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  “Enoch, let go,” Yancy barked.

  “No! He’ll take Mom! He’ll take her!”

  “Shut him up,” Carstairs shouted. “Shut him up!”

  Mason made it to our knot of people and swayed on Julian’s feet. Then, he just dropped. His entire body folded down, and he was a heap on the ground. I didn’t have time to consider what was coming because it was so fast. Julian went down, and Deborah surged up with a wet, horrible scream. She grabbed her father by the ears and dragged his face down in some parody of a horror movie, Carstairs thrashing away from her as Yancy shouted out in fear, pulling a screaming, crying Enoch back towards the bunkhouse.

  “No! Mom, stop! Stop!” Enoch broke free and ran hard at Deborah and his grandfather, tackling them both. He wrapped his arms around her and rolled back, trying to pull her away from Carstairs, who sat in stunned, bleeding shock at the sight of his dead daughter fighting her son. Julian groaned and it spurred me into motion.

  “Julian, move, move, move,” I begged. “Get out of the way!”

  “Help her,” Enoch shrieked. “Mr. Fellowes, please! He’s using her all up! Help!”

  Fuck. I waded into the fray, now with Yancy trying to pull Enoch away even as Enoch clung tight to his mother. “Mason Albright, you’ve caused enough harm,” I said, voice shaking slightly. I found Deborah in the tangle of limbs and grabbed onto the back of her neck and opened myself up, reaching for Mason Albright. He was twisted up inside whatever made Deborah, Deborah who was really more dead than not. She’d been slowly peeled away until all that was left was closer to dead than alive. I closed my eyes and shoved at my walls, pushing out the barriers I’d learned early on to keep in place, to filter out chatty dead. I could practically feel Grandmere’s irritation and disappointment as the last of those walls pulled down and I could fully grasp Mason Albright’s ghost, twisted and tangled in Deborah Carstairs’ energy. “There you are,” I panted, my headache reaching incredible proportions as his presence hit me—unfiltered and raw.

  “I thought maybe it’d be a bit poetic to use the last of her energy up, killin’ him.” Mason slipped free of Deborah and moved up, floating just a bit above her as I pulled back. “Things get kinda dull, waiting for justice when you’re dead. Deborah’s not gonna have to wait long to find out, is she?” he laughed. “She ain’t got but a sip or two left. Folks like her, like you, like your friend Ezra, y’all are like bright fires in the dark. Folks like me…” He grinned. “I’d call myself a regular Prometheus, but I don’t like how his story ended.” He tapped his temple, giving me a wink. “That fella of yours, he’s got himself a trove of stories kickin’ around in his skull. Regular library in there.”

  “Punished by the gods for hubris sounds fairly accurate in this case,” I panted. Mason chuckled, then quick as a thought, was gone and Julian was moving again. “Shit!” I was on Julian before he could rise to his knees. “I’m sorry,” I breathed. “I don’t know if this hurts or not, but I’m so, so sorry!”

  Mason fought me hard, but Julian was stronger than I thought. Mason was struggling to hide but it wasn’t working. He pushed against me, trying to pull away from my reach as I let my ability stretch. I heard Julian gasp, and Mason Albright was in my face, snarling and shouting. “You will not stop me,” he screamed. “I’ve waited too long for this! Do you know what it’s like to have your life stolen from you, to have to suffer for decades and watch your killers piss away your legacy? I don’t want your blood on my hands, but I’ll take it!”

  “No!”

  Deborah’s ripping, wet cry brought silence across the yard. “No!” she rasped again, and she was struggling forward, cadaverous and horrifying but something alive in her eyes as she reached up and flung her arms wide. I don’t think anyone else could see what I saw, the bright flare of marigold-bright light that spread out from her as she grasped at Mason Albright, her body arching backwards as he disappeared into her.

