CZM Book Club: The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion: Part Three

just making up a story. I admit I've never finished a Thomas Bench no.

began more somberly than my first. It was well after dark by the time Vulture showed up with potatoes and onions and spring greens to be cooked before heading back to the lookout rock. The days in Brn were in the living room working through plans, which left me alone to cook. I was happy to spend some time in the kitchen. It had been a long time since I've been surrounded by people living the way I wanted to live, and I was almost able to convince myself that things

were going to be fine. I've got a long history of scraping together little moments of peace in the midst of hardship, and cooking is a great way to do that. I cubed the potatoes, and, alongside lots of garlic and oil, set them in a pan in the oven. I went through their spice rack and realized half of what they had had been grown, dried, and chopped here in town. I let myself get lost in the smell of fresh and dried herbs. The Brussels sprouts were from the food bank,

but were going to taste amazing regardless. I cut them up, drizzled them with oil and salt, put them in the second tray. I've made fancier meals in my life, but it still felt good. I set the old fashioned kitchen timer and went to join everyone else. You can't figure it out, Brune asked, she was pacing. She didn't strike me as the typoo worried much, but she was worried. Even Doomsday looked paler than usual. She leaned back in her easy chair, feigning nonchalance, but her teacup trembled in

her hand. I didn't leave the ritual. I was blindfolded. I've spent and all day pouring over my books and there's nothing there. Nothing, nothing about dismissing a spirit, Brene asked, Or nothing about you, Lyxi. Nothing. Thursday was standing statuesque at his partner's side. There was certainly more to their relationship than him trying his hardest to guard her. I was sure, but times call for us to fulfill certain roles. Will Rebecca know how, Burne asked. I don't think so,

Doomsday said. Vulture went to warn her last night, and how did he put it? She's gone paranoid. Jet fuel can't melt steel beams. Level paranoid made him show her his ribs, Vulture said, And I agree that you only get that kind of paranoid when you've just got no agency at all, when you wish you had control over your life, but you just don't. She and Clay planned the ritual together. I don't know that either of them

wouldn't know how to do it alone. What are our options, Bern asked, If we leave town take Rebecca with us, will it come after us? Thursday asked it probably can't, Doomsday said, but it's a moot point. I won't leave without cleaning up my own mess. Rebecca's place is warded, too, Thursday asked, Eulyxie can't get her if you and Rebecca stay inside, what's it going to do? Nothing? Attack the people close to you. I have no idea, Doomsday said. She set down her tee untouched, then pulled her feet

up onto the chair and hugged her knees. Where are Clay's notebooks? I asked? People turned to me, realizing for the first time I was in the room. The only thing he liked more than the sound of his own voice was the sight of his own handwriting, I said. When he died, he didn't have any of his journals on him. They lived with Anchor for a while. Brynn said. They broke up last winter, and Clay took it kind

of badly. No one knows what they were fighting about though for a year and a half they were inseparable. Then a week of quarreling and it was over. They were fighting about Ulixe. Doomsday said anchor, worshiped it as it was, didn't need to know anything more about it. Clay wanted to understand it, so he moved into the basement of that gas station down by the bridge where it lives. He moved in with it. I asked, Doomsday nodded, So if Clay left notebooks, they'd be there. Doomsday nodded.

We have to go get them, bring them to Rebecca. Doomsday was lost in thought. Slowly she nodded the dear thing. I said, it's only up during the day, right, powerless at night.

ghouls are out, Doomsday said. She crossed the room and went up the stairs. I didn't want the rules to be out, neither of we have to do this. Thursday said, yeah, we do, Brynn said. Doomsday came down the stairs two at a time, her hand on the banister. It's gone, she said, my gun's gone. Anyone else would have asked Thursday if he'd put it away the night before, But Doomsday didn't even entertain the possibility that our partner would

have handled the fire army responsibly. Eric, Brynn said during the funeral. Now, Doomsday said, we saw him the entire time, except maybe the ten minutes we stepped away. He stayed there the whole time. I said, Eric, wouldn't know we had a gun, wouldn't know where it would be. He's never in the house, Kestrol, I said, wasn't it at the funeral the whole time too? Thursday asked, I knew I was the most likely third suspect, and what I was about to tell them wasn't gonna help. No, I said,

