There were so many people on the scene that I could make out very little. So why could I almost see a woman, lying prone on the floor? Why could I smell blood? My mind was a mess of traps and guns and teeth. It hurts—

“Hey. Look at me.” That wasn’t Cady’s voice. It was deep and gentle. Somehow, I focused on Mac’s eyes, focused on the fact that he was kneeling in front of me, steady and real.

He glanced at Cady. “You round up the other kids,” he told her. “Kira and I will be just fine.”

After a long moment, Cady went to find Free and Jude. Mac and I sat side by side on the ground in silence.

“When you do what I do, you see things.” Mackinnon Wade was nothing if not soft-spoken. “Natural disasters. Mass graves. The worst tragedies humanity has to offer.” He stretched his right hand out, looking at the back of his knuckles, like the story of those atrocities was inked into his very skin. “And then you come back to civilization, and you bring it with you. Sometimes, you keep those memories under lock and key. And sometimes, they get out. Sometimes, they drag you under, and you’re there, right there, all over again.”

I closed my eyes. Girl.

Running—

Hurts—

The fragments of memory stabbed at me like shards of glass. I breathed in, and I breathed out, and I breathed through them. Mac’s massive hand covered mine. I forced my eyes open. I didn’t like being touched. I didn’t like to show weakness. I didn’t know this man.

But somehow, I didn’t want him to let go.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Mac said. “Having ghosts. It took me a long time to learn that, a long time to feel like I was fit for human company, and even longer to believe: The things that haunt us, they make us human.”

He laid my hand gently in my lap and reached up to unclasp a pendant he wore around his neck. “When I met Cady, I was sixteen. She was fourteen, nosy, and somehow figured out that I was living in my car.”

I thought that maybe he’d changed the subject for my benefit, to make it clear that he wasn’t talking to get a reply.

That let me form one. “I bet Cady didn’t like that.”

“Me living in my car? She hated it. Somehow—and to this day, I don’t know how—I ended up living on the Bennett property.” He looked down at his massive hands. “I built the place myself.”

I thought of the makeshift cabin where Gabriel was living. Suddenly and without warning, the dam inside me broke.