So Flynn was like me once. He made the bargain. He let them in.
“What did you get out of it?” I spit. Flynn tilts his head, mildly puzzled. I plunge on. “You made a deal with the devil, and for what? You teach guitar in a basement.”
Flynn’s eyes narrow to glinting slits. “I had exactly the life I wanted,” he says. “I’ve seen the world. Played for millions. Made a living with music. You should be so lucky, kid.”
He sounds angry. I can’t tell if it’s at me, or at them, or at something else. I can’t tell whether it’s a lie or whether he believes it.
It doesn’t matter anyway. I can save my family and friends plus have everything I’ve always wanted, and in exchange, I give up myself. There’s not even a choice.
“So—what?” I croak out. “What do I have to do? I need to make some kind of flesh sacrifice?”
Flynn nods once. “But that’s just a gesture, really. It’s their way in.”
“And then . . . they have me?” My mouth can barely form words. “They have my soul, or whatever?”
Flynn grins. “‘Or whatever.’ Yeah.” He steps toward me. “You’ll be theirs. You’ll share in their power. And that’s a pretty amazing thing.” Flynn reaches out and grabs the knife. I’m so numb, it slides right out of my fingers. He holds it up, squinting at it in the faint moonlight. “This should work,” he says.
Flynn reaches into his pocket and pulls out something small and square. When he flips it open, I see that it’s a silver Zippo lighter. He crouches on the ground, a few feet from Yvonne’s case, and starts scraping together a pile of dry leaves and twigs. In a minute he grazes the tinder with the lighter’s flame. It sparks to life. The twigs catch. Flynn looks around for some larger sticks, adding them to the fire one by one until a bright, steady blaze is burning.
“What are you doing?” I ask. “Why do we need a fire?”
Flynn looks up at me. “Got to get rid of what you cut off, don’t we?” he says. He’s wearing a smile that makes my stomach churn. “Can’t have you taking it to the hospital, trying to have it reattached, either. You’re giving it up. For good.”
I stare down into the curling flames. My guitar teacher is building a fire to burn my own severed finger. It’s so unbelievable, so sick and ridiculous, I almost let out a laugh. But the force heaving up inside my chest might just as easily be puke.
This can’t be real.
But it’s real.
“We’ll give it a couple of minutes.” Flynn adds a snapped pine branch to the flames. “Make sure it’s nice and hot.”
I squint upward. Light and smoke from the fire rises up into the canopy, touching the hanging bodies. The bodies of everyone I love. I can see the color of Jezz’s Converse shoes, the glint of the beads on Mom’s necklace. The firelight makes all of them look more detailed. Warmer. More alive.
It feeds my hope. It makes me desperate.
Flynn has found a small, flat rock. He balances the pocketknife on it. Its blade reaches into the flames.
“There,” he says. “We’ll make sure it’s clean.” He gives a casual wave of his missing-fingered hand. “The blade’s pretty small, but you have to show that you mean it. You’ve got to open yourself up. Give them a way in. So no half-assed little nicks, got it?”
“Flynn.” I swallow. He’s been here, where I am. I wonder who he was back then. If he was another small-town, metalhead teenager, too floored by the gifts all around to see past them, into the dark. “Afterward—will I be myself anymore?”
He looks at me, hard. “Who do you think you are?” he asks. “You’re the kid who writes the songs. You’re the guitarist. That’s what you are. You’ll be those things again.”
His answer falls through me like rocks falling through water.
That’s not what I am. Not all I am.
That’s not me, deep down, at the very core.
Flynn puts a hand on my shoulder. A second later he pushes me down. I’m so wobbly, I don’t even resist. I drop onto my knees next to Yvonne’s case. Firelight turns the surface to a sheet of liquid gold.
Heat from the fire washes over my face. My head swims.
Flynn adds another snapped branch to the flames. In the distance, somewhere behind his back, I think I spot a patch of light glowing between the trees. But I might just be wishing.
