Page 42 of Blood Hymn

She lets go of the girls. She comes through the water to me and puts both hands on my chest.

"You promised me three o'clock," she says. Her voice is shaking. "You swore it."

"I know."

"You went without me."

"I know."

She looks down at her hand, which is flat against my side now, and at the blood coming up between her fingers. When she looks back up, her eyes are bright and terrible.

"How bad?"

I cover her hand with mine and hold it there against the wound, and I look past her at the east, where the sky over the marsh is turning the color of a bruise.

It's Halloween.

"Not bad enough to matter tonight."

CHAPTER 15

EVIE

Ispend Halloween morning with two fingers inside his side.

He talks me through it from the cot in a voice so level it makes me want to hit him. Cut the tape. Peel it back slow. The gauze has swollen and set in the wound like mortar, and when I ease the top packet out, fresh blood wells up dark behind it and runs down over his hip onto the blanket. He tells me dark and slow is good, that bright and fast would mean I should start digging. I flush it with saline from the Pelican case while he grips the cot frame and stares at the tin roof. I pack it again with the last two packets of hemostatic gauze, pushing them deep with my fingers the way he shows me, and his whole body goes rigid under my hand, and he doesn't make a sound.

Behind me on the floor, wrapped together in the wool blanket, Nellie and Lacey watch everything.

When the tape is on and tight, I shake four antibiotic pills into his palm and hold the water jug to his mouth until he swallows them. His lips are gray. A sheen of sweat lies across his forehead that wasn't there yesterday.

"We call it off," I tell him.

"No."

"You can barely stand."

"I walked two girls through three miles of marsh last night." He catches my wrist. "Nothing about tonight needs me to run. I stand on high ground with a rifle and wait for you to come to me. I can do that."

"And if you pass out in the dark?"

"Then you'll step over me." His thumb moves on the inside of my wrist. "Evie, there's no other night. By tomorrow they've found three men dead under Front Street and a welded wheel at the gatehouse. Judah moves everything, and nine girls go into the water somewhere we'll never find."

I look at the girls on the floor. Lacey has fallen asleep against Nellie's shoulder with her mouth open. Nellie is looking at me steadily over her head.

"He's right," Nellie tells me quietly. "They're all still in there. Brianna and Tasha and everybody else. They think it's a sleepover, a church retreat, something good. We’re the only ones who know what it really is.”

I don't answer her. I don't have to.

The day goes slow and then all at once. Silas sleeps most of the morning, and I sit on the floor beside the cot with his wrist under my fingers, counting his pulse against the second hand of Charlotte's phone. It's fast. It stays fast. Around eleven, I give the girls dry rations out of the ammo cans. Lacey eats three granola bars without speaking and falls asleep again.

At noon the Guidry radio crackles.

Silas took it off Tyler's belt in the red room, a black handheld with a stubby antenna, and I've had it on low beside me all morning with the volume turned down. Mostly it's been silence and static. Now a man's voice comes through, clipped and furious.

"—all three of 'em. Beau, Tyler, and Roy. Both girls gone."

A second voice: "Gone where?"