against all odds.

  Movement made me check on Dag. He was holding his phone to his ear.

  “No police,” I said.

  He ignored me. He disconnected from the first call and placed a second. Then he said, “Mom, I need to talk to Posey, and he’s not answering his phone—what do you mean he’s not there?”

  As Dag continued speaking with his mom, I sat back on my heels, my head drooping. I knew I needed to check myself for injuries I might not have noticed during those frantic minutes of fighting. I needed to check Dag, too—see what we could do about his shoulder or his arm or whatever it was, and of course, try to make it up to him. Again. There was blood and gore on the camo jacket, and I started to wriggle out of it. Then I stopped. I stared at my hands. I blinked. And then I thought, No. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, the shadows thickened in the trees, hanging there like bats. I didn’t look at my hands again.

  “Where are the girls—” Dag was asking, but his mom must have preempted him. He bit off a swear. “I’ll call you later.”

  I got to my feet.

  “They’re gone, all of them,” Dag said as he pocketed the phone. “Posey and the girls told my mom they knew how to help Reb, whatever that means.”

  The first step was the hardest, carrying me away from Dag.

  “Whatever it is, you can bet your hat it’s something stupid.” Dag grunted. “I don’t know how he talked the girls into—where are you going?”

  I walked faster now, still limping.

  “Eli?”

  I broke into a faltering run.

  “Eli, what’s going on? Eli!” His voice betrayed his struggle as he tried to get to his feet. “Eli, get back here!”

  I ran.

  I didn’t look back. If I looked back, I knew I’d be lost.

  III

  Mait’ Carrefour—Haitian god of magicians and lord of the crossroads, also called Kalfu.

  - Vodoo, Hans Peter Oswald

  DAG (1)

  The thing about sulking and feeling sorry for yourself and giving up on life and the world and basically writing off your whole existence like a bad first try was that eventually you had to pee. And while my parents loved me, and Eli never stopped talking about how they enabled all sorts of bad behavior, they didn’t love me enough to buy me a bedpan. So, even though I’d decided to spend the rest of my life in my room, eventually I had to get up and go to the bathroom.

  My shoulder hurt—a late night visit to the urgent care had ended with several prescriptions, stitches in one cut, and a sling for my arm. Because I was a rebel and nothing mattered and life was meaningless, I wasn’t wearing the sling. I thought about what Eli would say about that, and then I reminded myself I wasn’t thinking about Eli anymore. I’d spent most of the day reminding myself of that.

  It was quiet in the house. Posey, Dutch, and Lurnice still hadn’t come back—if they were ever coming back, if they hadn’t run off for good. Like Eli. Not that I was thinking about any of them. I peed. I washed my hands.

  When I came out of the bathroom, my mom called from the kitchen, “Dagobert, would you like some bread pudding?”

  I shambled back to my bedroom and shut the door.

  For a while, I tried to go back to sleep. Then I lay there with my eyes open. A lot of my books were still on the shelves. My desk still held old pens and check stubs and what my mom called mementos, like anybody was ever going to want my kindergarten noodle art. On the back of the door, a poster for the 2008 Braxton Bragg Memorial High School basketball team was still stapled in place. Mason looked like a baby. Some of his hair had fallen into his eyes, of course. My underwater light was gone, though, and so was my Bluetooth speaker; those had gone to the house in New Orleans. Eli’s running shoes lay where he’d kicked them off near the door, one fallen on its side.

  Eli had run. Again.

  I rolled onto my side—on my good shoulder, since I didn’t want to mess up the one that had been dislocated and still should have been in a sling. I faced the wall and told myself, once more, I wasn’t thinking about Eli.

  Then I rolled onto my back and craned my head toward the door. Baby-faced Mason was staring back at me, and I could hear his dumb, straight-boy voice saying, Who are you kidding?

  “Mind your own beeswax,” I told him.

  He looked dumber than usual with that hair hanging in his eyes.

  Eli had run. Again. After two years together, after everything we’d worked on. He’d run, and he hadn’t said a word, hadn’t told me why. I couldn’t help myself; I started playing it all back again in my head. It was like revving an engine, getting me more and more worked up. I knew he was scared. We were both scared. We were both hurt, and—and for a while, Eli hadn’t been Eli, with his eyes glowing blue and him being so strong, and not seeming to know who I was. And ripping that post out of the ground, my brain said. And killing that ape thing, my brain suggested, just crushing its head like a grape. And hurting you. Knocking you down, turning on you like you were next.

