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For seventeen years, I’ve prosecuted that sixteen-year-old kid inside my own head as if he should have known better. Should have walked faster. Should have stayed closer. Should have seen a thirty-seven-year-old predator hiding in a neighborhood full of costumes and porch lights and parents taking pictures. As if sixteen-year-old me should have been able to predict a monster. Knowing that doesn’t help.

Because grief isn’t rational. Grief is just a big brother still standing on a sidewalk, spinning in circles, shouting his little brother’s name until his voice gives out.

I swing off the motorcycle. The property is even more ordinary up close. My jaw locks so hard my molars ache. There’s a fucking wind chime on the front porch. Was it the last thing my brother heard?

The farmhouse is small and old, gray siding worn, porch sagging at one corner. A weak security light spills over the gravel. Beyond it, bare trees whip in the wind, and fifty yards behind the house sits the detached metal workshop Jubilee found on the map.

No dungeon. No collapsing horror-movie shack. No fucking sign. Just somebody’s house. Of course it is. Monsters have mortgages too.

I have the insane urge to shout his name. Just once. Just to hear if anything answers.

I leave the motorcycle beyond the main drive where the trees give me cover and walk the rest of the way. The wind keeps moving around me, dry leaves scraping over gravel with a sound too much like footsteps. I realize I’m grinding my teeth, and I hear it inside my skull. I make myself stop. Thirty seconds later, I’m doing it again.

No vehicle in the driveway. Garage empty through the narrow windows. I circle the house once. Dark. The workshop isn’t. A faint strip of light leaks from beneath the side door.

My pulse slides into that cold, slow rhythm I only feel on hunts, but underneath it, bone-cold fury is thrashing. I reach beneath my coat and curl my fingers around the handle of the sickle. Not yet.

The door gives when I test it. Unlocked. Either Martin Heller feels very safe out here, or he thinks nobody has reason to look for anything in this building.

I step inside. The first smell is motor oil, then old wood, damp concrete, metal, dust. Shelves hold paint cans, tools, automotive parts. A workbench sits beneath two narrow windows. Pegboard. Ancient radio. Nothing.

I move deeper. The building stretches farther back than it looked from outside. Somebody added onto it at some point, another wall and a heavy interior door. That one is locked. My heartbeat begins pounding hard enough to hurt. I grip the sickle so hard, the leather wrap creaks. I make myself loosen them one at a time. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

Nine-year-old Grady overlays everything. Grady tearing across our yard with his inhaler shoved into one pocket. Grady laughing because Maisie was chasing him with a garden hose. Grady standing unnaturally still while a half-feral barn cat decided whether his fingers were trustworthy. Grady in the Batman costume he and Maisie spent a fucking month making.

Gage, wait up!

I close my eyes. Three. Eleven. Fifty-nine. Seven. Eighty-three. Again. Three. Eleven. Fifty-nine— Grady laughing. Seven— Gage! Wait up! Eighty-three. Fuck.

My phone vibrates against my thigh. For one insane second, hope hits me like a physical blow. As if seventeen years might have folded in on themselves. As if I’m sixteen again and Grady is calling because he got separated from us.

Until I see Jubilee’s name glowing across the screen. I stare at it until the vibration stops. She calls again. I decline it.

Not because I don’t want her here. Because I do. More than I have ever wanted another human being beside me. And that is exactly why she cannot be here for this.

I put the phone away and turn toward the locked door. It takes me less than a minute to find another way into the rear section. The second space is colder than the first. And I know. The hair on my arms rises, and every instinct I’ve honed over the years screams: this is the place.

A mattress sits against the far wall beneath a fresh gray blanket. Heater. Storage bins. Bottled water. Canned soup. Crackers.

Children’s clothes.

My stomach turns. Jeans. Sweatshirts. Socks still bundled in store packaging. Different sizes. My lungs close up. Somewhere in my head, a small boy is wheezing, and I can’t tell anymore whether it’s memory or imagination.

There are chains anchored into the concrete wall beside the mattress. For a few seconds, my mind simply refuses to process them. My vision tilts. I put a hand against the cold wall to stay upright—icy, but it burns. I think, He felt this wall.

“Grady?” The name leaves my mouth before I can stop it. Nothing answers. Of course nothing answers. He should be twenty-six. Instead, every version of my brother I own is nine.

I move to the table opposite the mattress. Photographs. Dozens. Bile hits the back of my throat. Children outside schools. Children in parks. Children riding bikes. Some with parents. Some alone. Mostly boys. Different years judging by the cars, clothes, quality of the images. Not trophies in the way mine are. Research. Selection.

My hands curl against the edge of the table. There’s a newer stack on top. Halloween costumes fill the most recent photographs. Masks. Superheroes. Kids carrying plastic pumpkins beneath porch lights. One boy can’t be older than eight. Another is maybe ten.

My vision goes red around the edges. He’s still doing it. Fifty-four fucking years old and he is still doing it. Costumes make children harder to identify. Crowds make adults stop noticing which child belongs to whom. Everybody expects strangers in the neighborhood.

Seventeen years ago, a nine-year-old boy in black disappeared between porch lights. Heller came back to the same fucking holiday.

An engine growls outside. I freeze. Headlights sweep across the workshop windows. He’s home.

I kill the light. Darkness swallows everything, including my shaking fist, still gripping the sickle. The vehicle rolls over gravel and slows to a stop. I move toward the main workshop, putting the wall between myself and the windows.