Acquisition

Just after midnight and Barlow was on that long stretch of I-15 between Baker and Vegas when he felt the pull of the dead. It spiked his adrenaline and he scanned the other cars and the endless desert, searching for his prey. His mouth went dry and tacky. He chewed nervously on the side of his tongue and tasted blood.

A young woman ran into the road, lit up in the headlights of the Jeep like a wild animal. He caught a glimpse of a pink T-shirt, denim cutoffs, blonde pixie hair sticking out in disarray, before he slammed on his brakes, kicking up dust as he jerked the wheel, just missing her. There was a raging air horn from a passing semi, too close, and then his tires thump-bumped off the soft shoulder and the Jeep rocked to a stop.

In the rearview he saw the girl, red in his taillights, coming toward him in a limping rush of panic and gratitude.

He zeroed out the odometer.

Deep breath.

“Here we go.”

He reached across the seat and threw open the passenger door.

She scrambled inside and shouted, “Go-please-go-please-go-go-go,” her words running together. As she yanked the door shut between herself and the desert those words devolved into a violent crying jag.

Barlow clicked the electronic door locks and hit the gas.

He heard his wife in his head. Karen. Patience, she said.

Barlow let the girl cry. Gave her a minute. Someone her age should’ve been in college, or having her first legal drink, not stranded out here in the dark. He swallowed a few times, trying to rid himself of the taste of blood—a taste he always associated with anticipation. Metal, earth, and life. It made him edgy. Another semi passed around them and the Jeep shook in its wake.

“I was out there for s-s-so long, trying to flag someone down.” She was shaking. “They wuh-wouldn’t stop for m-m-me.”

He kept glancing away from the road, fascinated by her.

She pulled her smooth, tanned legs up onto the seat and hugged her knees. She was barefoot, with neon-green nail polish on her toenails, but there were no scrapes on the soles of her feet. No sign at all that she’d been standing on the gravel shoulder of the interstate.

Calm, Karen said. Be kind.

His mind wandered, a whirlwind of thoughts, of fears, and when he glanced at the odometer he was shocked to see that nearly two miles had clicked by. He was running out of time.

“I’m Barlow.”

The girl didn’t answer. Just sniffed. She used the back of her hand to brush tears from her wide blue eyes, to wipe at the rounded tip of her delicate nose.

He’d seen her face before.

“Wow, must’ve been some accident, huh?” Barlow was going for sympathetic, but came off as too cheerful. He imagined his wife smiling sadly at him, shaking her head. He was doing it all wrong. He unbuttoned the collar of his charcoal shirt, trying to get some air. Trying to get comfortable. “How’d you get all the way out here? Did you have a car, or—”

“Can you just drop me at the next exit, please?”

“Sure, sure.” He swallowed hard, as if something was caught in his throat. He undid another button and said, “Hey, want to see something neat?”

“If you show me your dick, I’ll rip it off,” she warned.

“No, no,” Barlow said, forcing a chuckle. “Nothing like that.” He wore a talisman around his neck, a rawhide strap looped around a thin bone. There were carvings along the length of the bone. Tiny, meticulous symbols. He held it up for her to see. Pulled it over his head. Held it out to her.

The girl hardly glanced at it.

“Metacarpal,” he said, turning it between his long fingers. “A near-perfect example of such a little bone. So delicate, but you need it to support the structure of the hand. It’s critical. We all have them.” Barlow swallowed again. “I used to stare at this bone and wonder what else we all had in common. What else was so necessary, hiding under our skin like that?”

Three miles, and none of the usual signs. Barlow cleared his throat.

“This is my favorite piece. A gift from my wife. It’s unique, and—”

“Please,” the girl said. She turned to the window. She had started crying again. “Can you just drop me off?”

Barlow frowned. “I was going to say, this is how I did it. How I knew you’d be out here. How I could find you. It pulls me along, and I just follow it, the way a lost man follows the needle of a compass. It’s special. People who know about these things, other collectors, they’ve offered me fortunes for it. You wouldn’t believe how much.”

Sniffing, she said, “My p-parents have money. Davis Asher, he’s my father. I’m Alyssa Asher. I’m … we’re … I’m wealthy. I can get you money, if you can just get me home.”

Barlow’s mouth felt flooded with the metallic tang of blood. He could smell it, too. On his breath, leaking from his pores, filling the cabin of the Jeep. The anticipation was palpable. He ran his fingertips over the cracked vinyl steering wheel. He let the traffic flow around them. Hardly glanced at it anymore. He tapped his fingers softly, ever so softly.

