094 — Billy
Max had known this was coming the moment she hung up the phone.
She sat on Richard's couch with her hands in her lap and replayed it — Billy's voice going from anger into something colder when she'd talked back, the way the line had gone quiet for just a second before he started again. That quiet was the part she'd learned to pay attention to. Loud Billy was manageable. Quiet Billy was the one who drove.
"He's going to come here," she said.
"Probably," Richard agreed, from the kitchen doorway.
"He's going to try to drag me out."
"He can try."
Max looked at him. He was leaning against the doorframe with a cup of coffee, completely unhurried, and the steadiness of it did something to the knot in her chest. Not dissolved it — but made it smaller.
In the bedroom, she could hear the boys talking over each other, the low competition of four people all trying to tell the most impressive version of the same story. She'd caught enough of it to understand what they were doing — trying to convince her that Richard could handle Billy, building the case brick by brick. The stories had started factual and were now somewhere in the territory of legend, Lucas and Dustin performing for her benefit with the unsubtle energy of boys who had not yet learned to be subtle.
It was sweet, in its way.
"He said —" Max stopped. She'd told Richard what Billy said on the phone, the specific words, and she wasn't going to repeat them. "He doesn't talk to me like a person."
"I know," Richard said. "He's going to find that approach less useful here."
The headlights swept across the front window about forty minutes later.
The doorbell rang once. Then Billy just knocked, hard, the way people knocked when the knock was already a threat.
Richard opened the door.
Billy had come in hot — Max could see it from where she was standing, the set of his shoulders, the jaw, the chewing gum working overtime. He was wearing his letter jacket and the expression he used when he wanted a room to understand he was the most dangerous thing in it.
Then he registered Richard, and something shifted. Not completely — Billy didn't fully stand down for anyone — but the volume came down. His eyes moved past Richard to Max, and back.
"I'm here for her," he said. "She's coming home."
"That's her call, not yours," Richard said pleasantly. "Max, the guys wanted to get a game going tomorrow. You staying?"
It was the most ordinary sentence in the world, delivered like Billy at the door was a minor scheduling consideration. Max felt something harden in her chest — not rage, something more useful than rage. Resolve.
"I already told him," she said, keeping her voice steady. "I'm not going home tonight. I can stay where I want."
Billy's face darkened. His eyes went to Richard and stayed there, doing the calculation Max had watched him do in the gym — the memory of the ball coming back at him off the bleachers, the effort it had taken to hold on. His fists closed at his sides.
"She comes with me," he said, quieter now, which was worse. "Stay out of it."
"It's hard to stay out of it when you're standing in my doorway," Richard said.
Billy shoved him — one hand to the chest, hard enough to move most people — and pushed past into the house. His foot connected with the clay pot by the door on his way in, a trailing kick that sent it off the step and onto the porch, dirt spilling across the wood.
Richard took the step back, let him in, and looked at the broken pot with an expression that was very still.
Billy crossed the living room toward Max. She held her ground — barely, her fingers white around the handle of the fire axe she'd picked up from the rack by the fireplace without fully deciding to. It was more of a prop than a plan. She wasn't sure what the plan was.
She didn't get to find out, because the rug moved.
It was subtle enough that Max almost missed it — a shift, a gathered bunch under Billy's heel — and then his foot went out from under him and he went down hard, shoulder catching the arm of the couch on the way, head connecting with the leg. The couch, which was solid pine and weighed as much as a small car, toppled backward as if something had pushed it from the other side, and came down across his legs.
Billy yelped. The sound was undignified and he clearly hated it.
From the bedroom doorway, four faces appeared in a stack, varying expressions of shock and dawning comprehension. Dustin's eyes were very wide.
Then Billy started sliding.
There was nothing pulling him that anyone could see. He went across the hardwood floor toward the kitchen anyway, heels dragging, coat bunching up under him, making sounds of escalating fury that turned into something less controlled when he hit the cabinets. The kitchen knives came off the magnetic strip on the wall in sequence — not thrown, lowered, placed with deliberate precision into the floor around him in a close perimeter. One of them came close enough to his head that it trimmed a length of hair. Another caught his forearm as he moved it, shallow but real, and blood welled up along the line.
