Free Red Devil (Dangerous Spirits) by Kyell Gold

do egg races,” Sol said. “You don’t want to—”
    “You can stay.” Alexei stood up, even though he did want Sol to come with him. “I don’t mind. But I am going home.”
    Sol did stay, and Alexei walked out quickly, without saying thank you to Jerry or good-bye to Liza or Mike. He thought he heard someone call out after him, but he was already in a black mood in which he wanted no pity from anyone, so he turned the corner of the house and walked down the path to the front gate, and nobody followed him.
    The sun beat down on his black ears, but he didn’t want to sit on a bus with a water-splattered shirt. After three blocks, he looked around at all the people walking shirtless through the streets and thought about taking his shirt off. Then he remembered Kendall saying,
Go on, take your shirt off
, and he kept it on.
    Panting harder, half a mile farther along, his shirt was drying out but his fur was still wet. Kendall was back in Jerry’s yard, and would never know. So Alexei stopped on the sidewalk, grasped the bottom of his shirt to lift it over his head…and stopped. What if some of the people around him laughed? What if Sol or Mike decided to come after him in a car? He released the shirt. His fur would dry out eventually. Even if it was a hot day, even if the fox across the street had a bare white-furred gut hanging over his belt, even if the deer jogging by was wearing nothing but a tight bra and shorts…
    He arrived home, panting, to find the apartment even more stifling than the outdoors. “Can I open a window?” he asked Meg, closing the door behind him.
    “Open yours,” she called from her bedroom, and then her head showed through the doorway. “Picnic over already? Where’s Sol? He go right to his date?”
    “He is still there.” Alexei strode to his bedroom, letting the door swing closed behind him, though he didn’t shut it all the way. His scent and Sol’s hit him in a wave in the oven-like heat of the room. He leaned over the desk, fumbled with the window catch, and then shoved the window up.
    The air he’d just walked in from, hot, muggy, and thick with construction dust, felt refreshing compared to the oppressive apartment air. Alexei pushed the fan into the window and breathed in, sitting on the desk with his head against the window screen.
    Meg pushed the door open. “Everything okay?”
    Here, back in his home, the specters of the past receded. Alexei nodded, curling his tail across the top of the desk and resting one paw on it. “I got tired of the picnic,” he said.
    Her eyes drifted downward. “Spill something on your shirt?”
    “Someone else did.”
    “Ah.” She folded her arms. “And Sol just let you leave on your own?”
    “I told him he could.” He looked away from her, back out at the construction site. Two bulldozers sat idle amid huge piles of dirt behind the chain-link fence. A rack of lights loomed above, two of them aimed directly at him. “Do they work at night on those sites?”
    “When it’s really hot, yeah.” Meg stepped into the room. “So what happened?”
    Alexei shrugged. “It does not matter.” He turned his head and stared up at the painting of Niki. “I want to do the ritual.”
    “What—” She followed his gaze. “Oh. No. No way.”
    Niki looked back at him with one friendly green eye. He knew what it was like to grow up Siberian, an outsider. He had overcome his childhood. “Why not?”
    “Because if you pretend you’re talking to Sol’s dream boy, he’ll be pissed. Or haven’t you noticed how he looks at that painting all the time, how it’s on his phone and his computer?”
    Alexei bit his lip. “If I can talk to him, then Sol can again, too.”
    “No, he can’t. And if—when you try and fail, he’ll just be more depressed.” She folded her arms.
    “
I
will be depressed!” Alexei was trying to keep his voice down, but his shirt clung to his fur and he could still smell the tap water from the balloon and see Mike