Page 46

On the church steps, Judah Harlowe has seen it too.

He's standing at the top of the stairs under the lantern by the chapel doors, and he's not smiling anymore. Four men flank him, two on either side, not in masks, in dark jackets, with rifles. His private guard. The ones he'd never send into the water. He looks down into the bowl at forty men drowning in the dark, and then he looks up, straight at the live oaks, straight at me, as if he can see me.

He can't. He knows I'm here anyway.

He turns and goes inside. His four men follow. The chapel doors close, and a moment later the light in the tall windows changes as someone lights candles inside.

I stand up.

It takes two tries. The first time, my legs fold and I go down against the trunk of the oak with the bark tearing at my shoulder. The second time I get my good arm around a low branch and haul myself upright, and I stand there with my forehead pressed against the wood until the ground stops tilting. Then I let go and start down the slope toward the water.

Not all of them are drowning.

Some of them can swim. Some of them were on the edges of the ring where the water's shallower, and they've turned back and are fighting their way toward the high side, toward the church, toward dry ground. They're coming out along the slope below me in ones and twos, crawling up out of the black water onto the grass between the old tombs, soaked, gasping, their masks gone or hanging off one ear. Some of them still have rope. Some of them still have pipe. And every one of them is between Evie and the church steps.

The first one comes up out of the water ten yards in front of me on his hands and knees, coughing, a pig mask pushed up on top of his head. He looks up and sees me coming down the slope, and his face goes slack.

"Oh, Jesus. Fuck. Silas Cain.”

I don't waste a bullet. I don't have enough to waste. I put the butt of the AR into the side of his head as he's trying to get his feet under him, and he goes back down into the shallows face first and doesn't come up.

The next two are together, a goat and an angel, dragging a third man up out of the water between them. They see me and drop him. The goat has a pistol, and he gets it up. I fire twice, he sits down in the water, and the angel runs. He runs back into the deep water rather than come toward me. I let him go. The water will do it.

I keep moving along the edge of the flood toward the church, and I kill them as I find them. It isn't a fight. They're half drowned and terrified and they've never once had to face a man who wanted them dead. I do what the old man taught me, what I did for fifteen years for the family that trained every one of these men, and I do it the way he taught me: fast, and without stopping to think about the man. A wolf in the shallows with the rope still over his shoulder. A man in a devil mask climbing out onto a whitewashed tomb, who looks at me and puts his hands up, and whom I shoot anyway because I remember his voice from the gates, calling a girl's name. Another, and another.

Somewhere in there, I lose time.

I don't know how much. One moment I'm wading through water up to my shins between two rows of old headstones, heading for the church with the rifle up. The next moment I'm leaning against a marble angel with both arms around her neck and my cheek pressed to her stone wing, and I don't remember stopping. My legs are shaking. The tape at my side has come loose. I can feel the gauze sliding, and something warm is running down into my jeans in a slow, steady flood. The marble is cold under my face. It would be easy to stay here. It would be easy to close my eyes.

A shot cracks across the water.

It isn't mine. It's the short flat bark of a .38, from up near the church, and it brings me off that angel like a dog off a porch. I get the rifle up. I push through the water toward the sound.

Evie is at the foot of the chapel steps.

She's in water to her hips where the flood has climbed the lower slope, soaked, her hair plastered to her skull, the white dress gone transparent and dark, and she's got the .38 up in both hands. One man lies floating face down in front of her. Three more have her.

They've come up out of the water on three sides, spread out, the way they were taught. One in a deer mask has a length of pipe. One has lost his mask entirely, and I know his face. Wendell Pruitt, the feed-store treasurer, Nellie's stepfather, with a coil of wet rope in his hands and his mouth hanging open. The third is behind her, circling, moving slow through the water toward her back while she's watching the other two.

She fires at the deer. The .38 clicks. Empty.

The one behind her lunges.

I don't remember covering the distance. I remember the water, and the church steps coming up in front of me, and the man who was behind her turning in surprise as I hit him. I get my forearm across his throat, take him down into the water under me, and hold him there with my knee in his back while he thrashes. Evie has spun around. She's got the empty .38 by the barrel, and when the deer comes at her with the pipe, she ducks under the swing and brings the gun butt up into his jaw with a crack I can hear over everything. He staggers back and goes down in the water, and she's on him.

Wendell Pruitt stands frozen in the flood with the rope in his hands, looking at the two of us.

"I didn't—" he stammers. "I was only—Judah said⁠—"

I come up out of the water with the man under me finally gone still, and I raise the AR. I shoot Wendell Pruitt twice in the chest. He falls back into the flood, and the rope floats away from his open hands.

Evie comes up out of the water beside me. She's gasping. She's shaking so hard I can hear her teeth. The deer mask floats between us, face up, its glass eyes shining.

We turn back to back without saying anything. Her spine against mine, both of us waist-deep, both of us facing out at the black water and the drifting masks and the bonfires still roaring on the rim with nobody left to tend them. I can feel her breathing through my back. I can feel her heart. Nothing moves out there but the water.

There's blood in my mouth. I don't know when that started. I taste it, copper and salt, and I spit it into the flood, and it doesn't stop.

She turns around. She sees my face in the firelight. Whatever she sees there makes her eyes go wide, and she reaches for me, and I catch her face in both hands and pull it to mine and kiss her. Hard. Blood and river water and all of it. She makes a sound against my mouth and grabs the front of my shirt in both fists and kisses me back like she's trying to breathe for both of us.