So I told the truth.
“Cheeseburgers. And fries. Thick, salty fries.”
Izzy smiled. “You got it. Dad?”
“I was thinking ice cream.”
Chapter 40
Arthur
The smell of burgers filled the cab of the truck as we drove up the mountain, the outside world passing in a peripheral blur of deep pine green. Izzy cranked up the radio and wound down the windows as we drove, content to let conversation slough away. She swayed with the music and belted out the lyrics she knew, and some others she clearly didn’t.
I couldn’t help but smile.
When we passed through Audrey’s single, blinking stoplight, my eyes snagged on the old white chapel. I leaned forward. “Iz?” I asked softly.
“Yeah?”
“Can we stop here?”
She eyed me curiously as she pulled off to the side of the road just in front of the battered church. I pressed my eyes shut and gathered a breath. Only days ago, I would have sworn that I never wanted to see this building again. I’d thought there was nothing I wanted to remember tucked behind its walls.
Before I could second-guess the tug pulling me forward, I unbuckled my seat belt and slipped out. The chapel had felt biggerto me when I was seventeen. Now it just felt quiet, not at all the beast it had become in memory, but wounded in the way of old abandoned places.
I quickened my step. If I could just see the pews, the rafters, the place where everything had changed… if I could just see it, maybe the shadow of this place would stop looming over me.
I pushed inside, surprised to find the door unlocked. Izzy followed a few steps behind. Her presence was lightweight, a comfort I didn’t realize I’d needed. She didn’t ask questions or watch me too closely, instead turning her eyes up in curiosity.
“There’s a nest up there,” she said, squinting.
“Sure is.” I didn’t have to check to know the species. Even if the last time I looked up into these rafters hadn’t been burned into my memory, their familiar call would have sent a chill along my skin. “Starlings.”
The stark emptiness within struck me as odd, though really, what had I expected to find? A wilderness of moss-covered wallpaper, with lichen riming the pulpit and flowers spilling across the pews? Time and someone’s obvious attention had worked here as it had on me, clearing out a mass of detritus and leaving it once again fresh and clean. The walls of the chapel had been scrubbed, the floors swept and weeds pulled out of the cracks. It was strangely cold, pale as bone, and eerily sterile.
A dead place.
“It took a while to clean out the garden she made,” Izzy mused, drawing a fingertip over a layer of dust on the back of a bench.
I looked at her. “You cleaned it up?”
She gave me a strange look. “Who else?”
I didn’t think the question was intended as a barb, but it did hold weight.
“Can I ask you something?” Izzy said. I nodded. “Whydidyou come back to us? I know, I know, you wanted to bring your mom’s ashes here,” she said, waving the reason away before I could give it, as though it wasn’t enough. As though she knew there was something more.
I’d thought I’d come to appease the monster and regain some control of my mind. But now? “I… don’t know.”
Izzy cocked her head. “I think you do.”
I thought of the monster’s gnawing hunger that had pushed me into the woods time and time again, looking for something neither one of us had ever been able to find. I thought of the way it had pushed me out of my own head, taking lives to keep me going, deer and bird and badger. So many flowers. So many trees. I wasn’t a hunter, but I felt like one all the same, with the taste of hides and hearts locked under my tongue.
I hadn’t wanted to lose myself. That’s why I’d come back, or at least it was part of it. Death was an endless slope, and I was so tired of climbing that hill. I just wanted peace again. I wanted—
“To live,” I said. The confession felt like a weight, handed over. I was almost dizzy from it. “I wanted to live again.”
Izzy nodded, a smile crimping the sides of her mouth. “Do you know how scion cuts work, Fairy?”
