Matt sat in the dirt at Bailey's bluff, the city lights strobing blow him in pops of sporadic, distant color. The trees rasped in the night wind. An owl somewhere nearby purred into the amalgamating whispers of the forest.

His father's voice cut hoarse through the speakers of his phone. "Matt, I'm sorry. Come home. We'll talk about it, alright?"

Matt let the next voice mail play on.

"Where you at, boy? I'm serious, Matthew. Call me."

By the next message, Jack was off his ass, slurring and sliding to every liquor-slick consonant. "I know, alright? I know I've been a shit dad. It was never meant to be this way. Was never meant to be just me and you." There was a moment of silence, a clatter of glasses bumping into one another. "Forget about all that. Everything I said, forget it alright? Just come home. Don't just...leave like she did."

Matt laid back and turned his gaze from the stars of the city to the ones in the sky. He didn't want to go home. He wanted to stay here with the dirt and bugs, the ghost of Bailey on the forest floor beside him. He laid there now, a beautiful figment—black lake eyes wet with stars, the soft round of his nose and the natural curl at the edges of his lips that toned each sardonic smile.

He was born from the shadows and in the shadows, Matt saw him—gone again in the blink of an eye or the washing headlights of a car. Matt chose not to look at Bailey's ghost this time. It always seemed to disappear when he did.

The world's a vampire and it'll suck you dry if you let it, the ghost spoke, his voice was so palpable, Matt reached instinctively to the dirt beside him where Bailey had laid that night. The earth was cold and gritty beneath his fingers.

Sleep deprivation.

The Wrangler was a hot box even at night, and twice now he'd woken with a terrible kink in his neck. Sleep was hard to find and when he did find it, Matt dreamed of Ricco's gnarled face and Bailey's bite mark, and the way the desert ground tasted when dozens of bullets were poured into his body. So Matt had stopped sleeping. But every time he thought of going home, he felt the burning in his arm. He thought of the empty barn and the bruise on his shoulder where Bailey had thrown him to the ground. He thought of the tan skin against his alabaster flesh. The skinny bones. The dented rib.

Think fast, sweetheart, Raven said. Before Daddy files a missing person's report.

"You told me to keep moving," Matt said. "So I'm moving."

That what you been telling yourself? Look at you. You're not moving, you're giving up.

"I'm not giving up anything."

You're giving up everything, Raven said.

What exactly, Matt wanted to ask, but he knew the answer would be too real, too indigestible. He'd felt several things when Bailey was around—bad things and strange things and things that sometimes still brought his blood south when he laid on the hood of his Wrangler at night, watching the stars and satellites blink across the sky.

Bailey's voice had a way of crawling back into Matt's bones. Echoes of their night together set him afire—the soft Fuck, Cowboy, that seemed to escape him like a beast from its chain. Every night, he thought of it and shivered. He thought of the sound and the way Bailey looked beneath him. His head curled to one side against the arm of the hot leather sofa, his face tensed and aching. His fingers wanting. His body taking and moving and giving. Fuck, Cowboy.

But if Bailey had felt those things too, would he have done what he did?

There are two sides to every story, said Raven. And a million truths on every side.

"What if we don't share a truth?" Matt asked him. A tiny jet blinked across the sky. "What if I was just a pawn?"

We're all pawns, kid. He was yours, too. Fast cash and a ticket out of his place.

"Things changed. He's..." A sudden burning burrowed up Matt's sinuses. The jet turned to a blurry star—all the same as the others. He cut down his tears as quickly as they came. "What if this is it? What if I never feel like this with anyone else?"

Then you die alone, like me.

Matt didn't reply. He watched the jet slide through stars until it faded behind the tree caps. When the night began to nip through his clothes, he left the bluff drove back to the ranch.

His father was slouched, half-asleep on his porch rocking chair when Matt arrived. The old man rose at the sight of the Wrangler's headlights and stumbled down the steps toward him. The intoxicated air he brought choked Matt sick.

"Jesus Christ, boy," he said as Matt climbed out of the Wrangler and shut the door. Jack stumbled closer, catching his drunken gait on the hood of the Jeep. "Where you been? Scared me half to death—"

Matt took a cautious step away from his father. Jack Richards, drunk and regretful, wiped a hand up the side of his neck and tore his hat from his head. "I know, boy." He said it like a secret. Like a thing they both knew and wouldn't speak of. "I know." When Matt wouldn't give him a word, Jack fanned himself with his hat and stuck it back on his head. "Listen. Fred dropped off the beef. Stocked your freezer, but...I can put it out in the shed."

"It's fine," Matt said. "Leave it."

As he started toward the guest house, Jack barred out an arm. "Can we talk? About the other day, I—"

"I don't wanna talk to you." Matt shoved his arm away. "I just wanna sleep."

Jack lowered his sunken eyes and Matt left him there, slumped solitary in the wash porch lights.

