Sam returned from a Monday shift at Brunson’s to find Lola and Remy hard at work in the kitchen, making some sort of rapturous-looking chicken in cream sauce with fettuccini and a Caesar salad. With the bakery closed on Mondays, it was the day when everybody slept in and relaxed, and it usually meant the best meal of the week.

“That looks amazing,” said Sam, standing behind Lola and resting a hand on the small of her back as he leaned in to smell what she was cooking. Lola could be icy and a little too calculating sometimes, but he liked her anyway; her domineering streak was something of a turn-on, and he had wondered more than once what she would be like if he paid her a visit when she was fast asleep. He would never do that—strangers were one thing, but people who trusted you quite another—besides which, Remy was nearly always beside her. But that didn’t stop him from imagining it now and then.

She pecked him on the cheek before shooing him out of the way. “Run downstairs and tell the others that dinner’s almost ready.”

“Is Rose back from school yet?”

“Yeah, she’s showering. She said she’ll be down right after.”

Sam opened the door to the basement and was immediately hit by the smell of marijuana. At the bottom of the stairs he found Kevin and Amy sitting on the floor in front of the small TV, passing a half-finished joint back and forth. Cops was on, which struck Sam as ironic.

“Heyyyy,” Amy greeted him, her smile big and sincere and stoned. “We were just talking about you.”

“Uh-oh.”

“All good things,” said Kevin.

Amy held out the joint. “Want a hit?”

Sam held up a hand to decline. He tried to keep his feelings on the subject to himself, but smoking weed annoyed the crap out of him. It had no effect on him, so he didn’t even grasp the appeal, and all he could observe was that it turned his friends into boring conversationalists with goofy, childish senses of humor. Its only advantage was that it made Amy horny as hell, and a lot less inhibited about being on top. He turned away from dreamers when he saw evidence that they were under the influence, but he’d long since made an exception for Amy, because she did it so often. It was a pity that she hadn’t waited until after dinner to get high, because it had been a while since she had treated him to that particular position, and he missed it.

They followed him up the stairs to dinner, where Rose wrinkled her nose at the smell emanating from Kevin’s clothing. It was almost a farce at this point that she wasn’t admitting her pregnancy to the group as a whole; they all could see that she was sick, that she turned down wine, and when she learned that Lola had used raw eggs in the Caesar salad dressing, demurred the bowl that was offered to her. If Lola and Remy hadn’t figured it out at this point, then they were even more self-absorbed than Sam had given them credit for being. But it wasn’t his place to tell anyone.

After dinner, his stomach pleasantly full, he laid down on the sofa on the side porch to enjoy his post-dinner cigarette. It had been three days since he had slipped out at night, and he was feeling it; for most of the day he’d had the sort of erection that TV commercials warned him he should see a doctor about. He was feeling wistfully nostalgic for his human days when such a problem could be dealt with by stepping into the soaking room of the tannery and making a quick contribution to the liming tubs.

He crushed out his cigarette and let himself fall asleep on the sofa, hoping to kill a couple of the hours that stood between him and his evening plans. When he awoke again, the sky was only beginning to grow dark, and Rose was bending over him, shaking his shoulder.

“Sam,” she said. “Everybody’s sick.”

He rubbed his eyes and pushed up on his elbows. “What? Sick?”

“Yeah, they’re all barfing their guts up.”

He got up and walked foggily into the house, where, as promised, the first-floor bathroom door was closed and clearly holding one unwell person or another. He hurried up the stairs to his and Amy’s room, and found her curled up on the cool tile beside the bathroom rug, her face strained. She opened her eyes enough to see who had opened the door, met Sam’s eye, and said, “Get ouuuttttttt.”

“Are you okay?”

“No.” She covered her eyes with her hand, and he could hear Kevin on the opposite side of the wall, sounding no better. “Go away. Just let me die.”

He could tell she had aimed for a theatrical tone, and came out sounding more serious than intended. “Can I get you anything?”

“A razor blade?”

