“Nah. Not that lucky. I was looking, trust me – I told Mookie I would. The luck part is that I found a ghost that had seen you. The poor demised fucker didn’t know what he’d seen, of course – mostly he was just reliving his last moments in his head again and again – but he’d seen the gobbos dragging you and some of the other folks from Daisypusher. I knew the location of the temple. Went to scout it and there you were. Half-conscious. A pack of gobbos on your tail. They took you one direction, the Daisypusher dead in another.”

They round a curve in the tunnel and she can feel a gentle slope downward.

“And how’d we get away from them? The goblins.”

He doesn’t have to answer her. All he has to do is point.

Up ahead is a souped-up Yamaha four-wheeler. With big-ass wheels swaddled in spiked, studded chains. Like chains for driving on winter roads but juiced up on steroids. On the front of the quad is a goblin skull with plastic googly eyes. The rest of the thing is painted red, white, and blue.

“Go America,” she says, somewhat breathless. “This is what you had under that tarp out back of your house, wasn’t it?”

“You got it. She’s an all right ride. Better than walking on foot. Doesn’t get into the nooks and crannies, but she’ll take me most places in the Shallows, even carry me through some of the Tangle if I need her to.” He winces, straddles the seat. “Chafes the shit out of my thighs to drive, but such is the not-quite-life of a reanimated burn victim. Hop on.”

He pats the seat.

She eases behind him.

He pops on a pair of goggles. Gives her a pair, too. They’re shop goggles made of clear – if dirty – plastic all the way around.

Then–

Key in the ignition. The engine gutters, then grumbles to life – a fat, slovenly dragon awakening from slumber after eating all the villagers.

“Let’s go find ourselves a ghost,” he says.

Then he guns it.

Time oozes. It twists. It crawls, centipede-like, away from Nora’s grip. She does not know how long she’s been here. How long since they killed her father, since they shot her in the stomach. How long since she thought she had the world in her hand and Mookie Pearl by the leash. How long since it all went to shit.

How long since Candlefly – whose face was now a mincemeat pie baked in a bloody crust – dropped her here in this bedroom to bleed out and die. How long since he whispered in her ear, “You betrayed me, and so now you suffer a death that creeps up on you, the anticipation slow as your misery mounts.”

She lies on the bed. Breath coming in little shallow rabbit gasps.

I’m dying.