Kevin Walsh came home from the hospital to a new life. If something shattered could be called new.

Bluebell Crescent was no longer the safe place he had grown up in. His neighborhood was like a snow globe village smashed on the bricks. The buildings small and feeble and the protective shell gone forever. But Aunt Gwen said, "You can hardly tell anything happened here."

To Kevin the signs were everywhere. A streamer of yellow police tape snagged on a scarlet sage shrub flapped in the air, when they turned off Warden Rd. The round island in the center of the crescent was crisscrossed with tire tracks, scarring its pristine green plain. The Westgate home had windows covered in plywood. The door was sealed with a sheet of black plastic that billowed as though the house was breathing. In and out. In and out. Slowly. (Just like the doctor had shown him to help his anxiety.) Black dots made spitball splats randomly across the house's exterior.

Although it wasn't the visible marks that made this familiar world so alien. It was the shadow memories overlaying the sunny afternoon. Under the daylight, the night of the attack bled like a marker through newsprint. That's where the ambulance had been. That's where the police officer told him he was brave. That's where mom was lying in her own blood. That's where the monster landed when it leaped from the window.

Aunt Gwen pulled into the driveway. Dad was watching out the window. Kevin had been happy about coming home until that moment. The way dad had to peer up to see from the seat of his wheelchair made him look a little like the Paterson's dog waiting for someone to come home.

Kevin didn't want to see him like that. He also didn't want dad to see him the way he was now: a coward. A whiny little kid who couldn't sleep if the light was off.

Who was he kidding? A whiny baby who started crying and trembling whenever the lights went out.

Kevin also didn't like that coming home meant leaving his mom. He suddenly understood how Ryan Kimball felt. His parents were divorced and he spent the weekends with his dad and school days with his mom.

You can have half your life now and the other half later, but you can never have it all together again.

They said he could visit mom when he went for his therapy sessions. (Which would be most days for the foreseeable future.) His doctor had an office at the same hospital. And who knew? Maybe one day mom would get to come home too.

"Are you going to be okay, slugger?" Aunt Gwen asked.

Kevin smiled and nodded.

A false smile. A lying nod. Even at the age of nine, he was mastering the art of hiding his feelings. That was one thing grown up about him at least.

Nothing was ever going to be okay—ever. He didn't care what that man from the government said or the people on the news kept repeating. It wasn't an animal that had killed the Westgates. It had been a monster.

He knew because it had left its mark on him. Left a scar right across his soul.

Coyotes couldn't do that.

***

It was visiting day at the hospital and Kevin was anxious to see mom. It would be the first time she came by since the doctors had told him he'd be home for Christmas. (Just like that depressing song they played in the hallways.)

Art therapy was usually his favorite part of the day but this morning he couldn't wait for it to end so he could go up to the lounge and look out for mom's Tacoma to come up the long drive from the gate house. The other children were working on Christmas drawings, pathetically childish things with Santa and fir trees and piles of presents. Kevin was filling in the last empty spaces on a large sheet of bristle board he started a week ago.

It had begun like all his drawings with a mark roughly dead center. Just a dot that became an eye, then a horse rearing up. On its back was a knight brandishing a sword. Behind him were two more figures on horseback: a man whose face was covered in a cloak with a bow on his back and a woman with long pointed ears wearing form fitting armor. In front of the knight, a narrow bridge spanned a chasm to a decrepit keep. The sky was turning black as foul beast spilled out of the moon in a spiral. They flocked like bats becoming clearer as they neared the adventurers, until the one over the knights head could be seen distinctly as a winged fiend with a maw of viscous teeth and talons dripping poison.

Some of the other kids didn't like Kevin's drawings, but Dr. Brenda said they were positive. She said empowerment fantasies were good for him at this stage. Good conquering evil and Kevin slaying his demons were the things he should be exploring.

She asked him if the creatures in his drawing where from his nightmares. He told her he didn't have nightmares anymore.

It was true. No nightmares. No dreams. The medication saw to that. He'd call his sleep complete blackness, except he had seen complete blackness once and his nights weren't that. (Thank God.) They were more like smothering grayness. And now that the dosage had been adjusted, his days weren't so smothered anymore and they were letting him go home.

What he said to Dr. Brenda about not having nightmares was avoidance, but she was nice today and didn't call him out on it. Just because he didn't have nightmares anymore didn't mean he had forgotten the creatures that lurked there. (Or specifically: The Creature.) The monsters he put in his art were terrible, horrific things, but it was never that one particular horrific thing. He refused to dare fate by mentioning it in any way. Even in his thoughts, he didn't look at it directly. He avoided its gaze as though it were the Medusa.

