Thirty-Five
Paisley is alive.
I saw countless headlines about Paisley’s death. We held a vigil and a burial for her. We found her fingernails. We—
She’s alive.
Paisley rushes into the room, slamming the door behind her.
There’s something wild about her, like she’s spent the past eight months on a deserted island and not holed up in the motel.
I’ve seen Paisley with her hair unbrushed moments after waking up at sleepovers, but I’ve never seen her with a slick layer of grease all over her, sunk into her scalp and the sides of her nose.
Even from a few feet away, her smell permeates the room, sweat with the sharp scent of acute stress.
Something only animals are supposed to sense on each other.
But Beck doesn’t care. Beck picks herself up off the floor and throws her arms around her sister, holding her so tightly her knuckles go white. Paisley stiffens.
“Oh my god,” Beck mutters. “You’re here. You’re supposed to be—” She shudders a breath. “Pais…”
Slowly, Paisley releases her muscles, moving her arms as slowly as snakes until she’s embracing her sister back. As Beck moves in hysterics, Paisley goes still, resting her forehead against Beck’s collarbone, her breath slowing so much I almost think she’s stopped altogether.
She lifts her head, making eye contact with me. “Hi, Emma.”
I’ve never heard her voice so soft; it’s enough to push the tears out of my eyes. Part of me wonders if I should join in Paisley and Beck’s hug, but I can’t move.
Paisley’s really alive.
It feels as impossible as the night I found out she was dead.
More impossible, somehow. Paisley being dead became such an important part of the reality I wake up and see every morning that this moment feels more like a dream than anything.
How did I miss this possibility when we learned they didn’t bury Paisley’s body?
Doesn’t this happen all the time in slashers, that a victim is presumed dead but then shows up alive and well at the end?
I don’t know. Maybe I should’ve guessed.
But she’s alive regardless. She’s here. I shut my eyes tight enough to see stars and open them.
I fully take in Paisley’s face as she blinks back at me.
It’s really her. I’m real and she’s real and this is all really happening.
I suddenly can’t stop shivering.
How the hell is Paisley alive?
But before I can get a word in, knocks sound against the front door again.
Paisley blasts as far away from the front of the room as she can, sinking into the space between the bathroom and one of the beds. “Don’t open it!”
“Hey guys, it’s Lars from the front desk,” the guy’s voice rings through the thin walls. “Where’d that girl go?”
Beck pulls away from Paisley, gripping her sister’s shoulders as she hiss-whispers, “Did that motel creep do something to you?”
Paisley shakes her head, her features screwing up like a toddler’s. “No. He’s no one.” She knocks her way out of Beck’s grip, falling to her knees. “But we can’t leave. We can’t.”
Beck shoots a glance back at me. “Can you get him to go?”
I nod as Beck moves back to Paisley, getting on her knees to be eye level with her. It’s the part of Beck who wrote that eulogy, the one who couldn’t imagine life without her sister. It feels wrong in some fundamental way knowing what I know, but shock can do a lot to people.
I approach the door, put on the chain lock, and open it up. The blast of fresh air clears more than just my nose. “Hey, we’re good,” I say. “She went away.”
“Okay.” Lars rubs his nose. “I’ll be in my office. Let me know if she comes back.”
Once Lars’s lumbering gait fades to silence, I turn back to Beck and Paisley.
“I guess we should get going,” I say. “Paisley, you probably need medical attention for your fingers. You don’t want to get an infection.
We took care of Evan.” My insides still squirm saying that.
“You’re safe now.” I know Harlow and Opal still died, but it’s like we’re in a suspended reality where one out of three is enough, where it’s not worth it for Beck and me to be risking our lives anymore.
We have more than a case-changing amount of information to take back to federal agents.
Hell, we have a daughter to take back to Mr. and Mrs. Horne.
But all Paisley does is widen her eyes. “We can’t.”
All this time, Evan did think Paisley was special. Special enough to keep alive. But god, what did he do to her these past eight months? I can’t let my imagination run without the horror enveloping me. We’re in rescue mode now. It’s more important than ever that I keep it together.
