Dark Witness

Charlaine Harris and Rachel Caine

It seemed to Emma Saxon that she’d been driving forever when she saw the crosses. No—not the crosses. First, she saw the woman.

Mom, her daughter Laurel’s voice was saying, in the blurry, distorted tempo of a slowed recording. We’ll be late if we don’t hurry up. So Laurel must have been in the passenger seat, but Emma couldn’t seem to turn her head that way. The road was black, the headlights showing nothing, yet somehow there was a woman kneeling down under a single streetlight. Her image was broken into stark blacks and whites by the harsh light.

She was hammering crosses into the hard ground.

Two crosses: mere crooked boards, nailed together, painted white. Cheap tinsel streamers floated from them in an unseen, unfelt wind.

Emma was pressing the gas but the van was slowing down, slowing down, and to Emma’s horror the woman turned to look at her. She had only a black hole for a face and a flash of pale, nauseatingly yellow eyes. The horrible woman inclined her head toward the crosses, and Emma had to look. The crosses read EMMA and LAUREL in crooked letters of blood, blood that dripped down the chilly white of the crosses, and her daughter was saying Mom, we’re going to be late, late, late . . .

And then Emma turned her head, finally, away from the crosses and the light and the blood and the eyes, and he was sitting in the passenger seat, smiling at her with that sharply handsome face and those piss-yellow eyes and she opened her mouth to scream and the scream turned into a shrill electronic shriek that went on and on and on . . .

Emma opened her eyes and slapped at the snooze button on the alarm clock. She missed the first two times, got it the third. In the sudden, terribly thick silence she tried to get her breath, tried to blink the tears out of her eyes. The room felt very cold, and she turned on her side and wrapped the covers more tightly around her shaking body.

Not again, not again, I thought I was past this. . .

She’d stopped having dreams about the bastard years ago. Why was she thinking about him now? What had she done to deserve that new trip into hell?

The shower started up in the hall bathroom, and Emma groaned into her pillow. Laurel was already up. Although she was more than old enough to get up, fix her own breakfast, and be off to school, Emma had made it a rule to sit down with her daughter every morning, even if there was only time for a cup of coffee (for Emma, milk for Laurel) and a breakfast pastry apiece. Emma needed that touchstone of normal life.

Get up, Emma told herself, but part of her didn’t want to obey. The bed was warm and safe, and the world out there . . . that was cold, and uncertain, and—with the dream lingering in her head—terrifying. Get up for Laurel. You have to do it.

That got her moving, though she felt frail and her skin was sensitive, as if she were recovering from a feverish illness. Everyday items seemed oddly juxtaposed, sinister, dangerous. Emma hesitated before thrusting her bare feet into her slippers, sure they hid scorpions or spiders, but when she stood she felt only the normal comfort of cotton-covered foam. She put on her bathrobe, brushed her hair, and was in the kitchen taking out the ingredients for scrambled eggs before Laurel came down the hall.

Her daughter was sixteen, and with the birthday had come attitude, tons of it. She was wearing eyeliner today. Emma didn’t protest; they’d had a fight about last week’s experimentation with eye shadow, which had been extremely overdone, so now she elected to pick the battles she was likely to win. The eyeliner looked good; it made Laurel’s rich brown eyes seem larger and brought out the golden gleam in their depths.

Gold, not yellow. It isn’t yellow. “Good morning, sweetheart,” Emma said, her voice coming out in a croak. She cracked four eggs into a bowl while clearing her throat. “Sleep well?”

Laurel grunted. Yes or no? It didn’t much matter. She was at that awkward stage where she could—and would—mutter secretively to her friends for hours on her cell phone, but you couldn’t get three words in a row from her if you were her mother. Even now, Laurel pushed her long, straight hair back over her shoulders in an absent gesture and bent over her phone, fingers flying as she texted. Emma had tried to make a no-phone-before-breakfast rule, but that had been a battle she definitely couldn’t win. She said, mildly, “No phone at the kitchen table, Laurel; you know that.”

Laurel groaned dramatically, but she put the phone on the counter next to her backpack. She emphasized her instant boredom by drumming her fingers on the table, maintaining her silence.

Fine. Let her work for it. “Milk’s in the fridge,” Emma said.

“Where else would it be?” Laurel asked, and rolled her eyes, but she got up and poured herself a glass. Without being prodded, she loaded the coffeemaker and set it to brew, a hopeful sign of morning cooperation. Emma whisked eggs and loaded up the skillet, made toast, and plated the food. The two of them sat down to eat in (mostly) companionable silence. Emma made two attempts to find out what Laurel planned to do over the weekend. Laurel’s response was a shrug that could mean anything.

Typical.

Laurel gulped down her eggs, toast, and milk, hastily dumped her dishes in the sink, and grabbed her backpack and phone as if they were life preservers in a shark-filled ocean. She headed for the door.

“Forget something?” Emma asked, standing. Laurel sighed—dramatically, of course—and came back to give her mom a quick kiss on the cheek. “That’s better. Have a good day, honey. And call me when you’re on the way home.”

“I can walk three blocks, Mom; I’m not five.”

“Just to be safe, okay?” Emma said quietly.

“Okay! You know, you have to let me grow up.”

“Sure. But not today.”

The put-upon look on Laurel’s face was pricelessly funny, but Emma didn’t laugh—at least, not until her daughter slammed the door and went jogging down the driveway to meet her friends for the walk to school. Next year, she’ll be driving, she thought. Dear God. How am I going to survive that?

But next year’s problems were just a dark cloud on the horizon. Emma felt better now, stronger, more in control of her life as she washed the breakfast things. She showered briskly, dressed for work, and headed off to the office. As she drove, she thought of her one o’clock meeting, and the presentation she had to prepare before then. Of course, accounting wouldn’t have any of the figures ready until an hour before. It was a relief to occupy her mind with the mundane. How could she have let the dream spook her so badly? Why had she even had such a nightmare?

She had no idea what had brought it on until she stopped for a red light four blocks away from their house. Something fluttered at the edge of her vision. With dread, she turned her head to look. Two white crosses had been pounded into the hard ground, just at the base of a streetlight. Cheap tinsel streamers tangled and bounced in the morning breeze.

