Chapter 8
We left the motel in the middle of the night, just after Death departed, driving north up the highway to a lake house owned by Stewart Gavin.
I sat curled fetal on the RV’s built-in couch, ignoring the girls.
I pretended that I didn’t hear Skye’s whispered apologies for not telling me the truth sooner, for not letting me know what they were before inviting me to join them.
I pushed away the cups of tea Naomi coaxed into my hands.
Chloe’s questions—about whether or not I was okay and if I wanted to call my mom in the morning or maybe speak with someone who wasn’t them, like a parent or a friend or perhaps a therapist—went unanswered, like I hadn’t heard her at all.
We were well past the Wisconsin border when Naomi put a hand on my shoulder and kept it there, a firm pressure. “Hey. Shiloh wants to talk.”
I pushed to my feet, off-balance. The RV was moving fast and the asphalt was pocked with potholes. I made my way to the back of the RV, where I found Shiloh sitting cross-legged on the Murphy bed. “How’s your hand?”
“Fine.” I flexed my fingers. The pain had disappeared soon after Death departed, and when it did, my mobility returned.
My hand bore no mark or scar, nothing indicative of the agony I’d suffered.
I felt like I was being pranked or gaslit by Death or the girls, and I kept toying with the idea that it was all in my head.
If the girls hadn’t been there, I might’ve thought I was going insane.
“Sit with me,” Shiloh said, and I obliged her, claiming a corner of the mattress, drawing one leg up to my chest just to have something to hold on to. “I owe you an apology. We all do. We kept things from you, and that wasn’t fair.”
My hand, the one Death had touched, spasmed painlessly, the muscle pulling tight, then releasing.
Shiloh saw, watched me clench my hand into a tight and bloodless fist. “It’s called the touch of Death. It’s a gift that lends us the ability to kill with a single touch.”
I got off the bed. It was all too much, but the RV hit another pothole, and I lost my balance and barely managed to catch myself on the wall. I felt suddenly carsick, my mind reeling.
“Roslyn, it’s okay—”
I wheeled on her. “No, it’s not.”
Shiloh went silent.
“That man—or thing—back at the motel, it showed me my sister dying in the woods. How did he do that?”
“He’s Death. He can do a lot of things.”
“Did my sister kill people for him?” I already knew the answer; I’d heard it straight from Death. But I wanted to hear her say it anyway.
“She did.”
I thought about the man I’d have to kill if I wanted to discover what happened to Adeline that night in the playhouse. His life the price of the truth.
My knees buckled. I fell back onto the bed.
“Hey,” said Shiloh, and she cupped me by the chin. “I want you to look at me.”
I looked. It hurt to meet her eyes.
“We’re going to take care of you, all right?”
“And what if I can’t do this?” I said, and I hated her then for dragging me into this. Almost as much as I hated the man called Death. “How will you take care of me then?”
Shiloh dropped my chin. “I don’t want it to come to that.”
I picked at a fraying thread on the cuff of a jacket I’d only just remembered was Shiloh’s. I’d never taken it off. I had half a mind to give it back to her, but the weight around my shoulders was comforting. It kept me grounded when everything else felt like it was spiraling wildly out of control.
“Look, I know it’s a lot—”
“A lot?” I laughed out loud, but it came out shaky and hysterical. “That’s an underestimate. I’ve been coerced—some might argue kidnapped—by a cult of teenage girls that worship a deranged man who calls himself Death—”
“We don’t worship anyone.”
I kept going as if I hadn’t heard her. “And now you’re telling me I have to kill people or you’re going to kill me? That doesn’t sound insane to you?”
“You’re just going to have to trust us on this.”
“Trust you? I don’t even know you—”
“Adeline did,” said Shiloh, her expression unchanged. “And she trusted me.”
“Adeline is dead,” I snapped. “Clearly, trusting you didn’t get her very far.”
Shiloh flinched like I’d hit her. “Before she…left us that summer, she asked us to make sure that you were okay if anything happened to her. I went to Michigan wanting to keep that promise, but when I saw you, I realized you weren’t okay at all. You were…”
I braced myself, but Shiloh stayed quiet. “What? Just say it.”
“Lost. Hollow. Death was right when he said you don’t have an attachment to your life. And maybe it was an overstep, but I wanted—I want—to help you. Adeline wanted me to help you. Begged me to.”
