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“They hurt you once,” I said softly. “So you decided you would never feel pain again, didn’t you? If you can’t feel it, then you won’t fear it.”
She smiled slowly. “Almost. But not quite. They hurt me once, so I decided pain can’t hurt me anymore. I decided pain feels really damn good. Pain keeps me going. Sometimes pain is the only thing that reminds me I’m alive.”
“Then I think we’ll get along just fine, Juniper Kynes.” I stood up, and she flinched at the scrape of my chair against the wooden floor. “Go home. Sleep off your liquor and think about it. If you want the deal, go into the forest tomorrow night, as deep as you can. I’ll find you.”
She looked at me with wide eyes, which quickly narrowed in suspicion. “The forest...why?”
I grinned. “Because out there, no one can hear you scream.”
8
I stayed at the table after he’d left, nursing my beer. I was already drunk as hell; it was the only way I’d managed to get the courage to meet him here. The whiskey I’d sucked down earlier clashed with the beer in my stomach, and I leaned heavily on the table, head hung low, trying to keep myself from vomiting.
What the hell had I done? I’d thought he’d get it over with. I thought he’d snap up my soul the moment I offered it. I’d come here ready to brute-force my way into bravery, but he’d told me to sober up andthink.
There was nothing to think about. I knew what I needed to do. There was nothing else left for me, nothing but this: a deal to damn my wretched soul, a deal that would bring me under the mercy of a monster.
I jumped at the touch of a hand on my back. But it was just Joanie, her long brown hair tied back, with a glass of water in her calloused hand.
“You look like shit,” she said, in her usual straight-forward, no-time-for-niceties manner. “You’ve been drinking too much.”
I shrugged. “Too much? Too much for what? For my fucking health?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t get smart with me now. I’ll still whoop your ass.”
I believed her. I picked up the water, sipping down as much of it as I could bear. She leaned against the table as she watched me. “I heard about your brother. I’m really sorry, Juniper.”
Words like that were supposed to be a comfort. Instead, it felt like a needle being slowly, meticulously pierced into my heart. I nodded slowly, and chugged down the rest of the water. “It is what it is.”
She shook her head. “Don’t be doing that to yourself now. I know you’re hurting.” She sat across from me, hands folded on the table. “It’s been a long time, Juniper. You know you can always call us. If you ever need a place, Alice and I would be more than happy —”
“I’m okay,” I said quickly. “I got a place.”
She nodded, but she didn’t look like she believed me. She knew my story, or at least she knew it the way the news had told it, the way gossips had framed it. By the time I was let out of the hospital at eighteen, I’d learned better than to try to make anyone believe me anymore.
“Did that, uh...friendof yours give you any trouble?” she said.
I shook my head. “Nope. But I’ll be trouble for him.”
She chuckled, clapping me on the shoulder as she got up. “That’s my girl. You give ‘em hell, Juniper. Don’t worry about hurryin’ anywhere. I’ve still got all the cleanup to do. Just let me know when you’re heading out and I’ll unlock the door.”
She went back to wiping down the bar, and I drank down the last of my beer. I’d give them hell, alright. Hell was just the beginning.
Dad left when I was ten, but I think he and Mom separated long before that. I had no memories of him living in the trailer with us. Instead, the days I could remember spending with him were in the little stone house in the woods.
It wasn’t truly a house, but I’d called it that as a child. It was a hunter’s cabin, built of stone. It sat on a half-acre of land that Dad claimed had been in the family since Abelaum’s founding. Isolated and quiet, it overlooked a creek and was surrounded by the woodland on all sides. He would go out there a few weekends out of the year to hunt and fish, and he’d usually try to bring me and Marcus with him.
Dad taught me how to use a gun. He taught me to hunt, how to clean a fish, and butcher a deer. He taught me not to be afraid of the dark, because there wasn’t a damn thing out there I couldn’t learn to protect myself from.
I was eleven when he died. It was the first funeral I’d ever been to. Marcus had cried, and Mom had been so silent. But I felt like someone had punched a hole in my chest. It was a great aching void, irreparably raw. The grief never left, it just grew numb.
Dad left me the cabin and the land it sat on. One of the things I’d made sure to do before I fled Washington was ensure the place was signed over into my name. I think Dad had hoped I’d sell it and go to college, but instead I’d clung to it. It was my last anchor to home, my last tie to him.
I was lucky I had the Jeep, because the narrow dirt road toward the cabin had gone so long unused it was almost entirely overgrown. The cabin itself was far more run-down than I remembered. The front window was shattered, and graffiti was sprayed across the walls. Inside, rats had eaten away the couch cushions and chewed holes in the bed in the loft. Luckily the well hadn’t gone dry, but the spigot sputtered and ran brown for a few minutes when I turned it on.
I’d stayed in worse places. The cabin was a mess, but it held memories. Here had been warm fires, and Dad’s hugs. Here there had been smores and ghost stories, fishing in the river, running around the yard with Marcus. Here my dad had put a rifle in my hands and said,“Juni, don’t let your hands shake. If a bear is coming down on you, you don’t have time to think. You stay calm. You take a deep breath. And you pull that goddamn trigger.”
I collected some wood from around the yard and got a fire going. I had no idea how I’d manage to sleep, even as exhausted as I was. A thousand thoughts were swirling in the murky alcoholic soup in my head: demonic deals, the price of a soul, the cost of revenge.
