Or had I just done it all for myself, really? Had I loved the attention, the adoration from Grandma and the townspeople, from Jeremiah and Cass? Had I loved having my own special purpose, being chosen from the beginning of time, plucked from the great mass of people in this world to be the bearer of visions, the prophet of the Spirit, the leader of my people?

Had it really just been about me all along, wanting to be liked, drunk on power and the affection of strangers?

Was Murphy actually the hero of the story? Same as Mom was the hero of her own tale for letting her brother die, for making the sacrifice that had so thoroughly fucked up her life?

Because let’s face it, all that power had gotten to Jeremiah, changed him somehow. I can’t believe he was born wrong. I mean, Mom loved him, right? At least at first? They were best friends, same as Murphy and me. And yet something had happened, something had driven them apart. Jeremiah said it was Mom’s jealousy and that Murphy was the same way, but something in me doubted that. Was the Spirit corrupt in itself, something evil, or is that just the nature of power? I remembered my vision of the guy slitting his throat, and I thought there was no way I would have ever made someone do something like that.

But what about everything that happened in the toolshed with Horace? I mean, hadn’t I tried to break Horace’s mind, to make him into another Carl Urquhart—to make him a slave, basically? Was that really so much better?

I’d had power for all of a week, and it had already corrupted me. Maybe the power itself was corrupted because our great-grandfather stole it to begin with. Or maybe it was me who was already corrupted, ruined from the start. Maybe I’m just a bad person, always have been, and I spent my whole life waiting for a chance to show it.

Or maybe people aren’t so simple as that, all good or all bad. Maybe those words are insufficient to describe how people really are, how vast and complicated and murky and strange we are in our hearts. How our purest desires become warped and twisted, and even at our best there’s something busted in us that wants to rise up and destroy everything. It’s like Grandma calling the Urquharts trash when they were just laid low because of what her own father had done. I can’t even really think of Grandma as bad, not totally. I mean, she did love me, and she did want the world to be a better place. It’s confusing.