“The Sanctum of Ash rises from its grave,” Marek intones, shuffling his tarot cards with practiced ease. “The dead children speak through us.”
Sometimes the way he talks gives me chills. Tonight, it gives me satisfaction.
“I've been thinking about that,” I say, minimizing the laptop screen and focusing on my brothers. “About what we say to him. How we make him understand.”
“We don't say anything,” Elias replies, stopping his pacing to look directly at me. “We show him. The way he showed us what power looked like when we were kids.”
“Oh, I like this energy,” Cole purrs. “Very Old Testament. Very eye-for-an-eye.”
“He took our mothers,” I continue, the words coming faster now as the plan crystallizes. “Mine and Marek's. Yours and Elias's childhoods. All of our innocence. What does a man like that fear most?”
“Exposure,” Jonah says immediately. “His reputation getting destroyed.”
“Close.” I lean back in my chair. “He fears irrelevance. Being forgotten. That's why he needs the foundation, the social standing, the young wife. He needs to matter.”
“So we make him disappear,” Logan says, understanding lighting his eyes. “Not killing—something worse. We make him nobody.”
“We erase Malachi Voss,” Elias agrees, and there's something in his voice I haven't heard before. Something hungry and patient and absolutely ruthless. “By the time we're done, he'll beg us to put him out of his misery.”
Cole's knife stills in his hand for the first time all evening.
“Boys,” he says with genuine admiration, “I think this might be our masterpiece.”
The trailer falls quiet except for the distant sounds of the carnival being erected outside—rides assembled, trailers positioned, the eternal rhythm of our nomadic life. But tomorrow night, we perform for an audience. And three nights after that...
“Confession is mercy,” I murmur, already imagining the blue spray paint on white colonial siding.
“Resistance is punishment,” the others respond in unison.
My father is about to learn both.
1
TEDDY
The only motel in Bellmour, Missouri, has water pressure like a leaky garden hose and a coffee maker that smells faintly of mildew. I've stayed in worse. I've stayed in better. After eighteen months of bouncing between field offices and motels that charge by the hour, I've stopped having opinions about beds.
The window faces east. That's all I needed.
From the second-floor balcony, past the dumpster and the cracked asphalt of the parking lot, I can see the Ferris wheel turning above the tree line, the red, gold, and blue lights. The carnival sits in the fairground on the edge of town, and at night, the whole thing looks like a fever dream.
The Seven Sins Carnival. Cute name.
I drop into the desk chair and flip open my laptop. The contents of the case file have been sitting in the same arrangement on the spare bed for three days now—printouts fanned across the comforter, a yellow legal pad I've filled and re-filled with the same names, the same dates, the same dead ends. Six adult men, six small towns, six disappearances spaced over years. Different states. Different jurisdictions. Different sheriffs who all sound the same on the phone.
Nobody noticed because nobody was supposed to. Or they weren't allowed to.
John Fields in Iowa—widowed, lived alone, ran a feed supply business with a quiet IRS problem. Last job was selling food to a carnival menagerie. Gone four days before his sister called it in.
Abel Hawthorne in Indiana—retired pastor. Pastor. That one made me sit up. Two prior allegations sealed because the diocese paid. Carnival had been in his town the week he vanished.
Three more like that. A Missouri rancher with a domestic charge that never stuck. An Ohio judge whose name showed up in a custody scandal nobody ran. A Kentucky businessman with two daughters who'd both filed restraining orders by twenty.
Then number six. Logged last month. Ezekiel Moore. Same shit as the rest of them. Respectable church-going community member. His wife, Mary, reported him missing days after a carnival left town.
I've thought of nothing but the Sanctum of Ash for over three years.
Two years where Quantico finished the polish on a man the military and the Secret Service already shined to a high gloss. Then a year and a half of chasing my tail. Governor Langford pulled every string he had to put me on the cult, and I have repaid the favor with a stack of dead ends tall enough to lean on.
