By which he meant—she was too nervous, and she was too old for those nerves to be charming, since she’s in her forties like the pair of us.
“I know,” I told him.
I spotted a young worker petting a large dog and drawing a crowd.
His hair was a bit too long, hiding cute, bright features.
Even though they looked nothing alike, he reminded me of Micah.
The sticker on his shirt named him Jayden.
I ran through the mental notes I’d memorized for today.
Jayden regularly worked at Barnacles between his veterinary school classes. He was exactly what this piece needed.
I elbowed Albert and pointed. “Him.”
Albert nodded his agreement. “Good call.”
He scanned over the dog pen with the camera, focusing on a little girl petting a beagle. While he focused on getting the footage, I asked the mother for her permission to use it. She was thrilled.
"Rafferty's favorite spot is right behind the ear.” Jayden held tightly to a different animal as he spoke to the girl. The creature on the leash looked more like a slobbery freight train with fur than a dog, one who wrestled bears for fun. And won.
The girl scratched the beagle behind the ear. The beagle’s tongue lolled out of its mouth. It dropped its hind legs out from under it, and started kicking the ground like a rabbit. The girl laughed.
“Can I pet that one?” The girl pointed to the dog-shaped monster Jayden was holding.
No one should pet that one.
“This is Toast.” Jayden twisted his lips. “Toast is a big dog with big energy.”
“I want to pet it.” The girl took a step closer.
Toast’s eyes snapped to the girl and widened like he’d just learned bacon grew on small children.
That gleam—pure, hungry joy—looked like how a wrecking ball must feel when it spotted a wall.
His tail wagged, not just a friendly thump-thump, but a full-body metronome.
He pulled so hard on the leash it cried.
Jayden flinched ever so slightly as the wild tail whipped him in the thigh, but he held strong, not giving Toast an inch. “Okay, but only if you like doggy kisses.”
The girl nodded enthusiastically and took another step forward.
Toast’s entire body stilled. His self-control lasted half a second at most before he choked himself to reach the girl. He lapped his tongue all over her face, soaking her in slobber.
She stumbled back, shocked, then went in for a hug and a whole lot more licks.
Jayden turned his attention to me. “Erika Campbell, right?”
“Yes. We’re doing a piece for WNCR on the adoption fair.”
The girl skipped off hand-in-hand with her mother to check out the kittens. Toast deflated onto the ground, long legs flattening to his sides like a spatchcock chicken on the grill.
“Wendy’s thrilled you’re here.” With a quick twist of his head, Jayden flicked the hair from his face. It fell right back down over his eyes. “There’s no one better to be in charge. She’s great. Works too hard, her and Marnie both, really.”
Marnie was the goth woman, the last of the three regular Barnacles workers. I’d speak to her after Jayden. I said, “I hear they aren’t the only two devoted to the animals. You’re studying to be a veterinarian, correct?”
Something shifted in my periphery.
A leaf blowing across the ground? Maybe a pinecone.
I glanced that way, but there was nothing.
Then again, I caught something—a twitch in the dirt. It was a subtle, unnatural nudge, like the earth had hiccupped.
“Yep,” Jayden said. “I can’t get enough of these furry little guys, so I….”
Jayden kept talking, but the words didn’t register. All I could focus on was the tiny shape emerging from the soil.
A tiny skeletal arm sticking out of the dirt and…it waved at me.
This. Was. Not. Happening.
I blinked, hoping the tiny bones would disappear.
They did not.
My gut slammed the panic button. My heart pounded in my chest. My mouth went dry.
I considered asking Albert if he could see it, too.
That would require admitting that I could see it.
Best case scenario—Albert could see it, and I hadn’t completely lost my mind.
The adoption fair would be ruined and no one besides Albert would believe the truth of what happened.
Carson wouldn’t only decide to finally serve me those divorce papers, but he’d move the boys to Colorado to be closer to his family, and make sure they never saw me again.
If that was the best case, I didn’t even want to consider the worst case. No thank you.
It took all my mental strength to rip my eyes away, to wrap up the interview with Jayden, to move on and talk to other people, and do my freaking job. I’d conducted so many interviews over the years, I could do this in my sleep.
It was a good thing, too, because my mind was elsewhere—way over there, in fact, with the tiny, waving arm.
Even after I couldn’t see it anymore, I could still feel it, beckoning.
All I could feel was creeping unease.
I spotted Wendy talking to a bald man in a suit. Her body language was tense, even with a smile plastered to her face. But none of that fully captured my attention.
Instead, it was the bird on her shoulder that I couldn’t look away from.
A raven.
With missing feathers, and missing flesh.
Wendy seemed completely unbothered by the bird, lending to my working theory that I had lost my mind completely.
When I finished interviewing the goth woman holding a tiny, terrifying dog, I pulled Albert aside. The need to keep my mouth shut warred with the itch in my throat that had me ready to rip my hair out.