He clawed back his hair from his forehead. He had no clue how to treat any form of human illness anymore. “Okay, listen, just yell if you need anything. Or text me.”

She offered a moan of assent, and he stepped out into the hallway, where Rose was standing with her arms folded over her chest. He looked at her in utter confusion. “What the hell happened?”

“Food poisoning, is my guess.”

“Oh.” He frowned, looking back and forth between the two bedrooms. “Well, what do we do about that?”

“Wait for it to pass. Keep them from getting dehydrated. And buy a lot of Lysol.”

He shook his head helplessly. “I hope you don’t come down with it next.”

“If it’s what I think it is, I’m not going to. I didn’t eat the Caesar salad.” When he narrowed his eyes in confusion, she explained, “Raw eggs.”

“Oh, right.”

“But you ate it. You ate a ton of it.”

Something uneasy in her expression rattled his nerves. “Good thing I’ve got an iron stomach. I’ll make a run to the store for some bottled water and Lysol.”

“Okay. Sam.”

He was already halfway down the stairs, but turned to look up at her.

“Once it settles down a bit, I’m going to make them all stick to the bathroom in your room and the one downstairs. I’ll clean mine up, and that’s the one you and I can use until this passes. All right?”

“Sure.”

He breathed out a distressed sigh through his lips and hurried out to the car. The nostalgia for being human had definitely passed, at least for today.

~ * ~

Despite the deteriorating conditions in the household, there was no way Sam was going to make it through the night without prowling. At midnight he set down a fresh water bottle at Amy’s bedside, checked in on Remy and Lola sleeping fitfully in their downstairs bedroom, and snuck outside, setting off in Amy’s car to park in the lot behind Brunson’s. For years and years, when he and Tabitha lived in the abandoned factory at the edge of Lowell, going out at night had been so simple; he could climb the stairs to the roof, turn into an ember, and let the winds carry him in the direction that seemed most appealing. When he returned home there was nothing to hide, because Tabitha had been up to the same thing. Now he had to take the car, because Brunson’s was eight miles away and Amy needed to believe that’s where he had gone. At least the car gave him a place to stash his phone, which—unlike his clothes, which would travel with him as long as they had enough of the essence of his body on them—wouldn’t survive the elemental shift. And because Amy could see his location on his phone’s GPS, leaving it in the car added credibility to his claim of late-night work.

In the lot, he stashed his keys behind a stack of wooden pallets, then sparked away. On this night, in the interest of not being away from home any longer than necessary, he was making a repeat visit. The weather was pleasant, and this particular dreamer liked to sleep with the window open. That was convenient for Sam.

Her house was a little yellow one at the end of a row of townhomes. She owned a cat, but she closed it out of her room at night, which was also fortunate; Sam hated cats, and cats hated him, and he had seen many a wonderful opportunity thwarted by an affronted housecat. Dogs were not so bad; they recognized him as fire, and shied away from him as they would from a torch. Among humans, he claimed to be allergic to them, although it was really more the other way around.

With the window open, silvery moonlight struck across the foot of the bed. Sam bent over the sleeping woman and breathed gently over her nose. When he touched his lips to hers, she responded readily, kissing him back. Permission granted.

He folded the covers aside and climbed into her bed.

She was older than the dreamers he pursued when he was with Tabby—in her forties, past the age where he would have imposed anyone’s seed on her, had he been carrying it. But he liked women of this age, and they certainly liked him. He took his time in touching her, though once he took off his shirt, her hands caressed his shoulders and arms and chest with such avid interest that he simply closed his eyes and let himself enjoy the smoothness and ardor of her touch. Without prompting, she tugged at the fastening of his jeans, and once she got her hand into his boxers, her thighs parted as if by reflex. He smiled.

He kissed her again and laid his body over hers. She moaned when he entered her, clutching at him to pull him deeper. She was very wet, so much so that it could interfere with friction, and so he compensated by adjusting his angle to stimulate her outside as well as in. That worked more swiftly than he had anticipated, and her orgasm caught him by surprise—a rush of wetness, a moan that pierced his left eardrum, and her fingers gripping so hard at his ass that he felt her nails scratch his skin.

