Even Michael’s name had been a lie. That was the part, oddly enough, that bothered her the most.
“Geneva?” Mitch’s voice.
They stood in front of the cabin. The moon had risen, shining pure silver light down on the familiar shape of the cabin, the sagging roof and hollow windows, bowed front steps. The rope swing still hung from the tree, motionless.
“Geneva? Can you hear me?”
A cold breeze picked up, biting her cheeks, making the bare branches clack against the walls of the cabin. This was the scene she saw in her dreams every night, this place. Home. Empty and dead, like this. It didn’t feel real.
“Girl’s gone,” Lanny said. “Catatonic. I told you. She grew up in a log cabin, saw her parents get killed, she ain’t gonna be in the mood for conversation. You want my advice? We gotta get her back to civilization, for real. Get ourselves off this cold-ass mountain, get some coffee, reassess the situation.”
“Just give her a minute.”
“You still got that laser gun, dog? We got to hole up, wait for that thing to come to us.”
The stars blazed down from overhead, brighter than she’d seen since she left. She picked out the constellations, the way her mother had shown her. Ursa Major. Orion. Draco.
“We can’t go yet,” Mitch said.
“Why not?”
“Jocelyn. She died here.”
“Look …”
“It was the Archangel,” Geneva said. “It attacked us here. But Jocelyn died at the hospital.” The words hung in the air, and she suddenly wished she hadn’t said them. But there was no turning back now. She had to tell Mitch all of it. “I got her and Michael into Brutus. Drove down the mountain into town. To the hospital. She died there, in the emergency room. I don’t remember much. Just cops. This one big black guy, asking questions. Michael told him she got attacked by a mountain lion. Said that I needed to go to the bathroom. Instead, he walked me outside to Brutus. We got in and drove off.” She swallowed. “That was it. Never came back.”
When she saw the haunted look on Mitch’s face, the way he was focused on every word she said, it made her want to cry. She felt like she was hurting him all over again, bringing back all the grief she knew he had buried inside. It made her want to run to him and hug him, tell him it was okay.
But it wasn’t.
“I’m sorry, Mitch. I wish it had been me.”
He shook his head and turned away, not saying anything.
Lanny came up next to her, shivering. “Don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why this Archangel come after Jocelyn?” Lanny said. “She didn’t know nothing about it.”
Geneva shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“That’s my point,” Lanny said. “You don’t know, then what the hell we doing here? How we supposed to know what to look for?”
“I don’t know, okay?” Geneva said, suddenly angry. “Back off.”
Mitch straightened up. His breath puffed in the air, carried away by the wind. He clicked on his flashlight. “Let’s go inside.”
Geneva followed him to the bottom of the front steps. He stopped and shined his flashlight up at the cabin.
The front door was open. A rusty nail stuck up at an angle from the wood, where her mom used to hang flower wreaths. It was bare now, sending out a long finger of shadow from the pale spot of the flashlight beam.
The light moved down the cracked wood to the floor, where pine needles and bits of branches had gathered in the doorway. It flicked up to the windows, showing the dirt on the glass, the cobwebs inside.
“Man,” Lanny breathed, “this ain’t good.”
“This is where I used to live. It’s not that bad.” Geneva put one foot on the bottom step. It felt weaker, somehow, beneath her weight. Fragile. As if the life had been sucked out of it, leaving just a hollow shell.
She crept up the last three steps. When she got to the top, she brought up her own flashlight. The beam of light cut through the darkness inside, falling on the overturned table. The mica-flecked stones of the fireplace sparkled in the corner.
Her chest went tight. She backed down a step. “I can’t do this.”
Mitch put a hand on her shoulder. She could feel the strength in his grip. “If you don’t go in now, you never will.”
She looked over her shoulder at him.
He nodded, once, and that was it.
She hefted her flashlight. The table was still in there, on its side, legs sticking out straight at her. A gust of wind picked up, carrying the earthy scent of the stream. A branch scraped against the cabin wall.
She reached inside her jacket and pulled out the pulser. It charged up with the old familiar whine, making her feel just a little safer. The sights lit up green.
