Chapter 16
After Corbin, time seemed to compress. There was never enough of it to go around. The girls scrambled to prove their worth as Death’s deadline drew near, killing more and more, until our dispatches climbed up into the dozens. I wrote down my own contributions over and over, making myself remember.
Stewart Gavin.
Jasmine Wu.
Elizabeth Paulson.
Corbin.
One night, with three days left before the deadline, I stared down at the names, the shadows of the campfire dancing over the paper, wondering how many more names I still needed to add to appease Death and earn the truth about what happened to Adeline.
I still had the final task ahead of me, a dispatch I suspected would be worse than any other so far.
On the other side of the fire, Shiloh stood up.
“Off to see him again?” Riley asked her, eyes narrowed against the smoke. The hot dog she held into the fire was charred and blackened, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her gaze was on Shiloh, sharp and accusing.
“I’ll only be gone for a few hours.” She walked to her pickup, impervious to Riley, no excuses or attempts to explain where she was going or what she would discuss with Death.
It didn’t take hours for him to give her a handful of names and addresses.
There had to be more they discussed, but whatever it was, she was unwilling to share it. “Stay out of trouble while I’m gone.”
For the past week, Shiloh had taken off before sunset and didn’t return until the wee hours of the morning. I’d hear her truck pulling in, but she wouldn’t come into the RV. No one knew where she went, how she spent the rest of her nights when she wasn’t away with Death.
That night, I stayed awake staring at the ceiling of the RV until, four hours after she left, I heard the familiar growl of her engine.
I waited a little while, and then, with my quilt wrapped around me like a shawl, went out to greet her.
But what I found was Shiloh dead asleep in her truck bed, curled fetal against the cold.
She was breathing heavily, eyes screwed shut.
With a pit in my stomach, I saw her hands were rusty with dried blood.
The stains of a dispatch. A bad one.
I dropped the quilt from around my shoulders, and I leaned over the side of the truck, draped it over her. I was making my way back to the RV when I heard my name: “Roslyn?”
I stopped, turned back to her. “Yes?”
Shiloh was sitting up, bleary eyed. She was more than two years older than me, but in that moment, she looked younger. “Stay?”
“Okay,” I said, and redoubled, climbing up into the truck bed with her. I sat there cross-legged at first, but when Shiloh lifted the corner of the blanket, I slid in beside her, facing her, our bodies slotting together. “Why do you sleep alone out here? There’s room in the RV.”
Shiloh stifled a yawn. “I don’t want to wake you guys.”
“Don’t worry about that. The girls are knocked out.”
“But I woke you up.”
“You didn’t. I stayed awake.”
Shiloh frowned. “You were waiting for me.” It wasn’t a question.
I rolled onto my back so I didn’t have to face her. Overhead, tattered clouds obscured the stars. “I wanted to know what you do out here. Where you go when the rest of us are asleep.”
I regretted the words almost immediately, because Shiloh went dark when I said them. I turned to her again and watched it happen, her mouth firming up, the joy leaving her eyes like a light flicked off.
I don’t know why I took her by the hand, why I felt bold enough to do it. We hadn’t touched each other that way since the night of Jasmine’s death, which felt like forever ago. A strange pocket of the past, complete unto itself.
She flinched when I touched her, turning her palm over in my hand, running my fingers along the bloodstains, so dried and faded they looked almost like bruises. “You’re going on dispatches. Aren’t you?”
Shiloh stole her hand away, closed it into a tight fist. “He expects it from one of us.”
“Then pass off some of the work to the others. Any of us would help you.”
But Shiloh shook her head, wouldn’t hear it. “You need your rest.”
“So do you.”
Shiloh’s eyes fell closed. I sensed I was losing her a bit, but to what I didn’t know. “Some of the worst dispatches happen at night. I don’t want you guys to see that.”
“It’s not fair that you have to shoulder this alone.”
Shiloh parted her lips to speak but faltered and wet them instead.
“I’m all right, okay? I go out on these dispatches because I prefer it.
I speak to Death so he doesn’t have to speak to you.
And I sleep outside because the cold air is nice and I don’t mind it.
I’m not doing anything I don’t want to.”
“I don’t believe you. None of us want this. None of us would choose to kill if we didn’t have to. No good person would ever want to do any of this.”
