Chapter 22
I woke to screaming and sunlight flooding in through the windows. It wasn’t a normal scream, more of a bellow, really. A round sound that came from the belly and seemed to swell, filling the whole house. I sat up, the rest of the girls along with me, bleary eyed and confused.
Shiloh and Naomi were the first on their feet. Riley and I scrambled after them to the pool.
I saw Monica on her hands and knees by the back door.
And there, just beyond her, was Skye floating in the pool.
If she hadn’t been facedown, I might’ve thought she’d just fallen asleep in the middle of a morning swim. But her fingers had gone blue, and her hair fanned out behind her, moving like a living thing on the surface of the water.
I moved with the tide of the other girls, through the living room and out onto the back patio.
But it was Naomi who first waded in to retrieve her, fully dressed, stepping stiffly down the stairs and into the cold water.
With all the tenderness of a mother—as Skye’s real mother lay heaving on the patio—Naomi turned Skye over.
Her eyes, wide open, were a raw red from the chlorine.
Her lips were just parted, as if she had something she wanted to say but died before she could get the words out.
Shiloh waded into the pool, helped Naomi drag Skye from the water. They laid her down on the pool’s edge, combed the hair back from her face.
Someone called 911. I don’t know why. It was too late, and we knew it.
That was when I saw him: Death, standing on a jagged ridge more than half a mile from the house.
He was motionless, facing us; perhaps he’d been there the whole time to watch the scene unfold.
But the moment I registered him—a black mote against the bright morning sky—he turned and began to walk away.
I felt a rage in me. Something horrible. A crack or a break, like the sickening crunch of a rolled ankle, a beat of shock, and then white pain after it.
I let myself out through the back gate of the house, stepped barefoot into the desert.
The sand was hot beneath my feet, studded with sharp rocks and bristling cacti.
I started running anyway, a sudden burst, like I’d launched myself off a starting block.
I didn’t feel the pain at first, but by the time I caught up to Death, my lungs were on fire and my feet were throbbing, my soles cut deep and bleeding.
I caught him by the back of his shirt, clawing at a fistful of fabric, dragging him back.
“You’re a coward,” I said. “Come back and look at what you’ve done. Look at what you’ve taken and explain it. You don’t just get to walk away from this. Not this time. Not with her.”
I pulled hard again, but Death kept his back to me, his head turned so that I couldn’t see his face.
But he rolled his shoulders, seemed too thin before my eyes.
His chest caved in, bones and ligaments and muscles snapping, a sound like a chorus of knuckles cracking.
He seized up, as though his body was struggling to contain the stuff of his soul.
When he finally turned to look at me, he was wearing Skye’s face. “There’s nothing to see.”
I blacked out. I must’ve, because I don’t remember him leaving or anything between the moment I saw Skye’s face and when I woke up in the dust. Eyes wide open, I stared up at the sun-bleached sky, black spots—like the charred circles of cigarette burns—obscuring the periphery of my vision.
My eyes stung like they had sand in them.
I squeezed them shut, scrubbed at them with a closed fist, afraid I might’ve blinded myself staring at the sun.
Shiloh dropped to the ground beside me, breathless, catching me by both shoulders. She spoke to me, but her voice was warped and tinny, slow at first and then altogether too fast, everything coming in garbled spurts of syllables and broken words.
“She’s gone,” I said, over and over again. “She’s gone. He took Skye.”