He entered the guest house, but stayed only long enough to shower off the stink of his sweaty past few nights in the Wrangler, then Matt let all his instinctual wants carry him to Bailey's barn. As he cracked the door open, he was surprised to find that single bulb shining from the rafters.

Maybe it was Bailey, back to collect his things. His chest lurched a little at the possibility. Maybe he was still here.

Matt stepped inside and shut the door soundly behind him.

"I was wondering when you'd show up."

Matt jumped, slamming himself against the barn door with a resounding rattle.

"Aren't you skittish?" Gabe appeared from the upstairs loft, arms crossed over the railing, chin rested atop them, model-esque and daydreamy.

"The hell are you doing here?" Matt asked.

"Delivery," Gabe said, tossing down a flash of black and white. Matt caught the flurry of flipping pages in his hand, recognizing the metal bindings and the abstract sketches inside. "Don't ask because I don't have any answers for you." Gabe slumped down the steps toward him and withdrew a note from his pocket—written on a page clearly torn from the book. "Don't tell him I gave you this. I've got a pretty face—I'd like to avoid any potential scarring."

Matt took the note and opened it to an address written in small, discrete cursive. "What is this?"

"An opportunity," Gabe said. He slid down the final step and stood within a foot of Matt, dimpled jaw smirking. "So you're the hero, huh?"

Matt didn't know what to say. He watched the knowing glaze in Gabe's eyes lift off of him. Then the tiny wolf brushed by, left through the barn door before Matt could utter a sound. The door shut so softly behind him, Matt wondered if it was another figment. Another ghost in his head.

The book in his hands felt as real as ever, though. So folding the address into his pocket, Matt climbed the stairs to the loft to get a look in better lighting.

He cracked open the book beneath the LED Christmas lights that draped the loft wall. Within the pages were dozens of those strange, abstract sketches. They were chaotic and meaningless—random shapes and strange shading, but as he flipped through them, he noticed the way their edges met. If he folded the page, he could line them up perfectly.

Matt found a roll of electrical tape on his dad's old tool shed and tore the pages out of Bailey's sketchbook, piecing them together like a puzzle. For every page that matched, he stuck it to the wall with a loop of tape, then he lined up another sketch to its edges.

In moments, those silly, nothing-sketches became wrinkles in clothing and locks of mussy hair, a nose, an eye, freckles and eyebrows. The birthmark on the side of his chin.

He slumped to his knees at the portrait of himself, pieced together by fifty pages of methodical puzzle-piece sketches. He was looking away in the image, but Matt knew his own face. He knew the way his brows quirked when he was in thought and the way his hair never sat right. His heart beat like a fist, fierce and afraid. All this time, these sketches were of him. All this time.

There was Bailey's ghost again, slumped against the wall in his save a horse t-shirt.

I draw the things that make me feel alright.

Matt felt something crack inside. He wanted to rip the pages apart, to destroy every shred, every piece of puzzle. Why had he said that? No one wants you. It was such a stupid thing, it was such a lie. He wanted to tear apart that beautiful portrait. He didn't deserve it. He didn't want it. He couldn't do it.

He gripped at his hair, gripped and pulled. A million images crushed him, a million ghosts on his skin. The itchy hay beneath his back, the edges of Bailey's fist in his gut. His grin that night they laid in the dirt, watching the skies and hating the world. The bruises on his face, the wet dung on the back of his neck. The hands that burned a searing hole in his heart, the tears that rushed him when he hit the loft floor. The anger, the fire, the want, the need.

The need.

He shoved himself back, pressed against the railing of the loft, hands fisted in his shower-wet hair. He hadn't noticed his cut, ragged breath until he was wheezing and his shirt suddenly felt too tight around the neck. Until tears pricked his eyes and the sound became something more than just himself. He grabbed at his chest and gripped the railing and begged his breath to come.

It didn't.

And it didn't.

And it didn't.

His flesh prickled, hot and cold and everything in between. Then darkness clouded his vision until the walls and the portrait faded, and the dark clustered blackness ate at the world around him, and there was nothing. Nothing but the empty dark.

A light burst on.

Raven sat beneath a swaying, naked bulb, the light casting pale shadows on his square face and the dirt stuck to his skin. He wore the same uniform as the day Matt saw him in the passenger seat of the Wrangler. "Do you know why I died?" he asked.

Matt found himself surrounded by nothing. There was no earth beneath his feet, no wall behind his back. No ceiling from which the light illuminating Raven's handsome face hung from.

"We're in your head, Cupcake. Surprised it's so empty? So was I."

A chair slid from the vat blackness and punched Matt in the back of his buckling knees.

"Sit down," Raven said, gentle smile turned wicked in the shade of that swinging light. "Let me tell you."

Slowly, Matt slumped into the imaginary chair, in the dark, empty room, inside of his own head. And the moment he hit the cold metal seat, images came to him in fast, successive flashes. Muddy uniforms and mud brick houses laid to waste on a landscape long bereft of life. Hot sun and distant gunfire—whispers and curiosity. Four American soldiers and a tiny Afghan girl in the black shadows of a shambled home. Screaming. Rapid fire. Blood.

