The demon in the vents watched them go. And for the first time in a long, long time, it smiled too.
Leyley was quiet for a long time. Then she turned in his arms, faced him in the near-dark. Her breath smelled like canned peaches.
"Feel that?" she whispered. "Still going. As long as that's going, you don't get to check out on me. You don't get to see ghosts. You look at me."
She smiled, slow and sharp. "Prove it."
"I saw Mom today," he said quietly.
Leyley sat up. The butter knife glinted. "The one with the door?"
"You're faking sleep again."
That night, they didn't sleep apart. They never did anymore. She pressed her back against his chest, and he wrapped an arm around her waist, and they lay in the dark listening to the building settle—or maybe it was the demon, shifting its weight in the ducts, patient as a spider.
Andy didn't move. "We can't stay here."
He looked.
The apartment had stopped smelling like death weeks ago. Now it just smelled like old tea, sweat, and the cloying sweetness of the preserves Leyley had been hoarding under her bed.
In the morning, they packed the butter knife, the last of the preserves, and the bones of their old lives into a grocery bag. Andy unchained the door. Leyley went first, as always.
The door to the apartment was still chained. The landlord's body had been gone for three days—they'd shoved it down the garbage chute in pieces, working in silent tandem like a two-headed animal. No one had come looking. No one ever did. the coffin of andy and leyley
"Promise you'll help me dig."