1

The crunch of tires on gravel grew in the distance. Oncoming headlights turned the tree line buttery yellow at its edges. They cut across the asphalt, illuminating a faded Sunkist-orange sign featuring a ruddy cluster of grapes and the cursive words

Hamm Winery

Spend a beautiful day in a beautiful place.

Exit 14 off State Road 217.

Behind a nearby tree, Fiona Jones, nine years old, squinted and hunkered down close to her bike. She’d overheard the men correctly. They’d brought him here.

Edgar Hokes’s blue pickup truck shuddered to a halt by the side of the road no more than twenty feet away from her. Her father, Robert, hopped out of the passenger seat and purposefully strode to the back of the vehicle. Edgar himself, tall and unflappable, with deep lines in his face, calmly stepped out from behind the wheel. Darren Fiddler—Caroline’s dad, Fiona thought, so nice during sleepovers—was seated in the bed of the truck. She’d known these three men her whole life, but the hard looks on their faces made them unrecognizable to her.

Edgar Hokes opened the back door, and he and Robert Jones carried the boy out of the back, their arms hooked at his elbows. Fiona’s stomach clenched in terror—his hands were bound with duct tape, his feet similarly so. They dumped him facedown on the grass at the foot of the road sign like a sack of garbage.

Edgar Hokes knelt behind him and pulled a deadly-looking knife from his boot. For a moment, Fiona thought her heart might explode, but then Edgar dug in with the blade and the boy’s hands and feet came free.

The boy got to his knees. He removed a rag from his mouth and a blindfold from his face. His army jacket was torn and bloody; a back patch with a strange symbol on it curled up at one corner like the lid of a half-opened can. The hood of his black sweatshirt was pulled over his head, obscuring him but for a few dangling strands of stringy hair.

Fiona couldn’t take her eyes off him.

“A few things you ought to know,” said her father in a tone she had never heard before, cold and slimy as a stone at the bottom of Winston Pond.

“The next time I see you,” said the boy, “I’m going to stand on your neck.”

Edgar’s knee pulled up, and in a flash, his boot struck the back of the boy’s skull, smashing his forehead into the support post of the winery sign with a thunk. Fiona gasped without meaning to, tears springing to her eyes. The boy fell forward but managed to stay on his hands and knees. The sound of his blood dribbling into the grass made her head spin.

“First thing is, you stay away from here,” continued her father as though nothing had happened. “I’m not just talking about our town. I mean the county, the region, the whole state. Got it?”

The boy spat.

“He asked you a question, you little shit!” yelped Darren Fiddler, a shaking leaf where there should’ve been a man. Fiona’s dad held up a hand, and Darren quieted down.

The hooded figure coughed. “My equipment,” he mumbled, “my laptop, my records—”

“Gone. Forget about them. Those are the least of your concerns,” said her father. “Your laptop? Son, you’re lucky we didn’t take your teeth.”

Tears ran down Fiona’s cheeks, hot and quick. She didn’t know why, but taking his music and equipment felt like they were desecrating him, ripping out his soul.

“Second. I’m sure you have plenty of friends from the city who think they’re real tough. Real gangsters. But I promise you, if any of your degenerate pals roll through here, they ain’t leaving. Which leads me to our third and final word of warning.” He leaned in close, his voice barely audible. “If we ever see one of these kids you got rid of wandering around our streets again, we’re going to take it as an attack. We will find you, and we’ll hold you personally responsible. Got it?”

A pause, the night full of electricity.

And then the boy shook as a dark, throaty laugh wheezed out of him.

“Something funny?” said Hokes, flicking his thumb on the handle of his knife.

“The…blindfold,” spat the boy. “My gangster friends. You three.” His chuckle became a cackle lined with a gurgle. “You think you’re a bunch of hard-asses because you beat up some kid in funny clothes? Let’s be honest, Mr. Jones, you couldn’t pay me. You made a deal with the devil, the time came to pony up, and you chumps didn’t have a soul among the lot of you.”

With a long inhale, the boy rose to his feet, the headlights illuminating the patch that dominated his jacket. Fiona’s eyes drank in the design on it—circles within circles, old Latin words, strange figures beckoning to distant planets.

“So here’s my warning to you,” said the boy. “Before tonight? You were just another pathetic small town that needed an exterminator. But I promise you, I’ll never forget this, or you.” His one hand slapped wetly against the sign, leaving a bloody handprint. “Hamm, Ohio. A beautiful day in a beautiful place—”

Her father’s fist hit the boy’s kidney with an ugly thud, sending him back down to his knees. Then Edgar and Darren moved in and kicked him for what felt like hours. Fiona sobbed silently and finally threw her hands over her eyes, unable to watch.

When the sounds of boot on flesh ceased, she parted her fingers and peeked at the scene. The three enforcers stood there in the dark, panting. The strange man who used to be her father nodded, and his cohorts climbed back into the truck. “Last warning, boy,” Robert Jones called over his shoulder. “Walk away.”

The truck’s engine coughed to life. The headlights flared, illuminating Fiona’s hiding place for one heart-stopping instant—and then they were gone in a spray of gravel. The night resumed its heavy silence, cut only by the shrill cries of crickets and the bloody coughing of the boy in the dirt.

After a few minutes, Fiona wiped her face on her sleeve and rose from her cramped crouch. The boy had moved only slightly, half collapsed against the post of the sign. What little of his face she could catch in the moonlight looked swollen and shiny with blood. She watched as he wept for just a moment—wracking, full-body sobs that shook him at the waist, reminding to Fiona just how young he really was—before he swallowed hard and went silent.

Somewhere in her core, she knew he was brave. To get upagain and again, to not fold under their threats, to talk back to her father…those weren’t the actions of a coward. There was no way he was the simple villain her town feared.

He was so strange, like an alien or an angel, a creature from a place she’d never known. She wanted desperately to help him. Her hands dug into her backpack, searching around for something, anything, to show him that he wasn’t alone out there.

She later considered how weird it must have looked to him—here he was, lying beaten and bloodied a good eight and a half miles from anywhere, and out of the trees comes this skinny, little girl with an overbite and a ponytail, the girl from the town council meeting, holding out an apple and a bottle of water.

It must have been frightening, surreal. But he didn’t even flinch when she approached him. As she put the food down a good three feet away from him—because who knew? Maybe he was dangerous—he didn’t budge. He just followed her with his eyes.

What did he see in her? she wondered. What was there to see?

“Thank you,” he whispered, his eyes shining like stars. “What’s your name?”

Her heart leaped, her lungs failed her, and she ran. She was on her bike in seconds, pedaling her butt off down the back paths through the woods. In one final glance over her shoulder, she saw him pushing himself up to his knees and reaching for the water.