by Jen Blood
“You don’t belong with a degenerate who’s twisting your minds,” Matt snaps. Zion backs away. Matt has always been unpredictable—affectionate one moment, troubled and broken the next. Though she has never been on the receiving end of his ire, in many ways Rebecca still prefers Joe’s violence to Matt’s. There is at least some semblance of control when Joe lashes out. The world makes her husband angry, but demons drive Matt.
“Let him go,” she says quietly. It is an order, simple and clear. Matt hesitates only a moment before he obeys.
“Zion, go back to the house,” she says.
“You should come with me,” Zion says. She notes that he does take a few steps away from Matt, however, until he is standing just out of his reach.
“I’ll be there soon. You need sleep.”
“You’ll come say goodnight?” he asks. The doubt is plain in his voice.
“Of course,” she lies. Zion looks at her, rain dripping down his face, and she can see that he does not believe her. He turns, regardless.
“Goodbye, Uncle Matt.”
Before he can go far, Matt reaches for her son again. This time, all trace of uncertainty is gone—he holds tight to Zion’s arm and takes a step toward Rebecca. A crack of thunder rocks the night. Lightning flashes just seconds later.
“You have to come with me,” Matt says. He pulls Zion into the greenhouse. Closer to Rebecca. Farther from the church. “We have to go. I came here for both of you.”
“I’ll go with you,” Rebecca says. “Zion has to stay. He has a destiny.”
There isn’t a trace of surprise on Zion’s face when he meets her gaze. “You don’t need to go with him,” her son says.
“I do.” She doesn’t cry, and she doesn’t waver. “You belong here. I don’t. We’ll write; I’ll visit. You will do great things.”
Matt still has hold of Zion’s arm. His fear breeds desperation, a darkness to his eyes that all but obliterates the gentle man Rebecca loves. Zion starts to struggle, intensifying his efforts at the first traces of fear on his mother’s face. An instant later, his struggling ceases when a familiar voice intercedes.
“Let him go.”
Isaac stands tall, silhouetted against the gray night and driving rain. As though too stunned to argue, Matt releases the boy’s arm. Zion races to Isaac’s side.
“You can’t have him,” Matt says. There is a tremor in his voice and fury that borders on madness in his eyes.
“I am merely God’s instrument,” Isaac says smoothly. “Zion is here for a reason. You cannot stand in the way of the will of God.”
Zion takes Isaac’s hand. “He wants to take my mother. Tell him she must stay, too.”
Isaac says nothing. She can see the moment when Zion understands the reality of what is happening; that Isaac has banished her. That she will leave and he will stay. Tears mix with the rain still washing down his cheeks.
“You have a destiny, my son.”
Zion shakes his head roughly. She can’t remember ever seeing him cry like this. “Not without my mother. She has to stay. She has no one else to protect her—she’ll die without me.”
Isaac puts a hand on Zion’s shoulder. Rebecca has been so absorbed in their reaction that she’s nearly forgotten about Matt. His gun is already raised by the time she realizes his intent.
“Leave us!” Zion shouts, his rage directed at Matt.
Isaac’s hand flexes on Zion’s shoulder, holding him still. “Matthew, I know there are demons that haunt you.”
“Shut up,” Matt whispers.
The preacher takes a step closer. “I know the voices of those you struck down cry to you in the night—I was there, Matt. I lost my way, too. War changes a man; makes him see the worst in people. I’m here to tell you there is still good in the world. Zion exemplifies that good.”
He takes another step forward. Matt steps back, the gun still raised. He is trembling.
“I want you to take Rebecca and leave this island,” Isaac says. Zion flinches as though a blow has been struck.
“No!” her son cries.
Isaac holds up his hand. Turns on the boy. “God has made his wishes plain to me. He has told me what your path holds.”
“I don’t care about God’s plan, then,” Zion says. His voice is choked with tears. Isaac ignores him and advances on Matt, faster now, his hand outstretched.
“Give me the gun, Matthew,” he says. “Leave here. Take the woman and don’t return.”
