The roaring gets louder. The demons hiss like they’re the ones being burned.

But there’s nothing left for them to take. Nothing for them to want.

At last, when the pain has gone so deep that it’s only a throb at the top of my shaking arm, I let go. At least, I try to let go. My hand is locked in place like a claw. The smoldering wood tumbles out of my grip and rolls across the muddy ground.

The skin of my hand is black and wet and cracked. I can’t stand to look at it. I’m going to be sick. But even out of the corner of my eye, along with the bloody fluid oozing out of the cracks, I notice something else.

Light.

Pure white light. The light Thea passed into me when she put her hands over my face. It’s pulsing out of me, filling the gray air.

Flynn staggers backward.

And then another streak of light, a thousand times brighter, strides through the shadows. It stops right beside me.

Thea is even brighter than before. She’s like staring into the sun. She erases everything else. The light pulsing out of me adds to the light that flares from her, until every shadow is burned away.

There’s a scream so loud that it makes the ground tremble.

In one thick, writhing mass, the black creatures disintegrate.

The air fills with ash. Fragments of darkness float and slither toward the crack in the ground, sliding through, disappearing.

Thea rounds on Flynn.

I see him trying to scramble away, blinded by her brightness, squinting and stumbling. Thea grabs him by the shoulders.

Flynn screams.

I’ve never heard a grown man scream like that, not in real life. It’s a scream of fear, I think. But I can barely think at all.

Thea takes off, dragging Flynn with her.

My head is sloshing, and my stomach is heaving. For a second everything around me shudders. The air has dimmed again. Blood and water drip from my hand onto Yvonne’s silver case.

From somewhere far away, there’s another scream. Flynn again. This time, it’s a scream of pain.

It’s awful. So awful it almost eclipses the pain roaring through me.

Then the screaming stops.

There’s silence.

Silence.

Only silence.

Thea

They will all wake up in their own beds.

Tomorrow, late in the morning, a few blocks apart, Jezz and Patrick will roll over and stretch and rub their eyes with the heels of their hands, wondering why their heads feel so heavy and their bodies so sore, with their memories full of black fog and not much else.

Anders’s parents will doze until nearly noon, not even able to hear the ringing phone when the hospital calls again and again. They’ll shake their heads at themselves, thinking they had too much to drink at that retirement party. Later, when they hear the nurses’ messages and rush out into the driveway, his father will spend one quickly fading thought to wonder where the scratches on the truck’s paint came from, as if it had driven off the road into the trees.