by Jen Blood
“Your old space,” Cameron said again. “On the third floor. I’m telling you, it’s there.”
He was lying, I knew. Everything I’d taken from the Crack was on the mainland, tucked away in the only safe place I’d been able to think of at the time: the Trib.
“Go!” Isaac shouted.
“Wait!” Cameron said. “I’ll go. I’ll show you where it is.” He approached me, Lilah’s gun trained on him all the while, and stood close.
“Thank you, but no,” Isaac said. “I’ve been hoping for some time alone with Ms. Solomon, anyway. We have a lot to talk about.”
Cameron kept coming toward us. Isaac had hold of me, but I saw his eyes bounce from me to Cameron and back again, not clear on what was happening.
“Let me…” Cameron said awkwardly, eyes begging Isaac. “Let me say goodbye, at least.”
There was no mistaking his suspicion, but Isaac still took a step back. Cameron pulled me into a hug, holding me tight against his thin frame. It said something about the situation that hugging Cameron was the most normal thing happening just then.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It wasn’t supposed to be you.”
I nodded, still forcing those tears back, but I knew he was wrong. From the day I watched Allie die; the day I was chosen to survive the Payson fire; the day I watched my father take his own life because of these people…
It was always going to be me.
Cameron let me go. Isaac pulled me back to him and shoved me forward. I tripped on the stairs. Fell. Picked myself up again. At the top of the stairs, I saw a little girl with glasses. A brown-eyed boy beside her, the two hand in hand. Isaac gave no indication that he saw anything at all.
They watched, silent, as Isaac pushed me forward. Cameron and Lilah stayed downstairs. Isaac and I moved further into the house, until we reached the narrow stairwell to his family’s old apartment. What the hell was I supposed to do when I got there? There was no doubt in my mind what would happen when he had me alone.
And then, I remembered the other night—lying in bed before Allie woke me. Listening to the creak of floorboards above. A drawer, sliding open.
Cameron had planned this.
It wasn’t supposed to be you.
He brought Isaac here.
I kept walking. A small, quiet certainty took hold of me. I looked back over my shoulder.
Will and Allie stood at the bottom of the steps. Waiting for me, it seemed.
I opened the door to Isaac’s old apartment. Outside, I could hear the wind screaming—like it would tear the roof off, shred the house from the rafters to the floorboards.
Forget the dark spots, Erin, I remembered my father telling me.
Now, those dark spots were all I could think of.
I stepped into the room. Flower-printed wallpaper hung in strips from the sloped walls. It was dank and dark and it felt like bad things had happened here—ages ago, maybe, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the house hadn’t forgotten.
Isaac shined the flashlight into the room. “Where?” he demanded.
I thought of the noise I’d heard the other night, and followed the beam of light as he scanned the room. An antique bureau stood against one wall. I went to it.
“Can I have the light?” I asked.
“No.” He liked the word—it was obvious in his voice. “You’re fine.”
He moved a little closer, but stayed far enough back that I couldn’t try any Ninja moves to take him down. I was left with a little bit of space, and a lot of shadows.
I opened the top drawer.
There was nothing there.
I wet my lips. Looked back over my shoulder. “Sorry. I’m nervous.”
I closed the drawer, and opened the next one.
Nothing.
“What are you doing?” Isaac asked me. “I have games in mind for us, Erin, but this isn’t one of them.”
I slid the next door closed. The third drawer was missing an ornate gold handle. I swallowed hard, and reached for the other handle. The drawer opened hard—I remembered the rattling noise again. This was it.
I moved my body to ensure Isaac couldn’t see. My hands were shaking. I blinked uncertainly at what stared back at me, nestled in the shadows of the ancient drawer.
There were no fancy digital numbers…but there were lots of wires.
And lots of explosives.
Fear chewed at me, but I pushed it back. I thought of Diggs, waiting for me. Allie and Will, at the foot of the stairs. Cameron, downstairs. The feel of his arms around me.
“No more games, Erin,” Isaac said. “Give it to me, damn it.”
I put my hand in my pocket. Found what I now realized Cameron had put there just moments ago.
The faces of all the people Isaac had killed flashed through my mind—everyone who had ever suffered at his hand. At the hands of this organization. Isaac had raped Kat. Terrorized Will. Murdered Allie.
“Erin,” he said. His voice was low. Threatening.
“You want it?” I said. I stepped away from the drawer. “Get it yourself.”
I stepped back. Hate, vitriol, burned black in his eyes. But he weighed torturing me now versus torturing me later. I saw the moment when he made the decision—the one that would cost him his life.
He pushed past me. Opened the drawer. I hurtled past him when he was still looking inside, trying to figure out what he was seeing. I reached the door, and slammed it shut behind me. Half ran but mostly fell down the darkened stairs, and then didn’t wait.
“Cam! Get out!” I screamed. I was aware of Isaac, still in the room. Running for all I was worth down the hall, I thought of Diggs. Jack. Kat. Einstein. My father, ruined by these people.
I slammed my thumb down on the button of the detonator Cameron had put in my pocket.
