—I was standing in the kitchen of a house I recognized without remembering.
TV was on. It was Sesame Street, but the language was Spanish, which I’d been brought up speaking. I still spoke it, though it took me time to make my brain understand it, like shifting gears on a bicycle. Elmo was talking about letters.
I looked up and saw a very kind lady with dark hair whose name I couldn’t remember. I’d been very little when I had lived with her. She was humming to herself and making cookies or something, and she paused to smile at me and tell me that I was a good girl.
Her husband came in, speaking in a tense voice. She dropped her spoon and then hurriedly set her mixing bowl aside and picked me up.
That was when the vampires came in. Shapes, not quite human, in black cloaks and coats and wrappings. They let out inhuman shrieks, bounding through the air, and I heard a gun go off just before the kind lady’s husband screamed, and the air went all thick with the smell of metal, and the kind lady screamed and pressed me against her.
“I know,” I said out loud in a firm voice. “The Red Court came for me. They killed the foster family who was taking care of me. It was awful.”
The kitchen vanished abruptly, and I was standing, half-bent over with my hands on my knees, breathing hard. The light from my phone showed me a lot of patent leather shoes.
I looked up, angry, and said, “I didn’t get hurt that day. Other people did. You’ll have to do better than that.”
Tear Streaks stared at me for a long moment and then said, “You’re going to lose this family, too. You always lose them.”
I started breathing harder. All my thoughts started going so fast that I couldn’t steer them.
Oh no.
Oh no, no. I was having an attack.
Tear Streaks stepped closer to me, something eager in the way her body curled toward me a little. “Your father means well. But he’s going to die. You’ve seen his scars. One day, he’ll get unlucky or he’ll be wrong, and he’ll die. You’ll be alone.”
My chest was clenching up. I couldn’t breathe. I heard myself making those stupid little-kid noises, and my eyes blurred over with tears. My heart felt like someone was hitting it with a hammer, wham, wham, wham.
“The Carpenters could die just like your first family. Horribly. Screaming. Because of you.”
“Stop,” I tried to say. I just heard sounds like, “Guk, guk, guk.”
The haunt leaned closer. I felt other kids putting their hands on my shoulders, fingers rigid and just wrong.
“Your mother died because of you,” the haunt said in that same tone. “Your father is going to die because of you.”
I had fallen to my knees. Tear Streaks came with me.
“You selfish little monster,” she said. “All those good people, dead because of you. You should just throw yourself into a hole. It would be better for them.”
In the dark and cold, when you’re tired and scared and can’t talk or breathe, with creeps all around you, words like that sound true. And if that was true, then there was no reason not to agree with them. There was no reason not to just lie down and let the monsters have me. For a second, I wanted it. I wanted to just lie down and stop. The words seemed right.
They really did. They sounded true. They felt true.
But feeling true isn’t the same as being true.
In fact, feelings don’t have very much to do with the truth at all.
Monsters had killed my foster family. That was true.
My mother died on the mission to save me. That was true.
But all those people were dead because monsters had come and killed them. And that was the only reason.
Monsters a lot worse than the ones who now surrounded me. Grown-up monsters. Monsters I had survived.
I made myself breathe as the others started to talk. They all said horrible things to me.
And then it hit me: The Book was right.
A dozen of these creatures, and they had dared to select the smallest kid with the scariest things in her past that they could find. They hadn’t tried to jump my dad or even a vanilla grown-up. They hadn’t tried to eat Mouse. They’d come after the littlest, most vulnerable person around.
Because they were afraid.
And if they were afraid, then maybe that meant they couldn’t be the scary ones.
“You know what I think?” I said suddenly and in a very clear voice.
The haunts fell into a shocked silence as I looked up at Tear Streaks. Her black eyes stared at mine, her mouth open, frozen in the middle of a sentence.
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I think maybe right now, I’m the scary one.”
And then I turned off my phone so we were all in perfect darkness—and I threw back my head and laughed at them.
I haven’t ever felt a laugh like that. It wasn’t exactly a bubbly laugh, but there was a ferocious, lionlike, sunlit joy beneath it. It wasn’t an angry sound, but it told them that I wasn’t impressed with their black eyes and their bad dreams. I didn’t try to be very loud, but the sound of it rang from the black stone walls, as true and clear as a bell.
And the haunts screamed.
Their screams didn’t sound like pain exactly. They were each on one note, an absolutely pure tone that didn’t waver around. None of them were notes that went with the others—it was just this horrible mash of sound, like a steam whistle on the cartoons, but without any of the happy, harmonious overtones a steam whistle carried. It sounded like when Molly or Harry walked into the room while the TV was on—sort of a shrieking, monotonous feedback.
And then, all at once, they went silent—and the only sound left was me giggling.
“Heh, heh, heh,” I heard myself say. “Ahhhhh. Stupid creeps.”
I turned my light back on. The kids were all lying on the floor, dazed. They were my age, more or less, and they started to sit up one at a time. Their eyes weren’t black anymore. They were just eyes.
The haunts were gone.
It was just us kids.
“What happened?” asked a boy.
“Ow,” Tear Streaks said, and started sniffling. “My eyes.”
“Um,” I said. I kept shining my light in everyone’s eyes so that they wouldn’t get a very good look at my face, and decided that it was probably simpler to go with the kid-safe version of events. “Gas leak. Come on. We should get out of here. It’s very dangerous to stay.”
It took a little cajoling, but I got everyone back out of the building and into the daylight. They all seemed very confused. Mouse was waiting right where I’d left him, and he walked very carefully next to me, each movement slow and deliberate, so that he didn’t knock over any of the confused kids.
One of the boys was smart enough to go straight to a security guard and ask for help, and Mouse and I went the other way. I found myself smiling. I might have skipped a little.
Beating the monsters is kinda fun. I mean, it’s awful when it’s happening, but after it’s over, it’s better than video games.
Maybe that’s crazy to feel that way. I guess I get it from my dad.
Mouse and I got back to the café, and I bought us victory fries. Mouse collapsed flat onto his tummy under the table in pure relief that I was all right, but that was okay. I leaned down a little extra to make sure he got his fries.
My dad came back about five minutes later, walking with a kid a few years bigger than me. He smiled at me, and I smiled back at him.
“Hey there, punkin,” my dad said. “This is Austin. He hasn’t ever seen the gorillas here, either. How about we get some food for everyone and then we’ll go over there?”
“Okay, Dad,” I said.
He blinked at that, and then he smiled so hard I thought he might break his face.
“Whuff,” Mouse said, and wagged his tail.
MY NAME IS Mouse and I am a Good Dog. Everyone says so.
There are many wonderful people in my life, but the most important ones are My Friend Harry Dresden and his daughter, Maggie. I love them, and I love being with them, and I love going to the zoo.