Lori, still clad only in Larry’s jacket, stood before Aashrita’s headstone once more. A metallic blue Lexus was parked nearby. It was Rajini’s car. Lori had found the key in the Dhawans’ kitchen. She didn’t think Rajini would mind that she’d borrowed it. The woman certainly had no use for it anymore.

The goddamned rain was finally starting to let up, had become a light sprinkle. She was still wet and cold, though, and she couldn’t stop shivering. That was okay. She deserved to feel uncomfortable. That’s why, in a weird way, she was grateful for her bum knee. It throbbed like hell and she could barely put any weight on it. She didn’t have any pain medicine – that was in her purse on the Nightway, along with her phone – but even if she’d had pills, she wouldn’t have taken them. She wanted to feel the pain. Needed to.

“I’m sorry,” she said, eyes focused on Aashrita’s name carved into the stone. “I didn’t mean to get your parents killed. I didn’t mean to get anyone killed. And I’m sorry I never got to confess what I did to you. I’m sorry because I wanted to stop the insanity that’s been happening, but I also wanted to take responsibility for what I did, to stop hiding from it. Hiding from you – or at least the memory of you. But I failed, and I’m so, so sorry.”

She waited, half expecting to hear Aashrita’s voice, especially after interacting with her – or a version of her – in the Garden of Anguish. But the only sound came from the falling rain.

Given everything that had happened, she would’ve expected to have a killer migraine right now, but her head felt fine. She would’ve welcomed the pain, though, felt it was the least she deserved. “We never get what we want in this life, do we?” she said.

Aashrita, of course, didn’t respond.

“One thing I don’t understand about all this.” Lori paused, then gave a bitter laugh. “Okay, one of the many things I don’t understand, is why if my urging you to kill yourself created an Imbalance between Shadow and the real world, the Cabal waited so damn long to do anything about it. If it was such a big deal, if it was going to cause so many problems – maybe even threaten the world – why not try to fix it right away? And why did it take the Shadowkin so long to show up? Seventeen years seems like a hell of a long time. I suppose the Imbalance might’ve taken a while to build up to critical mass. Maybe the Cabal didn’t detect it until recently because of that. But – and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way – how could what I did to you upset the Balance? You and I, we’re just two people. How could anything we do or anything that happens to us have any real impact on anything?”

She heard Aashrita’s voice then, maybe for real, or maybe it was only a memory. Either way, the voice repeated the words that Aashrita had said to her in the Garden.

You say you wanted to get back at me in a small way? Well, small actions can have pretty goddamn big consequences!

“What I did had serious consequences, that’s for damn sure, but it wasn’t small. Not to you, and not to me.”

She heard Aashrita’s voice again; this time she was sure it wasn’t a memory.

Then maybe it was something else you did. Something more recent, perhaps.

The idea stunned Lori. She’d assumed the action she had to confess and atone for had to have been the worst thing she’d ever done. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if what she’d done to Aashrita had nothing whatsoever to do with the Imbalance? Something small…. Like if you were walking on a mountain trail and accidentally kicked a stone that went over a cliff and started an avalanche. So what small thing had she done recently that could’ve caused the current situation?

In her mind, she saw a pair of eyes. Sad, haunted eyes, with threads of darkness that passed through the whites like storm clouds moving across a morning sky.

Can I ask you a question?

No, not like storm clouds. Like shadows.

Like Shadowkin.

She’d been suffering from a migraine at the time, had barely been able to think. The man’s question hadn’t fully registered on her consciousness, and she’d said no automatically and continued on to the pharmacy and the relief that awaited her within. If the man had approached her another day, she would’ve stopped, listened to what he had to say, and if she could, she would’ve helped him.

But would she have? Would she really?

Probably not.

The answer shamed her, but it was the truth. She’d do exactly what she’d done: written the man off as a beggar or someone who, if not completely crazy, was not right in the head and wanted to talk to her about whatever nonsense was rattling around in his skull. She’d ignore him and keep on keeping on. And just as she’d done, she’d forget all about him because he was in the past, and Lori Palumbo liked the past to stay where it was – dead and buried, where it could do no one, especially her, any harm.

So by not listening to the man’s question and answering it if she could, she’d kicked a stone over a cliff edge, and now, a week later, Oakmont was in danger of being crushed by a damn big avalanche – maybe the biggest that there’d ever been. But how could she make things right, and was it already too late? The Shadowkin were rampaging through the town, and the Intercessor was on its way. How could she hope to find the man – the Questioner – in time to stop what was happening? Hell, he could’ve been killed or unmade by the Shadowkin already, and if so, there was no way she could confess to him, let alone atone.

She wrapped her arms around herself in a futile attempt to generate some warmth, and once again focused her attention on Aashrita’s headstone.

“Looks like that last vision you showed me is going to come true after all. I wonder how long it takes to destroy an entire town. I suppose it all depends on just how big and powerful the Intercessor is.”

