“Dad?” Logan asked. She tried to hide it, but fear snuck into her voice. Her small fist was clamped around the ThermoGeist.
Ashley wondered if Logan could see the shadows at Brandon’s feet. If she could feel the way the tunnel seemed to contract now, a throat swallowing them whole. Logan had told her about the moment in Tulsa, but she hadn’t mentioned this.
And then Brandon spoke.
“Stay back,” he said.
Brandon wasn’t alone. Something else spoke, too. The second voice was deeper than Brandon’s, empty and cold. It roiled like thunder. It was indecipherable and wrong. The voice didn’t say the same words as Brandon; Ashley couldn’t make out if it was saying words at all. Something about it pried beneath her skin.
The darkness at Brandon’s feet spread until it was everywhere. Until only Logan and Brandon were left on the screen, distorted and melted and wrong. The picture continued to decay, and Ashley couldn’t look away.
“Dad?” Logan said again.
Her voice was impossibly small.
“Get out, Logan,” Brandon snapped at her.
The second voice groaned beneath the sound. Ashley touched her TV screen and it was hot.
Brandon closed his eyes. When he turned to Logan, he didn’t look at her. The dark substance crashed over him like a wave and, for a moment, the screen went black. The only sound was Brandon’s ragged breathing.
And then the screen roared to life. A commercial for tires. Ashley exhaled and her lungs ached. She wondered how long she’d been holding her breath. Her phone vibrated from the table next to her bed.
“Hello?” she said.
“Ashley.” A man’s voice. “It’s Gus. From the Chokecherry.”
Ashley blinked. She wasn’t sure who she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t Gus. “Oh. Hi, Gus. What’s going on?”
“I don’t wanna bother you. But I just saw your friend Logan in here. She said she was heading home, but I don’t know. She seemed kind of down. I think she’s heading to the old cemetery.”
“Why?” Ashley asked.
“She was pretty hung up on one of the graves. I don’t wanna get too much into it. Don’t know if you two are getting along, but she was looking a little worse for wear. I’d go make sure she’s okay, but I gotta close up.”
“Wait,” Ashley breathed. “The Ortiz-Woodley grave, right?”
“That’s the one.” Gus cleared his throat. “She … a couple of your friends gave her a hard time. I think she was pretty shook up. And then we got to talking about her dads and the grave. It’s my fault.”
“I’ll be right there,” Ashley said.
There was one thing they’d seen that they’d never talked about. One thing that had haunted Logan since the night they found Nick. And if Logan was going to visit the grave, it meant she wasn’t waiting for ghosts to find her anymore. Ashley clenched the fabric of her shirt between her fingers.
The logo for ParaSpectors crashed back onto the TV.
Ashley stared at Brandon’s face on the screen. This Brandon was different from the one she’d seen in Snakebite. His face was gaunt, eyes wide, hands trembling. The dark thing she’d seen coiling around him was gone, and now he was alone. There was nothing in his eyes.
He was empty.
Maybe whatever was wrong with Brandon was connected to everything going on. It was connected to the grave. It was connected to Logan—Ashley was sure of it. And if she wasn’t fast, she was sure it was going to kill again. Ashley turned off the TV and grabbed her purse.
If Logan was going to find the truth, she wasn’t going to do it alone.
29
Hands Made For Hurting
Ashley parked the Ford along the highway shoulder. On one side of the road, the lake beat against the shore. The clouds overhead were deep gray, bruised and swollen with an approaching storm. Ashley could taste the musky scent of impending rain on the tip of her tongue.
On the other side of the highway, Ashley spotted Logan. She sat in the dirt beside one of the graves with her face cupped in her hands.
“Hey,” Ashley called.
Logan looked up and her expression changed, brow furrowed in anger. “Oh my god, are you serious? Leave me alone.”
