Over lunch, Amy asked the Blotters a lot of questions about their plane or dimension, and how they perceived the world of the living. With two TTS and two speaking apps, the conversation with them flowed better than ever. I left her chattering with the Blotters at the table to clean the kitchen. I was just about to finish when we heard a thud from the basement. Amy turned to me, suddenly apprehensive.

"That's the shadow," I said, nodding. "It surely sensed you. I told it about you, and bet it can't wait anymore to meet you."

"You told it? It's conscious?"

"Conscious and intelligent," Edward replied.

"Okay, let me grab a few things," she said, and hurried to grab her bag from the east parlor.

I opened the basement door and stuck my head in. "Coming, Kujo! Just a minute!"

Amy came back with a fat white candle, a funny rosary and a small glass bottle of water with a golden cross painted on it. I frowned.

"You don't need any of this, Amy. Kujo promised to behave, and it will."

"Kujo! You named it Kujo?"

"Well, it doesn't seem to have a name and I didn't want to call it thing."

Amy shook her head, chuckling, and pointed at the open basement door. "Okay! Wanna lead the way?" She glanced at the table with her nice smile. "We'll be right back."

I grabbed the LEDs and started to the stairs. Amy hesitated, like giving way to somebody.

"The gents are coming too?" she asked, following me.

"That's why you won't be needing your holy water and your stuff. Edward and Joseph can protect us alright."

"Oh, I see. Yeah, they make some impressive bodyguards."

A loud bang knocked down a board when we reached the basement.

"Easy, Kujo. We're here."

Amy looked straight at the corner and stopped sharply, her face pursed in horror.

"You never saw it, right?" she whispered with a shaky voice.

"No. And I don't want to, if it's gonna make me fear it or find it revolting."

"Okay," she mumbled.

I took the lead toward the central pillar. I could hear muffled shuffles from the corner, and even a couple of growls.

"Control your fear, Amy," I said. "It's the best way to get through to it."

She didn't reply, but I heard her swallow and breathe deep. I placed one of the LEDs as a limit as usual and sat on the floor, facing the corner. A flurry of dust came floating from there into the sunlight. Amy took her sweet time to join me, and I could clearly sense how upset she was when she sat down to my right.

"Kujo, this is Amy. She's afraid because she doesn't know you, but she still wants to help you," I said. "So please, let her do it."

In the pause that followed, Amy stiffened, frowned and then gaped, eyes like grapefruits on the corner.

"What is it?" I asked, bringing my voice down.

"It— It sat down and sort of changed its shape. It's trying to look friendly!" She leaned forward.

"Careful," said one of the Blotters through my phone.

"Don't worry, Edward," Amy replied. "I need to do this."

To my surprise, she reached out past the LED beam and closed her eyes. A moment later, tears rolled down her cheeks. She raised her other hand.

"Don't," she murmured, and I assumed she was talking to Edward or Joseph.

She took a whole minute to bring her hand out of the darkness of the corner, letting out a long sigh and wiping her tears.

"Thank you, Kujo," she said softly. "May I see your chain?"

Even I was alarmed when she stood up and stepped past the light beam to go crouch down in the corner. She tilted her head, frowning, like she was inspecting something.

"Good Lord," she muttered, and shook her head. "I can't undo this. None of us can. But I will find a way, promise." I was surprised to see her smile.

"What was that?" I asked when she came back to where I was.

She nodded to the exit. "I'll tell you upstairs," she replied, still smiling, and glanced at the corner. "Till tomorrow, Kujo."

"Night, Kujo. Thank you for being so nice to Amy."

"Night Fran."

I spun around, surprised. "That was you?" Amy nodded, chuckling, and I smiled at the corner. "You're a champ. Bye."

Amy said she needed some fresh air after meeting Kujo, so we grabbed our jackets and strolled across the garden toward the trail to the Quabbin. I waited in silence while she looked around in awe and giggled, seeing the twins run around and ahead of us.

"This is a paradise for a medium like me," she said as we walked into the forest. "Six benign intelligent entities and an advanced parasite. Man! I wish I'd had something like this when I was young and learning to deal with my abilities!"