That sounded like Adeline, sticking her nose where it didn’t belong, trying to take care of me from beyond the grave because even in death she didn’t believe I was capable of taking care of myself.
“You think you’re helping me?” A harsh peal of laughter stripped my throat raw.
“This isn’t help, Shiloh. This is twisted, and the only reason I’m still here is because that man—that thing back there proclaiming to be Death—is dangling the truth about my sister’s death above my head just out of reach, forcing me to participate in this sick game you’re playing. ”
Shiloh was quiet for a long time at that; we both were.
She looked down at her hands. There was black beneath some of her nails. Dirt, maybe. Or blood. “I’m sorry. I’m not good at this part. I never have been. I always try to explain things as best I can, but I never get it right. Naomi’s always telling me my bedside manner needs work—”
“That’s an understatement.”
Shiloh almost smiled, caught herself, as if remembering the seriousness of our conversation. “Look, I know there’s nothing I can say that is going to make you believe or trust me, and that’s fair. I’m not sure that what we do can be explained in words. You just have to live it.”
“Living the deaths of other people.” I shook my head, disgusted with Shiloh and moreover myself for not throwing open the door of the RV, then and there, demanding that they let me out, take me home. Just how far was I willing to go to discover the truth?
We drove north through the last of the night, up to the northernmost part of Wisconsin.
The rising sun was just pulling clear of the pines when I first caught sight of Stewart Gavin’s house, flashing between the trees as we came up the road.
It was a cabin with a sharply slanted roof and a crude stone chimney listing to the left.
There was a wide gravel clearing in front of the house, and the caravan encircled it.
Riley parked Shiloh’s truck just a few feet from the porch but didn’t get out.
Iona pulled up in the station wagon. Shiloh emerged from the bedroom of the RV, and as she did, Chloe and Skye, who had been sitting with me in the kitchen, stood up.
“Well?” said Shiloh, looking down at me. “What’s it going to be?”
“I’m not ready.” My voice was hoarse from the effort of holding back tears.
I didn’t want to hurt anyone, much less kill them.
Hell, I couldn’t even bring myself to stomp on spiders, even though they absolutely terrified me.
I always made Adeline do the dirty work, but she wasn’t here to stand in for me now.
I was on my own. Maybe that’s what she’d wanted all along, a trial by fire, to make me as strong as she was. “I need time. Just a day or two—”
“We don’t have it to spare,” said Shiloh. “Are you going in or not?”
I was terrified and torn. Had Adeline felt the same way when faced with this choice?
Did she feel as helpless and guilt-sick as I did?
The thought brought me some comfort. This was a nightmare, but at least it was one that my sister had once lived.
Just the thought of that made me feel closer to her, in a way that I hadn’t since she’d first disappeared.
I closed my eyes, caught the briefest glimpse of her dying alone in that playhouse. The vision Death had given me.
It was enough. “Okay. I’ll do it.”
Shiloh, for her part, didn’t seem surprised. She turned to the other girls. “Wait here. This’ll be quick.” Then she held open the door of the RV for me. “After you.”
I had assumed there’d be some vital element of surprise at play.
That we’d ditch the vehicles at some secluded location, a mile or so from the house, and approach on foot to avoid announcing our arrival.
Maybe we’d slip inside through a cracked window like burglars in the night.
But Shiloh’s approach lacked that theatricality.
She walked up the steps of the porch as though it was her own home.
I felt like I was about to pass out again.
“Before we go in, a few ground rules.” We were just inches from the front door, but Shiloh didn’t even bother to whisper.
“The first thing you need to understand is that we’re not here to kill him.
This is a dispatch,” said Shiloh. “We’re here because he has to die.
Mind the difference between the two. The second is that, when you try the door, it’ll be unlocked for you.
It always is. The third is that, once our mark lays eyes on us, things will change.
You’ll feel it. We’ll be in another reality, adjacent to this one but different.
It’s almost like time stops for a little while, until the dispatch is complete.
” It bothered me that she called killing someone a dispatch, like something to cross off a to-do list. “Got all that?”
I didn’t, but I nodded anyway, ready to get this over with before I lost my nerve.
Shiloh waved me forward. “After you.”