Ashley’s jaw tightened. Cautiously, she walked around the iron fence that enclosed the cemetery and made her way to Logan as the dust under her feet spotted with rain. She didn’t check the stone key to see if this mound of dirt was the one marked ORTIZ-WOODLEY, but she didn’t need to. Bits of the dirt had been swept away by deft hands, hardly scratching the surface. Dozens of dried white lily petals littered the ground. Ashley recognized them as the flowers Alejo had left when they first arrived.
Logan leaned against the iron fence, knees curled to her chest.
“Are you okay?” Ashley asked.
“No,” Logan snapped. “I don’t want your help.”
“Gus called and said you were in trouble.”
“Gus is full of shit.”
Ashley frowned and motioned to the grave. “You were trying to dig this up? You can’t just…”
Logan ducked her forehead against her legs and folded her arms over her knees. For a moment, Ashley thought she was crying. But she was quiet. Dirt caked her fingernails and smeared her wrists. The rain freckled the dust around them, catching in Logan’s straight black hair.
“You probably hate me—”
“Correct.”
Ashley steeled herself. “—but I wanna help.”
“Then get my dad out of jail,” Logan said. She looked up. “That’s what you can do to help.”
“What do you think you’re gonna find?” Ashley asked. “It’s a grave.”
“Gus says they had a kid that died. They never told me about that.” Logan wiped her cheeks, leaving a streak of gray dirt behind.
Ashley swallowed and crouched beside Logan. “So you’re gonna dig up their body? What would that prove?”
Logan’s expression softened. She was afraid. Raindrops dotted her cheeks and speckled her scalp. Somewhere far behind them, thunder groaned.
“What if it’s exactly what it should be?” Ashley asked. “What if you’re just digging up a kid’s bones? There are better ways to figure this out. You could just ask Brandon.”
Logan shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Then you could visit Alejo and ask him,” Ashley said, swallowing the guilt welling in her chest.
“You don’t get to talk about him.”
Ashley nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“If you wanna help, you have to help me do this,” Logan whispered. She wiped her nose with the hem of her sleeve. “I … feel like I’m losing it. I don’t know what’s real. I don’t know if I’m remembering things right. I don’t know if I’m supposed to trust my dads or if they’ve been lying to me the whole time.”
Ashley touched Logan’s hand.
“What if there was never a second kid?” Logan said.
“What?”
“What if it’s…” Logan clutched the front of her jacket. “I told you about my dreams. When I’m being buried, it feels so real. It’s like at the cabin. There are all these things in Snakebite that I remember, but I shouldn’t. I’ve never been here before.”
“You think you’re connected to whatever’s buried here?” Ashley asked.
“I don’t know.”
Ashley stared into the mound of dirt.
“In my dreams, Brandon’s the one burying me.”
Ashley grimaced. Logan was right; it didn’t make sense that the Ortiz-Woodleys had a child they never mentioned. It didn’t make sense that this grave was down here with Snakebite’s unnamed ancestors and not up on the hill with the rest of the town. The more they unraveled Snakebite, the less sense it made. Fear grew in Ashley, warning her that if they unraveled too far, there would be no more Snakebite left.
Ashley swallowed. “Okay.”
She made her way back to the Ford and opened the tool chest in the trunk. She pulled out t
wo worn shovels and returned to the grave. Logan took one of the shovels and pressed it against the mound of dirt.
“Are you sure about this?” Ashley asked.
“No.” Logan bit her lip. “But I don’t know what else to do.”
They went to work. There was a strange hum on the wind, low and quiet like at the cabin, but now it was everywhere. The earth in Pioneer Cemetery was drier than the soil on top of the hill. It was caked together and hardened like brick. The hillside echoed with roiling thunder and the clang of metal against stone, but slowly, they made progress. Eventually, a layer of the dusty earth fell away, revealing a small wooden box in the grave. It took a moment for the strange object to register—Ashley had expected to find bones or nothing at all. The box wasn’t big enough or buried deep enough to be a casket.
Logan didn’t hesitate. The rain graduated from droplets to thick splatters of warm water bursting over the grave, swirling the dirt into a paste. Logan plucked the wooden box from the grave and pulled open the lid. Inside was a folded piece of paper.
