Excerpt:

Fox started walking again. A sound made her look up the stairs as she passed them, but she wasn’t even sure what she thought she’d heard. In the family room she plopped onto the battered tan loveseat that faced the TV on its old aquarium stand. She turned on the set, flipped past some dry antiques show on one of the PBS stations and some even more tedious comedy on the networks before she started back at the beginning again. Maybe something interesting had interrupted programming on one of the channels that they picked up decently well, you never knew.

She wasn’t sure how long it was before she heard a soft whisper. The hair stood up on the back of her neck. She’d never known their house to be haunted, but she felt a distinct presence, something there and not friendly. Her heart began to race again. “Is someone here?”

Another soft sound, like a very faint cackle.

“If you’re not friendly, you need to move on. You aren’t welcome here.”

Fox saw a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye. She turned toward it in time to see something black dart along the baseboards, under the massive bookshelf that held the stereo and the old turntable on the other side of the room. There couldn’t be more than an inch clearance between the bottom of the bookcase and the floor, but Fox could sense something watching her, hear a sound like someone whispering just a little too quietly for her to make out the words. She moistened her lips, sat up straighter in her chair.

Before she had decided what to say, something the size and shape of a large python zipped out from under the shelves. She didn’t see a head, just a rope of black as thick as her calf that shot across the floor toward the couch. Then something cold and unlike any snakeskin she had ever felt spiraled around her leg, climbing higher. Its grip was very strong. She started to scream, but it arced across her back, around her arm. It was made of a strange foggy material, whatever it was, and grew broader or fatter or something as it climbed, so that it reached her mouth without releasing her arm. Its touch was like icy silk, and she had a feeling of something squeezing her jaw. The sound died in her throat.

Something like a rat’s face—more like a cloud that looked like a rat’s face, with a long, pointed muzzle and sharp ears, but fuzzy and indistinct—rose out the middle of the ropes of black fog.

“Sss. Hush now,” it said. When she was very young, she had been frightened of mummies after someone told her that they were real people under those bandages. She was afraid that they would talk to her like the old woman in white that her parents never saw did. The mummies’ voices she imagined sounded exactly like this.

“What do you want?” she managed.

It laughed. “We won’t hurt her, won’t hurt her. She knows him, yes?”

The pressure on her jaw released. “No, I… I don’t know you at all, I swear. I don’t know what you think I did, but—"

The long, thick body forked and formed another face, identical to the first. “No, no. Not us,” it said. "Him. The pretty knight, the tall one.” It clutched tiny hands it hadn’t had a moment before together, its scratchy voice rising into a horrible, high-pitched mocking tone. “Wonderful Mister Justice and Good and Light.” A shift of shadows gave it the appearance of wrinkling its lip and it snarled like a dog.

"And she knows the pirate's dog, yes?" asked the other head. "Foolish hats, curly hair, asks too many questions?"

She’d fallen asleep. She must have. Or, or… she didn’t know what. Fallen and hit her head, or breathed something weird when she was out walking around earlier and it was slow to take effect. It was more likely than this.

“What are you?” she asked, hearing the panic in her voice.

They wound figure eights over her shoulder and around her , speaking over each other in the same dry voice. “We are Burke and Hare, Croup and Vandemar, the men with hands of blue, the Cat and the Fox.”

Fox jumped up from the couch. She’d expected it to be heavy or hard from the strength in its coils. The thing had no substance, and she stumbled a little at the lack of resistance. She wasn’t about to complain, though. Catching her balance, she ran back down the hall to the living room. Her hand was on the doorknob before she realized what she was doing. She let go of the knob. Going outside in the dark with that thing after her? Yeah, she’d had nightmares like that. As wrong as it looked in the room, with its forcefully cheery orange-gold paint and the delicate froof around the edges of the narrow old windows, at least in here she could see the thing. There wasn’t any other way out through the living room, but there was room to move. If it came straight for her, she could probably sidestep and get back into the hall. And then do… something. She’d figure that part out when she got there.