Zion tries to run past them both to get to his mother, but Isaac holds him back. Rebecca takes a step toward him. The wind rises and the trees moan and the heavens rain down. Isaac is smiling. Zion is possessed. Matt stands perfectly still, terrified. Something is about to happen—she feels it in a bone-deep pause, as though God himself is holding his breath. Waiting.
There is another crack of thunder, another flash of lightning that illuminates the night. A scream dies in Rebecca’s throat when she sees the man standing to their left, at the very center of the greenhouse. He is dressed in black, a hood up around his head, a cruel smile on his thin lips. The Angel of Death, Rebecca thinks suddenly. Has he been here the entire time?
Matt turns toward her to find out what’s wrong. Isaac takes the opportunity to wrest the gun from his grasp, still holding Zion close. Rebecca watches and she knows in the way that mothers always know, the moment that Matt’s finger grazes the trigger. The smile vanishes from Isaac’s lips. A crack that sounds like the end of the world tears through the night. Matt cries out.
Zion does not.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Nursing my bloody finger, I crawled back to Jack and Matt. When I reached them, Jack looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. The old man’s chest rose and fell in shallow, useless gasps—the final breaths of a dying man.
“Matt, who killed Zion?” I asked.
He blinked. His face was wet with tears. “I did,” he whispered. Jack stared at him.
“Just the body,” Matt said. “I killed the body—he’ll rise. I thought I found him.” He looked at Juarez with madness shining in his rheumy blue eyes. “I thought I found him, but it was a lie—I was wrong. She told me you were him. We believed. But if you’re him, he can’t still be in the ground. Joe says he’s dead.”
I tried to think of a question. As it happened, I didn’t need to; now that he’d started, Matt continued without being prompted.
“Everything got jumbled that night—everybody was moving. Isaac wouldn’t let us go. Zion wouldn’t leave Becca; Isaac wouldn’t let us take him.” More tears leaked down his face. He coughed and a trail of bloody spittle flowed down his chin.
“I shot them both,” he said.
“You shot Isaac?” I asked.
“Shot him dead. And Zion. Two birds with one stone.”
“Then who am I?” Jack asked. “If I’m not Zion…?”
Matt looked like he’d just been presented with some indecipherable riddle. “I don’t know who you are,” he said finally. “A boy who looked like Zion, grown to a man with no past. I thought you were him.”
I was still trying to put everything together when a branch broke off to the left. Juarez went for his gun. Before he could fire, Joe Ashmont emerged from the brush and stood tall at the edge of his son’s grave.
He was limping, a rag tied tight around his right thigh. His clothes were wet, his face black with grime. He held his shotgun in both hands, as though it would be too heavy otherwise.
“You knew all this?” I asked. “That Zion was dead? You knew what happened the night before the fire?”
Joe nodded. “I knew all Matt’s secrets. Just learned everybody else’s, though.”
“Why did you try to kill my mother?”
He ignored the question. “I’ve been telling them for years the boy was dead—I was there, I watched him die. But Becca had it stuck in her head that he was coming back, and anything Becca was selling Matt always bought. Right, Matty?” He leaned forward, eyeing Matt’s bleedin
g form.
“He dead?” Ashmont asked me.
Matt coughed. Something that looked a lot like relief crossed Ashmont’s face before it vanished.
“So Rebecca’s still alive?” I asked.
“Not now,” he said. Fast, short. Grief or anger or some combination of the two made him look away from me for a second or two, while he got himself back together.
“You killed her,” I said.
“Who the hell do you think I am—you think I just go around murdering every woman I see? I didn’t touch Becca. Twenty-two years, I’ve kept her secrets. Fed her, nursed her, kept outsiders from coming in here, while her and Matt kept on with the delusion that her fuckin’ kid was the second coming. He’s in the ground, Matty,” he said, addressing his old friend. Matt stirred.
Ashmont shook his head.
“Bat-shit crazy—both of ’em,” he said, half to himself.
