Page 324

Thousands.

They claw through the opening, reaching and grabbing at anything they can find as faces begin pressing against the soil beneath our feet.

Men.

Women.

Children.

Animals.

Bodies layered over bodies, twisted together so completely I can’t tell where one ends and another begins.

Centuries of offerings.

Centuries of blood.

Centuries of people fed into the same fucking thing until all that death fused together and became something else.

My stomach turns as the truth finally settles over me.

The Harvest we’ve been fighting all night was never some ancient god buried beneath Ward Farm.

It was a fucking wound.

And they fed it for so long that eventually… it learned how to eat.

Mercy begins crying. “I didn’t know.”

“How could you?”

“I fed it.”

“You were trapped.”

“I held it here.”

“You survived.”

“For two hundred and thirty-five years.”

“Exactly.” I grab her face. “You survived.”

She looks at me.

“That isn’t a sin.”

Her mouth trembles.

Behind us, the creature keeps climbing.

Hands hook over the edge of the opening and drag against the earth as it hauls itself higher. Bones snap beneath the strain. Roots tear apart. Bodies shift against bodies, fused together into one impossible mass of everything Ward Farm has swallowed over the centuries.

Every sacrifice.

Every offering.

Every person fed to the wound.