he sat up, he saw Ronnie draped across the foot of his bed, chewing a wad of gum while he flipped through one of his textbooks.
“Rise and shine, your majesty,” the other ghoul said without looking up.
Colt nudged Ronnie’s back with his foot and he rolled off the bed, hitting the floor with a thunk. “Asshole!”
Colt smirked. His head still ached, but at least his mind felt like his own again. He remembered everything that had happened the night before, but it was fuzzy, like a night spent getting trashed. He got out of bed as Ronnie picked himself up off the floor. “How long was I out?”
“About a day.”
“Shit,” Colt snarled. “Have there been any more disappearances?”
“Two,” Ronnie said, growing somber.
“Please don’t tell me they were taken on Junction Road.”
“No, the creep’s moved on. One kid vanished in Narragansett, the other in Providence on the north side.”
“Were they both male?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because so far all the victims have been, and I’m trying to figure out a pattern,” Colt muttered, peeling off his shirt to toss it into his empty hamper. “Other than the abduction locations.”
When Colt turned around, Ronnie’s attention was fixed on the wall. He sighed, pulling on a clean shirt. “Do me a favor and see if my holster’s in one of those boxes,” he said, nodding to the stack he still hadn’t unpacked after his move.
“Doesn’t it bother you that you live in a cardboard horde?” Ronnie asked, digging through the top box. When that proved fruitless, he dropped it on the dresser and started searching through the next one.
“It’s organized chaos.”
“Right,” Ronnie snorted. “Oh my God, what’s this?”
Colt looked up to find Ronnie holding the album his mom had packed with his things when he’d first left home. It was filled with photographs his family had taken themselves, as well as old pictures from other homes. He groaned. “I haven’t seen that in years. Don’t—” He scowled as Ronnie started flipping through the album. “—open that.”
“Holy shit, is that Jason?” Ronnie asked, cackling as he flopped back down on Colt’s bed with the album in his lap.
Colt reluctantly wandered over, peering over his shoulder. The photograph Ronnie found so amusing had been taken during the summer before ninth grade. Jason had convinced Colt to go visit some natural history museum on their last weekend off from school, and they were both wearing T-shirts that said, “I Survived the T-Rex Encounter.” Jason, of course, was making bunny ears and smiling like the smug little shit he was about the fact that he’d hit his growth spurt early and ended up being taller than Colt despite being a couple years younger.
“Yeah, that’s us. Can you just give me that?”
Ronnie held the album away from Colt. “Your hair. It’s got so much gel in it, it looks like icicles sticking up from your forehead.”
“In my defense, that was the style for the discerning tween in 2003.”
“Uh-huh,” Ronnie scoffed, turning to the next page. “Oh my God. Baby Colt! You were so…bald.”
“That’s why I gelled it when it finally came in.”
He flipped to another page where Renee was cutting his birthday cake and smiling at the camera. “No offense, dude, but your mom was kind of hot.”
Colt rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, I saw yours naked by accident once, so I wouldn’t start the MILF war if I was you.”
Ronnie’s lip curled back in a snarl of disgust, and he flipped the page. Colt waited for another jab at his childhood fashion choices, but instead, Ronnie stared at the photograph on the current page as if frozen in horror.
Colt looked closer at the scene of his first foster mother holding him on the boardwalk. He didn’t even remember that day, but Renee had told him it was from his fourth birthday, not long after he’d been picked up. As far as he could tell, there were no ghosts or weird illusions in the background, but the other ghoul’s face was white as a sheet.
“Is that you?”
“Yeah. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of the main character in this book. Or did the cutout letters that spell ‘Colt’ around all the hearts and dinosaurs on the cover not give it away?”
Ronnie finally looked up at him, but there wasn’t a trace of humor in his expression. “I’ve seen you before.”
Colt cocked an eyebrow. “Yeeeeah. Every day now, for the better part of a year. Did you get mindfucked by that freak, too?”
“No, I mean I’ve seen you like this,” Ronnie