  I’d always known Eli was strong. Not just mentally and emotionally—he carried a lot of lean muscle, and over the past two years, he’d spent a lot of time working on his body. Crunches, sure, because he got so silly over abs, but he trained hard just about every way you could. That was Eli for you. Never did anything the easy way his whole life. Never slacked once. And in the last year, that had started to pay off. He’d shed the weight he’d been trying to lose. His body was harder. I’d look at him naked sometimes, and the word was cut—like someone had pared away everything that wasn’t muscle and bone, but also the sharpness of it all, like his body was a blade.

  But what I’d seen him do the night before, that kind of strength, that didn’t have anything to do with gyms or weight bands or the days he lay on the floor and said he was doing Pilates. That had been something else entirely. And his eyes. His eyes glowing blue like—

  I’m not thinking about Eli, I told myself. He ran away. Like he always does when things get tough. And I’m tired of it, so I’m not even going to spare him a second thought.

  How’s that going for you? Mason asked.

  “Stay out of this,” I told him.

  It was Saturday. Halloween. And somehow, I’d packed all my monsters into my bedroom. So, I got up and went to the kitchen.

  My mom was mopping, drawing glistening arcs across the linoleum. The back door was open, and the breeze coming through the screen door was a little too cool for comfort. Outside, on the back gallery, my dad was cutting the tip off a tube of caulk.

  I picked a path around my mom toward the fridge.

  “There’s bread pudding, Dagobert.” She wore nitrile gloves, the way she always did when she was cleaning, and they made tacky sounds as she adjusted her hands on the mop. “Wouldn’t you like some bread pudding?”

  “I don’t like anything.”

  “Well, dear, I hope that’s not true.”

  “Dagobert, tell your mother you still like things,” my dad called from the back gallery.

  I ignored both of them. I dug around in the freezer until I found the brownies; my mom usually kept a pan of them frozen in case of emergencies—you know, like a neighbor moving in, or when someone had a death in the family. A distant relative, though. The death of a close relative merited the full Gloria LeBlanc treatment, which was a meal designed to give any survivors heart disease, possibly to speed them along to that glorious reunion in the bosom of Abraham, which might have been a phrase I had heard at church once. She’d probably never thought the emergency in question was that her son’s boyfriend was possibly turning into a monster and also had run away and had a lot of issues with intimacy and trust and even though he kept promising to go to therapy, so far, it’d just been promises.

  The mop whirred in the self-wringer as Gloria stepped on the bucket’s pedal. “Where’s Eli?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you have a fight?”

  “Mom, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Dagobert, tell your mother you and Eli had a fight.”

  “We didn’t have a fight. I don’t know where he went. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why he’s always running off like this. Maybe this is Lanny all over again, did you ever think about that?”

  My mom lifted the mop out of the bucket. She passed it back and forth over a shiny spot of linoleum that I was seriously suspicious had already been mopped.

  “And if this is like Lanny,” I said, unable to help myself as I dug into the frozen brownies with a spoon, “then I guess you’ll see Eli any day now, because you’ll be feeding him meals behind my back as soon as I turn around.”

  “He’s very thin, Dagobert,” my mom said. “He doesn’t have the ass God gave a cuttlefish.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Eli. I definitely don’t want to talk about his ass. And what does that mean, anyway? You don’t even know what a cuttlefish is.”

  “Dagobert,” my dad shouted. “Tell your mother she knows what a cuttlefish is. Tell her right now.”

  I sat at the table and stabbed the brownies a few more times. A piece broke off, and I got it in my mouth, bitter and dense and sweet and cold. It shouldn’t have tasted good, mixing with the smell of Fabuloso and silicone and mineral spirits, but it did. It tasted like home, and like a lot of Saturdays like this, and all of a sudden, I had to close my eyes against the hot rush of tears.

  The mop clattered, and my mom was at my side, squeezing me into a hug. I didn’t break down and sob or anything, but I mean, she was my mom, and maybe a few tears got out. She rubbed my head, and after a while, I felt my dad’s heavy hand on my shoulder, and after a while, I sat up straight.

  “Eli loves you,” my mom said. “He’s scared, that’s all.”

  “He’s always scared,” I said. “I’m tired of him being scared.”

  “Well,” my dad said, “maybe you ought to tell him that. I’ve always said, Eli is a perfect ten in looks, but he’s a bit soft-brained. You always liked them like that, I know. Simple.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “You have, Dagobert. It’s not your fault. Some men appreciate that quality in a partner.”

  “He’s smart. He’s plenty smart.”

  “Of course, he is,” my mom said, patting my shoulder. “The other day, I saw him doing that word jumble like it was nothing.”

