Page 45 of Blood Hymn

They come after me. Of course they do. They're men in masks, and I'm the girl, and every one of them has been told since he was a boy what happens to the girl in the water. They plunge after me into the deep end, wolves and goats and angels, forty men thrashing through black water that's rising faster than any of them can wade.

The voices change.

I hear it happen. "Evie, Evie Price" breaks apart and turns into something else, a shout, a curse, a name that isn't mine. "Dale! Dale, I can't touch—" A mask goes under and comes up without the man in it, floating, the painted angel face spinning slowly in the current. Somebody's screaming for Boudreaux. Somebody's screaming for help. Somebody's screaming for his mama.

I don't look back. I keep going deeper, the water at my chest, at my collarbone, the white dress floating up around me like a ghost's, Delilah's locket cold against my throat. I lead them out into the center of that bowl where the ground falls away, and they follow me like a bell.

I'm not afraid.

I thought I would be. I thought I'd be terrified. Instead, I'm lit up, every nerve blazing, the cold and the roar and the screaming all pouring into me at once like electricity through a wire, and I'm laughing. I'm laughing out loud in the black water with the bonfires burning on the rim and forty men drowning behind me.

Then I turn for the high side, and I swim.

CHAPTER 16

SILAS

From the live oaks above Harlowe Chapel, the whole bowl looks like a bucket someone is filling with ink.

I'm lying on my belly on a rise between two roots with the AR's forend propped on a folded jacket and the stock against my cheek. The bark at my back is rough and cold. My left side is a hot, wet weight under the tape, and every breath I take catches on something in there and pulls. I've learned to breathe shallow. I've learned to breathe on the right side only. The old man would've called it discipline. I call it lying still and not thinking about it.

Through the scope, the water spreads.

It comes off the spillway in a white rush and fans across the bottom of the bowl in the firelight, shining black, swallowing the flat rows of new graves first, then climbing the bases of the older tombs. The paper tablecloths from the supper lift off the long tables on the upper rim and sail down into it. A lawn chair somebody left behind tips over and floats. And in the middle of all of it, a girl in a white dress stands still while forty men in masks close a ring around her.

I keep the crosshairs on the man nearest her. A wolf with a coil of rope. My finger is along the trigger guard, not on it. If he puts a hand on her before the water does its work, I'll open his skull from here and ruin the whole plan, and I'll never regret it.

He doesn't touch her. None of them do. They're wading, and they're calling her name, soft and low, a sound that carries up the slope on the wind and makes the hair stand up on my arms. I've heard that sound before. I used to stand at the gates and listen to it.

Then she turns away from me and walks into the deep water.

That's not the plan.

The plan was she'd hold still until the water scared them and then run for the high side, for the church steps, for me. Instead she's wading out into the middle of the bowl where the old channel runs, where the ground drops eight feet in the space of a few yards. The water's at her chest. At her shoulders. The white dress floats up around her. And every one of those masks goes after her.

I understand what she's doing about two seconds after my body has already decided to stop her.

She's taking them where the water's deepest. She's pulling them out past where a man can stand, past where a man in boots and heavy clothes and a rubber mask can swim, into the old channel where the current's running hardest off the spillway. She's making sure.

I'm on my knees before I know I've moved, and the pain in my side is so white and total that for a second I can't see. When it clears I'm still on my knees in the leaves with one hand pressed to the tape and the AR hanging off my shoulder by the sling, and down in the bowl, the screaming has started.

It changes the whole sound of the night. The singsong calling breaks into something ragged. A mask goes under and comes up without its owner. A man thrashes, arms flailing, his voice going high and thin, and grabs the man next to him, and they go down together. Somebody's shouting Boudreaux's name up at the gatehouse. Somebody's shouting for his mama.

I can't see her.

I sweep the scope across the black water, across floating masks and heads and splashing arms, and I can't find the white dress. Two seconds. Four. My heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in the wound.

There. A pale shape, low in the water, swimming. Not toward the church. Toward the near slope under me, cutting across the current at an angle, the way somebody who grew up around bayous learns to swim. She's making for the high side.

I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding, and it comes out as something close to a sob.

On the far slope, a flashlight is moving fast away from the gatehouse. It's jouncing, running, heading along the top of the dam toward the rim road. The ram. Boudreaux has given up on the wheel, and he's running for his truck, or for Judah, or for anybody who'll tell him what went wrong.

I put the scope on him. It's a long shot, a hundred and eighty yards across open ground, a running man in the dark with a flashlight bouncing in his fist. My hands are shaking from blood loss. I brace my elbow on the root, let out half a breath, and wait for the flashlight to steady as he slows to jump the drainage ditch at the end of the dam.

He slows. I squeeze.

The flashlight flies out of his hand, spinning end over end, and lands in the grass pointing at the sky. Nobody picks it up.