Emma’s breath caught in her throat. She looked in the rearview mirror. Empty. Impulsively, Emma parked in the gas station lot on the corner. On unsteady legs, she walked over to take a look. The sun was still unbelievably fierce in late September, and the Dallas heat was unrelenting. Scorched grass crunched like tiny bones beneath her feet, and she felt the dream overlap into reality and bend it all out of shape, into the sharp angles of adrenaline and madness, until she saw the names.

JEREMY. AUDREY. And a faded picture stapled to the larger cross, Audrey’s cross, that showed a middle-aged woman with a young boy next to her. There was no indication of what had happened. Weren’t such crosses always erected for traffic accidents? She’d never stopped to look at one of these homemade roadside memorials before, and the faded picture brought home to her that the intersection she used every day was a place where someone else’s dreams had died.

“Sorry,” she said, and felt embarrassed when she heard her own voice. She hurried back to her van and started it up and felt the knot in her stomach slowly untie. The dream was just a dream. Not her name on the cross, and not Laurel’s. It was just an ugly mash of truth and fiction, like all nightmares. Now she knew where it had come from. Nothing to worry about.

Accounting didn’t have the figures ready when she got there. Typical.

By the time her presentation was over, she’d forgotten all about the dream.

LAUREL BROUGHT HOME friends for dinner. She texted first, though, which gave Emma time to evaluate the contents of her refrigerator. Luckily, there was enough steak and chicken to go around.

When they arrived, all together, Emma knew two of the guests: Laurel’s best friend, Amy, she of the curly red hair and pale blue eyes, and Elena, who was dark haired and dark eyed and spoke with a faint Spanish accent. Elena had become a friend more recently, but her manners were good and she had a sweet smile.

This time, for the first time, Laurel had brought home a boy.

He was good-looking, too—a little taller than Laurel, with shaggy blondish hair that kept falling in his eyes. He was tanned and fit and broad shouldered. He didn’t look up much, but when he did, Emma caught a glimpse of dark eyes. There was something familiar about him—maybe the cheekbones. Perhaps he’d gone to school with Laurel when they were much younger?

Laurel said, “This is Tyler.” She didn’t say anything else about him, which was unusual. Normally, she’d have been babbling out the details (He’s in my history class, He’s on the tennis team, He wants to design video games). Tyler himself volunteered nothing. He seemed to be working hard at blending in with the furniture. He sat at the far end of the table, as far as he could get from Emma.

“So, Tyler, how do you know the girls?” Emma asked, as she passed the potatoes around to Elena. The girls all exchanged quick looks that Emma couldn’t read, and Tyler didn’t raise his head. He was spooning gravy over his potatoes with great concentration.

“I met Laurel at the library,” he said. He spoke softly, and he definitely did not meet her eyes. “We both like biographies.”

That was almost suspiciously nonthreatening—like something rehearsed. But she supposed it could be true. Laurel nudged the boy, and he said, “History, too.”

“I didn’t know you liked history,” Emma said to her daughter, her tone bright and conversational. “I’m always trying to get you to read historical novels.”

“Not novels, Mom. History. Real history. And myth and legend and all kinds of things. You’re always trying to get me to read fiction. I don’t like fiction.”

That was news, because there were shelves of well-read novels in Laurel’s room. The Harry Potter series. Tons of paranormal books for teens. All kinds of things that Laurel and her friends had been white-hot passionate about for the past few years. Suddenly, that was over.

“What are you all reading now?” Emma asked, and that got the conversation jump-started again, with the girls talking over each other excitedly. Amy was still on the fiction bandwagon. Apparently Elena was the driving force to move Laurel over to the nonfiction shelves.

Tyler stayed quiet, eating his steak as if his life depended on it. He seemed shy and awkward. Despite her native caution, Emma’s heart went out to the boy. This wasn’t easy for him. Though he ventured a comment every now and then, the girls’ conversation flowed over him like a river. At least he was trying.

When dinner was over, Emma served cake and ice cream and put on a movie. She left them to have fun.

A couple of hours later, Emma could hear their voices in the hall and registered that they were saying good-bye. She wasn’t listening with much attention: curled up in a chair in her office, she was engrossed in her own book. She didn’t expect them to come thank her for the meal, though that would have been nice. She was surprised to hear a quiet knock on the open door. Slipping her bookmark in her place, she looked up to see Tyler standing there.

For a split second, she saw a glint of yellow in his eyes. Something inside her cringed. She scolded herself severely; her reading lamp had a lemon-yellow shade. She’d only seen its reflection. She forced a smile.

“I just wanted to say—” He licked his lips and started again as he shifted uncomfortably, one foot to the other. The boy was very neatly dressed, Emma noticed. He surely hadn’t gone to school dressed in the stiff khaki pants, checked shirt, and clean sneakers. “I just wanted to say thanks. For having me in.”

Emma smiled more genuinely. How nice! But from his grave face, she could see he wasn’t finished.

“I—look, you’re going to hate me, I know that, and I just wanted to say that—I’m doing this all wrong.”

He looked so wretched that Emma put her book aside and stood up, feeling sorry for him. “It’s okay,” she said. “Tyler, why in the world would I hate you? If you and Emma are going out together—”

“No!” he said, and looked up at her. Again, she caught that odd flare in his eyes, and she felt the answering sick kick in the pit of her stomach, but it was the lighting. Reflections. Tricks of memory. “No, that’s not it. I—look, it’s just that I wanted to meet you. I wanted to know why.”

“Why . . . ?”

He looked down at his shoes and shook his head. “Why you gave me up,” he said. It was almost a whisper. “Why you didn’t care. Why you didn’t want me.”

She sucked in her breath, and it made a sound as sharp as a scream. She stepped back, until the wall stopped her, and she felt cold, unaccountably heavy, as if she might sink straight through the floor. “What—what are you talking about?”

Tyler met her gaze and held it. This time, she saw no glints of yellow, no reflections. Nothing but pain. “I’m your son,” he said. “I’m the one you gave away.”

And then he turned and started to walk away. She cried out then, a sound that ripped itself out of her soul, and reached out to him—not to hold him, not to hug him, but to push him.

Push him away. Far away.

He didn’t stop. He didn’t look back. She heard him saying good-bye to Laurel and Amy and Elena, and she heard the other girls leave after him.

But she sat in her chair, numbed, frozen, unable to think what to do or how to stop the destruction that was rushing at her, at her daughter, at this tight family unit she had built so carefully out of lies.

It was all coming apart.

Kill him, something in her said. Brutal and quiet and practical. Kill him before worse happens.