When the session was over and Dr. Brenda and her assistant had looked over his work, he ran up the two flights of stairs to the lounge. It made him dizzy. Kevin had never been very athletic but the pills he took made it feel like there was a belt pulled tight across his chest whenever he pushed himself.

He entered the lounge breathing hard. No one noticed. The half dozen other patients were watching some cartoon on a flat screen. A golden statue was talking with a bird and a British narrator was explaining it. Kevin avoided the entertainment area. This time of day it was all the little kids. Greg Boyle was caught watching TV with them once and now everyone called him Baby Boy-L. Kevin wasn't going to make that mistake, even if his days at Laird Center were numbered.

The lounge had a big Christmas tree, not real like the one they'd have at home. And the ornaments were all handmade from craft classes going back who knew how long. Hanging on it were crude reproductions of toys he only vaguely remembered from when he was younger, and some he had no idea about at all.

When his mom asked him what he wanted for Christmas, he was going to tell her: a subscription to World of Warcraft. But what he really wanted was to see the third Hobbit movie. He'd seen the second one for the umpteenth (and last) time just after his tenth birthday, then he was admitted at Laird. Going to the movies was a pretty lame gift, but he knew mom was struggling with money. So he'd pretend to settle for that along with the usual presents of clothes and underwear. Besides he kind of knew mom would never get him the game. Dad would, but Kevin would only be able to play it when he saw dad at his new apartment on weekends.

Kevin knelt on the couch by the big picture window and looked out, his nose hovering less than an inch from the glass.

Any minute he'd see his mom's truck. There was no way she'd forget to come again.

***

Mom barely acknowledged him when he went out. She was lying on the sofa with the TV droning on half watching some celebrity gossip show pretending to be news or some news show pretending to be celebrity gossip (Kevin wasn't sure which). The glass on the table next to her was fogged from the ice. Her second vodka tonic of the night. She'd had a long day and skipped dinner going for the bottle instead when she got home. But it wasn't the alcohol that gave her eyes the glassy dull stare so much as the Xanax and her insomnia.

Kevin closed the door quietly behind him. Whenever he felt sorry for himself and how some mutant coyote derailed his life, he just had to think of mom. She'd never been the same. After undergoing three operations to repair the damage done by the bullet in the base of her skull and nine months of physio, she had returned home a shadow of who she was. It reminded Kevin of the ringwraiths (but mom wasn't evil). She was listless and never entirely present. Dad couldn't take it and split.

Having to see dad only on weekends was okay at first. But only at first.

Visiting dad was like going on a vacation: day trips, video games, presents, hot food, and clean cloths. But then mom had to go in for another operation and the vacation lasted four months and it wasn't such a vacation anymore. (Not by a long shot.) Dad was more than happy to be a fun dad in small doses, but had no interest in the full-time job.

To be fair, he was fighting his own monsters. It wasn't like mom and the self-medication. Instead, his bore him into the raw wilderness of emotion. Laughter and tears and anger. Then slaps and punches. Then tears and back to laughter. One rollicking rollercoaster of unpredictable hell.

When Kevin went home, those weekend vacations pretty well ended, as though all three of them had decided it was a bad idea without ever saying a word.

Nowadays, Kevin didn't begrudge mom her doctor prescribed (and liquor store enhanced) highs. How could he? The shooting had been his fault. If he had been home in bed like he was supposed to be, her and dad would never have gone outside during the attack. They would never have run into the line of fire as Mr. Ass-face Bryson emptied his assault rifle. Mom would never have had to relearn to talk. She never would've had to leave her job as an accountant because she couldn't concentrate without getting a headache. She wouldn't be working two jobs as a checkout clerk because no one wanted to give her enough hours to pay out benefits. Mom and dad would still be married and life might resemble one of those corny sitcoms.

No, she was entitled to her Xanax and her Stoli. Kevin was just happy he was finally off the meds and could see straight again.

Evening cloaked the sky except for a thin scrap at the horizon. That deep black night with its impenetrable shadows used to send him into a panic. He wasn't proud of his delusions and he was less proud about how he hung onto them. He could still remember how he used to think the doctors were trying to trick him. Like there really were monsters and they wanted to make him forget the truth.

Passing the old Bryson house, he had the urge to spit or throw a rock through the picture window (like he did that one time). But now a family named Ravichandran lived there and they hadn't done anyone any harm.

There were no monsters. Just ass-holes and rabid animals. When he was sixteen, Kevin was going to buy himself a gun and kill them all. The fucking coyotes, that was. Well, maybe a few assholes too. (If they got in his way.)

He walked the two miles, in the cold, to the corner of Mercy Ave. and Grant where he met up with Ryan and Marcos. They greeted one another with palm slapping and trash talk like gangster geeks. They were all heading over to the hump day D&D session at Hector Pryde's place. Hect ran mini-campaigns to blow off steam (as he put it) between the power sessions on the weekends.