Chapter Thirty-One
The house was consumed by flames by the time Jack got there. Half dead, drenched in snow and icy ocean water, later he wouldn’t even be able to say how he safely navigated the treacherous waters. Somehow, against all odds, he did.
He ran the steep slope from the dock, and trekked through the woods toward the blaze. Nearly there, the flames just up ahead, he ran headlong into a woman on the path. Dark hair, dark eyes. He read terror on her face.
Lilah.
“You can kill me or you can save them,” she said. His gun came up. She stared down the barrel, and didn’t waver.
“Or I can do both,” he said. “Why did you kill my wife?”
“Those were my orders.”
“Torturing her? Raping her? Those were your orders?”
She stared at him impassively. “Those were my orders,” she repeated.
“Why?” He was aware of the house burning—seconds ticking past. Lilah stared at him for one more precious second before she spoke.
“Because you left. You have secrets the organization will kill for—yet you left. You’re the boy who wouldn’t die, Jackie. Living happily ever after? It’s not in the cards for you.”
She continued to stare at the gun. There was no fear in her eyes. “You can kill me, or you can save them,” she said again.
“I’m not killing you. Come with me.” He waved the gun toward the path.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” The flames were burning hotter now—he could hear them, raging more loudly than the wind. “Erin’s trapped in there right now. You’re really going to do this with me?”
He could shoot her. Tie her. Force her to come with him.
There was no time.
In the end, she made the decision for him. Without a backward glance, she turned and broke into a run. Within seconds, she had vanished into the night.
He let her go, and ran for the fire.
Cameron was half dead when he found the man outside the house—still calling for Erin.
“Where is she?” Jack demanded.
“Inside. I can’t find her.”
“Wait here,” Jack said. Cameron nodded. Jack went to the d
oor, and backed off immediately when he was met by a wall of flames.
“Erin!” he shouted.
He put his shirt up over his mouth. Searched the night for some way in, some break in the flames.
“Erin!” he said again, the name ripped from somewhere deep.
The fire roared, drowning out everything else. For seconds, minutes, it was all he could hear. And then, barely audible, he heard something else.
“Jack! I’m here. I’m here.”
He found her in an alcove under the stairs, her lungs raw from the smoke, but barely touched by the flames. Together, they stumbled out the back door while the house burned, screamed, howled behind them.
Afterward, he sat with Erin and Cameron, no one speaking, as the flames roared toward the sky. The wind died down. The snow stopped.
The Payson House burned to the ground.
Chapter Thirty-Two
It was days before I was able to return to Payson Isle. Days in the hospital, mostly by Diggs’ side while he battled through the pain and slowly inched toward recovery. He refused any painkillers beyond Tylenol, despite doctors’ warnings that by doing so he was putting his body under more stress than it could potentially handle. Kat stood by him on that count, though, and the gratitude I saw in Diggs every time she took up the fight when he was too tired to continue was something I knew neither of us would ever be able to repay.
It was only when I started to see something other than pain in his eyes that I decided it was time to make the trek.
Nine days after Diggs had been shot and the Payson House went up in flames, I made the journey back to Payson Isle.
It was unseasonably warm, the sky blue, though the ocean was still the icy black of the Atlantic in January. Jack and Einstein were with me. Jamie and Bear met us at the dock.
“How goes the fight?” I asked.
Jamie smiled. Einstein greeted Bear ecstatically, circling the boy and yapping wildly while we trekked back toward the house. Or the site where the house had once stood.
“I was trying to figure out how to get rid of that place, you know,” she said. “Explosives hadn’t even occurred to me.”
“You spend enough time with us, you learn to think outside the box.”
“So I’ve gathered.”
Monty and Carl were at the boarding house with the rest of the crew, working to salvage lumber from the fire.
“I assume this means you’re staying on the island,” I said.
For the first time since I’d met her, Jamie looked guarded. “If you’ll let us—or if you’re really ready to sell, I can see what I can come up with to buy the place.”
“I already sold it to you. Was I speaking Lebanese when we did that whole thing? The place is yours. If it’ll make you feel better, let’s draw up the papers. I don’t want this place. You need it. It seems pretty straightforward to me.”
Jamie’s smile broadened to the widest grin I’d ever seen from her. “You’re sure?”
“Abso-frakking-lutely. Change the name, knock shit down, build shit up… I don’t care. It’s yours. Do something good with it.”
She nodded. “I think we can do that.”
Monty joined us before things got awkward. “How’s that man of yours?” he asked. “We could use another set of hands out here.”
“He’ll be laid up for a while, but he’ll be all right.”
He grinned. Unlike the rest of us, he seemed to have gotten through this whole thing unscathed. “If you need a pinch hitter till he’s back in the game, you know where to find me.”
“You’ll be the first one I call.”
He draped his arm over my shoulders. “See that you do, princess.”
After that, I left the others to their work. I knew my destination:
The Crack, one more time.
Will Colby had taken pictures of the Payson fire—which meant he hadn’t died with everyone else. But if he didn’t die with everyone else, where the hell was he?
I had Einstein with me, and an oversized flashlight. I felt little of the fear I’d known before when I came here. I didn’t see Allie Tate’s ghost. I didn’t hear any voices.
