The morning Gray looked blearily into the bathroom mirror and saw vividly blue eyes looking back at him where yesterday they’d been brown, he knew it was time to return to Chosen.

He hadn’t consciously thought of the name of his hometown in years. It had slipped from his memory like so many other things about his first fifteen years of life, only to pop into his mind this morning. Along with the unnatural blue glow in his eyes.

They were blue before the fires.

He grabbed the edge of the cheap motel sink as the anxiety hit. The stink of scorched wood and earth. The heavy thickness of smoke in his lungs. The heat of the blaze consuming parts of Chosen with their unending wrath.

Fire terrified him. Even the thought of it could send him over the edge. He didn’t want to go back to the place where that fear had begun, but something deep down was telling him to go. An instinct he couldn’t explain. He’d find answers to his memory loss. Answers about the faint notion that there was one person out there who still cared about him. Answers about the nightmares that had plagued him for the last few nights. Nightmares about fire and ghouls and sharp knives.

More than those things, though, he wanted answers about who his parents were.

Pounding on his motel room door jerked Gray into action. He snatched a pair of dollar store sunglasses off the TV console and slipped them on before he unlocked his door. The motel manager stood on the cement walkway outside the door, his saggy face creased with a frown.

“Hey, Mickey. What’s up?”

“You hung over or something, kid?” Mickey asked.

Thirty was hardly a kid, but Mickey had to be in his sixties, so Gray let the comment slide as he always did. He also ignored the sideways question about his sunglasses. He had no explanation for his now-blue eyes, and no way would Mickey believe he’d blown money on colored contacts. His nighttime gas station clerk job barely paid the motel’s weekly rate. “No, I’m fine. Did you need something?”

“Tried calling but your phone went right to voice mail.”

Gray turned to stare at his cell, right where he left it on the bedside table. “I put it on the charger last night. Shouldn’t be off.”

But the thing was dead. Gray tried every button he could; even plugged into the outlet it wouldn’t turn on.

“Anyway,” Mickey said, “Trying to get hold of you because the toilet’s all stopped up down in number twelve.”

“Okay, I’ll get on it.”

Gray got a discount on his rent by moonlighting as a handyman at the twenty-room roadside motel. He’d lived there for the last five years, ever since he finally decided to take control of his miserable, spiraling life and stood up to the people who’d taken advantage of him for too damned long.

Mickey handed him the room key. “Guy who rents it’s a dick, but he pays cash and on time.”

Code for do your job, don’t ask questions, and don’t get swishy, or the resident might harass him, and Mickey didn’t want trouble. Mickey was a decent landlord, and he didn’t give two shits that Gray was gay and couldn’t really hide it, but he was also a businessman. A businessman with a lot of shady residents, and he’d kick Gray out in a heartbeat if cops ever got called because of him.

So he’d keep his head down, fix the homophobe’s toilet, and then head into his other job.

Fixing a clogged toilet wasn’t his favorite thing, so he forewent his morning shower in favor of taking it afterward. He had a key to the supply closet near the office, which had all of the equipment he usually needed to maintain the rooms. He filled a small cart with the things he’d need, plus a few extras in case the job was bigger than Mickey had let on. Clog could need something as simple as a good plunging, or as complicated as taking some pipes apart.

With the discovery of his newly blue eyes and the urgent need to go back to Chosen already unsettling him, he could use a little simple.

The motel was U-shaped, probably built circa 1969, with all of the rooms facing the interior of the canyon, and the entrance to the cracked parking lot accessible through a cement archway that led out to the highway. A highway that used to thrive before the state approved a bypass, leaving local motels to fend for themselves. And cater to clients who rented by the week and paid in cash, no questions asked.

Suited Gray just fine. He liked his anonymity, and no one scrutinized his state ID too carefully. And for someone with no birth certificate or family to claim him, being dumped on the side of the road in Somerset County had been a strange kind of blessing.

