Chapter 20 #3
Bas’s warm hands cup my frozen cheeks, coaxing me back to reality. His fingers brush my ear, offering me a red earbud and the other half of a song.
“Together,” he promises, grim but smiling, the crinkle behind his eyes as much grief as it is love. “Together or not at all.”
Outside our culvert, the engines grow ever closer. I don’t know how he’s manifesting so easily despite everything, but Cain shakes his ghostly head, his features abruptly coalescing.
“Down!”
Bas flings himself backward, carrying me with him.
On our bellies in the underbrush, hiding behind scrub bushes and skunk cabbage, we watch from the bracken as black SUVs roar down the road.
They split at the exit ramp, half flooring it across the bridge, the others cutting down the ramp.
Across the river, something metallic bangs louder than a train crash.
Through the music blaring in my ear, I can just pick out a change in the energy warping around the gate, a noise like a winch laboriously cranking something into place.
The fingers tugging in my chest release, ever so slightly. The last SUV passes.
Cain spins. “Go, now!”
And we’re running again, with hands and ears bound together.
We scramble through a strip of woods. The red string of fate strains between us, earbuds tugging painfully in ear canals.
Scraping my palms on fallen logs, clambering over bracken and down another hillside, I don’t have time to worry about anything other than go, now.
I concentrate on the blasting music instead, let it wash away that awful summoning, its lie—its siren song offering me all the names I lost seventeen years ago.
“They opened the gate,” I gasp. “They must have. There’s nowhere for those cars to go otherwise, right? If we can get back up there, we can sneak in behind them.”
Cain surges forward, barreling through trees without even a flinch. “Tempting you with an obvious opening. We can’t go that way.”
“I know. But they were camped halfway down the river, not here. Not until we landed. So there’s gotta be another hole in the ghost fence somewhere, another way through the dome. Across the river maybe? Is there another bridge?”
“I don’t know.”
Bas’s face contorts. He shoots a sharp glance sideways, the movement almost ripping the earbud out of my ear. “What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I mean my intel is seventeen years out of date,” Cain snaps. “And there didn’t used to be a river here.”
“How could a river just appear?” Bas demands but I don’t need to ask; I know.
My mother broke the world. And when she clawed it open, cracking reality to suck its marrow and God knows what else, it bled. Of course it did. How could it do anything else after sustaining that perverse and gaping wound?
The tree line breaks, spilling us out at the bottom of another hill and into the back of a small cul-de-sac.
Just a single street, really, lined with battered houses, moldy roofs caving in.
Asphodel coats every yard; climbs rusty play sets; bursts from the open, dangling jaws of mailboxes.
It collects like snowdrift piles, higher than my shoulder, that must obscure abandoned cars.
Hand in hand—two teenagers and a ghost—we creep across a backyard, toward the street.
In the neighboring lot, my eye catches on a small, decrepit doghouse with a stakeout chain and a little ghost light wandering the base of a tree.
Sick to my churning stomach, eyes burning, I turn away.
I don’t want to look, can’t face this last straw in the wreckage of my mother’s selfishness—the devastation of weather-bleached bones waiting on a back porch for a door that will never open.
Out on the main street, Cain holds up a hand.
He beckons us into the shadow of a house, but I freeze, staring at a driveway two houses down.
Every other car in this cul-de-sac rots under a foot of asphodel, and yet right there sits a single white Prius, parking tag hanging in the rearview mirror, and I don’t need to cross the street to read what it says.
“That’s my mom’s car,” I whisper. “She’s here.”
But before I can point—before we can hide—a different car door opens farther up the road. Boots hit the pavement.
A woman’s voice calls out, “Hello again, Persephone,” pleasant, fake-friendly. “I was hoping I’d be the one to find you. We have a lot to talk about.”
Hand in hand in the shadow of the house, we peer around its corner.
Bully boys spill into the mouth of the cul-de-sac from a black SUV hidden behind a rickety sign.
But weirdly, they hang back, letting the woman walk ahead, clearing corners as she passes with a casual ease that reminds me of Cain standing on my mother’s porch with his lighthouse gaze perpetually scanning.
She stops just short of my mother’s car. The picture of patience, she pastes on a smile, gentle, despite the gun in her hand.
Out of context, in a crisp black suit instead of funky scrubs and plastic clogs, my tired brain struggles to place her. Bas beats me to it. His lip curls into a sneer.
“What’s the school nurse doing here?”