  “It was the children’s jumble, Gloria,” my dad said. “I couldn’t say anything, he was so pleased with himself. Now, Dagobert, on the other hand, Dagobert is a college man.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “I know he’s in college, thank you very much,” my mom said. “I know he’s smart. I’m trying to make him feel better. It’s not his fault Eli’s, well, touched.”

  “Sexually gifted, though,” my dad said. “You have to give him that.”

  “Nobody’s even talking about sex, Hubert. Of course he’s got talents. There’s got to be some reason Dagobert’s interested in him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Lots of reasons. He’s smart. And he’s brave. And he’s strong. And he’s funny.”

  Half-worried, half-pitying, my mom said, “Dagobert, last weekend, he was wearing a ballcap backwards. Your father and I aren’t ones to judge, but you have to be at least a little touched not to know how to put on a ballcap.”

  “I’m going to my room. And I’m taking these brownies. And I’m taking the milk.”

  “Take a glass, too, dear.”

  I didn’t take a glass.

  “Don’t you dare drink straight from the jug,” my mom called after me.

  “It’s probably something he’s seen Eli do,” my father said to her. I tried to walk faster, but he called after me, “The whole family has to drink that milk, Dagobert. Listen to your mother.”

  I didn’t slam the door. That was one of my big achievements in life.

  I sat on my bed for a while. I ate brownies—faster as they thawed. I drank straight from the jug because I’m a rebel and a wild child and I wanted to be bad. I thought about Mason and what he’d say, and then I figured even if he’d been alive, I’d have had to scrap all his advice as soon as he finished talking. It would have been nice, though. Just to hear it. No matter how dumb it was.

  And then, because that was the way my brain worked, I started thinking about Lanny. How he’d run out on me. How he’d taken all my money. What it’d been like, moving in with my parents, and trying to get out of bed every morning, trying to pretend my life could keep going. And all the days after that, when I’d gotten so good at pretending that I’d even convinced myself. All the days up until I met Eli.

  My first domestic, after we’d gotten the asshole in the tank, I’d gone to the men’s room and cried. And I hadn’t told Eli this next part because I was ashamed of it, but that night I’d gone home and drunk myself to sleep. I could pick memories like that out of a hat. The time we’d gone looking for a little girl who’d run away, and when we’d found her, I’d seen the bruises on her arms, and we’d still had to hand her over to her dad. The time I’d thought I was busting a boy for pot, and his mom threw a canning jar full of piss at the back of my head. What do you do except go back to the station and shower and sit around with a bunch of guys who don’t have anything left to say to each other, thinking about facts, thinking the weirdest things? You’re thinking that every minute, every sixty seconds, twenty-four people are the victims of rape or physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner. You’re thinking that one in three of the people you lock up will get locked up again, plain as that. You’re thinking that in small law enforcement departments, the suicide rate is four times the national average. And then your shift ends, and you go home, whatever that means.

  And then I met Eli, and we did something good together. Something really good. Because we were good together, even if it scared him, even if he didn’t know how to handle feeling vulnerable like that.

  I stared at his running shoes.

  He kept leaving; that was a fact. He was probably going to keep leaving. And that said something, didn’t it? I thought about years of this, year after year, of coming home to dark houses and empty rooms and the question written right at the end of whatever you wanted to call it—my soul or my spirit or my worth as a human being. I had options. I could find a self-help group. I definitely needed a therapist. Maybe join a cult. Heck, I could sit here and eat brownies until I went into a diabetic coma and they had to wheel me out. That sounded pretty good. He had run off. Again. He had run off again, and didn’t care one bit about—about the fact that the electric bill was in his name, and he had all the Rouses rewards on his savers card, and we were supposed to go to Colorado this Christmas and already had the Airbnb reserved. He didn’t care about any of that because he was so fucking selfish sometimes.

  I couldn’t stand staring at those shoes anymore. I set the jug of milk on the desk. I ditched the brownies on my bed. I pulled on joggers and grabbed my keys and wallet, and then, with those fucking running shoes hanging from my hand, I left the bedroom.

  “Dagobert,” my mother said as I came down the hall, “where are you going?”

  “To murder Eli.”

  She made a noise like that was the sweetest thing she’d heard in her whole life.

  “If you boys have finished making up to each other with the sweet language of your bodies before dinner —” My dad called from the back gallery.

  “You can’t say stuff like that,” I said. “I’m never going to have sex again if you keep saying stuff like that.”

  He continued, unperturbed, “—then have the decency to call your mother so she can defrost the good lasagna.”

 

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