Alyssa tensed, staring out the window. Hoping. Then she crumbled into herself and let out a whimper as he drove past an exit. “Please?”

The odometer clicked another tenth of a mile. She trembled, a tree with her leaves stripped bare, trying to hold herself together as a hurricane ripped her apart.

He heard Karen, again. Good. Almost time, now.

“You’ve come so far, little one,” Barlow said. He looped the talisman back over his neck and tucked it in his shirt. “I wonder … how far can you go before you break?”

Quaking, with tears running freely down her cheekbones, Alyssa finally turned her haunted eyes to him. Her voice was a frightened whisper. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Barlow rubbed the rawhide strap of the talisman, weighing his options. “There are buyers in Las Vegas. Those collectors I mentioned? True connoisseurs. Men who’ll appreciate you and see you as the jewel you are. On the other hand … I’m a collector myself.”

Karen made a dismissive noise.

It made him smile. “It’s something I’ll have to consider.”

Alyssa panicked and reached for the door handle, fingers fumbling. When she yanked on it, it didn’t open. Barlow let out a delighted giggle when it moved a little, though. The odometer was at six miles.

“Absolutely remarkable. And so far from your anchor! You must have incredible willpower.”

Then—he couldn’t help himself any longer—Barlow reached over and touched her bare thigh. Ice cold, but still tangible. Alyssa shuddered violently and recoiled, pressing herself against the passenger door even as she became translucent and began to fade.

In a final gasp, she said, “Let me out of the car right now!” It was like someone turning down the sound on a stereo, softer and softer and softer. She reached for the door handle again and her fingers passed right into it. She screamed, but there was no sound, only anguish, and Barlow could see right through her, through her window, into the outer dark.

And then she was gone.

The first pieces of Barlow’s collection were sad, folksy things, left hanging in trees or laying upon tombstones. A string of teeth. A floating rib. An ulna. The markings on those forgotten bones were rough and inexpertly done—superstitious trinkets, abandoned by their creators.

Still, they served a purpose.

Barlow had held them in his fingers and around him the dead manifested as flickering echoes of what they had once been. They were confused and dejected, lost and aimless and filled with sorrow. He spoke to them, hoping for insight, wanting to understand the hidden secrets of the universe. But there was only misery and helplessness.

Their stories differed, but to Barlow the ghosts were all the same.

The wonder of an afterlife faded quickly. When Barlow tired of them, he sold his pieces to real collectors. Men and women who already had everything else—a pet soul was worth whatever price he asked.

He’d met Karen through the collectors. She was an artist, and understood the archaic rituals of binding. She made beautiful pieces—each one polished and precious. Each a work of art. She was as fascinated with his ability to stumble upon bound souls as he was with her obvious talent for such an unnatural sense of expression.

She was an artist, but also a hunter. She uncovered the stories of the dead and tried to reflect the beauty of their lives in the pieces she created.

He didn’t understand her, but she fascinated him.

Now that he was out on his own, Karen was the voice of his conscience. He kept her close, especially when he had to go away. It was his way of staying true. Of staying focused.

“What do I do now?” he asked her.

Patience, Karen said, just as she had the first time he’d gone with her, out into the night to hunt the dead. It was the word she whispered in his bed, inches from his lips, pressed up against him, letting anticipation build until it drove him wild. It was what she said when she made that final cut, when she told him how to carve the runes, when she made him practice, made him repeat her instructions over and over again until he stopped fumbling and knew them by heart.

Patience.

Barlow chewed on his tongue.

In the halogen-blue halo of a lonely Chevron station, Barlow parked his Jeep and pulled out his cell. Alyssa’s range of manifestation was nearly double that of any other spirit he had encountered.

6.2 miles! She was something wonderful.

He scrolled through his contacts and almost dialed, but he put the cell back in his pocket. He needed to calm down first.

Inside the cinder block convenience mart the florescent lights made everyone seem radioactive and unhealthy. Barlow’s hand shook as he poured himself a coffee, and he had to use a handful of napkins to clean up the spill. The first bitter sip scalded his tongue.

“Long night?” the middle-aged woman behind the counter asked. Purple velvet pantsuit with frizzy orange hair.

“Something like that,” Barlow said. He managed a weak smile.

“Drive safe out there.”

Outside, back behind the wheel, Barlow dialed a number on his cell. Sheehan was a professional Las Vegas middleman. He’d given Barlow a business card, and under Sheehan’s name were the words: Procurements and Acquisitions. He answered on the first ring, his voice gruff and secretive.