Flynn crouches there, watching the leaping flames for a while. Then he takes the knife by the handle and lifts it up. I can see the blade glowing, red-orange color fading away as it leaves the fire for the cold night air.
Flynn touches its edge with one calloused fingertip. “Should be sterile,” he says. “Seems pretty sharp, too.”
He hands me the knife. So casual. He might as well be passing me a guitar pick.
The instant I have it in my hand, the darkness around us shifts.
The creatures are coming back. They’re drawn in. I see their long fingers wrapping around nearby trunks, their milky eyes staring.
I take a breath, and for a second, I think I’m going to black out.
Flynn casts a look at the bodies above us. Patrick has shifted so that his face is staring straight down at me. His eyes are closed. Frankie dangles beside him, her profile hidden in the shadows of her hair.
There’s no way out.
I have to do this. I will do this. Because any one of them is worth more than I’m worth to myself.
I spread my hand out on the case’s cool, firm surface.
“Hang on,” says Flynn. “You’ll want to do it to your strumming hand.”
Of course.
I switch the knife to my left. I place my right hand, palm down, on the case. With any luck, I’ll miss the major nerves and tendons. I’ll sever some veins, sure, but not enough to kill me.
I can live with this. If I’ll still be myself at all.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see another burning flash. It could just be a sputter from the fire, but it could also be something in the woods, moving closer.
The dark things are drawing closer, too. They surround us, creeping inward, gurgling, waiting. I can practically feel their hunger.
Cold and heat clash on my skin. The light is burning out. I’m ash inside. A lump of dead coal.
“It’s okay, kid,” says Flynn, and I hate him for the kindness in his voice. “Focus on all the songs you’re going to write. The shows you’re going to play. It’s all going to be worth it.” He squeezes my shoulder. “Just get it over with.”
I’m done fighting.
All right. Let’s get this over with.
Before Flynn can move, before I can rethink, I drop the knife. I lunge forward on my knees. I thrust my hand—my left hand, the hand I use to create chords, the hand that needs every finger—into the fire. My hand closes around a piece of smoldering wood. I grip it tight.
They want the guitarist. But they can’t have him. Nobody can.
I’m going to destroy him myself.
My. Self.
At first, the pain can’t even break through. There are too many other things. The molten texture of the burning wood against my palm. The smoke and heat stinging my eyes. The darkness and the light. Everything feels like a dream, and none of it can possibly be real.
And then the pain hits in a first giant wave. My arm shakes. My hand sears. My skin shrieks. Every cell of me is trying to get away. To drop the burning branch. But I hold on. I can’t let go yet, not until I know the damage is done. Until I know that I’ll never play a guitar again.
Flynn is shouting something. I can’t even hear him. Because all around us, the warped, dark things are roaring.
Their fury is like a tidal wave. It wants to drag me away. But I hold on. I clench my teeth and close my eyes.
The roaring gets louder. The demons hiss like they’re the ones being burned.
But there’s nothing left for them to take. Nothing for them to want.
At last, when the pain has gone so deep that it’s only a throb at the top of my shaking arm, I let go. At
least, I try to let go. My hand is locked in place like a claw. The smoldering wood tumbles out of my grip and rolls across the muddy ground.
The skin of my hand is black and wet and cracked. I can’t stand to look at it. I’m going to be sick. But even out of the corner of my eye, along with the bloody fluid oozing out of the cracks, I notice something else.
Light.
Pure white light. The light Thea passed into me when she put her hands over my face. It’s pulsing out of me, filling the gray air.
Flynn staggers backward.
And then another streak of light, a thousand times brighter, strides through the shadows. It stops right beside me.
Thea is even brighter than before. She’s like staring into the sun. She erases everything else. The light pulsing out of me adds to the light that flares from her, until every shadow is burned away.
There’s a scream so loud that it makes the ground tremble.
