"Watch out!"

Isaac's shout shook me awake, and I found myself wrapped in Price's arms as he staggered toward the front door. Trisha sprinted past us to open the door and drop the cameras on the grass, then came to help Price take me out of the guesthouse. Behind us, I heard weird noises overlapping Isaac's and Amy's voices, like fireworks cracking and something being sprayed.

Brandon —yeah, it's Brandon again, you know how this goes— reached the porch, panting and grunting, and made one last effort to get to the garden.

"Call 911!" he cried, turning around toward the house.

I was still too weak and hurt to stand on my feet. My knees just buckled and I fell to the grass, dragging him down with me. From where we were, I saw Isaac spray the blazing flames coming out of the fireplace with an extinguisher, while Amy rushed to move everything away from there and pick up her things.

Trisha was back inside, and if I wasn't seeing things, Isaac signaled her to film what was happening.

"What's going on?" I managed to mumble.

Brandon sort of shook his head, his arm still around me, looking in like me, his lips parted in a silent gawk. The fresh air cleared my head just enough to realize I had my face stuck to his shoulder, and both hands on the grass between his spread legs. Something to feel utterly awkward about some other time.

Amy scampered out of the guesthouse, her big bag hanging from her shoulder, as Mike and Susan came running across the garden.

"Are there more extinguishers in the Manor?" Amy asked. "Let's get them!"

She and Susan rushed to the backdoor while Mike dodged us to run into the guesthouse. Isaac saw him there, handed him the extinguisher and hurried toward the dining room, with Trisha on his heels.

Amy and Susan came with two more extinguishers just as Trisha ran out, filming with her phone in one hand, a bag of ghost-hunting gear and Brandon's glasses in the other. Isaac joined us a minute later, carrying a CPU tower and a duffel bag with filming equipment.

"The chimney caught fire!" he said, panting.

"Let's get you guys to the Manor," said Trisha.

"But I can't enter!" Brandon mumbled, wearing his glasses.

I could only gawk around, watching but not really grasping what was going on.

"You can't stay out here!" Isaac replied. "C'mon, Fran can explain it to her pet later."

We heard sirens wailing closer down Greenwich Road.

"C'mon, guys, get up!" Trisha urged us. "This is gonna make the local news. But if they see Brandon here, it's gonna go national and viral."

That seemed to do some kind of trick. Somehow, he managed to kneel up, and Isaac helped him to his feet. Brandon reached out to me, but I was incapable of standing up. Trisha grabbed my forearms and pulled me halfway up.

"Come, damsel in distress," he said with a weary smile.

I don't know where he found the strength, but he slid an arm behind my legs, the other around my back, and lifted me, carrying me all the way to the Manor in his arms. We made it through the backdoor at the same time that a fire engine turned onto the driveway. Isaac helped Brandon stagger to the table with me, he and Trisha dropped the bags they'd brought from the garden, and they hurried back out, still filming nonstop.

"Joseph!" I called out as Brandon left me on a chair, to crumble down on another right next to me with a hurting grunt.

"Are you okay?" asked my phone.

"I'll be. Please, somebody go tell Kujo not to go crazy 'cause Brandon's here. He's clean and he needs care."

I heard faint footsteps hurrying down the stone stairs.

"What happened?" asked one of the tablets.

"I'm not sure. I was out. I think the fireplace caught fire somehow."

I turned to Brandon and found him still panting and covered in sweat, looking around with a suspicious frown.

"You okay?"

He just nodded. I rested both hands on the table and tried to stand up. Can you believe my fingers still hurt from slapping him?

"Careful, Fran. What do you need?"

"Water."

The fridge opened right away and a bottle of water dropped to the floor, rolling up to my feet.

"Oh, thanks. Can we make it two?"

Two it was. I handed one to Brandon and took a long sip from the other. He gulped up half of it, turned to the table, folded his arms on it, rested his head on them and fell asleep or passed out, I'm not sure. A smile pursed my lips without asking for permission. Until I leaned back in my chair and spotted the long trail of watery blood that went all the way down his spine to stain the waist of his pants.

