Even his dad was starting to look at him funny, but ol’ Vince Varley was too much of a stick-in-the-mud to ask what was going on. Instead he’d turn his back quickly, always on the pretext of discussing some drilling BS with Dwayne or investigating a valve somewhere on the derrick. It was like he didn’t even want to think that maybe his only son had done anything less than shit gold.
Which he was probably thinking right now, Doug realized as he ventured a peek at his alarm clock. It was nearly eleven, and he was supposed to report into work at seven A.M. sharp. If Vince wasn’t his dad, he’d be so fired. As it was, he needed to get his ass down there before the ol’ man decided that maybe nepotism wasn’t his best bet.
Doug downed a few Advil as he struggled into his jeans. The snow days had been good: Not going to the rig meant not having to deal with his coworkers’ bullying. He’d had the foresight to stop in at Elmer’s Gas ’n’ Grocery when the snow got bad, so he’d had a couple of cases of Coors to keep him company, plus all the crap TV he wanted to watch, with nobody around to tell him to change the channel. Janie hadn’t been at the house; she’d texted him from that pointless search party to say she was going home with her folks that night, which probably meant she’d gotten her nose in the gossip mill and heard what happened with Luna at the Vein. She hadn’t texted or anything since then, either, so he figured he was probably getting the silent treatment.
Hell, he’d be pissed if he were her, too. And he deserved it, in a way—she hadn’t done anything to him except be weird and sad, and he’d tried to cheat on her. That was messed up. He kept telling himself that as soon as he felt like himself again he’d find a way to apologize, but so far that hadn’t happened.
Doug blasted Slipknot as he drove to work, the music pumping him up for what was sure to be another miserable day of getting mocked, laughed at, and generally shat upon.
He had barely pulled into the parking area when Sid started in. “Hey, look who bothered to show up for work!” His thick Cro-Magnon lips sprayed saliva as he talked. “What happened, bootlicker, you need to put in a shift at the shoeshine stand first?”
The rest of the guys guffawed, and Doug put his head down, the back of his neck growing hot as he tried not to let the jeers penetrate. He was just there to do a job, he reminded himself. Eventually the guys would forget about what had happened up at the Vein. They had to, right?
But Doug knew better than anyone what a lost cause that was. Wasn’t he the one who had teased Carl Boraca right up until high school graduation for the time he got an erection at the front of Ms. Tisdale’s class in the seventh grade? He knew how good it felt to latch on to something like that and never let go. That was the bitch of it: He could actually sympathize with the people making his life hell, because for most of his life he’d done it to everyone else.
It wasn’t something he felt so great about anymore, now that the tables were turned.
“Hey, Dad.” Head still down and insults ringing in his ears, Doug entered the trailer where his father and Dwayne were bent over a complicated-looking geological map. Their heads jerked up, twin looks of irritation on their faces. “Uh, sorry I’m late,” he soldiered on, fiddling with his zipper, pushing it up and down on its track. “My alarm didn’t go off, and, uh, I guess I overslept.”
“Jesus, son.” Vince slammed a hand down on the table. “You gotta get it together. I got a rig to run here—I need folks who’ll actually show up. I can’t keep doing you favors just ’cause you’re my boy.”
“Sorry,” Doug said again, his cheeks flaming. “I’m ready to get to work, if you have something for me.”
Vince looked at Dwayne, who sighed heavily. “We’re kind of in the middle of something, man.” His eyes darted around the trailer, looking to settle anyplace but on Doug. “Can you gimme a sec? Just go sit over there or whatever.”
“Okay.” Doug lowered himself obediently into a cold metal folding chair in the corner, feeling like Bella that time Janie caught her shitting on the rug. As his dad and Dwayne turned their attention back to the map, he wished it were a snow day again. He wished it could stay a snow day forever.
“So anyway,” Vince said to Dwayne, “you gotta make it deep—see, ’cause if we go under Floyd’s supply, we’ll not only get that oil for ourselves, but we’ll choke off his share.” His voice grew thick with glee. “Boy, I can’t wait to see the look on his face.”
“I dunno, boss.” Dwayne scratched at the stubble speckling his chin. “I mean, it’s a good idea, but it’s not, like, totally the safest. You see this fault line here, on the geo map? We’d basically be drilling right through it.”
“So?” Vince’s look wavered between angry and perplexed.
“So—well, you don’t want to disrupt a fault line.” Dwayne sucked in breath, obviously uncomfortable. “It could mess up the plates or, like, even cause an earthquake. That’s, like, Earth Science 101.”
“Oh, is it?” A nasty edge crept into Vince’s tone. “And you think you’re so fancy, with your spankin’ new earth science degree and that stupid foreman’s belt of yours?”
“No, sir.” Dwayne shrank back. “I just don’t want to cause an earthquake.”
“And I suppose what you want matters?” Vince took a step toward him, backing him up against the wall. “I suppose this is your oil rig, on your property, and you took out the loans to pay for it? Is that what you think?” His face was purple, set into the same glare of rage that had made Doug run and cower so many times throughout his life. He knew how it felt to have Vince Varley all up in your grill—it sucked, and even though Dwayne had been shitty to him since the bootlicker incident, he didn’t deserve to get that kind of crap just for trying to do his job.
“Whoa, Dad, chill.” Doug got up from his chair. “Maybe Dwayne has a point, y’know? Like, we haven’t even tried drilling on our land yet. Maybe we should do that before we go and cause an earthquake or whatever.”
Vince wheeled on him, furious. His hands were fists at his sides.
“Son, just who do you think you’re talking to?”
Doug looked down at his shoes.
“You have no right to tell me how to run my rig!” Vince continued, as Doug had known he would. Once his dad geared up for a tirade, there was no stopping him. All you could do was stand there and take it. “First you go getting some floozy knocked up, then you lose the baby, and then you try running around on her in the most asinine goddamn way possible. You think I don’t know about you licking that whore’s boots up at that bar? You think I’m not goddamn embarrassed right now that you’re my son?”
He paused, panting, his forehead glistening with beads of sweat. “Do you?!” he barked.
“I—I don’t know,” Doug finally stuttered.
“Well, I’ll tell you.” Vince’s chest puffed out with rage and a touch of the old Varley pride. “If I could renounce you as my son, I would. You are a disgrace to the Varley name.”
Something hot and unwelcome burned the back of Doug’s eyes. Oh god, please don’t let me cry, he thought, blinking rapidly. It would be too embarrassing, more embarrassing than one man could handle in a lifetime.
“But your mother would never let me do that, unfortunately.” Vince Varley’s voice was quieter now, although rage still simmered beneath the surface. “So listen, son, you have one job from now on—and trust me, it is not to tell me how to run my rig. All I want you to do from now on, son, is smile and nod. When I’m talking, when Dwayne is talking, when anyone is talking. Just smile and nod, son. Smile and nod. You got that?”
Doug, following his father’s command, nodded. He tried to smile, too, but the smile just wouldn’t come.
“Now get the hell out of here.” Vince Varley turned from him back to Dwayne, as if he was exhausted by the subject. “The real men in this trailer have work to do.”
Doug stumbled down the stairs, giving himself the small pleasu
re of slamming the door behind him. He trudged past his coworkers, their stale bootlicker jokes slashing at his ears, making his breath come in deep, ragged snorts. He could barely see by the time he got the door to his truck open and launched himself in, cranking the key in the ignition and getting the hell out of there as fast as possible, away from his horrible dad and shitty, fake friends.
He was still breathing heavily, his eyes still blurry, as he turned onto Buzzard Road and sped past town. It was like his whole world was coming down around him, and as he passed Elmers Gas ’n’ Grocery he thought of the dusty shelf of DVDs inside. He and Janie used to spend hours in there, joshing each other and fake-arguing over what to watch, finally settling on the goofiest comedy they could find and watching it on his couch with a bag of microwave popcorn in their laps, giggling and holding buttery hands and sneaking makeout sessions whenever his parents were out of the room.
