“But I drank responsibly!”
“If I hear you say, ‘I drank responsibly’ again, I’m going to homeschool you for the rest of your life.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I can do anything I want.”
“Then I will tell everyone you’re a vampire! And a killer!”
My mouth fell open. It stayed open for a long, long time.
“I’m sorry, Mommy. I would never do that. Ever.”
“You think I’m a killer?” I finally asked.
Tammy looked away, tears forming in the corners of her eyes. “I...I don’t know, Mommy.”
“You’ve seen me kill,” I thought. “In my memory.”
“Yes. You’ve done it a few times.”
“You shouldn’t be in there, baby. Ever.”
She nodded, which shook free the tears.
I said, “Mommy had to...do what she had to do.”
She kept on shaking her head.
“Baby, I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“It’s okay, Mommy. They were bad men.”
I mentally ran through the horrors of the past few years. Jesus, I thought.
I took in some air. “You need to stay out of Mommy’s thoughts, baby. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Do you promise?”
“I’ll try.” She paused, and what she said next had me laughing harder than it should have. “Now do you see why I was driven to drink?”
When I was done laughing into my hands, tears streaming down my cheeks—and I wasn’t entirely sure if some of those tears weren’t real tears—I grabbed her feet and proceeded to tickle them until she promised to never drink again.
Ever.
Chapter Ten
The Occult Reading Room wasn’t empty.
A man was doing just that: reading in a chair in the far corner, very near the darkest, creepiest of the books. The books that seemed to possess a dark intelligence. The books that seemed, in fact, to be alive.
I heard their whisperings now as the man read. The whisperings sounded more excited than usual. In fact, they hardly seemed to notice me at all. They were, in fact, focused on the man reading.
“You hear them, too, right? The books?” I asked the Librarian, whose real name was Archibald Maximus. He was Max to me sometimes. Or even Archie. Other than my daughter, Max was the only other entity alive who seemed capable of reading my thoughts. He also seemed to have all the answers, which is why I came around. That he was easy on the eyes had nothing to do with it at all. I swear.
“Yes, Sam. I hear them. In fact, I hear all of them.”