Dot, dot, dot…
“Ev, I didn’t kill him,” he said at last. “And neither did you. He was drunk. He played chicken with a train, and he lost. The police released the autopsy report. It was all over the news this morning.”
She blinked in the dark at the picture his words made. Shaun, fearless, invincible. Staring down the bright lights of a train—he’d lived his whole life like that. Like he could stop the world from turning. Keep the future from getting anywhere near them, keep everything exactly the same, forever.
But you just can’t stop a freight train.
R
Ré had no idea where he was.
The carpet under his feet was cold and spongy-wet, and then he remembered: in the Buick, in a pond, slowly sinking.
He turned his head. Everything hurt. Evie was beside him, unmoving. He said her name, but she didn’t respond.
He unclipped his seat belt, wincing at the pain in his side. “Câlisse,” he hissed, hand going to his broken ribs. His fingers came away wet, but he couldn’t tell in the dark if it was blood or just water. “Evelyn, you have to wake up!”
He shuffled across the front seat and grabbed her shirt. She slumped forward, and for a terrible moment he thought she was already dead. “Evie!” he cried, shouldering her back against the seat, white lightning cutting through his side.
He tapped her cheek, and she gave a soft moan. “Evie, please,” he whimpered. “Please wake up. We’re sinking!”
Water trickled in through the rusted doors. The back end of the Buick was sunk almost to the trunk. He thought if it filled, the weight might drag them even farther into the pond. Ré felt for his cell phone. It wasn’t in his pockets. It must have slid off the seat in the crash; it might be underwater now, useless. He felt like crying.
Instead he slapped at Evie’s pockets and found her phone.
He thumbed the button to dial 9-1-1, but it wouldn’t even turn on.
“Fuck!” He slammed the dash with his hand.
Evie moaned again quietly.
“Ev.” He shook her lightly. “I have to leave you here. But I’ll be back, okay? I’ll be back soon as I can.” He hoped that deep down, wherever she was, she could hear him. He hoped that if he couldn’t get back in time, she’d wake and find her own way up to the road before the car was full of water.
He tried to see how deep it was in the back seat, but all was dark. He pressed his hand to her cheek and said, “Evelyn. I am coming back for you. Do not die…”
Waking in that car had been the worst moment of his life. Worse than fighting Alex. Even worse than finding Shaun. But he’d dug his strength out and crawled from the wreck and waved down help on the highway. There was no way in hell he’d let her die.
And now her body curved next to his in the hospital bed. He was glad for the darkened room. After the fight with Alex, and the crash, he was looking pretty rough. Six stitches in his arm, more near his eye, white tape around his ribs, purple ink everywhere. He’d definitely seen better days.
But still, Ré smiled. “Omashkooz nindoodem,” he said.
“What did you say?”
“It’s Anishinaabemowin. It means ‘my clan is Elk.’”
“Okay.” She said it slowly, like a question.
He eased onto his back, wincing as his ribs pressed into him, scratching at his lungs. He stared up at the ceiling in the dark. “My whole life I’ve had these nightmares,” he told her. “Real bad ones.”
He thumbed through the dreams as he spoke, projecting them onto the ceiling, letting their power burn out. “I thought I was a bad guy, just like my great-uncle. Psycho Ré.” He swallowed hard. One image still hurt: blond hair in a bright halo. “When Shaun died, it seemed like I was right. Like, no matter what, I was always gonna be a bad guy.”
“Ré…” she said, but he wasn’t looking for comfort or sympathy.
“After I crashed the Buick, I had a vision,” he told her, watching Shaun’s shadow fade into the ceiling tiles. “An omashkooz came to me. An Elk Spirit.” Ré still felt the tingle of pure wonder fizzing through his veins. The memory of those great antlers rising to the sky, and the deer nodding, inviting him in. His clan. He smiled.
She moved a little, and he could feel her looking at him, questioning.
“I thought I was seeing demons,” he said. “That the dreams were all bad prophesy. But the whole time, it was just me, holding on too tight.” The muscles in his arms flexed lightly at the thought.
“To what?” she asked.
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he rubbed his thumb against her fingers, thinking about it. “I guess to the way things used to be?” he said. “To the guy I thought I was. Psycho Ré. I know it sounds crazy, but I think those dreams were just trying to show me what I gotta let go of. Like”—he rocked his head from side to side—“I’m here, but I got to get to there, y’know?”
He fell silent, halfway to that other place in his head. It had been calling him this whole time. Not Black Chuck. The future. The Omashkooz.
The path he was meant to walk as a man, in the footsteps of the Elk.
Ré shook his head. “I was so scared of it before,” he told her. “I was letting all kinds of dumb stuff get in my way. But I know where I’m going now, Ev, and I’m not afraid anymore.”
E
Evie couldn’t help it—her chest squeezed tight.
She felt like he’d only just been found. Like, for a split second, everything she didn’t even know she’d wanted was suddenly
