Page 39 of Love Her Ruin
Sera
Shewalksinfirst.
Blonde, curly hair piled into a bun. Oversized SpongeBob T-shirt, the yellow faded from too many washes, SpongeBob's smile peeling at the edges like he's tired of being so damn cheerful. Jeans with a hole in one knee. Combat boots. And threaded through the disaster of her bun, tucked in like a hair stick, is what I am almost entirely certain is a bone.
Abone.
My hackles go up before she's cleared the threshold.
Behind her come the men.
A shaggy-haired blond, glasses sliding down his nose, with a white button-down tucked into pressed slacks. Behind him, a taller one with lean muscle, short dark hair, and a smirk that glimmers in his golden eyes. And behind him, filling the doorway the way James fills a doorway but even bigger, is a huge, bronze-skinned man, with black curly hair, his armsand pecs inked with suns and moons that dip down below the waistband of his jeans. He has to duck to come in.
He’s clearly violating theNo Shirt, No Servicerule, but I let it slide.
They're not from around here. Not even close. They move like people who have been to places the map refuses to label.
The woman drifts up to my counter, and she has the same golden eyes as the rest of them. She's smiling, but it's not a friendly one. It's intimidation behind too many teeth.
"Hi," she says. "Cute store. Love the lighting. Very anxiety-inducing."
"Thanks," I say flatly. "We work hard to make sure our customers know we're all dying on the inside."
She grins, real this time, quick and startled, like I surprised her.
"I have a question," she says, leaning an elbow on the counter.
The bone in her hair shifts, and I try not to look at it. She notices me not looking at it, and her grin widens.
"And it’s a weird question, but I promise I'm not a cop."
I don’t say a word, but my hackles bristle even more.
She taps her nails on the counter, which have chipped black polish on them and bitten cuticles. I find myself relieved they’re not painted red.
"So. Your house."
My spine freezes. I let my face go to the blank setting and wait.
"I went knocking, but nobody appeared to be home," she says, friendly as arsenic. "Your house had a thing in it for years. It still has a thing in it, but now it’s different. It can leave and go to its own home, but it isn’t."
I say nothing.
"See, normally," she continues, "I don't have to do the driving-across-three-states part of the job, but a certain self-important dude with horns and an extremely bad management style hasnoticed that one of his, uh, long-term employees has been off the clock for a century, and he'd like a word with the thing from your house."
I keep my face still and run through my options.
Option one: lie. Tell her I don't know what she's talking about. Play dumb. Play normal. Play the bored gas station clerk who just wants to go home and watch bad television.
Option two: call her crazy. Laugh.Ma'am, this is a Gas N' Go.
Option three—
The lights flicker, then deepen, the hum dropping an octave. The shadow behind the beer cooler detaches from the wall. The shadow in the corner by the hot dog roller stretches upward. The shadow beneath the counter at my feet crawls up my legs like a familiar cat and then past my waist, past my shoulders, pouring into the air behind me like smoke from an invisible fire.
Daddy arrives.
He doesn't bother with a body. He comes as a column of cold black that rises from the floor to the ceiling tiles and bends them, frost crawling across the panels in fractal lace. The temperature in the gas station drops thirty degrees in a breath. The window behind the slushie machine fogs, then ices. The fluorescents buzz like wasps.