There were those that said playing Dungeons and Dragons put Kevin in the most socially outcast clique in middle-school. But his popularity was non-existent before, so he didn't see how it made things any worse. At least now he had a tribe. He had people he could talk to about the books he read and who appreciated the art he drew.

Hect ran the game and provided the space. It was up to the others to get the snacks, so they headed down the block to the 7-Eleven to stock up.

They were laughing and joking as they walked into the bright glare and warmth of the convenience store. Kevin was feeling blissfully at peace with the universe in one of those rare instances when his troubles were forgotten.

Then he saw the dead girl.

***

Kevin was running. Marcos had tried to talk him down but his words were lost under the rush and roar of reality being sucked out of the room.

He knew the doctor's would say he had just made a mistaken—a small trick of memory. The girl in the 7-Eleven was really a stranger. She wasn't Amy Westgate (his first crush). It was just someone who looked like her. That's what made sense. But he knew what he saw. He'd grown up with her, studied he. Hell, he damn near stalked her in his prepubescent way.

Every one of the Westgate family had died, while Kevin stood on and watched. Then he had seen the horrible monster—no! He had seen the coyote that had killed them. (Monsters didn't exist in the real world.)

But what about in a world where the dead come back to life...

Kevin couldn't explain to his friends why he was so scared. He wasn't afraid of her, of Amy. If anything she was even more beautiful than ever. She even had some goth, Daenerys Targaryen, sort of thing going on with her hair. What scared him was having to go back to therapy and back to the meds. What if they sent him back to the Laird Children's Center for Mental Wellness?

Kevin roamed around town for hours pushing himself further into the chill night, abandoning the streets for the wildness neighboring civilization, daring the darkness to scare him as it did when he was a child. Branches whipped his arms. A spider's web left sticky-itchy streaks across his face. He knew he was heading vaguely toward the water tower and the cemetery. Snow was falling. Maybe it was another delusion. Maybe he was crossing through to some Narnia-Hoth-NorthoftheWall world with each step.

The trees thickened until he was pushing past waves of leaves with his arms in front of his face for protection.

Then he was out in the open. And she was there too. And he knew it had to be a hallucination. She was naked. Dead and buried Amy Westgate was stark naked in front of him. It had to be some twisted fantasy dredged up from his fractured subconscious.

Before he could decide to embrace this delusion or run from it, the naked girl shimmered. A staccato film-effect of jittering flesh. Skin and bone melted and reformed into the murderous creature he'd seen four years ago.

***

Kevin was looking out at the sky through the wire reinforced windows more than he was reading. The book in his hands was a fantasy novel from a writer he had never heard of before. It was the only one of the genre in the hospital's limited library he hadn't read. It was all very much the same: elves, dwarves, chosen ones, yadda-yadda-yadda. Usually rehashes didn't bother him. There was a comfort to sameness, like all the books were somehow linked. He even sought out fan-fiction of his favorite series online to have more of the same things he liked. But this one wasn't doing it for him. The names seemed too silly. (Philidaleria, seriously? Would they visit Pittsburghonia perhaps?) The character were too wooden and the endless expository of the history of made-up rulers of made-up lands made him feel like sleeping.

Maybe it was just his mood. Maybe it was the medication they had him on.

The common room was quiet for an afternoon, except for the TV, which had some talk show on. A panel was interviewing an actress who looked vaguely familiar. Perhaps he'd seen her in some action movie recently. The dress she wore showed lots of cleavage. The absolute-nothing he felt about the sight proved how strong the new pills were.

The nurse came over to him—the overweight one with the frizzy black hair, not the cute Latina one he was pretending to have a crush on (like he could muster an emotion under this blanket of pharmacology). She crossed the room as if in a slow motion glide, on a rail from the swinging doors straight to the chair where he sat. By the time she spoke, it felt as though hours had passed while he waited for her.

"Hi Kevin. Your therapist has come by to see how you're doing. Isn't that nice for him to come all this way? Would you like to come with me? I could take you to him?"

The nurses always phrased their statements in the form of questions. Was it because of the amount of Jeopardy they heard in the background as they worked? Or were the patients more compliant if they felt they had a choice?

He was ushered out of the common room, Devon, the kid with the screaming fits, gave him a long, envious stare with his droopy, sad eyes. Then Kevin was led down the hall to a private area. The compact space was filled with two easy chairs and a coffee table so it wouldn't too closely resemble an interrogation room. The nurse had already closed the door behind him before Kevin realized he had never seen the man waiting for him in his entire life.

