The storm cleanup at Ochsner Medical Center-Bayou Mounds ran through Tuesday morning. Maintenance had been pulling branches off the loading dock since six, and the parking structure on the east side was still blocked off while facilities assessed a section of the drainage system that had backed up during the worst of it. Inside the pharmacy, things were running normally by eight-thirty.

  Karen finished logging the Tuesday controlled-substance count and pushed the clipboard across the counter toward the secured cabinet. She’d been in since seven, always forty minutes ahead of everyone else—her usual routine. The pharmacy, before the foot traffic, offered quiet; she moved through the morning’s receiving and reconciliation without anyone stopping her with questions.

  Paul Harris came in at eight forty-five carrying a box of beignets from the place on Decatur Street, which meant he either wanted something or had good news. With Paul, it was usually both.

  “Before anybody says anything,” he said, setting the box on the break table and lifting the lid, “yes, I drove forty minutes for these, and yes, it was worth it.”

  Michelle Warner looked up from her workstation. “Those better not be the ones with the powdered sugar that gets on everything.”

  “They are exactly those ones.”

  “Paul.”

  “Michelle.”

  She got up and took one anyway.

  Karen washed her hands at the sink and walked over. Paul was already into his second, powdered sugar on his scrub top, looking entirely unbothered. Carl Sims came through the back door with his bag still on his shoulder, read the room, and walked straight to the box without saying a word.

  “All right,” Paul said, brushing his hands together over the trash, “I need everybody’s attention for thirty seconds.”

  “You’re leaving,” Carl said.

  “What? No.”

  “You’re getting promoted and leaving.”

  “Nobody’s leaving. Will you let me talk?” Paul pulled his phone from his pocket and turned the screen around. It showed a photo of a two-story red-brick house with a covered front porch and two oak trees in the front yard, wide enough that the canopy over the walkway touched the ground. “Gwen and I closed on Friday. Before the storm, thank God, because the last thing I needed was to be the new homeowner calling my agent about water damage on day one.”

  Karen took the phone and looked at the photo. The house sat on a quiet street, neighbors visible on both sides, the kind of block that had been there long enough for the trees to grow into each other. “Paul. That’s a real house.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Cypress Ridge. The new development off the 308 corridor. Four bedrooms, two and a half baths, the yard Gwen has been describing to me in detail for three years.”

  Michelle leaned over Karen’s shoulder to look at the photo. “Is that a wraparound porch?”

  “Partial. But Gwen’s already got plans for the rest of it.”

  Carl looked at the photo from across the table without moving closer. “How much?”

  “Carl.”

  “I’m asking because I’m curious about the market, not because I’m judging you.”

  “Three-forty. Which is reasonable for what it is and where it sits, before you say anything.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  “You had a face.”

  “I always have a face.” Carl picked up another beignet. “Congratulations. Genuinely.”

  Karen handed the phone back. “When’s the housewarming?”

  “That’s the other thing.” Paul tucked the phone back in his pocket. “Gwen wants to do it before the month is out. She’s already contacted a caterer, and I’ve been told my only job is to invite people. So, Saturday the twenty-sixth. All three of you. Spouses, partners, whoever you want to bring.”

  “I’m in,” Karen said.

  Michelle pulled her phone out to check her calendar. “Twenty-sixth. Yeah, I can make that work. What time?”

  “Six o’clock. Dress code is whatever makes you comfortable, Gwen’s words. She said specifically don’t let people stress about the dress code.”

  “Tell Gwen I said that’s the right call,” Karen said.

  Carl folded his arms across his chest. “Is this going to be a situation where I’m there for an hour and it feels like three, or is it going to be a real party?”

  “Carl, I’ve seen you at Dr. Reyes’s retirement thing. You stayed until eleven-thirty and started two separate conversations about the Saints' secondary.”

  “That was different. I had opinions.”

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  “You always have opinions. Come to my housewarming and have them there.” Paul closed the beignet box and picked it up. “I’ll put out beer. You’ll have a good time.”

  “Fine.” Carl stood and pulled his bag off his shoulder toward his locker. “But I’m leaving at nine.”

  “Noted and accepted.

  Sheryl had taken three days off. Her department head had encouraged her to do so, and she had accepted without the argument she would usually have put up.

  She needed the rest.

  She spent her first day on what her house had needed for months: laundry, clearing storm gutters, and calling the electrician about the warm bathroom outlet. restorative.

  Derek came by the second afternoon straight from campus, backpack on one shoulder, wearing the look he wore when he’d been sitting through lectures that required him to keep his opinions to himself.

  “How’s the school year?” Sheryl asked, handing him a glass of sweet tea.

  “Twelve months left.” He sat at the kitchen table and stretched his legs out. “I can see the finish line, which helps.”

  “What’s after?”

  “Something close, ideally. New Orleans, Baton Rouge, somewhere I don’t have to relocate for. Cybersecurity work’s not hard to find.”

  “And if nothing comes through locally?”

  “Then Sumlin. Devin Stone’s been talking about a full-time position at SDC. Tactical security contracts, some federal work. It’s not what I pictured, but it’s solid.”

  Sheryl sat across from him. “Stone Defense. Olivia’s contact.”

  “Yeah. He’s competent. Private about most of what he runs, which honestly makes more sense for that field.”

  “And if that doesn’t work out?”

