Rainier glared into the flashlight’s glow. His mouth was a downturned rictus exposing most of his yellowed teeth. Abigail was frozen in the ravine as if unsure of which direction to move.
“Sir, I’ll ask you one more time—” Adam began to say, but was cut off as Rainier lunged toward him.
Two shots in quick succession. Rainier threw up his arms as if in one last supplication and collapsed in a heap, his skull misshapen from Adam’s bullets.
Something landed in front of Clare. In a haze she bent forward to pick it up, but Abigail snatched it first.
Her sister straightened and looked her directly in the eye. “You’ll understand one day, sister. When the earth is a scorched cinder floating through the nether, then you’ll know of faith, but it will be too late.” She brought Rainier’s knife up to her throat.
Clare leapt forward, not thinking, only moving. She caught Abigail’s arm and yanked the blade away from her neck, both of them losing balance and falling to the weed-choked ground. Abigail released a strangled cry, trying to gain enough leverage to bring the blade back to her throat, but Clare fought her. A deep, and very dark, part of her whispered to let go. To let this monster destroy herself. But another part could still see Shanna in the curve of her cheekbone, the set of her eyes.
Then Adam was there, pinning Abigail’s hand holding the knife to the ground with a boot. He pried the blade free and she released a primal howl of defeat. She bucked again, trying to shake them off, but Adam put a knee on her chest and after another few seconds, she quieted.
“Clare, there’s zip-tie cuffs in my back pocket. Get them for me, will you?” Adam said, grabbing Abigail’s wrists. Clare fumbled along the back of Adam’s pants until her fingers encountered two loops of plastic. She held them out and Adam quickly slipped the ties around her sister’s thin wrists and tightened them.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Abigail said as Adam brought her to her feet and began searching her for other weapons. “You’re damning us. You’re damning us all!”
“You have the right to remain silent and I suggest you exercise it,” Adam said, as Clare slumped against the ravine’s wall a few feet away. Colors raced across her vision and she pinched the soft webbing between her thumb and forefinger as hard as she could until they went away.
“Clare. Clare!” Adam said. She snapped free of her trance, unaware she’d been drifting. “Grab my light and walk behind us. Can you do that?”
“Yes. I think so.” She found the high-intensity light shining through the grass where he’d dropped it and picked it up as Adam hauled Abigail free of the depression. He guided her sister past Rainier’s body, and as she came even with Clare she dug her feet in and stopped.
“The first chance I get I’ll make the sacrifice and go through the door,” Abigail said quietly, her voice a husk of before. “You know the door well enough, you’ve been there once before.” Her sister smiled and the drying blood on her cheek cracked. “Someday you’ll go through it, too, and close the circle.”
Adam shoved her forward and Clare stood motionless, staring at Rainier’s body and not seeing it until Adam called for her and she followed them back the way she’d come.
She sat on the stump of a tree, listening to the rising and falling wails of sirens in the distance. They’d be here soon, Hughes along with them at some point, but she guessed she’d be gone by then.
Her eyes traveled over the scene still lit by the bonfire’s glow.
A half dozen bodies lay in a semi-circle around the flames, their feet pointed inward like some macabre geometric design. Several others were strewn less neatly across the ground, fallen with limbs akimbo in the throes of death. Apparently the ones around the fire had begun drinking the poison mixture as soon as she’d escaped the clearing. They must have taken her flight as a bad sign and decided to proceed with the evening’s plans, perhaps at Rainier’s instruction before he had followed her and Abigail into the forest. The others, Adam and the agent who had accompanied him to the clearing had shot in self-defense. Among them were Parson and his family. They lay together, their bodies intertwined with Margaret on top of them as if to shield them, her face turned away—a bloody exit wound glistening between her shoulder blades. Clare wondered if it had been Margaret’s voice she’d heard crying out at the sight of her fallen husband and children, and at the same time didn’t feel an ounce of sympathy. Hector’s small shape lay beside them, feet tipped apart, face mercifully hidden by shadow. At the very edge of the fire’s reach the surviving members of the cult sat with their hands fastened behind their backs as Adam and the other agent continued to secure the last of them. Abigail stared at her across the distance, firelight dancing in her eyes as if a furnace burned within her skull.
Clare took in the night sky, which had cleared in the last hours. Stars gleamed coldly down and she glanced away, unable to bear their flickering indifference she’d once thought beautiful.
Eric lay where he’d fallen, apart from the other sacrifices but akin to them in a way. They all had died for something. He had died for her.
She rose from the stump, knowing she shouldn’t move, not caring. Slowly she approached the man who she’d shared a life with up until an hour ago, and knelt beside him. His face was bloodless but serene, eyes closed, head tilted back. He could’ve been sleeping. She brushed his cheek, feeling the coldness of his skin, and thought of their home, how they’d never inhabit it together again, how she would never feel him holding her in the night, how she wouldn’t get a chance to answer the question he’d never be able to ask.
She cried quietly, her vision prismatic with tears. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
The sirens became louder and louder until strobes of blue and red light began to fall across the scene. More voices rising with questions, shouting orders, and all the while she held his hand, knowing it would be the last time.
“Clare.” Adam’s voice was low and tender. He didn’t need to say anything else. It was time to go. She leaned forward, kissing Eric once on the cheek, and began to rise before another wave of sorrow could wash her away, but paused.
“I would’ve said yes,” she whispered so quietly only she could hear. “I would’ve said yes.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
8 Weeks Later.
“Are you still having the dreams?”
Clare pried her gaze away from the window in Lia’s office. The sky was overcast, a fine rain having fallen earlier that morning, one day lining up before so many others like it in a Pacific Northwest autumn. “Not as much,” Clare lied. She’d dreamed Abigail was standing at the foot of her bed in the small hours of the night before and woken to the quick intake of her own breath readying itself to be a scream. Last night she’d been able to keep from crying out. She’d call that progress.
“That’s good,” Lia said. She was drinking again today, something amber and peaty in a small glass on the table near her elbow. “The sooner you believe she won’t ever be able to hurt you again, the sooner the dreams will go away.” Clare didn’t know if she believed that but nodded anyway. Lia saw her eyeing the Scotch and gestured to it. “Sure you don’t want some?”