My heart cracks in half.
I holster my gun slowly, always on me, ever since Paradise Falls became a battlefield, and crouch so I don’t spook her.
“Hey,” I say softly.“You’re okay now.You’re safe.”
She flinches at the word safe, like it’s foreign.Like it’s a lie.
Her chin trembles.Her dark hair is matted with dirt and blood.She looks like she hasn’t slept in days.
“No one’s safe,” she whispers.
A chill washes over me.
Not from the night.
From the certainty in her voice.
She doesn’t mean the Reverend, not directly.Her eyes are too wild, too haunted.I’ve felt the same presence brushing the back of my neck lately, like a storm building where there’s no sky, like something watching through the cornrows along the county road.
I shrug off my jacket and wrap it around her small shoulders.“What’s your name, sweetheart?”
A long pause.Then, barely audible.
“Cider.”
“Alright, Cider.You’re doing real good.But I need you to tell me who’s coming.”
The wind rattles the metal siding of the dollar store.Cider’s shoulders hunch like the shadows have teeth.
“The winged man,” she whispers.“With red eyes.He screams without a mouth.”
My stomach drops clean out of my body.
The drawings in Becki’s notebook.
Legend’s sleepless nights.
It’s not coincidence anymore.
“Did he hurt you?”I ask, voice barely steady.
She shakes her head.Then nods.“Not him.Not yet.But the others.They wore masks.Animal masks.Leather ones.They said we were unclean and the Leaper only comes for the unclean.Said they were making us pure.”
Bile rises hot in my throat.
Crowley.
His sermons.
His obsession with purity.
His followers who don’t blink unless he tells them to.
“Did you escape from Pearly Gates?”I ask tightly.
Cider nods, chin wobbling.“During evening prayer.They think we’re too scared to run.”Her voice hardens.“But I watched.I waited.I found the back door key in the pulpit drawer and I ran.”
Brave girl.
