The rain had started to fall some ten minutes into his aimless drive. He flicked on the windshield wipers and considered turning the headlights off. But he had no death wish tonight. If anything, it was self-preservation on his mind.

He merged onto the highway and drove without aim for about five miles, then took an exit ramp in a part of town he didn't know and let the road tell him where to go.

He listened to the conversation in his head like road music. He imagined his mother got in touch with Tessa after their call and gave her a full report.

He's so angry with me, his mother would say, I'm just trying to help him. I don't want him to get sick again.

You know how he is, Tessa would say, It's not your fault. He can be... selfish. When he wants to be.

As if summoned by the thought, Clay's phone buzzed. TESSA Calling...

He didn't answer.

I just don't know what to think, Tessa. What am I supposed to do?

You have to do what you think is right.

It took an angry horn blare for Clay to realize he was riding the dividing line. Clay corrected. He shook his head, gritted his teeth, and sucked his teeth in response to his mother and best friend's imagined conversation. The back-and-forth of phony concern made him nauseous.

I was really embarrassed for him the other night. He acted like a child. Kenny must've noticed.

Poor Kenny, his mother would say, You know, I wondered if Clay might be rushing into this, but now I wonder if Kenny knows quite what he's gotten into.

That his mother would take the side of a virtual stranger over her own son's was par for the course. She didn't trust Clay. Neither of them did.

He could be good for Clay. I just don't understand why he has to ruin it.

That's what he does, Tessa. That's what he's always done. He can never be happy. He doesn't want it bad enough.

They were so stupid. So sure of his incompetence that they couldn't see how trapped he was.

The rain was coming down in sheets. Thunder rolled high above. Wind rocked the car. There was no one on the road ahead. A shuttered strip mall and an abandoned chain fast food restaurant were up ahead, lit only by far-off streetlights. Clay pulled into the empty parking lot beside the empty restaurant, turned off his lights, and waited out the rain.

Over a distant hill, the cars that did stream down the high went slow for fear of hydroplaning. The rain had begun to go sideways. The passing headlights were transformed into shimmering orbs of floating light.

His boyfriend was a monster, he reasoned. He had killed and would kill again.

Admitting it to himself, though, he wondered if he could even trust himself. But then again, everything he had been afraid of had become real. Why shouldn't this also be real? He had rushed into loving this man, and told himself his misgivings were just fears of commitment. He believed his mother and Tessa were talking behind his back, and told himself it was paranoia. He wished it was paranoia. He wished it was all paranoia, psychosis, a dream, unreal...

There was no way out of it.

If he told anyone what he believed, even Captain Herkimer, who was already so suspicious, it would be another trip to the hospital. At least the first time he went, he was truly sick. There was a point to the medicine and the pain and the loneliness and the fear, even if it was traumatic, it saved his life. But no amount of medicine could shake him of the truth.

If he said nothing, he might be next. They would find him, half-devoured in his bed, and Kenny would be long gone. Or worse, he would be there, weeping and holding Clay's dead gray hand as police questioned him and wondered, What could have done this? They would have no way of knowing that the man sitting before them was not human. Not totally human, anyway.

His boyfriend was a monster—and he was trapped.

Trapped. Unless, of course, he saw him on the street. Out on his walk. Strolling, oblivious to Clay's car coming up behind him. He would have to turn the headlights off for real, then. He could end it all. It wouldn't matter at all if they thought he was crazy. He would be free!

The rain cleared as fast as it came. Pockets of water collected in the cracks in the road and in the gutters, but Clay drove back toward home.

It was on a curving and thickly wooded stretch of highway that Herkimer's call came through. Clay recognized the number and answered it. His relief was short-lived.

"Yeah?"

"Where's your boyfriend?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"I'm at the hospital. Lisette, the woman you met tonight, she's dead. Whatever tried to kill her on that bus came back to finish the job. Ripped her throat out."

Clay navigated a curve around a bend of evergreen trees. Their branches sloped downward like arrows pointed at the his car.

"I..."

"If your boyfriend really knows as much as he says he does—"

"What do you want from us?"

"I don't know, but there was a look on your face tonight that made me think..."

