CHAPTER 49

Corin was only asleep for what seemed like seconds before his cell phone shattered his dreams. He glanced at his alarm clock. One a.m. He fumbled for his phone and squinted against the light coming from it and looked to see who was on the other end.

Adrenaline shot through him and in an instant he was awake. Shasta. Was it possible? Was he healed?

Corin rubbed his eyes and tried to remember how long it had been since his brother sat in the chair. Three days? With Brittan, A. C., and him the healing had come within twenty-four hours, so there’d been plenty of time for it to work.

Please.

“Shasta?”

He heard the faint strains of the soundtrack from Gladiator playing through the phone.

“Shasta, you there?”

“Yes, I’m here.” His brother paused. “Are you well?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“How does it feel, to be ‘fine’?” Shasta’s voice sounded like ice.

No.

Corin stumbled to his feet.

“How does it feel to have sensation in your toes, your feet, your legs, your fingers, your arms, your shoulders? Tell me, brother, what is it like to be fine? I’m dying to know.”

“Don’t do this, Shasta.”

“I think it needs to be done. Because you had me. Really. Did you know that? I was convinced this was the time. Miracle city. When you told me that kid had been healed, I thought it was possible.

“When you told me A. C. had been healed, I called him. Did you know that? After talking to him I believed even more. Then the coup de grâce, telling me you’d been healed. In that moment I swallowed every worm on your hook.”

Shasta’s slow, labored breathing reverberated in Corin’s mind like a windstorm.

“Congratulations on ripping open a hope I’ve been trying to bury for ten years. Well done.”

“Shasta—”

“If you ever contact me again for anything, I will find a way to destroy you. No talking to Robin, no more presents for Sawyer, no e-mails, no Christmas cards, nothing.”

“I didn’t—”

“Do we understand each other?”

“Don’t do this.”

“You did it, not me.”

“I thought—”

“No, you rarely have ever thought, just acted.”

Corin dropped to his knees.

“Good-bye, Corin.”

He let his cell phone slide out his hand and clatter to the floor.

Then his despair twisted and morphed into an anger that lifted him to his feet, a burning in his mind that formed into a crystal-clear vision of what needed to be done.

He strode to his garage, his whole body on fire, and flung open the closest hiding all his old sports gear. He dug through the pile, flinging hiking gear, basketballs, his tennis racquet, his golf clubs, not turning or caring when the sound of them smacking into his car filled the garage.

Where is it?

There.

His baseball bat. The perfect instrument for the song he was about to play. A bat he’d crafted himself in junior high school after seeing that old movie The Natural about a player who’d made his own bat when he was a kid. The bat lay at the bottom of the pile, its surface still gleaming from the finish he’d put on it twenty years ago.

He lifted it out of the pile and ran his hand over its smooth surface.

He’d picked the perfect piece of northern white ash to construct the bat. The perfect choice for slugging homers off John Vanos in high school.

He stepped back and swung the bat as hard as he could. The perfect tool to bestow on it what had been bestowed on him.

Something inside tried to rise in protest, but he ignored the message and whipped the bat through the air again, the familiar swoosh filling his garage.

He’d lost little if any of his bat speed.

This was it. Payback time.