"Oh, God," I muttered, horrified.

"Is that blood?"

"I think so. It dripped every time Amy removed one of the worms."

"He needs urgent care, like you."

The touchpad beeping from the other tablet caught my attention.

"Kujo is fine but worried about you."

"Thank you, Joseph. Ann, I'm sending them to stay in town as soon as the firefighters leave."

"No need. They're both clean now."

"And he just saved you."

"Come again?"

"That's Haunter charming for you," Trisha said behind me, giving me a nice start. "He came back to just when the fireplace flames blazed up, and the first thing he did was pick you up, even though he could hardly move himself." She came to my side and kissed my hair, rubbing my back. "Heck, Fran. You guys put up a hell of a fight and won. I'm frigging proud of you."

"Now you need to take care of yourself."

"And Price."

Resting my hand on Brandon's shoulder was enough to jolt him awake. He turned to me still frowning, pushing his glasses up his nose.

"You okay?" he mumbled. "What happened?"

"D'you think you can help me up the stairs?" I asked softly.

He frowned deeper for a moment and nodded. "Sure."

I turned to Trisha. "I need to ask you a favor," I said while Brandon pushed himself up. "Go to the basement and check—"

"On Kujo. I got it, don't worry."

I was feeling a thousand times better than only ten minutes earlier, so I was able to stand up almost on my own. And while Trisha trotted down the basement stairs, I let Brandon circle my waist with his arm and started with him the long journey to the second floor.

Good thing Susan had had time to tidy my room. I left Brandon crumble down on my bed as I went on to the bathroom. Taking the robe off wasn't easy without assistance, but I finally made it. To find my flannel sleeves stuck to the bandages beneath. Shit. I'd forgotten about that. I'd felt the wounds ooze, and if the sleeves were like that, I didn't even want to think what removing the bandages would be like. Forget it. I'd leave it for later, when Amy could help me. But I did need to at least take the flannel off.

The fabric was so stuck to the bandages, pulling it down to get my arms out of the sleeves felt like ripping the dressing off, along with my own skin. I only noticed I was grunting and groaning when I heard a soft knock on the bathroom door.

"You okay?" asked Brandon.

I hadn't closed the door completely, and his knock pushed it ajar. He had a glimpse of me sitting on the toilet lid, trying to detach the flannel from the soaking bandages, and pushed the door wide open.

"Hey! What happened to you?" he cried, coming to crouch down before me, a shocked frown on my arm showing out of the sleeve.

"It's—"

"Not okay," he cut me off. "Let me see."

He held my forearm gently and pinched the fabric, carefully tugging it apart from the dressing. His frown turned questioning when he looked up to meet my eyes.

"What happened?" he repeated.

I shook my head. I didn't want to tell him Kujo had hurt me, afraid of giving him any excuse not to help me release him, now that we were just one step away from setting him free.

"Fran?" he insisted, the Haunter supreme demanding an answer.

"The other night in the basement, when you broke in," I grumbled. "When you came at me, Kujo lost it and—"

"The demon did this?"

"He's not a demon! He thought you were going to hurt me!"

Brandon leaned back, away from me, his frown now turning suspicious.

"You pushed me away," he said.

I nodded, shrugging. He touched his scratched side, stiffening.

"You did it to protect me?" He didn't wait for my answer. "And that thing attacked you."

"He couldn't stop in time." I faced him sheepishly. "He was furious and he couldn't help burning me when he rushed through me."

He grimaced, shaking his head slightly. "And that's what you want me to set free and unleash onto the world?"

I took his hand, pressing it. "He was trying to protect me."

"From me."

"D'you remember how mad you were that night?"

He looked away, like trying to remember. "I only recall I felt this urgent pull," he replied. "I had to put an end to it."

"And d'you remember why?" I asked softly.

Brandon faced me, shaking his head again with a puzzled frown. "To be done with all this?"

"Because if you somehow killed him, you wouldn't need to go through the final cleansing."

