“Missed you at the square,” Jerico said, leaning against the house. “Something the matter?”

“Sure is.”

“Care to talk about it?”

Bobby finally looked at him as his fingers worked over the sharp edges of the teeth.

“Darius said you’d try to talk me out of going,” he said.

“I’m only here to listen, friend.”

“He said you’d say that too, but it’d be a lie.”

Jerico rolled his eyes. “Lying’s not my style.”

Bobby grunted and looked away. He cut himself on one of the teeth, but if he felt it, he didn’t let it show. Faint smears of blood started to spread across the yellow and white.

“I heard her screaming,” he said. “I’d gone outside to piss, you know. That’s all. And then, as I’m coming back, I hear her screaming. Just Susie, not my little girls or my boy. Do you think that means they died quicker? Maybe in their sleep? It didn’t…it didn’t…”

Tears rolled down his face. Determined to remain true to his word, Jerico kept silent, letting the man say what he clearly needed to say.

“It didn’t even eat them, only my wife. Killed them for no reason, that fucking wolf. But Susie was alive when he was…eating. And it left me alive too, just looked at me and laughed. That damn thing laughed. I don’t know if the one you killed was the one that came here. I’ll never know. But I’ll kill every last one I can find and hope each one is that bastard. And I’ll laugh every time I kill one, Jerico.”

“I’m sorry,” Jerico said. “But this isn’t right, and you know it.”

Bobby looked up, and Jerico saw a rage there that frightened him.

“You think I care about what’s right? I’ve lived right my whole life, and look what it got me. Someone ought to do something, so I will. No one else needs to see what I saw, and there ain’t anything you can say to convince me otherwise.”