He wore a navy blue suit with a nondescript blue tie. There as a tiredness in his face that was the same as the one carried by most of the patients here. His hair was a thinning reddish-brown, with streaks of pale scalp showing through.

"You're not my therapist."

"That's right, Kevin. I'm not a therapist or a doctor of any kind."

"Oh." He hadn't expected that. Now what?

"Sorry for the ruse. But it was the only way to get to see you. Please sit down. I have come here to make you an offer that will change your life."

Kevin felt like he should be more surprised by this. There should be an alarm ringing in his head that this was not right, but he only greeted it with indifference. He sat down noting that there was an officiousness to the man that was familiar. Kevin remembered back to an interview a long time ago. The investigator for a government agency he had never heard of before (or since) had questioned him about the night his family was shot. The night his neighbors were killed. The night Amy...

At the thought of her, Kevin felt everything shutting down like someone walking through an empty house turning out the lights. Some time later, he was drawn back by the droning voice of this man—this government man, who wasn't the same government man as before.

Kevin tuned into the conversation like a television show already in progress. He had missed a lot. The man had introduced himself and had spoken about his employer. Now he was talking about his offer and it made no damn sense at all.

"We understand that it's asking a lot at your age but this may be the best and only way for you to turn your misfortune into a positive. It will be hard to leave your family behind. And I will be honest, you may never see them again. But if you're worried about your mother, she will receive compensation should you accept. Enough to pay off the medical bills and ensure she will never have to work again."

"What are you talking about?"

"Very few people have seen this creature and have lived to tell about it. We believe that makes you special. Kevin, there is a war coming and you have a valuable role to play in it."

"Is this some kind of joke? It was a delusion. Just ask anyone. Monsters don't exist."

"I don't need to ask anyone." He reached beside his chair to a briefcase. Carefully he withdrew a manila envelope. Inside the envelope there was a single photograph. It was placed down on the coffee table between them.

Kevin's mind circled around it noting the qualities of the object and ignoring the contents. It was black and white with a white border. It looked old and not just because it wasn't in color. There was a patina to it. The light from the window reflected in the sheen on the image but it wasn't even, as though the finish had worn off in places from age and handling. But despite this, it looked crisp, pristine, well taken care off.

"This is the creature you saw," the man stated as fact. "Well, not the exact creature but one like it.  This was taken in 1938."

No, it wasn't Amy. The fur was too dark. But yes that was the thing staring at him in his nightmares.

"Look, I have a daughter who is almost your age and I can't think of anything more heartbreaking than if she were to leave us. If you say no, I can perfectly understand it and I will pass along your regrets to my employer. But you need to understand if you stay here, you will be pumped full of drugs and be forced to sit through never-ending counseling as these doctors try and convince you what you know is real is just a fantasy. If you come with me, you will be with people who know the truth and who will help you not just face your fear but fight it."

***

Kevin was surprised how quickly things moved after he said yes to the man.

There was some discussion with the hospital administrators before he was allowed to set off for the private clinic. Only they didn't end up going to another clinic. They went to the airport and got on a private jet.  Hours later, the weight of the meds were lifting (the man had tossed them in a trash can at the airport) and they were landing in a city. All the lights of the buildings made it look like something magical—an elvish land made up of nothing but ethereal lights towering into the sky.

The man drove him through the traffic and noise, through an air thick with foreign energy. Kevin's questions were as dense as the crowds. What are they doing? What's that? Why is that there? The jet might as well have landed in an alternate dimension it was so different from Odessa, Texas.

Then they were travelling in darkness, moving subterranean into a parking garage. Then back up into the sky in a golden elevator to an empty office as vast as his school's gymnasium. It felt like trespassing crossing the deserted space, and he kept up with the man, almost fearing his guide would disappear if Kevin let too much distance get between them. The night sky outside the windows was black except for the illuminated Statue of Liberty standing majestic like some ancient monument to a forgotten god.

"Right this way," the man said directing Kevin to a large wooden door.

It opened up to another realm, yet again. Heavy wood timbers held up the roof of an ancient hall of heroes. The smell of burn and smoke filled his head. Oil lamps flickered a soft glow. Out of the darkness stepped a tall man who looked exactly like a knight from one of the covers of his books in modern clothes. He was broad of shoulder. The sleeves of his white shirt was rolled up revealing powerful (and hairy) forearms. His teeth were brilliant and his smile was at once regal and comforting, as it flashed above his neatly trimmed, blond beard.

"Kevin Walsh," he said. "What a pleasure it is to meet you. My name is Walter. There is much to teach you and no time to lose. Come." He beckoned Kevin deeper into the keep, past the prow of a ship and the spoils of war. "Tell me squire, have you ever wielded a sword before."

He hadn't but he anxious to learn.