Salem's Revenge Complete Boxed Set (96 page)

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. I won’t run. Just let go of me.”

She gasps when she releases me, collapsing in a heap. I want to go to her, to comfort her, but instead I’m as still as stone. Helpless. It’s the worst feeling in the world to see someone you love in pain and not be able to take it away for them. Worse still when you’re the reason for their pain.

Her body is shaking as she looks up from tearstained cheeks. “I had to say goodbye. I couldn’t just leave.”

Something in me breaks. It’s too much; I might’ve faced down pure evil and come out on top, but losing Laney is a completely other beast. “No,” I say. “You don’t have to go. I’ll go. My dad and Rain and I will go. You stay. It’s safe here for now.”

She shakes her head, her nostrils flaring as a pang of invisible agony washes over her. “It’s better that I go,” she says. “Bil and Huckle said they’d travel with me for a while. Chloe too.”

This is impossible. “Laney, I—”

“I know, Rhett,” she says. “I love you, too.” And then her lips are mashed against mine and though tremors wrack her strong body, I let the kiss linger for longer than I should, relishing the waves of warmth I feel in my bones. When she pulls away it’s as if my soul has been ripped from my chest. And when she leaves the tent, it’s as if the sun has been swallowed by the moon.

~~~

Laney is long gone, but thankfully I have the worst kind of work to take my mind off of her.

Burying the dead is a task of monumental proportions simply because of how many there are and how few of us there are. Everyone pitches in, except for the injured and the Claires who are caring for them. The witch hunters, still led by Floss—who I’m beginning to think is un-killable—seem to work twice as hard as everyone else. Regardless, the work is painfully slow. I don’t know if there’s any magic that could make the work faster, but no one suggests it—we have to bear this burden the old-fashioned way, with our backs and arms and legs. There aren’t enough shovels, so some people use their hands. Even Hex gets involved, shoveling the dirt between his legs into piles that Grogg immediately packs onto his body in exceptionally creative ways. When it’s time to cover the bodies, Grogg covers them with himself.

No one speaks. There are no tears. There is no laughter. Only breathing—in and out, in and out—and the occasional grunt and groan. The pain will come later, as will the tears.

We even bury our enemies, their majestic animal forms sometimes requiring dozens of us to roll them into the massive holes.

We don’t finish the first day. Nor the second. Our task becomes a shared mission, one in which we will finish if it takes a hundred years. From dawn until dusk we toil together, magic-born and humans alike. Although it’s probably more a product of exhaustion than anything else, there’s no animosity between us, not even a tattered shred. We share peace while we seek to give the same peace to those who died for us.

When we finally finish, there are tears and wails and hugs. We don’t know why we’re the ones chosen to live, only that we must go on for those who cannot.

Mr. Jackson and I stand next to Xave’s grave, which we’ve identified with a reddish-brown rock marked with an X.

“Why don’t you Reanimate them?” I ask, a question that’s been gnawing at me from the moment I noticed Mr. Jackson helping us with the burials.

“It’s not what Xave would’ve wanted,” he says, “and Necros, by our very nature, respect the dead as much as the living.”

Six months ago, I wouldn’t have understood what he means, but now I do. Still… “Are you sure it’s not because the war is over?” I ask.

He looks at me sharply. “Over? The war is never over,” he says.

My heart seems to sink to my toes. What next?

Seeming to read my expression, he says, “I don’t know if there will be another foe as powerful as the Shifters and their allies, but as long as there are humans and magic-born living on this planet, there will always be evil.”

“Then there’s no hope?” I say, not because
I
think it, but because the Reaper seems to.

“Quite the opposite,” Mr. Jackson says, offering a thin smile. “Because where there are humans and magic-born, there will also always be good.”

He squeezes my shoulder and walks away, leaving me to stare at my friend’s grave alone.

~~~

Hex

Although it’s been a few days since the Big Battle, Hex can still smell and taste and feel the death. Some of it was caused by others, but a lot of it was caused by him. Even though the old smells and tastes and feels are interesting, they’re more bad-interesting than good-interesting, and he wishes they would go away. Hex doesn’t like the feeling he gets inside when he thinks about that day, even if he knows he only did what he had to do to protect his friends, who are really his family.

So most of the time he only thinks of the Here and the Now and the beauty of the Two-Leggers and the even greater beauty of Grogg. These things make his tail go so crazy that he feels convinced he won’t be able to do anything else until he catches it.

Hex helps wherever he can, mostly following his favorite Two-Legger around and sometimes doing what he asks—like moving things with his mind (boulders or trees or rubble) or making things beautiful again (resurrecting dead flowers, fixing destroyed streets and buildings). But sometimes he pretends not to hear Rhett, as if he’s distracted by a butterfly or rodent. Hex doesn’t want Rhett to think he’s his master. Oh no, neither he nor Grogg will ever have a master again, nor do they need one.

