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As Clover reached out her hand to open the door at the end of the tunnel, I was overcome with the urge to pull her away from it. It was as if I was watching her reach for a hot stove. Everything in my body screamed that we should go, turn around and take the northbound train, like all the other evacuees. But Clover was happy—after everything she’d been through, this place made her happy—so I bit my tongue and followed her through what felt like the gates of fucking hell.
“Oh my God,” she gasped as we stepped out of the station and into a village square. Wind ruffled her hair as gray clouds swirled overhead. “It’s sooo cute.”
The tightly packed stucco buildings were painted every color of the rainbow—red and green and yellow and hot pink—or they had been, once upon a time. Now, their exteriors were faded and peeling. Dried, dead flowers drooped over the sides of the window boxes. And a few of the businesses were boarded up completely. But Clover didn’t see any of that. Or maybe she just saw past it.
Like she did with me.
But I didn’t have that ability, and I didn’t give a shite about her little folklore field trip. All I cared about was keeping her safe until we sorted out how to get to Boston. If the church was accepting refugees, then they probably knew where to send us to get on one of those American planes or ships. I glanced around until I found a stone steeple topped with a metal cross off in the distance. Guiding Clo across the quiet intersection, I steered her down a winding street that looked like it might lead to the church.
“I wish I had my phone so I could take pictures,” she said, walking backward as the square disappeared behind us. A touch of sadness had crept into her voice, but she shook it off and squeezed my hand tighter. “It’s crazy,” she continued. “Just yesterday, I was in a Russian encampment, thinking I was about to die, and now …” She dropped my hand and skipped ahead, spreading her arms wide as she spun in a circle. The bottom of her yellow dress twirled and lifted, exposing a pair of bruised, scratched thighs that I wanted to lavish with kisses all over again. “I’m in Glenshire!”
Her grinning eyes softened as they locked with mine. “Because of you.”
The corner of my mouth lifted as I stalked toward her, and Clo planted her feet, allowing me to catch up. She tilted her head back as I pulled her into my arms, and when I kissed her still-smiling mouth, I decided that maybe Glenshire wasn’t so bad after all.
We walked the rest of the way to the church, hand in hand, as Clo pointed at every landmark and explained every shred of lore that she knew about the seemingly uninhabited village. The only proof of life I could see were the hundreds of sheep dotting the valley that stretched out below us on the left side of the road. The landscape looked like a tattered green quilt, and on each patch sat a small house, painted some crazy bright color, just like the buildings in the square.
On the other side of the street, the hills rose up toward a distant purple mountain and were covered in trees. It was strange. I hadn’t seen the mountain from the train station, but I felt like I had known it would be there before I turned my head to look. Just like I knew the church would be lurking behind the next curve in the road, and there it was—a simple stone chapel with two massive red doors and a steeple just tall enough to be seen over the trees. The cemetery behind it stretched up the hill at least a hundred meters, stopping where the woods began.
“Wow,” Clo whispered, awestruck. “It looks exactly the way I pictured it.”
The books. That must be why everything felt so familiar. Clover had read to me about this place.
At the church, several people were gathered around a folding table at the entrance of the cemetery, so Clover and I walked that way. My goal was to find out if anyone knew how to get on one of the American planes or ships and then go there as quickly as fucking possible, but as soon as we approached the table, something at the back of the graveyard caught my eye.
It was a small white house with a door as red as the ones on the church, and the sight of it made my stomach lurch.
I suddenly knew why this place felt so familiar, so evil.
I’d seen it before, in my dreams.
CHAPTER 30
CLOVER
Glenshire.
God, it was so surreal. I was literally walking through the pages of my favorite fairy tales. The colorful buildings, the sheep spray-painted to match their owner’s house, the spooky old church … the woods—it was exactly the way Darby Donovan had described it.
Glancing across the tombstones, I wondered if she and her husband were buried out there somewhere. If so, I wanted to pay my respects before we left.
Before we left.
The thought punched me in the gut.
We weren’t just visiting for the day, with a cozy bed and clean clothes and a fully stocked fridge waiting for us at home. We had no home.
We had nowhere else to go.
I noticed that Damien had wandered away from the table and was staring at the priest’s house at the back of the cemetery. He was only about ten meters away from me, but that felt too far. I wasn’t safe without him, and he wasn’t safe without me.
“Name?”
“Hmm?” I turned my head and found a gray-haired priest with puffy bags under his bloodshot eyes standing across the table from me.
“Yer name and date of birth, miss.” He handed me a pen and gestured to a clipboard in front of me. “We’re tryin’ to keep track of all the evacuees.”
“Oh.” Accepting the pen, I looked around and noticed a few families gathered in groups, huddled over steaming bowls of soup or stew. There had to be at least thirty names on the paper, but some had probably come and gone already.
