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I've killed four of these. They come apart into smoke when they're finished and they don't leave anything behind but the smell.

This one is not finished.

"It's alive," Maren says. "I can feel it still going."

"How?"

"I closed the hole on it while it was coming through." She says steadily. "Half of it's in your kitchen and I don't know where the other half is."

The split loaf is on the counter under its reaching hand. The dish towel is beside it, unfolded flat.

Blue. Rosemary and coarse salt. Brought over tonight by a woman who had that towel at her place.

I take one breath through my mouth and file it where I put everything else.

Tell her.

Not tonight.

"Gage." Maren's watching my face. "Say something. What do you think about that?" She circles the air with her hand in that direction.

So I go and stand in front of it.

Close enough that the reaching hand is a foot from my chest. It tracks me the whole way. Whatever’s on the other side of my kitchen wall is still in there.

Sid’s under the table with his ears flat and every hair standing up.

I put my hand down where he can reach it. He doesn't come. He doesn't say anything into my head either, and he’s had something to say to me every single night since he decided he was allowed to.

I've spent six years making myself the kind of man people cross the street to avoid.

This is the first night I've been in a room with something worse than me.

"Can you finish it?" I ask.

"I don't know."

"Can you let it go?"

"I don't know that either." Her voice goes down. "Ask me the important question."

I turn around.

"Are you hurt?"

She stares at me. Something in her face goes soft, just at the edges.

"That's not the question," she says.

"It is to me."

“I’m fine then.”

Cass pulls me out to the porch to talk to me where Maren can't hear.

"They didn't come through the line." She's got her back against the post and her good hand flat on the rail. "I watched the line the whole time. Nothing crossed it. They opened up inside the house."

"I know."