The wind was quick over Snakebite Memorial and Ashley still tasted the Dark on her tongue like iron. She sat in the bed of the Ford, knees tucked against her chest, and let the breeze roll over her. It felt like she’d been here a thousand times since this all started. She’d already said a thousand goodbyes.
From the top of the hill, she could see them all: Nicholas Porter, Beatrice Gunderson, Tristan Granger. Ashley’s eyes traced the letters etched into Tristan’s headstone. His grave was almost completely obscured with bouquets of flowers. The first victim and the last one found.
TRISTAN ARTHUR GRANGER
2001–2020
“SLEEP ON NOW, AND TAKE YOUR REST.”—MATTHEW 26:45
In the parking spot next to her, a car door shut. Ashley didn’t look at who it was—probably another person here to lay flowers for the victims. News had spread outside of Snakebite in crashing waves. Frank Paris’s face was on every news station in the state. Under his picture were always smiling pictures of Nick, Bug, and Tristan. People drove from all over to pay their respects and to see where it all happened.
“Can I come up?”
The voice wasn’t a stranger’s. Tammy Barton stood next to the Ford, one hand resting on the tailgate. Like always, she was the perfect portrait of what Snakebite was supposed to be. Her short blond hair was ironed into easy waves, her long lashes perfectly curled, her lips painted a subtle mauve. Before all this, when Ashley looked at her mother she had seen what she wanted to be in twenty years. She had seen the kind of woman who held Snakebite on her shoulders. She had seen the best parts of this town—the strength, the loyalty, the pride.
But Snakebite was wrong. Maybe Tammy Barton was wrong, too.
Ashley nodded and motioned to the space next to her in the truck bed. Tammy carefully climbed up and nestled against her in silence. She placed her hand gently on Ashley’s knee and looked out at the lake, the hills, the bright gold horizon. After a moment, she unearthed a thermos from her bag and passed it to Ashley.
Ashley unscrewed the lid and a cloud of hibiscus steam wafted out. Even here, even after everything, the scent was home.
“How’d you know I was here?” Ashley asked finally.
“I’ve known you for a while now,” Tammy said. She hesitated, then added, “Well, I’ve known most of you, I guess.”
Ashley’s stomach sank. “I don’t wanna talk about that.”
“Okay. We don’t have to.” Tammy paused. “But we can.”
Ashley hugged her knees tighter to her chest. In the two weeks since Paris’s basement, she and her mother had talked about a lot of things. They’d talked about what Snakebite would do now, what Ashley needed to recover from this, what Barton Ranch would do to stay afloat amidst the scandal. But they hadn’t talked about this. They hadn’t talked about the sinking feeling in her chest.
They hadn’t talked about the way Logan made her feel incredibly, impossibly alive. The way Snakebite had tried to kill her piece by piece, and Logan had put her back together.
A few months ago, Snakebite had been her home.
Now home was something else.
“You mind if I talk at you for a second?” Tammy asked.
Ashley said nothing.
“I’m not gonna pretend to get it. I didn’t get it with Alejo, either. But back then, I didn’t really try. You’ve been through a lot these past few months. More than I ever went through at your age. And I know that’s gonna change things for you.” Tammy squeezed Ashley’s knee. “If this is something you want, I can’t stop you. But I’ve never seen it make someone’s life easier. And after all this, I just want your life to be easy.”
“Yeah, well that’s kind of impossible now,” Ashley said. She didn’t want to snap, but anger boiled in her chest. For the last few weeks—last few months—it had been like she was trying to breathe underwater. “My friends are dead. How could it be easy now?”
“I lost my friends, too,” Tammy said. “One of my best friends broke up with me and left. The other one…” She gestured to the cemetery.
“It’s not the same.”
“It’s not. But I get it.”
Ashley closed her eyes. She felt the hot tears before she could stop them. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, but she cried anyway. This pain came from deeper than any she’d ever felt. It wracked her, scraped her inside out, made her hollow and cold. Snakebite was the only place she’d ever known, and now she didn’t know it at all.
She was lost.
Tammy pulled Ashley’s head against her chest and ran a hand through her hair. They sat alone for what felt like hours, Ashley crying quietly and Tammy letting her.
“When is she leaving?” Tammy asked.
“Next week.”
“What do you want to do?”
Ashley sucked in a ragged breath. “I don’t know.”
Tammy ran a hand through her hair again. The horizon was cream-colored and light as a feather. It was the clearest the sky had been in months. The sun wasn’t blistering like before. Even if the sky was back to normal, even if Snakebite was settling down, Ashley couldn’t go back.
“Do you want to leave?”
Ashley sat up and wiped tears from her eyes. Tammy’s expression was genuine. Her eyes were clear and blue and pained. Ashley shook her head. “I can’t.”
“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 scoffe
d.
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.
Her phone rang.
Logan rolled off the bed and wandered to her motel room. She and Ashley had spoken a few times since everything went down, but the world had fallen apart from under them. Whatever plans they’d made, whatever promises they’d exchanged, it was all in the wind now.
Ashley deserved to be happy again, whatever that looked like.
Logan would learn to be okay with that.
“Hey,” Logan said, shutting the dividing door behind her.
“Hey,” Ashley said on the other end of the line. “Do you have a minute to talk?”
“Yeah, sure.” Logan lay back on her bed. She and Ashley had lain here one night, hours before the world fell to pieces. “What’s up? Where are you?”
“Visiting Tristan and the others.” Her voice cracked. “Are you packing up?”
“Kind of. Brandon’s helping me plan my stops.”
“Oh, cool. You’re still leaving next week?”
Logan swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Okay.”