The thing followed her, slowly. It moved, she suddenly thought, like a hornet warning something away from its nest, that sort of menacing zig-zag. And it kept up its stream of soft chatter. “We are the ones who are cruel and unstoppable and like their words in your stories. We are the Dyad.”

Dyad? She’d never even heard of a spirit like that before. And so she had no idea how to get rid of it. Fox scrambled around on the bookshelf. Times like this—not that there normally were times like this—she wished that she humored her family enough to keep the rosaries and card-sized images of serious-eyed Christ around. Or that she knew more useful people. Like a priest or something. She had plenty of people to call who’d be able to look it up in some book or tell her how interesting her encounter was, or help her cleanse the room tomorrow, but nothing that’d do her any good right this moment. She ran her hand along the spines of books without reading the titles, touched crystals for improving the room’s energy and hematite for absorbing negativity and some dried white sage for cleansing the space. None of that really seemed strong enough to take on the thing whispering its way up the hall. She wasn’t even sure how she’d use them, short of throwing them at it.

As she turned to face the room, her eyes lit on the small painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the mantle that one of her friends had done, that she’d bought from him simply because she liked the image. It might or might not work, but it was the closest thing they had to any religious symbols around there. She pulled it off the wall and held it in front of her at arm’s length.

The snake-thing stopped a few yards away. A beat, and one of the thing’s heads snorted. “Really, child,” it said in a dry tone. “We aren’t vampires.”

The other chuckled, a soft crackling sound. “Hasn’t told you much about what you’re dancing on the edge of at all, has he?”

She swallowed, not lowering her arm. It might be working after all, for all she knew. “What do you want?”

“Peace, child,” said one head.

“Peace,” echoed the second. The thing crawled in tight circles in the middle of the room, but didn’t come closer.

“Only a friendly warning for it—“

“For her, she’ll pardon us,” the second interrupted as it climbed the side of the terrarium.

“Quite right, quite right. Only a friendly warning for her.”

Fox blinked. “Of what?”

They looked at each other, laughed again. “For asking so many questions, her friend didn’t tell her much about what he wanted, did he?” one asked.

“Not good at sharing, he isn’t, not at all,” the other agreed.

“Who didn’t?” Neither of them had, the curly-headed young man in the hat or the taller, older one he’d be so interested in had told her much of anything. “I don’t—“

The thing wound around her ankles. She gasped and recoiled. On impulse, she brought her foot down hard in the middle of its body as it passed. She didn’t feel anything but empty air under her foot. The thing didn’t give any indication that it had noticed. “Tch, no questions, no questions,” said one head. “If she’s smart, she’ll mind her business. Won’t go telling people things just because they ask, or doing errands she doesn’t comprehend, mm?”

The thing rose until its second head hung inches from her face, swaying. “Or go trying to start fights she doesn’t understand.” It grinned, and she could see needle teeth in its mouth. “She hears?”

She swallowed and nodded. “I think I do, yeah.”

It wrapped itself over her shoulders like some horrible stole. “Good girl,” it said, its mouth inches from her ear. She could smell its breath, night fog and rotting meat. “Because next time…”

“Next time,” the other head said into her other ear.

It passed through the side of the lizards’ tank as if the glass weren’t there. Fox couldn’t quite tell what happened next. It kept moving, the slow, steady motion of a snake. Without pausing, it wrapped around one of the geckos, and the thing’s smoky sides bulged and blurredIt slid through the other side of the tank, leaving a smear of something moist on the glass. She wouldn’t have guessed that the sad little pile of gore left in its wake had been a lizard unless she’d seen it.

Her stomach lurched and she could taste sour acid at the back of her mouth. She swallowed hard. If the Virgin Mary didn’t ward off the Dyad, whatever it was, puking on it probably wouldn’t either.

It wrapped around her legs like ribbons around a Maypole.

“We’d hate to have to tell her twice.”

“Oh, we’d hate that, yes,” said the other face, and she wasn’t even sure if it was being sarcastic again.