Not that he’d thought so at first. Fifteen, alone, terrified of fires he only vaguely remembered, feared by police who were supposed to help him, not abandon him. For ten years, he’d existed like the piece of roadside trash he believed he was—until the moment the gun jammed and he started living his life again.

Such as it was.

Number twelve was on the opposite side of the U from the maintenance shed. He pulled the cart across the small, weedy parking lot. The folks who owned cars didn’t pay much attention to the faded lines indicating spaces, which made navigation a bit of a challenge.

He knocked on the door. “Maintenance!”

“It’s fuckin’ open.”

The doors all had old brass knobs with actual metal keys. Gray pocketed the key Mickey had given him, then turned the knob. The hinges squealed like most of the doors did. A sour smell made his nose tingle, something like burnt butterscotch. The curtains were drawn, the only light in the room coming from the blaring TV.

A flat-screen TV, which definitely hadn’t come with the room. Gray’s own boxy Zenith was the standard, and every time one stopped working, Mickey had Gray replace them with something from the local thrift store that barely a few years older than the last.

The resident was sprawled on his queen-size bed, completely naked, and not seeming to care that a perfect stranger had just walked into his room. Gray gave the middle-aged man a cursory glance—stocky, tattoos everywhere, drug paraphernalia on the sheet next to his hip.

“Here to fix the toilet,” Gray said as he pushed his cart across the faded carpet to the back of the room.

“Clean the shit off the floor while you’re at it.” The deep voice fit the build, but he spoke slowly, stretching out syllables. Definitely high.

Gray ignored the sounds of what was definitely porn from the TV, put on a mask and gloves, and set to his task. He’d cleaned up enough shit and bodily fluids in his life that the job no longer bothered him. The floor didn’t take long to sanitize, and all the toilet needed was a good, hard plunge.

“Oh yeah, fuck her in the ass.”

He jumped, nearly dropping his plunger into the toilet bowl. Ice trickled down his spine and his stomach rolled. The resident’s command to the actors on television startled him more than it should have. Then again he was already on the edge thanks to his eyes. He flushed the toilet so he could rinse the plunger in the running water.

The cart was too big to bring into the bathroom with him, so he’d left it just outside the door. This time, when he put the plunger away and reached for the toilet bowl cleaner, he caught movement on the bed from the corner of his eye.

Dude was jacking off to the porn. With Gray in the room.

Revulsion crept over him, leaving a sour taste in his mouth and a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He dashed back into the bathroom, determined to finish his job and get the hell out of that room. Flickers of memories tried to resurface and remind him of some of the worst years of his life. Memories of Slater and the halfway house and men who took whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it.

No more.

He completed his tasks with precision, leaving the bathroom sanitized and smelling like bleach. Getting out of the room meant passing by the masturbating man and his endless loop of porn. He steeled himself with a few deep breaths, grabbed the handle of the cart, and pushed. The wheels squeaked, making him even more noticeable.

The room’s door teased him with his future freedom. Freedom from the smell, the sounds, the high person who didn’t care he had an unwilling audience. He ducked as he passed the TV, doing his best not to obscure the screen for any length of time, and made it all the way to the door before the resident spoke.

“Hey, sweetheart, come over here and give a guy a hand.”

“Toilet’s fixed,” Gray replied. He curled trembling fingers around the brass knob.

“Suck my dick for me.”

Acid erupted in his stomach. He twisted the knob. The bed creaked and a shadow moved. Gray ducked instinctively, and a cluster of newspapers hit the door, then rained down on him. His pulse jumped and his breath caught. He stayed crouched behind the cart and eyeballed the pipe wrench as a possible weapon.

“Fuckin’ clean that up, you pussy, then get the fuck out.”

The wet slap of skin suggested the resident was back at jerking off, so Gray quickly collected the scattered newspapers. A headline on one of the pages stopped him cold, and he stared at the article. The words blurred together. The names meant nothing to him, but they also meant everything.

House fire. Two dead. Walter and Mavis Trent. No obvious cause.