Impulsively, he turned into the lot and headed inside, brushing past the new display of fancy beef jerkies and the refrigerated beer cabinets and going all the way to the back, where the DVDs still sat right where he’d left them all those months ago.
He’d get something funny and surprise her, he decided, selecting a romantic comedy that he could give two shits about but knew would make Janie smile. It had been a while since they did something together—actually together and not just side by side in the twin closed-off bubbles their lives had become since the oil and the pregnancy and the wedding and the mansion and all the crazy shit that had gone down since. It would be nice to spend some time with her, to actually look her in the eyes and ask how she was doing, to tell her he knew she hadn’t been all that great lately and that was okay because, hey, it turned out he wasn’t doing so great either.
Janie’d had enough time to calm down over the incident at the Vein, he reasoned. She’d been at her folks’ place for a couple of days, and now that the roads were passable he was almost positive she’d be there at the mansion, waiting for him to come home so they could talk about it and he could apologize and they could make up. To her, he was still the best halfback on the football team, the star rider at the motocross track, the guy in the cafeteria all the girls wanted to get with. He was still the star of her life.
This was gonna be good, he thought as he paid for the DVDs and the popcorn and an extra-large pack of Sour Patch Kids because, hey, why the hell not? He would show his wife some love, save his marriage, maybe even get her interested in sex again. Who needed Luna when he had a hot little number like Janie waiting for him at home?
He congratulated himself on his plan as he pulled out of the parking lot, Nickleback blasting in his ears while he hummed along in an offhand, off-key kind of way. He pulled into the driveway, cut the engine, and went running up the sweeping staircase, calling her name.
But his voice echoed back at him off the half-finished walls, and only Bella came running, yapping and pawing at his knees. He scooped her up and scratched absently at the soft fur behind her ears as he checked every wing of the house, even looking in the closets and beneath Janie’s neatly folded pink sleeping bag, like maybe she’d shrunk to the size of a doll and was playing a game of hide-and-seek to amuse herself.
But Janie wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the kitchen, or the bathroom, or their bedroom, or the den. Janie was nowhere to be found, and he felt his stomach twist with worry and something darker and more bitter, something that leached into the lining of his gut with every place he thought to look.
Finally he sank onto the couch in the den they had once shared, opening the Sour Patch Kids and popping one into his mouth in defeat. He picked up his phone and stared at it as Bella nuzzled into his lap, knowing he had to call her, that it was on him to apologize.
Five more Sour Patch Kids, he decided, munching thoughtfully. Five more Sour Patch Kids, and then he’d make that call.
22
SNOW SEEPED THROUGH DAPHNE’S JACKET, chilling her until she felt heavy and immobile, as impermanent as the drifts that had cradled her fall. Fire from her visions mingled with the day’s bright sunlight, orange and red and hot and cold and real and imagined. The world was all flames and sunshine, there were beasts and demons, the screams were both outside and inside her head.
A demon approached, scaly hands reaching for her, yellowed eyes burning. It opened its mouth to speak, to spew flames and lava down on her, and she shrank back, whimpering.
“Lady, you okay?” the demon asked. Its face swam before her, refusing to come into focus: She saw towering horns and scaly limbs rubbed gray by centuries of passing time.
She scurried backward, shielding her eyes from the sun, trying and failing to find traction in the snowdrift. Without the glare the horns turned to a Stetson hat, the scales to a case of dry skin. Was he a demon or a man in a hat? Fever burned at her, blurring the lines until she couldn’t tell which was which.
“Just want to make sure you’re okay.” The demon (or was it a man in a hat?) squatted next to her. “Ain’t exactly normal to come out of a bar and find a girl just lying in the snow.”
A bar. A girl. The snow. Daphne looked past his wide hat to the glowing red sign that towered above him. The Vein.
