She saw them coming now, too: flaming streamers of burning gasoline slithering toward them over the snow. No, not snow now: ice, odd and milky—but why wasn’t it melting? She watched in a kind of horrified paralysis as the greedy flames gobbled up distance and raced through the dark, heading right—
“Pop the locks!” Casey bawled. “Rima, pop the goddamned locks!”
With a gasp, Rima stretched, tripped the control, heard the ka-thunk of the locks, and then threw herself against the door. This time, the door flew open and she tumbled out. Casey was already there, scrambling to his feet.
“Come on,” he shouted, making a grab for her arm. “Come on, Rima! Run, run!”
Her flesh shrank from his touch, and she had to swallow back the scream that tried crawling past her teeth. But she knew what to expect now: that she would feel the ghost of Big Earl’s hard, meaty, callused hands instead of Casey’s because his father’s death-whisper, clinging to the flannel shirt, was that strong.
“Come on!” Casey cried, hauling her to her feet, and then he was churning through that lake of gasoline, dragging her along as they slipped and scrambled away from the car: two steps, four, six, ten …
Don’t look back. Rima dug in, willing herself to stay upright, feeling the treacherous ice trying to upend her. Don’t look back; run, run, ru—
The Camry blew.
The explosion was a fist between her shoulders, and Rima was suddenly airborne, flying over the snow on a gust of superheated air. The concussive force tossed her a good forty feet, and she had time to remember that weird, rock-hard ice and what something as solid as stone might do to a person smacking into it with such force. She had time to think, I’m dead.
Then she crashed—but not against the ice. Hurtling like a spent meteor, she bulleted into thick snow. She was not a big girl, or heavy, but the blast jammed her deep. Snow pillowed into her mouth and plugged her nostrils. Spluttering, she flailed, trying to fight her way back to the surface, but she was socked in tight.
In her parka, Taylor’s death-whisper shrieked with the terror that Rima felt explode in her chest. Her lungs were already burning from lack of air. A red haze blurred the margins of her vision. Out, out, she had to get out! But which way was up? How much air did she really have? Her heart galloped in her chest. She was cocooned so thoroughly, her parka bound her as tightly as a mummy’s wrappings. With Taylor twisting and squirming, the feeling was like being trapped in a gunnysack with a nest of snakes.
Completely disoriented, she swept her arms to either side, trying to scour out an air pocket. The snow in front of her face gave, and then there was space: not a lot, but more than before.
Okay, that’s good, come on, you can do this; you have to. Rima kept sweeping, doing the breaststroke over and over again. She felt the hollow grow from the size of a baseball to that of a basketball. There was also a little more air than before, because the snow wasn’t solid ice; there were air pockets and even slivers of space between flakes. She pulled in a thin breath and then another. The air was close, but she could breathe. Although her chest and arms and face were cold, heat palmed her calves. Must be fire from the explosion. So now she knew which way was up. Not good, not good … A sharp nail of panic scraped the back of her neck. If she felt heat on her leg, that meant …
My God, I’m upside down. My feet are above my head. I’m like a cork in a wine bottle.
But wait a minute, wait … I feel heat. That meant part of her—her legs, her boots—must be visible. Yeah, but someone had to be looking for her. Casey might be dead or in just as much trouble. If he wasn’t dead, well, she didn’t think that Big Earl would let Casey stick around.
She thought of that touch, the death-whisper that was Big Earl. Casey must be wearing something of his father’s. The parka? No, she thought it must be the shirt, that red-checked flannel she’d spied dragging over his knuckles earlier but that had seemed to retreat as the hours went by: a shirt that was first too big and now just right. Casey wouldn’t save her, because Big Earl wouldn’t give a damn. Any second now, those flames would die, and then, if Casey was still alive, she’d catch the muted cough of that snowmobile.
Wait! What was that? Had she heard something? She strained, her ears tingling. There was something there, I heard …
Something above her, beyond this prison of deadening snow … shuffled.
Her heart surged. Casey? Or maybe Eric and Emma had come back with help. She opened her mouth to shout—then clamped back, her throat closing down, as something else occurred to her.
The thing that killed Tony is gone. But what if there’s another? A shiver rippled down her spine. Oh God. Her chest was a sudden scream of pain, as if Taylor’s terrified death-whisper were trying to gnaw a hole through her skin and burrow itself deep inside to hide. But Rima could only wait, quivering, in a darkness that was growing thicker and more airless by the second—and it was a choice now, wasn’t it? Say nothing, do nothing, and she would suffocate. But something is there, it’s getting closer, it’s right on top of—
Something slithered around her ankle, and closed.
PART THREE THE
FOG
LIZZIE
Wear Me
AS HER MOTHER muscles the stick and they race away from what’s left of their home, the fog—all that remains of her father tangled with the Peculiars’ energy and that of the whisper-man—is both a fist, closing down over Lizzie’s past, and a ravening monster with a mouth, gobbling up the road and this world, and still coming on strong. Seeping from the cell’s speaker, the whisper-man’s voice is a faint, mournful sough: Come down, Blood of My Blood; come plaaay, come down, come …
Lizzie fishes up her mother’s phone. Crackling with the energy of Lizzie’s thought-magic, the magic-glass of her memory quilt is a shimmering dazzle. The special Sign of Sure, the tool her dad has used to get himself back and forth from Nows through the Dark Passages, is as iridescent as the Milky Way. But she thinks the fog has to be much closer. Maybe she has to let it inside, allow it to slip into and wear her the way she does the book-people and her dolls. The way her father has invited whatever’s in the Dark Passages.
But he’s done it with blood, by cutting himself, so will this work? Can I grab it hard enough?
She just doesn’t know. Yet this she does understand: everyone wants what they can’t have, same as when Lizzie whines for a second scoop of chocolate ice cream. They especially want what’s hard to get.
So make the whisper-man mad. Make it really work hard, get so greedy-pissed it flies for her like a moth to the hottest flame, so it doesn’t get what Lizzie’s doing until way too late.
I’ll show you. Come on, you big show-off. Let’s play my game. She thumbs the phone to silence. The cell rings again at once. This time, she turns off the power, which she already knows won’t make a dent, and it doesn’t. When the phone begins to chirp again, she pitches the machine into the black mouth of the foot well because there is no way, no way she’s answering again. Let that whisper-man stew. That’ll show him.