I’D LEFT THE bank of phones at the county courthouse almost floating on air. The tiny bubble of hope for the future that had started with the phone call gained inertia and carried me through the rest of the day. Instantly turning back toward North Carolina, I reached the edge of the Daniel Boone National Forest by nightfall. Checking in to a small motel that bordered the forest, I decided to spend the night figuring out the best, and safest, way to continue on to Charlotte.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, I didn’t have any nightmares. I slept a solid night filled with the memory of Clay’s embrace. In the time since leaving the hospital, I’d learned so much about how to survive without someone else protecting me, but I hadn’t discovered anything more about how to live. If anything, I was more dead inside than I’d ever been. Just the thought of being at Clay’s side again breathed life into me.

After checking out of the motel the following morning, I scouted the local streets for a car that would take me to Charlotte as fast as possible.

“You told Clay you’d be a week,” I reminded myself.

You can’t hang around in one place for too long.

“I’m not hanging around,” I justified. “It’s called reconnaissance.”

Just don’t do anything stupid.

While I wandered around the quiet streets, trying to avoid an argument with myself, a terrible headline screamed at me from the window of a small corner store.

“Two Dead in House Fire.”

My stomach twisted, and I wanted to scrub my eyes clean.

No!

On the front page, my face stared back at me from alongside a picture of two others.

No, no, no! I trembled as I dared to take a step closer. This can’t be right. This can’t be happening.

One was a woman I didn’t know—someone whom I’d never even met, but whose life I’d unwittingly stolen—the other was Hightops, the boy I’d befriended just over a day earlier.

Even as disbelief still raged in my mind, my instincts kicked in. I couldn’t be caught standing, staring at a newspaper that ousted me for a murder I didn’t commit. I cast a sideways glance up and down the street before tucking the newspaper under my arm and rushing away from the scene.

When I reached the end of the road, I pulled the newspaper to my chest so that I didn’t accidentally set it alight and then sprinted desperately toward cover, allowing my feet to carry me into the depths of the forest. My mind ran over the headline again and again, and each step I took was like another punch to my stomach. I wanted to know how it all went so wrong. Once again, the cost of my true nature had returned to take a life. An innocent life that’d done nothing to deserve the fate he’d suffered. Every time I thought it was impossible to hate myself more, I stumbled into a new low.

It was only once I’d run as far as I was able that I stopped and fell to the forest floor, panting and trying unsuccessfully to beat back the tears that filled my eyes. With my chest heaving from lack of oxygen and hyperventilating over what I’d done, I dropped the newspaper to the ground so that it was away from my incendiary touch and ground my fists into my eyes to clear away the tears.

I stared at the boy’s face again. It was clearly taken from his school yearbook, the mottled blue background behind him and the forced stance made that evident. The caption under his face told me I’d guessed wrong about his age.

“Luke Sutton, 16.”

Luke. I’d taken advantage of his hospitality and hadn’t even asked his name.

He’s dead because of you. It wasn’t the sunbird’s words but my own running through my mind, and I had no reply to the thought because it was true.

You can’t stay here. This time, it was the soothing voice of the sunbird prompting me up. To get up on my feet. Although I couldn’t always tell the difference in times like this—when she compelled me forward—it was easy to know.

“I know,” I murmured. “I just need a moment. I need . . .”

Clay?

I nodded. It was hard to resist when the sunbird offered up his name or an image of his face. Sometimes it was as if she wanted me to find him. For what purpose, I didn’t know. In that moment, he was what I needed—the him I’d lived with in Detroit at least. He would have soothed me and reminded me that it wasn’t my fault. That I didn’t choose to be this way. That I never asked to have such ruthless people hunt me. I didn’t set the fire or deliberately hurt Luke and his mom.

There was only one fire that I had to take responsibility for—the one that caused me to be alone. The one that destroyed the life I’d had in Detroit.

Enraged and filled with sorrow over what had been done in my name, I poured over the words on the page voraciously. I had to know exactly what had happened—needed the information that reading between the lines might give me. I used what little information there was to try to piece together the timeline.

Apparently there had been a deadly fire at the house of the boy who’d shown me a smidgeon of kindness. The article added that there was evidence the victims had been killed before the fire started. I could feel the life draining back out of me with every word I read.

A police spokesperson advised they had eyewitness reports of someone matching my description leaving the house on the day of the murders.

I’d been there.

I’d been spotted.

And the Rain had used that to set me up. When listed together with my apparent prior offenses, the evidence was pretty damning.

