He’s not human any more. There’s no happy-ever-after for Wade when this ends. He’s their creature forever, however long that might be.

He’s dead.

But he gets to kill Carrie, too. That was always the deal. That’s the last thing he wanted.

Now here she is, injured, weak, vulnerable. Leaning on her mommy, for fuck’s sake. No time like the present.

Wade reaches for her.

Carrie’s mom moves between them. Wade feels a small stab of pity for the senile old bitch. Trying to save her daughter.

That’s when he notices the scalpel in her hand. Where the hell did she pick that up?

“I told you I remembered you,” she says, and begins slashing at his face.

Eric hears gunshots and screams and general mayhem, but he can’t spare a glance. Colchester faces him, still holding Jeremy. He looks like a tiny general standing in front of his shadow army.

“What now, son?” Colchester asks. “Was that your best shot? Any more tricks up your sleeve?”

Eric figures that’s his cue. He holds up the sword.

Colchester cringes. The sword still frightens him.

Eric winds up and hurls it as hard as he can. It goes tumbling into the air, end over end, flying at least five feet wide of Colchester.

“You missed,” Colchester sneers.

Jesus, what an idiot, Eric thinks. Setting him up for a perfect comeback like that. You’d think he would know better after all this time.

“I wasn’t throwing it to you,” Eric says.

Colchester turns around.

Grace stands there, the sword in her hand. She looks at it with a kind of wonder. She slashes with it once, twice, as if getting used to the feel of the bone handle, the heft and the weight of it.

It lights up like a beacon in the night, like the birth of a new star.

And she grins.

Alana has raised Grace to be a normal girl. This is true.

But there are some things she’s always been able to do that a normal girl can’t.

Like fall from a tree branch thirty feet high without so much as a bruise. (She did that when she was five years old on a visit with her granddad when he wasn’t watching her very carefully. She never told anyone.)

She can run faster and lift more and hit harder than all the other kids. She has never missed a shot in kickball, or in soccer, or lacrosse, or field hockey. She is the very best on all of the teams.

There are also things that kids do in San Diego that they never did in Middleton. Fencing, for instance. Grace is the under-12 champion for all of Southern California in both saber and epée. She doesn’t even have to try that hard.