“Ahoy!” hollers a man from the chapel doorway. “Hurry on out of that rain.”

“Here’s the director,” Briggs says. The director strides down a steep staircase to meet us. Muddy rain douses his pants; his black pastor’s shirt covers a prominent belly. The bearish man with round glasses reaches me with a smile, but the white thumbprint of his religious collar drops my jaw.

Him.

“Mr. Major, hello,” says the director. “Welcome to my home away from home.”

“Reverend Packard?”

I’m ready to throw up now.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE WINNER’S WALL

The director.

The Reverend who organizes church fairs in Ambrose, runs the local Meals on Wheels, and owns the chicken farm across from my house…also orders men to abduct gay people to an island conversion camp. I didn’t think anyone from Ambrose traveled as far as Chicago, much less a Costa Rican jungle, but this explains why the Reverend always leaves town for long chunks of time. Mom and I figured it was for charity missions.

But here he is. And here I am.

Reverend Packard—the director, or whatever he wants to be called—hustles us out of the storm and into the darkened chapel. Ambrose Chapel, reads the sign etched into the arched doorway. Ambrose Chapel is identical to my church back home, with a brass pipe organ sitting on a raised stage in the corner, rows of pews lining each side, and a pulpit commanding the center aisle—only instead of pale birch wood, this one is crafted from dark ash. Instead of whitewashed, cheerfully small-town walls, Nightlight’s chapel is coated head to toe with a mahogany wood stain. Against the back wall, two cast-iron candelabras stand taller than me; their Haunted Mansion candles flicker, providing the chapel’s only light.

“Briggs got told off by Ramona for not giving the kids shoes,” whispers a kidnapper with thinning blond hair. Briggs’s nostrils flare at his tattling coworker, but the Reverend is already spinning around with a red, veiny face. A face I’ve been on the receiving end of many times—when the Reverend gazes at you like this, he pierces through you until you can’t think of anything but how screwed you are.

“Thank you, Archie,” the Reverend tells the snitch before—thwap—bringing his fist across the back of Briggs’s skull. My kidnapper winces like a battered dog. “You made them walk without shoes? I promised this boy’s mother he’d come back without a scratch.”

I wish I could enjoy a speck of relief that my mom is at least vaguely concerned for my well-being after everything I’ve been dragged through…but the Reverend is pulsing with too much barely restrained violence for me to relax.

“The kids jumped ship!” Briggs snaps, pressing a hand to his newfound lump. “The storm being what it was, I had to keep us moving—”

“Mr. Briggs,”—the Reverend snatches him by his soggy shirt collar, and I swallow my own gasp—“we will talk in the morning.”

“Yes, sir.” Briggs shuffles through the doorframe where Archie and the rest of the kidnappers congregate behind the pews. Archie glances away from Briggs, both of them racked with tension. Behind the men, a relentless shower continues to fall outside in sheets.