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that it was the Rain who had killed Luke and his mother. I had no idea how they’d known that Luke had helped me, or how they’d got to him so soon after I’d left. The only thing I could think of was that the shadowed figure I thought I’d spotted must have been part of the Rain. It was too much of a coincidence for it to be anything but a set-up.

Rage clawed at my throat until I could do nothing more than scream at the heavens. The way Clay had spoken about the Rain, he’d made them seem like a force for good. I couldn’t see any damned good in killing an innocent kid.

A renewed hatred for the organization that had ruined so much of my life and had taken so many lives, including my father’s, surged through me.

It can’t surprise you. You know that they’re dangerous. Remember the Rain massacre Aiden mentioned when you were at North Brothers Island? That had been a refuge for your kind, and they destroyed it.

“Yeah, I remember,” I snapped. I didn’t want to have to listen to the sunbird’s voice right then. I wanted to be alone. Truly alone like any normal person would have been in the same situation. “But they were slaughtering others there, not their precious humans.”

How exactly the lines had become so blurred that they’d stopped just ridding the world of evil and started punishing those who had unknowingly helped those apparent monsters, I didn’t know. Based on everything that Clay had told me about the Rain, the senseless murder of innocent victims was something I would never have expected. Then again, even Clay had been able to justify the murder of potentially innocent women just because some research suggested they were witches. I recalled the girls I’d encountered in the ladies’ room of the Hawthorne Hotel. They’d appeared normal, not wicked or evil at all.

Maybe it’s not that big of a leap from defense to offense.

I growled. Not for the first time, I wished there was some way of simplifying everything. The first kiss I’d shared with Clay had awoken sleeping beasts within me and introduced me to the true dangers of this world.

How long after I’d left had the Rain arrived?

“Was that where Clay was when I’d called him?” I wondered aloud.

Do you think he was involved?

“I don’t know,” I whimpered. “Someone’s been hunting me. It has to be him, doesn’t it? But why would he come so close and yet lay such an elaborate scheme to get me to meet him.”

It makes sense if the meeting’s a trap.

“I’m not sure I believe that it is anymore,” I admitted to myself. I recalled the tone in his voice when I’d agreed to meet him and given him a day. It wasn’t celebratory like someone whose well-constructed conspiracy was beginning to piece together. It was more of the relieved tone of someone who’d been desperate for something and had been granted their wish. I knew the tone because it would have been evident in my own voice if I’d found the ability to say more than just those few words.

What if it is?

My rage came tumbling down to earth, cooling my skin and leaving me empty. A loud sob escaped me. “What if it’s not?”

Then it’s not. There isn’t much you can do but wait and see.

“But maybe it’s changed now.” I pushed myself off the ground and started to pace. “What if he had forgiven me, and then he sees what happened to Luke? Will he hate me all over again?”

There’s only one way to know.

I bent down and picked up the newspaper waving it in front of me as if the sunbird was a person standing there that I needed to rant at. “What if he sees this and decides it’s safer to just destroy me before I can kill anyone else?”

We’ll burn that bridge when we get there.

I stilled as a cold shiver ran down my spine. The tone was one I knew—the deathly certainty that the sunbird would do what it took to keep us safe.

“No,” I whispered. “We can’t hurt him.”

Whispered apologies raced through me, but I knew they were false.

I threw myself onto the ground, sitting with my arms crossed. “I won’t go.”

As if you can stay away.

I sighed. She was right. It was useless to try to resist the meeting I’d set up with Clay. I had to know what he needed to tell me. Determination overtook me, and I prepared to leave. I pulled the front page off the newspaper, folded it, and then tucked it away into my bag. With a carefully placed touch, I burned the rest of the pages before leaving the ash on the ground.

Once I was certain the embers were all extinguished, I moved even deeper into the forest. Picking my way through the rugged terrain, I tried to find a place far enough away from the recreational tracks to hide from the mess I’d made just by being me.

Finding a suitable campsite, I gathered a few dry twigs and kindling and set a small fire to help keep me warm during the night. In less than twenty-four hours, I’d gone from optimistically joyful to being reminded of all the reasons I should keep running forever. After poring over the article multiple times to try to find anything to suggest who else might have been involved, I curled tightly around myself and tried to get some sleep.

My night was haunted.

