“Really?” Tammy asked, incredulous. “Why not?”
“I saw how you treated Logan’s dads.”
“Oh, you saw how I treated them? I guess you were a really observant toddler, then.” Tammy exhaled and her rage transformed into a bitter chill. Her perfectly maintained blond curls bobbed at her shoulders. “If you knew anything about it, you’d know I saved them.”
“You kicked them out.”
“And they’re lucky I did.”
Ashley arched a brow.
“You think they would’ve had a great life here?” Tammy asked. “You think they would’ve been happy?”
“It’s their home.”
“I love Snakebite, but I know what it is and it was never gonna be home for them.” Tammy leaned against the kitchen island, grip tight on the edge of the counter. “They were so stupid. They thought because they were from here it wouldn’t hurt them and they could just do whatever they wanted. People were ready to literally kill them and they wouldn’t leave. They have no idea how many nights I spent convincing people to put the pitchforks away.”
Ashley cleared her throat. Cautiously, she approached the counter and slipped onto a barstool across from her mother. The storm hadn’t passed yet—Tammy’s eyes were glassy with tears she refused to let loose—but her grip on the counter was slack. Soon, she’d reach into the fridge for a bottle of cheap pinot grigio and the worst would be over. But it wouldn’t be over for Ashley. A new storm raged in her chest full of pain and anger and even more questions.
“And now you’re making the same mistake,” Tammy said. She wiped her eyes, streaking eyeliner across her cheek. “Snakebite … it doesn’t change. They love you, but they won’t change their minds for you.”
“Do you hate me?” Ashley croaked.
Tammy’s eyes widened. She reached across the counter for Ashley’s hand, gently running her thumb over Ashley’s knuckles. “I could never hate you. I will love you no matter what.” She cleared her throat. “But this isn’t you. This isn’t how you are. You’ve just been through so much these last few months—”
Ashley winced. “It is me, though.”
Tammy closed her eyes. “No, it’s that family. They ruin everything they touch. They come in here, and—”
“Mom,” Ashley warned.
“Or maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just cursed.”
“Mom.” Ashley stood.
Tammy looked at her for a moment, and Ashley understood with crushing clarity that everything was different now. Her mother looked at her like she was a puzzle that needed to be pieced together to make any sense. Like there was a mistake tangled deep in her veins that her mother was trying to unravel.
Behind her, the floorboards groaned.
Ashley turned. Tristan stood behind her, fists clenched, eyes impossible to see under the shadow that obscured his face.
“What?” Tammy asked.
Ashley’s heart stopped. This was different from the other times he’d visited her. Every haunting felt urgent, but this one felt final. Tristan wasn’t waiting for her—he was begging her to listen. He wavered between Ashley and the front door and she knew she had to follow him.
“Ashley, what are—” Tammy started.
“I have to go.”
Tammy gave an incredulous laugh. “You aren’t going anywhere. You’re grounded.”
“What?”
“You don’t get a free pass for sneaking around and causing trouble for weeks.” Tammy ran a hand through her hair. “At least until roundup next month, you’re staying home.”
Tristan continued to fade in and out of the space near the door. Dread twisted in her chest. He was trying to warn her that Logan was in trouble—somehow she understood.
“Okay,” Ashley said. “Okay, fine.”
“Get some rest,” Tammy said. She threw open the fridge door and searched the shelves for a bottle of wine. “You and me have a lot to talk about tomorrow.”
Ashley tentatively made her way toward the front door and closed her eyes. It was time to be brave. For once in her life, she needed to be braver than the Ashley she had been. Tristan watched her, flickering in the low light. At his feet, the key dish was still toppled from where Tammy had knocked it over, leaving various keyrings strewn across the hardwood floor.
Her Ford was still parked at the cemetery, but the Land Rover was in the driveway.