His eyes widened behind his glasses. I nodded with a quick grimace. His eyes jumped back to my soaking bandage and his fingers around my arm pressed it gently.

"Jesus Christ!" he murmured.

"Fran?"

Amy's footsteps came straight to the bathroom, and she stopped at the door, surprised to find us both there, Brandon bending a knee before me with my arm in his hand.

"Weird place to propose," she teased. "You guys okay?"

"She needs help," Brandon said, straightening up.

Amy looked him up and down. "You should take a shower and go to sleep. I brought your bag, so you can have clean clothes. Come, Fran, let's take care of that."

Brandon took my hands to help me stand up and gave me way out of the bathroom. Amy motioned for me to keep going and faced him with a proud smile.

"I'm happy I was wrong about you," she said to him, closing the door.

We left him there, and I heard the shower running as I walked out of my room toward Amy's. Changing my bandages was an ugly, painful business, but not as bad as it would've been if I'd tried to do it on my own. Amy was swift and gentle, and she kept me distracted while she worked, telling me about the fire.

"The last two worms were so strong, they wouldn't burn," she explained, carefully cutting one of the dressings. "They started crawling up the chimney, still burning, to get away from the fire, and looks like Mike haven't had it swept in a while. It was lined in creosote, and it caught fire."

"You gotta be fucking kidding. Ouch!"

"Sorry. Thank God for Mike's slip. Else, we wouldn't have been able to offer any credible explanation for the fire."

"But they can't blame him! If we hadn't—"

"It could've happened at any given time. Keeping the fireplace on was a hazard in itself."

"And did the worms burn in the end?"

"I'm not sure. While they were putting out the chimney, sparks started raining down the dining room ceiling lights anyway. Everybody was baffled, because they'd cut the energy to prevent any short-circuits. I'm afraid the nasty things sneaked into the walls following the wiring and are still hiding there."

"Great! And how can we flush them out?"

"Lift your top, I wanna check your belly. I think I know a way to get rid of them."

I held the top bottoms up to my chest with a little smirk. "You wanna offer Kujo another snack."

"Yup. So we need to cut his chain before the whole guesthouse goes up in flames."

Trisha knocked on the door and stuck her head into the room.

"Hey, Fran! Good to see you're better!" she said, walking in. "We're having a little overcrowding situation. Where are our Haunters gonna sleep now?"

"Brandon's in my room."

"Now he's Brandon," Amy teased, trading a smirk with Trisha.

"We should ask Susan if we have bunks or something like that, so Isaac can go settle at the third-floor study."

"Oh, great, and we can set their computers and stuff up there, too."

I sighed and shrugged, recalling the mess of screens and wires in the guesthouse dining room. Trisha left at the same time Amy finished my belly dressing.

"There you go, my girl. Now get some rest. We should try to cut that chain as soon as Price gets up." She saw me stand up and frowned. "Where are you going?"

"First I wanna check on him. And on Kujo."

"I'll take care of Kujo. Else, you're gonna end up sleeping down there again."

She chuckled when my face reflected she'd just exposed my secret plan and shooed me out of her room. I walked down the hallway in no hurry, still feeling sore and drained, but thankful my head was clear.

My door wasn't fully closed, and I saw Brandon sound asleep wrapped up in my bathrobe, that hardly covered his knees, curled up on the bedspread in the middle of the bed. I tiptoed in, grabbed the big fat quilt from the closet top shelf and opened it to cover him. I was trying to tuck him in when he rolled over toward me. So much for letting him sleep. His hand came from under the quilt, reaching out to me.

"Come," he mumbled, eyes closed, taking me completely aback.

The bastard. With or without parasites, even hardly awake, he still played those dirty tricks on me. My hand reacted faster than my brain and held his. And when he tugged gently, I decided to just stop thinking and sneaked under the quilt with him. He kissed the back of my hand and slid his arm under my neck. I would've liked to roll over and stick to his side, but my burns wouldn't allow me to. When I lay on my back, he came closer to me, rested his forehead against my hair and pressed my hand to his chest.

We were asleep in about ten seconds.