Ashley was quiet for a long moment. Wind rattled like a long sigh from the other end of the call. Around Logan, the room sank. She hadn’t said goodbye yet; she hadn’t figured out how. Because all the years she’d spent picturing her life on the road felt hazy now. The only thing she pictured was Ashley next to her, Ashley smiling again, Ashley playfully shoving her when she said something stupid. At some point, something had shifted in her.
She didn’t want to be alone. She wanted to be loved.
And she didn’t want to say goodbye.
“Ashley…” Logan said.
Ashley cleared her throat. “Do you want some company?”
40
In The Morning Hour She Calls Me
On the last day of August, Snakebite was a dream. It was bathed in gold sunlight and bright under the wide-open sky, crisp and cool as summer tilted into fall. It was different than it had been when Logan first arrived. Or she was different, which felt just as likely. The sun had calmed the day the Dark died, like the town was freed from a paranormal vise grip. The endless hills that held Snakebite in place were softer now, rolling out to the horizon like ripples on the lake. From the beginning, she’d intended to follow the tide out of Snakebite and as far away as it could take her. That much hadn’t changed.
But now, she wouldn’t be alone.
The Ford dipped as she tossed the last of her overnight bags into the truck bed. Ashley fastened a bungee cord to keep their luggage in place. Even after everything, the sun in Snakebite treated Ashley differently than it treated everyone else. She ran the back of her hand over her brow and her freckled skin glowed in the late-summer light.
“You’ve got underwear?” Tammy Barton asked, leaning against the driver’s side of the truck. “Phone charger? Gas money? GPS?”
Ashley clapped on a baseball cap. “Check, check, check, and check.”
Tammy eyed Logan and pursed her lips. She’d been trying to conceal her disdain for the last week. She wasn’t succeeding, but Logan appreciated the effort. “Do you two have any idea where you’re going?”
Logan and Ashley exchanged a smile. They had a couple of spots on the road, a couple of sights to take in, but no destination. That was the point of it. Logan had been everywhere, but she’d never felt at home. Ashley had only known one home her whole life, but it wasn’t home anymore.
They had a thousand new skies to see.
Before either of them could answer, Alejo ambled from the front porch of the Barton Ranch house with the last box of Ashley’s things nestled in his arms. Brandon followed close behind him, tapping incessantly at his phone screen. As Alejo loaded the box into the truck bed, Brandon sidled up beside Logan and turned his phone so she could see it. It was a compact map of the US, pocked with virtual red thumbtacks in almost every state.
“I added a few places in Missouri,” he said. “Weirdly, there’s lots of cool stuff there. It’s probably my favorite place we visited.”
“Also the most depressing place we visited.” Alejo snorted. “So that checks out.”
Brandon scoffed. “Obviously you don’t have to stop everywhere, but it’s a start. If you follow the ninety-five east out of Snakebite, you’ll wind up in Idaho. Nothing much to see there, but I highlighted a few spots you can check out. I’d say head north from there until you hit Coeur d’Alene, then…”
Logan nodded. The map didn’t matter, but the fact that he’d helped her make it was perfect. She was trying and he was trying. They had years ahead of them—they had time to heal.
“… sound like a plan?” Brandon asked.
Logan smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Cool.” Brandon rubbed the back of his neck. “Me and your dad are taking off tomorrow morning. I know it’ll be hard to check in with each other, but we’ll at least let you know when we’re back in LA.”
Logan nodded. She pulled Brandon into a hug.
Alejo rammed into them, joining the group hug with the ferocity of an excited golden retriever. “No goodbyes without me. It’s illegal.”
“I’m gonna miss you guys,” Logan said. “I mean it.”
“Can’t miss us if we FaceTime every night,” Alejo joked.
She hoped he was joking.
On the other side of the truck, Ashley wrapped her arms around her mother. Th
e Bartons’ goodbye was quieter. It was more solemn. Ashley let go of Tammy and tightened her ponytail, looking out at the lake behind the house like she thought she might never see it again.
“I know things are … hard,” Tammy said. “But I love you. No matter what.”
“I love you too, Mom,” Ashley said.
Tammy gave her a terse kiss on the forehead and squeezed her shoulder. “If this doesn’t work out, the ranch will always be here for you. You can always come home.”
“And they’re always welcome to crash with us, wherever we are,” Alejo said. “You too, Tammy. We can have a big sleepover.”
Tammy rolled her eyes. “Hilarious.”
“I’m serious. We’ll be like a big family now.” Alejo ran a hand through his hair. “A big family that probably needs a lot of therapy.”
Ashley climbed into the driver’s side of the Ford, and Logan silently climbed into the passenger seat. They settled in, staring at the driveway that stretched out ahead of them like a doorway to another world. Ashley jammed her keys into the ignition and the truck roared to life. They pulled out of the driveway slowly, waving a final goodbye to their respective parents until they rounded the corner onto the highway. Logan pulled out Brandon’s map and gave it a cursory glance.
“Where are we going first?” Logan asked. She threw her feet up on the dash and swiped her round black sunglasses over her eyes.
“East, to the highway.”
“Then?”
Ashley smiled. The sun was golden over her freckled cheeks. “Another highway. Probably some mountains. A lot of nothing.”
Logan slipped a hand over Ashley’s thigh, fingertips tracing circles against her skin. “And then?”
“Somewhere, eventually. You ready for it?”
Ashley’s smile was brighter than the sun.
The truck rattled on, shaking clouds of dust loose into the haze. The soft, gold hills of Snakebite cradled the girls in their palms, pouring them out of the lake valley and into the world beyond. Snakebite had been a nightmare for Logan; for Ashley, it’d been home. Logan touched the knuckles of Ashley’s hand. Home didn’t have to be a place anymore. It didn’t need four walls or a rocky shore or stars over the hills. It was a feeling.
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