“Oh please, Mother, you and I both know that you’ll do no such thing.” Dorothy twisted her hand out of her mother’s grip. “You have a rap sheet longer than my arm. You don’t want the police showing up any more than I do.”

“But, how did . . .” Loretta was clearly trying to sound calm, but her breath caught, making her voice hitch. Her gaze was on Dorothy’s face again, and she seemed to be having some internal struggle with herself over what she was seeing.

She muttered, under her breath, “This just isn’t possible.”

Dorothy took a step toward the chapel. Loretta shifted in front of her, blocking her path, and Dorothy said, with an exasperated sigh, “Mother, please—”

“Stop calling me that,” Loretta snapped.

“Then, please, just get out of my way.” Dorothy sidestepped her mother and hurried forward, throwing the chapel doors open. Music swelled, not just violins and cellos but a full string quartet.

How lovely, Dorothy thought. Avery certainly went all out.

And then the music was drowned out by the sound of wood creaking and bodies shifting as seventy-five people swiveled around in their seats to stare at her.

22

Ash

And, sometimes, the pain faded for longer stretches, leaving Ash alone in the nothingness.

Or, not so much nothingness as darkness. Like night layered over more night layered over even more night and on and on forever.

And then, after what seemed like a very long time . . . something that wasn’t darkness. The black looked different, somehow. Richer. Ash reached through the haze of his brain, struggling to remember the word.

Blue. That’s what it was. And not just blue, but purple, too, and deep, bloody flashes of red. The colors swirled around each other. The longer Ash stared, the more color seemed to be woven in the whorls and tendrils of darkness that was his entire existence.

Here, there was a flash of orange. And, there, a curl of pink. Pinpricks of light flashed deep within the black and, for a moment, they made Ash think of stars. Dozens, and then hundreds, and then an entire galaxy waiting for him.

A deep rumbling echoed from somewhere inside of his mind, and then the stars all winked out at once, like they’d never been there in the first place.

Time tunnel, Ash thought, relaxing. That’s what this reminded him of, of being inside the anil. If he was inside the anil, then everything was going to be okay. He’d always felt most at home inside the anil.

He relaxed and, as he relaxed, images of his life began to appear in his mind, there and then gone again, like the flash of a camera: