Chapter 15. The Kiss He Stopped

Rae POV

"Do you know him?" I asked on the ride back up the mountain. "The man in the hat."

Wade was quiet for a quarter mile.

"No," he said. "But I'll know him when I smell him."

He said it the way another man might say I'll know him when I see him. Calm and certain. It should have frightened me, but it didn't. It made me feel like there was finally somebody standing between me and the dark.

Kyle picked Crystal up that afternoon for vandalism. She told him she'd done it alone, as a joke, and that she'd never seen the man in the hat before in her life. Kyle said she was lying so badly her hands shook.

***

That night I couldn't sleep, so I went to the booth.

Wade's tank was on the s