Eddie was running down the stairs before she could tell him to be safe. Nina followed after him, then Tobe.

Mitch lumbered down the hall, wincing with every step. When Jessica saw his flesh, she took an unconscious step back. A criss-cross of scarlet slashes covered his entire torso, neck and face. It looked as if he’d been given a hundred lashes with a bullwhip.

“It burns so much,” he said, his voice pleading.

There was no need to ask him what had happened. Whatever they had done while filming had stirred the EB children into a rage. Mitch, the cocksure man who wanted to press on no matter what, was the unlucky focus of their anger.

“The burning will stop soon,” Jessica said.

“How do you know?”

“You’re not the first person to get clawed up by an EB. I’ve gotten a few myself.”

She didn’t tell him that she’d never seen it done to this extent before. Some of the welts were deep and beaded with blood. Plenty would heal into scars that would never, ever go away.

Kneeling down to the children, she was taken aback by the blank expressions on their faces. They looked like a pair of sleepwalkers, both deep in a dreamlike trance. They hadn’t been right at all since they’d found them in the special place where the Last Kids had died. What hold did the Last Kids have on them? She wished Eddie were here to find out.

She said to Daphne, “You should check them for scratches, too, just to be safe.”

Their mother looked on the verge of tears. She nodded. “I just want to get them away from here.”

“I know, I know,” Jessica said, stroking Jason and Alice’s cheeks. “We’ll wait out here while you check.”

Daphne ushered them back into the room where they had just been locked away.

Looking at Mitch’s savaged body, Jessica found it hard to find sympathy for the man.

“You should probably put your shirt and jacket back on, unless you want to freeze to death.”

“Yeah.”

He turned to go back to the master bedroom where he’d left his clothes and gasped.

The end of the hallway was choked with children, eyes like silver dollars, mouths “catching flies” as Jessica’s Aunt Eve used to say when she spotted her staring off into space.

They were a dozen or more, silent, motionless, a wall of un-death.

In all her years investigating the paranormal, Jessica had never seen anything like it.

“Perfect, not perfect,” they said, though their mouths never moved. Their collected voices sounded as if their throats were clotted with dirt, the words pushing through the gaps in the worm-filled earth.

Mitch skittered behind her, his hands on her shoulders. She tried to shrug him off but he held firm.

Perfect, not perfect.

Eddie had said that when they were in the attic.

What did it mean?

Perfect.

Perfect people.

Perfect race.

It all came back to eugenics.

An island of perfect but not perfect children. Generations of what the Ormsby patriarchs deemed experiments gone wrong.

Jessica buckled over. Her stomach felt as if it was teeming with burning snakes. Her pulse pounded at the back of her skull. The journals slipped from her hands, thudding on the hardwood floor.

No!

The children phased in and out as she struggled to remain on her feet. It was so hard to breathe. Impossible to stay upright.

Sleep. God, she was tired. Beyond bone tired. An exhaustion that depleted her energy right down to a cellular level.

As consciousness faded, so came an influx of empathic emotions, a tidal wave of sadness and horror, sweeping down the hall, tumbling her end-over-end, sluicing down her throat until she couldn’t scream, couldn’t draw a lifesaving breath.

Paul was unconscious but breathing at the foot of the stairs. Each breath sounded wet, like blood was filling his lungs. Eddie knew that was a very bad sign. His left leg was twisted at an impossible angle, a compound fracture for sure. He was going to need some serious medical attention.

Eddie felt for them man’s pulse beneath the wiry beard on his neck. Still strong.

While Nina dropped to the floor to hold the big man’s hand in her own, Tobe stepped over his brother-in-law’s body, heading for the kitchen.

“He’s alive,” Eddie said to the retreating man. “Just in case you give a shit.”

Tobe whirled at him. “Of course he’s alive. I can see that.”

Eddie wondered just how he could in the dark.

Before he could ask, Tobe stalked into the kitchen, banging cabinet doors.

“Should we move him to the couch?” Nina asked.

“No, with that leg the way it is, we just have to make him comfortable where he is. Grab a pillow from the couch and a blanket. Then see if there are any painkillers in the house, or Ibuprofen at the very least. When he regains consciousness, he’s going to be in a hell of a lot of pain, and probably shock.”

He didn’t express his concerns about the sound of the man’s breathing. Should he be rolled onto his side, to drain any fluids that made come up? Or was it better to keep him on his back? Eddie couldn’t think straight.

She nodded quickly, running to the great room to get the pillow and blanket.

“What did you do up there?” Eddie asked her when she came back.

“I…we…”

“I need to know what you said or did to get them so angry. I’d find out for myself, but it’s hard to make out anything through their static. It’s like listening in to a kennel of pissed off pit bulls.”

He lifted Paul’s head so she could slip the pillow underneath.

Nina wiped her hand across her face. She looked ten years older than she had before the night started. Yes, she had a touch of psychic abilities, just enough to get her and everyone else in a world of trouble. That was a problem that wasn’t unique to her. Too many others thought they had all the answers, could control every outcome when dabbling with the unknown. They could take the cork out of the bottle, but they had no concept of what to do with the genie when it emerged, or how to put it back in the bottle. Genies were not to be trifled with.

“I was telling the children here I could reunite them with their father. Children need their parents, more so in death than life.”

“You what?” He desperately wanted to shake her for displaying such profound stupidity.

Tears snaked down the crow’s feet around her eyes.

“I just…just thought.”

Eddie bolted erect. “You didn’t think. You didn’t think at all. You play acted like a goddamn fool. Those children don’t need to be with their fathers for a very simple reason. Their fathers were the ones who murdered them. They watched them grow, grand little experiments that were tossed aside the moment they didn’t live up to theory.”

Nina’s mouth worked, open and closed, but no words filtered out.

He left here there, pondering the consequences of her actions, turning on the assistive light on his cell phone to search for the Ormsby graves.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Mitch grabbed under Jessica’s armpits to keep her from face-planting on the floor. “Daphne, I need a little help!”

The door to the children’s room flew open. A hand flitted to Daphne’s mouth.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Those damn ghost kids appeared and she passed out from fright, I guess.” He gestured with his head down the hall. Daphne barely contained her shriek when she spied the gathering of dead Ormsby children.

“Help me get her inside,” he said.

Unable to tear her eyes from the silent children, she grabbed Jessica’s ankles and helped Mitch get her on one of the children’s beds. Jason and Alice sat on the other, staring at Jessica.

“Don’t forget the books, Mommy,” Alice said.

“Books? What books?”

“The ones Ms. Backman found upstairs in the bad place,” Jason said.

The flood of questions threatened to overwhelm her. Alice pointed outside the door. Daphne tilted her head in that direction and saw the three large books spilled on the floor.