  “Mom,” Enoch and Yancy both shouted, rushing forward. Deborah fell and rolled weakly onto her back. “Mom,” Yancy was crying, sobbing over her. “Mom, no, no, Mom,” he chanted, patting at her face, grabbing her hands,

  Enoch shook his head. “No, no! Help her! Help her!” he screamed, voice raw and nearly the rasp I’d heard in my head for the past few days. “Help me,” he whispered. “Oh god…”

  Deborah was shaking. She managed to focus on her boys and her lips twitched into maybe a smile. “L… Lo…”

  Then she was quiet. Gone.

  I felt the shift in the energy, felt her leave, and Mason Albright was gone with her.

  Wherever she had gone, whatever she had done, she’d taken him too.

  “No,” Enoch moaned, rocking back and forth. “No, no, no…”

  “Deborah,” Carstairs whispered, finally speaking for the first time in several long minutes. “Deborah, I didn’t know, Deborah…”

  “Are you Oscar Fellowes?”

  “Fucking Hell, this place is undead grand central,” I groaned, canting my head up to see a middle-aged man, wearing fairly modern clothes and looking infuriated. “I am.”

  “Fucking finally. I’m Dewayne Hicks. This asshole,” he jabbed a finger at David Carstairs, “fucking hanged me in my own goddamn house!”

  I turned my head to look at Carstairs. “You’re the one who killed Hicks,” I said. “You?”

  Carstairs was too shocked, too shaken, to argue. “I had to. He was gonna ruin everything. He’d found evidence about what our families had done. Not just rumors, real honest to God proof. And he was gonna sell it to some macabre collector. He’d run his family farm into the ground and wanted the money. He… he taunted me about it. Seemed excited by the idea of a scandal.” Carstairs shook his head, staring at Deborah’s twisted, desiccated remains. “We’re barely hanging on to this place by the skin of our teeth. Rumors would’ve ruined us.”

  “Not old ones like that,” I whispered. “Mr. Carstairs…”

  “I couldn’t let him tell a soul. The… the letters… I destroyed them afterwards.”

  “Mom saw him,” Enoch growled. “She saw his body. And Mason Albright saw her. He wanted her light, her strength, and he took it!” Enoch flew at Carstairs, beating him with his fists, kicking him and howling in rage. No one moved to stop him.

  I edged to Julian and felt his pulse. It was slow but strong, and he was breathing. Bloody, beaten, traumatized to Hell and back, but alive. The crunch of gravel again made me look up and it was a large silver SUV rolling up the drive slowly, like whoever was driving was uncertain if they were at the right place. I knew when we’d been spotted, though, because the passenger door flew open and CeCe shot out, not caring about her red bottomed shoes and her designer outfit as she flew across the grass and dirt, shouting her brother’s name. I sobbed once, quietly, and laid my head on his chest.

  Finally. Finally.

  Chapter 15

  Julian

  I didn’t remember much of the ranch. Or much of anything else until we were on the road. It was like coming out of deep water. First, I could parse a change in light, then sounds went from dull whispers to muffled speech to louder than I thought necessary. By the time Harrison did a pretty nifty slide-turn into the hospital parking lot, I was conscious and considering how mad CeCe would be if I ruined the nice Christian Siriano jacket she had on.

  I guess I’d find out because that handbrake turn did nothing good for my nausea. “Oh my god, Julian! Ew!”

  My sorry, Cec was lost in the upholstery as I pressed my face against the back of the seat, trying to stop everything from spinning around me.

  The police flew past us as we headed into town to the hospital. The desk nurse quirked her brow at us as Harrison, Oscar, and CeCe manhandled me into the lobby, where Ezra was jittering nervously. “Aren’t you supposed to be in room twenty?” the nurse asked Ezra.

  “Um. Yes? But I heard the chatter that ‘some English guy got himself beat up at the Carstairs place’ and I knew…” he looked at Oscar, then did
a double take back to me. “Holy shit!”

  Cec snorted. “Get him back in there then.”

  “We’ll even get you an escort,” the nurse said. She hit a button by her computer to page orderlies to the lobby. Ezra was whisked away, Oscar in tow, to get more scans done. The official story seemed to be he had a seizure and hit his head. CeCe, Oscar, and I pretended not to notice when Harrison tried to follow before stopping himself and sitting down hard in one of the waiting room chairs.

