Above him, the brilliance of the sky finally began to fade.
Inside his head a woman’s voice pealed with laughter.
“Seventeen,” he said softly.
Then, as Laurie Kingsford slumped in a pool of her own blood, Logan moved on, already searching for the next target of Lizzie Borden’s axe.
ERIC STUMBLED, GRABBING the back of his head where the searing pain sliced through his brain as if by—
— as if by an axe!
He heard a dull voice. A dead voice.
“Seventeen.”
But the voice wasn’t like the other voices — not like the voices he’d heard when he was on the footbridge.
This voice was real!
As the pain started to fade from his head, he looked around, frantically searching for its source. But there were people everywhere — crowds of people, all of them staring up into the sky.
Then Eric saw him.
The man from the boat — the boat with the huge cross mounted in its bow.
The man with the wild gray hair and the full beard.
The man who was now swinging an axe back and forth as if cutting wheat with a scythe. But instead of grain and chaff falling to the ground around him, this reaper was leaving a grisly trail of pain and terror.
And death.
Now a babble of voices was rising in Eric’s head, but one single voice — the voice of the woman he’d heard on the bridge — rose above the rest.
“Yes!” the woman cried every time the axe slashed through flesh and bone. As the carnage grew and one victim after another fell beneath the bloodied weapon, a note of ecstasy crept into the woman’s voice. “Yes,” she moaned. “Oh, yes…”
Again and again the axe flashed, and Eric watched in horror as glimmering droplets of blood played among the fireflies swarming from the trees and embers falling from the sky.
And over it all — even over the howling voice of the woman whose ecstasy rose with every strike of the blade — another voice rose.
A voice keeping careful count of the dreadful carnage.
“Seventeen…eighteen…nineteen…twenty…”
LOGAN’S FEET TOOK on the same cadence as his voice as he trudged through the crowd, the axe swinging back and forth with every stride.
One after another, people fell away, the slickly bloodied steel slicing as cleanly through bone as the flesh that enveloped it.
“Don’t stop,” the woman moaned. “Don’t ever stop….”
Yet even as she spoke, Logan paused to wipe the blood from his face before it blinded him completely.
“More! More!” the woman howled. “Keep going! Kill them all!”
Logan swung the axe again, ripping it through the top of a young boy’s head even as the child raised his arms to fend off the weapon.
“Twenty-eight.”
All around Logan, people cheered at the spectacle in the sky, unaware of the massacre that was closing in from behind.
“
THERE! SEE THEM? The mother and the father and the little girl!”
Though the fireworks were exploding every second now and the cheers of the crowd were all around him, Eric recognized the voice in an instant.
Recognized it, and knew that only four people were hearing it.
He himself, Kent Newell, Tad Sparks…
And the man with the axe.
The unseen spirit behind the howling voice seemed to rise above all else, and suddenly not only did Eric hear her voice, but saw with her eyes as well.
Saw the people she had just chosen.
“My family,” she was raging now. “My mother and my father and my sister. My sister Emma!”
But the little girl Eric was seeing wasn’t her little sister at all, and her name wasn’t Emma.
Her name was Marci.
And she was his own little sister.
“Kill them,” Lizzie Borden’s voice implored. “Kill them now!”
MERRILL BREWSTER SLIPPED her arm around her daughter’s shoulders and drew her close as they gazed up at the spectacle in the sky. As the fireworks built toward their finale, she tried to remember ever having a more perfect Fourth of July, but even as the question formed in her mind, she knew the answer.
Never.
The day had been perfect, and she finally understood that Dan had been right — whatever had happened to Ellis Langstrom had nothing to do with her or her family, and for once she hadn’t let her fears ruin the summer for everyone.
As if reading her thoughts, Marci grinned up at her. “Now aren’t you happy we didn’t go home yesterday?” she asked.
Merrill smiled down at Marci, who was still dressed in her costume as the Statue of Liberty. “Very happy. Happier than you’ll ever know.”
“
KILL THEM!” LIZZIE commanded. “Kill them now!”
Logan lumbered toward the family that was still a dozen paces away, the steady stream of flashes from the sky lighting his way, the slashing axe, which was flickering as if lit by a strobe.
“Thirty-three. Thirty-four.”
ERIC CHARGED PAST the screaming, bleeding people whose cries were all but ignored by the mob whose attention was still focused on the spectacle in the sky.
“No!” he howled as Logan moved closer to his family, the axe rising high above Marci’s head while inside his own head Lizzie Borden’s voice screamed for more blood.
More death.
Ahead of him — just out of his reach — the rag-clad man stood poised with Lizzie Borden’s axe over his head, and in another moment—
A surge of panic triggered something deep inside Eric, and then he was leaping forward, his arms outstretched, the single word he’d uttered before now erupting from his throat with enough force to rise above the volley of fireworks that were pouring into the night sky as the finale began.
“NOOOOO!”
With an unnatural strength that came out of nowhere, Eric seized Logan’s arm and whipped him around.
Logan’s eyes — dead black orbs — fixed on him.
“Kill him!” Eric heard the voice command, and this time knew it was his own death she was demanding.
Jerking free from Eric’s grip, Logan raised the axe again.
But then he hesitated, and a faint glimmer flashed in his eyes.
“Kill him!” the voice screamed.
Now Kent and Tad appeared out of the crowd, hurling themselves on Logan, trying to bring him down, but the old man held his stance as if braced by some unseen force.
Eric grabbed at the axe handle — slippery with blood — and wrenched it free from Logan’s grip.
The voice howled: “Yes! Yes! You do it! I killed my family. Now it’s your turn!”
Eric’s eyes flicked toward Marci, who had finally turned away from the glory in the sky and now beheld the horror all around her. Her face paled and her mouth opened wide, but no sound came out.
Eric tore his eyes away from his little sister to look once more at Logan.
Their eyes met.
And their gazes held.
And in that moment when their eyes held each other’s, Eric understood everything.
Logan, his eyes finally coming back to life, nodded.
Tightening his grip on the axe, Eric raised it, then brought it down, sinking it deep into the old man’s shoulder.
Logan staggered, but held his stance, and as blood began to gush from his shoulder, he spoke.
Spoke so softly only Eric could hear.
“Thirty-eight.”
Time seemed to stand still, and once more the eyes of the boy met those of the man.