Kestrel wasn't there. At the end, I told them about meeting Eric, about our conversation in the park, about how Kestrel showed up late. He'd had plenty of time to steal the gun. It's not nice to wrap people out like that, but it's also not nice to steal people's guns. Doom Thursday said, can we keep you away from the windows? Maybe take Brinn's room. He climbed up on the couch to lock the window. Likely there were bars ready to

go over the doors. There's not a squatter alive who hasn't been through their house and analyzed all the ways the police might break in. Hell, usually we've already broken in once ourselves. Thursday left to secure the house against human intruders, and Doomsday made her way, defeated up the stairs. Brenn and I stood in the living room, facing one another, getting ready to head into the night. The kitchen timer went off, dinner was ready, no one was in the

mood to enjoy it. We walked down the middle of the street and I was calmer than I thought i'd be, probably because I had a plan. I had something I was going to do. I wore my pack emptied, but for some essentials we had no idea how many books we'd be trying to bring with us, so the extra storage was important. It had been dark for hours, and I scanned the power lines with those creepy ghoul birds.

Either they weren't there or I couldn't see them. What I did see were torches below us, coming up from the river. People were walking with torches. I counted a dozen specks of flame dancing through the night. Brynn saw them too, mourners, she said, people celebrating Eulyxe. What it's a tradition, Brynn said, any other night, it wouldn't be something sinister. Hell, two days ago, I would have been

with them. But tonight it can't be good. She led the way off the street through a front yard sculpture garden of rusted reebar animals Eulyxe and as ghouls I recognize now. We took shelter in an ivy covered roofless house and peered back out at the street through what was left of a window and what was left of a kitchen. The torches came around the bend. Nine adults and three children bore them, each with a homemade animal mask. Goats and geese, sparrows and sheep. One of the figures

stood head and shoulders above the crowd. They marched past us in silence. When they turned the next bend in the road, we left our shelter and started back down the hill. The basement door, I learned, was just off the river, near the base of the bridge. We scrambled down a steep path, then hopped from rock to rock along the edge of the water. The trees were thick down here. The gibbus moon cast enough light that we

could make our way without turning on our headlamps. A breeze brought the earthy smell of the forest, and the river was a white noise that drowned out all other ambient sound. What's in it for you, Berne asked, as she clambered over a fallen tree. Why aren't you skipping town? For some of the last months of Clay's life, he'd walked this path every morning and night. You know there's a part of me that hates this place, I asked. It was rhetorical, of course, and brendan answer, I'm too

stubborn to give up traveling. Clay wasn't that same stubbornness is going to carry me through I came here to find out what happened to him. I'm going to I clambered over a fallen log, the bar digging into my hands. And also, this is clearly the most important reason. Could you imagine just leaving now, never learning what's going to happen? The fear of missing out would rip my heart out of my chest as surely as that deer. Brynn laughed. I like when she laughed. We continued on along the water,

and I heard the dry heave of gold animals. I never would have expected that would be a sound I'd come to recognize. We crouched low, peered into the woods. We're almost there, Brynn said. She pointed. The base of the gas station went all the way down to the water, and a chain link fence stood between us and the door with a simple unlocked gate. When I focused, I could just make out a dozen silhouettes between us and

where we wanted to go. Goats and geese, squirrels and sheep in all respects, but for their lack of organs and ribs. They acted like every barnyard animal I'd ever met, annoying and fully aware of the sorrow and emptiness of their captive lives. They're awake, I said, Should we go around in through the front. Bryn shook her head. The trap door to the basement is welded shut. Should we, I don't know herd them somewhere, get them away from

the door. Bryn, still crouching, flicked open her extendable baton. I sighed, then extended mine. The weight felt good in my hand. Most days, a baton made me think I could take on the world. That night, though I wasn't so sure it was going to be enough. I wouldn't fight a single living goat by choice, let alone an undead one with all its friends. Brynn stood back up straight and walked right toward our destination. Always afraid, never a coward, I mumbled to myself. My blood started racing.

