The door to the next room crashed open before collapsing from its hinges. Alejo stood in the dark, half dressed, eyes wide with terror. He surveyed the room as though he thought he might be dreaming.
“Brandon?” he asked.
Brandon turned slowly to face him. Draped across his arms, hidden from the debris, a girl with dark hair and unusually dark eyes blinked awake. She looked into her father’s face—into Brandon’s face—and smiled. And though he was full of darkness, Brandon smiled too. He’d done it. Nothing else mattered.
He was the Dark, and he was whole again.
Alejo looked at Logan and his eyes welled with tears. His expression was recognition and fear and love all at once. Slowly, cautiously, he stepped into the room and reached for Logan. She reached back and wrapped her arms around his neck. Alejo’s laugh was sharp with a sob. He shook his head.
His dark eyes met Brandon’s.
“Brandon…” he breathed. “What did you do?”
36
A Goodbye Of The Forever Kind
“Wait,” Ashley said. “So … you’re the Dark?”
Brandon rubbed the back of his neck. “Until a few months ago, yeah. Kind of. I was more like a host for it. I carried it around for years, but I never killed anyone. That’s new.”
“Then how is it killing people now?” Ashley asked.
“Not sure.”
“How are you not sure?”
Alejo scoffed. “I think Logan’s rubbing off on her.”
Ashley flushed.
Brandon took off his glasses and cleaned them with the hem of his shirt. “I don’t know as much about it as you’d think. It doesn’t really talk about itself. After Logan … after the incident, we packed up and left. There’d be too many questions about the cabin if we stayed. People would ask how she was back. We couldn’t explain any of it, and we knew no one here would take our word for it.”
“Plus, we had to get rid of the Dark,” Alejo said.
“Well…” Brandon trailed off. He looked away from Alejo and cleared his throat. “At first, it did help me. It said it would keep us afloat. It wanted to help us find a new home.”
“Logan said you guys lived on the road,” Ashley said.
“Not on purpose. We ended up in different small towns that were a lot like Snakebite. Which meant we ran into the same problems. People didn’t like outsiders, and a couple of guys rolling into town with a five-year-old girl in the back seat made them nervous. Everywhere we went, we ended up leaving again. The longer we went without settling down, the pushier the Dark got. It was like it was getting weaker. More desperate. The angrier it got, the more of me it took up. I spent months in a blur, just driving, not really knowing where I was going. It wanted more to feed on. For years, it’d had all of Snakebite. Now it only had me.”
“Why would it do that?”
Brandon shrugged. “I have my guesses. It might’ve wanted me to do something it needed a physical body for. My best guess, though, is that it wanted a new town to infect. It needed a way to move on. It wanted me to lay down roots in a new little town. And if we’d stopped moving, it would’ve started all over again.”
“But it made a mistake,” Alejo said.
Brandon nodded. “We’d been driving for two weeks straight, living on the last bit of a loan from my mom. I remember putting gas in the car while Alejo was in the store buying some water. And I remember hearing it whispering right at the back of my neck. It said to take the car seat out of the back and leave it on the curb. To just … take the car and go.”