Beck pulls her hands off Paisley. “What’re you talking about? Emma’s telling the truth about the guy who hurt you. Let’s get out of here. You can tell us about what happened when we’re on the road.”
And Paisley starts to cry. “You two don’t get it,” she moans.
“It was—god, it’s my fault. The woman in town told us about a witch and it sounded so creepy.
When the college guys told us the same story and that the best place to find the witch was the mining town, I had to check it out.
Harlow and Opal didn’t want to, but I made them.
Townspeople had told us about rituals we could do to summon the witch, so we wanted to try them out for fun.
No one thought it’d actually be real, you know?
” I nod along, knowing the feeling deep in my guts.
“But we tried the ceremony, and this woman came into the ghost town to check on us. But it was too late. We’d summoned the witch, and she took over. ”
Paisley starts rocking on her feet, eyes staring at nothing. My heart sinks at every word. Paisley keeps saying she. She’s mistaking Evan’s long hair and slight build for him having been a woman, right? Because it was Evan. He admitted to killing Vanessa.
“Paisley, are you sure it wasn’t a man?” I ask.
She ignores me. “She gave us drinks to drug us into submission. She said sacrifices had to be made to cause the witch to manifest outside of the possession.”
She ignores me, just like she would’ve when everything was normal. For the first time on this trip, the anxiety and sadness in my gut changes to anger. For just a second. I can’t let the anger sizzle for any longer than that. Not when we thought Paisley was dead.
“She told us that we’d have to sacrifice a piece of ourselves and pulled out this horrible knife,” Paisley continues.
“Harlow refused and—” Her next words come out as a burst of air.
“She killed Harlow and Opal. Once they were dead, they took fingers and ears and—god, I was so terrified. I told her to take whatever she wanted, just not to kill me.” She holds out her hands.
“She took all my fingernails and told me to watch. But I ran. I found this tower, but she found me. I dropped my phone and it broke. I ran down the back roads with her chasing me. I ran and hid in the motel, but I didn’t know what to do.
I just knew I had to hide. The motel owner was working that night, and I gave him Mom’s tennis bracelet. ”
My mind swims. So she paid to be here? Evan wasn’t holding her hostage? Did she even encounter Evan? When did he get her jacket and phone?
“…It was worth enough to stay until now,” Paisley continues. “I went back to the tower and stole some of the food, but there was no way to contact anyone. Besides—”
Beck’s face fills with rage as much as pain.
“Why the fuck didn’t you call Mom or Dad or the police?” Beck demands. “It was one person!”
But Paisley ignores her as she hugs herself. “We can’t go. I can’t even go outside. She’s waiting for me. Why do you think I haven’t left since everything happened? I can’t escape her.”
Why does she keep saying she? “Do you remember what the person who attacked you guys looked like?” I ask. “We encountered someone in the woods. But it was a man. He was one of the rangers here.”
The cold rushes over me.
Paisley’s here. Paisley has her fingernails ripped off and has holed herself up in a motel room for the past eight months, with very little food, living off whatever water comes out of the sinks. Paisley has been in here because she’s terrified of someone. Enough not to call anyone, either.
What if Evan wasn’t the only one killing? What if Evan was just an accomplice and the person who did the actual killing, the person Paisley’s so scared of, is someone else? Someone who hasn’t found Paisley these past eight months.
“Yes,” Paisley says, her word sinking deep into my bones. “It’s the witch.” Her breath comes out as a shudder. “I don’t know about a man. I know about a woman. She possesses people and it’s a real person who’s possessed.”
I lean forward. It’s not even cold in here, but my fingertips feel numb. “Who is it?”
“I’m trying to remember her name,” she says. She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes.
“Ivy?” I offer. “The woman from the campsite?”
I don’t really think it was her, but who else could it be?
“No,” Paisley says. She pulls her gaze back up to meet mine. “We met her as soon as we arrived. She had dark hair and was kind of pretty and older than us. She worked at the visitors’ center and said she had a partner in the woods. A ranger, I guess.”
Natalie.