“Did you know my father’s still alive?” I asked. “Do you know where he is now?” He barely acknowledged the questions—I might as well have been talking to the air.
I looked back to Matt for more answers than Ashmont had provided thus far. Juarez had brushed the hair from the old man’s forehead. He was crying, while Matt continued to leak blood and gasp for breath.
“What about the fire?” I asked Matt. “And my father—Rebecca said she knew a secret about my father. Do you know what she was talking about?”
A flash of panic crossed the old man’s pain-filled eyes. “They killed Becca. They warned us—it’s what happens when you start telling secrets.”
Matt closed his eyes. I turned to Ashmont, who was watching all of this with only mild interest. He’d dropped the shotgun to his side and was using it to prop himself up.
“Who’s they?” I asked. I took a step toward him, no longer mindful of staying out of sight. Ashmont just smiled. “Who set the fire, dammit? Who attacked my mother?”
He looked past me, straight into the woods. Matt started coughing. Jack knelt beside him and tried to staunch a fresh flow of blood.
“I tell you and you’re dead,” Ashmont said. He still wasn’t looking at me. “Just like the rest of us—Matty’s almost there. They’ll get you too, one way or the other. Becca said it was the Angel of Death that struck the match, but you and me know better. He ain’t no angel; I don’t know who the fuck he is, but he’s just a man. Adam wants to pretend it never happened, and Kat’s the only thing standing between you and a bullet that’s had your name on it since the day you was born. There’s a stack of bodies a mile deep and they keep piling up—you really think it’s worth all that?”
I hesitated, but only for a second. “I need to know what happened.”
His eyes flitted to mine for just a second before they returned to the trees behind us. Jack was oblivious, now doing CPR on a dying man whose bloody past would chase him to the grave. I turned around. The world slowed to a series of freeze frames that my brain could barely process.
Twenty yards away, a man stood with a rifle pointed at us. He looked directly at me. In the moonlight, I could make out high cheekbones and a thin, sharp nose.
He fired.
Ashmont never flinched. Never ducked. He fell into the grave where I’d just uncovered Zion’s body, and he didn’t move again. I was dimly aware of Juarez shouting for me to get down, but I ignored him.
When I turned back to the tree line, the cloaked man from my nightmares had vanished into the woods.
I got to my feet and ran after him—through the woods, past the boarding house, down the trail to the ocean. I ran through a blue forest toward the deep black sea and I didn’t stop. Didn’t slow. The ground was rough beneath my feet. I tripped and landed hard, skinned my knees and jarred my bones. I tore my face on a bramble of thorns I couldn’t get free of, while just up ahead the man with all the answers I’d been looking for since childhood ran like a specter through the night.
Except I didn’t believe in ghosts.
I kept running.
He broke off from the path somewhere along the line; I caught glimpses of him through the trees, but he was always out of my reach. He was leading me toward the south side of the island, where the cliffs were high and the drop to the ocean below was fifty feet of hard edges. I couldn’t see him anymore. Heard nothing. Somewhere far off, Juarez was calling for me.
“Ssh,” my father says. It is night in the woods. We are alone. “Don’t make a sound. Hold your breath. Listen to the forest. You can hear a mouse creep, if you listen hard enough.”
I stopped running and held my breath.
Five seconds passed. Ten. Nothing but the wind in the trees and the distant surf, Juarez’s voice sounding more and more panicked as he shouted my name. And then…
Footsteps, moving fast. I followed the sound, running faster than I had ever run in my life. I saw him up ahead—a black silhouette racing like he couldn’t be stopped. I didn’t slow down when he led me off the path again, where the trees grew thinner and the wind got colder. We cleared the forest and reached the cliffs.
He kept running, leading me dangerously close to the edge. I could hear the waves crashing below, could feel a vast emptiness to my left. A single misstep and I’d be gone. The cloaked man was ten feet away, maybe less, when he turned toward me. He stood at the edge of the cliff and smiled. He held a long, bony finger to his thin lips.
“Ssssh.”