It was a good thing he healed so quickly. And also that Amy wasn’t likely to see him naked for a couple of days.

She rolled her hips against him in pursuit of another, and he knew he would have to finish when she did if he hoped to be satisfied before she dismissed him. He slipped his arm beneath her shoulders, pulling her closer so he could feel her breasts against his chest, and increased the pace of his thrusting. This time he knew to bury his ear against her neck, and the contractions within her made him come with an intensity that blocked out everything except the flashes of lightning that were the pathways of his nerves, the flickering fire that consumed him and would never stop consuming him.

She went limp against the mattress with satisfaction, and he rose up on his hands, exhausted and energized.

He brushed his lips against hers for a final kiss—both to keep her asleep, and to thank her. He wished he could roll onto his back and take a few moments to savor the serenity and well-being that flooded through him after a good encounter, because those feelings were so fleeting in his life these days. But he could only do that with Amy.

He straightened her clothing and his own, stepped back to the window, and sparked out into the cool night.

~ * ~

By Thursday afternoon everyone had recovered, and on Friday morning Sam drove Lola, Kevin, and Amy to the airport to catch their flight to Los Angeles for the food tour, right on schedule. Amy was still looking a little wobbly, and Sam felt sorry for her; usually effusive in her physical affection, she had barely let him kiss her since she fell ill. When he got out of the car at the terminal to help unload the massive amount of stuff the group was bringing to Los Angeles, she hugged him goodbye with both arms almost desperately tight around his neck. “Love you so much,” she said, and her breath was warm against his skin.

“Love you, too, baby.”

“Have fun in Nashville.”

His flight was leaving that night from this same airport. “I will. Not too much, though.”

She replied with a little laugh, and her smile looked relieved.

He wished them all a successful trip and drove back to the house, where he still needed to pack for his own journey. Fortunately, his needs were very few; for most of his afterlife he had lived on much less than he did now. He plunked his gym bag on the bed and tossed in a few items of clothing, his cellphone charger, and a comb. He added a set of earbuds and glanced around the room to see if he had missed anything.

Rose was standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. Her posture was a little tenuous, as if she wasn’t sure if she would stay. “You leaving soon?”

“Not until after dinner. Red-eye flights are cheaper.” He threw her a smile. “Hope Remy isn’t going too crazy at the bakery by himself.”

“I said I’d help him this weekend.”

“That’s nice of you.”

She nodded and flexed one of her ankles a bit, shifting her weight incrementally. For a moment she hesitated. Then she asked, “What are you?”

The question hit him like a fist, making his stomach clench as if he had been physically struck. It was not the first time he had been asked this over the years, but he had not expected it from her at all. Still, he managed to keep enough presence of mind to push an amused smile to his face. “What do you mean?”

“I mean ... I don’t think you’re a ... person.”

The only solution to this situation was one he deeply disliked, and that was to gaslight her—to respond as if she were worryingly crazy. Every other time this had happened, the suspicious individual had been someone to whom he felt indifferent—an employer, a bartender who had noticed his patterns, a homeless person who saw him around too much late at night. In those cases it didn’t bother him much. To his thinking, being Mara was kind of like being in Fight Club, where the first rule was not to talk about it, and it was ultimately nobody else’s damn business anyway. But he had never needed to lie to the face of a true friend, and to turn their questions back on them.

He replied with one lifted eyebrow and a confused tip of his head. “Rose, are you okay?”

She nodded and bit her lip, looking uncomfortable. “You’re looking at me like I’m crazy.”

“Well ... I mean ... I’m obviously a person. So I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He stepped into the bathroom to get his toothbrush and razor, like a human would do, and added them to his bag.

“I mean, you didn’t get sick,” she persisted. “That’s not how salmonella works. You should have had it. And the whole time they were sick, you never used my bathroom. You never used any bathroom.”

