“And Dad?”
“We’ll deal with him, Castro and me. His time is almost at hand.” Her voice comes to me as if through a tunnel.
“When?”
“Don’t you worry about that. I want you focused on the future of this place.” She smooths her clammy palms down my cheeks. “You, son, are the future.”
“We’re cutting it close.” Castro taps his watch.
“We must go.” She hugs me tight. “But remember what I’ve said. Your time is almost here. I love you, Adam.”
“Now, ma’am.” Castro tugs at her elbow.
She pats my cheek one more time and lets him lead her away to the car.
“It’s the future, Adam. It can be our future.” Grace moves close. “We can start over. I want to give you another child, to show you that we can have everything we ever wanted. I made a mistake with… Well, before. But this time I’ll do better. This time, with a new little girl, we can be—”
“If you don’t get out of my sight, I will drag you to the creek and do everything I’ve promised you. Understand?”
She cringes and backs away. “You’ll see, Adam. I can be what you want. I’ll show you.”
Grace turns and scampers to the car, shooting me a glance before dropping into the passenger seat. After a few moments, they’re gone. The night is still again, not even the air stirring—and it’s as if they were never here at all.
Some leaves crunch to my left, and Noah appears from the shadowy woods, his steps rushed. “What the fuck, man? What. The. Fuck?” His eyes are wide.
“I don’t know, but please tell me you have a cigarette.”
He pulls one out of his pocket, his fingers shaking. When he drops it, he kneels to retrieve it and finally gets it lit.
“Did you hear all of it?” I take it from his grasp and draw the burn into my lungs. My old habit is becoming new again.
“That you’re the new Prophet and they’re going to kill Dad? Yeah, I heard.” His voice trembles. Maybe from cold. More likely from shock.
“Mom killed that girl. The one who went missing.”
“Georgia, though she was Mary when she was mine.” He pauses for a moment, and something like regret crosses his face. “I just assumed Dad—”
“I did, too. The markings on her couldn’t have come from anywhere else.”
“Yeah.” He wrinkles his forehead with thought. “But he did have us out searching for her.”
“He claimed she must have run away and was hiding somewhere on the compound.” I dredge up the memories from that time, how angry Dad was when we couldn’t find her, and how he went nuclear when an outsider found her body and made a stink. “After she was found, I figured he’d been acting and that he’d killed her all along.”
“Right.” He takes the cigarette from me. “Or at least I thought that was right. But Mom must have gotten the book. Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe she came up with her own symbols. She said she’s been talking—”
“To the devil. Yeah, I heard.” I rub my eyes. So fucked—everything is utterly beyond fucked. “She could have come to us. For years now, we could have taken her and gone.” Too many emotions crowd through me, but there’s a little extra room for rage. Always has been. “This whole time, she’s been sitting back and watching what’s happening all because she wants to be the one to run this place with me as her puppet.”
“She’s still our mom.” He puts a hand on my shoulder.
I shrug him off. “Just like the Prophet is still our dad?”
He frowns at the ground. “It’s all so messed up.”
“No shit.” I take the last pull from the cigarette, then toss the butt.
“What do we do?”
I’m out of options. “We carry on with the plan.”
“But Mom doesn’t want to leave. How can we bring her?”
“I don’t know, but we can’t leave her here, especially if she wants to keep this place going. We have to take her with us one way or another.” A pounding headache sets up shop behind my temples.
“What if she won’t come?”
“Then we make her come by whatever means necessary.”
“Adam.” He grips my upper arm. “We can’t hurt her. She’s our mom.”
“She killed an innocent girl after torturing her, Noah. Your Maiden.”
He winces.
I keep going, “She thinks she talks to the devil. She’s joined forces with that piece of shit, Castro. If she gets her wish, this place will be as bad or worse than it was under Dad.” I point through the trees toward the east. “Did you hear what she had to say about the innocent children at the Cathedral?”
“She didn’t say she would—”
“There’s no coming back from where she is, Noah.” I rub my forehead. “Have you learned nothing from Dad? When he started all this, there was no way to stop him. Remember?”