I stood up, tightened all the straps of my pack, and followed. Animal eyes turned toward us with mute curiosity, which turned to malice as we had to rush past them. A silent mess of geese got underfoot and lunged for my hands. I started swinging. It was an animal abuse. They were dead already. Some of the ones I hit didn't get up again. Brynn was almost to the gate. When the goat ran at me, someone or something had sheared off the beast's horns, presumably before Eulixie had stolen

the creature's rib cage. Not an easy life, or on life or whatever. I pulled back and swung from the hip like a one handed batter and hit the goat in the skull with all my strength. I must have grown up watching too many zombie movies. Hitting that thing's skull was like hitting a bowlder, and I probably hurt my hand more than I hurt the goat. Still, the blow seemed to have stopped its charge. It was still in my way. It tried to bleat, but it had

no lungs. I heard a low rumble, like distant thunder, and turned in time to see a demon bull crash out of the trees and barrel toward us. Oh fuck, I said, or Brynn said. I started thrashing at the dumb goat in front of me with the baton. It bit my hand and I dropped the weapon. I dove over it, but my backpack destroyed my attempts at a smooth acrobatic roll, and I landed on my back. Brynn helped me to my feet and we were through the gate.

I swung it shut, dropped the latch, and was knocked off my feet as the bowl slammed into the chain length. The fence post bent to a forty five degree angle, and the beast backed up to charge again. I got up again, clutching my bleeding right hand, and we stumbled in through the open door to the basement and slammed it behind us. As though that pitch dark room offered us safety, we switched on our head lamps. It was a single, large room, like any basement in any shitty

house anywhere. A water heater and a furnace and pipe stood out from one wall, and a box spring and mattress lay on the floor in the near corner, with simple gray sheets and a pile of ratty old comforters. A milk crate served as a bedside table, and a short stack of books stood atop against the far wall. A blood red deer with three antlers lay sleeping upon a knee high pile of rib bones. As soon as my head lamp flashed across Eulyxe, I put my hand

over my light, but the demon didn't stir. With the sun below the horizon, he likely couldn't move at all. The bile rose in my throat. The bones Eulyxes slept on weren't the pale white of long dead, sun bleached corpses. They were gray and yellow and gristly. Some of them, I surmised were human. Let me see your hand, Brynn said, you're hurt. It's fine, I said. I hadn't really looked to tell if that was true, but I didn't want to look, not until I was somewhere safe. It wasn't

bleeding horrendously. I wrapped my wounded hand with the bandana from my back pocket, tight enough to keep pressure on the bite. Don't want you turning into a wear goat or something. Though Brynn laughed, it was a nervous laugh, probably because, well, I don't think either of us knew for certain if that was an actual possibility. It'll be fine, I whispered. I went to the books beside Clay's bed

while Brent stood watch. There was a copy of twenty thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the copy I had given him. I opened the front page, saw my own handwriting, Clay, maybe you'll get as much out of this as I did under it. He'd written back, Danielle, I think at the end of it, you're more nemo than I. It took all my presence of mind not to drop the book. Had he known I would come hunting after his ghost

and end up looking through his bedside reading. More likely, he'd just written a note absent mindedly for Fox's sake. What did I know about the world anymore? The next book was history, something about the Kronstat Rebellion, obscure Russian history, when the Bolsheviks decided to kill all the anarchist sailors. I flipped through it. No notes to me, but here and there he'd highlighted passages. Last a spiral bound notebook, the first couple pages were filled with some college kid's

