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The hinges to the door break and Misha pulls me up, practically pushing me out toward the garage.
My mom and Ash are already there, both brandishing guns as fire blazes on the side of the house. At least the driveway seems to remain untouched, but the fence to the neighbor’s house is burning and crumbling into ashes, and the demons are following us from the garage door even as Luke and Malon try to jam it closed.
I didn’t think that the two of them were ever going to work together, but this isn’t really the time for me to think about it.
“Malon was right,” my mom says. She has a gun in her hand. My gaze follows the end of it to find that there are other demons crawling through the garage door, so they’re closing in on us in both directions. “We should’ve left.”
“Mom…”
“You need to get out of here, Trine,” she says. She fires a shot. The gun is silenced but the sound of the popping noise is enough to make me grimace. “They’re not coming after me anymore. They’re coming after you.”
“You have to come with us,” I say. Ash stands next to her, also looking down the barrel of a rifle. They take down the humanoid creatures with precision, as if they were playing a video game or something.
“We’ll catch up,” my mom says. “Right now, you have to go, okay? You can still fix this. But not if you die here. We’ll cover you.”
I want to argue with her, but someone is pulling me away from her. I don’t know how it is–I don’t look, all I know is that I’m running as fast as I can, and that Malon is in front of us slashing and beheading any of the demons who might be in our way.
There’s blood and ash and all other sorts of substances on me. I don’t even feel like I can drag my feet when I’m being pulled away from the garage, when heads roll at my feet, where I can feel screams in languages I don’t understand in my ear.
“Wait,” I say when we get to the car, though I’m not sure who I’m saying it to. “There’s–we can’t go, my mom…”
“Get in the car,” Misha growls at me. “We can’t stay here.”
“No, I can’t, my mom…”
“She’s coming,” Rei says. “She said she was coming, so she’s coming. But you have to get in the car so we can start driving away.”
“Rei, I…”
“It’s okay,” he says, meeting my gaze. “It’ll be okay.”
His eyes darken as he looks at me. I think he’s going to try to convince me again, but he grabs me by the shoulders and pushes me inside. I don’t know what the fuck I expected, but it certainly wasn’t that. Before I can do anything, before I can react by trying to get out of the car, Luke is holding me by my waist and Misha is sitting in the driver seat, the car’s engine purring under us.
I think he’s going to drive away when Malon hops into the passenger seat. “Wait,” I say. “My mom…”
“They’ll get in their car and drive behind us,” Misha says. “But we need to leave now.”
He pulls away from the driveway as fire crackles around us. I look around at the men in the car. We’re all a little worse for wear, but no one seems to be seriously hurt.
I let myself breathe out a sigh of relief as Misha peels out of the driveway. We’re leaving behind the flames engulfing the house. The smoke makes it hard for me to see anything, but even in the fire, I can see two silhouettes moving toward my mom’s car as we park on the curb.
Finally, somewhere in the distance I can hear the sound of sirens approaching us, turning into the suburban street where the house is.
When the headlights of my mom’s car turn on, though, they don’t follow us.
The car is put in reverse for a split second…and then the whole house fucking explodes. The fire spreads and I watch the whole thing happen in slow motion, the car tipping to its side with the momentum, and then exploding into fiery flames.
I think I scream.
I’m not sure.
I can’t hear a fucking thing, the sound of the bomb still ringing in my ears.
And then Misha is driving away, as fast as he can, and I’m only vaguely aware that my eyes are swimming with tears.
EPILOGUE: LUKE
It’s been four weeks.