But she couldn’t do it when he’d been born, and she couldn’t do it now, not after having seen his pain.

Maybe I was wrong, she thought. It was a frantic thought, a child’s desperate plea for mercy. Maybe he’s not like his father.

But he was. She knew he was.

Because if he wasn’t . . . what did that make her? What awful, terrible monster did that make her?

THE NEXT DAY passed in a nightmarish fugue. She didn’t know how to find the boy, how to contact him; she couldn’t ask Laurel. Her daughter would know something was wrong.

But when Laurel was late coming home, she couldn’t stand to wait any longer. She started to call, but no, her voice would betray her.

Texting was safer: Where are you? Who are you with?

She imagined Laurel telling her phone, none of your business, but the text back was more polite. Just Amy and some other ppl. All OK.

Emma couldn’t ask the deadly question, Are you with Tyler? She just couldn’t. So she compromised. Where are you?

Mall. Emma could almost hear the where else would we be? at the end of that, and see the eye roll. Home soon.

He’d met her at the library. Maybe she wouldn’t have invited him shopping. Maybe it might all go away, now that he’d been here, seen Emma, said what he had come to say.

Maybe it was over.

Emma tried to pretend it was, desperately. She made dinner—Laurel’s favorite, beef stroganoff. She rehearsed answers to questions in her mind. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Honey, you can’t believe what strangers tell you.

She was stirring in the noodles when she heard Laurel’s keys in the door. Without turning, she said, “Hey, honey, thanks for being on time.” Which, of course, Laurel wasn’t; sarcasm was a nervous defense against the fear churning inside her.

Because she didn’t turn, she missed whatever nonverbal cues Laurel might have been giving her, but she couldn’t miss the tone in her daughter’s voice. The hard, flat, angry tone. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Laurel asked.

Emma put down the spoon and turned to look at her, and with one glance she knew, knew, that it was all going to fall apart. There was no rehearsal for this. No possible response that made any sense at all.

“Why didn’t you tell me I had a brother?” Laurel said, and the sick feeling in Emma’s stomach turned black and toxic, and she sank down in a chair at the kitchen table, staring blindly at her hands. On the stove, the stroganoff bubbled and hissed, and she ought to be stirring it, but she didn’t care. Let it burn. “Mom? Mom! Answer me!”

That last rose to a shout, almost to a scream, and Emma raised her gaze to fix on her daughter’s. The golden flecks in those eyes. The fury in her face. The betrayal.

For sixteen years, she’d kept secrets, and now . . . now they were out. But she tried anyway.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Emma said. Her lips felt numbed, as if someone had hit her. “Honey—”

“Tyler. I’m talking about Tyler!” Laurel spat. “He has all the papers, all the proof that we’re twins. Twins. And you gave him up? Why did you give him up? How could you? Didn’t you love him? Do you even love me? My God, what are you?”

It was all black with pain, all of this, and she hated hearing it in Laurel’s voice, knowing that her daughter was infected with this horror too. She’d tried to shield her. Tried her very best to make it go away.

But like the dream, it came back.

Emma took in a deep breath, closed her eyes, and said, “I had to give him up. I couldn’t keep him.”

“Why?” It was a wail, and she heard the tears in her daughter’s voice.

Against the black velvet backdrop of her closed lids, Emma saw a flash of yellow eyes. “Because . . . because I would have hurt him,” she said. “It was the only way I could save him, Laurel. I kept you because I could. But he—he was—” She couldn’t explain this, not in a way that her daughter would ever understand.

“He was what? He was just a baby!” That last rose to a scream of raw fury and hurt, and then it was too late; Laurel was gone, the door slammed loudly enough to rattle glass, and Emma opened her eyes and wiped away tears and realized, with a jolt of horror, that her daughter was running away from her.

Into the dark.

Toward an evil she knew nothing whatsoever about.

Still, she tried. She ran out the front door just in time to watch her daughter slam the passenger door of a sedan, catching a glimpse of Tyler behind the wheel as it sped away. He’s too young to drive, she thought ridiculously, conventionally, knowing that was the least of her problems. She wheeled back into the house and flew into action.

Emma had sense enough to take dinner off the stove and dump it aside, and sense enough to open up the gun safe and take out the two things she’d sworn she would never need again: the silver-coated knife and the revolver filled with custom-cast silver bullets.

The other thing in the gun safe was a manila file folder. Emma hesitated, then grabbed it. The file. The whole story. Gruesomely illustrated. She didn’t know if it would do any good at all, but she took it anyway. She changed into dark pants, dark shirt, black jacket: like an assassin, she told herself. In case sneaking was necessary.

And then she went out; not after her daughter, but after her son.

FINDING LAUREL WASN’T that hard; though Emma had always tried very hard to be a normal soccer mom, she’d never been able to shake the habits she’d acquired when her life was ripped to shreds. For years, she’d lived in a state of caution, of paranoia, of fear so pervasive it was existential. So while she let Laurel have leeway, she kept a tether on her. The cell phone had a tracking feature, and if there was one thing Laurel would never, ever discard, it was her cell.

Tyler was definitely moving quickly. The signal that Emma locked in was on the freeway. Emma mounted her own cell phone into the console of her van, put the revolver under the seat where she could easily grab it, and set off in pursuit. She kept the speed reasonable until she was safely on the interstate; it was late enough that the traffic was lighter, and speeding cars were nothing new around here anyway. She weaved in and out of traffic, following the blinking light of her daughter’s mortal danger as it sped west, and she felt absolutely sure that her life—the life she’d constructed—was over.

I’ll take him with me, she thought. One way or another, this stops here.

She was gaining on the signal by the time they’d hit the outer borders of Fort Worth, out into what was officially the countryside . . . and that was dangerous, because the cell coverage would get spotty the farther out from population centers they ran. That might be the intent, she realized. She needed to catch them before the signal disappeared.

She floored it, blowing past slow-moving trucks and sedans and semi tractor-trailers, some whose drivers blew their horns in warning; she didn’t heed them, didn’t care about the consequences of what she was doing. She’d been waiting for this, she realized. Whether she’d been able to acknowledge it consciously or not, she’d been waiting for this to happen every moment since Laurel’s birth.

There was a kind of freedom in knowing it was finally here.

She caught up to the signal.

It was a truck. A cattle truck, rattling along in the night, full of scared and shifting cows on their way to the end of their lives.

