Haylo Kiss < Updated >

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.

Haylo Kiss had never been afraid of the dark. She was afraid of what the dark hid.

Then she stepped back.

The thing reached out a hand made of long, twig-like fingers. “One kiss,” it whispered. “And I’ll go. No more sheep. No more silence. Just you and me, Haylo Kiss, for the space of a single breath.”

The thing screamed—a sound like a barn door tearing off its hinges—and collapsed into a heap of mud and moonlight. Where it fell, a single sheep’s skull lay, clean as porcelain. Haylo Kiss

“I’m not giving you anything.”

It tilted its head. The slit opened. Inside was not teeth or tongue, but a deeper darkness, a vacuum that pulled the warmth from the air. Haylo Kiss kicked the salt aside and walked down the ladder

She looked at the shotgun. She looked at the salt. She looked at the thing that had haunted her hollow for a year.

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.” And for the first time in fifteen years,

That was the first time Haylo understood the name her grandmother had given her. “Haylo,” the old woman had whispered on her deathbed, “is for the place where you hide. And Kiss is for the thing that finds you anyway.”