English literature notes. A decade back, Clay had shown me that trick Punk's Christmas, he called it. When the school year ended, college kids threw out everything from unopened food to art supplies, to furniture, to computers to well, obviously notebooks. Head on over to the dumpsters, pick up anything you need. After the wrote transcription of some boring lecture in a stranger's hand. However, I saw a page with Clay's handwriting on it. I threw the books into my backpack. From

outside the open door, I heard birds, dawn, shit. Brenn and I had the same thought at the same time, and we grabbed one another and bolted across the room to crouch behind the furnace. A row of small windows lined the top of one wall. The first hint of color and light came through them a moment later, and Eulix stirred. The sheer, unrid reality of the situation took off the worst of my anxiety. Brynn held my good hands so tight it hurt almost as bad as the

one the goat had bitten. And we watched you, Lixey rise to face the day for all the world. He moved like a regular deer, graceful but nervous. If he knew we were there, he made no sign. Instead, he headed for the door and was gone. We crouched in the encroaching dawn, our hands locked together, are breathing as quiet as we could make it, for full two minutes

before we left to find Rebecca's tree house. A squatter's life is ruled by darkness, breaking into buildings, digging through trash, even just sneaking up onto rooftops to see the city. All those things are easier and safer to do after dark. But the sun was up as we marched along and then away from the river the day before summer solstice. It was going to be up for a long while. Still, I trained my eyes on the woods for movement. Walking in the forest, you don't see most of the animals

only once I saw something. Something in the branches above us. Could have been a squirrel or a bird. Hell could have been a mountain lion. Better a living mountain lion than an undead squirrel. After twenty minutes along the river bank, it was an hour's high cup to a ravine. There was another way to Rebecca's place, a path that ran up over the top of the hill, but it would

have taken us through town. We needed to get Clay's notes to Rebecca so she could figure out how to perform the ritual, and we couldn't risk running into Ulixe or Eric. Brynn led us unerringly with a compass and a laminated US Geographical Survey map. Having a destination Rebecca's treehouse and an idea of how to get there where about all I had to prop up my waning courage While we walked, I let myself wonder more about Eric and Kestrel. They said doomsday and the rest they were

going to summon something worse. I'd play it by ear, I decided, listen to Rebecca, decide how much to trust her. We stopped only once to pick at the previous night's dinner from tupperware. Brynn had a few bottles of cold coffee and caffeine did its best to replace the adrenaline that have been slowly draining out of my system since we left the basement. I love coffee, she said, smiling. I know it's been all to say. I know I'm addicted.

I know everyone loves it. I don't care. There's only a small handful of things in this world that make me happy, and coffee is one of them. What's another, I asked. We're both slightly delirious. She thought about it for a while. Shit like feeling useful or not paying rent, right, But I'll stick with weaknesses romance novels. I fucking love trashy romance. The straighter the better, the worse the politics, the better. I'll just eat that shit up. That's awesome,

I said, your turn, she said. We capped, the coffee started back up the ravine. I want to say horizons because as often as not, the chance to get over the closest one is what gets me up in the morning. But you told me about romance novels, so I'll do you one better. Fan fiction, erotic, queer fan fiction. I don't even care what fandom. Give me someone getting on with a werewolf, of a seahorse, unicorn, whatever, and I'll

be happy. Really, I read it on my phone. I said, you know I'm gonna have to make fun of you about this, right, you won't be the first one. I said, I'm gonna make fun of you about it, but I still want you to read it aloud to me as soon as we get back to phone signal. I promised. God. My wiring was all kinds of fucked up for the rest of the hike, going crazy from lack of sleep. I was happier than I'd been in months. The treehouse was a beautiful little witch shack, held a full thirty

feet aloft between four narrow pines. Its siding had been blowtorched to black during the finishing process, and there was one porch on the side of the house and another on the roof. The windows were mixed matched and erratically placed. A rope and wood ladder dangled down, inviting us up. A black stovepipe thrust out and up from the side and on the east slope of the hill like that, I knew it got a full view of Dawn in love Rebecca. Bryn had her tattooed hands up of her

