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The sight of his fangs and his claws makes me panic, just a little, and it hits a little too much to one side. I get propelled upward, all right, but slightly on the diagonal. Jagged plaster teeth scrape at my arm; I think I crack my leg against some floorboards. And it slows me down just enough that I’m sure I feel something.

His hand on my ankle, suddenly desperate.

The brief sense of being dragged back to my doom.

I scream and kick, and get a hand on the tufted remains of my cheap blue carpet. Then another, when I can feel that’s not going to be enough. I practically ball it up into my fists—though it’s not this that saves me.

It’s my phone.

My asshole phone, that refused to have any part of me going to this party.

You reveal that you’re a witch to anyone or anything in this silly town, and you’re going to attract your supernatural stalker, she had said. Keeping it a secret is the only thing that’s kept him away from you. And she had been right, quite clearly. She’s going to be insufferable about it, obviously.

But she must hear me crying out in terror, because she makes her own sound in return. Something so high-pitched that I can hardly hear it—like a broken whistle, blown far away. Only that’s clearly not what it seems like to him. He hears it and almost immediately lets go. I see him just beyond my body, through this hole, and he’s clutching at the sides of his head.

He’s on the floor.

It’s fucking with his bat-like hearing, clearly.

And it gives me all the time I need to haul myself up, and through, to something like safety.

CHAPTER THREE

The first thing I do is grab Phone and climb into the closet so I can try to safely explain to her why I actually wasn’t a fucking fool to do all of this. But of course by this point, she’s so pissed off at me that she doesn’t even want to speak. I try to get her out of sleep mode and she refuses. She briefly flickers into life, and then makes the Windows closing sound and the screen goes dark again. Where did you even find that chime, I want to ask her. But by the time I get around to it she’s already moved on to her next attempt at blowing me off.

She makes a fart noise, and shuts herself down entirely.

It takes me a good half hour to get her back on and willing to say a word to me. And the words aren’t great when I manage. “Well, well, well. Look who’s come crawling back. Only a few hours since you refused to listen to my sensible advice, yet again, and now here you are. Desperately needing my help,” she says.

Because she’s a jerk.

To be honest, she’s been a jerk since she first revealed a few months ago that she was sentient—by announcing, as I enjoyed a little alone time, that I was doing it wrong. Needless to say, from that point on I kept her in the living room. The last thing I need is a hunk of plastic telling me I’m going to rub my own vagina off.

And I don’t need her making me sound so needy, either.

I can feel how needy I am all on my own.

“Okay, first of all, Phone, I am not desperate.”

“Don’t give me that. I can smell it on you.”

“You can’t smell anything, you don’t have a face.”

“Of course I do. It’s right here.”

The generic screensaver—a swirling, starlit sky—abruptly turns dark. And when it returns, I almost scream. The whole screen is now filled with what can only be described as the pieced-together image a serial killer might make, if they didn’t have easy access to a picture of their victim.

And also did not really understand what a human being looks like.

Literally every single feature is the wrong proportion. One eye is massive, the other is small. The nose is the size of a flea, and so far up the face it could pass for an eyelash. And that mouth? I don’t know why it stretches across the whole of the face, like some sort of hinged split. But I know I don’t like it. And I don’t like that it has ten million tiny teeth in it, either. They look like rows and rows of sweet corn. If sweet corn were really terrifying, and possibly intent on eating you.

It simply has to be that she’s messing with me.

I mean, I could buy that her last attempt at this was real. But this one has beige pupils and one ear that looks suspiciously like a shrimp. I just can’t continue being accommodating of her clearly pretend journey toward finding herself. “Okay, Phone, I can tell you’re not just self-actualizing with a face that has seventeen fucking eyebrows.”

“I’ve told you, my name is not Phone.”

“But you refuse to tell me what you actually want it to be.”