“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” he said.
“It could,” I told him quietly. Because it could. His work was dangerous. “And maybe there wouldn’t be anyone. Maybe I’d be a warlock.”
He looked at me and took a deep breath. He was wondering about whether he should tell me the kid-safe version of the truth. “Maybe,” he said, finally.
“That could be me.” In the corner of my eye, I watched the circle of haunts regard one another, then turn as one to stare at me. Ugh. It just felt icky.
This warlock boy needed help. And I needed to deal with the haunts before they hurt me again, or maybe hurt someone else, like my dad. That was the right thing. Even though it would be really scary.
It’s what my dad would do. I think. I mean, we’d just met, really.
“I can eat more French fries,” I told him. “Mouse will keep me company.”
He blinked at me as if surprised. “You sure?” he asked. “It could … cut today kind of short.”
“If someone needs your help, you help them,” I said. “Even when it’s really hard. Miss Molly told me that about you.”
Because what if Miss Molly had told me the kid-safe version of the truth about my dad? What if he wasn’t as good as she said he was? What if he didn’t want to take care of a daughter who had issues? Who was really hard to be around?
But he looked at me and then he smiled, and I suddenly felt warm inside, like I’d had all the hot French fries in the world.
“Yeah,” he said, winking at me and rapping a fist cheerfully on the table. “Yeah. That’s right.”
MY DAD LEFT, and I told Mouse, “You know I have to do it like this. You can’t come all the way.”
He made a soft, distressed sound, and kissed my face with his big, sloppy tongue.
“Yick,” I said, and rubbed my face in his fur. “I love you, too, Mouse.”
He made a rumbling sound in his chest and sighed. He felt tense, his weight shifting, as though he was eager to go somewhere and do something. He wanted to help, but he couldn’t.
I got up from the table and walked out of the café and straight up to the waiting haunts. I addressed the girl directly. “Hey, you. Space Face.”
The haunts all stared at me with their empty eyes, and for a second it was like there were shadows writhing everywhere, people in pain. I ignored those images because otherwise I would have gotten really scared. Instead, I made eye contact with every haunt and then said, “You guys are the worst. Let’s get this over with.”
And I turned and started walking, Mouse at my side.
There was a confused moment of silence, and then the haunts started following me.
The Book is pretty specific about haunts. They feed on fear. That’s why they dig up all the scary things from your past. It’s like their mustard. They want you to marinate in fear, and then, when you’re soaked and dripping in it, they move in and start eating you like some kind of gross bug. All the kids these haunts had taken? The invaders would eat them up from the inside, taking bites out of their minds, keeping them focused on fear. When they ate their fill, they would start looking for someone else to move into. The kid would wake up, like from a bad dream, but the Book said that the kids the haunts had gotten wouldn’t ever be right again.
There were a dozen black-eyed kids walking along behind me. I wondered what it would be like to get chewed on by a dozen haunts at once.
Probably really scary. Like a nightmare you couldn’t wake up from.
Anyway, the Book says that there’s only one way to deal with fear, and only one way to deal with creatures who thrive on it.
You face them.
You go, alone, to the darkest and scariest place around, and you face them. It has to be alone, nothing but you and yourself facing the fear. It has to be scary, because you have to face the fear on its own ground.
Otherwise, the haunts just … follow you. Endlessly. Nibbling at you until you just collapse on the ground making bibbly noises.
Mouse walked alongside me, his head turned to face the haunts, the mane around his neck and shoulders bristling. He didn’t growl, and his body language had changed to something grim and very serious.
It’s never really hard to find a scary place; they’re everywhere—it’s just that grown-ups don’t pay much attention to them. I found one right there in the zoo, and I had to go through only two gates marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY to get there. By sheer coincidence, they’d been left unlocked.
Good boy, Mouse.
So it took me only a couple of minutes to walk down a utility staircase into the basement of the big cat exhibit, and from there to open the door to an old, old, old staircase made of stone and slick with water that went into the building’s unlit subbasement.
At the top of the stairs, I turned to Mouse and said, “Don’t be afraid. I got this.”
I was kind of lying. Maybe I didn’t have it. Maybe the Book was wrong. Maybe I’d have an attack. Maybe the haunts would just beat me up. There were enough of them.
Mouse seemed to sense my uncertainty. His expression shifted and he whirled to face the haunts following me, baring his teeth and letting out the kind of rumble you hear only from really old cars and maybe tractors.
The haunts drew up short. Their leader, the girl with the tear-streaked face, faced him and sneered.
“Guardian,” she said. “You know the Law. We are within our rights.”
Mouse growled lower and took slow steps forward, until he stood before the haunt, almost eye to eye. His fur did that thing where light comes from it, silvery blue sparkles that glitter across the very tips of the hairs.
If the haunt was impressed, it didn’t show it. “I know the Law. As should you.” It pointed a finger past him, at me. “That is my prey. Stand aside.”
I really needed Mouse not to get involved. If he did, I couldn’t break the haunt’s empty-eyed pursuit.
“It’s okay, boy,” I said. “I got this.”
Mouse looked at me, falling silent. Then he bowed his head down low to the ground for me. He prowled past the haunts—bumping a couple of them with his massive shoulders, enough to make them stagger—to the entrance we’d just come in, and settled down with an attitude of patience.
All the eyes turned toward me.
I took a deep breath and got my phone out of my pocket. I had it powered down, because I’d been hanging out with my dad, and wizards kill phones just by looking at them funny if they’ve got any electricity actually moving through them. Powered down, the phones seem to be okay. I turned it on, waited for the dumb little apple screen to go away, and then flipped on the light.
Then I walked down the stairs into the black, and the haunts came with me.
I got to a room at the bottom of the staircase. It was a big, open concrete space with a lot of dusty old machines. It smelled musty down there. It smelled awful. Shadows stretched everywhere, threatening. My light glittered off small eyes, close to the ground, outside of the actual area it lit. Rats, maybe.
The light was shaking a little. I was afraid.
That wasn’t a good sign. If I was afraid and they hadn’t even started on me, maybe I’d break. Maybe I’d just fall down and cry. Maybe they’d get me. Maybe I’d walk back up into the zoo with my eyes all black and my dad wouldn’t even be able to see it. I’d just start freaking out and everyone would just think, you know, that I had gotten worse. And they’d have to put me someplace safe.
I shivered.
Then I turned around and faced the lead haunt.
Tear Streaks stood, like, six inches behind me. As I watched, her mouth twitched into this bow of bared teeth that resembled a smile about as much as Sue the Dinosaur’s teeth at the museum. Her eyes gaped black, like a skull’s sockets.
The other haunts slowly walked around us, until they stood all around me in a circle, close enough to reach out and touch me. Their eyes got darker, got absolutely huge, and then …
And then—