The Dead and the Dark(86)

“Plus, we had to get rid of the Dark,” Alejo said.

“Well…” Brandon trailed off. He looked away from Alejo and cleared his throat. “At first, it did help me. It said it would keep us afloat. It wanted to help us find a new home.”

“Logan said you guys lived on the road,” Ashley said.

“Not on purpose. We ended up in different small towns that were a lot like Snakebite. Which meant we ran into the same problems. People didn’t like outsiders, and a couple of guys rolling into town with a five-year-old girl in the back seat made them nervous. Everywhere we went, we ended up leaving again. The longer we went without settling down, the pushier the Dark got. It was like it was getting weaker. More desperate. The angrier it got, the more of me it took up. I spent months in a blur, just driving, not really knowing where I was going. It wanted more to feed on. For years, it’d had all of Snakebite. Now it only had me.”

“Why would it do that?”

Brandon shrugged. “I have my guesses. It might’ve wanted me to do something it needed a physical body for. My best guess, though, is that it wanted a new town to infect. It needed a way to move on. It wanted me to lay down roots in a new little town. And if we’d stopped moving, it would’ve started all over again.”

“But it made a mistake,” Alejo said.

Brandon nodded. “We’d been driving for two weeks straight, living on the last bit of a loan from my mom. I remember putting gas in the car while Alejo was in the store buying some water. And I remember hearing it whispering right at the back of my neck. It said to take the car seat out of the back and leave it on the curb. To just … take the car and go.”

Alejo shook his head. “It wanted him to leave us behind.”

“It wanted to find a new home, I guess. Obviously I didn’t do it, but I remember wanting to. And I remember knowing that the need wasn’t mine. It was the first time I felt it trying to … overwrite me. The Dark didn’t want to help me, it just wanted to use me. It wanted to find a new home that was just as hateful as Snakebite so it could start all over again.”

Ashley’s stomach sank. This spiraling dread, these uneasy shadows, this black-tar fear that’d burrowed its way into her since January—it was the Dark. It was all the years of hatred Snakebite had built up, sticky and black and cloying. She’d loved this town her whole life, but this was what it had created.

“From then on, we were just looking for ways to get rid of it,” Alejo said. “We knew we couldn’t stay in one place for long or the Dark would find a way out. I’ve been able to see spirits since I was little. But Brandon and I realized that we could use this … whatever to find people who might have some answers. We helped people talk to dead relatives, scooted lingering spirits out of people’s houses, exorcised haunted objects, but we were always looking for information on the Dark.”

“Eventually, we started to make a name for ourselves,” Brandon said. “We were approached by a network that wanted to make a show about what we did. It was a perfect setup—we could move around the country without worrying about money, and we’d reach a bigger audience. Someone would know about the Dark and how to get rid of it. We found lots of people who could see ghosts—”

“Who, by the way, were not fans of the show,” Alejo interjected.

“—but no one knew about the Dark.”

Ashley looked out the window, head reeling. She and Logan had spent weeks trying to understand what was plaguing Snakebite, and here it was, laid out in front of her. Logan had been an arm’s length from the Dark her whole life and she’d never known it. Ashley thought of Tulsa. Of the way a single moment had haunted Logan for years.

“What happened in Tulsa?” Ashley asked. She sat forward, leaning against the back of Alejo’s seat. “Did the Dark threaten her?”

“Not so much threaten. More like…” Brandon sighed.

“It asked what would happen to Logan if we got rid of it,” Alejo said. “It just put that out there. We didn’t know if getting rid of the Dark meant getting rid of Logan.”

“But obviously we couldn’t risk it,” Brandon said. “I had to put distance between Logan and the Dark. Which meant putting distance between Logan and me. It knew we’d do anything to keep her safe.”

Ashley nodded.

Alejo turned in his seat to look at her. His expression was strangely calm. “You’re taking this all really well, by the way.”

“I’ve had a really weird year,” Ashley mused.

“Yeah,” Alejo said. “We know the feeling.”

Ashley traced the back of Alejo’s seat with her pointer finger. Something about all of this still didn’t add up. She closed her eyes. “Why did you come back to Snakebite?”

“It was a bad idea, but I couldn’t think of what else to do,” Brandon said. “I couldn’t kill the Dark without the risk of losing Logan. And I didn’t even know how to kill it. So I thought I’d come back to Snakebite and stay for a week or so. Let the Dark settle back into the place where it came from. Then I’d leave.”

Ashley sucked in a breath. Brandon had brought the Dark back here on purpose. “You let it—”

“—get away from me?” Brandon said. “I did. It was way too easy. The first morning I woke up in Snakebite, everything was so quiet. There was a solid few days where I wandered around Snakebite and thought maybe I did get rid of it. Maybe it was really that easy. I even booked tickets back to LA.”