Four dead soldiers and a tiny Afghan girl in the black shadows of a shambled home.

Raven's voice grazed him deeper and deeper as Matt returned to that black room in his head.

"They deserved it. All of them."

"I know," Matt said. He hadn't seen it—he'd only had those sparse few flashes—but somehow he knew. He felt sick. Was it possible to feel sick in a dream?

"I had quick aim, you know. The best in my regiment. Put a gun in my hands and point out a man and I could shoot 'em square between the eyes. Doesn't matter if it's a pistol or a sniper rifle. Square between the eyes. She couldn't have been older than thirteen, had her by the skirt when I walked in."

"And they killed you?" Matt asked.

"Well, not the dead ones," said Raven. His grin broke free of his dust—dry lips. "Got those suckers square between the eyes."

"Do you regret it?"

"No," he said, without a moment of thought. "That's why my wolf brought me to you, Hero.

"I'm getting tired of people calling me that."

"But it's true, isn't it? You'd rather take a hundred bullets to the chest than to sit by and watch four grown men hurt a child. Am I wrong?"

"No."

"Not a drop of hesitation," he said, "so what's holding you back now?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the little boy in those photos," Raven said. He stood now, blocking out the light of the swinging bulb. Matt was taken aback by how tall he was—a statuesque shadow, cut from fierce-bleeding light. His boots cracked against the nothing-floor as Raven paced around him. His presence felt of ice—cold fingers gripping the back of his chair and chilling Matt at the nape. "I can help you get him back. Like I helped the woman in the sedan."

Matt swallowed, arms goose-fleshed. "What if he doesn't want to come back?"

"What if he does?" whispered Raven in his ear, so close now, the icy blow of his breath swept Matt's cheek. "What if he's waiting for you? What if you're too late?"

The thought put a difficult lurch in his chest.

"What do you want?" asked Raven. "To sit here and do nothing?"

"No."

"Then do something," said Raven. "Why won't you do something?"

He thought of the night he met Rico and his massive size—of the way he lifted him by the scalp and sent him into a wall. That's what he would face for the sake of finding Bailey—and who was to say he even wanted to come back?

"I'm scared," he admitted.

"Would you kill for him?"

"I'm not the hero everyone says I am. That's you. I didn't do any of that shit, I—"

"Would you kill for him?"

Matt felt like weeping. Kill? Would he kill? Would he have to? "I don't know."

"Would you let me kill for him?"

There was something hungry in the way he said it that made Matt whip around to look at him. That smile was too certain—those steely, frozen eyes gutting him open. "You enjoy killing," Matt realized. "You like it, don't you?"

"I like watching bad men burn," said Raven. "Should I burn them?"

Matt's heart thundered over the sound of Raven's voice. He was a murderer. A black knight. He killed bad people, but he still killed. There had to be another way.

"They're hurting him," whispered Raven.

"Stop."

"They're gonna take him away."

"Stop!"

"I can't," Raven said in his ear. "I can't stop it here in your head. Let me out."

"How?" Matt asked, tears on the rims of his eyes. "How do I let you out?"

"Go to sleep," Raven whispered. "All you need to do is go to sleep."

Then the light snapped off.

It was nine at night when Raven woke, sprawled on the floor of the loft. He sat up, stretched his arms, then his legs. Cracked his neck and his knuckles and smiled at the stars shining in through the cupola window. It was a beautiful night to kill a man.

He shoved himself to his feet and bounced down the steps with a hum, feeling for the address in his front pocket. The world came alive beneath his fingers. The earth pulsed beneath his boots.

Somewhere in his head, the boy echoed. Words too far gone to catch. The fear rang on—curling from the tallest mountain, clicking from the walls of his mind.

"I know, pal," said Raven. "I know." Though he didn't, and he wouldn't. Raven had never loved a thing in his life.

He slipped out of the barn and made his way toward the guest house with a skip in his step and a song on his lips. He stopped first at the key-ring by the door, snatching the keys to the Wrangler off of the hook. Then Raven danced his way into the kitchen for a beer. The fridge cracked open to a stacked wall of wrapped beef and a single dark malt, stuffed between two wax-paper rolls. He popped the cap off on the counter edge and meandered down the hall, pausing at a mirror to get a look at himself.

The kid was still so young. Freckles and unruly hair—and just a bit of shadow on his chin from days gone unshaved. He slicked his fingers up the wayward curls of his bangs and straightened the collar of his shirt. Then Raven shoved open the closet door and cooed at the sight of a tall, black shotgun case.

With a few pops, it unlatched and he raised the worn leather shell to wake the metal beast that slept beneath. Raven smiled at the glinting metal and smooth wooden grip.

Jack's old Remington shotgun smiled back.