The article was short, amounting to a mysterious house fire with no obvious cause or starting point that killed the two people who lived there. He read the dozen or so lines over and over, memorizing the scant bit of information. Only the house burned, not the ground around it or any buildings close by, and firefighters were unable to stop the blaze. It burned until the house was rubble.

She punished them.

Gray reared back, hitting the door hard enough to rattle it. He didn’t know who “she” was or how he knew the Trents had been punished. But they had.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” The naked man looked over him, his dick still at attention. His concern meant nothing to Gray. It barely registered over the driving instinct to protect himself.

He grabbed the pipe wrench and jabbed it forward. “Stay away from me.”

The man backpedaled and flung his hands into the air. “Fuck, kid, calm down. Not gonna bite yah. You wanna get sick, do it outside is all I’m sayin’.”

Gray shoved the newspapers away, then used the cart to stand, never lowering the wrench. He was shaking so badly he had trouble opening the door. The soundtrack of a woman moaning made the entire production even more ridiculous and embarrassing, but he got out with his cart. Outside into chilly, oil-scented air and freedom.

“Fucking freak,” the man said as he shut his door. The lock clicked loudly.

He gulped in deep breaths as he shoved the cart back across the parking lot to the maintenance room. He needed to calm down before someone thought he was tweaking and snitched to Mickey. The handyman work was contingent on being able to trust Gray, and part of that meant no drugs.

The handful of times he remembered taking illegal drugs, they’d been forced on him. His mind was scrambled enough without deliberately adding more confusion.

It only took him a few minutes to empty the cart and properly store the tools he’d used. Mickey checked everything. He locked up, then fled for his room. A long, hot shower sloughed away the stink of room twelve and some of the sticky fear that had clung to him the entire time he’d been inside. Maybe the resident wasn’t a terrible person, but he’s scared the shit out of Gray.

Not that scaring him was terribly difficult most days.

The shower did nothing, however, for the newspaper article. Walter and Mavis Trent haunted him, insisting they were important to him, and he had no idea why. After drying off, he checked one more time to make sure his eyes still glowed with that unnatural blue. They did.

So did his birthmark.

The small spot on his left pectoral, right over his heart, was usually a faint red color in the shape of a treble clef gone wild, with extra loops and squiggles. It had never been anymore more than an oddity until today. Now that he was seeing it with his shirt off, the usually pinkish skin was the same blue as his eyes.

He grabbed the edge of the porcelain sink for balance as the world around him tilted and swayed. It wasn’t possible. Eyes were one thing, but for his birthmark to change color? It looked as if someone has sneaked into his room during the night and tattooed him with glowing ink. Only that hadn’t happened. One, he was a light sleeper, and two, tattoos hurt. He’d have felt it. Plus he had enough locks on his door that no one, barring Kitty Pryde, could get into his room without permission.

The tattoo didn’t hurt. The skin ha the same vaguely lumpy feel as yesterday. No heat or sign of infection.

But it was fucking blue.

“What the fuck is happening?” he asked his reflection.

Desperate for answers, he rode his bicycle four miles to the local library so he could use their internet.

The search found a few more articles about the deadly blaze, all citing the same unknown origin, and the speed with which the fire burned without any evidence of an accelerant. They were small articles in bigger papers, though, and he finally traced the original article to a tiny town in Madison County, a couple hundred miles northeast of him.

That article had photographs of the couple. Driver’s license photos, from the look of them. The man and woman staring at him from the computer screen seemed to look right inside of him and recognize something. Recognize him.

And he recognized them.

He pushed his chair away from the terminal with a strangled gasp, cold all over, uncertain how he knew it, but he did. The same way the name Chosen had popped into his mind this morning, he knew without a doubt that Walter and Mavis Trent were his parents.

They died in a fire.

“Gray?” Judith, the cardigan-loving librarian who kept the small place open four days a week, approached his station with open concern. “Are you all right, son?”

He offered her a forced smile. “I’m fine, sorry about that. Um, Charlie horse in my leg.”

“Oh, those are the worst. One woke me up from a dead sleep a few months ago. Took all day for that ache to go away. You need some ice?”