Billy stopped moving. He was breathing hard, surrounded by a ring of blades, and for the first time in the entire encounter he looked like something that could be scared.
Max walked into the kitchen.
She was aware, distantly, that something else was present in her — a cold overlay, something that had come in from the axe handle when she'd gripped it and was now looking out through her eyes with an interest that wasn't entirely hers. She let it. Whatever it wanted to say, she agreed with.
She stopped over Billy and brought the axe down.
The blade split the floor between his legs, close enough that he felt the displacement of air.
"Listen to me." Her voice came out steadier than she felt, with a resonance underneath it that wasn't quite hers. "I don't need you managing me. I don't need your protection or your rules or your curfews. These are my friends. You don't touch them. You don't come here again. And you don't ever —" She leaned down, close enough that there was no looking away, "— talk to me like that again. Are we clear?"
Billy's mouth moved. Nothing came out for a moment.
"Are we clear."
"Yeah," he said. Barely audible. "Yeah. Clear."
The cold overlay receded. Max straightened up, and she was just herself again, her heart hammering, her hands steady, looking down at her stepbrother on the kitchen floor surrounded by knives.
She stepped back. The axe stayed where it was, embedded in the floorboards.
Richard appeared in the kitchen doorway, took in the scene, looked at Billy, and crossed the room. He got a hand in Billy's collar and walked him to the front door with the efficiency of someone removing a raccoon from the garage — not cruel, not angry, just conclusive.
"You don't want to be controlled by your dad," Richard said at the door. "So stop doing it to her." He put him over the threshold. "Go home, Billy."
The door closed.
The five of them stood in the kitchen and living room and looked at each other in the particular silence that followed something that had gone as well as it possibly could have and still been genuinely terrifying.
Then Dustin said, very quietly, "Is the axe still in the floor?"
They looked. It was.
"There are spirits in this house," Will said. "There are spirits in Richard's house."
"I told you about the entities," Richard said, already heading to the utility closet for a broom. He surveyed the knives, the broken pot, the overturned couch. "I didn't specify they were this opinionated about houseguests."
Lucas put his arm around Max's shoulders, briefly, the kind of contact that asked nothing. She leaned into it for exactly one second and then straightened up.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Yeah." She looked at her hands, which were steady. She was surprised to find that she meant it. "Yeah, I am."
Dustin started righting the couch. Mike came out of the bedroom doorway — he'd been in the stack with the others for the whole thing — looking somewhat shaken but trying not to show it, which was standard Mike. He picked up one of the throw pillows that had landed on the floor and put it back.
"Next time," Mike said, "maybe we give her a heads up about the knives."
"Next time, maybe knock," Richard said.
The first thing any of them registered was the headlights.
They came back — not pulling away down the road, coming back, growing in the front window, the sound of the engine wrong somehow, higher and more ragged than before. Max got to the window first and saw Billy's car at the end of the driveway, not turning, accelerating.
"Get back —" Richard was already moving.
He got the teenagers into the bedroom doorway a half-second before the car hit the front of the house.
The impact was enormous — wood and drywall and the whole front wall displacing inward, the car's hood crumpling, one headlight still burning and throwing a wild angle of light across the ruined living room. Plaster dust. The smell of engine fluid. The groan of the house adjusting to the new load distribution.
Then the car door opened.
Billy got out.
Or something wearing Billy got out.
His eyes were completely black — not dark, not dilated, black, edge to edge — and the veins visible on his neck and forearms ran dark against his skin, moving. His face had the particular quality of something that had decided expression was no longer necessary. He looked at the hole he'd made in the front of the house, and then he looked at them, and the thing looking back wasn't Billy Hargrove managing his anger.
"I'm going to kill all of you," he said, with a calm that was worse than any screaming.
Max stared at her stepbrother's face and understood, in the cold specific way she was getting used to understanding things in Hawkins, that the black particles in the test tube on the workbench weren't the only ones that had been loose in town.
One of them had just found a host.
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