“Where are the women who bore your children?” he demanded.

“I had no children,” Nathaniel gurgled. “Only failure. No matter how hard I tried, only failure.”

Another voice, a memory, whispered, “Perfect, not perfect.”

“How many women did you bring here? Who were they? What did you do to them?”

Nathaniel Ormsby laughed, a horrid cackle that chilled Eddie’s psychic essence.

“Why would you care so much about cattle? I looked for the finest stock, and they gave me runts. Every last one. I hope those cunts are burning in hell.”

Eddie never wanted to strangle someone before, alive or dead. If he could, he would tear Nathaniel’s corpse to pieces while doing his damnedest to shatter what was left of the madman’s life energy. If it meant destroying himself in the process, so be it.

Stop it, Eddie. That’s what he wants.

He slipped into Alexander Ormsby’s coffin. The old corpse regarded him with dripping, milky eyes.

“You won’t get what you want from me,” Alexander said. “Buried and burned, buried and burned. Buried and burned.”

He’d gone completely mad before he’d taken his life, before he’d burned his children to death. It would be impossible to glean a coherent thought. It was painfully clear to see that there was nothing he could say to make the dead man expose his secrets. If only he’d been stronger.

“Buried and burned. Never find them. Never. Buried and burned.”

The Last Kids. How they must have suffered in those final agonizing moments. And here was this fucking creature who called himself a man, singing about their demise as if it were a nursery rhyme. Alexander and Nathaniel, and even George, they were the bad man. Their power coursed through the island like a blood-borne disease. But it wasn’t incurable! Eddie and Jessica had been lured here to put an end to this.

Perfect not perfect.

Their mothers. Where were their mothers?

A soothing warmth came over Eddie as he realized the only way to shock both dead men to telling him what he needed to know. He tunneled through the earth, slipping through his own body and into the night.

It was time to be a shepherd.

Jessica awoke in darkness. She startled when a man’s voice said, “Thank God you’re awake.”

She looked across to where the voice had come from.

“Are you all right?”

A bright flash of pain went off in her head like a bottle rocket. It was Mitch. Why was she in a room with Mitch?

“Yeah, I think so. Where is everyone?”

“I don’t know. When the lights cut out, the kids walked out of the room. Daphne went after them. You were out cold.”

She swung her legs off the bed. Her legs gave out when she tried to stand up. It was an effort to even breathe. What the hell happened to her?

“Where’s Eddie?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t seen Rusty in a while, either. All I do know is that I’m not leaving this room. No fucking way.” Something hard and heavy smacked into his hand. “If anyone tries to screw with me, they’re getting the leg of this bed over their head.”

Struggling to talk, she said, “Mitch, what’s on this island can’t be hurt by you. They’re already dead. You can’t kill them twice.”

Snorting, he said, “I can make them think twice before touching me again.”

“You have to put that down. You’ll hurt someone, if not yourself.”

“No fucking way.”

Summoning up the few stores of energy she had left, Jessica managed to get to her feet, holding onto the bedpost for support. She had to get out of this room. For all she knew, Mitch would bash her head in if he heard the mattress settle. The man was wound tighter than a banjo string.

“Where are you going?”

“To find Eddie and the kids. Promise me you’ll stay here. I don’t want to think about you running around the house with your little bat.”

The bed creaked under his shifting weight. “I told you, I’m not leaving here, at least until the sun comes up. Then I’m getting the hell out of here, and I don’t care how.”

She took a shuffling step, leaning forward into the wall to keep erect. Bearing her shoulder against the wall, she slowly made her way out the door, sitting on the top step and taking them one at a time. Daphne cried out for the kids on the first floor, her voice faltering, desperate.

Come on, Jess. Slide down another step. That’s it. Now the next.

She wished she could say she was getting stronger, but in fact it was becoming more and more clear that her body was shutting down.

Perhaps for good.

Chapter Forty

Alice stumbled in the dark. Her brother’s hand snagged the sleeve of her heavy, wool night dress, keeping her from falling.

The bad man was in the house. The Last Kids had warned them about the bad man when they put them in that swirly wind. Hadn’t they? It seemed like something she had known all along, yet for some reason, this was the first time she’d actually thought about it. She was so sleepy. She knew she was walking, but it felt like a dream, as if she would float above the floor if she willed it.

“Over there,” Jason whispered in her ear, tilting her head to the kitchen.

They’d passed Nina and Uncle Paul, who’d been sleeping. It was weird that he was sleeping on the floor and not in his room. And why was Nina sitting by him?

She wasn’t important. Neither was Uncle Paul.

As long as the bad man was here, nothing else mattered. The other adults couldn’t see the bad man. Only she and Jason had the gift of special sight. The bad man had been right there, with them, the entire time.

They had to make him go away. He was hurting everyone, just like he did the Last Kids.

There was enough light in the kitchen to see by and avoid bumping into the table. The back door was open. Jason and Alice turned in unison to the butcher block, gravitating to the big knives they were told never to touch. The metal blade sung a high, short tune when it was extracted from the metal holder. Jason handed one to Alice. It had a long, curving blade, the one their mother used to cut vegetables.

Jason took the one that was a big, sharp rectangle. She’d watched her mother cut through rib bones with it or quarter a chicken.

“Out there,” Alice said softly.

They stepped onto the back patio.

To their right was a type of shed, the place where the generator was kept. The tall picket door was open. The bad man was in there.

She looked over and saw the Last Kids standing by the shed’s entrance, an affirmation that she was in the right place, doing what was necessary. Jason gripped her hand, taking a steadying breath.

They stopped when the bad man emerged from the shed. He had a face she’d never seen before. Balding, with a large, bulbous nose, ears that came out too far from his liver spotted skull, a loose sack of skin hanging from his neck.

“What are you doing out here?” the bad man asked. His initial surprise was replaced with a cold sneer, his voice somehow changed. “You don’t belong here. I exterminated you! Get away from me!”

Alice’s stomach seemed to go all soft, like it did when she was sick. She knew it wasn’t from fear of the bad man. It was something else. Something the Last Kids hadn’t told her about. More than anything, she just wanted to lie down. But she knew she couldn’t, not now.

Alice felt the cold steel in her hands and braced her arm. If the bad man came any closer, she knew what she had to do.

They were everywhere.

Jesus. How much were they drawing from Jessica and the kids to manifest like this? If he didn’t stop them now, they could very well kill them.

Floating above the trees, able to view every inch of Ormsby Island, Eddie called out to the EB children.

“Help me,” he pleaded. “I can make the pain stop. I need your help.”