Shiloh opened her eyes, her gaze searching, that same question in them. “How do you know that I’m good?”
The truth was I hadn’t thought much about whether or not Shiloh was a good person. If any of us were. I wasn’t sure if goodness was a thing that could be retained in such close proximity to Death, with all the horror and violence that came with that.
“You are good,” I said, trying to convince her and myself. “I can just feel it.”
“Your feelings haven’t led you astray before?”
They had. They would continue to as long as I was with her.
I could feel the pull even then, to draw near to her at the risk of everything else.
To lose myself in her.
I swallowed dry. “What are you exactly?”
I could tell I caught her by surprise from the way her eyebrows knit together. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, why did Death choose you?” I said, propping myself up on one elbow, needing to put some space between us. “There are a million girls in the world. How did he land on you?”
I asked the question like I couldn’t fathom the answer when, in truth, I suspected that Death had selected Shiloh for the same reason I found it difficult not to look at her.
That strange quality she possessed, a kind of dark charisma that made the world seem to shrink around her as if everything and everyone else were suddenly less important.
Shiloh rolled onto her back and pulled off the blanket, like she needed air. “I don’t know. I guess there’s always been something…wrong with me.”
“What do you mean by wrong?”
Shiloh chewed on the inside of her lip, considering whether or not she wanted to answer that question. “When I was little…my parents thought I was the devil.”
I choked out a laugh. “I mean, don’t all parents think that about their kids at some point?”
“No, I mean literally…” She grasped for a way to explain it, and I could tell she was frustrated, not with me, but with herself for failing to find the words.
I was surprised to hear her stutter when she spoke again, voice breaking a little, the tip of her tongue catching on her top teeth.
“I—I was…odd. I talked to myself constantly, always in a whisper. I didn’t play with toys the way that other kids did, just wasn’t really interested in them.
And I wore my clothes inside out so the tags wouldn’t scratch me, and if my mom made me wear them the right way, I’d just…
break. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t focus on anything else.
I got so agitated, you know? All this anger and energy in me that I didn’t know how to express. I think I was overwhelmed.”
“That just sounds like normal kid stuff. Everyone has their quirks.”
But Shiloh shook her head. “It wasn’t just that.
There were other things too. Worse things.
I had a temper—a bad one. I’d break things when I couldn’t find more productive ways to express myself, and that was often, because…
” She paused, considering. “The world just felt like it was moving fast, you know? Everyone speaking so quickly, on some wavelength that I just couldn’t tune in to no matter how hard I tried.
And I did try. All the time. I never stopped trying, and I think that was the frustrating part.
That I tried harder than anyone I knew and I was still always behind. ”
I knew what she meant. I’d felt something similar after Adeline died. Everyone carrying on and me left behind with Adeline and the rest of the dead, or near-dead, as if frozen in time.
“When things got really bad, I had these outbursts, I guess you can call them. I’d lash out at people…
and myself. I’d have bruises all the way up my arms just from—” She stopped short, shook her head.
“I scared her—my mom, I mean. I scared her so badly that she started trying to find ways to fix me. She went to the doctors first, but that didn’t help, so she turned to the church for answers that medicine didn’t offer. ”
“And what kind of answers did they have?”
“Prayers and snake oil,” said Shiloh bitterly. “We lived in this small town in rural Georgia, and the chapel was right down the road. Sometimes she’d walk me there in the summer heat and she’d make me stay on my knees for hours, praying in the aisle, right in front of the altar.”
“Good god. Shiloh, I’m sorry.”
She didn’t hear me, and I watched as she slipped away from me again, into her memories.
“The first time she tried to drown me in the bathtub, my dad was on this long work trip. He traveled a lot, and when he did, my mom got meaner and more devout. Anyway, she held me under, said she was baptizing me. Making me pure. When I passed out, she let me go. But that wasn’t the end of it.
There were more…baptisms to follow. And one night—a bad one, just before my tenth birthday—she drowned me. That was when Death showed up.”
I didn’t want to let myself imagine it, but I did: Shiloh in that tub, thrashing, her mother pinning her down to the bottom. I’d known my share of grief, but this was…horror. A mother turned against her own child, drowning her. Shiloh powerless to stop it.
“So he saved you,” I whispered as the pieces slotted together.