Blood or paint?

  The vision disappeared, and the woman flickered out of existence.

  I sucked in air, batting at the tent collapsed over my face. Somehow, I was on my back. The storm was over.

  She had come to show me the next step in my plan. I hadn’t considered I would need to build a structure for her, but now that she had revealed a vision within a vision, everything made more sense. Of course I would need a dedicated location for the spell.

  I needed to start preparing right away.

  I flailed, turning to my side, and patted around looking for the zipper for the exit. My stomach churned as I undid the tent doorway and pushed back the collapsed side like a hood before retching.

  Visits from her never came without a cost, but it was a price worth paying.

  The snow burned my hands, and I realized I was half in, half out of the tent, my palms pressed into the newly white earth.

  I leaned back on my heels and rubbed my hands together to warm them as I took in my surroundings. Most of the ground was buried under six inches or more of snow. That wouldn’t stop me though. The goddess had given me everything I needed.

  I just had to do the work.

  Before I began pawing through the snow, I found a pair of gloves in the jeep. As I tugged them on, my attention was drawn to the shallow ravine where I’d found the tunnel. The opening had collapsed but there must be another way inside. Another way to discover the source of the heat.

  Except it was probably just some strange natural phenomena I’d never heard of. It wasn’t like I often went spelunking around Thorn Tree.

  I set to work moving snow with my cupped hands to look for stones I could use for my altar. My stomach ached, raw and empty, but even water seemed like it would come right back up. I ignored the heaviness in my chest—it felt a bit like the urge to cry—and focused harder on finding stones.

  A few poked from the snow, and I unburied those first. They were wet and slippery, and I struggled to carry them to the narrow clearing in front of trees where I would build my altar.

  This was going to take a lot of stones.

  I squatted down and pawed at another patch of snow.

  Something snapped. I spun around with a half-formed gasp on my lips.

  Mac stumbled into the campsite. Blood crusted his lips and down his chin. Ropes dangled from one arm, and he nearly tripped on another bound to one ankle opposite a heavy bandage sliding off his other leg. He limped and cradled his arm against his chest. His eyes held a wild, dazed look.

  My heart sank. He’d gone up against Thorn Tree.

  “I tried to tell you,” I whispered, but the words held no weight.

  No one not from Thorn Tree could ever really understand until they experienced it for themselves.

  This town would do anything.

  I shifted aside snow, found a rock, and unburied it, pointedly keeping my gaze averted from the mess that was Mac. If I looked harder, I might understand exactly what had happened to him.

  My heart couldn’t take it.

  I hefted up the rock, fingers aching to hold onto the wet mass, and lugged it over to the small but growing stack of my finds.

  “I need you to look at this.”

  I startled at his words, nearly dropping the rock. When I finally allowed myself to look at him, he held out a folded piece of paper.

  “What’s that?” I asked without interest, lowering the rock to the stack.

  “It’s a map.”

  “A map?” I scanned across the ground for any hint of another rock just below the surface of snow. “Why do we need a map?”

  “It’s a way out of Thorn Tree.”

  That was why he’d gone? Why he’d subjected himself to this town the last few hours?

  For a map?

  “We already have a way out of Thorn Tree.”

  Once the spell was unleashed, I could only hope the Goddess intervened; she would.

  I stooped to brush snow from a lump, but a tree root poked through. I moved up a few feet and dug away at the snow.

  “There’s apparently a tunnel under the town, or something,” he said, sounding like he was struggling to understand his explanation himself. “I just…I can’t make sense of the map. It doesn’t align with anything.”

  “I possess no cartography skills you don’t, Mac,” I said, tightening my grip on my emotions. If I didn’t, I would pop.

  He’d risked his fuckin’ life to get a map we didn’t need.

  A map. Like I hadn’t lived my whole damn life in this town.

  I bit down on the words before they made their way out of my mouth and channeled that energy into unburying another rock.

  I needed so many rocks.

  “There’s some lines, but I can’t make sense of them,” he said, swaying on his feet.

  I ignored him as I placed another stone on the pile.

  “Will you just look at the goddamn map, Gracie.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  I kept my gaze on the snow on the ground. I needed to focus on my task. I couldn’t be derailed with the map. When I finally glanced up at him, the distress on his face, the exasperation bleeding from him, halted me in my spot.

  Whether we needed the map or not was irrelevant. He’d already paid for it.

  I came to his side to stare down at the unfolded paper in his hands. His arms shook and it wasn’t just the cold. He needed a doctor, maybe a hospital, but both of those were not options right now.

  With a finger on the map to still it, I studied the lines—except they didn’t make sense to me, either. None of them except one.

  I flicked the all-too-familiar X-shaped mark. “That’s the sign of the church.”

  I sauntered away to continue gathering stones.

  “The church?” He held up the map and traced it along the horizon slowly back and forth. “If that’s the church, then are the lines a tunnel under it? Does the church have a secret tunnel?”

  I had no idea. It made no difference.

  I didn’t tell him that though.

  “But what are these big squares? And the star? They don’t match up to anything.”

  Another stone into the stack.

