Page 35 of The Bright Lands

“Reynolds is lying about something. But if he killed Dylan for a piece of the spotlight, why would Whitley be half-naked when his throat was cut?” Clark said.

Mayfield said nothing.

“Sir—” Clark looked at the map on her phone’s screen, at the little red pin on the coast toward which she and Mayfield were crawling, one little town at a time. “What the hell happened at this house?”

BETHANY

Bethany Tanner, the team captain of the Bisonettes and Dylan Whitley’s erstwhile ride-or-die, awoke beneath stars and a hard sliver of moon. She was stretched in the dirt, her hair in her face, her shorts riding high in her crotch. When she pushed her hair aside, she saw the body beside her.

She recoiled, scrambling to her feet, but some cold survival instinct stopped her as she turned to run. There was no ground behind her. She stumbled, screamed and very nearly pitched herself over the edge of a great black pit: a perfect circle of nothing, a wound in the earth. Past the circle, all around her, there was only the countryside: flat night sky, inky empty prairie.

No escape. No safety.

With ashushof falling dirt, the pit opened wider. Her head turned over her shoulder, Bethany took a few clumsy steps away but found she could go no farther. She was paralyzed by the sight. Her throat prickled with cold. She heard a distant, high screech from deep inside the dark and realized that something was moving down there, watching her.

The pit crept open wider and Bethany realized that what she’d heard was not falling dirt but a voice—a real voice, anoldvoice—whispering words that wound their way up her mouth and down her ears and around the inside of her skull, oily and almandine as the coiled meats that spilled from the stomach of a deer when the knife did its work.

bosheth

the voice said, and the wall around Bethany’s mind collapsed.

The faceless body slipped into the pit without a sound. A joyous smell of rot rose up to greet it.

The ground beneath her feet disappeared.

“Bethany? Bethany? Jesus Christ, girl, breathe.”

Bethany awoke with a gasp, scrambled away from the body in her bed and got tangled in her sodden sheets. Her heart beat so hard she thought her veins would burst.

“Bethany, it’s me. It’s Jasmine.”

Jasmine. Not a faceless corpse but Jasmine Lopez, the second-prettiest girl on the squad.

Bethany breathed. The panic faded. Her bedroom seemed to form itself around her: her massive bed, her tall dresser, the frilly lounging sofa she’d taken from her mother’s room after the divorce. Sunlight prodded at the curtains. In the distance Bethany could hear the cows lowing on the ranch behind her property.

The whispering voice—theoldvoice—went silent in her head.

“Fuck my cunt,” Bethany said with a sigh. “I’ve been having these dreams.”

Bethany caught something on Jasmine’s face in the dim light, a hesitation.

“How about you? Did you sleep okay?”

Jasmine sat up and stretched, fluffed out her hair. “I can’t believe any of this is real.”

Bethany’s phone began to chime its alarm. She reached over Jasmine to silence it, checked her messages, felt a dull ache of loss replacing the fear around her heart. Dylan was dead. Finally, after everything they’d been through, Dylan was dead.

And Jasmine hadn’t answered her question.

Before she could press her friend, Bethany caught the rattle of the garage door rising beneath her. She scrambled for a shirt, for eyeliner.

“Is that your dad?” Jasmine asked, her nails clicking on her phone.

Bethany fumbled with the light in her bathroom. “I can’t let him see me like this.”

Russ Tanner had just steered his suitcase into their sprawling kitchen when Bethany and Jasmine reached the foot of the stairs. Her father was like many men around town, a towering former lineman who’d gone to seed. The last five years had added several inches to his waist and a jiggle to his chest. His embrace had grown no weaker, however. Bethany felt the air deflate from her lungs as he wrapped his arms around her, squeezing like he wanted to break her back.

“Oh, Spud,” he murmured into Bethany’s hair. “You must be a wreck.”