I could also see his not-thereness, which was bizarre. As I thought about him being invisible, he started being more not-there than there. I quickly focused on his thereness, and he came surging back.

He was smiling strangely. I realized he was probably trying to keep his teeth covered.

“Hello, Elizabeth Ryder. You have nothing to fear from me,” he said.

Bob’s face was definitely humanoid — a somewhat flattened nose, red lips, and large, dark eyes. But the whole thing was covered with short, white fur. He didn’t have eyebrows, exactly, but there were large tufts of curly fur above his eyes. Starting on the top and the sides of his head, the hair got longer, blending with the fur on his body to form a thick, shaggy coat. His mouth looked a bit too large for his face. It probably had to be to fit all those teeth inside. Short, sharp horns stuck straight out from the sides of his head. I could imagine him disemboweling a horse with them.

Graham emerged from the dark, grinning broadly.

“Excellent! Great idea, Bob!”

I turned on him. “You guys did that on purpose?”

“Yup,” Graham said. “Bob wondered if needing to see a danger might overcome whatever part of your mind was blocking your sight.”

Graham looked pretty pleased with himself.

“Great. That’s great. Thanks a lot. You can take me home now.”

I stalked back toward the car.

Graham trailed after me. “Hey, don’t be that way. You really did want to see, right?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Elizabeth,” he said, catching my arm.

“Get off me!”

I think my anger surprised both of us. We just stood there, me seething at him, him looking at me with a mystified expression.

“I don’t understand why that upset you so much,” he finally said.

I suppressed the urge to just let fly with something nasty and instead let the silence stretch until I calmed down a little.

“Look, I’ve been getting really scared of nothing all my life, but the last few days have been way worse. Now it’s not nothing that’s scaring me. It’s you people. And you’re doing it on purpose. I’m sick of it. I didn’t have you pegged as someone who was going to do that to me.”

His expression softened, then tightened again in anger.

“Williams.”

I looked away so he wouldn’t see the fear wash across my face.

“It’s unfortunate that he found you. Most unfortunate. He’s not cut out for dealing with emerging talents.”

“Glad to hear you think so,” I said caustically.

Graham looked down. Then he said quietly, “He’s very good at what he’s assigned to do. That’s because he’s a sadist.”

I shuddered. “Yeah.”

“Look,” Graham said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have played that trick on you. I didn’t know you’d been treated so badly.”