mouth to project her voice. Rebecca, maybe she's in town, I asked, after a few fruitless minutes, you heard vulture. She's not going anywhere for a while. There's a wardstone there keeps you Lisie out. Brynn pointed to a single white stone about the size of my head. A circle suddenly etched onto its face. Not sure why the ladder is down. Though she tested the ladder, it held her weight, so she made her way up. I followed. The house

was even more gorgeous up close. Rebecca had done an amazing job, down to details like filigree carved into the doorframe and an oreboris painted on the door. Brynn knocked. No answer, Rebecca, she shouted, I don't think she's here, I said, pointing to a padlock that held the door shut. Shit, Brynn said, stomping her foot on the porch and shaking the trees we were attached to. She went to the

nearest window, peered in. She fell trembling. If it weren't for the railing, she might have fallen off the porch. I looked. The sun lit the floor in big squares where it came through the windows, and in one of those squares was a dead woman. She lay on her side, with her eyes open, her mouth open. She was so small, almost childlike, but I could see in the lines in her face she had lived at least a decade longer

than me. I knew the hard way that when faced of the corpse, it's up to the person who didn't know the now dead person to handle things. Clay had done it for me once when we found agnes O Deed. I'd done it for him a year later, when it had been Sammy with his guts on the wrong side of a knife wound. Can you pick the lock, Britt asked. Clay always said you were good at shit like that, probably, I said. I pulled a screwdriver from my pack, a

large Philip's head with a rubber grip. I took my shirt off, wrapped it around my good hand and jabbed at the corner of the window to break the glass. It broke with that strange thud that surprises me every time, nothing like the sound you hear in movies. You've got to break glass against glass to get a noise like that. I reached through and unlocked the window, opened it stepped inside. Brynn came in directly after. Some people respond to crisis

by shutting down or running. Some people respond to crisis emotionally, which is probably the healthiest way. Myself, I handled crisis by shoving fear and sadness and worry down as far into my gut as I could. It's never nice, and all that nasty shit comes up as trauma later, but the practice has kept me alive. Brynn, she was made of the same stuff as me, maybe sterner. She went directly to the corpse started searching her friend for wounds. They weren't hard to find. Four bullet holes marked her

sleeveless white blouse. All were on her torso, two on her chest, one near her hip, one in between. You know anything about forensics, Brynn asked, No, I said, neither do I, But I know enough about shooting to tell you that that's a pretty fuck off bad shot grouping. While Brin saw to Rebecca, I scoured the rest of the one room shack. A mattress lay on the floor

in the corner. A bookshelf was filled to overfull with dried and tinctured herbs and jars and dropper bottles, plantain and ragwart and fever few, plus flowers and leaves I couldn't recognize, hung drying from line stretched across the space. The wood burning stove was cold since it was June, that didn't tell me much. An antique desk, the only piece of furniture in the room not handbuilt from scrap lumber, took up most of one wall. Under a bank of windows.

A ladder led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Something like a dozen well carved wooden figurines of deer littered the desktop, each no larger than my palm. They were stained blood red. A piece of cardboard dripped from a case of beer served as a cutting mat and a staining mat. It looked like with silhouettes of dark stain and gathered chips of wood. The carving tools themselves were scattered all over the floor. Rebecca's corpse was close to where I stood. My mind wouldn't forget that fact for

long enough to concentrate on anything else. Bullet holes pierced the plywood along the back wall. The bullets went out the back, I said, running my finger along the splintered wood. Who the fuck, Brynn said Eric. I said, we don't know that. Yeah, we do, I said, who the hell else? Kestrel, maybe, but I bet it was Eric. Brynn closed Rebecca's eyes, then kept searching the body. She has a knife in her hand, carving knife. Tears welled up, catching me by surprise.