She could imagine Tyler, smirking, coming alongside the cattle truck, taking Laurel’s cell, tossing it into the stinking hauler. Easy enough to do, especially if it was stopped at a light. His idea of a joke. That made sense, because his father would have found it hilarious.

The realization hit her like a bullet.

My daughter could be anywhere.

Emma pulled over to the shoulder in a spray of gravel; her tires skidded, and she almost went over the steep shoulder, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t get her breath, and her heart was pounding so hard and fast it filled her ears with a furious drumming. A desperate silent scream was locked inside her vocal cords.

And then she heard the cheerful sound of her cell phone’s ringtone.

She put the van in park, shook her trembling hands to get feeling back into her fingers—that was how hard she’d been gripping the steering wheel—and then yanked the cell phone off the console. The screen read PRIVATE CALLER. No number visible.

She didn’t say hello.

She didn’t need to.

“Don’t you just love modern technology?” the voice from her nightmares said. “I fucking love it. Makes everything so easy. Just—reach out and touch somebody.”

Her phone made a little chirping sound; she had a text message. She opened it and saw a smiling photo of Laurel, taken with a flash. Laurel, inside Tyler’s car.

“You know who this is, don’t you, Emma?”

She couldn’t answer, didn’t want to answer, the way a child puts the covers over her head to hide from the monster in the bedroom. She could feel his attention fully on her, like the scorching heat of the sun in the desert.

“Do you want her back?”

She swallowed painfully, licked her lips, and said, “Yes.” It took everything out of her, but she did it.

He laughed. She reached down under the seat and took hold of the gun; she put it in the seat next to her, as if its mere presence could protect her from that laughter.

But nothing stopped the sound from crawling inside her, touching her, taking her. That confident, utterly callous laugh—it told her he was certain he could repossess her.

“You’ve been watching us,” she said; it came out more like a whisper than she wanted. “All these years.”

“Nope. No point in wasting my time. You’re predictable,” he said. “One of your best qualities. Tyler’s taken a liking to little Laurel, and good for him; a brother ought to care for his sister. He’s bringing her to me for a proper introduction. If you want to be here for it, you’d better get back on the road.”

“Where?” The fear had drained out of her, as if she just couldn’t contain it anymore; it was too big, too vast. It had ruptured the skin of her and bled out, leaving her empty.

He gave her an address in Rockwall; at least an hour’s drive east across the metroplex.

“Emma?” She’d thought that she couldn’t be afraid anymore, but the sound of her name in his mouth made her shudder. “You be careful on the roads, now. Wouldn’t want you to miss this.”

She didn’t wait for him to hang up. She put the phone back into its holder on the console, put the van in drive, and sped away, sliding into traffic just ahead of a Mustang. The young man in the passenger seat flipped her off as the small car whipped around her. She didn’t care.

She took the next exit, U-turned, and floored the gas headed back the opposite direction.

He’ll wait, she thought. He’ll want me to see. He’ll want me to know.

She had to pray that was true.

THERE WAS SOMETHING eerily unsurprising in the utter middle-class normality of the subdivision. The brick wall at the entrance bore the words SERENE SHORES. To justify the “shores,” there was a large pond right inside; it was probably charming in the daytime. Now, there were only the indistinct pale shapes of ducks dotting the bank and dark smooth water, and the trees looked frozen and twisted. She drove around the pond and then turned right. The streetlights lit up the front of a McMansion, built on the same pseudograndiose lines as its neighbors looming only a couple of feet away, maximum houses on minimum lots. There was something vile about this ultimate horror hiding here, in this neat, pretentious suburban neighborhood.

She pulled up to the closed garage door. Tyler must have put his car inside. She prayed Laurel was in the house. Emma shut the engine off, dropping the keys and her cell phone into one pocket of her leather jacket and jamming the revolver into the other. She picked up her purse with the file stuffed inside, took a deep breath, and opened the van door.

The front door was flanked by two Chinese temple dogs, staring off into the distance; there were leaves and spiderwebs and a wrinkled flyer for a tree-trimming service jammed in behind the one on her right. As she looked down, half crazy with fear, she suddenly had a premonition, a strong one. She’d learned not to ignore those; if she’d listened to the first one she’d ever had (I really need to catch a ride home from school today, not walk home), she wouldn’t be in this fix now.

So she took the gun from her pocket and put it down in the shadow between the temple dog statue and the brick wall.

Then she rang the bell. A cheery little three-note chime sounded from within, and only a second or two went by before the door swung open.

Tyler was standing there.

He didn’t say a word. He took a step back, avoiding her gaze. That was smart. If her stare were able to kill, he’d be writhing on the floor. She stepped inside. The door closed behind her with a soft, final click. She clenched her teeth and walked on.

The entry hall had striped wallpaper. The house smelled like lemon furniture polish and vanilla—air freshener, not the warm scent of things baking. The art was of the Thomas Kinkade school: cozy cottages bathed in sunshine.

“Sorry about this,” Tyler said, his face turned away. “I really am.”

She didn’t speak. She couldn’t. There must be something of her in him, but he was his father’s puppet. She followed him down the hallway, past darkened doorways, to a brightly lit living room. The monster’s lair.

The lair gave a good imitation of a homey den. The monster and her daughter were sitting on the sofa, having some flowery-smelling variety of hot tea. There was a muted TV program playing on the wide-screen television set. Tyler’s influence could be seen in the room—gaming equipment, wireless controllers dumped on the coffee tables, empty soft drink cans on the pass-through bar to the kitchen. Everything about the room was . . . normal, and at the same time completely fake, as if the monster had ordered a room of furniture from some store ad and positioned the pieces exactly as they’d been in the photograph.

There was one personal touch: a single photograph, framed and centered under a spotlight on the wall . . . a posed image of her and Laurel, done years ago for a Christmas card. How did he get that? She couldn’t think about it, couldn’t worry about that now.

She said, calmly and firmly, “Laurel, please come here.”

Laurel’s father looked up at her and smiled. He wore the same skin she remembered. It sent a seismic shock through her . . . like the house, he was bland, nondescript, brown hair (dusted now with silver) and brown eyes. His skin tone was medium, too; a dozen witnesses would have given him a dozen different nationalities, depending on their preconceptions.

He couldn’t be picked out of a crowd, and that was the point. The entire point.

“Emma,” he said. He sounded pleased. “Have a seat, we were just talking about you.”

