“How about it, Mouse?” he asked. “Can you behave yourself around food?”
Mouse was staring out across the park, like he was trying to see something hidden from him. I’m sure he knew the creeps were around, though he left them alone if they left me alone. He made a noise in his chest that was part whine and part rumble.
“Trouble, boy?” my dad asked.
See, my dad is pretty smart. Most grown-ups try to tell you about how limited dogs are and how smart they aren’t. Mouse has been going to school with me since I was little, and he reads better than I do. If he thought there might be trouble, only a dummy would ignore him, and my dad wasn’t a dummy.
Mouse stayed staring for a minute, then exhaled slowly and looked up at my dad. His ears perked up and he wagged his tail.
My dad took that to mean that all was well. “All right,” he said, and wagged his finger at Mouse. “Be good.”
“Whuff,” Mouse said.
“He’s always good,” I said, and kissed his ear. “We’re gonna have to handle these haunts while he’s gone, Mouse,” I whispered. “Real smooth, okay? He worries enough.”
Mouse made a sound that I could feel in his neck but couldn’t hear. I hugged him a little tighter and then let go.
“Okay,” my dad said. He got us seats in the restaurant, which were miraculously open—Good boy, Mouse. He bought me some French fries and handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “To pay for the food if you need more.”
“Okay,” I said. I was pretty hungry, and the fries smelled good.
“Don’t leave until I come back for you. Okay?”
I nodded, and he strode out. He should have had his coat. It would have been all swirly, like Batman. Jeans and an old Battlestar Galactica T-shirt just didn’t make the same impression.
I’d eaten maybe three French fries when the chair across from me scraped on the floor, and the haunt sat down across from me.
It looked like a girl, maybe a year older and a lot bigger than me. She had blond hair and a nice school uniform and her eyes looked like outer space.
“No one likes you,” the haunt said. “They make people be your partner at school.”
Mouse growled, and the saltshaker on the table rattled a little.
I tried to ignore what the haunt said. They all did this. They stared at you and read all your terrible memories like they were a cartoon strip. Then they talked to you about them.
“No one likes you,” the haunt repeated. “You’re weird. You’re different.”
I felt Mouse gathering himself, but I couldn’t let him act. As far as everyone standing around us knew, it would look like an absolutely giant dog attacking a little girl when she hadn’t done anything to provoke it. That would be bad. So I put my foot on his head and pushed down as hard as I could. It barely made him move, but I felt him relax. Mouse is a pretty good dog.
“You’re losing your mind,” the haunt said. “No one wants to be your friend. No one wants to play with you. No one even wants to say your name.”
I put more salt on my fries. Quite a bit of it, actually. Some of it fell into my other hand.
“You should be alone. Then no one would have to put up with you,” said the haunt.
I looked up into its empty eyes and said, “I know what you are. I’m going to give you this one chance to go away and bother someone else. After that, things will get ugly.”
“Don’t you think you should be somewhere safe?” the haunt asked in a calm voice. “Somewhere you can’t hurt yourself when you have a f—”
I interrupted it by throwing salt into its black, empty eyes.
Creeps in general don’t like salt. Don’t ask me why. That’s how it is.
The haunt flinched back so hard that it fell out of the chair. It didn’t make any sound, but the body it was occupying twitched and jerked randomly, the muscles all tight. I felt bad about that, a little. It wasn’t this other girl’s fault that the creeps got her. She probably didn’t even know why she was doing and saying the things she was.
“You should wash your eyes out,” I advised the haunt. “Someplace else.”
The creep stood up, tears streaming down its expressionless face. It stared at me for a moment, eyes all red around the black, then hurried into the café’s ladies’ room.
Mouse let out another growl and rose, pacing restlessly around my chair.
“Hey,” I said. “Settle. It’s okay. They’re in the Book. I know how to handle them.”
Mouse made an unhappy noise. He’d read the Book, too. Molly had started it, back before she’d become a grown-up and forgotten it all, and her little brothers and sisters had added to it. Harry Carpenter, who was kind of my big brother, had passed it on to me when the underhide had come into the house.
Mouse knew what I had to do as well as I did. He just didn’t like it.
“Maybe they’ll leave me alone now,” I said. “Come on. We need mustard.”
I got mustard, which is the best, for my fries. We started eating them, and Mouse settled down a little. He has a very practical attitude about worry—he doesn’t, when there is good food with people you love.
My dad came back in a couple minutes later, looking … older. He didn’t seem like he was angry anymore, just really, really tired. He tried to smile at me but it wasn’t a real smile.
“What was it?” I asked him.
Behind my dad, the door to the bathroom opened. The girl haunt came out, her face dripping with water she hadn’t dried off. She gave me a dirty look, and the power of it brought up a smell, something from my darkest dreams. Kind of rotten and metallic, and I suddenly felt my stomach do swirly loops even though I was standing still.
Then the haunt walked out and just stood there, facing away from me.
The others began to drift closer to her, in ones and twos, until they all stood silently together in a circle, facing one another. Nobody talked. Maybe haunts just think at each other or something.
I ignored them and looked up at my dad, who looked thoughtful. “A warlock,” he said quietly after a moment. “A young wizard whose power is not in control. Dangerous.”
Miss Molly had told me about warlocks. They were awful. “Did you fight it?”
“Him,” my dad said. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because most of the time, they never meant to do anything bad,” he said. He didn’t talk to me in a kid voice, like some grown-ups did. They sound different when they talk to children. My dad sounded like he did when he talked to anyone else. “They don’t even understand what’s happening to them. No one has warned them what will happen if they break the rules.”
“That’s not fair,” I said.
“No,” he answered, and he made the word sound sad. “But that doesn’t make them any less dangerous.”
“Can’t you help?”
“Sometimes,” he said very quietly. “I’m not sure.”
I shared a French fry with Mouse, thinking. My dad always helped warlocks if he could. Miss Molly had been a warlock and my dad had helped her. I figured he’d be running to help this one, but …
“But I’m here,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “And you’re more important to me.”
That made me feel warm all over, hearing him say that. “They just get powers?”
He nodded. “Born to it, yeah.”
Just like my dad and Miss Molly. And maybe me, someday. Or that’s what Miss Molly told me. “Am I going to get powers?”
“Maybe,” he said. “There’s no way to know for sure.” He sounded honest, like a teacher talking about George Washington. I tried to imagine him teaching a class, only maybe wearing like a teacher outfit. In my head, it was kind of easy to see him doing it, really.
“Weird,” I said. I passed a fry to Mouse, who snapped it up, and got the next one. “If I do, will you teach me stuff? So no one gets hurt?”
“If you want me to,” he said.
Which wasn’t the same thing as if he said that he wanted to teach me. But he probably just meant that he wouldn’t if I didn’t want to learn. Like that would happen. Only maybe it could happen. That thought made my tummy flip and turn some more. “If … something happens to you, who is going to teach me?”