Everything smelled and sounded different, too. My body wasn’t used to the bed facing a different direction.

Sleeping in a new house wasn’t helping my situation any. Based on how groggy I felt, there was no chance I’d been asleep longer than a couple of hours.

He didn’t have nightmares often, but when he did, he always found his way to me… regardless of whether I was awake or not. “You okay?” I whispered in return, trying to will my heartbeat back to a respectable pace. I was too young to have a stroke, wasn’t I? I let the covers drop to my lap, still rubbing my chest. “I’m sorry, Tia Diana,” Louie whispered in that sugar-sweet voice that immediately had me forgiving him for everything he’d ever done and everything he would ever do. “Heck out of me,” I went with instead, even though he’d heard words much worse than ‘hell’ and ‘Jesus’. I really had been trying to get better about using bad words in front of Louie at least, since Josh was a lost cause, but old habits died hard. “You scared the hell-” I groaned, realizing I messed up again. “Jesus Ch-” I started to say before going with “cheese and crackers.” I could still hear my mom’s voice a year ago ripping me a new one for teaching the boys to use the Lord’s name in vain. He was the cutest little boy I’d ever seen-in the daylight-but somehow he didn’t understand that staring at someone while they were sleeping was pretty damn creepy. How many times had he scared the living shit out of me in the exact same way over the last couple of years? One hundred? I should have been used to him sneaking in to my room by now. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find him on my bed. I blinked and clutched the skin over my heart like it was about to dive-bomb out of my chest.

“Oh my God, Lou,” I wheezed at the realization of who was trying to kill me before I turned thirty. Camouflaged in the nearly pitch-black room, the little face a few inches away from mine wasn’t really the devil’s minion it was a five-year-old. In the middle of reaching over to grab the pillow next to me to-I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do with it, pillow fight Willy Wonka’s evil Oompa Loompa or something-I realized it wasn’t a travel-sized disciple of Satan about to sacrifice me to the Dark Lord. “Shit!” I shouted as my back hit the headboard, and I sucked in what might have been the last gasp I’d ever take before having my throat slit. I swear my soul left my body for one millionth of a second as the two eyes staring at me blinked. My eyes snapped open at the middle of my “Ahh!” to find a mini demon inches away from my face.

Or pretty close to screaming, considering I was still getting over a cold I’d caught from Josh two weeks ago that had left me sounding like a chain-smoker going through puberty.

Wait for it mariana zapata