“Laurel, please come here.”

Laurel took a sip of her tea and settled in deeper on the couch. “I’m fine, Mom.” Emma couldn’t read her voice, and Laurel was looking at the creature in the man suit. Was she really oblivious to the danger?

Emma wanted nothing more than to launch herself across the coffee table, grab her daughter, and get out of that room, but she knew that was what he was waiting for. She focused on him. If she’d brought the gun inside, she would have tried to kill him now . . . but she realized that wouldn’t have worked. He was expecting instant, unreasoning violence.

So she said, “What name are you using these days?”

His eyebrows raised, as if he was very mildly surprised. “The same one I’ve always used, Em. Charles Wilson. I noticed you changed your name, though. Laurel, did you know your mom used to have the last name Kazinski?”

“What?” Laurel blinked, and her bright, accusing eyes focused on Emma for the first time. “How much more haven’t you told me? God, Mom. My real name is Kazinski?”

“Your legal name is Saxon,” Emma said. “Everything he tells you is a lie, Laurel. Believe me.”

“Why should I?” her daughter shot back. “You’ve lied to me my whole life. What about Tyler? Even if you couldn’t keep him, why didn’t you tell me I had a brother somewhere out there? And you told me my dad was dead!”

I hoped he was, Emma thought. Her breath caught in her throat as she saw Charles—this was the first time she’d ever known what he called himself—put an affectionate hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Don’t be too hard on your mom, kid,” he said. He patted gently. He left his hand there. Every nerve in Emma’s body screamed at her to do something.

“Your mom went through a very hard time,” he told Laurel. “Look, I was no prize; I admit, I left before you two were born. Your mom went into a tailspin, and she had to be treated for depression. She gave your brother up for adoption because she was so angry at me. I’m just happy that I came back to my senses after that. I was able to get him back.”

“But—but you didn’t look for us? For me?” Laurel looked up at him, and for the first time, she frowned a little. “Why not?”

“Well . . . I did talk to your mom. But she told me she didn’t want me to be part of your lives. Then she moved away and changed her name. It took me a long time to track you guys down again, and once I did, I wasn’t sure I ought to contact you. It was Tyler who made that decision. Right, son?”

Tyler, leaning against the wall, nodded. Could he really have grown up in this house, with this . . . thing? He was staring down at his feet, looking remote and almost disinterested . . . but that was a mask, Emma thought. He was scared.

Almost as scared as she was.

“Laurel,” Emma said. She reached into her purse, and Charles’s stare came to fix on hers. She saw the pulse of yellow fire in his gaze, but she was ready for it this time. Although it terrified her, she didn’t let it stop her. She took out the file and handed it over to her daughter. “He’s lying to you. This is the truth.”

Laurel opened the folder and gasped. She clapped a hand over her mouth as she stared at the first photo of her mother’s battered, misshapen face. She turned it over. The next one was of the damage to Emma’s torso. Laurel gave a high-pitched noise of denial. When those pictures had been taken, Emma had been hardly older than Laurel was now.

Charles smiled. He didn’t look away from Emma’s face.

Laurel turned the pages with a trembling hand and looked up with horror in her eyes. Finally, something had gotten through. “Mom!” The word was soft, almost muffled, and Laurel closed the folder and tried to get up to come to her.

Charles’s hand on her shoulder held her back.

“That wasn’t me, sweetheart,” he said, not even making an effort to sound concerned. “I was her boyfriend when that happened. She was already pregnant by me when she was raped. I freaked out; wasn’t my finest hour, Laurel, I know that. But I came back. I came back.”

“Mom?”

Emma held her hand out. Laurel slipped out from beneath Charles’s hand and went to her, and as Emma put her arm around her, she felt a surge of strength.

“He’s lying,” she said flatly. “He attacked me on my way home from school when I was seventeen. I never knew his name, but I knew—I knew what he was.”

“And what am I?” Charles asked, and tilted his head to one side. “Go on, Emma, tell our daughter what you think I am. Let her know just how insane her mother really is.” When Emma didn’t take the bait, he sighed. “Laurel, your mom is sick. I’m sorry, I wish I didn’t have to tell you this, but she thinks I’m some kind of demon, and you and Tyler—she thinks you’re both some kind of demons, too.”

“Not Laurel,” Emma said. “Just the boy. It’s always the boy, isn’t it?”

“You’re insane,” Charles said. “Laurel, do you hear what she’s saying? How crazy that is?”

“Is it?” Emma backed up, toward the doorway. Charles, sitting calmly on the sofa, didn’t move; he watched, still toying with her, still smiling that unsettling little smile. “Is it really? I’m not letting you have my daughter, you bastard. No way in hell.”

“Hell,” he repeated, and he moved his gaze from her to Tyler, who was between them and the hallway. “Funny you should say that, because I’ve got nothing to do with hell. That’s a concept that came long after me. I’m not the devil, you know. I’m just . . . well. They call me a Witness.”

Laurel took in a sharp, trembling breath, and Emma knew just what was happening—the ground was moving under her world. She’d thought it was all malls and boys and simple, though sometimes brutal things . . . but maybe her mom was crazy, and maybe her dad was, too. Her rapist dad.

Maybe it was something worse. Maybe neither one of them was crazy.

“Witness to what?” Emma asked.

“Witness to the end,” he said. “I’m here to see it.”

“See what?”

“Everything,” he said. “I must watch the human race forever. I have to look like one of them to do this. But bodies wear out, and I have to make new ones. Only the most special women will do, Emma. Like you. Like our daughter.” He laughed, then shook his head. “I know it sounds sick. It’s just the way things work for Witnesses. Nothing personal.”

Nothing personal. He’d said that—she remembered it as clearly as she did the feeling of the blood running down her cheeks, of her broken teeth grinding in her mouth. As she remembered the cruel, relentless weight of him on her, and the taste of her own desperate, muffled screams. She remembered that phrase, the dispassionate way he’d said it then. He’d made it almost a chant. Nothing personal, relax, nothing personal . . .

The memory made her lose control.

She still had the knife, and instead of doing what she should have done—lunging for Tyler with it, forcing him out of the way—she went for Charles. For the source of the evil, not its issue. She dove over the coffee table and right into him as he sat on the couch.

And he didn’t even try to stop her.