“Mr. Barlow?”

“Yes. I think I’ve found her.”

“Who’s her?”

“That vanishing hitchhiker we talked about.”

“Pink shirt? Cutoffs?”

“That’s her.”

In his suite in Vegas, Sheehan whooped as if he’d just hit blackjack. Then his voice dropped an octave. “You think you can get her?”

Barlow hesitated.

“Don’t dick me around here. Karen told me to trust you, so I’m trusting you, but my buyers are serious men. If you can’t—”

“I can get her,” Barlow said.

“You have a name? Any details at all?”

“Not yet,” Barlow said. The lie came easily.

“Get some. Pronto. Everyone’s nocturnal in this city, so we can do this tonight if you don’t drive like an old lady.”

“I’ll let you know.”

He almost hung up, but heard Sheehan calling his name.

“What was that? I missed it,” Barlow asked.

“If it pans out, this puts you on another level.” Sheehan chuckled. “From scavenger to hunter. You move up the food chain, man—just like Karen did.”

Barlow ended the call. “Scavenger,” he said, and his voice was gravel and rage.

Patience, he thought, and this time it was his own voice he heard, not Karen’s.

It became a mantra. A reminder.

He said it aloud. “Patience.”

The next swig of coffee burned like acid down his throat, and Barlow welcomed it.

After twenty minutes of driving—first west, then east again—Barlow pulled off the road into a dark stretch of the desert. He killed his headlights first, then the dome-light before he opened the door. The midnight wind kicked up dry grit, hints of juniper, and rancid exhaust from the interstate. The temperature had dropped, and it was colder than expected. There was a leather jacket draped across the backseat of the Jeep, and he pulled it on before running around to the trunk and disabling his brake lights. He felt anonymous, twenty-five yards from the busy road, but he was wary of eastbound authorities. He had to be careful now. Patient.

He watched for a full two minutes, headlights coming, taillights going. A steady rush of whispering tires on asphalt. Then he got back into the Jeep and threw it into four-wheel drive.

There was nothing romantic about the desert. Even at night it was a scorched wasteland—a flat-black void stretching out to a jagged horizon where it met the purple bruise of the sky. He drove cautiously between the skeletal frames of dead trees—silhouettes of agony, reaching for unseen stars. Once the constellations would’ve rotated above, but the ambient light from the nearby interstate kept them hidden. Kept them biding their time until civilization collapsed and they could return.

Barlow took it slowly, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, worried about cracking something vital in the engine by driving over a boulder. He felt a rush of warmth from the talisman around his neck—another pull—so he stopped, grabbed a black medical bag from behind his seat, and headed out on foot into the dark.

The wind picked up. It grabbed at his door. He caught it and kicked it shut. He hefted the bag, blinked away dust, and followed the pull of the talisman.

It was cold in this dead place. Skull-shaped rocks pushed up from between clutches of desperate scrub-grass. Gravel and sand crunched underfoot. His eyes couldn’t keep up and soon he felt blinded by the night. He stood alone in the darkness, frantically pawing through his bag.

“Patience,” he said again. He forced himself to slow down. Just like Karen had taught him.

He found the flashlight and clicked it on. A circle of white sand jumped in front of him. The light offered no relief from the pressure of the void, only changed it—sacrificing the anonymity of the shadows for less treacherous passage.

Barlow was close. He knew it. He swept the flashlight from side to side, following the psychic tug of the talisman. Then, in the flashlight’s relentless beam, abandoned in this isolated place, was a cairn of chipped rock and hastily-shoveled earth. Just a mound, easily overlooked, but unable to hold up against closer scrutiny.

Proof that some animal had tried to hide its shame.

Barlow tasted blood, again. Fresher this time. He hadn’t realized that he’d been gnawing the inside of his cheek until it tore. He approached the mound, holding his breath, swallowing copper.

There, left to the world, left to the elements, were the remains of her uncovered foot.

Alyssa was suddenly beside him. Her pixie hair blew in the breeze. Her pink shirt rippled. She didn’t feel the cold.

“I found her like this.” There was no panic in her voice now, only concern. “She’s badly hurt. She needs help. I tried to flag someone down, but nobody stopped.”

Barlow smiled at the ghost and patted his black bag.

“I’m here to help.”

