He looked around and then pointed off to the right, just beyond a cluster of flat rocks past the end of the road. “About twenty meters that way. We’ll have to carry him the rest of the way.”
I nodded mutely.
From inside the car, Tyler coughed. A wet, hacking sound.
“We need to hurry,” Simon told me, throwing down the map and shoving the flashlight into his back pocket. “We’re almost out of time.”
Even though Simon carried most of Tyler’s weight, I was sweating by the time we reached the top of the short hill. My job was to hold Tyler’s feet and serve as lookout, but Tyler was more alert now, moaning every time we bumped or jarred him, which was pretty much always, making me cringe inside. The coughing was worse, too, growing deeper and wetter sounding by the second. I worried he was drowning in his own fluids.
“Simon,” I rasped, unable to hold back my tears. “We found it. This is it.”
He grinned back at me, and for the first time I thought he might feel it too. Hope. “Just a few more steps,” he beamed.
When we reached the edge of the legendary crater, we set Tyler down and I collapsed. Wiping my cheeks with the back of my hand, I approached the brick wall that surrounded the rim. Someone had gone to great care to look after this place. Even the perimeter was well manicured. The grasses and brush were trimmed back so they didn’t crowd the wall or the area surrounding it.
At my feet, Tyler wheezed, a rheumy sound that made my skin crawl. “Now what?” I turned to Simon fearfully.
He looked back at me, and I could see it . . . in his eyes. The look that told me he had no idea.
We’d been waiting for almost an hour.
Waiting for the taking. Or, it seemed more likely at this point, waiting for Tyler to die.
I was okay with that now. I just wanted him out of his misery already. It was too hard to watch him suffer. Too hard to listen to his pleas for relief.
The morphine was wearing off, and he’d begun clawing at his own skin—at the blisters we could see, and the ones we couldn’t. It was like watching him try to rip away his own flesh.
“Try singing to him again,” Simon said from his place near the edge of the cavernous pit, where he’d been chucking rock after rock into the hole. “He seems to like that.”
Simon was right; the singing had worked . . . for a while. I’d tried everything I could think of to keep Tyler calm: whispering, cajoling, soothing.
“It’s not working,” I shot back. “He’s in too much pain.” My face crumpled. “Are you sure this is the right place?”
He paused, his arm cocked midthrow. “I’m positive. How many giant holes could there be?” He flung the rock to emphasize his point, and I knew he was as frustrated as I was.
I didn’t want to freak out, but that’s exactly what I was doing. “Maybe we’re scaring them. Maybe they won’t take him with us sitting right here, in plain sight.”
His shoulders fell as he stepped away from the rim. “Kyra,” he explained, and even in the dark I could make out those eyes of his, the same way I had that first time I’d seen him, in the bookstore. “People have claimed for years to witness the takings. Obviously bystanders have never stopped them before.”
“Then what?” I complained. “What are we doing wrong?”
The sound of tires rolling over gravel stopped us both cold. My head snapped around, in the direction we’d parked, while my heart beat once . . . twice . . . and once more, hammering agonizingly, thunderously inside my chest. “It’s them, isn’t it?”
Simon lunged for the flashlight on the ground, and he switched it off, ignoring me as he scurried to the ridge to get a better look. He gave me his answer the second he dropped down again, his back pressed against the wall of rocks and his fingers to his lips. There was nothing I could do about Tyler’s whimpering.
“What do we do?”
He pulled a knife from his back pocket and rolled up his sleeve. “I don’t want to do this, but if we have to, I’ll infect them.”
“Simon, no . . .” I jumped up from my spot next to Tyler, meaning to go to him, to convince him that was crazy talk. How could he be willing to use himself—his blood—as a weapon like that?
But I stopped, unable to speak or think or breathe the moment I saw it . . .
. . . them.
So very many of them.
It was like looking at a constellation.
A radiant, sparkling, living constellation.
“Oh my god . . .” I covered my mouth with both hands and gasped between my fingers. Tears blurred the lights, blending and distorting them until they were one giant mass in my eyes. “They’re so . . . so beautiful. . . .”
Simon looked at me, confused. He lowered the knife and let go of his sleeve as he turned to see what I had. To know what I knew.
That we’d been in the wrong place all along.
“Fireflies,” he breathed.
They weren’t amassed near the mouth of Devil’s Hole like we’d believed they would be but were gathered at the top of a rugged stone peak instead. The site of them, with the moon hanging high above and the outline of local wildflowers and brush below, was picturesque, and almost made me forget what they foretold . . . and the reason we were here in the first place.
I knew for certain then that I’d never seen anything like them before, not in real life, because if I had, if I’d ever witnessed anything like their spectral presence, I would have known. I would have remembered. They were as out of place as they were haunting, and I fell to my knees as I realized what seeing them meant.