Blake is pulled to his feet. He’s not sure by whom. Caitlin’s holding the gun but it’s angled on the floor, and she’s pulling him toward the open door. And he’s letting her. When Nova grabs for him, Caitlin swings the gun on her. “Don’t worry. You can be next. Maybe those boys did more to you than you told your daddy. We can bring them here too.”
“Let go of him!”
Blake feels some form of protest bubble inside him and burst somewhere around his chest before it can become words. Caitlin shoves him gently through the open back door with one hand against his back, and he stumbles forward into the porch rail, and then they’re moving through the shadows toward the brightly lit gazebo. He can hear Nova in pursuit, but he can’t take his eyes off their destination. Surrounded by darkness, its floorboards cast aside, it looks like an ornate cellar door. And Caitlin is dragging him toward it by one hand. “Remember when we were kids? When we tried to become blood brother and sister? When I pricked your finger? Well, this will be just like that, Blake. Only much more special. So much more special.”
He can hear himself crying now, or his best attempt to hold back the sobs. He is a rag doll in Caitlin’s one-handed grip, and the gun she carries is a third presence next to him, the reason Nova is following at a distance, her eyes mostly sclera, her terror evident in her inability to stand upright and the glances she’s casting back at the door and the murderer they’ve left bound inside.
“You can’t do this!” Nova screams.
“I’m not doing anything,” Caitlin snarls. “I’m giving him a choice.” In her free hand, Caitlin reaches down and picks up a pair of pruning shears from the red toolbox. One blade is slick with fresh blood. She tried, he thinks. She tried to use her own blood to kill him and it didn’t work, so now she wants mine. Needs mine. Why? Why the rush? Why now?
“Blake,” Nova wheezes. “Don’t. Please. Please don’t…”
As if to earn his trust, Caitlin sets the gun down on the ground between them. She takes his left hand in her right, the pruning shears at the ready in her left. She has angled his back to the tiny pit, as if she fears the sight of those thick, slick growths under the floorboards will frighten him out of consenting.
But it is John Fuller’s fingers he feels gripping his palm, not Caitlin’s. Lifeless and unresponsive as the black water rises to swallow them both.
Caitlin guides him backward. His heels strike the rise of the gazebo’s first step, and he finds himself stepping up and onto it. She’s pushing him even closer to the open floor, and he’s allowing it. Because all he feels are his own fingers grasping at John’s palms, striking and slipping, flint against a steel stone.
“Caitlin…” All he can manage is this frail, breathy utterance of her name, but there is something in it that strikes at her, a certain tone that pierces the veil of comforting delusions she’s pulled around herself in the wake of having her world cracked in two. Maybe there was grief in it, Blake wonders, grief for John that got all tangled up and came out sounding like grief for the woman Caitlin was before she surrendered to rage and whatever power has come crawling up out of the earth around Spring House. No matter its source, the sound of it has made Caitlin go rigid with something that comes off her like fury. The open shears between them tremble with the promise of homicide.
“They’re coming, Blake,” she says. “There were others. He’s been calling them all night. They’re coming.”
“Why?”
“Because I told them if they didn’t, I would send the tape to every news station in the country.”
“You have the tape?” Blake asks.
“What does it matter?”
Blake sees it first, and when Caitlin sees the sight register in his eyes, she turns to see Nova holding her own gun on her. Her stance seems surprisingly steady, but it could be a trick of the shadows.
“Get away from him,” Nova growls.
“That’s not smart, Nova. Injure me and they’ll simply go for the wound. Then they’ll go after you for betray—”
“Shut up! You have no idea what this is!” Nova shouts back. “And you have no right to force it onto someone else, not this way. Not like this.”
“I’m not forcing it on anyone. Grown-ups don’t blame other people for the truth, Nova.”
“You never lived the truth your whole life, you spoiled, crazy bitch. You’re nothing but privilege and lies. Something finally wakes you up after being so goddamn blind for so long, and now you think you have the right to drag someone else into your darkness? No way in hell! Get away from him. Or I will shoot you. I swear to God.”
“Yeah. Whatever.” Caitlin turns away from this blast of hatred as if it were a puff of air. “We don’t have time for this, Blake.”
“No,” Blake says.
Maybe she expected him to whisper his refusal as if it were a shameful confession and she’s startled by his bluntness, because Caitlin stares at him, the pruning shears open in her right hand. “No?” she asks. “No, you won’t make a—”
“No, I won’t do it. I—” Just thinking through his next words has steadied his heart, but before he can give voice to them he feels a white-hot strip of pain across his chest, and only then does he realize Caitlin has slashed him through his polo shirt from his left shoulder to his right hip. Nova screams.
And then he hears the slick sound of sudden movement behind him, and Caitlin is backing away from him, arms spread, the bloody shears in her right hand. Her expression is sympathetic, and she is shaking her head back and forth as if Blake’s refusal to accept her gift is as despair-inducing as a battered wife’s refusal to file a police report against her husband.
When the smell hits him, he spins, one hand flying to the dripping wound in his chest. There are four of them. They have risen from the pit, and now they stand erect, snakelike, like cobras without hoods. The obscenely large blossoms have opened and are angled at Blake. And the smell coming from them is impossible: smoke, fire—and something else. The overpowering musk of unchecked body odor, so strong and pungent it seems to come from an era without deodorant or soap or any other modern cosmetics.
Blake’s eyes water, and when he opens his mouth to scream—Shoot it, Nova. Just shoot the damn thing!—he can taste the smell in the back of his throat, and when he blinks, he finds himself staring into darkness.
…They have not come. The men, Felix promised her. The extra bodies that would make the backbreaking work of this prison more bearable for them all. She has waited for the wagons to bring them, waited to hear the horse hooves pounding the front drive and the soft muffled cries of new arrivals with faces as black as her own. But even though she had given him precisely the bounty he asked for, there are no new slaves. No greater and more compassionate division of labor.
She has used her power to give them two growing seasons in one—twice the amount of cane and twice the amount of money Spring House has borne every year since its creation. But there has been no trade as Felix promised.
Before her rage can turn to despair, she waits for Spring House to sleep, then she walks barefoot from the slave quarters so as to make no noise. When she reaches the edge of the field, the vast and verdant field she grew with her own magic, she lays her hands against the nearest stalk and gives the ghosts in the soil a single command.