Logan looked at Ashley. Ashley looked back. A truck whirred past on the highway behind them and Ashley was suddenly reminded that there was a world beyond this moment. She held her hands over Logan’s piece of paper to protect it from the rain.
“There’s writing on it,” Logan said.
“Can you read it?”
Logan’s hands shook but she nodded. She brushed dirt from the paper, crumpling its edges in her grip. “It’s … to me.”
She scanned the paper again and again, and each time her tear-rimmed eyes widened. She exhaled and pressed her wrist to her eyes. The damp wind through the cemetery was colder than it had any right to be. Whatever was on the paper, it was unspooling Logan from the inside.
“I don’t get it…” she breathed.
Tenderly, she handed the paper to Ashley. The writing was brief, scrawled as if it’d been written quickly. It read:
Logan,
I tried everything. I tried to live quietly, but that was too loud. I tried to raise a family right, but I lost it. I tried to live without you, but I couldn’t. I tried to save you, but I lost myself. Maybe this was all a mistake and things won’t ever be the same.
I’m happy I got to see you again.
Love,
B
Ashley shook her head. She read it over again but the words swam without meaning. She turned the paper over but the other side was blank, dotted with bits of dirt and rain. There was nothing else in the box, nothing else in the grave, nothing else at all.
“What does it mean?” Ashley asked.
Logan snatched the letter back and read it again.
“It’s from Brandon.” Logan took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I think this grave was mine.”
30
Game Over
Elexis Carrillo was lonelier than he’d ever been.
It’d been a month since Nick’s funeral. A month since Logan dropped off the face of the earth. A month since his nana started acting like going outside was suicide. It’d been a month since his world was flipped upside down and shaken until all the good fell from its pockets.
“It stinks in here, Nana,” Elexis said. He shut off his PS4 and leaned across the doorway into Gracia’s room. “I’m gonna take out the trash.”
Gracia spun her recliner away from the TV screen and fixed him with one of her looks. She narrowed her eyes and the wrinkles at the corners bunched up like a thousand tiny frowns. Her room reeked of cigarette smoke and honey-lemon cough drops. “We took out the garbage yesterday. It doesn’t stink so bad.”
“It does in my room,” Elexis groaned. “And I want some fresh air.”
“You need a buddy. It’s too dark to go alone.” She leaned back and pointed across the parking lot. Logan’s light was off and the Neon was missing from the lot, though Gracia didn’t seem to notice. “Ask your prima.”
Elexis grimaced. “She’s not there. Not like she’d come out of her room, anyway.”
“If you ask nicely she would.”
Elexis rolled his eyes. He pulled on his sweatshirt and sighed. “Okay, okay. I’ll ask her.”
He had no plans to ask Logan anything. He grabbed the trash bag from Gracia’s room, then gathered up the empty chip bags and frozen food boxes from his floor. The Bates Motel dumpster was only a few feet from his room. It’d be a longer walk to Logan’s door than it was to take out the trash. It was ridiculous to think he couldn’t handle walking even that far on his own.
He stepped into the night and closed the door behind him. Without the rambling of the TV or the groaning air conditioner, the air was quiet. The silence was like a cool balm to Elexis’s racing brain, smoothing the nerves that the motel room made jagged. Without Nick, he’d spent the last month playing video games until it felt like his eyes were going to cave in.
The truth was, since Nick, it felt like the world was moving too fast. Elexis had stayed upright for now, but Nick was the one person in Snakebite he’d been able to call anytime without worrying that he was being annoying. Nick was the only person who made him feel less lonely.
Nick made Snakebite feel like home.
He’d died alone, and now Elexis was alive alone. It wasn’t fair to be mad, but sometimes Elexis wasn’t sure where to put the hurt in his chest. On nights like this, he took a moment to lay his head against the motel door and just breathe.
He made it all the way to the dumpster before he heard it.
Boots echoed hard and fast off the pavement.
Elexis turned, but the stranger grabbed him before he could scream and clapped a hand over his mouth. He pushed Elexis hard against the dumpster, crushing his cheek into the sticky metal. He was bigger than Elexis, but not by much. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse.
