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Something crawled up the back of Everett’s skull from between his shoulders and he froze, listening intently through the cabin’s wood panels into the dark.

“It’s back.”

Marshall didn’t hesitate, crossing the room in three strides to grab his shotgun from where he’d propped it. He checked out the window, like he could see anything in the night, with the lamp burning inside. “Hold tight,”

he said shortly, and before Everett could react, he was out the door.

Everett fisted his good hand in the sheets, fingers tingling and thick-feeling, teeth grinding as his breath came faster than that dying steer’s.

Sitting up straight, he strained to hear what was happening, struggling to get his legs over the edge of the bed.

Every movement took monumental effort, his head swimming from drink and blood loss, half-blind and off-balance.

When his feet were planted on the floor he staggered sideways, crashing his bad arm into the wall.

He blacked out from the pain, but didn’t stop trying to follow Marshall outside.

A crack rang out and Everett stumbled, his heart missing a beat before coming back triple-time.

A second shot from the second barrel — the first for a ranged attack, the next for defense in close quarters.

Everett fought his way to the door, his dread a solid mass dragging him down.

For a horrible second, he didn’t know which outcome was worse: that Marshall was dead, or that he’d killed the creature.

No.

That thought couldn’t be his.

Fumbling the door open, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark, Everett couldn’t breathe.

Something was wrong in his brain.

His thoughts weren’t coming right.

He needed Marshall to be alive, to have killed whatever that thing was, but every time he blinked, he saw Marshall lying bloody in the dirt, ripped open like a butchered bull.

As awful as that image was, printed in red against the backs of his eyelids, a sick part of him wanted it.

There was a gnawing hunger in his belly growing by the minute, a deep ache like he wanted to sink his teeth into a raw steak, like he wanted to fuck something hard and rough until it went limp under him.

Fucked up, violent thoughts that weren’t his, in the middle of the night with his arm all bloodied and his friend facing down the devil in the dark.

“Marshall?”

The name came out mangled.

“I got it,”

Marshall said.

His silhouette materialized from out of the night and Everett’s knees went weak with relief or horror.

“Bring me that lamp, I want to see that it’s dead.”

“You got it?”

“Hit it dead on. It dropped like a rock, but I don’t want it crawling off to bleed out in some hole before I see what it is.”

“No,”

Everett said numbly, “no, it’s dead. I can feel it. It’s all in me, now.”

And then he dropped sure as that creature had, out cold before he hit the ground.