  I was taken back to an exam pod and then admitted to a room for observation and a thorough cleaning of my leg wounds, then scans for my head injury which was declared a ‘nasty bump but looks like you’ll survive.’ Harrison reported back that Oscar was given a once-over and declared fine, not even a scrape on him despite the 911 call about ‘some English dude getting his ass beat.’

  That must’ve been wistful thinking on Carstairs’ part, I thought, probably calling the cops as soon as he’d seen Oscar with Enoch and not knowing what was about to happen.

  When CeCe was finally allowed back to see me, she caught me up on everyone’s situation. “Ezra’s back in his room,” she said without preamble. “Harrison whipped out the legalese to smooth things over, but I’m pretty sure it only worked because everyone is too damn tired to give a shit right now. Oscar’s glued to his side. No signs of brain injury, but his electrolytes are off and he’s sleeping like the dead. No pun intended.”

  I nodded. “Occupational hazard, accidental puns about death.”

  “So.” She settled into the guest chair and offered me a sip of her iced coffee.

  “Where’d you get that in this town at this time of night?”

  “I know people. And Harrison offered to pop over to Reefter. They’ve got a Buc-ee’s so he picked me up a coffee and got some fresh clothes. Don’t you love my truck stop fashion?” she asked, holding out one arm. For the first time I realized she wasn’t in her dirty clothes but a pair of stiff, unflattering jeans and a red t-shirt with the truck stop’s beaver logo on it. Fucking Buc-ees. It wouldn’t be rural Texas without one every hundred or so miles. “Tres chic, non?”

  “I must be tired not to have noticed that when you walked in.”

  “It’s the coffee,” she confided. “It mesmerized you.” She held out the massive cup and let me take a long sip, not even making a face about brother cooties when I hand it back, half-drunk. “So,” she began again, “what the fuck was all that?”

  For a long, quiet moment, answers tumbled around in my thoughts ranging from snarky to flat out maniacal laughter. Finally, I aimed for blunt honesty. “I’m still figuring it out,” I admitted.

  “Better think fast because you’re gonna get questioned in a bit. Harrison tried to put them off, but the local authorities want to put out the fires before they get going. Carstairs apparently told the officers who showed up he’d killed Dewayne Hicks around the time Deborah ran off and now all hell’s broken loose. They had to call in the state troopers because Budding isn’t equipped to handle this. Apparently, they average one murder per year, usually after someone’s been drinking and feels hard done by.” She let out a low whistle before taking a sip of her iced coffee. “I wish y’all had filmed this,” she sighed. “This would’ve been a fucking epic episode.”

  “Cecily,” I said, horrified. “Seriously?”

  “Sorry. I know. Shitty thing to say. Let’s pretend I didn’t do that, and I’ll just have to live with the fact I turned into my ex-husband for a minute.” She worked the straw in her coffee and finally fixed me with a familiar, loving glare. “You scared me, asshole.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “When I saw you laying there… Julian, you looked dead,” she admitted with a hitch in her voice. “I thought for sure…” The pause stretched into an uncomfortably long silence before CeCe sighed again. “You’re not allowed to die before me. FIFO. First in, first out, remember? I’m the older twin so I get to die first and haunt you, then make your afterlife miserable because you ignored all the messages I left you in the intervening years during which the world mourned the loss of the good twin.”

  “Just FYI, if I wasn’t feeling like hammered dog shit right now, I’d noogie you.”

  “You haven’t noogied in me ten years,” she laughed wetly.

  “Don’t talk about dying first and I won’t have to start up again.” I laid my hand atop hers where it rest on my hospital bed and noticed, for the first time, her fingers were bare. “Your rings?”

