voices now, calling out. It was a horror show. Why was the world so full of darkness?
Lara, Tess and Hank, all destroyed in different ways by Kreskey, who was destroyed by his own parents. And who knew what his own parents had suffered?
She wanted, truly wanted, to kill this woman on the ground in front of her—though she wasn’t even sure who she was, what she had to do with the children. The woman moved to get up, and Rain lifted the hammer again, moved in quickly.
“Don’t move,” she warned.
She didn’t even recognize the sound of her own voice.
How many evil people were there in the world? How could they ever find them all?
“Lara.” No one had called her that in years. “Don’t.”
She felt him before she saw him standing behind her. The heat of his body; she knew it. She turned to find that Hank had come to his feet. The other man lay bleeding on the ground, groaning. Hank, too, was bleeding from the mouth, holding his shoulder.
His eyes—they were haunted, exhausted.
The woman on the ground crawled away, still weeping. Rain watched her go—revulsion, anger, fear doing battle in her center. The hammer was still clutched in her hand. Who were these people? How had they all wound up here?
“It’s done,” Hank said, reaching out a hand.
He took the weapon from her and pulled her close. She sank into him, her old friend, and held on tight.
FORTY-THREE
“It’s over.” His voice was just a rasp. They could have been back there on the floor of Kreskey’s house, his corpse bleeding out beside them.
It’s over. She wasn’t sure what he meant.
Would it ever be over? For them? For those children? But then the trees came alive, figures moving out from the black space between the thick trunks.
The field came alive with light and sound, with voices shouting. Hank pulled her to her knees, put his hands behind his own head and Rain did the same. There was an unreality to the scene as Agent Brower came to stand before them, gun drawn.
Hank looked up at her, over at Rain.
“We’re not going anywhere,” he said. “Just go take care of the kids. There are kids—who need help.”
The young agent regarded them both, her gaze stern, bemused. But she holstered her weapon, snapping the clasp closed, then marched past them with a shake of her head.
“What’s going to happen here?” Rain asked, dropping her hands, sinking down onto her heels. How was she going to explain this to her husband?
“Honestly, I have no idea.”
The night was long, endless. It seemed to stretch and pull.
Three children—a boy and two girls—were retrieved from that cellar.
She watched them carried out of the hole on stretchers. Alive. All of them alive—weak with malnourishment and dehydration, in various states of injury, with long, twisting roads ahead of them. But alive.
Just like her and Hank so many years ago—but not Tess. They were all too late for her.
The spotlights all around them, the towering trees, the stars. It could be a dream, one of those nightmares that take pieces from your life and make them strange, recognizable but only distantly. If she woke up in her bed, next to her husband, she wouldn’t be surprised. Rain closed her eyes and wished she would, that this would be like so many of her terrible dreams that faded in the light of the life she’d built.
But no. This was real.
Cool metal beneath her, some strange beeping, the crackle and hiss of a police scanner. Rain and Hank sat on the back of an ambulance, shoulder to shoulder. They’d been treated for their various cuts and bruises by a team of young and efficient EMT workers.
“What are you doing here?” Hank asked when they were alone.
It was the way it always was with old friends. Years had passed, but the energy between them was the same. They knew each other, were familiar in the way of family—they’d seen all the layers of each other, even those they’d managed to hide from others. Time and circumstance had never turned them into strangers. Enemies at one point. Antagonists. But not strangers.
“I followed you,” she said simply.
He shook his head, mystified. “Why?”
“I have no idea,” she answered honestly. “I was on my way to your house. I had questions, things I needed to talk about. But when I got there you were leaving. I followed.”
“Where’s your family?”
“Home,” she said. “Sleeping, I hope.”
“Well,” he said awkwardly. He released a breath and looked off into the