And when Hex needs a break, he and Grogg go to the only place where only they can go and no one else without getting sick: the Other Here. The Here that’s always in the corner of your eye but that you can never see. Well, unless you’re Hex, of course, which no one else is. Sometimes when he’s there, he thinks about why he is the way he is, a question which he’s pretty sure doesn’t have an answer. But most of the time, he and Grogg just play and roll in the mud and run circles around each other, and yes…

They live.

~~~

Rhett

Cameron Hardy is holding his daughter flush against his chest as he approaches me. I’ve seen him around, participating in the burials like everyone else, but have made no attempt to speak to him, nor him to me. His clothes are singed, bloody and tattered, although his daughter’s black dress is relatively clean. With a start, I realize it’s the same combination of button-down shirt and slacks he was wearing when he led the humans out of New Washington.

For some reason, he reminds me of a drunk driver who once came to speak at my school. The guy had killed a woman and her daughter when he fell asleep at the wheel and jumped the curb, careening across a parking median before crashing into their car. They’d just gotten inside after shopping for new clothes before the teenage girl left for college. The drunk survived, which he considered to be the worst punishment of all, his own personal hell.

The expression on Cameron’s face is the same as the drunk driver’s.
Shredded
. That’s the only way I can describe it.

I shouldn’t feel sorry for him, but I do. His wife was too young to die. All those who died were. And I know what it’s like to have the love of your life ripped away from you by forces seemingly out of your control.

His lip quivers as he tries to speak, his words overcome by emotion before they can exit his lips. He tries again and again while I wait patiently. Finally, he says, “She’s so young,” and I know he means his daughter.

I don’t know what to say to this man. I try to stare past him, but my eyes keep returning to his. He looks lost, like he could wander for years and years and never find a familiar place. I want to be angry, to scathe him with the kind of clever words Laney would be proud of, which this man probably deserves, but I can’t. Maybe it’s because his daughter is sleeping in his arms. Maybe it’s because he just lost his wife. Or maybe it’s because I just don’t have that in me anymore, if I ever did before.

“At one point I had to make a choice,” he says, biting on his lips and his words, chewing them to bits, fighting for control. “Who to protect. There were so many enemies around us. So many. I know what my wife wanted. She told me with her eyes. So I grabbed her”—he motions to his daughter—“and ran as hard as I could, somehow getting away. I hid her in the woods and went back for my wife, but it was too…” He finally loses his composure and sobs into his daughter’s hair.

“Your wife is safe now,” I say. “None can hurt her where she’s gone.” Even I don’t know what I’m trying to do. To comfort him? To comfort myself over my own losses?

His eyes glistening, he looks up. “This was my fault. All my fault. I don’t deserve to live. She deserves a better father.”

In some ways he’s probably right. But not in all ways. “What she deserves is a father who loves her,” I say.

“I
do
love her,” he says.

“Then she deserves you, and you her. And anyway, the Shifters and their allies would’ve come either way. They were already coming. We were always going to have to fight.”

He tries to speak but I wave off his rebuttal with a quick swipe of my hand, because I already know what he’s going to say. We could’ve been more prepared. We could’ve fought on our own turf. We might’ve had fewer losses. All of that is true, and maybe he’d be right. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since this all began, it’s that, “Regret will claw you apart from the inside out. We can be
more
than the sum of our regrets. We can learn from our mistakes and be better. We can go forward even when the path appears unpassable. Do it for your girl. And then do it for yourself.”

~~~

The truth is, I’ve been avoiding my dad. He’s tried to speak to me three or four times, but I always make up an excuse about having some urgent business to attend to. I don’t want to be angry, but every time I see him I think of how Laney and I are apart because of him. I know that’s not fair, but I can’t help it. I’m afraid to ask him the only question whose answer might bring me peace.

However, today when my father parts ways with Rain after their daily walk, I approach him. I can’t help but notice the way his shoulders slump as he watches his daughter walk away.

“Dad?” I say, and he turns toward me. To my surprise, there are tears glistening in his eyes. “Are you okay?”

He nods, but I know there are pages and pages of words behind his simple expression. “Your sister is hurt,” he says.

“What happened?” I ask, thinking he means she’s injured.

“In here,” he clarifies, tapping his chest.

“Oh.”

“She’s got a lot of hate in her still. Most of it is aimed at herself. We’re trying to work through things, but it’s going to take time.”

I’m confused. “None of this was her fault,” I say. “She was being controlled. Once she was freed, she helped us.”

“That’s not entirely true,” he says, and I frown. “She
was
being controlled by Flora’s wizard, but she was the one who originally joined the Shifters, offering her Resistor abilities to help them.”

“I—I don’t understand.”

My dad says, “Walk with me,” and I’m surprised at how normal it feels to fall into step beside him. Now I understand why Rain insists on these daily walks. It’s almost like we’re staying just out of reach of all of our problems while talking about them at the same time.

“Rain thought the world was against her. And Flora was full of clever words about making the world a better place and getting rid of all the evil. This was before Flora Shifted into a panther, mind you.”

I didn’t know any of this. I’ve talked to Rain a few times, but our conversations have always been light and superficial, as if we’re both too afraid to dive into the depths of our souls with each other.

“If Rain was already willing to help her, then why did Flora have to control her at all?” I ask.

A light mist streams from the sky, and my father stops, tilting his head skyward, letting the cool moisture coat his skin. When his eyes return to mine, he says, “At first Flora was like a mother to her—a mother she never had. But slowly Rain began to see the madness in Flora’s eyes, particularly after she Shifted. Rain witnessed Flora committing atrocities, and eventually decided she couldn’t be a part of the Shifter’s plans anymore. She tried to escape, but Flora caught her. That’s all she remembers. The wizard must’ve cast his spell and you know the rest.”

“She tried to do the right thing. She tried to get away,” I say.

“I think she’s slowly coming to terms with that,” my dad says. “But that’s not the only thing that’s troubling her.”

He begins to walk again, and I follow, waiting patiently for him to continue, content to avoid the question I have yet to ask him.

“She’s hated me for a long time,” he continues. “She still blames me for abandoning you and her and never trying to reconnect to explain myself.”

“I get that,” I say. “It’s taken me a while to be okay with that.”

“But you never hated me for it?” he says.

“No. Not for that,” I say, suddenly dangerously close to the conversation I’ve been avoiding for days.