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“It was the devil.” Brandon’s voice cracks on the verge of tears. He keeps jerking his head, looking at the other building near them, checking to make certain the old rusted frame of a demon is still where it should be. His eyes are wide, too wide, like he can’t close them. Whatever he saw has opened them to something they never considered before, and he can never shut it out again, never blink away the truth.

“What does that mean?” Mack demands. Brandon needs her to be gentle, but she has to have answers.

“That’s two.” LeGrand’s tentative features have shifted, a subtle change that rewrites him. He still has a baby face, but gone is the expression of a lost child. “So we have until tomorrow morning. We need to get out.”

“What do you mean, the devil?” Mack presses.

Brandon rubs his eyes as though trying to physically remove an image. “It’s a monster. The devil. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Mack looks to LeGrand. He nods in silent agreement.

They’re not making any sense, but Mack can’t dwell on it. It doesn’t matter. Ava matters. “We have to look for Ava.”

LeGrand doesn’t argue. Brandon shakes his head. “It won’t help,” he says, but he drifts in the direction he saw Ava run anyway.

It’s not hard to follow the trail, even for three people inexperienced with such things. Beautiful Ava’s drops of blood are fresh enough they catch the light, a thread of violence unspooling to lead them to what they need to see. To the final destination, the end of Mack’s infant hope. A new thing, so fragile, drowned in the pool of death they stop at.

“Can someone survive after losing that much blood?” LeGrand’s deep voice is soft but practical. He’s not asking it hypothetically, or hopefully. He’s asking whether they should keep looking. He’s letting Mack make the decision.

Mack stares at the only evidence remaining that a few minutes ago, she was happy. There’s nothing around the blood. No drag marks. No sense that someone ran, that they made it out, that anything happened here other than two violent, final ends. It’s an exclamation mark of blood, not an ellipsis. And certainly not a question mark. The story is ended.

There isn’t any more.

Beautiful Ava is gone. And so is Mack’s Ava. The first person who became a person to her since her family died, the first person who made Mack wonder if there could be more in her life. If there could be life in her life.

It’s over now. For Mack, at least.

She looks at LeGrand. Sad, haunted LeGrand, who Ava wanted to protect and help. “Why are you here?”

He doesn’t seem to consider her line of questioning odd given the circumstance. Perhaps none of them will ever find anything odd again, as long as they live.

The smell of blood and something older, more decayed, wronger, is overwhelming. As long as they live is feeling like not a very long time at all.

“I was banished from my family for trying to get a doctor for my sister. It’s against the rules to go outside the compound.”

“Compound?” Brandon asks.

“My father’s the prophet,” LeGrand says.

It doesn’t answer Brandon’s questions—raises far more of them—but Mack understands as much as she needs to. LeGrand was a prisoner. He broke the rules to help. That makes sense for the type of person who runs toward the sound when someone is screaming. He’s here because he was trying to save his sister. Mack is here because she didn’t try to save her sister. Because she hid and did nothing while her world was cut apart.

“If you get out,” LeGrand says, looking toward the trees where the fence looms somewhere in the impenetrable, winding green, beyond the ever-present stone pathway walls, “will you help her? I’m from Zion Mountain in southeastern Colorado. Her name is Almera. She can’t talk or walk, but she likes bubbles and the color yellow. They won’t give her the care she needs. You’ll have to kidnap her.” LeGrand nods, as though he’s made up his mind about something. “It’s the only way. I should have done it that way.”

Mack looks at Brandon. Brandon’s eyes are filled with tears, and she can’t imagine him kidnapping anyone. “Give us the details of how to break in and find Almera, just in case. But LeGrand gets to win,” Mack says to Brandon. “If there’s such a thing as winning. And if there’s not, he’s the one who gets out.” She’s afraid Brandon will disagree, that he’ll insist it’s not fair for them to decide on LeGrand without discussing it.

Brandon swallows hard and nods. “Anyone but Jaden.” His voice cracks and Mack can’t help it. She laughs. Anyone but Jaden.

Her laughter breaks the spell of the blood, releasing them. They walk on, like Ava would have wanted, like Mack wants. She has one goal now, one goal only: Get LeGrand out. Let him go save his sister, because he still has one, and he can.

Get LeGrand out, and whatever happens after, she will accept with open arms this time.



* * *



—

It’s almost over. Two more days, and Linda can close her family’s journal and not have to open it again for seven years. Well, six. They do have to plan these things well in advance to make certain everything is in place. And she shouldn’t have to open it again at all, but she will. She knows she will.