Ryan looked at the egg, at the creatures, at Ethan. “What in the fuck?”
“Fernanda,” Kyla said. “Where is she?”
Ryan’s face fell.
With a grunt of pain, he rose to his feet. There was something wrong with his shoulder. In the moonlight, Ethan saw the black leather of his jacket was wet.
Ryan was bleeding, badly.
“Something happened, didn’t it?” Ethan said.
Ryan let out a slow breath. “Follow me.”
The Guardians stepped out of their way as Ethan and Kyla followed Ryan down the porch. He led them to the covered walkway, where two corpses waited for them. Fernanda was slumped against the wall near the supply room’s door, a long streak of blood and hair spread along the wall above her. She had fallen forward enough for Ethan to see the hilt of a knife sticking from her back.
Fernanda’s eyes were wide with sadness. Fear.
Stanley Holiday was across the porch from her, sprawled on his back through room 3’s open side door. Two red craters had opened in the man’s chest. Fernanda’s gun was in his hand.
“I’m sorry,” Ryan said to Kyla. Nodding to Fernanda and the wound to his own shoulder, he said, “Stanley got loose somehow. He got the jump on us.”
Ethan said, “Thomas, probably. It sounds like he blew up the kitchen and the generator while he was at it. Tabitha was right—he’s scared of changinganything.”
“It may not have been entirely his idea,” Ryan said. “I swear, for a second when I turned around, it wasn’t like I saw Stanley standing here, but that other guy. The weird fucker who showed up at midnight.”
“Jack Allen,” Kyla said. She took a deep breath, and Ethan couldhear the tears in it. She crouched down near Fernanda, shut the woman’s eyes. “I thought I could save her tonight.”
“There’s always tomorrow, yeah?” Ryan said.
“Hopefully. Unless Thomas is right, and we’ve already ruined the ceremony.”
Behind them, the mountain moaned and shook the earth. Ryan shivered. “In that case, there won’t be a tomorrow for anybody, right? Sort of consoling.”
Kyla stood, shaking her head. She looked at Stanley’s corpse, bent down to take the gun from his hand. “I still don’t get it. I don’t get why Jack Allen is so set on killing all of us. He said last night that we were standing in his way. But standing in the way ofwhat?”
Ryan said, “He’s just fucking crazy. He got stuck here back in the fifties, right? That’ll break anyone. I saw it all the time in Huntsville: keep a man trapped for long enough and they’ll lose themselves in a hurry.”
“It feels more complicated than that,” Ethan said. He saw another flash of a memory,
feels himself on the floor of the old house. Hears Jack Allen say,
“I will be granted audience once more.”
Ethan rubbed his head. The memory was gone, but he knew what it meant. “Kyla’s right. Jack Allen’s got some kind of agenda. He’s getting something by killing all of us. He might even be strengthening the thing in the mountain, just like Tabitha thought.”
The mountain moaned again, the sound almost trampling them.
Kyla said, “I don’t want to know what a man like Jack Allen could do with a thing likethat.”
“And somehow, Sarah’s death is the key to all of it.”
“If we don’t figure out a way to expose that film, I don’t think we’ll ever know what happened to her,” Kyla said. “And if we don’t figurethatout, we might be stuck here—”
Ryan gave her his best sly smile. It was almost impressive, considering how much pain he was clearly in. He nodded to the supply room. “I really need to talk to you about the film you found hidden in here last night.”
A greatpopand crash echoed from the cafe behind them. Atongue of flame lapped through its shattered window. Ethan said, “Let’s talk about it somewhere else.”
The fire was growing: they could hear it spreading through the cafe, a hot roar. As Ethan led them to the end of the porch, he studied the motel’s roof, the wooden railings of the porch. He thought of the shop in Ellersby, the sun climbing over the highway, the smoke in his rearview mirror as his whole life went up in flames. He thought of the resolve he’d felt. The certainty that he was about to start his life over.