“It’s very big and very powerful.”

She turned to see the Driver coming toward her. His red robe had been torn to shreds, and it was something of a miracle that the scraps of cloth still managed to cling to his body. His flesh was cut, bruised, even burned in some places, and his left arm hung limply at his side, as if broken. One of the skin patches that covered his eyes had been torn, and a dark smoke-like substance curled forth and rose into the air. Even seeing him hurt like this, her first reflex was to reach into the jacket for the Gravedigger Special – a more than appropriate weapon to be used in a cemetery – but she found the inner pocket empty. Then she remembered: Reeny had taken the gun at the Dhawans’ and fired the last two rounds. Even if Lori still had the Gravedigger Special, it wouldn’t matter. What good was a magic gun without any bullets?

“Where’s Goat-Eyes?” she asked.

The Driver looked at her for an instant, as if he was unsure who she was referring to. But then he understood. “She’s still on the other side of the entrance to the Nightway, doing her best to hold off the Intercessor.”

Entrance? Right, the one near the cemetery wall that she’d used to escape the Shadowkin during her first visit to Aashrita’s grave. She assumed that was how the Driver had gotten here.

“I didn’t know you guys were that powerful,” she said.

The air was cut by a scream and then an object came hurtling toward them. It struck Aashrita’s headstone so hard that the impact broke the marker in two. The object bounced off, hit the trunk of a nearby tree, ricocheted, hit the ground, and rolled for a half dozen feet before finally coming to a rest less than three yards from where Lori stood. Steam rose from the object as if it had been exposed to superheated air. It was a head. More precisely, Goat-Eyes’. Roughly half of the head was a gleaming white skull, but the other half was more or less intact. The woman’s remaining goat eye was wide open, and for some strange reason it looked less disturbing in death than it had in life.

“We’re not,” the Driver said, his voice tired, defeated.

Another sound echoed through the cemetery then, unlike anything Lori had ever heard before. It was like the high-pitched whine of a jet engine crossed with the racheting-pounding of the world’s largest jackhammer. Lori clapped her hands to her ears to muffle the sound, but it didn’t help. The sound seemed to be coming from inside her head as much as outside. The noise even bothered the Driver. He gritted his teeth in pain and pointed to the far side of the cemetery, where the entrance to the Nightway was located. She didn’t see anything right away, but then she became aware of a crimson glow. The light grew larger, brighter, and she saw the air shimmer all around it. There was a shape within the red light, sharp and pointed. It hung high in midair, a hundred feet, maybe two hundred. It was difficult to estimate. After the experiences she’d been through in the last day, she thought she understood what it meant to feel terror, but now – looking at the tip of the Intercessor’s horn as it worked to make the entrance large enough for its titanic body to pass through – she understood she’d known jack shit about terror.

That noise…. Was it the sound of the entrance being forced open wider, or was it the voice of the Intercessor, bellowing to the world that it was coming? Maybe the sounds were one and the same, she thought.

The Driver’s lips moved, but Lori couldn’t hear him. She stepped close, lowered her head to his, and turned her right ear to his mouth.

“It’s over,” he said. He shouted these words, and she could still barely hear them. “Nothing can stop the Intercessor now.”

“I think I know what I did,” she yelled back. “It happened a week ago, but I don’t know how to fix it.”

More of the Intercessor’s horn protruded into the real world. She tried to estimate just how much. Ten feet? Twenty? Would the Intercessor have to continue slowly widening the entrance, or would there come a point where the strain would be too much and the entrance would suddenly open the rest of the way, like the lid of a jar that was stuck? You strain to open it, giving it all you have, and just when you think the goddamned thing is never going to loosen, it suddenly moves, and after that it comes off easily. She supposed she’d find out soon enough.

“Do you remember the exact time and place?” the Driver shouted.

“Yes, but like I said, it was—”

The Driver pressed the flat of his palm against her chest and shoved – hard. Lori stumbled backward, her bad knee gave out on her, and she fell….

Chapter Fifteen

And fell….

And fell….

It felt as if she dropped for hours, the world around her a hazy-gray nothing, the entire universe one vast cloud bank.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, her bare ass hit something solid. Pain jolted through her tailbone and up along her spine, and she let out a loud, “Fuck!”

A woman holding hands with a toddler boy shot her a dirty look. Lori realized her face was more or less level with the child’s, and the mother seemed to hover over them both like a giant.

“Watch your language!” The woman’s upper lip curled in distaste. “And put some clothes on, for godsakes. And why are you all wet? Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

She turned away and continued on, dragging the boy with her. He looked back at Lori, eyes wide. He mouthed a word that she thought was fuck, but he said it so softly, she wasn’t sure.

She put her hands down, felt the cold hardness of concrete. I’m sitting bare-assed on a sidewalk, she thought. Cars passed by, going in both directions. Dry cars. It wasn’t raining. It looked like it hadn’t rained in some time.