Even before she gave him the talisman, Karen was worried that he wasn’t cut out for acquisitions. She encouraged his ability to communicate with ghosts, and frequently brought him to the sites of recent murders in the hopes that he’d be able to help her track down a wayward soul or two. She said that death was a force of nature, and there was so much they still didn’t know. She told him he needed to be wary, and that not all spirits would fit into narrow categories. Souls were unique.

You can’t be so vulnerable around them, she had said. You’re too open. They are beings of pure emotion, and they can haunt you. They can tear you apart. Honestly, I don’t know how you’ve survived this long.

Whether what she said was true or not, Barlow found it hard not to see most manifestations as almost painfully predictable. The ghosts were overwhelmed with contradictions. With denial. With confusion. The hell they lived in was one they created for themselves—and one that could not be derailed. They became fearful, and needed to run as fast and as far as they could, only to be snapped back in place. To be returned to the place of their deaths.

To their anchors.

If he chased them back he would find them pathetic and lost and ripe for the plucking. They would look to him for help. For solace. And when he said the wrong thing or sent them into a panic, he would simply leave and return later, because every new manifestation was like a reset button. It changed them, forcing them back to the beginning of a new narrative.

It was doubtful, Barlow knew, that Alyssa remembered him, or could recall being in his Jeep at all. How many times before that had she run? How often did she flag down a car and jump in, hoping for salvation, only to return to this barren place? To this rough burial mound?

You’re close, Karen said. He could feel that playful smile she got during a collection … and that harsh edge to her voice. Don’t screw it up, love.

“Hold this for me.” Barlow gave Alyssa the flashlight. She shifted her weight and her toes waggled in the sand. He couldn’t quite make out the neon-green nail polish. “Point it right into the bag, will you?”

Barlow reached in and pulled on his leather gloves. Then he removed a small hatchet.

They walked together to the cairn. Barlow knelt and started shifting rocks. Brushing away debris. He worked quickly, and in the harsh glare of the flashlight he saw the torn pink T-shirt, filthy and faded, splattered in black blossoms of old, dried blood. She smelled of dust and time and the desert—the lost remains of a twenty-two year old girl.

Alyssa Asher. How long had she been in the news? How many times had her face been on the covers of magazines with ambiguous headlines speculating everything from cult-ritual murder to drug-induced suicide?

She was a genuine celebrity—heiress to a fortune, and ripped away from that tabloid world by unanswered questions and unfound evidence.

After so long, her decomposing body was in bad shape, and every rock he overturned resulted in a new detail of brutality. Shattered ribs. Jagged knife cuts through her clothing, into the dried jerky of her remaining musculature. Vertebrae where her head had been twisted violently around, displaying the staved-in crater of her skull.

Alyssa held the flashlight on the body. “Is she going to be okay?”

Barlow grunted, and wondered at the cosmic force that could bind a spirit to this world by its dead husk, but still establish coping mechanisms to deal with such a shock.

He found her left arm, bent out of true. He frowned, afraid of how much damage had been done. Afraid of what he’d find. “Right here,” he said, asking for light. Her left hand was undamaged, and he let out his breath in a rush.

The first few times he had needed to disassociate himself from the process, telling himself that it wasn’t meat and bone under his fingertips, only sticks he was breaking up for kindling. Karen was the one who forced him to make the connections, who told him how important it was to be aware when he did the work … no matter how distasteful.

He held her left hand, knelt on the bent arm, and brought his little hatchet down on her wrist. Four hard whacks later, he threw the hand into his black bag with the hatchet, closed it up, and took the flashlight back from Alyssa.

Go now, Karen said. Quickly.

“Oh, no,” Alyssa said. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

There were actual tears running down her cheeks again. In all his years, he had never seen such a thing. Again, he marveled that she had such a strong sense of self that she could conjure tears, clothes … a whole and undamaged body. She had so much strength.

“Why did you do that?” she asked.

Barlow started back toward the Jeep. “She’s fine, now,” he said dismissively.

“She’s not. Just look at her.”

“Don’t worry,” Barlow said. Now that he had the hand he walked a little faster. A little more confidently. “Everything’s fine.”

“Wait! Don’t go!”

Alyssa grabbed him by the shoulder, and Barlow screamed.

Her fingertips were like frozen hooks in his flesh. There was so much power in her. More than in any of the other apparitions he’d ever encountered. Her desire to exist—to be—overwhelmed him.

Barlow felt afraid, and something rushed in with the fear. The wonder of a soul. A living soul. The undeniable truth of it. And layered over that, a sudden lurch in his chest. A panicking realization.