  Finally, Mac lowered the map and he seemed to see me—and the campsite—for the first time since his return.

  “I’ll help you build a campfire,” he said as he folded the map.

  “It’s not a campfire.”

  He held the folded map in front of him with bloody fingers. Something about the skin of his left hand made my stomach hurt worse.

  Had they burned him?

  “I’m sorry,” I said, staring down at my pile of rocks.

  I wasn’t sure which of the many fates he had suffered—and would in the near future—I was apologizing for.

  He limped to me and caught my face with his burned hand, wincing, then tipped my face up to him. I stared at his hairline so I didn’t have to look him in the eyes.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said.

  It made no difference anymore if it was.

  His gaze lowered to the pile of rocks. “What are you doing?”

  “I need an altar for the spell,” I said.

  That was the truth, just not all of it.

  “I’ll help.”

  He touched a kiss to my forehead before making his way to the jeep. I watched him with a small frown. In a few hours, the town had decimated him from a strong, assured man to someone who had barely dragged himself home.

  I began stacking the stones into the first pillar. Mac joined me and without any direction, assisted with forming two nearly square posts.

  I continued gathering rocks. We worked in silence, fanning out farther on each trip, digging deeper but slower. Soon, we were rolling rocks instead of carrying them. My back ached, my arms were numb. My lungs hurt from the cold air. I could barely move my fingers.

  We ran out of stones to find under the snow around the camp, but I needed more.

  Mac stood at the edge of the ravine. I held back, not quite ready to confront whatever had been down there in the collapsed tunnel.

  “There’s plenty of rocks here,” he said. “I could pass them up to you.”

  I didn’t respond as he eased himself down into the shallow. As he knocked rocks loose, I sat on the edge and waited. He hefted them up to me, one by one, and I set them aside. When we had a sizable collection, he clamored back up as I clenched the front of his shirt and one arm to stabilize him. Together, we moved the rocks to join the others.

  “I feel for Sisyphus,” Mac said as we moved the rocks.

  I laid out the framework the size of a grown man—Bobby, in particular—and began filling the shape in with rocks. Mac, my ever-amazing companion, piled up the stones right behind me.

  “So what are these for?” he asked.

  “Those two,” I said, gesturing to the smaller structures, “are for candles.”

  “And this one?” He dropped another rock into place.

  My heart sank.

  “Just a worktable,” I said softly as we built the altar three rocks high.

  He leaned against one of the smaller structures, catching his breath. “That’s a big worktable.”

  The unspoken question was clear: couldn’t we make this easier on ourselves and create a smaller work area?

  “It is,” I said, noncommittal.

  I refused to stop piling rocks, because if I did, I wouldn’t have the energy to pick back up on this. I was pretty sure several of my fingernails inside the glove were chipped down into the pink. My back locked with each bend, and I could barely stand upright again.

  Mac hobbled over to me and reached for another rock. I caught his wrist, staring down at his marred hand.

  “I’ve got this,” I said. “Just go rest.”

  “Not until it’s done.” He ran his good hand over the back of my hair. “I told you, Gracie. I’m in for the long haul.”

  Boy, was he ever.

  The rope still tethered to one of his arms hurt my heart. I stalked over to the jeep, fumbled around until I found a knife, then stormed back over to him. He looked up as I caught the rope and sliced it with ease.

  I’d used this knife on his brother’s restraints several times in the last week.

  He muttered my name in a half-formed protest as I stooped and cut the rope around his ankle free too. When I stood, he caught my head with both hands and pulled me in for a deep, claiming kiss.

  I couldn’t close my eyes as he melted into me.

  When he pulled back, he pressed his forehead to mine, meeting my gaze. “What’s this workbench for?”

  He didn’t believe me, yet he didn’t know why.

  I pressed my lips to his. My kiss was deep and angry.

  “Fuck me,” I said against his mouth.

  He stalled, his hands on my sides.

  “Anything you want. This is your chance to do anything whatsoever.”

  “I have everything I want,” he said and kissed the tip of my nose.

  I leaned back just enough to look him in the eyes. “I want it, Malachi. Give me everything.”

  The tent would take too long to repair. I put down the back seat of the jeep and knocked the few items from the cargo area to the ground. Together, we crawled inside before closing the door to seal out the cold air.

  I lost myself to him, wrapping my hand and lips around his hard shaft, his hand in my hair, as we worked together and as one. Then he took me from behind, pulling at my hair, claiming me until I was his and no one else’s ever before or again. Every motion was surreal, detached from the world in the way I had hoped. It was just him and me. I came around him hard, and we sank together into the floor of the cargo area.

  I rested with my head on his bare shoulder, my naked body along his side, skin to skin. Our body heat filled the interior of the jeep as wind danced new snowflakes through the air.

  I gingerly touched the wrist of his burned hand. “Did they do this?”

  “Not precisely, but close enough.” He shook off my touch and eased me back as he lifted up to one elbow. “You never told me you’d been pregnant.”

  Pain like an ice pick stabbed straight into my heart. I sucked in a shuddering breath, pushing back from him.

