Page 58
“The staff.”
“The men on the payroll?” I said. I thought of the bartender’s thumbs moving over his phone. “They have a name, don’t they?”
“Keepers,” he said. “It’s what I was told I was born to be. The last time I said no to something, one of them came to my workshop and told me a story about someone else who tried to say no. Now and then I still wake up from nightmares about that story, because I know it’s true. I know it happened, and they’d do it to me, too. And they don’t just come after you. They come after everyone you care about.”
“Your own mother would allow them to do that?”
“When I was ten, they gave me a dog.” His voice caught, then steadied. “I raised him for a year. I trained him. He slept on my bed. I loved him more than I’d ever loved anything, because he was the only thing that had ever shown me unconditional love. On my eleventh birthday, they handed me a knife and told me that nothing they gave me was really mine, and that they could call it back at any time. And the worst part is that I completed the initiation. I did it, and I don’t think I’ve ever been the same since.” His grip shifted on the steering wheel. “I miss him every day.”
I looked away for a moment. A lump the size of a plum stone filled my throat. I couldn’t look at him and see that ten-year-old boy inside, still grieving, because the feeling it gave me felt like drowning. Like my ribs weren’t large enough to hold it.
“They’re fucking monsters.”
“But they don’t see it that way,” he said, too calmly. “My mother wouldn’t just allow the Keepers to hurt me. She’d schedule it. She’d think of it as finishing my education. That’s what they called it when they did it to her.”
“So why aren’t you like them?”
“It’s like I always knew I didn’t belong with them. I used to watch other kids and be so envious of what they had: a normal life that wasn’t controlled by rituals and secrets. Kids with mothers who hugged them after school. Kids who didn’t have to kill their pets.”
“This is so—”
“I’m sorry. I promised I wouldn’t burden you with it. It’s dark. Really dark.”
His eyes flickered to the black mass of redwoods beyond the window.
“You don’t have to apologize. We all have scars.”
“Some of them never fade.”
The redwoods thinned, and power lines appeared. The fog had almost disappeared, and the moon was a crescent of hammered pewter, blinking behind a loose patchwork of clouds.
“Your dad. Is he in the coven?”
“No.” He let a few seconds go by. “There are no fathers in this system.”
He said it like it was a complete sentence, so I let it be one.
By the time he pulled up outside my house, I knew three things for sure: Damian had survived thirty-three years of a life I’d only brushed the edge of for four days; I wasn’t sure I was the same woman who had walked into that campsite last weekend; and despite everything, I ranked this date the highest of any.
He parked and opened the door for me, then walked me to my front porch.
“Thank you, Marlowe,” he said.
“For what?”
“For listening. For not getting out of the car at the first red light after I told you just how bad things are.”
“I’m way more annoyed that my underwear is still wet.”
He smiled. “I’ll make that up to you. I promise.”
I wanted him to make it up to me now, inside my apartment. But after everything he’d told me, I now understood what was at stake. That we couldn’t unspool together so fast that we forgot about what we had to fight.
“Goodnight,” he said, then kissed me under the glow of the porchlight.
Chapter Seventeen
Ihad told myself I was going to take a long bath, soak off the ocean’s salty fingerprints, and go to bed.
