Chapter Twenty-Two
What the Island Keeps
The rain kept hammering the diner like fists.
Everyone who could be accounted for had crowded inside.
The world beyond the windows had dissolved into black and silver—lightning ripping open the sky, thunder rattling the glass.
Inside, voices climbed from confusion to fear as people shouted over one another.
Harmony moved through the crush of bodies to the open door, hair dripping, clothes plastered to her skin.
“Candy!” she called into the wind, but her voice was swallowed by the storm.
The runway had dissolved into a smear of rain and mud, the lights dead, the sound of the sea rising from far below the cliffs.
Cass moved up beside her, soaked and shivering. “She was so happy, playing for us, Harm. Where is she?”
“We need to find Candy,” Harmony yelled back. “Let’s split up—”
Torie stumbled from the darkness, mascara streaked, a sandal missing. “She ran away. She said she needed air. I told her not to go.”
Tosh appeared, jaw tight. “You let her leave?”
“I didn’t let her do anything,” Torie snapped. “She ran. I tried to stop her.” Her eyes flicked toward the ridge, now only visible in flashes of lightning. “It’s not my fault she wouldn’t listen.”
A jagged bolt split the sky, lighting the entire airfield for a heartbeat.
Everyone froze. Thunder hit so close it felt alive.
The power was out; the world existed only in short, violent bursts.
In that instant, Harmony saw it all—Torie shaking; Cass so pale she looked translucent; Tosh a live wire ready to snap; Mary carved from stone; Zach gripped his flashlight like a weapon.
Mary stepped forward, her wrap plastered to her shoulders. “We need to move. Now. We’ll be trapped up here if we don’t. The roads could wash out.” Efrain stepped beside her, trying to herd people into something like order.
“We can’t leave without Candy,” Harmony said.
“Harm,” Cass said, grabbing her hand, desperation in her eyes. “We’ll find her when it’s safe. Please. We have to get off this mountain. We can’t search blind, and we’re no good to her if we’re dead. She’s probably found shelter. She might be safer than we are in this death box.”
Tosh moved forward with resignation in his eyes. “We’ll come back at first light. Mary’s right. There are more lives at risk than one. Candy runs when she’s overwhelmed. We won’t find her because she doesn’t want to be found.” He shook his head.
Harmony swallowed hard, then nodded once. “I don’t approve, but I’ll go with the majority vote on this one.”
“We’ll radio the station as soon as we’re back in range,” Efrain said. “Search and Rescue can’t launch in this, but they’ll be ready at first light.”
No one else argued. They wanted out of there . . . and they wanted to move fast.
They piled into vehicles, making sure no one was left behind. Mary slid into the backseat with Harmony and Cass, refusing to ride alone.
Deputy Ciscel strode from vehicle to vehicle with a flashlight, checking headcounts, his jaw clenched. He wasn’t there on official duty, but he was always an officer. “We can’t safely search until this lets up. The last thing we need is more bodies on that road.”
Engines coughed and caught. The first vehicle pulled out, and then it was a parade of headlights slicing through sheets of rain that fell in every direction. The road off the mountain twisted, a dark ribbon slick with mud, every turn a guess.
Cass gripped the wheel, squinting through the downpour. “This is insane!”
“Just drive slow,” Harmony said, voice steady despite her shaking hands. Behind them, the airport vanished into fog just as Candy had.
A branch crashed across the road. Cass swerved, barely missing it. “Dammit!”
Mary muttered from the backseat, warmed by wine. “The island’s realigning itself tonight.”
“You’re not helping,” Cass said through clenched teeth.
She drove with both hands white-knuckled on the wheel. Harmony braced herself, tossed side to side, scanning the road for anything that could kill them faster than the storm.
“See anything?” Cass shouted.
“Barely. Just water, lots and lots of water.” Harmony narrowed her eyes, the headlights carving a pale tunnel through the darkness. “Steady and slow. The last thing we need is to slide off this damn cliff.”
“Didn’t think of that. Thanks for putting it in my head,” Cass said, voice pitching higher.
Behind them, a vehicle fishtailed and then straightened. Cass nearly cried.
“We’re fine. We’re just fine,” Harmony assured her.
The storm roared so loud it felt like they were inside it. Wind howled through the canyons like a voice—long, low, furious. Harmony thought of Candy’s song and the line about dancing on borrowed time. Her chest tightened.
Lightning flashed. For a second, the mountainside lit up, revealing a fresh landslide spilling rock and mud across the road. The earth looked wrong, bulging and buckled.
Cass slammed the brakes. “Holy hell!”
“Go around,” Harmony ordered. “Stay left.”
“There is no left!”
“Then make one!”
The jeep slid sideways, wheels spinning before catching again. Cass let out a wild, hysterical laugh.
“If I die doing this, you’d better make it sound heroic!”
“Deal!” Harmony said, gripping the door handle until her knuckles screamed.
They lurched past the debris as another bolt struck somewhere behind them, washing everything in electric blue. For an instant, Harmony saw the ridgeline—and something moving along it. Too deliberate to be blown debris, too upright to be an animal, too still to be a branch. There, then gone.
