That hadn’t been what happened. Time seemed to warp, stretching around him like sunlight refracted through a glass. His fingers thinned, spindling like bone. Threads of white shot through his hair, his cheeks going sunken, until he’d looked like a living, laughing skeleton, hands still held in open supplication before the dark.
He’d reminded Thomas of his own father then—flayed lean by guilt, frantically muttering Mary’s Canticle at vespers:from this day on, all generations will call me blessed. Now Christian Price groveled in the grass, his hands upright in his lap. His mouth moved over and over in a single, muttered phrase. It was the only thing he’d said in hours.
“I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. Did you see it?”
“Walsh.”
He glanced up. Reed stood alongside Adrian Faber, both of them looking as exhausted as he felt.
“There’s a detective here. He wants us to go down to the station for questioning.”
Thomas thought about this. Philip’s mantra rang in his head:Keep it in the family.The Farrow family was dashed to pieces. There wasn’t anything left of it to keep.
“What are you going to do?”
Reed shrugged. “Go, I guess. I don’t care—I’ll tell them everything.”
“Think they’ll believe you?”
In the yard, Christian Price began to yell as a weary-looking officer tugged him onto his feet. “I’ve seen it! I’m telling you, I’veseen it!”
Reed grimaced. “Maybe,” he said. “But probably not.”
He didn’t bother asking if Thomas was okay. They both knew he wasn’t.
“Walsh,” he began, and then clamped his mouth shut. He scowled down at him. Beneath his eyes, the bruises had begun to yellow. He sighed thinly and tried again: “She made her choice. You couldn’t have stopped her.”
And that was that. It was all the goodbye he got. It was, he supposed, probably more of a goodbye than he deserved. Thomas watched them head for Reed’s Jeep, feeling nothing. When they were gone, he fell back to looking out at the water.
He was so lost in its depths, he hardly noticed when a car pulled up and Colton Price stepped out.
They met eyes over the sleek silver roof. Colton gave him a single curt nod, and Thomas felt an impossible squeeze of hope. The back passenger door clicked slowly open, catching in the light.
Out slid Vivienne Farrow, still dressed in his T-shirt.
He hopped from the back of the ambulance, not caring that he was lumbering—lurching, really—the pain in his side searing in protest. He ran, and so did Vivienne. They met in the sandy middle of the street, her arms flinging around his neck, him bracketing her middle, until she was lifted entirely off the ground, her limber dancer’s legs hanging against his.
He didn’t know how long it was before he finally lowered her back down. A minute. An hour. He stared down into her face, breathing hard. She smiled up at him. Her eyes were bright, burnished gold in the light. It stole the breath from his lungs.
Say it back, she signed, a mirror of what he’d said to her that night in his bedroom.I’ll help. “I love you, V-i-v-i-e-n-n-e.”
“I do love you,” he said solemnly. “Since day one.”
And he meant it.
Vivienne woke, quite absurdly, to the crowing of a rooster. Her very first thought was that she must have been dreaming. Her second thought was that she hadn’t the slightest idea where she was. She stared up at the ceiling of an unfamiliar room, tucked inside an unfamiliar bed. Wrapped in the lingering haze of sleep, it took her several seconds to remember.
She was in her brother’s house.
It hadn’t quite sunk in yet.
She had abrother. The word felt foreign, after so many years of thinking herself alone.
Outside the room, the rooster crowed a second time. She didn’t have the energy to go and investigate. A faint but febrile ache pulsed in her joints. She suspected it was the end result of being swallowed up by an eldritch horror and then dragged through gaps in the sky. The whole of it felt like a fever dream. The bent bowers of bone. The ever-shifting features of the Not-Thomas. The stunted shape of her lifelong haunt hovering alongside her.
She shut her eyes and pictured its face. After all these years, it hadn’t been what she’d expected. She’d envisioned something slippery and strange. A parasite, with wide alien eyes and a predator’s smile.
Instead, she’d been faced with an angry little girl with honey-colored eyes.
