Free Long Summer Nights by Kathleen O'Reilly

Aaron was prepared. Today he’d fought a harmless snake and won. Today he’d braved a naked Jennifer, and nearly survived the experience.
    After all that, Didi seemed almost mundane. But to be on the safe side, he’d scattered papers here and there, marked up pages and opened the Oxford English Dictionary to the letter M. In short, he looked like a writer buried in his work.
    “You have been busy, I see,” she pronounced, picking up a discarded page, before he grabbed it out of her hands. “How can you abide this prison? There are no skyscrapers, no pastrami, and…you’ve forgotten to shave. Are you chopping wood and wearing flannel, as well? Oy.” She dusted the seat of his battered rocker, but eventually gave up andstood, casting him a damning look in the process because being uncooperative was what Didi did best. They had that in common.
    “Did you bring the food?” he asked.
    “Squash, ground lamb and the bone meal. A diet without calcium is not good for your bones. You should take supplements, too. I brought you a bottle, but I’m sure you’ll only throw them away.”
    The cat jumped at the food and sniffed, yowling with hunger, and Didi shooed him away.
    “You shouldn’t push him away. The food isn’t for me. It’s his.”
    Her eyes widened in alarm. “I carried takeout for your cat?”
    “Do you know what they put in cat food?”
    She lifted her hands, warding off the thought. “I do not choose to know. Instead of working, you stagnate here playing Top Chef for this ragged monster?”
    At that, Two crouched low to the ground and showed leonine teeth.
    “He has to eat,” Aaron defended.
    “As do I.” Uncaring of the dust, she collapsed in the rocker, her hand over her chest. “I cannot do this any longer.”
    Immediately Aaron backtracked, feeling something cold and clammy close up in his throat. “You can’t leave me.”
    “I’m an old woman, Aaron.”
    “You’ve got a good thirty years of spite left in you.”
    She wasn’t amused. “And you? What is left in you? Did he steal it all?”
    Quickly he rose and pulled the food from the box, Two perched protectively on the cabinets, overseeing the process. He chose not to answer Didi, because he didn’t knowwhat was inside him. Whatever remained, he used for his writing, and nothing else. It worked.
    Two batted a paw at the lamb, awaiting supper. Unlike Didi, Aaron recognized that this wasn’t companionship but survival. The cat wore his scars on the outside, but Aaron didn’t have any scars. A long time ago, he’d been drained of blood and life. All that he’d kept safe was his imagination, and Cecil Barksdale would never get at that.
    “You owe me a book, a chapter, even a sentence. Or I will leave you. Like that,” Didi threatened with a snap of her fingers.
    “Do what you need to do,” he said with a careless shrug, seeing the pain in her eyes, but he wouldn’t be cornered, not even by Didi.
    She rose just as carelessly, just as heartlessly. Their relationship was back to what it should be, exactly as he needed. Aaron began to breathe once again.
    “You’ll be back?” he asked, carefully erasing all trace of expectation from his voice.
    Didi being Didi wasn’t fooled, but her smile was old and weary and he wondered how long it would be before she left him for good.
    “Thank you for the food,” he told her politely.
    She adjusted her shawl, flinging it over her shoulder, and then made for the door, her heels never missing a beat. “When will you learn, Aaron? When will you rejoin the human race?”
    “Never,” he said, his voice firm and stubborn, but Didi had already left, and he told himself that he didn’t care.

5
    I N THE 1960 S, A MERRY band of psychics had occupied the rolling hills to the north, and when psychics were involved, law enforcement wouldn’t be far behind, and Jenn knew just where to find the truth.
    In Harmony Springs, Sheriff Omar Phelps was the long arm of the law, and unsurprisingly enough, his