Blake looks back to the spirit. More of Caitlin’s features now dominate the otherwise misshapen face. Her eyes burn with a familiar rage.
“Caitlin… please…”
The spirit’s eyes meet his.
And Blake is speechless. Please… What could he say to her? What could she reveal to him that would help him to make the choice he knows comes next?
Show me. Show me you have learned something in death. Show me you have become something better than the self-loathing and the rage that have delivered you to this state and set this nightmare free upon the soil. Show me, Caitlin. Show me you are worth saving. Show me why I shouldn’t destroy you with the new power that has been placed in my hands.
Her answer is the same mad, rhythmic plea: “Ammmmmmmmm IIIIIIIIIIIIII prrrrrrreeeeeeeettttttttyyyyyyyyyyy?”
And he cannot answer. Is this death? he thinks. Is this what we become at the moment of our death, not our purest form, but our basest self?
From outside the shed, Nova Thomas screams, “Let her go, you bitch!”
The lips vanish from Caitlin’s mouth. Once again it’s a yawning dark hole, and from it pour two heavy flows of insects, blacker and thicker than any of the earlier eruptions—their constituent parts too tiny to make out, their sound a smooth buzz compared to the night’s previous swarms. And as they evacuate the body, Blake watches in astonishment as her skin darkens until it’s a light shade of mocha. The limbs become slender and proportional, delicate even. For a few seconds, it appears the great tide of black spirit matter leaving her has also caused the dirt floor to swallow her. But she is simply shrinking down to human size. Her black skin glistens; her delicate facial features are defined enough to give her an expression of astonished surrender as the bugs leave her.
Virginie…
Blake is so astonished by the slave woman taking proper form before him, he has paid no attention to the gathering cloud above. Within its dark swirl, a towering and ghostly impression of Caitlin Chaisson has taken shape. Her mad, pupil-less eyes are focused on the astonished gathering just beyond the shed’s open door.
Did Virginie Lacroix summon some great reserve of strength and wrest control of her resurrected body from Caitlin’s spirit? Or did Caitlin leave her in a divine rage over Nova’s last slur? Has Caitlin chosen this form because it will better allow her to tear Nova apart?
There is no mistaking the hatred in the spirit’s—Caitlin’s—eyes. The wall around the shed door shatters. A tide of wet, cold air blasts across Blake’s neck. He glimpses Willie hoisting Nova off her feet, one of his arms around her waist, the other holding his shotgun, and the terrified assemblage scrambles desperately up onto the back porch. Then Blake gives Felix Delachaise his first command since ordering him to consume Vernon Fuller.
“Take her!” he cries. “Take her now!”
At the last second, when it’s clear they won’t be able to outrun the mad ghost made of insects, Willie drops Nova and spins on the advancing spirit, raising his shotgun. Nova’s ass slams to the floor of the porch so hard her teeth knock together. But the pain is a dull, distant thing as she stares death in the face.
Nova is ready to die. The rage has left her, and she is filled with a sudden and total comfort over the fact that she will die in defiance of the spirit’s rage—of Caitlin’s rage. She only wishes the men would leave her to her fate. Not her father. But Sam and Allen. Because this is not something they invited on themselves.
These thoughts are halted by the sight of Blake standing just inside the shed’s ruined front wall, a silhouette through the dark gauze of the furious approaching insects. But his hands are at his sides, his fingers splayed, animated, it seems, by an intense power.
The first column of them comes zipping over the roof of the house, glowing so brightly their violent interior light isn’t dimmed in the slightest by the rising sun. They are like fireflies that appear out of thin air itself, and they tear through Caitlin’s raging, advancing spirit in a fierce bright line, like shrapnel shredding a plane’s fuselage. The first column is dotted by white flapping wings, as is the second, which flares across the cracked, shifting roof of the shed before blasting into Caitlin’s remnants from behind. It looks as if they are cleaving and incinerating the tiny monsters in the same instant. Compared to what they are attacking, these new luminescent winged saviors move with determination and grace, making a sound like a saw cutting cleanly through wood.
And there’s no mistaking Blake’s pose, his posture. If he isn’t driving these things, he has summoned them somehow. How else to explain his confidence, his stillness, and the steadiness of his outstretched hands?
It made a difference, that I said no. You were right, Nova. It made a difference.
But the battle isn’t done. The remaining floating tendrils of Caitlin’s mutilated spirit rise, struggling to reassemble. But the fierce blue invaders—they are either dragonflies or the spirit world’s imitation of them—are penetrating these columns, matching their every duck and weave until the last dark remnants of Caitlin Chaisson’s spirit are being chased skyward, toward the lightening sky and its tufts of clouds.
Only when a silence falls does Nova realize how high the last evidence of this battle has ascended.
She rises to her feet, stumbles down the back steps, eyes skyward, searching for any last remainder of the spirit that almost devoured her. But they are gone, and as the last few sparkling flecks of power Blake called forth wink out in the sky overhead, she sees he has gently closed the fingers on each hand.
And then the watery silence is pierced by a new sound, a sound that in any other circumstance would be alarming enough to elicit at least a grimace from one of the stunned people staring skyward. But in this garden of ruin, it is a comfort. It is full of promise. It is the sound of a woman crying with the confusion and pain of one newly born.
AFTER
The letter finds him in a small town in Arizona called Superior. A few months after he left New Orleans, a stray rock shattered the windshield of his motorcycle, and when he pushed it by both handlebars into the nearest auto body shop, he found himself surrounded by a ghost town cradled in a vast, dry valley, with a boarded-up main street he recognized from various films about the sad and lonely Southwest.
The bike is a Honda ST1300, new and easy to fix, and the Navajo who runs the auto body shop on the edge of town had no trouble getting the replacement parts right away. But within hours of arriving in Superior by accident, Blake was seduced by the stark solemnity of the place. After a few nights at the nearest motel, he looked into renting a trailer on the edge of Queen Creek. He believed, perhaps foolishly, Superior’s vast emptiness would give his nightmares enough space in which to roam so they wouldn’t crowd him come sunrise.
So far, he’s been right.
The website for the local chamber of commerce tries to make a big deal out of the town’s geographical location. Superior sits on a dividing line between Arizona’s three predominant landscapes: Sonoran Desert to the west, mineral-rich valleys and plateaus to the south, mountain ranges to the east. On the map he’s managed to draw in his mind after half a year of exploring the region on his bike, the eastern half of the state is covered in a giant DO NOT ENTER sign, its letters dripping red ink. Because with mountains comes denser foliage, even in Arizona. Just the thought of a branch dangling in the air behind his neck causes him to shudder and ball his hands into fists.