CHAPTER 37
WREN
He doesn’t finish it.
Lazarus was always going to be faster. That’s the one thing Silas, for all his planning, could never plan around, that there is a man on this earth who has spent twelve years rehearsing the single act of putting his body between Wren Mercer and the thing that would end her, who has done it through walls and bolts and a witness stand and six years of concrete, for whom it is not a decision but a reflex older than thought.
He’s across the desk before the gun finishes rising.
There’s no grace in it, nothing like the movies, just enormous violence in a small burnt room, the revolver going off once into the rafters and bringing down a hiss of old snow, and then the two brothers going to the floor in the lantern light, and the awful brief sounds of it, and the music box knocked from the desk to spill its six brass notes one last warped time across the scorched boards —
— and then it’s quiet.
The quietest the world has ever been.
Lazarus gets up. Silas doesn’t.
I won’t write that part either. I’ve decided there are things I get to keep inside the door now, by my own choosing, which is different, which is everything, from the door being shut for me.
I’ll only say that it was fast, and that my brother did the thing he is built to do, the thing he warned me he was on a snowy stairwell when I was eighteen, I will burn down the world to keep it, and that when he turned around to me with his father’s blood and his brother’s blood on him exactly as he’d turned around six years ago, I did not reach for a grey dress. I did not begin to build a lie.
I crossed the room, and I took his ruined face in both my hands, and for the first time I chose him in the light with the whole truth between us and nothing edited out of either of us, and I said the only thing left that was true.
“Mine,” I said.
And Lazarus Frost, who came back from the dead for me, who took my worst night into his own body so I could live, who I am going to spend the rest of my life refusing to let decide a single thing for me again, Lazarus closed his eyes and let me hold him up for once, and breathed out slow and easy, in, and out, and said, “Yours. Always. Stop asking.”
We almost made it. We almost got to stand there in the quiet and call it the end.
But the reels were still turning when Silas’s heart stopped.
And six years ago a careful, patient man had built a careful, patient machine, and somewhere, in a lawyer’s office, on a timer, in the cloud, in all the places a planner plants a dead man’s revenge, the copies began, exactly as he promised they would, to go out into the world.
To a district attorney. To a newspaper. To a parole officer.
The truth of Marrowfield, the line of vanished girls, the fire, the lie, my four minutes, all of it, unlocked at last by the one heartbeat Silas was always going to make sure stopped in this room.
I’d opened the box to set myself free.
And in doing it, I’d set everything free.
Down in the town, eleven minutes away, in a green Bronco, a good man’s phone was about to start ringing.
And somewhere out in the wide dark world, a girl who was twelve six years ago, a girl I told to disappear, a girl I made myself forget, was about to hear, for the first time since a woman carried her out of a burning house into the snow, the name she’d been running from her whole life.
Frost.