Four fire trucks scream past me, cutting through the haze. I stare after them, willing them to keep going straight, as if my will matters at all, as if anything in this damn town has ever gone right.
The trucks turn in to the motel parking lot. My jaw twinges, the way it does when I’m about to puke.
I run faster.
I make the last turn and the heat hits me. It boils off the motel in an acrid wave, drying my eyes and cracking my lips, burning the mist away. I shove past knots of onlookers, knocking phones out of hands, taking an elbow to the corner of my mouth and not caring, not even feeling it. I trip over a canvas hose and lurch back up, coughing hard, lying to myself as hard as I can.
Maybe Bev tried to reheat her pizza in the toaster again. Maybe a guest stubbed their cigarette out on their mattress. Maybe it was just regular bad luck, rather than a Beast with a taste for Gravely blood.
It’ll be fine. Everything’s okay.
Then I make it around the last car and see that nothing is okay, that it might never be okay again, because the Garden of Eden is burning.
The Garden of Eden is burning—flames blooming from the rooftop, shingles melting and oozing into the gutters, guests huddled beneath shiny emergency blankets—and I don’t know where my little brother is, and it’s all my fault.
Someone is shouting at me. I ignore them, squinting through the smog, blinded by the blue strobe of police lights and the sting of smoke. I’m looking for that brass number 12, that not-quite-a-home, that one safe place—but it’s gone. There’s nothing but a gaping hole where our door used to be, a black throat spewing smoke. The window is gone, too, the sidewalk glittering with glass. Flames lick over the sill to lap at the eaves.
I run. A hand grabs my shoulder and I bite it, quick and vicious. The hand disappears. I taste someone else’s blood.
I’m yelling now, my voice swallowed by the hungry roar of the fire, close enough to feel the bite of cinders through my jeans. They get me right before I dive through the hot maw of the door.
I don’t go down easy. It takes two volunteer firefighters and a state trooper to pin me and get the cuffs around my wrists, and even then I’m still kicking and clawing, because once I stop fighting I’ll start screaming.
I should have gotten him out of Eden. I should’ve known a lucky penny and a mad Warden weren’t enough to keep him safe. It’s only now, thrashing on the hot pavement, that I realize how much I still trusted Arthur Starling. He failed my mother, but I never really believed he would fail me.
“Let me go, let me go, where is he? Did you get him out?”
They don’t answer. Someone steps through the smoke and stares down at me with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, and of course Constable Mayhew would be here. Of course the two worst moments of my life would be overseen by a saggy old man dressed like an extra from the set of a direct-to-DVD Western, his ten-gallon hat held up by the sheer density of his eyebrows.
I laugh at him, and note distantly that it sounds like sobbing.
He points at me with the waxed tip of his mustache. “This her?” It takes me a dizzy second to understand that he isn’t speaking to me.
He’s speaking to the man just behind him, a hulking figure in a sharp black suit. His face is unpleasantly familiar; I remember those eyes staring at me from the slanted surface of a rearview mirror.
It occurs to me that not every Beast comes crawling out of Underland. That some of them live up here, and walk around in expensive suits and pencil skirts.
That Arthur didn’t fail us, after all.
“Yes, sir,” the man says earnestly. His accent is local but overblown, a step away from caricature. “I saw her acting funny this evening. She dropped this.”
He hands the constable something small and square, and Mayhew squints down at it. It’s an old-fashioned matchbook with something written across the front in blue cursive. I can’t read the words by the flare and flicker of the firelight, but I don’t have to. I already know what they say.
My Old Kentucky Home.
TWENTY-FOUR
It’s nine miles to the constable’s office in Mudville, but it feels like more. The sheriff’s office gets bigger and shinier SUVs every year, but Mayhew’s car smells like hot piss and cigarettes. The AC dribbles from the vents. My hair is gummed against my cheek, clotted with soot and blood, and my shoulders are wrenched backward in their sockets. Already my fingers feel staticky and dead. One of the troopers suggested they might uncuff me for the ride over, pity on his face, but Constable Mayhew gave him a long, grim stare and said, “Not this one, Carl.”