I felt something kick against my feet, and I was on my back again. Ty fumbled at my shirt, trying to get control of me and pin me again—he could turn invisible, but he couldn’t break his fighting habits. He had to stick with what he was comfortable with.
Shards of broken ceramic jabbed painfully into my back, and the twisted metal workings of the lamp lay across my chest. I grabbed it. The shade had come off, but the bulb had not broken. I felt Ty heave his weight on me, about to throw more punches, and I jabbed upward.
It wasn’t hard to guess where he was. The thin glass of the bulb shattered with a muffled shink sound, and I pushed.
I heard Ty back away, cursing. The bulb was broken almost down to the socket, with a couple of nasty glass shards sticking out. I’d expected to see blood on them, but there was nothing, just a faint, slimy sheen. I tossed it aside and sat up off the bed. Ty didn’t come at me again.
He cursed again, and I oriented myself on the sound. The left side of my body below my arm was bruised, and I had several spots on my face and head that felt painful and inflamed. If he’d been planning to beat me to death, it would have taken him a long time, but he was capable of it.
Ty cursed again, and this time his voice had gone high with fear. Had I hit a vital spot like a throat or an eye? I couldn’t say I was sorry if I had, but I didn’t want to deal with the consequences of killing him here. I wasn’t ready to face four drapes, or to defend Dale from them.
Ty let out a wordless cry, then said: “It’s like a tongue!”
“What’s happening?” Dale cried.
“Ty!” I said. “Show yourself.”
He did. There was a tiny drop of blood on his shoulder. It didn’t look serious to me, but Ty shuddered and twitched back and forth. “Ah! Omigodomigodomigod …”
I moved toward him at the same time Dale did. There was still a delicate sliver of glass protruding from his skin. While I watched, it slowly backed out of the cut as though pulled by an invisible hand, then fell. I picked it up off the carpet. There wasn’t a drop of blood on it.
Dale grabbed Ty’s bare arm, then let go with a hiss. Ty grimaced and turned his face to the ceiling. The cut on his shoulder didn’t look serious. It barely seemed to be bleeding.
“Shit!” Ty gasped. “It’s digging in and squeezing—Ah, God!” He grimaced and staggered as though the right side of his body was paralyzed. “It’s milking the blood out of me!”
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 drinking my blood?”
“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.
He screamed. Oh, how he screamed. His voice almost covered the sound of the meat hissing against metal, but nothing could mask the smell of burning flesh and polyester shirt.