Page 41 of Dead Vengeance

“What do you mean you need them for Liam?” Simon cuts back in. “You’re making this for him? Breakfast for the killer?”

“Liam?” I do actually laugh at that. “Liam has all the killer instinct of a baby duck. And he’s just as sweet as one. I promise, he will do you no harm whatsoever.” I stretch past him to juggle butter and milk out of the fridge, though, to be fair, I could walk straight through him. But it might be considered rude. “I’m sorry. I need him here. I need his help because…”

Because I’m so bloody miserable. And so, so lonely.

There it is, right there. Didn’t even take a full minute to come up with that one.

I am so lonely, I want to cry. Every day, every night, surrounded constantly by voices, by dead people, and all I want on this planet is someone real, flesh and blood, who I could just have a cup of tea with on occasion. Not this mess of want, want, want—

“Breakfast!” Old Tony shouts, like a nail in my skull.

“Fine.” I slam a piece of bread into the toaster, whack a frying pan on the hob, and crack an egg into it. “If you don’t want to wait for pastries, this is all you’re getting.”

“Because, why?” Simon goes on, like a dog with a bone.

I slam my head into my palm, probably leaving a splatter of flour there too. “Do you think maybe you could just give me ten minutes of quiet, please? Just to wake up?”

“Why should you get ten minutes of quiet when I get eternal wandering?” Simons whines. “You with your nice fleshy body, and your heat, and your sleep, and your food that you can actually taste.”

“Breakfast!” comes the next nail in my temple.

“You used to have all those things too,” I argue with Simon. “It’s not my fault you’re dead.”

Simon’s mouth drops wide open. “That’s a very insensitive thing to say!”

“Monster.”

“What?” I ask Old Tony.

“I said, it’s very insensitive!” Simon repeats, twice as loudly.

“No, what was the other thing?” I ask Old Tony.

“Kraa!” says Edgar.

“That’s enough raspberries!” I snap at him. “Tony, what did you say?”

“Monster.”

“What?”

He’s never said a word that doesn’t involve his morning meal, and it honestly scares me half to death.

I step over to him cautiously. He’s still staring straight ahead at the wall. There’s nothing there—nothing that I can see.

A screech, sharp and menacing, sounds behind me. I whirl around just in time to see the claw come for me. I dodge it. It continues the motion downwards, hooking the back of a chair, throwing it to the ground as I stumble away.

“That’s new,” Simon reflects, studying the interloper with vague interest.

Indeed, it is. It’s tall and wispy, humanoid only in that it has long arms with claws at the end. There is no head where a head should be, no legs, the lower half of it dissipating into strings of silken light a foot above the floorboards, where the too-long arms slice with a horrifying scraping sound when it lunges for me again.

Whatever it is, it didn’t come to chat.

I throw myself backwards, barely dodging it again, my back hitting the wall hard. It hurts, really it does, but that doesn’t register half as much as the exhaustion.

I am so tired.

So tired of all of this.