“Stop the car,” she shouted.
“What? Why?”
Harmony twisted. “I thought I saw her.”
“Candy?”
Harmony twisted to look again. Nothing but rain and blackness. Another flash. Still nothing. “I was wrong. Keep going.”
Cass exhaled. “We’re cursed, Harm. Everywhere we go, death follows like it’s on the guest list.”
Harmony didn’t answer. Mary didn’t either. The words felt too true to touch. She didn’t want to feed them and make them grow.
By the time they reached Avalon, the storm had swallowed the town.
Streets ran like rivers; storm drains gurgled with seawater.
The power was out. No streetlights. No Neon.
There was only the slap of never-ending rain.
The ferries were grounded, and The Casino loomed like a ghost ship on the horizon.
They abandoned the vehicles and ran, soaked, breathless, shaking.
Inside, The Hotel Atwater, the backup generator buzzed, casting jittery yellow light over terrified faces in the lobby.
Dozens of people huddled in corners, wrapped in towels and blankets, fear drifting through them like smoke.
The front desk bell kept ringing because a draft drifted through the room, or they hoped it was the wind causing the sound.
Mary strode in, shaking off water. “Phones are down. No signal. The grid’s out across the island.”
Zach flung a wet jacket onto a chair. “So we can’t call Search and Rescue?”
“They’ll know we were hit,” Efrain said grimly. “But the choppers won’t fly in this.” He tried his radio again, but static answered like laughter.
Torie sat apart near the windows, trembling, lips blue, eyes shallow. Harmony crouched in front of her, voice calm. “Tell me again what you saw.”
Torie’s tears cut tracks through the dirt on her cheeks. “I told you—she ran toward the ridge. I followed, just a few steps. The wind was insane.” Her voice cracked. “She looked back, smiled, and then . . . she was gone. I couldn’t see her. She was gone in a flash.”
“Gone how?” Harmony asked.
“Like the darkness swallowed her whole.”
Harmony studied her. “You two seemed to make peace tonight.”
Torie’s lips trembled. “I tried.”
Mary approached with a blanket and draped it over Torie’s shoulders. “We’ll call Search and Rescue at dawn,” she said. “If the roads hold.”
Zach leaned against the wall, rubbing his temples. “What if she fell?”
“Don’t,” Tosh said.
Silence dropped heavy. They were all thinking the same thing.
Thunder rolled back toward the sea. The rain shifted from a battering to a whisper. Harmony straightened, staring at the glass, at the warped reflection of their frightened faces.
“The weather isn’t the only thing hunting us,” Harmony said. “Something is surrounding us until there’s no possible escape.”
No one knew what to say to that. It was too close to true to react and make it real.
“Torie, think hard, think if she fell or not,” Cass begged.
Torie’s voice broke. “I don’t know. One second she was there. The next—nothing. Just rain. Just—nothing.”
Harmony watched her for a long moment. “You did try to stop her?”
“Yes, for the millionth time.”
“Did anyone see you together?”
Torie blinked rapidly. “I don’t. You can’t.
This is . . .” She stopped, clearly frustrated.
She took a breath. “I don’t remember who was there, but I do remember a ribbon hitting my cheek.
People were screaming, the sign fell, it was chaos.
” She rubbed her temples. “I just know she was there and then she wasn’t. ”
“I think we’re all scared,” Harmony said. “Scared people make mistakes.”
Mary returned with a bottle of whiskey and a handful of plastic cups. “Storm’s biblical,” she said. “Might as well confess our sins while we wait.”
Cass forced a shaky smile, her teeth chattering. “I already do that daily.”
“Then you’re ahead of the rest of us,” Mary said, pouring.
They drank, the thunder fading to a distant growl. Each flash of lightning carved different expressions into their faces—guilt, dread, denial.
Outside, the rain thinned to a drizzle. The world felt hollowed out, the air too thin. Avalon lay in a blackout, the kind of quiet that came right before something was finally uncovered.
Harmony stood by the window, watching waves crash against the pier. Her reflection stared back, her eyes dark, her jaw set.
“The storm’s not finished.”
Cass joined her. “Do you mean Candy?”
“I mean all of it.” Harmony touched the glass with her fingertips. “It’s already asking for another offering.”
This was the reason no one left to go home. They didn’t want to be alone and vulnerable, where they could then end up being the next body found.
Later, when most had drifted into uneasy sleep on lobby couches with borrowed blankets, Harmony sat alone, notebook open, pen hovering. The clock on the wall had stopped. She wrote.
The night the island screamed, it wasn’t thunder that frightened us. It was the silence that followed.
She paused, listening. For once she didn’t know what she expected to hear.
Torie’s voice broke the quiet. “You don’t think that she’s alive, do you?”
Harmony looked up. “I think her death has been summoned.”
Torie shuddered. “Why? Why is this happening?”
Harmony shook her head. “Whether we like it or not, there’s a price for living in paradise. Maybe that’s sacrifice, maybe it’s not. I have no doubt, there’s more to come.”
No one said a word, the fear too real.