Ashley stooped near the front door and picked up the key dish. She slowly, methodically placed each set of keys back in the bowl as though she were just cleaning up. She reached into Tammy’s purse and gently hooked a finger in Tammy’s keyring.
When Tammy turned to pour herself a glass of wine, Ashley ran.
She bolted into the driveway and threw open the Land Rover’s driver’s-side door. Behind her, Tammy stumbled onto the front porch. She watched, wide-eyed, as Ashley tore out of the driveway and into the night. Down the road, Tristan flickered in the Land Rover’s headlights, guiding Ashley into town.
Wherever she was going now, there was no turning back.
33
The Devil, The Devil
When Logan woke up, she was fairly certain she was dead.
Slowly, pieces of the world around her came together like a mosaic in the back of her skull. The surface she lay on was too narrow to be a bed, the walls too close. She rocked up and down, each bump searing her muscles. Outside, trees blurred into a mass of green and black.
She was in a car.
She was in the back seat of Paris’s car.
Logan pushed herself up and rubbed her eyes. The seat under her head was damp with lake water. She was being taken to either the police station or the hospital, but either way, she was being taken by the father of the boy who’d just tried to kill her. It was possible that John and Paul had been arrested, too, but something told her they’d probably been released with a slap on the wrist and nothing else. Even attempted murder was a forgivable offense in this hell town.
“Logan,” Paris said from the front seat. “How’re you holding up?”
Logan stabilized herself, dizzied by the force of sitting up. Wet hair clung to the back of her neck. She brushed fingertips along her cheek and it throbbed at the touch, swollen and crusted with blood. “I, uh…” She trailed off. “Where am I?”
“On your way to the hospital. You got pretty scratched up back there.” Paris didn’t look back at her. “It’s a long drive into the city. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions on the way in.”
Logan blinked out the front windshield. The road was narrower than the highway she remembered. The trees closed in like a tunnel, headlights cutting through the filmy dark. She’d driven into the city with Brandon once and it hadn’t looked like this. “Sure, I guess. How long was I out?”
“Only about fifteen minutes. Are you feeling okay?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m fine,” she lied. She wasn’t okay, but she hadn’t been in a long time. “Did you arrest the guys who did it?”
Paris gave her a thin-lipped smile through the rearview mirror. “John’s at home. He’ll be getting a talk when I get back.”
Logan swallowed. “Like, a parent talk or a police talk?”
“You’re funny,” Paris said.
Logan was no expert on the law, but she was fairly certain she’d just been the victim of a verifiable crime. The kind that people went to prison for on TV. Instead of arresting everyone involved, Paris had just sent them all home. All but her. Paris hadn’t called an ambulance. She shrank into the back seat and clutched the seatbelt.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened,” Paris said. “From the beginning.”
“Okay.” Logan cleared her throat. “Me and Ashley were at the lake, just talking. Then John and Paul showed up and—”
Paris shook his head. “Before that. John says he saw you two at the graveyard. What were you doing there?”
Logan narrowed her eyes.
“There were shovels against the fence. I found one of the graves partial
ly dug up. Did you two find anything?”
Logan peered into the front seat. Paris’s knuckles were a sickly yellow with bruising, and red welts like claw marks tracked all the way up his forearm. On his ring finger, a puckered indent was purple where a wedding ring should have been. He kept his eyes trained forward on the road, but his stare was miles long. She shook off the swelling sense of dread that curdled in her chest and focused on breathing. “We weren’t at the graveyard.”
“Huh.” Paris turned the cruiser along the curve of the road. It skidded off of pavement and onto gravel. “Do you know what prompted the attack?”
“No.”
“You have no idea?”
Logan cleared her throat. “I was at the Chokecherry earlier today and John threatened me…”
“Gotcha.”
Logan swallowed again. Between the scratches on Paris’s arms, there were red half-moons like fingernail indents. His thousand-mile stare was fixed on her now, and she understood. The truth was a slow thing, but the fog was burning away second by second. Logan met Paris’s eyes and there was nothing there. He smiled, but there was nothing, nothing, nothing.
