"Don't let go!" Isaac yelled, meeting his brother's gaze. "Don't let them take me again!"
"We won't!" their mother shouted.
Jake mustered strength from deep inside himself, pushing away the pain and the smell of his own blood and the sight of the desperate tears sliding down his mother's face. This was a time of second chances. He felt that so keenly. A night when time might be turned back, when they might all wake from nightmares that had haunted them for a dozen years, if not the same then at least with a chance at something new and good. Pain seared his back-something had torn in the muscle tissue there-but he would not let go as long as he still lived … not of Isaac and not of Miri, now that she'd come home.
It was a night when so many mistakes might be undone.
"Leave him!" he screamed, glaring at the demon that held his brother, looking into eyes that seemed full of centuries of malice. "Leave us alone!"
Jake heard his mother scream and turned to see another ice man clutching at her hair and wrapping one arm around her belly, pulling her into the sky. The demon had thinned to almost nothing but still had the strength to carry her along on the wind. As Jake watched, it paused, glanced at the sky with a frozen grimace that looked almost like fear, and then plunged itself into her. Its arms seemed to merge with his mother's flesh, passing through her the same way Niko's ghost moved through solid objects. Ice showered down from the place where his mother and the demon met, as if the thing were crumbling with the contact, and in a moment of recognition that made Jake roar in panicked fury, he realized that the demon was entering her, trying to possess her the same way Isaac had possessed the dying body of Zachary Stroud.
"No!" he screamed, but he could do nothing for her from the ground, and that knowledge made him scream all the louder.
A gunshot cracked the sky and the bullet shattered the ice man's head, just as it had begun to dip toward his mother's chest-to submerge itself within her, seeking an anchor to keep it in this world. The wraith shattered into ice shards that turned into a spray of crystals before they hit the ground and Allie fell perhaps a dozen feet to land with a whispered thump in the snow. Instantly she was up and moving, scrambling to be sure none of them tried to grab her again.
Jake spun to see Joe Keenan staring at the place where she'd hung in the air above, wide-eyed with breathless horror at the hideous violation he had just prevented. In the sky, an opening had appeared in the clouds and a white veil of mist was all that separated the earth from the stars in that one place. The storm was passing. The ice men looked ever thinner, growing almost as insubstantial as Niko's ghost … and they were furious.
They attacked as one, riding the wind with spindly fingers outstretched. Another took hold of Isaac and Jake shouted, knowing he could not win this battle. Keenan kept firing, destroying two more, but Jake felt his feet leave the ground and wrapped both hands around his brother's waist. A demon slashed at his arms and then another grabbed him by the back of his shirt and now they were both being dragged upward.
Gunshots came from the other direction, only one bullet striking home, blowing the arm off an ice man a dozen feet above them. Jake twisted to see that it was Miri who'd been firing, but now she tossed the gun aside and ran to him, jumping to wrap her arms around his legs. The storm had thinned dramatically and Jake heard ice cracking and felt something snap above him. For just a moment he feared that it had been Isaac's neck, but then they were falling, he and Isaac and Miri, and they hit the snow in a tumble of limbs.
Miri held Isaac, looking for injuries. Jake gritted his teeth against the pain in his wounded back, enjoying the freezing snow beneath him. He let his head loll to the left and saw Harley shuffling toward them, bloody and cradling one arm.
Jake heard his mother cry out and dragged himself up again, the pain in his back like fresh daggers as he saw the ice men concentrating on her, half a dozen of them-all that remained-dragging at her clothes and hair with their pitifully thin fingers. They were barely more than ghosts themselves but they swept her from her feet.
Detective Keenan took aim, but his gun clicked on an empty chamber. Whatever ammunition he'd had was gone. Jake staggered to his feet but knew he would never reach her.
"Joe, please!" he shouted.
Keenan did not hesitate. He hurled himself into their midst, using his bare hands to snap icy limbs, curling himself around Allie and driving her to the snow, covering her with his body to protect her, screaming as the ice men slashed at his back.
And then they had him.