He turned to face the abyss.
An instant later, he was gone.
I ran after him, stopping short at the ledge. Below, I could see him make his steady way down the sheer face, hand over hand down a rope anchored into the granite just a foot down from where I was standing. A boat was idling in the waves below. I couldn’t see details, but at least one other person waited for him.
I stood there gasping for breath and watched as the cloaked man, the man in my nightmares, the man who had been a ghost but was now once and for all incontrovertibly proven flesh and blood, climbed into the boat. He disappeared into the night.
I found Jack in the woods fifteen minutes later, calling my name. Blood coated the front of his shirt. When I finally appeared on the path in front of him he stopped short, his breath coming hard. He wiped blood, sweat, and tears from his face with the back of his hand. I’d never seen him so angry.
“Diggs is right—you do have a death wish. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I swallowed past the boulder-sized lump in my throat. I’d sprained my ankle and scratched my face. My jeans and jacket were torn.
“I’m sorry—I wasn’t thinking. I just…I had to try and catch him. I’m sorry,” I repeated. “Matt…?”
“They’re both dead,” he said numbly.
There’s a stack of bodies a mile deep, and they keep piling up, Ashmont had said. Matt might have killed Zion and Isaac all those years ago, but were the rest of the deaths really on my father’s head?
“I didn’t find Rebecca,” he said.
I nodded again. I took his hand and led him back down the path. “I think I know where she is.”
August 22, 1990
Joe appears after the shot is fired. He is not there, and then he is. The last remnants of coherence in her tangled brain tell Rebecca that he has been lurking in the background, waiting to intervene when he was needed. He is too late.
Isaac falls first. He sinks to his knees, his eyes wide. The bullet hit him in the chest; the blood soaks his shirt and the ground beneath and he dies almost immediately. Rebecca barely notices, however. Her attention is fixed on Zion. He falls backward, hard, and she worries about him bumping his head until she gets closer and sees the gaping wound in his forehead. His face is still wet with tears, but his eyes do not see. She falls to the ground beside him. Pulls him into her arms.
Matt is screaming—the scream of a madman who will never be silenced. Joe is the only one who is calm, though she can see that he is barely holding on. He takes Matt by the shoulders and steers him away from them. Gives orders that Rebecca only
half-hears:
“Stay with her, Matty—I’ll come back for you. Just stay here ‘til I can get back. I’ll take care of everything.”
Matt becomes very quiet. Joe takes his gun. He kisses Rebecca’s head and wipes away her tears, but he can’t get her to move away from their dead son.
“I’ll be back, Becca. I’ll take care of you.”
He leaves her there with her dead child and her dead lover and the man who took them both. Matt stands. He is still weeping. He goes out into the rain and disappears down the path. Rebecca is certain she will never see him again.
She hopes she will never see any of them again.
She sings to her son, lying broken in her arms.
The Angel of Death reappears. His brow is furrowed. He touches Rebecca’s head. “What a mess you’ve made,” he says. He smiles at her.
He goes to Isaac’s body and lifts it easily over his shoulder, as though it weighs no more than a sack of flour. He carries the dead preacher down the path, paying no mind to the rain or the blood that drenches his cloak. Rebecca blinks away tears, wipes away her son’s blood. The Angel turns back.
“Your son will rise. If he is Chosen, he will rise. Leave him. Come with me.”
She kisses Zion’s lips. Arranges him as carefully as she can on the granite floor. She stands and crosses herself in a way that Isaac would disapprove of, though the priests she knew as a child would find it only fitting.
She follows the Angel of Death into the rain.
They go to the chapel. The sun is just coming up, and the congregation has already gathered for their early-morning service. Candles are lit, and churchgoers are singing inside. Their voices are hazy—the chorus of drunken sailors rather than a choir of angels. Her Angel of Death drops Isaac’s body at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the chapel. She watches as he latches the door to the chapel, and places a heavy iron padlock on it.
“It is God’s will,” he tells her. “You are here as witness to God’s fury.”
