“Like a valentine?” Brad asked, looking up and meeting his partner’s eyes.

Dany kissed him on the forehead before returning to his story, “Yes, like a valentine… except the paper heart was cut out in the shape of a real human heart, with the ventricles and arteries and everything.”

“Gross.”

“And the poem read:

Every drop of my blood is for you, each moment. Each pump is for you.”

Brad shook his head but his eyes remained transfixed by the last flickering flames, “That’s messed up.”

“I know! So I pulled it off the wall and took it with me to show people when we got back to town,” Dany continued, lifting the stick from the embers and offering a perfectly golden marshmallow to Brad before popping the remaining two in his mouth. “Whew! These are hot!”

“Did you really take it with you?”

“Only Chris, Gil, and I ever saw it.” Dany nodded, talking around the warm, sugary mess in his mouth. “When we got in the car and started driving, we saw the light, jumping from ditch to ditch like it was chasing us.”

Brad turned and punched Dany in the chest, laughing, “Shut up!”

“Seriously,” Dany replied solemnly.

Though Brad didn’t like it, he sensed his boyfriend was telling the truth, “What did you do?”

“I ripped the creepy heart poem in a bunch of pieces and threw it out the window.”

“Oh, because that would definitely make the light thing less angry.…”

“Well, it stopped chasing us,” Dany defended as he stuck the sharp end of the roasting stick into the embers to burn off any marshmallow residue. “Are you ready for the really creepy part though?”

“Oh great, there’s more,” Brad laughed. “Are you ready to stay awake with me if I have nightmares?”

“I’m hoping you’ll be awake for a while,” Dany whispered into his ear suggestively. “So the next week, we decide to get a big group of friends together and head back out to Light Road. Three cars packed with at least a dozen of us, right? We park and walk out to the old abandoned farmhouse in the field. It’s got to be a good two, maybe three football fields away from where we’ve parked the cars. We walk inside and are looking around and suddenly the air feels really cold… and I feel like there’s someone right behind me, breathing on my neck… and there’s this sudden heaviness on my shoulders like something is pressing down on them,” Dany said as he reached around and grabbed Brad’s shoulder.

“Seriously!” Brad yelled with a jump. “Don’t do that!”

Dany lowered his voice again. “And I look up at the wall beside the door… and the poem on the heart is back, all in one piece.”