Chapter 16 #2
She nodded. “He brought me back to life on the bathroom floor while my mom was praying in the kitchen. He struck a bargain with me. He told me he’d make sure I got to grow up safe.
That my mom wouldn’t take my life so long as I agreed that, on my fifteenth birthday, I would belong to him.
He’d spared my life just to take it from me.
” She smiled, but with anger. Like after all the years, she still couldn’t believe what was stolen from her, couldn’t bring herself to accept it.
“I was scared, but I agreed to it. I wanted to live.”
“What about your mom? Did she know he came for you?”
Shiloh shook her head. “But things did get better after Death left. I crawled out of the bathroom to see my mom on the phone. My dad had been in a bad accident. Almost lost his life. He recovered but stopped working as a lineman and was home all the time, disabled but alive. My mom got a job as a secretary in town, and she never did warm up to me, but the baptisms stopped. I was safe, if not happy, just like Death promised that I would be. I sort of forgot about the bargain I’d struck with him, started wondering if I’d imagined it.
But on the eve of my fifteenth birthday, I went to sleep and woke up to him sitting on the edge of my bed. He’d come to make good on his deal.”
It seemed like Shiloh intended to end the story there, but I prompted her to continue. “What did he say?”
“Not much. He gave me simple instructions. Told me to steal my parents’ truck.
I knew how to drive—kids where I lived learned early—but I didn’t have a license.
Death told me I wouldn’t have to worry about details like that anymore—homework, jobs, GED—all that stuff was in the past. All I needed to do was pack up and hit the road.
So I did. Death had me drive north until I reached the home of a woman whose name I don’t remember.
Maybe I never knew it. As we stood over her, Death took me by the hand and put his power right through my palm.
Then he had me kill her. We left, and then, a day later, I killed again. ”
“Was it hard for you?” I asked, wanting to know if she’d struggled the way I had, the way I was still struggling then. Shiloh seemed like she was born to be Death’s servant; it was hard for me to imagine her doing or being anyone else.
“Not really.” Shiloh sat up, slid out of the truck like she needed to move, to get something out of her system.
She started to pace a bit. “I think I just…I felt bad about how easy it was for me. In the beginning, Death only gave me these quiet departures. People who died the way we all hope to. Painless, bloodless, peaceful passings. Of course, I knew there were worse ways to go, but he didn’t show me any of that at first. He really protected me, and in those early days…
I don’t know. He was almost like family to me—as close to a parent as I ever had.
I know a part of me loved him for that, and I hate myself for it. ”
“You shouldn’t,” I whispered, and climbed out of the truck after her. When I put a hand to her arm, she stopped pacing, stood beside me. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“But I do,” said Shiloh, peering down at me.
I was tall, but she had me by a good few inches.
“I knew that he was what he was, Roslyn. That he was trapping me and that I had let him. So when he asked me to drive west to St. Louis and find Naomi, I knew exactly what I was dragging her into. But he told me that it would be okay. And you know what? I believed him. Over time, I came to love this life, and I didn’t want anything different.
Even when the deaths became more violent, gruesome.
I didn’t mind much, or if I did, I found a way to get over it.
At least, that’s what I told myself back then. ”
“What about now?”
Shiloh’s eyes glazed over, and she shut them, shook her head.
“Now…I know that it catches up to you eventually. All of this—the group, this fucked-up family that Death brought together—it’s just a bunch of scared girls fleeing the inevitable, and I’m just the go-between.
Riley isn’t wrong about that…She’s not wrong not to trust me. ”
“I trust you,” I said, so soft my voice was almost lost to the night.
Shiloh turned to look at me, and I became aware then of the space between us. There wasn’t much of it to begin with, but she leaned closer still. “Why?”
It wasn’t what I was expecting her to say. “Why…?”
“Do you trust me?”
We were so close our foreheads very nearly touched.
My gaze dropped to her mouth, and I had this strange urge to drag my thumb along her lower lip, trace the shape of it so that when all of this was over, I would remember her properly.
But I didn’t move, except to draw back, my hand limp at my side.
“Why wouldn’t I trust you? Adeline did, and her instincts were always better than mine. ”
Something passed over Shiloh’s face at the mention of my sister’s name, a kind of contamination ruining whatever nameless thing had been building between us.
She leaned back, smiled. “Why do you always do that?”
“Do what?”
“Withdraw into the memory of her every time I try to…”
“Try to what?”
Shiloh dragged a hand through her hair, frustrated, grasping for the words. “Every time I try to…get close to you.”
I faltered, trying to process what she had just said. “You’re trying to get close to me?”
Shiloh made as though she hadn’t heard me. “You use Adeline like a lifeline. Every time you’re presented with the possibility of something beyond her—something that could be good—you retreat back into her shadow like it’s the only place you feel safe.”
“No, I don’t.” It was a lie, and I knew it.
“Yes. You do. What are you so afraid to face without her, Roslyn?”
“I’m not afraid of anything, Shiloh. My worst nightmare already came true. I lost her already. What is there left to be afraid of, really?”
Shiloh looked at me with pity. “You tell me.”
I flinched, nodded. First to her and then to myself. Then I stepped past her, heading back to the RV. “I should get some sleep—”
“Roslyn, wait.”
I stopped, turned back to her, hoping she would say something. An apology or an excuse that would make up for what we’d said to each other, take us back to those quiet moments before the mention of Adeline ruined everything. “What?”
Shiloh didn’t look at me, spoke with her gaze on the ground. “There’s something terrible waiting for us in Las Vegas. You need to be ready for it.”
“How am I supposed to be ready when you won’t tell me what’s coming?”
“It’s not that I won’t tell you. It’s that I don’t know exactly—”
“Bullshit. You know something more than that or else you wouldn’t have told me. It’s Death, isn’t it? Something he said.”
“Look, Roslyn, I’m just trying to do you a solid—”
“Then tell me the truth, Shiloh.” My voice wavered. “What’s waiting for us in Vegas?”
“I said I don’t know,” she whispered. “But you shouldn’t need me to tell you. People die in terrible ways every single day. And you haven’t been made to accept that as a physical reality. You haven’t been on any truly horrible dispatches—”
“That’s not true,” I said, affronted, feeling like she was calling me weak.
After everything I’d been through? After the people I’d killed?
After Death had drilled his power into the very palm of my hand.
After I’d watched my sister be carried out of the woods behind our house in a body bag.
“I watched a man burn alive in his car. I stopped the heart of a girl my own age. What do you mean I haven’t seen anything horrible? ”
Shiloh went dark in the eyes. “There is tragedy, and then there is horror. The two overlap, but they’re not the same.”
I swallowed dry, feeling sick and wondering how a night that felt so perfect had suddenly turned into this. “Is this some kind of punishment?” I asked. “Is Death trying to get me to break?”
She shook her head. “When a new girl enters our group, there’s always this…culmination at the end of her first kills. That’s what’s waiting for you in Vegas, but if you can’t manage it—”
“I can,” I said. “I’m stronger than you think I am.”
Shiloh merely nodded, expressionless. “For your sake, I hope that’s true.”