“Go away now, please,” Mr. Prosper said. He lay down and curled up on the bed, clutching his bottle and pillow.
Outside, it was starting to rain again. Clouds of silver and midnight blue roiled over the rooftops as a few fat raindrops fell onto their faces. It’s going to be a downpour, Zoe thought. She was struck again by how beautiful Iphigene could be in the right light. There was something wrong with that. It didn’t seem fair for there to be any beauty in a place like this. She was about to say something to Valentine when he shoved her back against the building. She tried to move, but his hand swept back and held her in place. She was getting annoyed when she saw something across the street coming toward them.
She could make out three of Hecate’s wolf men in the rain, which was coming down hard and steady. As the wolf men advanced, Valentine shifted, keeping Zoe behind him. He reached under his coat and pulled out Mr. Prosper’s knife. The wolf men hesitated. Moving away from the apartment building, Valentine pulled her along, shifting his stance with each step, keeping himself between Zoe and the wolves. She looked around for a way out, a place to run. She couldn’t see anything. This wasn’t fair, not after they’d learned how she could get home. She held on to Valentine’s coat sleeves.
“Zoe?” whispered Valentine.
“Yeah.”
“When I tell you, I want you to run. Find Father. He’ll take care of you.”
Zoe held on to him harder. “What are you going to do?” She felt his body tense.
“Now!” he said, pushing her away and leaping at the wolf men, slashing the closest one. The knife flashing streaks of silver streetlight as the air filled with Valentine’s shouts, the wolf men’s howls, and the hissing of the rain.
As the wolves closed on Valentine, Zoe looked around for something to hit them with. A branch or pipe, anything.
“Go!” yelled Valentine.
Still, her mind screamed for her to stay, to help him, but she knew what this was. It was Valentine’s sacrifice for her. To stay now when she couldn’t help and would only get in the way would turn him from a hero into a fool. So she turned away from the fight and ran as hard as she could. The pain in her ankle grew steadily worse, but this time she was grateful. It was something to focus on, something to enable her to shut out the voices telling her to turn around and go back. In her mind, she drew a circle, then she eased the white-hot pain in her leg into its center, letting the hurt propel her through the storm all the way to the sea.
She walked out onto the beach and her feet sank into the wet sand. Each step hurt her ankle and the usefulness of pain had passed a couple of blocks back. Now pain was just pain and each time she had to drag her injured leg out of the heavy sand, the pain made her breath catch in her throat. But she didn’t stop walking until she made it to the abandoned carousel.
She stepped up to the crooked platform and dropped immediately to the floor, breathing hard. Rain seeped through the cracks in the carousel’s wooden roof, dripping onto the faces of some of the nearby animals. The horses looked like they were crying. Zoe lay down and pressed her ear flat to the floor. Overhead, the rain was a high-pitched patter, while the sound coming into her ear on the floor was deep bass mixed with the pounding of the waves. There were no monsters here. No mad queen. Just the rushing of the water. There was no reason for her to ever get up, she thought.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something move. She rolled over and saw a man’s legs. He was sitting on the floor smoking, his back against the carousel’s hollow central core, the spindle room where the ride’s motor was housed. Zoe couldn’t see the man’s face, but she knew him immediately.
Slowly, she rose and limped over to her father. “I wondered if you’d be here.”
“Zoe,” he said. He lowered the cigarette and rubbed his red eyes. “Damn. I hoped you be gone by now.”
She leaned on the pole connected to a pink-and-silver shark. “Nope. Not yet,” she replied. She shrugged and looked out at the boardwalk, a bit more paranoid now after the wolf men’s sudden appearance. She looked at her father. There were fresh scars on his face and hands. He looked even more gaunt than before.
“I’m sorry I ran,” Zoe said.
Her father patted her leg. “You did the right thing.”
“At least we found a way out.”
“You and your friend?” Her father took a puff of his cigarette. In the dark, the red glow lit up his whole face. Worn and weak, he suddenly reminded her a little of Mr. Prosper.
“Yeah. Val-” she started to say, but broke off, reminding herself of her promise not to tell her father about him. She could at least keep her word about that. “He really saved my life. Hecate’s cops or whatever they are- those wolf assholes-they arrested him.”
“I’m sorry, honey. You all right?”
Zoe nodded. She knew it was silly since he was already dead, but it bothered her to see her father smoking. Still, there was something comforting and normal about it all. Having a cigarette at the end of a long, hard day. It’s what regular people did back in the world. The real world. It seemed so far away now. Like Iphigene was the new normal and the other was a dream. Would she ever see the other world again? She felt a sudden, unexpected twinge of homesickness. “I’m okay,” she said. “You know, I thought you were dead back there at the café. Like dead dead. You know what I mean.”
He smiled up at her, a weak, exhausted smile. “It’s not as bad as it looks. I just need to rest for a couple of days and I’ll be fine.”
“Then she can do it to you all over again.” Zoe hugged her coat tightly around herself.
Her father didn’t say anything for a few minutes. “If you know a way out of here, you need to go. The whole city is looking for you. How the hell did you get here?”
“I ran. I really wasn’t thinking about it. It was raining hard. I don’t think anyone noticed me,” she said, looking back toward the boardwalk again. “I guess someone must have seen me before and told the cops, right? But I was so happy to have found a way out. I should have been more careful.”
“You know, if Hecate arrested your friend, he isn’t coming back,” her father said.
Her injured leg made it too hard to stand anymore. She slid down the pole and sat facing her father. “So, I just run off back to Sweet Valley High? I leave him in a dungeon and you to get sucked dry.”
Her father leaned forward and touched the dirty toe of her sneaker. “If Hecate finds you, she’ll kill you.”
Zoe felt herself laugh, but nothing felt funny. “She’ll do worse than that, from what I hear.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Her father finished the cigarette and tossed it away. The glowing tip arced high, making burning red loop- the-loops through the rain out into the sand. “You can’t just sit here, honey. You have to go.”
“Don’t worry. I am,” she said. “But the beach is the way out. I have to wait for low tide.”
“Oh.” Something in his voice surprised her. After he’d told her to go home God only knew how many times, there was a hint of regret in his voice. It made Zoe happy, in a quiet, sad way. She said, “Is it okay if I sit here with you while I wait?”
“That would be nice.”
As she went over to him, he put one arm out and she laid her back against it, leaning against him as he wrapped the arm around her. She held on to his jacket as she had to Valentine’s.
As she sat there quietly in the dark with her father for what would be the last time, the ice inside Zoe began to crack. She’d felt nothing for so long. The numbness was comforting, even though it brought the guilt of not really feeling how she knew she should, how she would feel normally. About her mother, about her brother’s arrest, and this last meeting with her father, doomed to be food for Hecate’s children. And then what? He would just wander away with the dying dead forever?
If leaving was what everyone wanted, why did it feel so bad? The truth was that a part of Zoe wanted to leave Iphigene right then. To run away and forget about it, about everything she’d seen and heard. Even father and Valentine. How could she live with herself knowing she couldn’t save them and that she was partly responsible for the horror that was their lives?
