“Well, isn’t this unfortunate…” Another voice comes from behind Wicked’s body, and he freezes. His whole body turns to stone, but he shifts closer to me. Whether it was on purpose or coincidental, I notice it.

Slowly, he turns around, his back now against my face. “What have you done?”

I start to shift to the side, wanting to know who it is that’s behind whatever weird shit happens here, but Wicked moves faster, blocking my view.

“You know the rules, Hangman. You broke them anyway…”

He steps forward, but my hand flies out to his, urging him back. I don’t know why I did it. It makes no sense. I hate this man. He would have killed me. Yet something deep inside wants to protect him anyway.

He stops. “What. Did. You. Do.”

There’s a long stretch of silence, and when I finally manage to see around Wicked’s body, my eyes collide with an older man dressed in a suit covered in a robe. He wears a similar mask to Wicked, only not bone. He has dark hair slicked back, a shadow of a beard. He’s big. Bigger than Wicked even. There’s a small diamond tattoo on his chest, where his suit is unbuttoned, and when I travel back to his eyes, dread fills my blood when I see he’s already looking at me.

Wicked shoves me farther behind his back. “I did everything Skully wanted me to do. For years. I obeyed…”

“Tsk, tsk…” The man’s loafers come into view. He moves closer. There are other men surrounding him too, and I swear the chanting is so close that the people who are doing it have to be within view. “You’re mine now, and your little Poppy? Well… unfortunately—” He steps to the side and everything happens at once. Wicked’s body falls to the ground slowly until his knees hit the dirt, and what he just saw is staring back at me, exposed. An upside-down cross has flames burning around the ankles of a half-crisp corpse. Her head is tilted to the side, her face torn off. The flesh on her face has been peeled back—or melted back—to the skeletal remains, as the angry flames of the fire ignite the rest of her body, ripping through the clothes I last saw her wearing from the party.

Wicked screams a roar loud enough to cause a ripple effect throughout the village, and I drop down beside him, my hand on his shoulder to pull him closer into me.

“Pick them both up—” the man with the diamond tattoo says, and I look up at him from below. “They’re mine now.”