Chapter Seventy-Two

MOM LIFTS ME TO MY FEET and pushes me.

Why do I smell smoke?

“Leighton, go,” Mom says.

He’s still holding the gun, staring at it like he only just realized it was in his hand. His hand closes over the gleaming metal. Squeeze. Relax. Weighing it. Weighing something. Realizing he cannot run away. His keys are gone.

We have to go. But the only way to go is up. To the girls.

“Go, Leighton.”

I crawl up the stairs, hand over hand. I’m not hurt, but I’m tired. Like a hundred years just passed in the blink of an eye. Forever can exist in a moment. In the crack of a firework. The pull of a trigger.

And then I don’t just smell smoke. I see it, coming from my room, and I know it’s the lantern, and I know it’s the girls.

But how? I always hide the lighter. They don’t know where I keep it.

Mom and I fall into my room, and she locks the door behind us.

I don’t see Campbell or Juniper.

The lantern is spilled, burning. As I watch, it catches the curtains of my window, the edge of my quilt.

The book of matches that Joe left me is on my bedside table, open. Missing a few matches.

Smoke starts to fill the room, and the girls are—

I hear a muted scream. The armoire.

I run across the room and bang on it. It’s locked. I hear Campbell coughing, Juniper sobbing.

I pry at the locked doors with my fingernails. Panic swells inside of me. The girls. The flames grow into a wall of heat beside me, and I’m coughing so hard I can’t catch my breath. I scratch at the door until my fingers start to bleed. Why is it locked? My fingers slide over the keyhole, and it’s burning hot.

The keyhole.

I run to my dresser while Mom takes over prying at the armoire’s door. I grab the rusted key that Joe left. The key we thought was lost years ago, tucked into a safe place by a worried grandfather.

At the armoire, the key slides right in, and turns.

The doors swing open, and the girls fall out. Their skin is hot to the touch. Shiny tracks of tears mark their flushed cheeks.

Mom lifts Juniper into her arms.

“Leighton!” Cammy says between coughs. “Are you hurt? We heard the gun.”

“No one is hurt,” I say. “You started a fire?”

“You’re bleeding,” Cammy says.

I look down at my hands. They are covered in blood, but I’m not hurt. The house is hurt. And now it’s burning.

Something slams into my bedroom door. Shit.

Mom understands before I do. We are trapped.

“We can’t put it out,” she says, coughing through every word. “We have to go.”

Another slam on the door, and the lock shifts.

We usher the girls to the window.

Boom! Fireworks light up the sky outside.

We make it onto the roof outside of my room, but it isn’t far enough. I hear another slam of the door inside. Wood splinters but holds.

“Keep going,” I tell them, and we shuffle along the roof until we are outside of Mom’s bedroom. We are out of the smoke, for now.

Higher, something in me screams. The creature. Fear. It knows where I need to go, and I know to listen. No sooner does the thought cross my mind than something breaks inside the house. He’s in my room. But at the same moment, I hear another sound—the front door. I look over my shoulder and see he’s out of the burning house, but only for a moment.

A chaos of crows descend, and they drive him back.

They force him into the house.

And I see them at every window, cawing and diving. Making it impossible for him to leave, even as smoke billows out, choking everything in its path.

I hear sirens in the distance, but they sound so far away. Too far.

The smoke thickens, but we can’t go back, so instead we lift the girls, cupping our hands under their feet, pushing them onto the highest part of the house. Mom helps me next, and then I pull Mom up. Smoke streams out of the bedroom windows, burning our eyes.

I hear the glass of the window shatter, and outside of my room, something emerges—but it isn’t him. It’s a shadow, moving across the roof of the porch. It’s some part of this house, breaking out, coming after us. A shadow in the shape of rage.

We’ve gone as far as we can. I hear a noise behind us and shift, careful to balance. At the far end of the roof, half hidden in smoke, the figure rises. It’s on the roof with us. It is little more than a silhouette moving toward us. Still, it comes. It hurts to look at it—it pulses with anger. All the rage he ever felt, detached from him, unleashed on us. And here we perch, with nowhere to run.

I grip Campbell’s hand on one side and Junie’s on the other. Mom stands on the other side of Juniper. Soon they’ll see the shadow emerging from the smoke.

But when I look from side to side, their eyes aren’t on the figure in the smoke. All three are calm, looking straight ahead.

I follow their gaze.

The crows are coming.