Page 108 of Devil

I’m gracious enough to concede that this is mostly my own doing. Not just with the NDAs but with the entire idea of a deal to begin with. But how else was I supposed to seduce my pretty martyr without allowing her to think she was martyring herself for it?

She needs to know that. If she doesn’t want anything to do with me still, then I’ll… Actually, I don’t know what I’ll do. Living without Birdie hasn’t been an option for me since the moment I saw her. But that’s a problem for future Ryan, because right now, I just want her to know: I’ve always wanted her. I will always want her.

Meant to last?It was never meant to be anything else.

She still has the phone I gave her, and I see she’s at the farm. I give the roiling sky a peeved look before climbing into my truck and driving west to that creek-bound fist of land outside Tonganoxie, the place the locals call Stranger.

The farther west I go, the more irritated I am by the storm. The wind is nasty enough that it rocks the truck as I drive, and by the time I pull into the farm’s turnoff, there’s a fresh burst of rain, and it’s got something to prove, judging from how hard it hits the ground.

Birdie’s truck is here too, so there’s nowhere else she could be, but when I go into the barn, I don’t find her, and when I go into the unlocked farmhouse, she’s not there, not even in the dank cellar only big enough for two people and some wooden shelves that presumably used to hold jars and cans.

I check my phone for her location and see that I have no signal, absolutely none.

When I emerge back into the storm, the rain has changed to a small, streaking hail, fine and sleet-like. I hop in the truck, shake the ice out of my hair, and punch the button to start it. The truck jolts down the sloped gravel drive to the place Birdie calls the hill house. I park and jog through the hail to knock on the door.

The door swings open like something in a horror movie, and I see that the jamb is now so warped with moisture that the door was never latched to begin with.

Behind me, the hail abruptly switches from sleet into something that seems intentionally bent on destruction, the kind of thing you’d send to destroy a town where men demand the flesh of angels.

I’m not my oldest brother, I’m not a little princeling about what I drive, but I let out a resigned sigh as the hail clangs against the roof and the hood of my truck. I can already see the dents forming, and it just keeps streaking down, bumpy and knobbed and ready to brain anyone standing outside.

“Birdie?” I call over the threshold. There’s no response, apart from the hail outside, which sounds like a rain of pebbles, like plinking buckshot. But she has to be here, because she wasn’t in the farmhouse or the barn, and where else would she be? In this weather?

I turn on my phone flashlight and step inside, struggling to see. Even without a storm, I think it would be murky as fuck in here, a bunker more than a home, despite the game attempt at domesticity outside with the seventies-era siding and vinyl shutters.

Birdie told me about how the house had flooded, but seeing it now…it’s little better than a shell. Carpets were pulled up at some point and never replaced with anything, so the floors are unpolished concrete—raw subfloor—and the Sheetrock has been cut away from all but the top three feet of the walls, the insulation pulled out too. It’s all studs and wires and pipes, and when I shine the flashlight down the hallway, I can see back to the farthest wall of the house. It should make the house feel less oppressive, the walls being mostly gone, but it doesn’t. It only highlights how un-homey it is, how clammy and damp, how closed-in. Birdie makes her childhood sound sweet and mostly untroubled, so I imagine her father did his best to make this misbegotten pit into something like a home. But I still can’t really picture it, the twins giggling their way down the hall, sitting at the kitchen table and kicking their feet as they ate cereal. Not in this place. Not in these walls.

It makes me sad to think of that Birdie in high school, anxious and bashful and grieving. With a sister thrashing against the world and a mom slipping away from it. Aiden had to run away to a monastery to figure himself out, but there were people there who knew what to do and had the capability to do it. Birdie didn’t have a monastery; she didn’t have anyone to help. At sixteen, she’d been dropped into a situation that even Aiden struggled to handle in his thirties with infinite money and infinite choices for care. She’d been alone in a way that went deeper than who slept under the same roof, laden with responsibilities no teenager should even know about, much less bear, and she’d been handed a squalor of miseries at the end of it, with never a moment to rest.

I guess I can’t be surprised that she doesn’t know how to trust a good thing.

I do one more sweep with my flashlight to make sure I didn’t miss Birdie somehow, give the house a final professionally offended glare, and head back to the door. The hail has stopped now, but I think I almost preferred it to what I find waiting for me outside.

An absence of birds and wind, a heavy hush to the world, all of it charged and expectant. An ancient part of my mind understands what I’m hearing and smelling; it wants me to take shelter, get away from this eager, electric air.

But I can’t. I need to find Birdie, and it’s gone from a need to plead my case to making sure that she’s okay, that she’s not out in this fucking mess.

At some point, they started the sirens, and the rotating whine comes from everywhere, inescapable, a sound that should be ordinary after hearing it my entire life, every month and then for every terrible storm that made it far enough into the city to matter.

But it’s not ordinary right now. It’s uncanny. The horns of angels just before the sky breaks open.

I stride up the hill house’s driveway as quickly as I can, thinking I’ll try the farmhouse again and maybe the barn. The driveway is long enough that the wind changes by the time I reach the place where it joins the driveway to the farmhouse. It’s back and it’s a pissed-off, bullying kind of wind, irregular and spiteful.

That’s when I see her.

Frail looking and captivating in a white T-shirt that’s fluttering around her frame, red hair dancing, her eyes big and fixed on the sky. Loose grass and torn leaves flurry in the air around her, a parade’s worth of it, the green work of summer turned into a strange snow.

There is nothing more beautiful than heris the first thing I think.

The second thing I think is,Is that a trash bag?

You don’t normally see those twenty feet up in the air.

I turn and look to where Birdie is looking. A skinny, bending spool of silver stretches from the sky, lovely and graceful, a dancer alone on the stage. Even the dark splash of dirt at its base is beautiful in a way—expensive dirt, a dirt that I know will be reported to insurance later. It was fertilized, sown, sprayed, and watched over, and as the funnel dips and sways and then finds itself again, kicking up sideways sprays of near-black soil, I can see green mixed in, soybeans and alfalfa. Maybe some sunflowers and corn.

It takes only a moment—but it feels like an eternity—for the tornado to decide something.

It unbends itself, it goes vertical and thick and straight as an organ pipe. It’s fully begotten now, this son of the storm.