What he needed was privacy. “Thank you, ma’am, but I’m fine.”

She gave him a once over before nodding and returning to the main desk. The place was quiet, being a weekday morning on a school day, which suited him fine.

He closed the article about his parents. Their images were burned into his brain. In his mother, he saw his own light brown hair and narrow nose. In his father, he saw wide eyes and a chin dimple. He had a vague sense of sitting at a dining room table with them, eating meals in silence. A house with very little joy. All of Gray’s joy had come from another source.

Another person.

A fuzzy shape he couldn’t pull into focus yet.

He started to search for “Chosen, ME” but froze before he could hit enter. That was wrong.

Pennsylvania. I was born in Pennsylvania, not Maine.

He changed the state. The search brought back a bunch of unconnected links that had nothing to do with his hometown. No records of a town in PA called Chosen.

It burned.

Gray swallowed hard and with cold fingers, added the word “fire” to his search field.

A site for “Mining Town Myths and Legends” popped up. He clicked on it. Multiple entries for ghost towns in the state, many abandoned after the mines dried up and workers went elsewhere with their families. Some still existed with populations as small as twelve residents; a few offered ghost tours.

The one that caught his eye, though, was for Chosenone, PA. The pronunciation guide suggested “choe-suh-no-uhn” was the correct way to say it, but Gray didn’t hear that in his mind. All he heard was “chosen one.” The small coal town of Chosenone was abandoned fifteen years ago when a fire began in the coal mines that ran below and around the town in a bizarrely circular pattern.

A pattern that, according to an infographic, looked suspiciously like his birthmark.

Toxic fumes and cracked earth forced an evacuation, but not before several dozen people died. All access roads were closed off by the state and the area was considered a safety hazard until the coal fires burned themselves out. The webpage hadn’t been updated in a year, but at that time, the fires were known to still be raging.

I was supposed to burn.

Gray pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, gasping as thick smoke filled his lungs. Intense heat licked at his skin, taunting him with its nearness. Voices around him chanted nonsense. His throat grew thick with tears, born of fear and grief. Fear for his own life.

Grief for the other person about to be burned with him.

But why? Why us?

The flashback cleared, and in its place came resolve. The idea of visiting a place that was the living embodiment of his greatest fear filled Gray with dread, as much as it did with relief. He’d find answered there. Answers he’d been seeking for the last fifteen years. His life as Gray Jones had begun fifteen years ago—the same time as Chosenone burned. This was no coincidence.

Columbia County. He could remember that.

He wiped his search history, then shut down the internet. Waving a brief goodbye to Judith, Gray left the library, certain he’d never see it again. Whatever he found in Chosenone, Pennsylvania, was going to change his life forever.

For better or worse remained to be seen.

Getting there was the first major obstacle. His bicycle wasn’t going to get him over five hundred miles to Chosenone; he needed a car.

He couldn’t afford a car, not with zero credit and less than two hundred dollars in cash until next payday. His boss had no sympathy for emergencies, so begging an advance wouldn’t work. The only alternative was digging into the bag of tricks he’d learned during his six years in foster care, much of that time living in group homes.

For the first time in his adult life, Gray was planning how to willingly and knowingly commit a felony.

All of his possessions fit into a large duffel bag, and it wasn’t much when collected together. Clothing, some toiletries, a small plastic baggie of wheat pennies he’d hoarded over the years, his still-dead cell phone and charger. He had some snacks and bottled water, too.

He didn’t leave a note for Mickey. There was no reason to. He wasn’t coming back ever again, and his maintenance work this week would more than cover any small damage Gray might have inflicted upon the outdated, grungy room.

The local pawn shop was about two miles ride, and he was exhausted by the time he got there. The bike netted him twenty bucks, but cash was cash. He also traded in his dead phone for thirty, then begged the use of the landline to call a cab. By the time the cab arrived, his stomach was reminding him he hadn’t eaten all day, and it was already noon. He ate a cheap granola bar during the ride to a larger town thirty miles away.

