Gooseflesh rises on my arms. It could have been a trick of the eyes, except Brecken is out here, and he’s staring at that darkness. I scan the length of the building again, searching for something. Looking for—there. Another vague impression of movement in the shadows, near the corner of the building.

It’s too dark to see. It could be anything. Nothing.

My eyes find their target and my heart lodges into my throat. The moving thing steps out of the shadows. It’s not nothing.

It’s a person.

They step into the murky light of the parking lot, snow crunching. I don’t want to look, but I do. And I immediately see a familiar battered yellow hat. He lifts a recognizable withered hand and my insides freeze.

“Cold one, innit?” His voice is as gnarled as his fingers.

“It is cold,” Brecken agrees. His eyes are hard, but his tone is polite. Distant and clipped, but undeniably polite. “Which is why we need to get moving.”

He puts a hand behind him, waving the two of us back to the car. He’s discreet, but I think the man notices. His face turns, still lost in the darkness under his hat, but tilted in a direction that tells me he’s watching this. Watching our retreat.

“I’m not here to hurt nobody.”

“No one says you were,” Brecken replies.

Another door opens. “Everything all right?”

Josh. Somewhere behind us, near the car. I hear the chink of one crutch hitting the snow-covered pavement. I inch my way backward, but I feel the man’s eyes on me. I still can’t see his face under that hat and I don’t want to.

“Have a good night,” Brecken says to him abruptly. “Be safe on the roads.”

“Just the thing I’m getting to,” the man says, slurring the last bit of the sentence. “You might see I’m traveling without a car.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Brecken says.

“Looks like you’ve got a little space.”

“No, we don’t. We’re all full.”

“With little things like them?”

I feel the man’s eyes on me. Watch them graze Harper, too. We are the little things he’s referring too. Harper curls her fingers into the sleeve of my coat and pulls me close. Her breath shudders.

“Why don’t you two get in the car?” Brecken asks. He’s using the same, easygoing tone but there’s an edge underneath. It matches the stress cording out the tendons in his neck.

“Let’s all go,” Harper says, her voice shaking but loud. “We’re already full, so come on, Brecken.”