  “Officer Candidate Program. My degree now makes me eligible for the Army’s OCP. I’ve looked into it.”

  Sheryl turned her glass in her hands. “You’d go back?”

  “As an officer, it’s different. More authority over what I’m actually doing.” He looked at her. “I’m not going back as a grunt. That’s not what I’m describing.”

  “I hear you.” She got up and checked the window. The afternoon was grey but calm, nothing left over from the storm. “If you end up in Sumlin, keep yourself grounded. That city’s built for people who don’t ask too many questions, and I don’t want you becoming one of them.”

  “You know me, I’d always ask the questions.” He opened the fridge and looked at its contents. “What’s for dinner?”

  “I was going to say leftovers.”

  “No.”

  “Derek.”

  “Strong no, mum.”

  “Then order something.”

  “Pizza. I’m ordering pizza.”

  “The tab’s yours.”

  He called the order in, they moved to the living room, and Sheryl pulled up the true crime series they’d been watching in installments since October. The pizza arrived forty minutes later, and they ate on the couch while a cold case detective from Ohio walked the camera through a cornfield where a set of remains had been found in 1987.

  Karen had texted Sheryl earlier about the housewarming at Paul’s new place, and Sheryl had written back that she’d go if she wasn’t on call. Derek had fallen asleep by episode two, head against the arm of the couch, plate balanced on his chest. Sheryl moved it to the coffee table, turned the volume down, and kept watching.

  Outside, the moon was three-quarters full, and the yard was quiet.

  Meanwhile, Karen got home at six-fifteen, changed into leggings and an oversized shirt, and opened a bottle of cabernet she’d been saving for a night that required it. She poured a glass, took it to the living room, and turned on the television to a reality competition show she watched without much investment, mostly for the background noise.

  Her two-bedroom was ten minutes from the hospital and near the local commercial strip. She'd lived there four years, had a helpful neighbor, and a routine that fit her.

  She curled her legs under her on the couch and checked her phone. A text from Michelle with a screenshot of the Zillow listing for Paul’s new house and three fire emojis. A reminder from her gym about a class on Thursday morning. A voicemail from her mother she’d listen to later.

  She poured a second glass just after nine and put on a different show, something older, a procedural she’d seen before, chosen because familiar was easier than new on nights when her brain had already done enough. The wine was smooth, the couch was comfortable, and the television did what it was supposed to do.

  The window on the east side of the room shattered inward.

  Karen sprang off the couch before she even processed the sound. Glass sprayed across the hardwood and the rug. She stumbled back against the loveseat, bare feet missing the glass by two inches.

  From below the cushion where she’d been sitting, two hands closed around her wrists.

  Black-furred, wide across the palm as a dinner plate, each finger longer than her forearm. They came up through the seat cushions as though the furniture were air and closed on her wrists with a grip that compressed tendon against bone. She pulled against them and got nothing. She planted her feet, threw her weight backward, and got nothing.

  Through the broken window, it stepped inside.

  Eight feet tall, black fur across every surface, shoulders too wide for the window frame, which gave under the pressure of its passage with a crack of splitting wood. It ducked under the frame and stood up inside her living room, and looked at her.

  Its eyes were green, not the pale green of cheap colored contacts or a camera filter, but a deep, saturated green that put its own light on the fur around the eye sockets and turned the darkness around it into shapes.

  Karen’s chest was moving fast and shallow. She could hear herself making sounds she’d never made before, a high, pressurized keening that her own throat was producing and that she had no control over.

  The creature looked at her for a long moment, tilting its head, and then it spoke.

  “Do you believe now?”

  Karen’s knees buckled. The hands below her kept her upright. The creature stepped forward until she could feel the heat from its body and smell the wet earth and pine on its fur, and its jaw opened, and the sound from its throat was below the threshold of what she could process as language anymore, vibrating in her chest and her back teeth.

  One hand closed around her jaw, holding her head still, and the pressure forced her mouth open.

  The creature stepped back. Its body dissolved.

  Not all at once, not the way fire goes out. It dissolved from the edges inward, the outer fur and mass disappearing into a dense black vapor that held the creature’s shape for two seconds and then lost it, collapsing into a roiling column of black smoke that rose to the ceiling and then descended.

  Karen’s mouth was already open from the grip that had been on her jaw. The vapor moved down in a concentrated stream, entering through her mouth and nose in a single continuous flow, and her lungs filled with it before her body could respond.

  The hands on her wrists released. She hit her knees on the hardwood floor, and her hands came up and clawed at her own throat from the outside, fingers scrabbling against skin, finding nothing to grip. Her spine arched forward and then back and then forward again in rhythmic convulsions. A sound rose in the room, coming from inside her chest, low and continuous, the resonance of a frequency her body had not produced before. Foam gathered at the corners of her mouth.

  Her pupils dilated until the brown of her irises disappeared, and then the green came up from behind them like a light switched on in a dark room, filling the entire iris and spreading to the whites in thin, radiating lines.

  Then she fell.

  Face down on the hardwood, arms at her sides, still. The wine glass rolled off the table where she’d knocked it with her elbow on the way down and shattered against the baseboard. The television played its program in the silent room. On the kitchen counter, her phone screen lit up, the name flashing at the top of the incoming call.

  Sheryl.

  The screen pulsed blue three times, four times, five times, and went dark.

  No one picked up.

  Author’s Note

  Family Ties stops easing you back in.