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Smoke. Rot. Old blood under it.

It doesn't come closer.

It tips its head, the way a dog does at a sound it doesn't like, and it waits.

"Gage." Her voice is very small. "It's not moving."

"No."

"Is that better or worse than moving?"

"Worse."

Fog rolls through the streetlight. A second one comes out of it beside my mailbox. A third along the hedge. Then a fourth, slower than the rest, bigger through the shoulders, new at having a body.

They spread into a loose line across my front yard.

Not one of them crosses the walk.

I know where that line runs. I've stepped over it four hundred times in six months. Evelyn laid it the week Maren moved in.

Two hours ago it was a seam of light nobody could feel but Maren.

Then she reached for it with her mind, just to see, and it opened for her like a latch under a thumb.

"Why are they stopping?" she whispers.

Because an open door is still a door.

Because the opening isn't gone, and someone has to go through first.

"Get inside."

"Gage."

"Maren. Inside."

She doesn't move.

There's a fifty-pound sack of rock salt against the porch post. I bought three of them Wednesday, and she made a joke about margaritas, and I didn't laugh.

I get a fist full of salt and go down the steps.

The nearest one doesn't brace. Doesn't run. Doesn't do one single thing an animal would do.

I hit it low, drive it into the wet grass, and grind salt into whatever it uses for a throat.

It comes apart with the sound of a fire going out under water.

Black spatter hits my forearm and starts eating.

I'm up again with the burn climbing to my elbow before I realize something.

None of the others watched.

Not one turned. Not one shifted a foot. The thing that stood eighteen inches away from it turned to smoke, and it never took its eyes off my porch.

Off her.