She sank the blade deep in his guts and pulled up, muscles straining and twitching with the pulse of adrenaline, and something inside her that had been bottled up screamed and jumped and capered with delight.

He was smiling. He was still smiling, she had to make him stop smiling.

Then it was too late to think about what she was doing, there was blood gouting all over her, and he was falling sideways, so much red gushing out of him, all over her, and his eyes rolled back in his head but not before she saw that last guttering flash of poisoned yellow in them.

He never stopped smiling.

Over the roaring in her head, Laurel was screaming. I killed him, Emma thought as she staggered to her feet. It felt good, but it also felt strangely distant. I killed the bastard, finally. He’ll never touch me again. It tasted like victory, but felt like a loss. It occurred to her, slowly, that she’d just killed her daughter’s father in a particularly gruesome way, right in front of her.

But when she turned toward Laurel, she realized that Laurel was screaming for an entirely different reason.

Tyler had moved away from the wall. He was in front of his sister, staring at her, and his eyes were flickering, igniting into a bright, hot, poisonous yellow. Her son said, grinning, “Thanks, Mom. Knew I could count on you to do the hard part.”

Her instinct was to rush blindly at him, to wrest Laurel away, but she knew better; that was what he was waiting for. Instead, Emma backed away, to the still-twitching corpse of the dead man, and pulled the knife free of his body.

Tyler’s grin dialed down from glee to business.

He lunged forward to seize Laurel’s wrist even as she tried to run. He pulled her into a tightly enveloping embrace. “You really should go, Mom. I don’t think you’re going to want to see what comes next, do you? You’ve kind of already been there. Wouldn’t want you to get flashbacks and crack up again. . . . Hey, sis, did you know that dear old Mom spent six months before we were born scratching padded walls and mumbling to herself? And then spent another year after she gave me up getting high? Dear old Mom, the crackhead. They didn’t even let her hold you until you were nearly two, after she detoxed.”

“Stop,” Emma said. She’d never, ever told her daughter about those dark, awful days; she’d tried to forget they ever existed. She took in a deep breath and took a step toward him. Her grip was too tense on the knife, and she deliberately relaxed. “Tyler, you’re as much a victim as I was. You never asked for any of this, and now . . .”

“Sorry, were you talking to someone? Because I know you weren’t talking to little Tyler, that squirming bundle of joy you almost killed when they tried to put him in your arms. If you’d had your way, little Tyler would have had his baby neck broken before he took his first breath. Right?”

“Yes,” she said. She’d lied to Laurel for so long, but it was time for truth now, hard and scalding truth. “I knew what you were, even then.”

“You knew because I told you,” the thing inside Tyler said, and arched one of her son’s eyebrows. “I told you everything, just like I’ve told each of them, for thousands of years. But nobody remembers, because if they did, they’d go mad—or worse, they’d go sane. You came the closest, I have to admit. You almost knew.”

“Let her go,” Emma said. “Let my daughter go. Take me instead.”

“Nice try. But like I said, I’m a Witness. I see everything. I am the Many-Eyed, the Recorder, the All-Seeing. So I know that right after you got clean and sober, the first thing you did was get yourself fixed, like a stray dog. Too bad; I’d have taken you up on it, just to see the look on your face. But not to worry. Your genetic heritage lives on in this lovely young lady. Time to start the next incubation cycle.”

“You can’t do that,” Emma said. “She’s your sister.”

“Do you think I care about stupid human genetics? I’m eternal, sweetheart, and she’s just a temporary measure to keep me here in flesh. I’ll find someone else for the next go-round.” He shrugged. “Compatible women are always drawn near me. They can’t help it. It’s part of the gravitational structure of the universe.”

And as if his words had unlocked some secret closet in her mind, she knew. She saw. She remembered the vision he’d shoved into her mind as he was planting his seed inside her . . . a vision of a universe so complex, so vast, so cold that it had driven her mad. And always, the Witnesses. Part of the world, waiting, with the keys to open the way to something she could only, incoherently, call the Apocalypse, because the vision of that bloody vista of death and despair couldn’t be looked on directly.

To a Witness, she and Laurel were nothing, nothing at all, but vessels to ensure his perpetuity: broken bottles left empty on the road in the wake of his speeding car.

She also knew something else, something glimpsed in one blinding second—the one thing he’d given her that he didn’t want her to know.

He could be stopped. Not with the silver knife; he’d let her kill his old shell as a sign of his arrogance. He’d done it for his own convenience. If she buried that knife in Tyler’s chest, he’d laugh, spit blood in her face, and cut her to pieces with the same bloody blade.

That spark of hope steadied her in a way that all the fear in the world couldn’t.

“If that’s true, there’s another compatible girl close by,” Emma said. “Let me find her. Let me bring her here. And then you can let my daughter go.”

That surprised him. Finally. She saw him stop and consider her, frowning just a little. “You’d do that? Bring another woman here, knowing what I’ll do to her?”

“I’ll do anything to save my daughter,” she said, and she meant it. “I swear to you, on my soul, I will keep my word. But you have to swear you won’t rape Laurel, seduce her, or harm her in any way while I’m gone. Swear it on your name.”

A flicker of yellow danced in his eyes, and he smiled a little wider. “You have done your homework. All right. On my name, I swear that I will not rape, seduce, or harm your daughter while you are gone.” She felt a little shiver through her bones, a kind of power rippling in the room.

“Mom?” Laurel whispered, shuddering. Tears gathered in her eyes. “Mom, you can’t leave me. You can’t.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said. “But he won’t hurt you. He swore on his name. Try to stay calm. I’ll be back soon.” Emma took in a deep breath, turned to Tyler. “Tell me how to identify her.”

The piss-yellow glare in her son’s eyes flared almost red and then subsided almost to nothing . . . until she could see her human son beneath it. Or the shell that was left of him. Though this broke her heart, it forged it into steel at the same time.

“You’ll know her when you see her,” he said. “They’ve got a glow. Look at Laurel. Really look.”

She turned her gaze on her daughter, and she saw it—maybe she’d always seen it, in some way, but now she recognized it consciously. An aura of gauzy light drifting behind her like mist.

Like wings.

Like angel wings.

“Blood of angels,” the Witness whispered almost in her ear, and she shuddered. “ ‘The sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair’ . . . you carry that, Emma, you and Laurel. That’s what makes you perfect.”

She fought to keep her voice from shaking. “Get away from me.”

