The Dead and the Dark(97)

“You’re eighteen,” Tammy said. “I can’t … I wouldn’t stop you.”

“The ranch…” Ashley trailed off.

“… will go on one way or another. It always does.”

Ashley’s heart raced. She’d spent years imagining a future, and it was always here. It was always in Snakebite, always on the ranch, always married with two kids and a dog, always quiet and predictable. Since all of this, she hadn’t imagined a future at all.

Now, she saw it. Sunset roads and forests she’d never seen. The truck rumbling under her, a soft hand folded in hers, dark eyes always watching.

“I don’t wanna leave you,” Ashley said.

Tammy smiled, bitter and soft at once. “You’re not. It’s not like you’ll never come back. It’s not like I’ll never see you.”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” Tammy said. She laughed under her breath. “It sounds like a horrible idea. But I know you, and you don’t want to stay here. You want to go with her. It’s not the first time this has happened to me. Or to people I love. Staying here would be worse, I think.”

Ashley nodded. She pulled her phone from her pocket and eyed Logan’s number. Tammy looked her in the eyes for a long moment, and then she smiled. She squeezed Ashley’s wrist once, then climbed out of the truck bed and made her way back to the Land Rover.

Only the quiet and the dead remained.

Ashley clicked Logan’s name and pressed the phone to her ear.



* * *



At the Bates Motel, the world was anything but quiet.

The door between rooms seven and eight was wide open, a warm breeze sifting between the two. Brandon leaned over the breakfast table, needling a map of the US with the sharp end of his pencil. Alejo shoved the last of his floral-patterned shirts into a duffel bag and hauled it to the minivan, humming a Johnny Cash song under his breath.

Logan sat on the bed. They casually moved through their morning, and Logan could almost pretend this was how they always were. A collection of three lost things that had cobbled together a life they could be happy in. A family.

“Gimme another thing,” Brandon said, tapping the eraser of his pencil against his glasses.

“Uh, how about America’s oldest cemetery?” Logan asked.

Brandon frowned and circled a spot on the map. “You can also pick fun places. America’s biggest mall. The tallest place you can drive to. The—”

“What about that big rubber band ball?” Alejo cut in, clapping dust from his hands. He closed the back of the minivan and strode back into the motel room, yellow sun bouncing from the aviators perched at his hairline.

“Do I look like a tourist?” Logan scoffed.

Brandon and Alejo made eye contact and said nothing.

“You guys are rude.”

“I like that tree you can drive through,” Alejo suggested.

Brandon grimaced. “Yeah, but it fell down in that storm.”

“There’s other ones.”

“But it’s not the same.”

“You are such a downer.”

Brandon shook his head. His lips hinted at a smile. It was a frequent expression now, but something in Logan still sank each time she saw it. How many smiles had the Dark swallowed whole? How many years had he lived in a blur of gray, waiting for the end? Even now, they were making up for lost time. She could spend every day with her fathers for the rest of her life, but it would never fill the hole the Dark had left. There was no fixing things; they could only move on.

Alejo and Brandon were packing to take off back to LA. They’d decided not to expose Snakebite to the ParaSpectors canon, but that didn’t stop news cycles from associating them with the mystery. Even after police cleared them of any involvement in the deaths, Brandon and Alejo were inextricably linked to the crime. Clickbait news sites screamed headlines like:

KILLER IN RURAL OREGON: WHAT TV GHOSTHUNTERS HAVE TO DO WITH THE INVESTIGATION!



PARASPECTORS COUPLE SOLVE MURDERS?



BRANDON WOODLEY AND ALEJO ORTIZ HELP POLICE SOLVE COLD CASES IN OREGON



The sudden publicity meant there was damage control to do. There was another season of ParaSpectors to film, and they had to come up with locations to fill it. There was a life to live—something they hadn’t thought possible with the Dark always looming over them. Despite everything that’d happened, Brandon and Alejo were going to move on.

They were going to move on alone.

Logan had dreamed of cruising the US on her own for years, but now that it was the next thing on the horizon, it felt empty. She was going to be alone again. At the end of all of this, she was still going to be alone. She was going to have to meet new people. She was going to carry this darkness in her chest—the truth about Snakebite, about Brandon, about herself—and no one would know.

“Once we figure out filming locations, maybe we can meet up for a few episodes,” Alejo suggested. He tucked the beige motel comforter under his chin and folded it. “You could be a guest investigator. An in-guest-igator.”

He laughed at his own joke.

“Maybe,” Logan said. And maybe she would meet up with them and film a few episodes. Maybe she would roll into a town a few months down the road and realize it was perfect. Maybe she would lay down roots somewhere and figure out how to build a life from the ground up. It all felt impossibly far away.