I settled on an even whisper. “Are you seeing this?”
“Yeah, these people really need our help.” Albert scratched his chin. “They’re hardly closing any adoptions, even though it’s clear they’re passionate about their work.”
“Not that.”
He furrowed his thick brows in confusion.
I pointed at the bird. “That.”
“A crow. Weird.” He pulled the camera back up to his face, like that was the end of the discussion.
“It’s a raven, and it’s clearly diseased. You see that, right?” Was it related to the tiny arm that had waved at me? I looked back to the place I’d seen the arm, but it was gone.
“No, but I’m not really a bird guy.” Albert shrugged.
He didn’t have to be a bird guy to see. Then again, no one else seemed bothered either.
It was me. Only I was seeing the impossible.
Was I hallucinating? Was it somehow connected to my white-outs?
Everything was fine. All I had to do was keep reminding myself to stay calm and focused on the very real reason I was here—to work.
A girl peeked her head out from behind a tree like she was playing hide-and-seek.
No, she wasn’t a child. She had bright clothes like a child, and short wild curls with a tiny bow like a child’s, but her wrinkles definitely made clear she was an adult.
I glanced around for another kid she might be playing with but found no one who seemed to be playing along.
A shrill screech carried across the field.
My mind went blank as my head snapped in the direction of the sound.
Toast burst through the dog corral gate. Whether it had been left open, or the monster-sized dog had broken it, I couldn’t tell.
Regular-sized dogs relished the chance to retreat. They darted in every direction. People, too, scurried around, some trying to help, others running away.
Jayden was on the ground, face-first in the dirt. He wasn’t moving. Marnie checked him, making sure he was all right before moving on to capture some of the animals.
The ground began to…twitch.
First one bump in the dirt. Then another.
A series of writhing dirt mounds emerged like creepy little nightmare Whac-A-Moles with I didn’t want to know what inside.
A brown thing surfaced under a picnic table—a little rat-like creature with milky eyes and patches of fur. It looked like it had lost a fight with a weed whacker.
Screams erupted—horror-movie, punch-to-the-chest screams.
Toast surged across the open grass with the force of a furry linebacker. Jowls flapping, tongue lolling. He splashed through a muddy puddle then dove at a man in a suit, tackling him to the dirt.
More mounds appeared in the dirt, one after another.
My stomach dropped, like an elevator with its cables cut.
Finally, I knew.
This was all real.
A rush of sound assaulted my ears—barking, yelling, metal clattering. All of it layered over the buzzing of my brain trying to reboot.
A smell hit next—dirt, fur, ozone, maybe something dead.
Maybe something that should be dead.
Albert lowered his camera, realization and horror overtaking his features. He stammered. “Erika?”
A rat emerged beside my foot. It moved in jerky, unnatural lurches—like it had forgotten how legs worked. Greasy patches of fur clung to its bones like damp carpet scraps. Its eyes—empty sockets with the faintest glimmer of something wiggling.
My whole body quaked with revulsion.
The ground rippled, everywhere, like popcorn kernels hitting oil.
Little mounds burst as more undead rodents clawed their way to freedom.
This wasn’t just a disaster, this was some kind of wild rodent zombie apocalypse. I grabbed Albert’s wrist and turned for the van, because the last thing we needed to do was get bitten and transform into zombie rat people.
Thunder boomed overhead.
A pale woman with blond hair stepped into our path. Her brown eyes were tired, her expression unnaturally calm. She smiled warmly at both me and Albert. “You will remember nothing about the dogs escaping. You will remember nothing negative about today. You will delete it from the film.”
I opened my mouth to tell her where she should shove that ridiculousness.
Albert nodded.
I stared at her, so befuddled, no words came out of my mouth.
“Oh.” She patted Albert’s arm. “You can’t wait to adopt a cat.”
“I can’t wait to adopt a cat,” he repeated.
Well that was a weird lie he’d told to appease her.
Albert headed deeper into the disaster zone instead of away with me. Maybe he forgot something, like a piece of equipment. My pulse pounded in my ears.
The blond woman headed to the next group of people attempting to make their escape. As soon as she spoke to them, they returned, slowly, to the center of the mess.
“I’ll meet you in the van,” I yelled to Albert.
Should I have tried to stop him? Was that even possible? What was with that woman?
I climbed into the van, locked the doors, then stared out the window, my mind racing.
When Albert returned, it was with a cardboard carrier, and a wrinkly hairless cat inside.
“You hate cats,” I said, confused.
“I adopted a cat,” he said.
Weird….
“What a nice time we had at the adoption fair,” he said.
Weirder….
“You should come over for dinner tonight. Carol’s making lemon chicken.”
He said it as if he hadn’t suggested the exact same thing to me earlier.
“Okay,” I said, because whatever word magic that blond woman had done to him, I needed to make sure he was all right.
Weirdest of all, why hadn’t her word magic worked on me?