The curving road straightened out. It was straight on for miles. A road bookended by tall trees and shallow ditches. Clay looked over his hood as it swallowed up the miles and miles of road.

"I don't know what the fuck's going on here, but I've got a feeling it's... something unbelievable. And I've got a feeling you and I are on the same page about that."

It came up on Clay's field of vision like a dangerous idea. A dark mass just illuminated by the headlights. It moved sharply, seeing him come.

"Do you know something you're not telling me?"

The shadow mass broke in two. One half scurried off the road. The other took the form of a prostrate deer, its spilled innards spreading across the road like a cloud of red and pink meat and blood on a black sky.

Clay slammed on the brakes. His car swerved, tires squealing, twirled along the side of the road, sending gravel into the ditch. Its tail bumper made a sweeping arc over the deer's head, rear tires just missing it, as the car flew headlong over the side of the road, headed for the trees.

The car skidded to a stop on the edge of the road. Its front tires had planted in the grass at the top of the shallow ditch, making the nose of the car dip downward.

"Hey! Hey! You there?"

Herkimer's muffled voice came from somewhere below Clay. He fished the phone out from between his seat and the center console and ended the call. He didn't want to deal with it yet. Maybe he would call back if he needed help, but right now, he needed to breathe.

As the dust the flailing vehicle kicked up began to clear, Clay craned his neck to see where the deer was, and if the thing that had eaten it was still in sight.

He could only see the ripped carcass, illuminated mostly by his brake lights.

Clay got out of the car and let the flashlight function of his phone lead the way.

The mutilated deer was not quite dead. Muscles still twitched. Its chest conceived with ragged, final breaths. There was no smell of rot yet, just the metallic musk of blood. It was a fresh gash. As he stepped closer, he saw the teeth marks. Jagged and triangular, meat torn away with vicious force. The guts kept slipping out. Intestines, stomach, organs Clay couldn't comfortably identify. Some were shredded, half-chewed.

Whatever had been here, it was nowhere near finished with its meal and was probably still very hungry.

Breathing, hot and lusty, emanated from the trees just beyond the spot where he stood. It was too dark out here. Clay couldn't see, but he knew, somehow, in that part of his brain his coping mechanisms couldn't dull, he knew he was being watched. Then came the unmistakable sound of a snarling animal. A warning.

He wanted to run.

There was an animal there, hungry and unsatisfied; its meal interrupted.

He knew it was there, looking at him. Waiting to see what he would do next. If he had the mind to, he could run back to his car and try to chase it down.

But even in that inhuman sound, he felt warmth. Like a memory half-remembered but cherished all the same, or a sweet dream he forgot he had dreamed.

He knew, at that moment, what was out there in the woods would not hurt him. At least, it did not want to.

He was safe.

Then, he could see the eyes. Fiery, orange, and knowing. Piercing the dark between two trees. As he began to make out its furry shape, some twisted and abominable approximation of a dog, he turned his back on it. He was not afraid, and he wanted the creature to know it. He kept his pace steady all the way back to his car and drove off without urgency. He did not glance back in his mirror. He left it to dine in private.

He drove serenely. For hours, he circled neighborhoods he knew. He passed the schools he had attended, restaurants where he had eaten, stores where he had shopped, parks where he had lazed about as a child; ridding himself of what embarrassments and anxieties he had developed there. In the changing rooms of the department stores where his mother made him try on clothes that did not fit, in the locker rooms of school gymnasiums where other boys had taunted him for his silence and underdeveloped body, in the restaurants where he choked on his words when a server asked him what he wanted to drink.

A peace filled him like a cool breeze, penetrating the places where fear lived, earned and unearned, and drove it out. There was a sense of something fresh and lasting being built within him. He drove past these places of his past and found himself saying silent goodbyes to them; saying goodbye to the versions of himself created there.

For the first time in years, he felt fearless. Not brave, not indestructible, but without fear.

When he returned to the apartment complex, a light was on in the kitchen window facing the alley. Kenny's figure danced across it. Upstairs, the apartment was filled with the smell of spice and frying meat and the sound of disco music. Kenny stood over the stove, dancing while he cooked burgers. He smiled when Clay walked in.

"Hungry?"

Clay nodded. He was starving.