Shelling out cash for the cab hurt, but it couldn’t be helped. He’d lived here with two different foster families in his first year as a ward of the state, and he knew the area pretty well. Two car dealerships—one respectable, the other less than. He found a spot behind an empty storefront to hide his duffel bag, prayed it would still be there when he got back, slicked his hair with a little water, then hoofed it on foot two blocks away to a small hardware store.

He was tempted to steal the screwdriver, but the place looked like a mom-and-pop shop on its last legs, so he paid the couple of bucks for what he needed. Then he went and stole the license plate off the pickup parked behind the store. Stashed both plate and screwdriver with his stuff.

Then he headed toward the shady car dealership.

Gray fixed an affable smile onto his face, coming in from a direction that suggested he’d parked his own car on the street. The place had about a hundred makes and models available, all used, all advertised as “Like New!” by big, yellow painted letters on the front windows of the brick office building. An office the size of two parking spaces.

He took his time perusing the cars, making a show of being totally at ease, while his insides did somersaults. Didn’t take long for a salesman to exit the office’s single door. Skinny, short, with a suit way too big for his frame, the guy oozed inexperience and appeared to present no real physical threat—perfect target.

“Nice day today, isn’t it?” the salesman asked.

Gray caught himself before he commented on the gray skies. “Sure is. Coolest we’ve had in a while.” June had been unseasonably hot, but as they closed in one the twenty-first—and Gray’s birthday—the days had cooled considerably.

“Don’t expect it to last, though, not with July right around the corner.”

He saw the opening and grabbed hold. “Exactly why I’m here. My old piece of junk’s lost air conditioning again, and it’s gonna cost more to fix the problem than the damned thing is worth. Figured it was time to invest in something else.”

The salesman beamed. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. Name’s Troy.” He held his hand out to shake.

“Gray.” He hated shaking hands, but did it briefly. Giving his current identity didn’t matter, either. Gray Jones was a ghost with half of his life hidden in shadows.

“So what are you looking for? Sedan? SUV?” Troy tilted his head. “You look like a sports car man to me.”

Gray laughed. “I was hoping for something meant more for rugged terrain. My girlfriend and I have recently discovered a mutual love for off-road exploration.”

Yeah, right. Girlfriend.

He didn’t date anyone. Period.

“You have to keep the ladies satisfied, am I right?” Troy’s exaggerated wink made his skin crawl.

“Exactly right.” Gray wandered toward a black Jeep that looked like it had already seen some hard miles. He pretended to give a shit about the price and the spec sheet. Ten years old. Automatic. Good enough to get him a couple hundred miles south of here. “This one actually caught my eye from the road. Turned around and came back.”

“That right?” Troy was practically vibrating with energy at having landed a live one today.

Guilt made his already upset stomach roll harder. Gray ignored it. He needed this, damn it. “I don’t suppose I can take her out for a test drive?”

“Sure, sure, I just need your license.”

“Of course.” He handed it over.

More anxiety flashed through him when Troy disappeared into the office. He came back a moment later with a key, his license, and an even bigger smile. “Just had to make a copy for our records,” Troy said as he gave back his license. “You know, in case you steal it.”

Gray forced a laugh. Fortunately he’d be heading in the exact opposite direction of his stated address with his stolen car and stolen plate. “Have to admit,” Gray said, “never occurred to me to steal this beauty. I’m a terrible liar, a bad thief, and the last place I want to end up is federal prison.”

“I hear you, man.” Troy raised his hand, and Gray met him in an awkward high-five. He finally handed over the key and fob. “Take her out, get a feel for her. But don’t go crazy, okay?”

I’m already crazy.

“No off-roading, I promise.” He waited for Troy to put a Dealer plate in the rear window, then carefully drove his new ride out of the parking lot.

His duffel was where he left it, and after dumping the dealer plate and securing his new one, Gray was on the road. Once he crossed the border into Pennsylvania, he’d switch plates again and buy a roadmap. Maybe a case of energy drinks for the trip.

Come hell or high water, by tomorrow morning, he was going to be in Chosen.