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Her outrage at his duplicity – and his denouncements within earshot of her mother – is barbed wire in her veins, far worse than a broken jaw, splintered teeth or a body leaking blood. Joseph Carver has just eviscerated her for his own gain, cutting her open from breastbone to navel and letting her bowels spill on to the grass.
Tilly crumples slowly, silently, as if her bones have turned to paste. The air she pulls into her lungs is a poison, reducing her further.
Every man she’s ever known has let her down. And Joseph Carver has just shown himself to be the worst of them.
On the ground, close to her mother’s chair, she sees the crossbow he keeps in his wardrobe. Clearly, he’d arrived here hoping to save Max, while throwing his stepdaughter to the wolves.
Tilly’s fingers, as they contract, scratch crumbs of soil from the lawn.
Fucking get up.
Fucking end this.
Fucking now.
She rises.
Not a Carver.
Something else.
SIXTY
Holding Drew’s phone before him, Gabriel Roth watches his brother die.
And Joseph, standing above him, tells himself that it’s now, it has to be now, beneath these freshly minted stars piercing a red sky.
Because here, at the end of things, this task falls to him alone.
From the phone he hears the bone-splintering impact of Tilly’s first swing with the log. Moments later, Drew’s cry: ‘Tilz, stop, what the fuck!’
As smoothly as he can, Joseph reaches up. He loosens the noose around his neck and lifts it over his head.
Another impact sound. Drew’s scream.
Gabriel contorts as if skewered.
Then comes the blow that ends Angus Roth’s life – the act that destroys first one family, then two, then three.
Joseph allows himself to fall. As gravity takes hold, he pushes off from the chair and launches himself at Gabriel Roth, who looks up in time to see him but not in time to react.
Their coming together is as violent as it is destructive. Joseph is almost horizontal as his shoulder slams intoGabriel’s sternum. The chair bursts apart and Gabriel is driven through the wreckage, his back thumping into hard turf. Joseph’s momentum carries his legs over his head. The ground swings up and punches him, as unyielding as a granite slab. He lies prone, his neck and spine vibrating, the shock dissipating through his bones. His diaphragm spasms, unable to pull in air. Above him, all around him, he sees red fire and distant suns.
He has to move but he can’t. Has to find the crossbow, can’t see it. He’s a broken thing, a beached carcass. A ship impaled on rocks.
Above him, Max rattles out a breath, the last of his energy spent. The noose tightens around his neck.
Somehow, Joseph manages to roll on to his front and lift himself on all fours.
Gabriel Roth has already found his feet. From his belt he draws the knife Erin confiscated earlier. It’s a savage-looking piece, ruthlessly capable, the blade coated with black ceramic.
Joseph stares at it, his horror rooting him to the grass. Then he crawls forward and seizes the largest piece of wreckage from the chair they both destroyed – the slatted backrest still connected to the rear legs. It’s a defensive tool at best, and then it’s not even that, because Gabriel snatches it from his hands and pitches it across the lawn. In doing so he reveals, behind him, a sight initially too complex for Joseph’s brain to process.
A silhouette has detached itself from the falling dark. Shadows gather to it, or flow from it; he can’t be sure. It approaches with marionette-jerkiness – like a reanimated corpse shuffling on grave-rotten limbs.
For a moment Joseph thinks the dead man must have clawed his way out of the Black Down soil and journeyed here to join his brother. But the truth is perhaps even worse – because this isn’t Angus Roth, returned from death. It’s Joseph’s stepdaughter.
How Tilly is managing to stand he doesn’t know. Nor how she’s managing to see. Her face has taken such a beating it looks like it’s been inflated by a high-pressure pump, the skin so taut it’s in danger of splitting or bursting.