She’d seen a face like that before in her dreams. She’d seen it behind Brandon’s spectacles, piercing and cold and empty. She could taste her heartbeat.
“You’re sure this is the way to the hospital?” Logan asked. “It seems pretty dark for the highway.”
“Yep. Almost there.”
This was not the way to the hospital. Logan had driven on this road before. She’d seen these trees at night. She’d seen the black hills across the lake, the blips of campfire, the scratches of road on the distant shore. This was the way around the lake.
Paris was taking her to the cabin.
It was him.
He was the killer.
Paris leaned back in his seat. “You’ve been through a lot since you got to Snakebite. Can’t be easy coming here, where things are so different from the big city. We’ve got good hearts, but we keep things traditional. Maybe that’s a bad thing—I don’t know—but it must be hard on you.”
Logan could only stare at his hands. They looked strong enough to choke the life out of her like they’d done to all the others. Maybe that was why he was taking her to the cabin: to kill her. She kept her arms at her sides to hide her shaking. She was going to throw up.
“You probably think I’m backward, or that I hate gays. I’m not like that, Logan. I never had a problem with your dads. It hurt me to see all that hate just as much as it hurt them. Alejo and me were always good friends, and I never had a problem with Brandon. The two of them always kept to themselves. To see people accusing them of crimes we both know they didn’t commit … it’s a shame. I really wanted to keep your family out of this.” Paris sighed. “But I think you’ve figured out by now that the three of you are always gonna be connected to all this.”
“What do you mean?” Logan asked, voice shaking.
Paris arched a brow. “You still cold? You’re shaking.”
“A little.”
Paris reached into his passenger seat and handed her a towel. Logan wrung out her hair and covered her face with the towel. She counted her breaths to keep from panicking. There had to be a way out of this car, off of this road, back to safety. She patted her back pocket for her phone, but it was gone.
Paris gave a low hmm and looked at her in the rearview mirror. Suddenly, his expression changed and he shook his head. “Looking for your phone? I’ve got it up here.”
“Can I have it back?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He let out a disappointed sigh. “Wouldn’t matter much. There’s no service out here.”
Logan blinked. Her heart climbed up her throat. Somewhere, miles away, she hoped Ashley was looking for her. She hoped someone was looking for her. There had to be a way to tell them where she was. Who she was with. What he’d done.
“Where are we actually going?” Logan asked.
“You know where we’re going,” Paris said. “You kids have been out here a dozen times already.”
“The cabin, right?”
“I am sorry,” Paris said. “I would’ve kept you out of it if I could.”
Logan closed her eyes. “Are you gonna kill me?”
“No.”
Paris signaled his way off the main road and pulled into the gravel turnout. His headlights cut through the trees. Deep in the woods, Logan could just see the outline of the cabin. Inside, a single lantern glowed orange against the night.
The ghosts, the deaths, her fathers: it all started here.
Logan let out a shuddering breath. A piece of her had thought the voice she heard in the water was a hallucination. That it was something her mind had created to keep her from dying. But it had told her she needed to go to the place where everything began. And for one reason or another, that place was here. Something told her that the cabin was where it would end, too.
“Why are we here?” Logan asked.
“Because it says I’ve gotta do one more thing, then I’m good.” Paris turned in his seat to face her. His eyes shone like glassy obsidian in the dark night. “Look, I don’t know what it wants with you or the kid from the Bates. Carrillo.”
Elexis. Logan’s eyes widened.
“Anyway, I’m supposed to tell you that, if you want your answers, you gotta head into the cabin. The Carrillo kid’s inside. You think you can do that?”
Logan swallowed. It was probably a trap. It was probably dangerous. But she’d left Nick at this cabin and he’d been killed. She couldn’t leave Elexis, too. They could find a way to signal someone from town. There had to be a way out of this.