Mitch shrugged off his backpack and got out the long silver Cerenkov. It hummed, a deep high-voltage buzz. A blue glow seeped from the muzzle.
“What about me, man?” Lanny climbed up the steps after them. He held up the AK-47. “Don’t I get something runs on batteries, too?”
Mitch motioned him back. “Do me a favor, okay? Don’t try to shoot anything.”
“Then Mother Nature best keep her distance. Any grizzly bear tries to take a bite out of me, I’m goin’ all Apocalypse Now on his ass.”
Geneva edged the door open and peered inside. Nothing looked the way she remembered it. Broken plates and fireplace logs littered the floor. Scraps of clothes were bunched up in the corners, hidden behind curtains of spiderwebs and dust. Dry leaves had blown in everywhere, and a half-circle of frozen slush sat under a broken windowpane.
The trapdoor in the center of the floor was closed. The ladder that had once gone up to her parents’ bed lay across it.
Geneva’s boots sounded hollow on the floor. It was a strange sound. She’d never had boots when she was a kid, only moccasins. Boots were something she’d picked up in the outside world, under Michael’s wing. Boots, leather jacket, and makeup. God, how she’d changed.
The cabin felt smaller than she remembered. Cramped, dingy, primitive. It made her feel guilty, thinking like that. Made her all the more aware of the aching hollowness inside her.
She’d thought the cabin would feel haunted. But it didn’t. It just felt dead. Empty. Like a burned-out lightbulb, all the energy gone, leaving nothing but a fragile hollowness.
Mitch came in behind her. He unscrewed the head from his flashlight, turning it into a tiny lamp. He held it overhead, bathing the room in a soft gold glow.
She cleared her throat and motioned Lanny in. “Come in. Close the door.”
“In there?” Lanny poked his head in through the doorway, eyes wide. “I don’t know. Think I’m safer out here, where there ain’t no man-eating mountain lions made a nest or something.”
“Come on.” She went over to the door and waited for Lanny to come inside. Broken plates crunched under her boots. Lanny slunk inside, shining his flashlight at every shadow.
The door stuck at first, then swung closed. The wrought iron latch clanked.
She turned off the pulser and stuck it back in her waistband. “Come on. Help me pick up the table.”
Lanny looked worried. “You serious? Probably something living under there.”
“Nothing’s going to hurt you, I promise. Come on.”
“Wait! What was that?” Lanny froze, eyes wide, looking around. “You hear that? Like a rattlesnake or something.”
“It’s too cold for rattlesnakes.”
“Maybe it’s a raccoon. Or a rat. Or a porcupine or something, I don’t know.”
Mitch turned off the Cerenkov and handed it to Geneva. He grabbed one end of the table and nodded to Lanny. “You gonna help or what?”
Lanny touched the table, then gripped it with the tips of his fingers.
Grunting, they lifted the table up and set it on its legs. Dirt and dry leaves sifted to the floor.
Geneva nodded. “Okay. Good. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m cold. So if we’re going to be here, let’s get a fire going.”
Mitch took the Cerenkov back from her. “You sure you want to do that?”
“What’s wrong with a fire? This is my home. I grew up here. I lived here. This is where I belong.”
Mitch nodded. “I can see that.”
“Good. So glad.” She picked up firewood by the pale light of the flashlight. “God, I forgot how much work it was chopping firewood. Splitting the logs. There’s a stump out back you set the logs up on for splitting. I used to be out there every afternoon, sometimes.”
Mitch picked up a couple of logs and brought them over to the fireplace. “Hard to imagine anybody still doing that. Living here. Chopping wood. Just like frontier days.”
He dumped the logs into the fireplace.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought you wanted to make a fire.”
“Mitch, you build a fire. You don’t just throw a bunch of logs in together.”
“Yeah? That’s what I do, kid. Squirt some lighter fluid on there and you’re all set.”