“Calm down,” the man muttered. “You’re not gonna die.”
Elexis writhed against the stranger. He wanted to scream, but the sound died in his throat. His heart beat so fast he thought a heart attack might kill him before the stranger ever got a chance.
This was how Nick had died.
This was how Elexis was going to die.
“Hold still,” the man said.
Something crawled over Elexis’s back, cool and slick as oil. He kicked at the dumpster, searching the parking lot frantically for someone who could help him, but no one came. No one could hear him. The substance at his neck snaked along his collarbone and then, slowly, seeped into his skin.
He shuddered, but the urge to scream stopped.
Everything stopped.
Do not be afraid, a voice whispered to him. The voice had the timbre and depth of a great ocean. It lured Elexis into its waters, and before he understood it, he was submerged. It continued, I only want to help you. Don’t you want to fix your lonely heart?
He did. He wanted nothing else.
He wasn’t sure why.
You want a place for your hurt. I know whose fault it is that you’re alone, the voice breathed as though it were coming from the dark itself. You want this town to feel what you feel. You want them to feel alone. You want them to feel like the last people alive.
“I … do,” Elexis murmured.
Good. The dark wrapped around Elexis’s chest, and then poured itself into his heart. It was thicker than blood and it pumped through him like tar. It was all he could feel. Overhead, the stormy sky was streaked with gray and pinpricks of lightning, but Elexis only saw dark. You’re going to help me, Elexis Carrillo. But right now, you’re going to sleep.
The last thing Elexis saw before he slipped into darkness was his nana watching TV in the window and the vicious blur of the sky as he fell and fell and fell.
31
The Great Stage Of Fools
From the cemetery, it was a short trek to the lakeshore. Logan stumbled along the highway shoulder, stopping at a small slab of concrete stuck in the earth. A picnic table was bolted to the concrete, rusted and discolored as though it had never been used. Ashley paus
ed somewhere behind her; Logan sensed her there, cautious and afraid as if she thought speaking were dangerous. Wind whipped Logan’s hair across her face, sticking it to the rainwater on her cheeks.
Logan exhaled. “Can we sit for a second?”
Ashley nodded. They climbed onto the picnic table at the water’s edge and let silence pour over them. It was all wrong. The world was unsteady under Logan’s feet, like one too many stones had been pulled from the foundation. The grave was supposed to contain answers, but she’d dug it up and only had more questions.
She pressed her face into her palms. “It doesn’t feel real.”
“The letter?” Ashley asked. “Or…?”
“God, any of it.” Logan reached for the rain-spotted paper in her pocket. The handwriting was Brandon’s, but she couldn’t untangle the meaning. An apology, but it didn’t say what Brandon was sorry for. Logan traced the letters—they were jagged and misshapen, like he’d scrawled them in a panic. The letters were shaped like they hurt. “Whatever’s doing all this, I think you were right. Brandon’s connected to it. So am I.”
Ashley looked down. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Logan waved a dismissive hand.
Dusk settled into the valley as the storm clouds burned away. The horizon was a crown of black hills blanketed in shadow and, beyond that, the sky was bloodred and bright as fire. Specks of white starlight crept through the sunset, promising that night was only minutes away. Dark water lapped at the gravelly shore, rhythmic and calm as a heartbeat. Other than the crickets and the water and the tender, cautious sound of Ashley’s breathing, there was quiet. The night smelled like juniper and gentle anticipation.
Logan closed her eyes.
“I bet people used to think this was paradise.”
“Yeah.” Ashley stared at the hills across the water and her eyes were full of sunset. “I did. Maybe I still do. I don’t know. I look at it and there’s nowhere else I wanna be.”
“Not me,” Logan said.
“I wish you saw it before all this,” Ashley said. “It wasn’t like this before. I used to actually like how it felt like we were the only people in the world. There’s no one around for hours. You could do anything you wanted here and it would never matter to anyone else.”
The Dead and the Dark Page 21