They were linked, and somehow that was important, vital, but she didn’t have the time to think about it.

She fired at him.

The shotgun kicked hard at her shoulder, and a stinging fog of gunpowder blew back over her, but she was too late; he’d read her intentions and melted back into the others, and the ones who were splattered weren’t him, weren’t the master.

And then he was gone, sinking through the grating.

“Time’s up,” Eve said. “We have to find Shane now.”

CHAPTER NINE

SHANE

I was nearly gone. I could feel it now, how my body felt light and weirdly empty, how my muscles ached. My head pounded harder and faster—low blood pressure, less oxygen getting to where it counted. The water (not really water) around me was a dull crimson now, and it reminded me of terrible things, of opening a motel bathroom door and a tub and my mom’s slack white face and the color of the watery blood around her. She’d had her clothes on, I remembered suddenly. And she hadn’t filled the tub all the way, only about halfway.

I was thinking about it too much, because it started to become real, like those fantasies I’d already rejected. All of a sudden I was there, standing on cold tile, staring at my mother, and her papery eyelids opened, her eyes were the color of ice water as she said, “If you let go, it won’t hurt so much, sweetheart. Claire’s not coming back for you. Nobody ever comes back for you.”

“Mom—” I whispered. It was her voice, just like I remembered … sad and quiet and disappointed. Maybe a little scared. Mom had been scared most of the time. “Mom, I’m sorry, I can’t just give up.”

“You can’t do a lot of things, Shane,” she said. It sounded kind, that voice, but it wasn’t. “You couldn’t save me. You couldn’t save your sister. And you can’t save yourself, either. It’s too late for you. You have to let go, because that’s the only thing that will help stop the pain now. I’m your mother. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

“Claire’s going to come back for me.”

“Claire’s a dream, too. She never loved you. Nobody ever really loved you, sweetie. You’re just not built that way. Why would a smart, pretty girl like that want you? You made it up, the way you made up all that other nonsense, about getting married and having a little baby and being happy. Because that will never happen either, son.”

That sounded like my dad, not my mom. He’d always been the one telling me I was hopeless, helpless, worthless. She’d quietly tried to make me feel better, not worse. Until the end.

But the terrible thing about what she was saying was that somewhere deep inside me, the black monster that lived there actually agreed with her. Good things didn’t happen to me, because I didn’t deserve them. All I was made for was fighting, right? For trying, and failing, to protect other people.