“So the reason that you always disappear is because of how I feel now, isn’t it?” I asked gently.

He smiled gently. “Yes.”

I bumped my knee against his. “But don’t go yet, okay?”

“Okay.” He bumped me back. “Do you want to work, then?”

We went to the beach and I saw what I’ve seen for too long now- black smoke rising out of the palm trees, laughter like high-pitched birds cackling, the sound of alien legs and feet shuffling on the sand.

I walked through the house and pulsed white light through every room. Creatures appeared like a video game and I sliced them with a sword, battered them with an axe, and they dissolved into ash. Creatures with black, slimy skin. Creatures with no head. Creatures with a face of fangs. Creatures that ran at me like deformed dogs, on uneven and unsteady limbs.

Destroyed, destroyed, destroyed. Maybe I was screaming the whole time. I don’t even know for sure. It seemed I could feel their oily thick blood all over my skin, in my bared teeth, clumping in my loose, wild hair.

There was a silence and I ran my hand over the countertops in the kitchen, slowly walked through the living room, and then he was there. In the doorway. The way he’d been so many times, when it meant I was about to be torn apart, sliced open, organs spilling out, so many empty holes to be ruined.

His neck looked broken, his head dangling loosely to one side, occasionally popping up like a puppet as he spoke. His eyes were black, black, black. His voice sounded like shrieking metal. His arms hung rotten and limp at his sides.

I was terrified beyond words, but approached him anyway, and this is when Fisher came to lay on my chest.

“You aren’t welcome here,” I said.

His broken neck waggled slightly, and his foul fangs slid from behind his lips. “I see that you know who you are now.”

“Yes. I do.”

He began to talk nonstop, telling me what was real, what wasn’t, and I felt an old, familiar feeling. Smoky sickness, weeping into my brain, making my logic surreal and confused. Fisher laid his little foot on my hand and flexed his claws gently into my fingers.

“Get out,” I sneered, lifting my hands and pushing him backwards with pure energy. “You don’t belong here.”

He kept trying to speak, but I continued to blast him backwards with my hands, until he was at the edge of the sea. My entire body was shaking.

“You are not welcome here,” I announced. He began to shrink as I screamed, smaller and smaller, until he was the size of the tiny, piggish little demon that first attacked me in 2005. How silly and small and pathetic he was now, how he’d always been. Nothing magnificent or awe-inspiring… just another bag of garbage energy, a tiny little charger that tried to suck from the innocent.

And I told him so. How dare you steal from a little girl. How dare you take something she had no idea she was giving. How could you betray a love so pure, so generous, so naive.

But of course, he had no smoky words for that.

I spun around to face the island, and light rose from the sand. “None of you are welcome here. This. Is. My. Home.

“All. Of. You. Are. Banished.”

A blinding light seared through the entire landscape, and there was the sound of shrieking and screaming and tearing of flesh. I felt severe, searing pain roar through my third eye, and my entire body convulsed through one strong shudder.

And then all was still.