He took a long step back, and his voice rose to a normal level. “If you go look, you’ll find her. She’ll be close. You won’t have to go too far.”

“Mom—” Laurel pleaded.

“I have to do it,” she said to her daughter. She knew that if she looked in the mirror now, she’d see the same gauzy light behind her own body, but mutilated, dirty, broken. She couldn’t allow that to happen to her own child.

No matter the cost.

Laurel was still calling her name when Emma walked out the door, retrieved the gun from the place she’d concealed it, and got into the car to search for their salvation.

EMMA SPOTTED THE girl less than two blocks away. It was easy. She was the only pedestrian in the quiet neighborhood. She was striding confidently down the dark sidewalk, a tall blond girl, maybe a few years older than Laurel. Under the streetlight, she looked tan. There was a backpack slung over her shoulder. She was wearing a red hoodie with a community college logo on the breast. A girl with her whole life ahead of her.

And those ghostly angel wings whispering through the air behind her.

Emma pulled the car to the curb, rolled down the window, and leaned over to wave at the girl. The girl hesitated, looking around (nighttime, stranger), but then she bent over to look into the car. She didn’t come closer, which was smart; but that didn’t matter, because as soon as the girl’s eyes were level with hers, Emma brought up the pistol and pointed it right at her.

The girl froze.

“What’s your name?” Emma asked her. The girl, terrified, suddenly looking like a child instead of a woman, just stared back at her with blank, shiny eyes. “What’s your name?”

“Jenna,” she finally whispered. “Please don’t—”

“Jenna, shut up now and listen. This won’t make any sense to you, but to save your own life, you better believe me. I want you to turn around and run, run back to campus. Then I want you to find another school on the other side of the world and go there. Get the hell out of here. Don’t come back. Wherever it is you would naturally go? Now do the opposite. Save yourself.”

“I—” The girl licked her pale lips. “Okay, okay, sure, I’ll go.”

“Tonight. I mean it. I’ll be checking, Jenna. You get the hell out of town on the first plane you can find. Act like a psycho killer is after you, because he is. Understand?”

“Yes,” Jenna faltered. She clearly believed she was talking to the psycho killer. Emma felt her attempt had only frightened the girl senseless.

But she sighted the pistol on Jenna’s chest anyway. The girl gasped. “Tell me again what you’re going to do.”

“Transfer. Get out of town,” Jenna said. “I will, I swear! Please—”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Emma said. “But I’m not the one you should be afraid of. If you ever see a man with yellow eyes, don’t hesitate. Run.”

Then she put the gun back on the seat, put the car in drive, and sped away, leaving Jenna bewildered and shaking on the sidewalk. In the rearview, she saw the girl start to run the opposite direction from the way she’d been going.

She’d done the best she could do.

She had no doubt that Jenna would be dialing 911 before she reached the end of the block, so she’d have very little time before the cops would be cruising Rockwall, looking for her van. Emma shook the bullets one-handed out of the revolver, then drove to the pond at the subdivision entrance. She got out and pitched the revolver as far as she could into the murky water, exciting some mallards, and then got back into her van and used her cell phone’s browser to find the nearest church.

It happened to be a Methodist church, but the denomination didn’t matter to her; she was compelled to be in a sacred space. She’d avoided churches most of her life, for her own reasons; she’d always felt presence in them, and it had frightened her.

Now, it didn’t. She knew—because of what she’d glimpsed in the Witness’s mind—that the church was where she should be. There was safety there, but it was more than that.

There was power. She just had to find it. It was Laurel’s only hope.

No cars in the Methodist parking lot. The side door had an office hours sign in the window, but of course it was night. Emma expected the door to be locked . . . but when she tried it, the handle turned. She had the sense, strange but very real, that she was expected.

She made her way through the dark halls to the sanctuary, and she went inside; it was a neat, clean place, straight lines of pews with red velvet cushions and burgundy carpet. The arched windows were patterned stained glass, now black with night, and the whole place had a hushed, silent feeling to it. There was an area for the choir behind the pulpit, and a simple wooden cross hanging above the altar. No adornments.

She felt a sudden surge of electricity go through the air, and the bulbs in the fixtures overhead flared on, brightened to an almost unbearable intensity, then went out. The church was left bathed in moonlight, and the feeling of energy racing through it lifted the hairs on her arms. She saw the thin blue crackles of it between her fingers.

And then a voice whispered in her ear, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

She spun, and saw—saw something that her brain refused to process, a raw spiraling tangle of light, bright as the heart of a star. She fell to her knees not out of piety, but out of awe. Even with her eyes tightly closed she could see it hovering before her.

“Do you know who I am?” the voice whispered. It didn’t seem to come from the light; it seemed to be on her shoulder, always on her shoulder.

“Uriel,” she said. She didn’t know why she said it, but the name floated up from her, and she knew it was right. “You’re Uriel.”

“It is my honor to deliver to you your destiny,” that whisper said. “Emma, child of angels, you have been chosen. Rise, and receive that which you seek.”

She couldn’t have refused even if she’d wished; there was so much strength and inevitability to what the angel Uriel was whispering. She stood, not even aware of the effort, of the muscles working, because the light that was blooming inside her was so warm, so sweet, so perfect that she felt utterly at peace.

And then the pain took hold. She felt her life burning away, the dross of it disappearing in an excruciating blaze of power. The darkness was coming, close enough to touch.

“Peace,” Uriel’s whisper said, and she caught her breath and felt tears break free to steam away from her cheeks. “I give you the kiss of peace. Your destiny is upon you, Emma.”

She let out that held breath slowly, and as it trembled in the air, the beautiful, terrifying thing that had faced her was . . . gone. Just gone. Not a fading, not a slow withdrawal. Uriel was gone as thoroughly as if he’d stepped through a door and slammed it behind him.

The only evidence that he’d been there was steam rising from the carpet like morning mist and the burned-out bulbs in the ceiling lights.

Emma looked down at herself. She looked the same, though steam rose from her clothes, too. And even from her skin. The pain was gone, and so was the feeling of power.

But she knew that she was different.

She smiled and turned toward the altar, and said, softly, “Thank you.”

Nothing. But she hadn’t expected anything this time.

SHE WENT IN without knocking and found Tyler standing behind Laurel, holding her as a human shield. He’d expected Emma to come in shooting, she realized. She might have done that if she hadn’t understood it wouldn’t accomplish anything.

But she didn’t need to. She knew that now.

