Headlights(122)

I close my eyes and send out a signal.

Please.

Static, silence.

My phone buzzes. It’s been almost three weeks since everything happened. The first week, when I was in the hospital, my phone was blowing up nonstop. Inundated with hundreds of requests for comment. The media frenzy unbelievable. I’ve made it clear I don’t want to talk to any of them. Finally they’re starting to slow down. Theo Wharton / Father Sky will be taken into custody once he’s out of critical care.

The Witchwalker never stopped searching for me. Sometimes it was drawn by Theo Wharton’s light. Not as bright as Hannah’s and mine, but still there. Sometimes it went to him at the jail. Sometimes it visited children whose lights shined a little, because kids always shine, a little, I think. But it wasn’t satisfied. It wanted Hannah and me. We were the two it had chosen.

The knife has been lab tested, and we can’t identify the material it’s made of. As far as we can tell, it is made of nothing known to us on earth. I don’t know how the Witchwalker moved it, how it took my hair from the motel room, how it moves anything through physical space here. Unless it was by possessing a person and having them carry it. I don’t know if it ever possessed Hannah, or me. My best guess is that when Hannah found the knife on her bed, the Witchwalker maybe thought Theo Wharton was a threat to Hannah. That maybe Wharton was back near her cabin, so the Witchwalker gave Hannah the knife for protection. I don’t know why it wouldn’t just kill Father Sky. I don’t know so much.

But then I think of Hannah, what she might say. Interspecies communication can be difficult. It’s hard to understand the wants of other animals. Besides survival, we never quite get it. This thing that thinks differently than us, the Witchwalker, that somehow, for some insane reason, decided to spend its life protecting Hannah and me, in the strange ways that it could. I don’t get a lot of its motivations. And maybe I won’t.

I don’t know if it’s coming back.

Josie and Jack had enough evidence pulled together to take Oliver Wright down for embezzlement, tax evasion, fraud. And with Wright’s involvement with the prosecution of the Drifters over the years as well as his land’s ties to the crimes, he might go down with Father Sky for the rest of it all. The timelines match up exactly, between when Wright was building and the Witchwalker was killing. When Wright stopped construction, and when the murders paused. It was right there, in front of us.

I talked to a bookkeeper, figured out my financials. Marianne and Noel left me significantly more than I realized. I put a lot of it into a fund for Jack’s family, and for the families of the victims and killers in the case. I should have done it sooner, hate myself for not thinking of it. For not realizing I can use this money for good, just like my parents did.

And with a lot of the rest, I’m buying almost every property Oliver Wright was about to develop. His investors are grateful for the buyout offers, given the crimes he’s about to go down for, and I’ve been put in contact with someone at the city to discuss plans for making the lands public, putting protections in place so there will be no more building, at least where I can help it.

I close my eyes. Reach again.

Where are you? Please.

Silence.

I brace myself, and I limp over to the storage room beside the gym. In the corner, the box of all my parents’ papers, photos, sentimental and valuable items. Whatever they deemed appropriate for the Whileago Manor trunk. And for the first time since they died, since their executor handed it over to me, I kneel down—slowly, painfully—and open it.

It takes a long time, carrying the items up the stairs, to the main floor, then the second. To the end of the hall and into the room with the trunk. Piece by piece, book by book. I tried to pick the whole thing up, but with only one arm and a bum leg on that side to support it, I couldn’t do it. It hurts, in every way. But it feels fitting that it should take so long. That I should sweat and push and strain to carry these items that were two people’s lives. Two of the people who meant the most to me.

Within an hour or so, I’ve got everything upstairs. I lay it all out on the floor and the bed, where the two copies of The Shining used to be. And one by one, I open each item or document or photo album, and I learn even more about my parents. How much they helped the world, how much they traveled. Letters from friends and family revealing how much they impacted other people’s lives. Seeing how much they preserved from my childhood, ticket stubs to concerts and games, team photos, yearbook photos, Yule cards from every year. It’s December now. Yule will be here soon. The darkest day of the year, a celebration because it means it will get no darker. It means that from that point forward, we are moving toward the light. Or it’s returning to us. Marianne loved it.

Death is the worst thing. Taking the people we love and hovering always, waiting to take another. I would do anything to be stringing up garlands with my parents. Jazz on the record player, fire crackling, snow falling outside. The giant tree Noel would let me pick out with him. At the end of the holidays, we’d take the dead tree to the edge of the forest and lay it on its side, thank it for making our home festive. Hang pine cones on it, with peanut butter and seed for the birds. Watch it become home to more creatures. Watch, on our bellies with binoculars in the snow, to see who else might have arrived.

I reach out to the other-place, desperate.

There’s no answer.