“Just go to him?” Logan asked. “You won’t hurt us?”
“I won’t.” Paris unlocked the doors and pushed Logan’s door open. “Now get in there.”
Logan swallowed her fear and nodded. She stepped into the night and waited for her dizziness to pass. Without a flashlight, she only had Paris’s headlights and the light in the cabin to follow. She tripped over roots and stumps, scraping her arms against the rough juniper trunks as she went, but she didn’t stop. Behind her, Paris’s headlights seared yellow against the dusty forest floor.
And then they didn’t.
She turned in time to watch Paris’s cruiser reverse out of the gravel turnout and drive away.
He was gone; he’d left her here.
Something wasn’t adding up. If he wanted to kill her, why would he leave?
Logan made her way onto the cabin’s porch and placed her hand against the front door. Inside, she heard the strangled sound of Elexis’s breathing. Logan sighed in relief. “Elexis. Hey. It’s me.”
“Don’t come—” Elexis started. He choked on the rest of his sentence as if the words were too big for him. “I can’t…”
“It’s okay,” Logan said. She pushed open the front door and stepped into the cabin. The wind followed her inside, gusting against the old wood like a whistle. “I’m not gonna leave you. We’re gonna get out of here.”
Elexis sat against the back wall of the cabin, tied to the piano. Other than the rope, he looked unharmed. Logan scanned the room for some sign of danger, but it was exactly the same as she remembered it. Another wave of wind gusted into the cabin again and snuffed out the lantern.
“Hello?” Logan asked in the darkness.
“Logan, you—”
Something crawled over her skin, and she was frozen. The sensation was the same one she’d had underwater. It was the same creeping blackness, the same cloying, thick tar crawling up her throat. Logan could just see Elexis across the room, and he shook his head. The long shadows of the room crawled over her skin like icy fingers, pressing into the exposed skin of her neck. She willed her legs to move, but they didn’t answer to her anymore.
I am glad you could join us, a voice whispered. She felt its sickly breath against her throat. It has been a very long time.
“What…?” she began.
She couldn’
t remember what she meant to ask.
You want to know why you dream of death. You want to know why your bones reach for the earth. You have spent your nights starving for the truth.
Logan’s stomach churned. She nodded. The voice’s words were true, but they were true in a way she’d never felt before. They were true in a way that had no alternatives. Logan was peeled away and something else took her place. The truth was the only thing she wanted; she couldn’t remember wanting anything else.
“The truth…”
The dark rested just above her skin like gathered cloth. Sweetly, the dark breathed, Would you like me to show you?
Logan didn’t answer. She didn’t need to answer. The dark swallowed her whole and she was gone, hurtled out of time.
34
If The Truth Is A Lie
Ashley followed Tristan to the police station with her heart in her throat.
As soon as she killed the engine on the Land Rover, Tristan’s silhouette disappeared and she was left in the yellow glow of the station lights. She’d followed Tristan because there was supposed to be an answer at the end of the road, but the station was empty. None of the police cruisers were parked outside. The only car in the lot was the scuffed-up ParaSpectors minivan.
Ashley climbed out of the Land Rover and ran into the station. The front desk was empty, but all of the lights were on. Behind the reception desk, she heard clattering and scraping like someone was digging around in the drawers. The overhead lights flickered, and it struck Ashley that it was too bright, too alive in here to be empty.
“Hello?” Ashley asked.
The clattering stopped. A man stood up behind the counter. She immediately recognized his short crop of dark hair and thick-rimmed spectacles. He’d been living in this town for months, but this was the first time Ashley saw him face-to-face. The first time she saw him alive.
Brandon Woodley rolled his eyes. “Are you serious? I don’t have time for this.”
“Mr. Woodley?” Ashley asked. “Are you here for Logan?”
He stared. “I was. She’s gone. Her phone is off.”
“But she…” Ashley trailed off.
The Dead and the Dark Page 23