Chapter 60
NOT ALL WHO VANISH STAY GONE
Cold nips at my nose as I jog through the woods.
Jude and I locked the crypt and covered the door.
I told him about the plans Twig and I made, knowing they would go nowhere without his consent.
We won’t tell a story that features his family, that features him, if he doesn’t want us to.
But Jude agreed. He might even be a guest.
I come to a stop in the clearing. I remove the chain from around my neck and let the key sit in my palm—a memento from a shoebox, a necklace my mother once wore.
Did she think of Simon whenever she put it on?
Did the mark beneath her collar burn like ice when she remembered him?
If she’s alive right now, is the mark still there or did it disappear like my own?
When Jude broke the curse, did her brokenness break, too?
Will she come for me now, healed and whole?
With my eyes closed, I picture her.
Kneeling in the garden.
Praying over her rosary beads.
Reading me a book.
I used to think my mother was Max, sailing back and forth between home and the place where the wild things are. But now I know she was never Max. She was always a wild thing. Or maybe she was made into one because of the story she was dealt.
Simon was stolen from her. She knew what happened.
She tried telling the truth, but she didn’t have a best friend to help, or a podcast for an outlet, or a dad to keep her safe.
Instead, she was locked up in a psych ward, which is maybe where her addiction began.
She stopped telling the truth. Maybe she stopped believing it herself.
Perhaps the mark faded when the curse broke, but she has other scars, the kind that aren’t so visible.
I have one myself, left by her because she, herself, was scarred.
Trauma passed down from mother to daughter like a curse through the generations.
But it’s not inevitable. It isn’t written in the stars. We aren’t helpless.
We have the power to face it.
To fight it.
To do everything we can to stop it.
In the end, my mother wasn’t stolen by some otherworldly force. She was broken by grief and circumstance.
I set my elbows on the stone lip of the well, and with a deep inhale, I turn my palm over and drop the key.
A breeze stirs the branches overhead.
They creak and sway.
And on the wind, I hear a whisper.
The soft call of my name.
I turn around.
But there’s nothing.
Nobody.
Just a scuffling in the bushes.
A strange chirping sound.
Curiosity draws me closer.
Slowly and quietly, I pick up a stick, move aside the overgrowth, and gasp.
A small creature looks up at me from eyes that are glossy and luminous, with no pupils at all. Just a pair of full moons set in a pointed face covered in lavender fur. It coughs up a glowing seed, then scuttles away.
Mesmerized, I follow it.
Off the path, into the trees.
I pick up my pace as it hops into thicker foliage, darting through a curtain of ferns without so much as rustling a leaf. I hurry after it, my heart pounding as the woods grow darker around me. Quieter, too. The kind of quiet a person notices.
Like the forest is holding its breath.
For a moment, I lose sight of the creature. But then, there it is, poised on the edge of a shallow gully, nose twitching as it looks at a ripple in the air. Not a wound that is healing, but a small flickering doorway no larger than a windowpane. The creature hops through it without a sound.
I stay where I am, rooted in place, staring at this new rift, open and pulsing, when my phone begins to buzz.
I pull it from the pocket of my leggings.
The screen is alight with messages.
From Twig.
From Dad.
From Harper and Naomi.
One after another after another.
Lainey Sikes—a girl I watched combust into flame and vaporize into ash—has been found alive.
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