“Where is she?” Tyler asked. “The girl?”

Emma said, “Outside. But I’m not bringing her in until you give me my daughter.”

Tyler was smart, and he was powerful, and he was immortal—but he was not omniscient. He studied Emma, and he saw nothing except what she wanted him to see—the same tattered, ragged light trailing behind her like broken wings. The same beaten, degraded look in her eyes. “You’re a weak little bitch, aren’t you? Humans. No wonder the Apocalypse is coming for you. You deserve it.” He thrust Laurel at her.

Emma held her daughter in her arms for one long, precious second, feeling the strength of desperation in Laurel’s embrace, and then whispered, “You have to go now, baby. Get in the car and drive away.”

“Not without you,” Laurel whispered back. “Mom, please!”

Emma kissed her temple—just a bare brush of her lips—and felt her child go still and quiet. “Hush,” she breathed. “Now go, baby. I love you.”

That kiss had given Laurel more than words—it had given her knowledge. All the knowledge that Emma now possessed, of the Witnesses, of the angels, of what was past and what was to come. Not omniscience, but some portion of wisdom.

And that gave Laurel the strength to push back from Emma, look straight into her eyes, and for the first time in their relationship, Laurel saw her. Saw her for the girl she’d been, the broken thing she’d become, the woman she’d tried to be for her child.

Saw her for the bright-burning thing she was now.

“I love you, Mom,” she said. “Thank you.”

And then she took the keys from Emma’s hand and walked out the door with no hesitation. Emma didn’t turn to watch her go. She heard the car start, the tires hiss, and the engine roar as Laurel drove away.

Silence fell.

Tyler was still smiling. It looked less like a human expression now than a hole into darkness.

“Well,” he said. “You owe me a girl. So let’s have it.”

“You don’t think I really brought one, do you?” she asked. “Come on, Tyler. I wouldn’t give you an innocent victim, and you know it.”

He shrugged. “Well, it was worth a shot. Sorry, Mom, but your usefulness is pretty much over now. You got any weapons you want to try? Knife? Gun? Ballistic missile? Break it out and let’s get it over with. I’m impatient. I want to start tracking Laurel, and your pain’s getting boring.”

“Is it?” She stepped forward, empty-handed, eyes locked on his shining yellow ones. “Is it really? Are you sure?”

“What are you doing?”

“You’re my son,” she said. “Tyler, you’re my son. Maybe I didn’t want you. Maybe I should have killed you. But I didn’t. You’re here. Whatever else you are, I still love you for being my son.”

He frowned slightly and took a step back. “I’m not your son. I’m wearing your son, bitch. A slight difference.”

She kept moving toward him, moving slowly, quietly, and Tyler finally took another step backward. She saw him recognize it, that energy crackling in the air. A lightbulb popped in a lamp. Another one, with the sound of a gunshot crack. The stereo, playing softly in the corner, let out a distorted squall and a puff of smoke. But Emma moved closer.

His next step put his heel into the blood of the body of his father, his last host. He had nowhere to go now.

Emma stepped forward, her chest almost against his. As he froze in confusion, she kissed him.

The kiss of peace.

Time stopped, and universes paused in their spinning. Heaven and hell took in breaths.

And then the Witness was cast out, screaming, into the abyss that was neither heaven nor hell, life nor death, but eternal darkness.

She felt him being unmade in the merciless emptiness—ripped apart. Lost forever, all his schemes, all his ambition, all his destiny, gone.

All his evil, cut off at the root.

And it hurt.

God, she was so glad it hurt.

Her son collapsed in her arms, and his heart beat on in faltering thuds once, twice, three times. For an instant, his dark eyes focused on hers, and she saw the gratitude there. The love. The peace she had given him.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “For everything. Go to God, Tyler.”

He did. Without pain.

She lowered him back to the carpet, closed his eyes, and folded his hands neatly on his chest. What the coroner would make of this, Emma couldn’t guess—death by heart attack or stroke, maybe. Or some kind of family death pact.

It no longer mattered to her.

Human bodies were as fragile as lightbulbs, and as prone to shattering. The power that Uriel had poured into her—the power that had opened a window to darkness and unmade a demon—was gone now, poured out like starlight into that void, and it had burned away everything else inside her

She was a dying bulb, and she felt the last flickers of light course through her veins. It felt sweet now, life. Sweet and clean and restored to the clarity it had possessed when she was a girl, full of promise and possibility.

Emma walked out into the dark and stood there for a moment, soaking in the late September warmth. All around her, as if it was broad daylight, the night-soaked grass flared green, the flowers shouted colors, and the world spoke.

She raised her face to the sky and laughed in delight.

And then she was gone.

JENNA SEARLES WALKED down a gray street in Portland. In the late fall chill, she wore layers of protection against the relentless drizzle. Despite the cold and rain, she had to admit she liked it here. Tall evergreens, mountains, coffee shops on every corner. And Portland liked her; she had friends who had come to her as if she’d always been meant to be here.

From time to time, she thought about the woman in the van, that desperate, crazy woman. As she’d been packing in the early morning, the cops had come to her parents’ house to tell Jenna that they’d found her. The news reports had given Jenna the full story—the murdered dad, the dead son, the woman collapsed from a massive stroke on the front lawn. They’d never found the gun. But they’d found a fascinating file. The details were never in the papers.

For no good reason, Jenna had chosen to take the dead woman’s advice. To her parents’ consternation, she’d packed up and left for Oregon, which was as opposite to Texas as she could get. She liked the University of Portland and its funky students; she liked her new friends and her cool apartment. It felt like . . . destiny, somehow.

She stopped to get a cup of hot chocolate and sipped it as she hiked up the hill toward the university grounds. Cars whizzed by, stirring fallen leaves; there was a sharp smell of burning wood in the air. People were starting to put out Christmas lights.

She paused at the light to wait for the safe crossing, and a soft jingling of bells drew her attention a few yards down the side of the street, off her route. Normally, she wouldn’t have glanced that way.

That was how she came to see the crosses. There were three of them clustered together—crude white-painted wood, black paint, faded silk flowers jammed in at the base. The jingling came from frayed ribbons with bells tied at the ends, tossed in the wind.

She could see the names from where she stood. EMMA. TYLER. The third cross was blank.

Jenna shivered, as if someone had just walked over her grave, and then the light changed, and she kept walking, and put it out of her mind.