I had a feeling that the last of those voices had died out in the fire at the Payson House, for me. I’d come to after the first explosion with Isaac’s burning body just a few feet away, and it seemed then that all I could hear were the dying cries of all those I’d lost—the families I’d known on Payson Isle, the kids I’d played with, Rebecca and Matt and Joe… My father. I’d crawled to a space under the stairs where Allie and I used to hide when I was little, and sat there as the screams and the heat and the flames intensified. I was almost out, almost faded to black, when I realized that one of those cries didn’t come from the dead—it was from the boy who lived. The man who wouldn’t die.
And Jack had saved me, one more time.
Now, I pulled myself from the flames one more time, back to the present, and crept through the darkness, the granite close on either side of me. I reached the hip-height rock I’d had to climb over the last time I was here. This time, though, I didn’t keep climbing up the way I had before—I just climbed over it. I shined my flashlight on the other side of the rock, into a crevice just beneath it.
I found a Polaroid camera.
And the remains of Will Colby.
I cried for a long time that day, at the top of the Crack alone with Einstein. From our vantage high up on the rock, I could see everything: the island, the ocean, Littlehope, and most of Muscongus Bay. Will never got away. No one came to save him. I didn’t know what had happened to him—how he’d died out here. Even if he’d drunk the henbane Isaac had given him, it would only have been enough to make him woozy. It wouldn’t have killed him. All I knew was that he’d been alone here. Terrified.
And it had taken me twenty-five years to even remember that we had been friends.
“But you remember now,” Diggs reminded me gently, later that night. He was in his bed at the hospital, while I sat beside him. His pallor put a whole new spin on fifty shades of gray.
“I do remember now,” I said. He brushed a tear from my cheek. “I just hate the idea of him being alone all this time.”
He looked at me a little funny, but he didn’t point out that Will Colby hadn’t been alone all that time—because he’d been dead. He wet his lips instead. Closed his eyes. “He’s not alone anymore,” he said. “He’s not lost now. You found him. You can’t do any more than that.”
“I know.” I kissed his cheek. “You’re tired. I’ll go.”
“Did you hear they found Laurie Smith?” he asked.
“No—where?”
“She was picked up hitchhiking in Newry. The woman who gave her a ride recognized her from the news, and led the police right to her.”
“No more bloodshed?” I asked.
“Not a drop,” he said. “The sheriff dropped by earlier. He said she’s sticking to her story: that it was all Nate’s idea, and she was there against her will.”
“Did she explain how Nate got his throat slit?”
“Self-defense is her story,” he said. Diggs shifted, then gasped at the pain.
“Easy,” I said. “Do you want me to get the doctor?”
He shook his head. “No. They’ll just try to give me something I can’t take.” He slipped his hand into mine, and squeezed hard. “Can you just stay a little longer?”
“I’ll stay as long as you want.”
“Just until I sleep,” he said. He closed his eyes again. I lay my head on his shoulder, and stayed there until I could hear his breathing even out once more.
◊◊◊◊◊
The next day, Jack, Kat, Maya, and I went to dinner at Bennett’s. There was another snowstorm in the forecast for the overnight hours. Mimi was running a Cabin Fever Reliever special as a result: every entrée just $12.95—with the understanding, of course, that we would all spend six bucks a pint on beer and drink ourselves into a stupor.
“Gotta find some way t
o make up for you assholes shutting me down the other night,” she said when she delivered our dinners. Maya raised her hands, the one innocent party in all this.
“Don’t look at me. I was there to get sloshed with the rest of the town.”
“Well, you’ll just have to make up for it tonight,” Mimi said. “So long as you got yourself a designated driver, of course.”
Maya glanced at Kat with the faintest hint of a smile. “What do you think?”
Kat nodded. Slipped her hand over Maya’s. “We can probably work something out.”
Jack had been quiet since the events on Payson Isle—even more so than usual. I waited until Mimi had gone before I said anything.
“So, what are you going to do now?” I asked him.
He looked uncertain. “What do you mean?”
I laughed—probably more than I should have. He just looked so confused. “I mean… You don’t have a job, right? And I know Lilah is still out there, but blood vengeance doesn’t really pay the bills.”
“No,” he said. I did manage to get a smile out of him. “I suppose it doesn’t. I’m not sure. Jamie actually offered…something.”
“Something?” I raised my eyebrows.
“Helping with searches,” he clarified. “On a case-by-case basis—not full time. I’m not sure what else I’ll do.”
“What about Lilah?” I asked. “Any word?”
The question killed his brief moment of good humor. “No. I’ve got a description out, but I haven’t heard anything. Probably won’t. I get the feeling she’s used to keeping a low profile.”
“Do you think that means J. will just rise again?” I said. “New leader, same mission? Whatever the hell that mission was.”
“I’ve been thinking about that a lot, actually,” Jack said. He took a second to bite into one of the biggest burgers I’d ever seen, chewed, and wiped his mouth after he’d swallowed. Then, he finally continued. It was good to see he had his appetite back, but I was on the edge of my seat waiting for his theory.
“I have Willett’s files—they’re exhaustive, actually. There’s no question the organization was massive when Mandrake was manning it.”