I gotta buy my own vehicle. If I can complete this job, I’ll be able to afford it… I just need a way to get there.
Stealing a car isn’t tough when you know what you’re doing. I know a truck stop down the road with parking that backs up to the woods, and the owner keeps his beat-up Chevy out there. No sight lines to it from the windows. It’s probably sitting there now. A thirty-minute walk, and I’ll be in that car, heading to Summerville.
I jump off the bed, pull my clothes on, and leave the beer on the nightstand. I make it out the side door without attracting Hindley’s attention, and I jog up the road. All I gotta do is steal the car, drive to the house, resurrect Wolcott quietly, grab the cash, and drop the car somewhere near the truck stop. I’ll wipe it down good to get rid of my prints, and the police will think someone just took it for a joy ride. Hell, it’s not a crime if I’m doing it to save a life.
This can work, and if it works, I can do it again. I didn’t just sell Wolcott resurrection. I sold him freedom from cancer. The whole package. He’ll come back from the dead good as new, ready for another few decades of life.
If there’s one prize people will sacrifice anything for, it’s life. More days, more hours, more minutes. I can offer themyears. Ican’t fix what ails living people, but as I’m bringing them back, I can restore them to perfect physical condition. That’s my angle for building my own client list—targeting not just anyone but the really desperate folks. The terminal patients who are right on the edge, looking into that abyss. The ones willing to believe that I can reach beyond death and drag their souls back for another chance at life. I feel guilty sometimes, looking for the folks with no other options, but they’re the only ones who won’t laugh at what I can do. I’m not hurting them—I’m saving them. Rescuing them from death. And in the meantime, I’m earning the money to rescue the woman I love.
Resurrecting Wolcott is going to take a lot of energy. I’m risking plenty here, hoping I’ll have the chance to recover before Hindley needs me to resurrect one ofhisclients. Fortunately for me, the resurrections he does are usually spaced pretty far apart. If he’d take on more people, we’d be a lot richer.
I’ve asked Hindley a few times if he wants me to try to drum up more business for our necromancy business, but he always refuses. “Can’t be too careful,” he says. “Stick to folks we know, folks we can trust to stay quiet and pay up. Friends of friends. No strangers. No risks.”
Ironic that he’s a gambler at heart, yet the area where he won’t take risks is the one that could actually make us some money. After all, he’s got me, which is an advantage. The Coosaw Lockwoods have all but quit the resurrection business, since it takes three of them to manage a decent pull, and they can’t heal the person afterward. Not much point in offering resurrection services if you’re just gonna plop the soul back into a ruined body.
I’ve always had the golden ticket to a better life. I just didn’t have the courage to use it until I met Catherine.
Witnessing someone’s agony for thirteen hours—it changesyou. I watched her suffer and sob, hobbling through the forest on bruised feet. I carried her in my arms—slender and fragile and stronger than I’ve ever been. Everything shifted, and she was the new sun, me in her orbit. She lit a fire in me and got me going on the plan I’ve always thought about but never had the courage to try until now.
There’s the truck stop ahead, through the trees. If I can pull this off, I’ll be back around nightfall, and I can sleep off the post-resurrection lag in my own bed.
13
Cathy
Dad gets home around four o’clock, just two hours before the usual Sunday evening prayer service. I’m sitting at the kitchen table, munching pistachios and scrolling through cottagecore Instagram posts, getting ideas for new displays at Aunt Nellie’s.
He heads straight for the coffee maker. Brewing coffee and snacking on pork rinds is his way of coping when he can’t be drunk.
“Do I have to go tonight?” I ask. “I got this weird email from Edgar, and it freaked me out. What exactly happened at church today?”
Dad’s huge, sloped shoulders stiffen under his suit coat, and instinctively I shrink a little in my chair.
He turns around slowly. He’s chewing his lip, his eyes churning with anger and…something else—something frighteningly close to panic. “You gotta be there tonight. They need to see that you’re one of us.”
“But I’m not.”
He slams a palm on the counter so violently that I jump. “Idiot girl. Can’t you see I’m trying to protect you? Theyknow, Cathy.Edgar knows. Mark Linton knows. By now the whole church probably knows what you are. Only reason they haven’t kicked us out yet is because they need me. There are so few of us left…”
The hollowness in his gaze terrifies me. “So few of the deacons? Did someone else die?”
He wipes a hand across his forehead. “Five more.”
My stomach drops. “Did you sayfive?”
“We went out to Old Sheldon Church last night, Cat, and we prayed, sang, dumped gallons of blessed water—even invited a couple priests from Saint Martha’s over in Yemassee. I guess the death toll is seven if you count them.”
The air around me feels very, very still, incredibly brittle. The hairs on my arms are standing straight up.
I didn’t sense any of those deaths. Which means there’s no doubt of it now—the god is awake enough to deliberately conceal them from me.
“What happened?” I whisper.
He grabs the bag of coffee from the basket, then sets it down as if it’s too heavy to manage. “Don’t know if I told you this, but the demon stirred once before, right about the time you were born.”
“You told me,” I whisper. “You said thick vines like tentacles pushed right out of the ground. Some of them came up right through the trees and made big holes in the trunks, and you and the other church leaders filled the holes with bricks of blessed clay. I’ve seen those bricked-up places, set right into the tree trunks.”
He nods. “We got it under control pretty quick. But I should have known then that something was wrong with you. That you were messed up, diseased. You came out blue and we thought you were gone, but then you screamed—I’ll never forget that scream. Just that once, though, and then you were fine. You didn’t cry muchas a baby. Real quiet. We thought you were just a contented kid. Didn’t know you were saving it up for later.”