Here was a woman cut down by a man afraid of her power. She'd fought back knife versus gun. I never got to meet her, I said, I've got the feeling I really missed out. Yeah, Brynn said, I want to kill him. I said, it was true, a simple thing, a clear epiphany. I wanted to kill Eric for killing this woman, even though it could have been Kestrel. I wanted to kill Eric for killing her. Eulxe might do it for you, Brynn said, imagine his thinking. I said,

he's got to have thought this through. Killing Rebecca means saving Eulyxe means he's doomed himself to being killed by Eulixe. Imagine being so sure of the righteousness of your cause you're willing to sacrifice your own ideals to achieve them. Every politician ever, Brynn said, every authoritarian communist. He killed her in cold blood. I said, I couldn't think straight killed her. She came up and wrapped her arms around me, and I buried my head into her chest, and my

anger turned into something like sorrow. I cried, standing over the body of her friend. She supported me. We've got to get back, I said, pulling away. I stepped out of the treehouse. The air outside was fresh, cleansing. Bryn joined me, and I went to the latter and looked down. Eulyxe stood silent, staring up at us from the ground.

There was a hammock on the porch. On the roof, thick cotton rope held our weight, and our feet dangled over the edge, like we were teenagers on a date instead of squatters hiding from a demon in a corpse. I can't stay there all day, I said. I had a friend in town about six months back. You know how you think you know somebody and then they just do something awful, beat their partner, abuse someone something like that. Yeah, I said, so this guy I lived with, my friend Greg.

I liked him all right. He was friendly, hard working, really polite. His partner Sam, no one liked her. She used to throw shit fits at general assembly, horde booze from the everything for everyone, that kind of thing. She worked hard too, I guess, but I don't know. She just rubbed everyone the wrong way. She and Greg had been together maybe three months, when one night they were drunk and he raped her. I don't know if he

thought he raped her, but that never really matters. She didn't want to have sex with him that night, and he did it anyway. Yeah, it doesn't really matter what he thinks about that. The next day, the very next day, before she's even told anyone, Greg walks outside her house and there's Ulxe just standing on the porch, just looking at him. He goes to the fuck back inside, and he waits elixes out there, not moving until sunset. The rest of us come and go, But that fucking deer

was just waiting for and watching him. What happened as soon as night fell, Sam drove him up to Minneapolis, kicked him out of the car and said if she ever saw him again, she'd kill him herself. I whistled. Moral of the story is that Ulixie most definitely can stay there all day. We're not predators, I said, no. But we're hunting for a way to dismiss it, aren't we.

I can see why you all kind of like having it around, though, with a story like that, I'm not going to tell you it hasn't been nice, Bryn said, up until the point when it wasn't. I'm always so quick to resort to violence, I said, I'm not ashamed of that. I think it's necessary sometimes, but damn, it'd be nice to be able to just quit violence cold Turkey, let a spell take care of it for me. There's no magic bullet, though, Brynn said, never was, never will be.

I agreed. It should have been a beautiful day. It was warm enough that the breeze felt good, but not hot enough to be uncomfortable. Fuck, I said, how are we going to dismiss it now? I guess that's up to doomsday.

My palm's still hurt, but I wasn't ready to look at it. There was an awful lot of shit going on just then that I wasn't ready to let myself think too much about God. I wish you'd showed up like a month ago or something. Brynn said, what do you mean. It'd be nice to get to know you proper, Bryn said, instead of like this. Oh you don't like

demon hunting with me? I asked. Brynn giggled. I looked at her, and she must have gotten self conscious about giggling, because she started giggling harder, covering her face and laughing. She fell onto her side in the hammock, and I had my arms around her and I started laughing too. What a fucking day, I said, What a fucking day? She agreed. We both fell asleep like that, curled up on the hammock. I dreamt about jail. A few hours later, I broke out of dream jail by waking up, but

