Charley's still screaming. Through locked doors and creaky wooden floors you can still hear him kicking out against the bedframe or something, maybe the wall, a hard sharp rattle interspersed with the wet noise of feeding. It's making Ed's mouth prickle, and his newly-cut teeth ache.

"You'll get used to it," Cole says, brushing his hair back from his sweatless forehead. If the sound of screaming bothers him, he doesn't show it. His face is smooth, though his brow is faintly furrowed in concentration. He's not good-looking like Jerry — before Jerry's mouth split into a Halloween mask of teeth and skin, obviously — he just is. He looks normal. But that's what they say about psychopaths, right — they look just like everybody else.

Down in the basement, he's screwing fresh hinges onto an old coffin lid — it looks like a prop, exactly like a prop, and Billy hefts the heavy oak lid like painted plywood. All the stuff in this house looks like movie-magic prop shit from a hobby magazine— right down to the phony cobwebs.

Faithful handyman. Ed's throat is bubbling with barely repressed laughter; he knits his taloned hands into fists, then flexes.

"So this is what you guys like, huh?" His teeth are kneading in his lip to keep from chattering. There's no blood, but the skin is split. "This is what gets you guys off?"

"For Jerry, sure," he says equitably, straightening up and straightening out his shirt. "I don't care for it one way or the other."

Ed's face pulls in a convulsive smile. "And is your friend always such a messy eater?"

"It doesn't have to be that way. He's just proving a point, that's all." He sets aside the screwdriver and dusts away a few stray wood shavings. The whole room smells like a sawmill — Ed can smell everything now through the curtain of antique lumber and junk, can practically see it like color hanging in the air. The heavy rolled-up carpets stink with age and the whole place is like a sensory funhouse. He can smell fear-sweat and house dust and the acrid jerk-off smell of sex, and beyond everything else, blood.

(Upstairs, Charley is still screaming. Which means he's still fighting — that Jerry's letting him fight instead of subduing him. That's something.)

Billy thumps him on the shoulder to console him, and to cut off the potential line of questioning where it stands. His skin is fever-warm and it sets his skin crawling off. "It doesn't have to be hard, you know, doing what you're told. He's not asking anything unreasonable."

Cole's hand rests on bare skin. There's no reason why Ed should be self-conscious about his nakedness, any more than any other animal, but some peeled-off remnant of shame is still sticking to the edges of his mind, memories of locker rooms and swimming pools. He keeps expecting somebody to laugh at him, and nobody has. It's not like good old Billy even seems to mind.

Ed laughs at the absurdity of it all, then, since nobody else will. It's the sick kind of funny, like a late-night horror show host, or like riding your bike past a cemetery — nothing's serious, nothing's caught up with him yet. There are too many thoughts swirling in his head, stuck through like a needle with thoughts that aren't his — maybe they were in the blood, stuff about mastery, stuff about changing his shape. He can't even think about defying Jerry now — it's impossible, like a brick wall in his brain. He'd called him master. Why the fuck did he do that? For a joke, because it had been funny. Because it's true.

"Yeah? And what's reasonable, huh?"

"Nothing you won't like."

Hunting, killing, howling at the moon maybe, who the hell knows. Ed can't quit staring. Billy might be nothing special, but he's here, and he's close, and when he looks Ed over it isn't with pity. What other chance is he going to get? The touch of his skin is too-hot all over — he's something else, not like Jerry at all. No sharp teeth. He's smiling.

Without being asked he lifts Ed up onto the coffin lid, employing some kind of freak strength — Ed jokes lamely about splinters but the smile on Billy's face is strictly ambient, directed at nothing in particular. A mannequin smile. He rests his forearms on Ed's shoulders and rubs his hands through his filthy hair, like he's a kid — a little blood flakes loose, maybe his own, maybe someone else's.

The animal half of him still roils under his skin when this freak pulls him close — the bones in his back shifting, or wanting to shift, and Billy's cold hands on his shoulders gentling him down. He's patient with him, Ed is writhing against his lap with impatient grabbing scratching hands and naked legs going everywhere, but he kisses him — no other boy has kissed Ed before, not even as a joke, not even Charley. But this isn't a boy, and the inside of his mouth tastes like sucking on a thumbtack. It's making his lips itch.

It occurs to him that this might not be a person at all. He's just Jerry's puppet, Jerry's mannequin, and Jerry is watching them up there and laughing. If Ed cracked this guy open and dug into his ribcage with both hands, he doesn't know what he might find in there. But for all of Ed's necking he's not picking up anything like a pulse.

Great, somebody's finally interested in him and he's making it with a zombie. It doesn't take very long but he's being kissed and petted like nobody's given a shit about doing before — he's biting blindly at inert pink flesh and drawing no blood. After he's done he holds him fast, chest to chest — maybe he's forgotten about him, forgotten about what normal people do. Nobody's held him before, nobody who didn't have to. Ed blinks away reddish tears, and laughs.