The ghosts of all the people who were dead because of me lined up for their turn at punishing my already tortured mind. Dad, Nurse Nancy, Luke and his mother, and Louise. One after another they showered me with their contempt and forced the blame for their deaths to manifest inside of my body like a thousand insidious tiny worms wiggling and writhing beneath my skin until my body shook awake.

Shadowed figures lingered at the edge of the campfire, maybe as many as twenty—or possibly as few as one. Their specters waited just outside the light provided by the fire. The menacing watchfulness I’d experienced so many times overwhelmed me, pinning me in place and making me long to run at the same time. Ash invaded my throat, causing me to choke as I tried to force myself to breath normally.

My hands trembled as I rolled onto my side, trying to turn away from the remnants of the small fire I’d set at my campsite. Dying embers and the heavy scent of smoke served as a reminder of all of the deaths I’d caused. Under the vigilant scrutiny of the dark forest, I thought about the newspaper article again.

It was pointless to try to get back to sleep, so I pushed myself up off the ground and grabbed the newspaper page from my bag. Using the dim light of the moon and ignoring the shapes that flickered and morphed around me, my eyes scanned the article once more, even though I practically knew it word for word because I’d read it so many times. Parts of the print were blurry and illegible because of the tears I’d shed over the news.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been set up for a crime I hadn’t committed, but that didn’t stop me my guilt over putting Luke in that position. I’d specifically left when I did so he wouldn’t be hurt because of me. There was no way for me to know that it was already too late. Something I did or searched must have triggered a red flag in the system.

Maybe Clay had something to let him know when the address he’d left me was searched for?

I refused to believe Clay could take an innocent life, but in my vulnerable state, a range of crazy theories formed in my mind. If I was wrong about him, if my faith in his unwillingness to kill a human was misplaced and he had killed Luke, who else might he have murdered along the way?

Was Dad’s burial contrition for his murder?

Tremors raced down my spine in response to the thought. Regardless of who had done it or how they found him, one irrefutable truth remained—by forcing my way into Luke’s life, I had brought it to a premature end.

It was my fault.

Although I might not have pulled the trigger or set the blaze, I was responsible. I knew the type of people I was dealing with and I should have stayed better hidden. The unfortunate thing was that Luke wasn’t the first innocent whose life had been lost after helping me, and I was certain he wouldn’t be the last. Lives would continue to be snuffed out all around me until I was captured or killed. That’s what the Rain wanted, and they would pursue the mission relentlessly until it was completed.

And yet, I continued to run.

I didn’t stop and hand myself in. I didn’t do the one thing I knew would end the senseless killing.

Perhaps Clay and his family were right—I was a monster.

A selfish, self-serving evil being that didn’t deserve life. A long time had passed since I’d last thought of myself as such, but I didn’t know what else to think.

They’re the ones that killed him, the sunbird soothed in a gentle voice.

“Luke,” I said aloud, reminding myself that he’d been a young boy on the brink of the rest of his life. “And he’s dead because I picked his house at random.”

I thought about Clay’s request again—for probably the fiftieth time since I’d heard it.

The urgency and desperation in his voice on the end of the phone had made me wonder whether he was tiring of the hunt just as much as I was, or if he hadn’t been responsible for the latest string of attacks on me. There was a definite hint of my Clay; the one who had spent days holed up with me, whispering to me repeatedly of his love and his commitment to share a life together.

But with the newspaper article in my hands—the evidence that someone was still tracking me and was determined to make me pay for being what I was, to hurt those who were willing to help me—it was hard to believe he was anything but the hunter intent on capturing his prey and laying traps along the way. Maybe he hadn’t killed those people, but it was likely he knew the person who had.

My mind twisted endlessly around the possibilities of love versus trap, as my heart wrestled with the guilt that a random choice of house had cost a boy and his mother their lives. Either way, it had gone on for too long—I needed to stop running. I needed to stop getting others killed because of a passing association with me. As much as it scared me to die—as much as it was an insult to my father’s memory—I was no longer able to justify the ever-increasing death toll on my hands. If it was Clay hunting me still, I would at least have my answer, and my death would stop the senseless killing.

With the fresh murder charge, I’d have to move at night and avoid people as much as possible, which would slow me down significantly. One thing was clear, I couldn’t risk turning up in Charlotte any sooner than I’d initially told Clay.

Throwing the page on top of the remaining kindling, I pressed my hands into the dying fire and forced energy into my fingers. My focus became set on revitalizing the flames and, for at least the hundredth time, reanalyzing every moment of the last time I’d seen Clay, thinking maybe something in those moments would help make sense of everything that was happening.