I was still trapped. I peered over the edge of the treehouse roof and Elixie peered right back at me. The bowl was beside him. That woke me up all the way, and I looked to the trees around me. Squirrels and birds all on dead, sat silent on the branches, not ten feet from my head, all staring at me with their glossy eyes like as not. They'd been there for hours already, and they didn't seem to want to attack, just watch, just bore into me. Bryn was snoring, her

head crane back. I trusted her. I realized everything around me was terrifying and none of it made sense, but Brinn seemed to accept it, and I was learning to accept her. Freedom ran on trust. I needed to trust someone. I flipped through Clay's notebook, his handwriting only grace. Twelve pages. On each he'd written the same single line, The only way out is through the last page had another line underneath the first. What hand dare sees the fire. He'd

always been saying shit like that. When you needed advice, he was always there saying something needlessly cryptic but reasonably wise. I wish he'd listened to his own advice, though, I wish he'd kept going. I wish he'd found his way through Sitting there then, with the sun dappled through the leaves and the needles of the forest, I tried to piece out what had happened to him at his funeral. I thought he'd given up because there wasn't any future

in writing the Rails. But that wasn't it. It couldn't be it. That was me seeing more of me and him than there really was. Motherfucker had spent fifteen years looking for the hobo utopia the Big Rock Candy Mountain, until he just gave up and made the place. Then he defended it with the witchcraft he knew. Then he'd run away. Then he'd done Eulix's work all on his own and ended his own life. Why. Maybe because he'd been exiled from Paradise by a beast of his own making.

Maybe because he decided freedom was home and he couldn't come back. That's what having a home will do to you. Maybe I dropped the notebook onto the hammock. Brynn woke up. The only way out is through, I said, pardon, I should brin the pages. We did all this and we've got nothing, nothing from Clay, nothing from Rebecca, and we can't get home to warn anyone there's a killer on the loose. That's funny, Brynn said, that's not the quote. Quote.

He says the best way out is always through. And I agree to that, or in so far is that I can see no way out but through. It's from a Robert Frost poem, A Servant to Servants. It's a true statement, I guess, I said, But doesn't do us any good. He got the other one closer. What the hand dare? Seize the fire? The Tiger by William Blake? That line mean anything to you, I asked, Hell, it means even less to me than the Robert Frost. Clay moved into the gas station because he was studying Eulixie right,

trying to learn how to dismiss it. Yeah, and the only thing he wrote down, I said, And all that time was some misquoted poetry. I guess here, come downstairs with me. I went to the hatch in the roof, opened it and climbed down the ladder. The house stank of death, leaving us gagging, and I opened all the windows that could be opened. We tried our best not to stare at the dead woman on the floor for a few hours more. We just had to keep ourselves

from thinking too hard about her. These, I said, pointing to the twelve deer figurines on the desk, What do you make of these? She was obsessed, Brent said, half the town is obsessed. Though she held up her hand showing me her eulixe tattoo. I picked up one of the red figures and on a whim, lined it up to the dark outlines of stain on the cardboard that marked word had been painted. I did the same with the rest, a sort of simple jigsaw puzzle. They formed

a circle, each facing clockwise. The figure at one o'clock was on its side, and the figure at twelve stood over it, its mouth down by the other's ribs, like it was killing it, like it was eating its heart. I don't know what it means, I said, I don't think it's a coincidence, though Clay writing twelve pages and Rebecca carving twelve figurines. Now, I don't suppose it is, oh, I said, twelve pages, twelve figures, twelve months, Solstice to solstice.

It's just telling us that her only chance is tomorrow, which we already knew, which we already knew. She agreed, hooray. But what are they gonna do?

I enjoy. Like one of them is the very like because the harm and the danger is incredibly clear with a gun, Right, You've got like an end and the thing comes out of the end and you want to be real careful that nothing is in front of that end that you don't want things through, whereas the magic is much much less unclear and how it functions in some ways, and so it leads to this kind of I don't know, maybe recklessness on behalf of the protagonists.

she didn't die. Yeah, and then got blamed. He like got blamed because he was the older one, yeah, like inciting her to jump, and she was like, well, no, I was. Everyone did this, all of the dumb kids. We all did train hopping. He's he didn't get me killed. He's the only reason I didn't die. Yeah, but yeah.