This close, with the icy knives in his shoulder, he knew Karen was right. He was unprepared for this. For the emotion of Alyssa Asher. For her strength. It frightened him, but it exhilarated him, too. This was not another depressing trinket for millionaire collectors.

Alyssa was unique.

He wanted her for his own.

Barlow wasn’t sure he could handle her.

He moaned at the pain in his shoulder. “You have to let me go.”

Through gritted teeth, she said, “She’s been here such a long time.”

There was an electric light behind her blue eyes. Something ethereal. Something wrong. A secondary stage of manifestation—one he’d only heard rumors about.

For Barlow, fear clenched into terror.

“I’ve been here such a long time,” Alyssa said.

“Yes.” Barlow nodded. Her fingers threatened to tear his arm off at the shoulder. He struggled.

Then he looked right at her and said, “You really have. Fifteen years, give or take.”

Alyssa flinched away as if he’d slapped her. The moment she released him, Barlow ran, stumbling over tombstone slabs of rock, slipping in gravel. The talisman burned against his chest and he wanted to tear it off, to scream at his wife that she should’ve been here. That she could’ve handled this one.

I couldn’t have. The girl is too powerful, Karen said.

He felt the wind change. Strengthen. Behind him, in that hidden place, Alyssa started screaming at the veiled moon. She screamed as time collapsed in on her. As all of her carefully-built walls against reality began to crumble.

Fifteen years, he’d told her. Fifteen years of being unseen, ignored, and forgotten. Fifteen years, falling into place.

He heard an avalanche of thunder coming from right overhead. There were lightning flashes behind him in that same electric blue he’d seen under Alyssa’s skin. He felt the wind pressing into him, trying to pull him back. Trying to pull him toward her.

Run, Karen said.

Something shifted in his mind. It stopped him at the door to his Jeep, braced against the wind and trembling in the crash of thunder.

It was an epiphany. A sudden and horrifying realization.

He was a hunter, yes, but—but what if he could do more than just collect her?

What if he could free her?

He turned and saw a force of nature. A soul ignoring the frail reality of her afterlife, of her desert tomb. A soul bending and shaping the very weather in her anguish.

He had never wanted something so badly in all of his life. A jewel in his collection.

Or … was she something else?

Could she be his salvation?

Don’t be an idiot, Karen said.

He always tried talking to them. Always. He tried to calm them and soothe them and help them along the way, but Karen had been so focused. So brusque. So willing to bind their souls to remnants of bone and call it art.

Alyssa screamed at the sky, and the stars appeared, pushing through the layers of night, of filth and pollution, to shine just for her.

“What if there’s a different way?” Barlow asked the world.

He suddenly knew, no matter the risk, he couldn’t leave her rotting out here in this cold, lifeless place.

You’ll kill yourself, Karen said.

“Patience,” he told his wife. “We’ll see.”

He stumbled into the Jeep and yanked open the back. There was a butcher’s block in the trunk and a tackle box filled with tools. Shaking, rushing, he pulled Alyssa’s dismembered hand from his bag and slapped it down on the block. The wind whipped at his jacket, and made his Jeep rock as it had when the semi had passed them on the I-15. He held the flashlight in his teeth and went to work, scraping away the remaining meat from the bones with a fillet knife. Stripping it. Preparing it.

He clipped out the third metacarpal of her left hand—the one that continued on to the ring finger. Karen always liked that one best. She said it was symbolic, and he didn’t disagree.

The howling wind brought pressure. More grit. The overwhelming sense of failure. That he wasn’t good enough, that he could never be good enough. That he had screwed it up before and he’d do it again.

Barlow carved into the bone. Those tiny, meticulous runes that Karen had made him practice again and again—the symbols of her profession. Binding spells she had taught him, and that he’d worked so hard to get right.

He’d never been in a rush before. It had never felt so important to hurry.

So much power, swirling around him, changing the desert wind into a hurricane.

There was so much at stake.

So much he could lose—more than just another sale.

This wasn’t a ghost.

This was a life, tearing itself apart.

Barlow finished the runes and then Alyssa was right beside him, screaming, and he screamed back in fright and dropped the flashlight. He nearly dropped the bone into the dirt, too, and ran into the darkness, as far away as he could get. He held his ground against her. She was a shrieking dervish, a devil of the desert, filled with rage and fear beyond measure.

“I’m trying to save you!” he shouted.

Lightning flashed just under her skin. Her construct—the manifestation of her soul after death—deteriorated, becoming the raw emotion Karen had warned him about. Raw power, like nothing he’d ever believed. Like nothing he had known existed.