In one thick, writhing mass, the black creatures disintegrate.
The air fills with ash. Fragments of darkness float and slither toward the crack in the ground, sliding through, disappearing.
Thea rounds on Flynn.
I see him trying to scramble away, blinded by her brightness, squinting and stumbling. Thea grabs him by the shoulders.
Flynn screams.
I’ve never heard a grown man scream like that, not in real life. It’s a scream of fear, I think. But I can barely think at all.
Thea takes off, dragging Flynn with her.
My head is sloshing, and my stomach is heaving. For a second everything around me shudders. The air has dimmed again. Blood and water drip from my hand onto Yvonne’s silver case.
From somewhere far away, there’s another scream. Flynn again. This time, it’s a scream of pain.
It’s awful. So awful it almost eclipses the pain roaring through me.
Then the screaming stops.
There’s silence.
Silence.
Only silence.
Thea
They will all wake up in their own beds.
Tomorrow, late in the morning, a few blocks apart, Jezz and Patrick will roll over and stretch and rub their eyes with the heels of their hands, wondering why their heads feel so heavy and their bodies so sore, with their memories full of black fog and not much else.
Anders’s parents will doze until nearly noon, not even able to hear the ringing phone when the hospital calls again and again. They’ll shake their heads at themselves, thinking they had too much to drink at that retirement party. Later, when they hear the nurses’ messages and rush out into the driveway, his father will spend one quickly fading thought to wonder where the scratches on the truck’s paint came from, as if it had driven off the road into the trees.
Sasha and Carson, bruised and sick, will wake up in their beds. Their clothes will smell like whiskey—a slosh from Aunt Mae’s bottle—and they’ll both be grateful that they made it home safely. They’ll think their headaches are hangovers. Nothing new.
Frankie will open her eyes in her own pale gray bedroom. She’ll wake to the sound of screams. Joyful ones. Her parents and little brother will hug her and sob and pile onto her bed and ask her ten thousand questions that she won’t be able to answer. She’ll remember fragments. Darkness. The woods. Something wrapped tight around her neck. Police and doctors will question her next, examine and evaluate her. Teams will keep on searching the woods for her kidnapper, for clues, for an explanation.
They won’t find anything. I’ve taken care of it all.
There are lots of benefits to moving fast.
For Flynn: the river.
For Yvonne, in her silver case: a hole in the ground. A circle of white stones.
Memories are sacred. I don’t like to tamper with them, as a rule. But this time I had no choice. There were too many loose ends, too many snapped and sparking wires. Besides, I didn’t have to take much. The ones who had been held in the darkness, between this world and the one below—Jezz and Patrick, Anders’s parents, Frankie—had minds that were already clouded. A quick touch. Erasing light. Nothing left but shadows that will fade away as another sunny spring morning pours through their bedroom windows.
Only Anders will wake up in a strange bed.
The darkness didn’t drag him to sleep, like the others. He’ll wake up with his memories intact, but impossible. He will have seen things he can’t even bring himself to name.
Because I let him see.
I let him see the darkness. I let him see me.
Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed. That’s one of Aunt Mae’s favorite verses.
Anders will float into consciousness. He’ll try to move and find that he’s in a bed with railings, with tubes and needles in his arm. He’ll discover that his hand is fat with bandages and his blood is syrupy with painkillers and people in pastel scrubs are hurrying back and forth beyond the hanging curtains all around him.
Then his parents will arrive, looking stunned and rumpled and terrified, and the doctor will talk about second- and third-degree burns and grafts and permanent nerve damage and physical therapy, and everyone will absorb about a third of what she says.
They’ll all ask what happened.
And Anders will remember what he saw. Darkness and light. Demons and something else. Something he’s still not sure what to call. Something that looked like a girl made of light. The hanging bodies. Flynn. Fire in his fist.
And he’ll say that he’s not sure.
He can’t remember.
Probably shock, the doctor will say. Not uncommon, perhaps another result of the injuries.
She’ll tell his parents that Anders will stay in the hospital for another few days, under careful observation, making sure there’s no infection, that the pain is never more than he can stand. They’ll discuss a plan for the future. And Anders will drift off again in that crinkly electronic bed.
For a moment last night, I held him.
I reached an arm under his head and eased him up into my lap. I elevated his burned hand.
I touched his skin.
His eyelids fluttered. I wasn’t sure if he could hear me, or even feel me. There was nothing to say anyway. But I wished that I could stay there even for a minute, holding on, while the empty woods creaked and breathed around us.
But I couldn’t.
And neither could he.
I brought him to the hospital. Left him at the ER doors, making sure no one caught sight of me.
I watched from behind a row of bushes as someone in white scrubs hurried to the doors, summoned others, pushed a gurney out onto the pavement. I watched as they wheeled him inside.
It took everything I had not to follow him through the doors. To be there when he woke. Just to sit there while he slept, holding his other hand.
But the glass doors slid shut and stayed shut. And I went home to wash the blood out of my clothes.
Anders
You dress differently when you’ve only got one working hand.
Pulling on your own jeans? Hard. Zipping and buttoning them? Really hard. Tying your shoelaces? Really freaking hard.
For the first couple days after I came home from the hospital, I wore sweatpants and old pullover sweaters. I barely left my bedroom anyway, so it didn’t matter if I dressed like a total slob. On the second day Jezz and Patrick came over. The both stared at my big bandaged lump of a left hand while trying to look like they were staring at anything else, and then we all sat around and watched videos on YouTube. Not music videos. Just stupid comedy stuff. People doing voice-overs for their fat pets.
Finally, after we’ve been sitting there for almost two hours, Jezz turns so he’s sort of halfway facing me, and says, “Your mom says you don’t remember what happened. How”—he nods toward my hand—“how you got that.”
I shrug.
I can’t explain. Not yet. Not even to myself. The memory is like an open wound in my head. I don’t want to look at it too closely.
I don’t even want to think about it. I just want to leave it alone, let it start healing, and maybe when I’m halfway back to normal, I’ll feel ready to touch it again. Maybe.
“Everybody is saying that there was somebody in the woods,” Jezz goes on. “Like, some psycho kidnapper. And you went out and found Frankie, and whoever was holding her tried to stop you, and that’s how your hand got burned. Or something.”
I nod slowly.
“So,” says Jezz. “Was that it?”
He’s looking straight at me now. His eyes are worried. Patrick is watching me, too.
And then, because it seems like the right thing to do, I lie.
“I don’t remember much,” I start. Both Jezz and Patrick keep staring at me, frozen, hanging on every word. “And I don’t think there was a kidnapper. I just think it was some kind of accident, and Frankie was trapped, and I had to reach into a fire to get her out. To get both of us out. That’s all I remember.”
They watch me solemnly.
“That makes sense,” says Patrick at last. “Maybe it was a car accident or something.”
“Oh,” says Jezz. “Yeah. Maybe the car caught fire, and you had to reach in to open the door and get Frankie out.”
They nod at each other.
Of course, that doesn’t really make sense. No one’s found a burned car. Frankie didn’t have any fire injuries. But it makes a lot more sense than what actually did happen. And right now, Jezz and Patrick are being kinder and more careful with me than they’ve ever been before. They’d agree with any stupid thing I said, I’m sure.
So I smile and say, “Hey. Let’s watch that Swedish cooking clip again.”
They smile back. And we do.
On the third day, in the middle of the afternoon, Mom taps on my bedroom door. She’s been working only half time this week, even though the bills for my hospital stay and the coming physical therapy are going to be huge, which means money is going to be even tighter. I’m trying not to add that guilt to the pile of bad things in my head.
“Come in,” I say from the bed, where I’m lying with Goblin on my stomach.
The door swings open. Frankie Lynde steps inside.
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