The forest was such a feature of their lives that neither Mandy nor Rusk knew if it had an end besides the space where it opened toward the schoolhouse, and that was more of a clearing than an ending. Now, with the moon hidden behind a menacing canopy full of tree limbs intertwined like trapping fingers, with the rumbling clouds and the air hanging heavy with moisture, Rusk found himself testing every step along the path to make nothing tripped him. The buzz of flies swelled around him and Mandy in eclectic volumes, as if a swarm might be getting closer and then farther and then closer again with every turn they took, with every decision they made.

Mandy was making all the decisions. She marched through the forest with silent abandon, keeping her hand in Rusk’s but taking lead, stepping so lightly, as if she’d wandered these woods a million times before in the dead of night and knew how to avoid anything unseemly. Rusk wondered if she were leading him to his doom, but quickly squashed that thought out of his mind. Mandy would never hurt him. She’d asked for his help.

He was supposed to be her hero.

He straightened his back and quickened his steps, taking stride at her side instead of lingering behind her like he had been for most of their midnight hike.

“Mandy, where are we going?”

She shushed him.

He shushed. He thought about all the different kinds of monsters that could be lurking anywhere around them. In a shadow, behind the trunk of a tree, hunched in the canopy waiting to swoop, swimming inside splotches of moonlight ready to spirit them away the moment they took one wrong step. Trees with fangs for leaves and bones for branches. Mounds of dirt were no longer the beds of animals to Rusk but instead became ready graves in his perceptions. And the flies. The flies and the first drops of water, cold on the top of his head. A steady, patient torture. The forest had all the time it wanted. It could make their deaths as slow as it liked.

“I really don’t think we should be going this far.”

“Do you want to be a hero or not?”

“It’s starting to rain.”

“Are heroes afraid of the rain?”

Rusk yanked his hand out of Mandy’s. “What’s your problem today?”

She kept walking.

He jogged to catch up to her.

The first crackles of lightning lit the sky. The forest floor illuminated, and the shadows warped into hungry sneers. They were standing in the middle of a gravesite. Bones, animal or human Rusk couldn’t tell, revealed themselves in flashes of white undertow, stabbing out of the soggy ground like knives with each burst of lightning. The heavens cackled.

When Mandy spun around to face Rusk, her face was wrong.

He screamed in an unheroic manner, racing backward away from her.

The thing that was not Mandy tilted its head. It smiled with pointed fangs. Its eyes were the eyes of the monster that Rusk remembered from his first encounter half a decade before, but it couldn’t be the same thing. It couldn’t be. That one was slain.

He saw that one’s head slashed clean off by Iya Tarfell. If only he had a sword. If only he had a weapon. What kind of hero goes off on a quest without a weapon?

“What have you done with Mandra?” Rusk put all his bravado in that challenging tone. He tried to slow his breathing. “Tell me or I’ll slay you!”

The thing giggled, a girlish sound Mandy would never make. “Who says I’m not Mandra?” It jangled Mandy’s necklace, and the keys made heavy clunks as they struck together. The sound mimicked the rumble of thunder, the way the earth itself shook under Rusk’s feet. “I’ve got all her keys.”

This wasn’t Mandy. His friend would never act this way. Rusk steeled himself, found a hardness inside his heart and latched onto it, and then raised his fists in a guard. He’d been practicing for the bullies. He’d gotten good enough these past two years to beat them off every time they tried for another session of torment. Taking on a monster with fists alone was foolish, he knew, but better to be a fool than a coward, and his fists were the only weapons he had. They’d have to do.

A monster had tried to take his arms once and hadn’t succeeded. Rusk had faith. He might earn more scars, but he’d survive.

“Don’t,” said Mandy, suddenly looking and sounding exactly like herself before the wrongness, the monstrosity, reclaimed its territory. “Fancy yourself a hero, do you? What does a hero do with a hostage?”

Rusk felt so cold he might’ve turned into a ghost. It numbed everything. His fists dropped to his sides, but he still clenched them. The numbness curled into anger, sending heat all through his veins. The only reason he knew he was clenching his teeth was his gums started aching. All of his attention, all of that ire, focused directly on the thing that was but wasn’t Mandy. The thing that was inside her. The thing that took her over. The monster.

It, or Mandy, laughed.

“Why does her father make her collect keys?” asked Rusk, surprising himself with his own question. Maybe he wanted to know before Mandy was gone for good. Maybe he’d already lost hope. He realized with a jolt of despair he’d addressed the monster, not Mandy herself.

The monster tilted its head, as surprised by Rusk’s question as Rusk was for asking it. Curiosity painted its features. They became less ghoulish, but still no less deformed. “Why?” It asked itself, or Mandy. “Why does her father make her collect keys.”

Rusk took a step forward, calculating how long it would take him to knock the monster out. Mandy might go with it, but she might come back when she woke up. Or he could find a way to get her somewhere the monster could be forced out of her in the interim. He could do this. He had to. The monster was distracted and he was a hero.

The monster snapped its fingers, and Rusk halted.

“To keep her occupied,” said the monster, or Mandy, or maybe both of them. The words echoed as if two people might have spoken. The rain pounded through the canopy to pummel the ground, sloshing the dirt into mud and drenching both Rusk and the monster wearing Mandy. “A futile quest. How cruel. How delightful!”