"It's six persons and a captive entity," I corrected her softly.

She nodded, chuckling. "That's why they love you," she replied, taking me aback. "Even the parasite. It's got a name, but it wants to be Kujo because that's what you call it."

"Does it have anything like a gender? I hate using it."

"Guess you may use him, because his energy is sort of masculine."

"Why were you so horrified when you first saw him?"

She searched for something on her phone and showed me a picture that froze me where I stood. It was a nightmarish mix of a monstrous skeleton dog with the Alien from the movie franchise.

"That's kinda what I saw," she said, retrieving her phone to search for something else. "And this is what he would look like for you if he could."

I saw the next picture and laughed heartedly, because it was a white fluffy poodle.

We sat on the fallen tree I'd officially declared my bench, a few steps away from the water, and lingered there, talking. I couldn't believe my ears when she confirmed my theory of the scavenger changed by living energy, and that this event had put it —him— on the way to becoming what some called a half-breed demon, with the skill to live attached to living humans and manipulate them to get his daily fix of negative vibes.

"In any other circumstance, I'd approve of what Brandon Price did. Kujo would've literally eaten him alive in five years tops, so he really needed to get rid of it. And I'm not sure he knew how the ritual worked when he accepted to perform it. Surely the witch involved only told him it would sever the attachment."

"Were you able to find out anything about it?"

"Kujo's memories are scrambled after so many years chained down there without any source of energy whatsoever, but he was able to show me a woman doing something with candles, a circle of what looked like twigs on the floor and a shiny goblet in the center. Kujo was still attached to Price and was feeding on him while he watched the woman at work, so it didn't pay much attention."

"Jeez, that sounds horrible. But it confirms what you thought: a two-step ritual of some kind."

"Yes. And that chain is like iron forged in hell. It's thick as my wrist, and it's got pikes on the inside where it wraps around Kujo's neck."

"That's frigging awful."

Amy nodded, grimacing. "That's why he hates Price so much, his bare voice is enough to upset him. You should see the scarred wounds all around Kujo's throat. It's like the chain's been burning him all these years."

"Sounds like what the Ring of Power did to Frodo." I sighed, shaking my head. "See why I wanna set it free?"

Amy chuckled under her breath. "That's because you're too kind for your own good, Fran. But that's exactly why I think Kujo would rather starve than feed on you ever again. He sees the good in you, just like the Blotters, and trusts you. Have you read Frankenstein? Well, he's like the monster and you're the blind farmer. His looks can't scare you, so you treat him like no other human before in his existence. And he will do anything you ask of him." She scoffed. "Which is something I've never heard about a half-breed demon."

"Because you see them as demons," I replied, raising my eyebrows.

She raised her eyebrows too. "Because that's what they are, Fran. They stop being just scavengers the moment they start feeding on living energy."

"Then Kujo ain't one anymore. 'Cause he hasn't fed at all for years."

"Well, now that you put it that way."

"So how can we set him free?"

She shrugged, shaking her head. "Not by ourselves. We need whether the witch or Price himself. If I could see the pendant he used, I could look into it. Else, it would take us so much time, Kujo would starve to death before we release him."

Later on, Amy would confess that all about Kujo had made her question a lot of what she considered accepted lore about his kind. Did scavengers feed on negative energy because they had more of it available? She had a point. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of old prisons, asylums, hospitals, poor farms all over the country. All brimming with negative residual energy as to feed swarms of scavengers. But how many places had the same amount of residual positive energy? Was it on us, humans, for being such a ruthless species? Ever since she shared her doubts with me, I've been wondering the same. And we pondered together if scavengers could change their nature and feed on that positive energy without causing any harm to their host.

Of course we ended up laughing out loud, because if that turned out to be possible, I would totally adopt Kujo. And we tried to picture Mike and Susan working in the garden, with the big dark shadow roaming around to fetch a stick. Pity I already knew the Blotters would never have it.

But that afternoon we didn't get to talk any longer.

"Come back."

The speaking app startled me. Amy looked up to her right and stood up.

"C'mon, Fran," she said. "Joseph says Brandon Price is here."