Shadow Kissed 03 - Shadowman

seven-year-olds. So it had to be Joyce, who did kind of look happy, like her name.
    â€œI have two special-needs kids here now.” Layla felt Joyce’s soft arm come around her.
    Layla knew that special needs meant like you . The arm on her shoulders felt heavy, just like the word schizophrenia that she carried from foster home to foster home. Layla still couldn’t read (too dumb) but she knew that word. Schizophrenia meant she saw things that weren’t there. Meant she couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what was “in her head.” Which didn’t make sense, because what she saw was not in her head. Never in her head.
    â€œThis is a safe place,” Joyce said, pushing open a door. In her free hand was a plastic bag with Layla’s new medication, handed over by the caseworker. The doctor was “trying something different.” But the way he’d said it made Layla’s tummy hurt. Like he wasn’t so sure after the last “episode.”
    â€œMicah and Jonathan have been with me a long time,” Joyce said, “and they’re doing great.”
    One of them was in a funny kind of laid-out wheelchair. The boy’s body was all wrong, his mouth stretched weirdly to the side like he was trying to tell a big secret. The other boy was kneeling, and he rocked, rocked, rocked his body while he mumbled, Dead man, dead man, come alive, which was part of a rhyme Layla knew but couldn’t remember from where. The room was clean. Smelled okay, too. The TV was on—a kid’s show—but the sound was soft. Nothing like at the last house.
    Layla’s caseworker had said that Joyce wanted to save the world, one kid at a time.
    Somebody needed to save the world. Dark people were everywhere, squeezed into shadows and trying to get out. And when nighttime came and the shadowy patches grew, the dark people came after her. Their long fingers scraped at her skin, so cold, snagged her hair, and the voices whispered bad things— should be dead, already dead —in her ears so that sometimes she ended up in a ball on the floor, rocking, rocking, rocking like that boy. One day the dark people would find a way out of the shadows, and then, yep, the world would need to be saved.
    The doctor called it paranoia. Said nothing could hurt her. But when the dark people pulled at her hair, it did so hurt. She wasn’t pulling it out herself, no matter what anyone said.
    Grown-ups didn’t believe her, and she didn’t believe them. Which is why she stole the knife. She could take care of herself.
    Layla’s gaze flicked over the room, then stopped. There.
    She went tight and cold, and clutched the backpack closer. Joyce had told her something about the boys, but she hadn’t heard. Her heart was beating too loud and making it so she couldn’t breathe right.
    â€™Cause one of the dark people was right . . . over . . . there. In the big triangle of shadow made from the lamp and a chair.
    Which meant the dark people were here, too, in Joyce’s nice house. The dark people were everywhere.
    The shadow man crouched, dark, dark, dark, his long hair shining like a slick waterfall, as he watched her. But he didn’t have greedy meanness in his tipped-up eyes. His eyes were sad.
    â€œWhat happened here, Layla? Will you show me?”
    The dream folded in on her, rolled into a muddle of color, darkening into the night. Walls fell and switched around and stood back up again so that Layla was in a bedroom, still clutching her backpack, but dressed in a nightgown, the cold from the floor twisting up her calves. The messed-up covers where she’d been lying had princesses all over, which was dumb because no one ever really got to be a princess. A new teddy bear was on a kid-sized desk that Joyce had gotten just for her.
    â€œI thought you said she was nonviolent,” Joyce argued from way far off. “I can’t keep a violent child in the same home as an autistic one. He’s making so much progress. I can’t help them both.”
    No, that wasn’t right. Mama Joyce had said that later. After the blood.
    The room went scary quiet, and Layla made her breathing even quieter. Her heart did that running-away thing that always happened when the shadows came close, but her heart was trapped inside, like her.
    Layla’s throat hurt to call out for help, but she bit her lips. At the last home she’d called out and got