  “That was rough, I’m sorry.” He stilled me with a hand to my side and kissed my shoulder. “I love you, Gracie. I just don’t understand. What happened?”

  An emotion grayer than the world outside draped over me. The spike of panic subdued with the assurance that I could separate the two stories—the one he now knew, and the one that would unravel everything.

  “I was pregnant,” I began, “before…before I was accused of lying.”

  He stroked my arm with his good palm. “Then what happened?”

  I grimaced. Couldn’t he read between the lines just this once?

  Maybe it was best he didn’t. He might read the ending of how this would all play out too.

  “I was pregnant when they left me in the field, after they…”

  He let out a long slow breath. “Jesus Christ.”

  “He doesn’t exist. Not in Thorn Tree,” I whispered.

  Mac pulled me close to him in a hug, but I didn’t cry. I didn’t even relax into his hold. It was all so long ago and now I existed for one reason.

  To destroy this abomination of a town.

  “I buried them in the woods,” I said, as if that would conclude the tale.

  I hoped it would, for him.

  He stiffened, and I eased out of his hold to look him in the face. He looked unwell, and not just from the night he had spent in hell.

  “I found the grave,” he said as if it were a confession.

  I wasn’t sure how to process that detail, so I decided to put that aside with everything else I gave up feeling all these years.

  I turned away from him, staring out the back window into the endless forest of snow. “I’m going to kill them all.”

  He pressed his good hand to my arm, my shoulder, my cheek, as if he couldn’t decide where to touch me.

  “I’ll help you,” he said.

  Did he not yet realize that the death toll would include the miserable human being he called his brother?

  “We need to finish the altar,” I said. “I need red paint.”

  He scowled a little. “For what?”

  “The festivity,” I said, deadpan. “I have some paint back at my house in the shed. If it didn’t blow away in the storm.”

  He grabbed our clothes from the pile against the side of the cargo area.

  “Are you going to be okay, Mac? Your hand looks pretty bad.”

  “It matches my ankle,” he said with a grin that was a bit too psychotic for his face.

  I crawled forward, ass naked, and peeled back the bandage that was barely hanging to his ankle. The skin was marred and puffy with a bruise.

  He leaned forward and finished removing the bandage. “It’s fine now. Better than it looks, anyway. Just hurts if I’m on it too long.”

  “Let’s wrap up your hand,” I said.

  He slipped on his shirt before tugging on his boxers. “Then my hand won’t fit in a glove, and right now, I would rather a pair of gloves.”

  I crawled past him and stretched across the front seat to pluck a pair off the floorboard. “I think these were yours at one point.”

  “Oh, thank fuck.” He snatched them from me and eased them on—hissing as he pulled the left one over his burned hand—before he finished dressing.

  I sat with my clothes in my lap, watching him. The fact he was so ready to do the right thing, at least what he assumed to be, spoke to his character. Bobby had been correct; Mac wasn’t like him at all.

  Unfortunately, only Bobby and I knew that. Mac wouldn’t figure it out until it was too late.

  I dressed and followed Mac back out into the snow only long enough for us to circle around and climb into the front of the jeep. Mac placed his gloved hand on my thigh, using his knuckles to prop his burned palm off my leg. I smiled at him before I shifted into drive and headed towards my house.

  I hoped the goddess would take paint for the trees. The red runes hadn’t been distinctly blood, and I didn’t have any feeling she had meant to use anything particular. The color and the shape were most important.

  Something caught my attention. I parked the car, tipping my head to listen more closely. Mac started to speak, but I put my finger to my lips to silence him. Carefully, we stepped out of the idling jeep and crept forward.

  Glass shattered, followed by a whoop.

  I crouched behind a tree, and Mac took one across from me.

  At my house, a group of people from town stood holding flaming torches and metal rods. Mr. Taylor even wielded a goddamn ax.

  Sarah swung a bat and took out my living room window. She tipped her head back to the darkened sky and howled as the people around her cheered. Blow after blow followed, windows shattering, door splintering, siding cracking. Mr. Taylor stuck his ax through the living room wall, yanked it free, and swung at it again and again.

  Antonia shrieked with glee as she raised her torch against the wind and touched the flames to the drooping eaves. The fire flickered and then caught. Despite the dampness, the flames along the eaves spread back towards the roof. With a maniacally laugh, Billy twisted at the loose railing on my porch until it tore free then he chucked it through my bedroom window.

  The flames continued to spread.

  I shuddered, hunched into myself, staring unblinking as my house was demolished.

  It was symbolic, the way they beat at it, tore at it, lit it up. This was their anger, their indignation at the life I had destroyed for them. The truth they did not want that I had forced down their throats.

  Mac wrapped his arms around me. I wasn’t sure when he had approached me, or when I had started crying. I leaned into his shoulder, sobbing.

  He made soft shushing sounds as he rubbed between my shoulder blades.

  “We can’t let them hear us,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I need the paint,” I said between sobs, like it was the most important thing in the world.

  It was. I would never get out of this town alive if I didn’t finish my tasks. If I didn’t paint the trees and cast the spell and spill Bobby Bruno’s blood.

  I couldn’t stop now, never could. I had to finish what I had started.

 

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