Like diamonds in their settings. She always did have pretty eyes....
“Stay with me. It’s you I want,” she said. “It’s you I’ve always wanted.”
He looked long and hard at her. He knew....
“Come on, baby. We can’t stay here. We’ve got to go.” He half turned, crossing out onto the far side, to the ground that would take them away from there. He gestured for her to follow. She stayed where she was, right on the edge of the tunnel. The Thrall side.
The nagging thought came again, but in pieces his mind refused to assemble. Thrall born and bred. Thrall’s natives can’t leave.
“Mia, baby? Don’t you want to go home?”
“I am home,” she said, still unmoving, in a voice that wasn’t entirely hers.
The little Raw that the Twin had breathed out, breathed onto her. The little Raw that Mia (the realno!sheistherealMiadammit) had pushed him out of the way of. She had saved him.
“We have to go,” he said dumbly.
“Stay with me. Die with me here, where we belong. You and me and Caitlyn. As a family.”
Thrall’s residents can’t leave. The Raw. The mummers. It gets inside people, hollows them out.
Jesse felt hot all over. The corners of the world went a fuzzy gray, and he thought he might vomit. No, no, nonono.
“Stay with me. Stay with me.” Behind her, the sounds of deconstruction nearly drowned her out.
“I can’t,” he said finally, but the effort broke something inside him.
A voice sounded far off from somewhere behind him, over the din of the crashing tunnel stones. From the periphery of his vision, Jesse could see that Tom had stopped, turned, and was pounding his way back to him. A word, a name—Jesse’s name—clawed frantically at Jesse’s ear. He ignored it.
He knew, but the Thrall-soured part of him, the bitter, angry, hurting part, the part that wanted to believe Thrall would pay something back that it owed him, didn’t want to see it.
“Please,” he croaked. “Please come with me this time.”
The phantom returned nothing but a soft smile. Her shoulder wasn’t bleeding—she wasn’t bleeding anywhere, as a matter of fact—but her tears collected fat enough to blaze glistening trails down her cheeks.
Carpenter was wrong....
“Jesse!” Tom again, close to his ear.
“Mia, please....” Jesse begged. “Please.”
“Jesse, don’t you gooz-fuck this, either....”
Something sharp and sudden impacted against his jaw and the pain cleared away the haze around Mia. Around the thing pretending to be her. His woman, who he hadn’t saved. His dead woman.
Where the tears had touched her cheeks, her skin singed and flaked away from the bone. Those canyons of ash spread outward, eating up her face. Cold air, almost like breath on a winter day, puffed out from the black depths of her empty eye sockets.
“Please,” Jesse whispered, now acutely and painfully aware of what the phantom was and of what the town was doing to him. He begged anyway, begged against the unfairness of circumstance.
Carpenter had been wrong about one thing regarding the mummers. They could pretend to cry.
“Damn it, Coaglan, that’s not Mia!” Tom tugged on his arm, and he finally turned. Tom gave him an “I-ain’t-got-time-for-this-bullshit” look, but beneath it, Jesse saw a kind of urgent pleading. It brought everything back fully into focus.
“It’s not her, man,” Tom said softly. “You gotta know that. Now c’mon.” A stone thudded heavily to Tom’s left, and he flinched. “Run, Jesse!”
Jesse nodded slowly, letting Tom tug him away from the tunnel and into a run toward the car. He felt the Mia-thing’s eyes on them but he didn’t turn around.
“You punched me in the jaw, you fucker,” he said without any real anger, realizing what the throbbing in his jawbone was.
Tom laughed, and there was relief in that laugh. He flung open the driver’s side door. “I’ll drive. It’s been, what, three or four years? Like riding a bike, right?” Jesse tossed him the keys and he slid in. “Let’s see what this pony can do.”
It was only from the safety of the car’s interior that Jesse ventured a glance back at the tunnel. Beyond it, Thrall was closing in on itself, its screams and the screams of its last few mummers slicing the sky above it to ribbons. The thing that had been Mia was nearly unrecognizable now, its charred skin in an oily patchwork over the bone frame. It watched the car from the mouth of the tunnel. Its hair had clumped and faded in color and as it stood, the wind caught strands and carried them off its head.
It blew him a kiss and waved.
He slipped into the back seat, alongside Caitlyn. Her cheeks shimmered with the salt from her drying tears. She’d seen what happened at the mouth of the tunnel. She knew her mommy wasn’t coming with them. Her little face turned up to him as the car peeled off onto the road. Her big blue eyes, rimmed red from crying and rubbing them, fixed on his. In her gaze, Jesse saw uncertainty and a kind of sadness. There was a child’s sense of mourning there, too—for her mother, for her home, for everything and everyone in her life as she had known them. Jesse knew that feeling pretty well.
Still, he saw trust in those eyes, too—trust that he could keep her safe in the world outside of Thrall. He saw a willingness to love her new daddy in the soft turn of her smile. Those things, more than any physical similarity, reminded him of Mia—the real Mia. And a surprisingly unconditional love was born into a place in his heart he’d never known was there.
“Are we going to the place with no monsters now?”
“Yes, baby. You bet we are.”
Caitlyn looked at Nadia, who sat half-turned around in the passenger seat, and offered her a tiny wave. Nadia returned it with one of her own, curling her fingers gently.
“She looks like you,” Nadia said to Jesse.
The car ate up the ground beneath and spit miles out behind it, putting distance between them and Thrall. What was left of the town-beast shriveled with a final shriek into the air and sank, by degrees, into the hard, unforgiving soil.
Thrall Page 29
