Jason Briffel reads the transcript again.
His hands are shaking. If anyone inside this roadside diner notices how badly he’s sweating, they’ll probably blame the baking desert heat outside.
But it’s not the heat.
It’s the same full-body reaction he experiences every time he reads the ten-year-old record of the last time Trina appeared onstage with her birth father.
Normally the transcript focuses him, which is why he picked it up after the plate of steak and eggs in front of him failed to ignite his appetite. He thought it would collect his scattered thoughts, channel his anxiety and doubt into action.
It’s been seven years since he showed up on the doorstep of her grandmother’s house in California, even longer since he mailed her those letters explaining how her birth father and her so-called rescue by the authorities had averted her true destiny. Her soul was being starved. Together, the two of them could reawaken that exceptional and enlightened young girl Daniel and Abigail Banning had coaxed into being.
But today the transcript hasn’t worked its usual magic. Reading it has left him angry and confused.
He’s gripped now by the humiliating memory of what happened to him that fateful night at Burnham College. He’s feeling the vise grip of the two blazer-clad security guards who’d appeared out of nowhere right after he entered the auditorium. The ones who’d threatened to call the cops as they carried him out so quickly he could practically feel the wind in his hair.
A hopeful, perhaps foolish part of him had been convinced that someone in Trina’s inner circle would have seen the wisdom in his letters.
Abigail Banning certainly had.
Unlike Trina, who responded to his attempts at honest communication with a restraining order, Abigail replied in great detail to every single letter Jason mailed her at Haddock Penitentiary. She recognized Jason as the vehicle for her adopted daughter’s restoration, a daughter who’d been divinely gifted to her and then cruelly removed by a world that did not understand the spiritual necessity of life taking. Abigail blessed Jason with words he’d been desperate to hear since he’d first laid eyes on Trina.
You will be the Daniel to her Abigail, she’d written. And in so doing, you will become my son, too.
Why hadn’t he read that letter instead of this transcript?
He’s brought it with him, along with several others. They’re at the bottom of his backpack, along with the coil of rope, the rolls of duct tape, and the Ziploc bags in which he plans to put the bullets he’s going to strip from the three different guns she keeps in her house.
Should he read it now?
No, there’s no telling what effect it might have on him.
Instead he searches the diner for corrupters. There’s one sitting a few tables away: pretty and young, with a blonde ponytail and a halter top that reveals just enough suntanned skin to corrupt. She taps at the screen of her smartphone. The mustached man sitting across from her gazes out at the passing eighteen-wheelers with a vacant stare that reveals all the damage she’s done to his soul.
She ignores the man on purpose. Jason knows this. That morning, or possibly the night before, she denied the man sex and took great, silent, delight in the pain this caused him. Right now she’s texting a girlfriend, or maybe several, and they’re reveling in the power she lords over the man, in the pain her withholding creates in him. And she does this because she is a corrupter, one of many. And once Jason has awakened Trina to their combined destiny, she will give herself entirely to their union and help him remove women like this blonde whore from the earth. Trina will burn away the evidence of his work, just like she burned away the detritus of Abigail and Daniel’s victims. But first he has to break down her walls, show her there’s no escape. From her true calling. From her real mother.
From him.
These thoughts, these plans—this vision—finally give him the confidence he’s been seeking since he stopped off at this diner.
He has only a few hours left in his drive, a few hours until he’ll reach the isolated parcel of Arizona desert she now calls home.
Today is a day like no other, and it will require a great deal more strength and confidence than it did to write those letters.
Because a few months ago, all those years of not knowing where she’d disappeared to came to an abrupt end, thanks to a single miraculous e-mail. As thrilled as he’d been to have the information, the knowledge brought with it a distinct challenge: to return to the mission he’d almost given up on entirely—to stoke the flames that would turn Trina into Burning Girl once again.
As for the name she calls herself now, he must never let it pass through his lips. He would be doing her a disservice if he did. His job is to free her of her delusions, not strengthen them.
So he avoids thinking it now. To him, she will always be Trina Pierce. And if he succeeds this time, she will become his Burning Girl.
2
“Charlotte, why don’t you step away from the window?”
She knows it’s a good idea.
Most of Dr. Thorpe’s suggestions have been good ideas, or at least the 30 percent she’s been willing to try.
It’s true. If she doesn’t stop staring at the movie theater across the street, she won’t be able to focus on his advice. But a crazy part of her believes that if she turns her back on the bold cluster of words on the old-school marquee, they’ll somehow strike at her like a snake. They’re the same words that stopped her in her tracks when she first saw them, that have turned every night for the past two weeks into a prolonged battle with terrible dreams.
HALLOWEEN DOUBLE FEATURE—SAVAGE WOODS & SAVAGE WOODS II: THE RECKONING
The Blake is a restored movie house, one of the new jewels of Scarlet, this tiny, once-abandoned mining town in the Arizona desert turned hippie enclave and aspiring tourist trap. Its stucco facade is painted a shade of hunter green that from a distance makes it look like an oasis rising from the parched Sonoran desert. At night the vertical neon sign that spells out the theater’s name is visible for miles around.
At dusk, however, the sign looks skeletal and hungry; the unlit neon letters cast spidery shadows along its length. And then there are the posters flanking the ticket booth; the same blood-dripping art that used to stare back at her from the T-shirts worn by all those horror movie fans who’d pack the house at the events she used to do with her father.
“OK,” Dylan says. “Then describe what you’re seeing right now.”
“A movie theater,” she says.
“Is that all?”
“Invasion. Injustice.”
“Fear?” he asks.
“That, too. The girl on the poster looks very afraid, just like she always does.”
“The girl that’s supposed to be you.”
“Well, she doesn’t look like me. Her hair’s still brown, for one, and I’ve got about fifteen pounds on her. And they changed some of the letters in her name, so there’s that. One in the first, one in the last. My father saw to that part, you know, ’cause he’s such a kind, considerate, selfish, motherfu—sorry.”
“Since when did I say you couldn’t curse?”
“Well, if you had, I’d probably just do it anyway and then leave.”
“You’re free to leave at any time. You know that.”
“I do.”
“But I wish you wouldn’t, Charlotte. I wish you’d keep talking.”
“Honestly, it’s easier when you try to read my mind.”
She sits, looks at him for the first time since she stormed into his cramped office, which always smells of burned coffee from the AA meetings downstairs.