The morning rushed back at her: the sheriff’s corpse strung up outside the police station, Owen’s strange behavior when she confronted him, Luna interrupting and filling Daphne’s head with that otherworldly blue light, trying to bend her will.
“You faint or something?”
She remembered the vision then. It flooded her head, filling it with fire and chasms and that shadowy black figure falling into an endless void, its screams echoing off the walls. She clutched her forehead, trying to fight the searing pain there, a sudden and brutal headache.
“Miss.” The man grasped her shoulder. “I’m gonna take you to the hospital.”
Daphne rubbed her temples, willing the headache to subside. Instead it spread through her limbs, making her shudder against the pain. “No hospital,” she said through gritted teeth. She didn’t want to deal with doctors, with machines, with Pastor Ted showing up at her bedside to pick at her last vision before she could think it through. All she wanted was a glass of water and her bed. “I’ll drive home.”
She started to push herself to standing, but a wave of dizziness rolled over her, and she pitched forward, her cheek landing painfully on the snowdrift’s icy crust.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” The demon morphed into a man again, a man with concerned, heavy-lidded eyes. “I may’ve had two beers, but you’re too sick to even walk. Tell me your address, and I’ll drive you.”
Ordinarily she would have known better than to accept a ride with a strange man. Ordinarily she would have crawled all the way home through the snow before giving in.
But the pain flooded through her, and images from her vision still pulsed in her mind. She was sick, she realized—definitely feverish, possibly delirious. “Okay,” she said weakly. “But I carry pepper spray, just so you know.”
He reached out a weatherworn hand and helped her to her feet. “You won’t have to use it on me. Scout’s honor.”
The world rolled at her in waves as she stumbled, half-supported by the stranger, to his truck. She gasped out her address and collapsed in the passenger seat, scenes from her vision descending over her eyes like a stage curtain. Over and over again, a chasm opened in the earth—the same chasm she’d seen in her second vision, the one separating her from the Children of God.
Over and over, the ground opened up to release a pillar of flames, and just when it seemed like too much to bear, like the world was about to end in a rain of fire, she turned to see that dark figure falling, his screams echoing off the walls, being sucked down to a place that, the voice in her head had been clear, was worse than a thousand hells.
Where was that place, and who was the falling figure? She was dimly aware of the truck’s wheels bouncing over Carbon Cou
nty’s back roads, the familiar scenery mingling with scraps from her vision as her eyes slit open and closed again, the lemony sunlight seeping through the clouds outside stabbing tiny daggers into her head.
“We’re here.” The man’s gruff voice broke through her fever dreams, and she realized the car had come to a stop in front of the Peytons’ trailer. “Told you you wouldn’t have to use that pepper spray.”
“Thanks.” She fumbled for the door handle, but he was already there, opening it from the outside, helping her out. “Who are you, anyway?”
He held her elbow as they made their way slowly to the door. “Not much of anyone, really. Just another sucker drifting through Carbon County, hoping to hit oil and strike it rich.”
Daphne’s mouth fell open. So he was one of the drifters: those unsavory characters everyone in Carbon County was hardwired to hate.
“Do you live up at the old motocross track?” she asked.
He gave a single, doleful chuckle. “Don’t know if ‘live’ is the right word for it, but yeah. That’s where I stay.”
They were at the door, and before Daphne could fumble for her keys, Aunt Karen opened it, took one look at Daphne, gasped, and collected her in her arms. Another wave of dizziness broke over Daphne, and she let her aunt lead her to the couch and tuck her under a warm blanket. She lay there gratefully drifting in and out of consciousness as her aunt clucked around her with hot tea and cool compresses and promises of chicken soup. It was only when she heard his truck pull away that Daphne realized she had never thanked the drifter who had helped her home. She had never even learned his name.
• • •
The fever broke at dawn, but Daphne felt like she had broken with it. Still too weak to leave the couch, she let the afternoon sunlight slide over her face, pulling the afghan up to her chin and sinking deeper into the pillow, knowing but not caring that the plush corduroy would leave tracks across her cheek.
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