LITMIR.BIZ

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been the best kind of family to each other. And Declan has no doubt that if Molly thought it was necessary, she would pull the trigger without hesitation.

      “You know I’ll do it, Declan,” Molly says calmly. The listening device is sensitive: he can hear Lorelei’s rapid and frightened breathing. “You’re the one who taught me how to be ruthless.”

      Declan trained her to shoot. Declan was with her for her first kill. He steadied her, whispered in her ear all the lies he once believed, about how Playing called for blood, how killing could be righteous when in service to the line and the game. He created her, as his father had created him. Thousands of years of cruel lies, all come down to this: A killer he made. A woman he loves. A daughter he’s sworn to protect. A gun.

      “I’m sorry, Declan,” his father says. Declan’s heart breaks at the sound of his voice, so disappointed—so hard. “You’ve left us no choice.”

      “You want her to live, show yourself,” Molly adds in a hard voice. “Now.”

      “Please,” Lorelei murmurs. “Please, Molly, don’t.”

      He spent so many years learning how to shut down his feelings, to do what needs to be done. But now, when it matters most, his love and fear threaten to overwhelm him.

      He tries to clear his head. Aisling and Lorelei need him focused.

      They need him.

      He swaddles the pink bunny in Aisling’s blanket and presses it to his chest. He kisses his daughter good-bye. “I’ll be back,” he says, but he doesn’t promise. He tries never to make promises he can’t keep.

      “Don’t hurt her,” he says into his comm. Then, just in case, shouts it as loud as he can, his voice booming across the green. “We’re coming!”

      Then he descends into the valley, taking a circuitous, untraceable route down.

      “Give me the child,” Pop says as soon as he comes into view.

      Just seeing his father makes Declan nearly lose his grip on his emotions again. For so many years, Declan has excused the man’s obstinance, telling himself that his father is trying to do the right thing. That Pop believes his stubbornness is in service to a higher cause, and that even wrong, there is virtue in loyalty and steadfastness, in Pop’s commitment to his people and their beliefs. But no more. Here is the man who raised him, swore to love him—the man who is willing to put Lorelei’s life at risk, to sacrifice his beloved granddaughter, all for a lie. “No.”

      “You’d risk your wife for this insane delusion of yours?”

      “Endgame is a lie,” Declan says, fury rising. How many times has he tried to force his father to face the truth, and how many times has his father refused to listen? “If you would just hear me for once—”

      “I’ve listened to enough of your bullshit!” Pop snaps. “We all have, and I can’t let you humiliate yourself anymore.”

      “You mean humiliate you—”

      “I mean disgrace your family and your line and yourself!”

      Lorelei is murmuring something, soft and urgent, trying to convince them all to calm down, to lay down their arms, but Declan and his father are too focused on each other, too angry, both of them too determined to finally win this argument they’ve been waging for years, both of them so certain, both of them so hurt, both of them so lost without each other, neither of them hearing Molly when she snaps, “Enough!” and makes a move to reach for Declan’s bundled blanket and Lorelei won’t let her lay hands on the child and fights free of her grip and there’s a struggle and a shout and then instincts kick in, a mother lunging for her child, a Player fighting for her line, and a trigger is pulled and a shot echoes, and only then do Declan and his father fall silent, and see.

      Lorelei, on the ground.

      Lorelei, bleeding.

      Lorelei, eyes open to the sky, unseeing.

      Lorelei, gone.

      Molly drops to her side, screaming. “I didn’t mean to,” she says, over and over again. “It wasn’t supposed to go like that.”

      Declan lets the blanket drop from his arms. The bunny rolls in the grass, lands a few feet away from the pool of blood.

      Pop looks back and forth between his son and his daughter-in-law, between the living and the dead, frozen in between. “Son,” he says. “I’m—”

      But Declan will never know what he is: Sorry. Not sorry. Tired of blood. Thirsty for more.

      Declan no longer cares.

      Declan cares for nothing now but his daughter.

      He turns his back on his father. His Player. His lovely, raven-haired miracle bleeding into the grass.

      He runs.

      Declan doesn’t know how to tell Aisling what happened to her mother. Not now, when she’s too young to understand—and not later, when she will have questions that he can’t answer. Questions about the choices he’s made, and the mistakes.

      He doesn’t know who to blame.

      He can’t help blaming himself.

      He spirits Aisling away from the Ozarks and drives her into the heart of the Mississippi delta. Deep in the swampland, miles from civilization, an old woman lives in a shack, like a fairytale crone. She speaks with the thick accent of the old world, and wraps him and Aisling in gnarled arms when she finds him on the doorstep.

      “I’ve been waiting for you,” she says. Her name is Agatha, and she claims to have the Sight. Declan doesn’t believe in such things, but there’s a fire roaring in the hearth and stew boiling on the stove, and the couch is made up as a bed. He stumbles in gratefully, allowing Agatha to take the child from his arms.

      He feels empty without her weight.

      “It’s happened, then?” Agatha says, her voice a rough croak. “They’ve designated her as a Player, and you took her away?”

      “The Sight?” Declan says, skeptically.

      “The evening news,” Agatha says. “I extrapolated.”

      Agatha is La Tène, like him, which is why he is allowed to know her name, see her face. And like him, Agatha is an apostate, a traitor, a nonbeliever. He grew up hearing tales of her, a bogeyman invented to scare the children: ask too many questions, the wrong kind of questions, and you’ll be sent into the wilderness, where Agatha the witch will find you and gobble you up. Agatha has been with Le Fond for longer than Declan has been alive.

      She’s lived in hiding for decades, because the La Tène have never stopped hunting for her and the ancient scriptures that she stole from the archive.

      Agatha blazed the beginning of the trail that Declan has been following.

      She discovered the first clues that Endgame wasn’t what it seemed, in the words of their very own forebears—and as a reward she will live out the rest of her days in lonely exile.

      She can be trusted.

      “She’s gone,” Declan says. It hurts to speak the words aloud. “Lorelei. They killed her.”

      Agatha says nothing for a long moment. Her expression never changes. Then, though he hasn’t asked yet: “Yes, you can leave the child here with me for as long as you need. Until it’s safe. Do what you need to do.”

      What he needs to do.

      Go north.

      North as far as Canada, where he can slip across the New York border unseen, then south again as far as the city, his city, where he found the happiness he will never have again.

      Dye his hair, turn telltale red into mousy brown.

      Disguise his face with false nose and beard.

      Return

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