Grief spilled out of her in waves, and she dropped the frame from her hands, covering her face, smearing the tears along her cheeks, and then collapsed to the floor. How did she get here? How did all of this happen?
“Grandma?” Kegan froze in the doorway and then immediately dropped to his knees, gently placing his hands on her shoulders. “Are you all right?”
Iris leaned her head back, eyes red and glassy. “It was wrong.” She turned to Kegan, locking eyes with him, and then grabbed his arm before he could pull away. He was like his father. He always had a problem staring difficulties in the face. He ran from them. But unlike his father, Kegan could be swayed. He could be convinced of another way. “Kegan, I—”
Sirens blared beyond the walls, and both turned to the door. The noise grew louder, and both of them knew what the police had come here for.
“C’mon, Grandma,” Kegan said, gently lifting Iris off the floor. “We need to get you to bed.”
“No,” Iris replied. “I need to see.”
Kegan opened his mouth to protest, but then stopped himself and only nodded as he helped her out of the room and down the hall.
The going was slow, and before they even reached the first floor, they heard officers banging on the door. No doubt Dell had called for backup when he arrived. But there was no Dell here, no bodies, nothing to incriminate them. The witch would see to that because she still needed to perform the ceremony.
“Wait.” Iris held up her hand for Kegan to stop as they reached the second floor. She gestured toward the nearest room and then walked to the window. She pulled back the curtain and saw half a dozen highway trooper vehicles parked along the end of the main street, which dead-ended into the circular drive of the mansion’s property.
“They’ll press us hard,” Kegan said. “Dell’s car is still down there, and I don’t think they’re going to just go away if we pretend not to know anything.”
“The wolves at the door,” Iris said, her voice a breathless whisper. “Scratching, clawing to get inside. They never stop.”
The pounding continued, and Kegan tried to pull her away from the window. “The longer it takes for us to answer, the longer they’re going to stick around because they think something’s wrong.”
But Iris just kept staring out of the window, ignoring Kegan’s pleas for heading downstairs, and then her gaze turned toward the town. Even from far away, it looked like it had deteriorated into nothing. “We made it. We can destroy it.”
Kegan pulled Iris from the window, forcing his face into hers. “What are you talking about? Grandma, we need to head down there and talk to them.”
And Iris wasn’t sure she understood what she was saying herself. But there was something growing deep within her thoughts, an idea that wanted to break free. She couldn’t live like this anymore. She couldn’t put her family through this anymore. The witch was right. She could make a different decision than Allister made. She could set what was left of her family on a different path. Because she was starting to realize that the road she’d chosen had a dead end, and it was coming up. Quickly.
81
After battling the woods again for the hundredth time, Sarah broke from the trees and saw Redford stretched at the bottom of the hill where she stood. The sun had risen higher in the sky, and Sarah figured it was somewhere around mid-morning; late enough to where people had already commuted to work, leaving the roads below barren.
The chapel was on the west side of town, and Sarah spotted the cross rising from the sharply-pitched roof. The sun was still low enough for the tip of the cross to scrape the bottom of it, which cast a shadow that stretched into the road and covered the building to the north.
Sarah adjusted the book in her bag over her shoulder, looking up to check her distance from the church, and then lowered her eyes.
The closer she moved toward the church, the more her stomach soured. And despite the cold, beads of sweat appeared on her forehead and dripped from her underarms and down her ribs.
When she was a kid, either in the orphanages or in a foster home, there were always people that came from the church to help volunteer their time or donate clothes or toys. And while Sarah accepted their hand-me-downs, she never enjoyed the transaction.
The volunteers always looked down on her and the other kids like they were disease-ridden. But it was the looks of pity that she hated most.
The people that gave all of those donations weren’t giving orphans all of those toys and clothes because they wanted to make the kids feel better, they were doing it because it made themselves feel better.
It was like some kind of moral ‘taking out the garbage’ that involved dropping off toys and clothes that their kids had outgrown. A yearly purge of do-good that came and went quickly.
But where were the church goers when she had gone two days without food? Where were the priests and pastors when her foster father was beating the shit out of her? Where was God when she was scared and alone and cold in the middle of the night during winter because her foster mother had gone on another bender and didn’t have enough money to turn the power on?
Those memories swirled to the forefront of Sarah’s thoughts, and by the time she reached the front chapel, she was seething with anger. She no longer cared for seeking answers, she just wanted something to yell at.
Sarah burst inside, finding rows of long pews empty with a red carpet that ran through the middle of it, which led toward the pulpit. Light shone through the stained-glass windows that sat high on the walls to her left and right,
