I gave Harvey another hug as I began to sink back to the ground. He was starting to fade away, and in a matter of moments I was watching as a large leaf devil whirled and danced out of sight. I waved a final time and began walking back toward my car with a smile on my face.

I knew I would miss him in time. I knew I’d miss Rusty as well. But for now, all of that seemed very distant and unimportant compared to the wonderful truth burning in my heart.

We were both finally free.

Marrowtooth

I was frightened of my grandmother when I was a little girl. Her house lay at the edge of a foul-smelling bog filled with snakes and strange bugs during the day and alien bird cries and flickers of green swampfire at night. My mother would always reassure me that she had grown up there, and while yes, there were some dangerous critters roaming around, as long as I stayed in sight of the house and watched where I put my hands and feet, I should be fine. That eased my fears of the house and yard a bit, but it did very little to help with my fear of the woman that lived there.

It wasn’t that she was unkind, and she acted as though she was happy whenever we came to visit, but I still found her off-putting all the same. I’d like to say it was her odd ways—the small furtive movements of her thin lips as she sucked idly on hard candy, her dark eyes darting this way and that as though she was following the invisible motions of some internal metronome. Or perhaps the way she seemed to panic as it grew closer to dark, wanting to make sure that we were all inside and her “safety candles” were lit at the threshold of every door and window. But to be honest, my mother seemed to take these things in stride when we visited, and so I quickly grew used to them as well.

No, the main problem was her leg. She wore a brace on her right leg—an ancient-looking metal and leather contraption that may not have been the same one she first got as a teenager sixty years earlier, but I couldn’t have said for certain. She always wore it for support, and the soft metallic creak creak creak it made as she puttered around the house always set me on edge during the day and terrified me in the small hours of the night.

But even the brace wasn’t the worst part. It was the smell.