“You can’t help,” Alyssa screamed. “Nothing can!”

And in his head, just as loud, Karen echoed her words. You can’t help. Nothing can.

“No,” he said.

She’s lost to us.

Barlow checked the runes again.

You’re lost to me.

They needed to be perfect.

Satisfied, he cut into his own thumb and rubbed blood into the runes, tearing Alyssa’s anchor away from the dead thing under the forgotten rocks and binding her finally, forever, to that small, delicate bone.

Alyssa was gone in an instant. The wind died. The thunder moved on. Barlow trembled, heart racing, mouth filled with grit and shame and contradiction.

He stared at the bone. Wiped tears from his eyes that he hadn’t known were there.

“It’ll have to do,” he said.

Karen didn’t answer.

Barlow held the delicate bone in his fist. Made the call.

Sheehan didn’t believe him at first. There was harsh laughter. “No one else is buying them for this kind of money. You’ll kill your reputation.”

“I can’t,” Barlow said. “Not anymore. Not ever again.”

Sheehan growled frustration into the phone. “You don’t have a choice, here. We’re already in the middle of this. If you back out now, I’ll find you and take them anyway. You don’t want that, Barlow. You don’t want me as an enemy. Don’t be a fool.”

“I’m sorry,” Barlow said, but he wasn’t. Not really. Not after everything he’d seen.

Threats were replaced with a rising plea in the man’s gruff voice. “I’ve made commitments. Karen vouched for you!”

Barlow hung up on him and pulled the battery out of his phone.

The bridge to that world was burned. Sheehan would find him eventually. Make good on his promises.

But by then, who knew what the world would be like?

I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?

More silence in return. Karen didn’t answer.

Barlow drove into the hills of Los Angeles as the sun came up in the east. It would already be bright and warm and golden over her cairn in the desert. Night was gone.

The bungalow he shared with his wife was small, but in an expensive area. The job paid well—when he didn’t bail out of a sale—and there was a certain acidic queasiness in his stomach when Barlow thought about how badly Sheehan would come after him. Not that it mattered.

He could never do it again. For years he’d sold bones to faceless men like Sheehan for incredible amounts of money.

Not bones. Souls.

He had to swallow hard to keep from screaming. He couldn’t let himself think of all the others in his collection. Not yet, anyway.

There was too much that needed to be done.

He held out the new bone. Beside him, in his home, Alyssa took it warily.

She’d been quiet on the ride back, away from the dark of the desert. She’d had her feet tucked up and she had stared out the window at passing traffic, at glowing billboards, and at the pocket havens of light and life off every exit. She never asked to leave, and never tried to run.

She had asked, once, where they were going.

Barlow had answered as honestly as he could. “Home,” he said. “I need your help.”

He led her into a back room with a view of the encroaching desert—a wilderness waiting to reclaim Los Angeles when humanity finally leaves.

Alyssa turned away from the view, and Barlow led her to a figure in the shadows.

“Darling,” Barlow said to his wife. “This is Alyssa.”

He read disappointment there, in the tilt of his wife’s head as she slumped in her chair and the way her lips were curled back, turning her once-lovely smile into a rictus snarl. She never talked to him anymore. Not really.

“Things have changed, my love,” he said.

In the hollow, empty sockets of her rotting skull, Barlow imagined his wife’s eyes filled with judgment.

He held his wife’s flayed and broken hand—the talisman he wore around his neck had been an integral part of that structure—and he readjusted her wedding ring. The worst of the smell was gone after so much time, but he would need to change her clothes again. Something foul had sloughed off underneath and had stained them.

Barlow had tried to take care of her. She’d done it to herself, cut out the metacarpal of her own hand, and she made him go step-by-step to finish the binding ritual. But he had screwed it up. Left her trapped in this husk. Tied to her anchor for eternity.

Karen had never wanted that. She’d never wanted to die.

The cancer hadn’t cared.

Barlow pulled the talisman from around his neck, looking at the amateurish way he had tried binding his wife’s soul. The way he had tried to trap her inside that consequential bone. It was a dead thing. He let it go.

“Are you sure you can?” Barlow asked.

With lightning in her eyes, sending flashes across the walls of the dark room and across the face of his wife’s dead body, Alyssa nodded.

“First we save her,” Alyssa said. “Then all of the others.”

She stared at the corpse, and held her hand—clutching the last anchor Karen had to this world. Alyssa hesitated only a moment, then said, “Hello, Mrs. Barlow. Why don’t you join me?”

Alyssa pulled, and the room was filled with light.