Ryder and I are both on our feet a second later.

  “You need to tell us these things!” I shriek.

  But another moment passes, and both Ryder and I realize that we’re not in any immediate danger.

  Do I?

  The fucking Game is being sarcastic.

  I collapse back onto the couch, slouching back with my hands over my face. “Can you at least tell us exactly what sort of monster it is, and where it is?”

  “That would be too easy,” Ryder mumbles.

  I can only scan your immediate area.

  “Told ya.”

  I groan as I sit back up. “Okay. I guess we do this the hard way. Come on, fire mage.” I grab the plastic baseball bat from where I left it beside the couch.

  Ryder lets out a groan of his own, but he extricates the blanket from where it sits tangled around his legs and lights his fire as he follows me.

  The house at night with no lights is creepy, despite it being the house I grew up in. I used to sneak through the side door in high school after staying up past curfew. I knew which stair to skip because it creaked. Midnight snacks, power outages, leaving early in the morning for work on those dark winter days… I’m not a stranger to this house in the dark.

  And yet.

  I lead Ryder first to the laundry room where the side door is, knowing that my mom kept a flashlight there. I can’t flip a light switch, but the cars still turn on, so I hope that a flashlight with a heavy duty 9-volt battery would still power up. I use Ryder’s small flame to locate the thing and breathe a sigh of relief when it turns on. It gives off much more light than Ryder’s little bead of fire. Maybe someday he’ll be able to light a whole room easily, but the kid’s still an entry-level mage.

  With the flashlight in hand, we do a walk-through of the main floor. Nothing in the office off the living room. Nothing in the kitchen or the connected formal dining room. Nothing in the powder room. Nothing in the master bedroom suite that’s off the front hall, taking up the west side of the house. I don’t let him check the closet in the master bedroom. I know my mom’s gone, and I know that we’ve had our differences, but I don’t like the idea of a strange kid going through her clothes.

  It takes me until I’m staring at my parents’ bed to realize there was a part of me that hoped my dad had made it. That when Ryder and I came through the front door, he’d be there waiting, pacing. He was on one of those hybrid work schedules and today was a work-from-home day. He was clacking away at his work computer in the office when Mom and I left for our errand.

  That was only this morning. Feels like a million years ago.

  But there is no dad.

  And there’s no monster, either! I usher Ryder out of the master suite and close the door behind me.

  “Should we check upstairs or downstairs first?” I ask Ryder, because I don’t know how to be impartial about these things. I’m searching my home. For monsters.

  “Down,” he says without hesitating. And without waiting for me to take him to the stairs or to let me lead the way, off he goes.

  They grow up so fast.

  Heading down the stairs into the basement behind Ryder means his shadows move on the walls from the light of the flashlight, and I’m much jumpier. The basement is basically one large room, a bathroom, and an unfinished pantry space that we use as a sort of cold cellar. We go through the main room quickly, checking under the couch and in the drawers of the coffee table. We peek into the bathroom first and finally stand in front of the pantry’s door, hesitating. Ryder grabs the doorknob.

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  “If it’s in here, it’ll probably a mutant mouse or something,” Ryder says, staring at his hand wrapped around the old brass knob. His other hand holds up his little flame. “And if it’s only as mutated as Elsa was, it can’t be that scary.” He looks up at me. “Right?”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself,” I say, “so… Right.”

  He scoffs and turns back to the door. But he still hesitates.

  “Hey, Game? Is there a monster in our immediate area?” I ask aloud, wondering if can tell us that.

  I can only see what you see.

  That is… less than helpful.

  I let out a sigh. “Open the door, Ryder,” I say, and I hoist the flashlight up with one hand and my plastic bat up in the other.

  He opens the door.

  And nothing happens. We step into the pantry and look around. It’s a long and thin space, shelves running along one side. There’s nothing there, other than the extra cans of beans and tomato paste that my mom stored down here.

  A monster is in your immediate area!

  Ryder and I jump, whirl around, but the adrenaline fades faster than it came.

  “There’s nothing here,” Ryder whines, and turns toward me.

  “Look behind the cans,” I suggest, and I reach out to push one aside to do just that.

  A little furry thing launches itself at me.

  I let out a small, very undignified, shriek and swat it away with my hand. My hand that’s holding my baseball bat. I manage to whack myself on the nose with plastic but my hand does make contact with the monster, and the thing is flung against the bare wall and tumbles to the ground.

  It is, indeed, a mutant mouse. It’s about the same size that a common field mouse would be, but its feet and ears are comically large for its body, like a puppy before a growth spurt. The mouse rights itself and looks up at us, letting out a squeak that belongs to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator, not only in how deep the voice is but in that same almost robotic manner.

  It scurries back toward Ryder, wobbling a little on its giant feet, and Ryder scrambles away while looking rapidly between his flame and the mouse. “Just step on it!” I cry, though we’re both in socks and I probably wouldn’t want to do that if our positions were reversed.

  He lets out a repulsed sound—again, don’t blame him—but to his credit, actually tries. The mutant mouse manages to avoid the kid’s foot. It starts heading back toward the shelving, and I know that if we lose it under the lowest shelf, it’ll stay hidden. With a battle cry I didn’t know I had, I throw myself forward and come down on the thing with all my weight as I drop to the floor, bashing my knees into the concrete slab and needing both hands to break my fall. Hands that are currently holding a light, hollow plastic children’s baseball bat and…

  The big, bulky, heavy flashlight comes down on top of the mutant mouse. The little thing explodes into a mush of blood, gore, and bone.

  And splashes onto my face.

  I promptly vomit all over the corpse.

  “Ohmygod, Jane,” Ryder says, and I can’t quite tell if he sounds like he’s about to laugh or to cry. And my face is covered in mutant mouse blood, so I can’t really wipe my eyes to check. “That was so gross.”

  I nod. Yes, yes it was.

  I climb back up to my feet, leaving the flashlight (now broken) and the mouse entrails where it sits. I find a spot on my arm free of mouse offal and use that to wipe at my mouth. The last thing I want is to accidentally ingest any of this. I’m still a little too scared to open my mouth, though, so I think at the game instead: Can you please make this a safehouse now?

  There is still a monster in this dwelling.

  “Oh you gotta be kidding me,” Ryder says—guess he got that notification, too.

  Speaking of notifications, I have one from the Game:

  New Achievement! You’ve killed your first monster!

  It’s not something that fills me with pride. I look over at Ryder and, still afraid to open my mouth, point up. Time to check upstairs.

  The monster up there we find pretty quickly. It’s a spider in the bathroom, making a web Charlotte would be proud of in the shower. The spider’s body is just about the size of my fist, its legs about four or five inches each, but it’s a scrawny thing, and a touch of Ryder’s fire to its web is enough to have the whole thing go up in flames.

  New Achievement! You’ve created your first Safehouse!

  Either this spider ate every single other insect in my house to become this mutated master of the shower, or there are still some living things that haven’t mutated yet. I hope that the creation of the Safehouse means that whatever might remain living in my house doesn’t mutate. Or at least, doesn’t mutate into a monster.

  Though I don’t think a talking spider was the pet that Ryder had in mind.

  I take a shower and wash off the mouse guts. As I’m finishing rinsing off, the hot water tank empties. I kind of forgot that that would happen, and it makes me think of a bunch of other things that we’ll have to do.

  I dry off and put on clean PJs and head back to the den where Ryder’s on the couch playing with his fire. “Come on, kid,” I say. “We have work to do.”