He felt like kicking himself. It was true—he had been so busy taking care of people, and rushing to and from work, and squeezing in a prowling run every night because Amy was completely off-limits, that the finer details of being human had completely escaped his attention. Still, he had a recent example to fall back on. “Well, you’ve seen me use a tree. That doesn’t count?”

“That’s like the only time, ever.”

“Since when are you tracking when I take a leak?”

Somehow this seemed to embolden rather than intimidate her. “Just explain it to me. I don’t care. I just want to know.”

He zipped up his bag and looked at her with irritation. “I don’t know what you’re asking me to explain. Why I didn’t get sick? Why I’m not filling out a potty chart? I can’t exactly—”

“More like how you can light a cigarette with the end of your finger,” she interrupted. “Yes, I’ve seen you do that. Last week when we were all outside, but at least a couple times before that too, and I thought I must be imagining it. But even if I factor that out—even if I say, okay, that’s not happening—” Her hands shaped the air in front of her with adamant gestures, but here she stopped, and the muscles in her jaw tightened. “There’s something off. It’s not just that you didn’t get sick, it’s that you seemed to know you wouldn’t. You went to work that night and everything. And you never smell bad, either. You pulled out that stump last week and came inside covered with sweat but smelling like roses. Even your dirty laundry smells good. It doesn’t make sense.”

He covered up his panic with a perplexed smile. “You’re sniffing my dirty laundry?”

“Can you just explain it to me?”

“Yeah. I bathe and use deodorant.”

She threw her hands up in the air. “I’m not crazy. And I’m not saying I think you’re an alien or something. I mean, I can see that you look normal. But you’re ... more than a person, somehow.”

He laughed quietly, already hating himself for what he was about to say, but knowing he had few options if he wanted her to end this line of questioning. “I could tell you what the problem is, but I think it’s better if we don’t get into that.”

“What?”

He adopted a regretful tone and didn’t fully meet her eyes. “You’re attracted to me. And I can’t say it isn’t mutual, but—I mean, I’m not sniffing your laundry.”

“What? No!”

“Come on. We can be adults and just admit it. I mean, what else do you want me to say? That I’m secretly an elf or something?”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. It isn’t about whether I’m attracted to you. It’s just very Twilight Zone. It is.”

“Fine.” He crossed the room to where she stood and pulled off his shirt. She looked taken aback, but he drew closer to her and turned over his arms and hands, offering himself for her inspection. “Go ahead. Poke and prod.”

She laughed a little. “What?”

“Well, if want to feel around for horns, or wings, or magical fire-shooters in my fingers, or whatever. I’m not sure what you’re looking for, exactly.”

He knew, from this distance, she could readily smell him. He knew that would distract her, as well as make her feel uncomfortable and a little sheepish—the swirling inner conflict between wanting to explore his body and knowing she should not. She would choose the way that was loyal to Kevin, and that would be the last Sam would hear of this, because he had given her the opportunity.

“Never mind,” she said. Her voice blended frustration and a little disgust. “This pregnancy must be messing with my mind. Just forget it.”

He picked up his shirt from the floor and shook it out to put it back on, and she closed her eyes as the burst of air touched her face. “No problem. I’ll try to make my bodily functions more obvious from now on.”

She grimaced in embarrassment. “Ugh. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, no big deal. I’m going to take it as a compliment.”

She offered a smile of grudging appreciation and, curling her hand into a gentle fist, let it rest in the middle of his chest. He knew what lay behind that gesture—what she was holding back. She wanted to hammer both fists against his chest and demand real answers; she wanted to shove him backward with the force of her desire to know, and her desire for him, and have it end in the tumultuous fervor she lay listening to through the wall when she fell asleep at night. Just like with Lola, he had imagined what she would be like in bed: vanilla, difficult to get off, inhibited even in her dreams. Kevin probably didn’t have the patience. She probably told him she didn’t need anything, not to worry about her, and he took her at her word.

“Enjoy Nashville,” she said.

He left the house within the hour. The entire day stretched ahead of him before he needed to catch his flight, but the less time he spent around Rose, the better. She needed time to second-guess herself, not more opportunities to watch him.