  “Ah. Well. Jacob had given them to me, not just my wedding set. Couldn’t stand the idea of keeping them so I sold them and donated the money to the Annie Fund.” She fidgeted, not quite meeting my eyes. “Hey, look, a shiny subject change! What do you think happened to Deborah, to make her do this? Do you think maybe she could’ve been helped? Was she being held prisoner or something?”

  I shook my head. “I know what Carstairs believed, but…”

  “Yeah, that’d be impossible,” CeCe murmured. “Ghosts, sure, but revenants?” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s ridiculous.”.”

  I snorted. “Well, there’s something called Cotard’s Delusion that could possibly explain some of it. People with it believe they’re actually dead even while they’re alive and can end up starving to death or dying by accident because they believe it’s already happened, and they can’t be harmed.”

  “Fucking hell!”

  “It’s not really common and there are therapists who can work with patients afflicted but…” I spread my hands. “It’s impossible to know now. Deborah Carstairs is dead, and it’s a sad thing. Whatever reason they decide is behind her disappearance and all of this, it won’t bring her back. It won’t make things easier for Enoch or Yancy.”

  We were both quiet for a long time then. I was feeling faintly buzzed from the pain killer they’d given me earlier, and a little woozy from the antibiotics, but I didn’t want to close my eyes just yet. “I hate hospitals,” I said to break the soporific quiet but mostly because it was just one of those things you’re supposed to say in a hospital. This coffee is awful. I hate hospitals. How’ve you been?

  “Well, if we’re lucky, we’re out of here day after tomorrow. You up for the drive to Denver still?”

  I knew she wasn’t offering to cancel the filming or let me out of it—the contracts wouldn’t allow for it. But I was glad she’d asked. And if I’d said no, she would have helped figure out something, some sort of buffer, to make it easier on me.

  At least, I think. I hope. “I’m up for it if Oscar is.”

  She sighed again. “Y’all need to get your heads out of your asses, by the bye. You’re both so gaga about one another but too proud to meet in the middle.”

  “It was his abominable pride and my abominable prejudice,” I misquoted. She rolled her eyes and held out her coffee to me. This time, she didn’t ask for it back.

  The painkillers were better than I thought, I decided as a sudden wave of intense sleepiness washed over me. CeCe had left me after about an hour, declaring she was too young to sleep in a plastic chair and ruin her back. When I pointed out we were the same age and it wasn’t as young as all that, she threatened to turn the television to infomercials and crank the volume to eleven before leaving with the remote. We very maturely flipped one another off (she started it!) and she kissed my forehead, made me promise not to die, and said she’d be back in the morning, dropping my phone on my chest as she left. I tried to text Oscar a few times, but he didn’t reply. It stung a bit, but I reminded myself he was literally just a few doors down with his best friend and quasi-brother, not ignoring me for funsies. Still clutching my phone, I drifted off into a hazy half-sleep where I could hear the soft beep of my monitors and even the murmur of voices outside my room, but it was all folded into the thick, flannel-warm sensation of a good doze.

  “Julian Fitzgibbon Weems,” a familiar, long-gone voice chided. “I can’t believe you.”

  “Grandma Dennings,” I said, opening my eyes to se
e her much-loved face at the end of my bed.

  Well, the rest of her too. It was just her face I noticed first.

  Hospital grade drugs are better than I give them credit for.

  “I told you, that Grandma Dennings crap is all your mother putting on airs. I like it better when you call me Nana.”

  I chuckled. It had appalled Mom that we called her mother nana and, in her words, clambered all over her like monkeys on ketamine and for God’s sake that’s cashmere, Julian! Stop chewing on her pashmina! “Hi, Nana,” I said dutifully. “Long time no see.”

  “For you, maybe. I’ve been keeping an eye on you and your sister. Julian, you need to let her know I was right about Jacob. Tell her I was right, and she should’ve listened when I gave the message to that nice British boy you’re seeing. By the bye, you should thank me for setting you up with him. If it weren’t for me, he’d never have been on your radar!” She hopped up on the foot of the bed, her tiny legs kicking idly as she regarded me with a tiny smirk. “You don’t look like you believe me.”