Geneva dropped her firewood on the stone hearth and knelt down. She pulled out the logs Mitch had thrown in. “You put a big one in the back, facing out.” She wrestled the biggest log into place. “That’s your hearth log. That’s what reflects the heat out into the room. Then you put a smaller one in front of it, like this. Get that just right.” She settled it into the sooty iron grate. “And before we put the last one on top, we need some kindling and tinder. Something light and flammable.”
Lanny dug in one of the backpacks and came up with a roll of paper towels. “Here. I don’t know why we have these anyway. I ain’t cleaning this place.”
She took the roll and tore off a long strip of paper towels, crumpling them up. “These’ll be good for tinder. But we still need kindling. Some little sticks and stuff that’ll burn long enough to start the logs.” She picked up some of the leaves and twigs that had blown in over the years and piled them between the logs, snapping the longer twigs to fit. Lanny and Mitch did the same. “Okay. Now the last log, we put that on top. In this case, we’re going to have to use two, but that’s okay.” She settled the logs in place and stood up. “My dad built this fireplace. He used to say a good fireplace keeps good memories. I guess he was right.”
Lanny held out his gold Zippo. The metal was smooth and warm. She flicked it open and watched the lazy blue-yellow flame. “Now why didn’t I ever have one of these? Beats the hell out of striking a flint.” She bent down to light the tinder.
Mitch put a hand on her shoulder. “Wait.”
She stopped, the Zippo an inch from the crumpled paper towels. “What?”
“Just wait.” Mitch stepped back from the fireplace. He held out his hands, framing it in his vision. “Doesn’t this look just a little too big for this place?”
“What? What’s too big?”
“The fireplace. Come back here and look at it.” He motioned her back.
She snapped the Zippo closed and walked over to join him. The fireplace looked the same as it always had her whole life. Giant, solid. Made of sparkling rounded river stones cemented together. “I don’t see anything.”
Lanny went over to join them, frowning at the fireplace. “Big old medieval fireplace, man. What’s the problem?”
“It’s too big. Look, if you’re gonna haul rocks up a mountainside for your fireplace, you’re not gonna make any extra trips if you can help it.” Mitch scratched his chin. The stubble was loud beneath his fingers. “Your parents built this place?”
“No. My dad said he was hiking one time in college and he found it. Way before I was born.”
“So someone used to live here, maybe a hundred years ago. Like a gold prospector or something.”
“Probably.”
“They had to have a fireplace, right? I mean, originally. There’s a chimney poking out of the roof.”
“So?”
Mitch walked over to the fireplace and tapped a rock with the butt of his flashlight. He put his ear against the stone and tapped another rock.
“What are you doing?”
Mitch closed his eyes and kept tapping, working his way across the fireplace. “I don’t think your dad built the whole fireplace. I think he just added onto …” He stopped, went back a few inches, and tapped again. “I’ll be damned.”
“What?” She put her ear to the rock.
Mitch tapped the stone. Tunk tunk tunk. “You hear that?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Listen.” Tunk tunk tink. “It’s different here. You hear that?” He tapped that spot again. Tink tink tink.
Geneva pulled back and looked. The stones didn’t seem any different. “Mitch, you’re driving me nuts. What are you talking about?”
Mitch pointed. “Somebody added onto the original fireplace. This whole thick mantel on top, it was all added on later. The rocks are different. The mortar’s different.” Mitch traced out a rectangular patch with this finger, directly above the hearth. “Here. This whole area. It’s hollow.”
He left her staring at the spot and came back a few moments later with a hammer. It still had the bar code sticker on the steel head. “You know, when we went shopping for this stuff, I never thought we’d use it. Better get back.”
“Mitch, don’t—”
He drew the hammer back with both hands and swung it into the middle of the mantelpiece. The noise sounded like a gunshot.
She backed away as Mitch hammered at the stones, leaving white half-circles on the rock, sending chunks of mortar flying and skittering across the floor. A few blows later, a rock came loose. Mitch dug it out and dropped it. He stepped back, breathing hard, and wiped his nose.
She was about to start yelling at him when something caught her eye. In the hollow gap where he’d pulled out the rock, she could see the flat side of a steel box, covered in dust.