The world turned inside out. She felt her name peel off her like a second skin— Haylo tumbling into the void, Kiss flowering in the thing’s chest. For one eternal second, she was nothing but the space between heartbeats.
And then Haylo Kiss stepped out of the circle.
It stepped closer. The salt sizzled. The thing paused, then smiled without a mouth. “The kiss was never yours to give, Haylo. It was mine to take. You’ve carried my name since birth. Now I’ve come to collect the debt.”
“I’m not giving you anything.”
Haylo Kiss kicked the salt aside and walked down the ladder. The north pasture was quiet. The stars were coming out. And for the first time in fifteen years, the dark held nothing she hadn’t chosen to keep.
She raised the shotgun. “You took my sheep.”
Her family’s farm sat in a hollow of the Ozarks, a place where cell signals died and the nearest neighbor was a three-mile walk through poison ivy and prayer. For fifteen years, Haylo had worked the land: mending fences, slopping hogs, and learning the particular silence of a starless night. But last autumn, the silence broke. Haylo Kiss
Her father, a man of hard hands and harder whiskey, blamed rustlers. Her mother, who read her Bible by candlelight, blamed the end of days. Haylo blamed neither. She knew what she’d seen on the third night of the disappearances: a shape that walked on two legs but bent like a broken wishbone, its skin the color of mud and moonlight. It had stopped at the edge of the hayloft’s shadow. And then it had kissed the air—a wet, smacking sound—and the nearest ewe had simply dissolved into mist.
“Now you belong to me.”
Haylo Kiss had never been afraid of the dark. She was afraid of what the dark hid. The world turned inside out
She understood then, with the cold clarity of a girl who has mended too many fences in the dark. The name Haylo Kiss wasn’t a warning. It was a receipt. Her grandmother hadn’t given her the name to protect her. She’d given it to pay for something—a bargain struck before Haylo drew her first breath.
Now, at seventeen, Haylo stood in that same hayloft, a shotgun in her hands and a circle of salt around her boots. The moon was a thumbnail paring. The thing was back.
Then she stepped back.
“Haylo,” it breathed. Not a question. An introduction returned.
“I take what is given,” it said. “Your father left the gate unlatched. Your mother prayed for a sign. The sheep were… collateral.”