As the snow became nothing but a flurry, the last of the ice men came together to drag Keenan into the sky. Jake could no longer stand and fell to his knees as his mother and Miri, Isaac and Harley gathered around him and the five of them watched the ice men carry Joe Keenan into the storm clouds, so high that they lost sight of him.
They heard him screaming as he fell, thirty yards away, crashing through tree branches before hitting the ground with a puff of white and a crack of bone that echoed across the snow.
"Oh my god," Miri whispered.
Side by side, Jake and Harley staggered through the snow, bleeding and exhausted, until they reached him. Detective Keenan's eyes were open and his chest rose and fell with wet, guttural breaths, but one leg had folded beneath him and a tree branch jutted from his abdomen, pinning him to the snow.
"Joe," Harley said. "Jesus, no."
Keenan gazed up at them. "I found him, didn't I? The lost boy?"
Jake frowned for a moment and glanced at Harley, who slowly nodded.
"You found him," Harley said quietly, as the last snowflakes floated to the ground around them.
"He's home, now," Jake said, glancing back at Isaac and Allie and Miri. "He's with his family. With his mother. You saved her, Joe."
But Keenan didn't respond. The rattle of his breathing had ceased, and when Jake moved nearer, he saw that the light had gone from the detective's eyes. They were dead, now, and bottomless, as if the void left by his spirit's passing went down and down and down, forever.
Jake grieved for him, and yet he knew that, in a way, even Joe Keenan had gotten his second chance tonight, and made good.
TWENTY-TWO
Coventry had never been more beautiful than in the days that followed the storm. Blanketed in snow two feet deep and with drifts three times that height that gave the illusion of a frozen white ocean, the city was enveloped in a gentle calm. The skies were blue, the days warming up just enough that by Friday, the ice and snow that had caked trees and power lines had melted away. The streets had been plowed. To the delight of children, the sidewalks had not been completely cleared in time for school on Friday morning, allowing them the pleasure of a third snow day in a row.
On Friday morning, just after nine o'clock, Allie Schapiro drove her five-year-old Nissan through the gates of Oak Grove Cemetery and followed the familiar, narrow, curving roads until she came to the place where Niko Ristani had been buried, twelve years past. Another car had already parked beside the high snowbank near Niko's grave, and though she was expecting them, it took her a moment to recognize the car as Miri's rental. Miri waited by her father's grave, a red knit cap on her head and a matching scarf setting off the somberness of her long black coat.
As Allie drove up, the doors of the rental car opened and Jake and Isaac stepped out. She parked behind Miri's car and put on the parking brake, her heart fluttering at the sight of her two sons. It jarred her, looking at Isaac-knowing he was Isaac-and seeing the face of Zachary Stroud. The other dead who'd returned had all inhabited the bodies of people whose spirits were still intact, but to hear Isaac tell it, Zachary Stroud's spirit had left his body when the little body had begun to drown, and Isaac had stepped in before the body could surrender its life in full. She had to believe him; surely Isaac would not lie to her. And yet she shuddered a little whenever she thought of it, wondering if some shred of the Stroud boy's consciousness remained there, a prisoner of his own flesh and blood. She prayed that his soul was gone, told herself that it had to be.
It had to be, if only so that she could sleep at night.
"Hi, Mom!" Isaac said, rushing to throw his arms around her. She hesitated for only a fraction of an instant before returning that love, and hoped he would not notice.
"Hello, Ikey," she said, kissing the top of his head. "I like the outfit your brother bought you."
Isaac stood back and glanced down at his clothes as if he'd forgotten what he had put on that morning, a blue-and-red-striped sweater with a gray winter coat, black boots, and jeans. Allie smiled; that was just like him. He'd never paid any attention to what he wore. No matter whose face he had, this was her little boy. She hoped that she would be able to get used to that.
"Hey, Mom," Jake said. "You look good."
Allie thanked him, frowning as she noticed the stiffness in his posture and the tightness of his expression. Beneath his clothes-his outfit similar to Isaac's-Jake had tape and bandages covering much of his back, protecting the stitches that had been required to close the worst of the puncture wounds there.
"You, on the other hand, don't look so good."
He arched an eyebrow. "Gee, thanks."