The game of Tag didn’t last long.
There was nowhere to run. The sawmill was a maze of dead ends and rusted iron, and Elias knew every shadow, every loose grate, every echo. I scrambled over the conveyor belt, my boots slipping on twenty years of grease and dust, but he was already there.
He didn’t tackle me. He corralled me.
He moved with the terrifying speed of an animal that has lived its entire life in the dark. One moment he was behind me, the next he was looming in front of me, a wall of tattered canvas and stink.
He grabbed my wrist. His grip wasn’t crushing, but it was absolute. It was the grip of a child holding onto a balloon he is terrified of losing.
“You’re It,” he rasped, his breath hot and smelling of tin cans and rot.
He dragged me back toward the center of the room. Back to the “courtroom.” Back to Julian, who was straining against the zip ties binding him to the chair, his face a mask of bloody desperation.
“Elara!” Julian shouted. “Fight him! Kick him!”
“Quiet!” Elias roared. He didn’t look at Julian. He only had eyes for me. “The Bad Prince doesn’t speak. The Bad Prince waits for the judgment.”
He spun me around. He reached down into the dirt and debris.
He picked up the revolver.
I had thrown it. I had rejected it. But the script demanded a weapon, and Elias was the director.
He shoved the gun into my hand. He closed his massive, scarred fingers over mine, forcing my grip tight around the steel. He lifted my arm, pointing the barrel straight at Julian’s chest.
“Finish it,” Elias whispered. His voice trembled, vibrating against my ear. “Do it, Princess. Send him to the box. Then the Dragon can’t hurt us. Then we’ll be safe.”
My arm shook. The gun felt like a living thing, heavy and hateful.
“I can’t,” I choked out.
“You have to!” Elias screamed, spittle flying from his lips. “It’s the rules! If you don’t kill the villain, the story doesn’t end! And I’m so tired, Elara. I’m so tired of the story.”
I looked at him. Really looked at him.
I saw the madness in his eyes, the wild, frantic energy of a mind that had snapped under the weight of isolation. But beneath the madness, I saw the exhaustion. I saw the fourteen-year-old boy who had huddled in a shed while the floodwaters rose, clutching a smooth stone and waiting for someone who never came.
He wasn’t trying to hurt me. He was trying to rest.
He thought that if we played the game to the end, if we reached the “happily ever after,” the pain would stop. He thought murder was the key to the exit.
“Shoot him!” Elias commanded, his hand squeezing mine so hard the bones ground together. “Be the Queen!”
I looked at Julian. He stopped struggling. He met my eyes. He knew. He knew I wouldn’t do it. But he also knew that if I didn’t, Elias might kill us both in a fit of rage.
The only way to win is not to play.
That was what the therapists said about trauma loops. You don’t fight the current; you get out of the river.
I took a breath. I inhaled the smell of the mill—rust, wet wood, and the copper tang of the victims arranged in the shadows.
“No,” I said.
I didn’t scream it. I didn’t shout. I just said it.
I relaxed my fingers.
Elias tried to hold my hand closed, but I went limp. I let go.
The gun slipped from my grasp.
Clatter.
The sound was deafening in the cavernous space. Steel hitting concrete. It skittered away, spinning into the darkness under the conveyor belt.
Elias froze.
He stared at his empty hand. Then he stared at the floor where the gun had vanished.
“You dropped it,” he whispered. He sounded bewildered. “You… you broke the prop.”
He looked at me, his face crumbling. “Why did you drop it? We were at the end. We were almost there.”
He raised his hands—huge, dangerous hands capable of snapping necks and dragging bodies. He reached for me. Not to hug, but to shake. To force me back into character.
“Pick it up!” he shrieked. “Pick it up and play!”
I didn’t retreat.
Every instinct in my body screamed at me to run, to cower, to find a weapon. But I knew that running triggered the predator. Fighting triggered the defender.
I stepped forward.
I stepped right into his reach.
“I’m done playing, Elias,” I said softly.
He flinched as if I had slapped him. He towered over me, a giant in rags, trembling with potential violence.
“You can’t be done,” he insisted, his voice hitching. “The wedding… the guests…”
I reached up. I placed my hands on his chest.
The canvas of his coat was stiff with filth. Beneath it, I could feel his heart hammering like a trapped bird. Thump-thump-thump-thump.
“Elias,” I said.
He looked down at my hands. He looked terrified.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
He blinked. “What?”
“I’m sorry I forgot you.”
The anger in his face wavered. The tension in his shoulders locked, then spasmed.
“You didn’t forget,” he muttered, repeating the lie he had told himself for twenty years. “You were sleeping. The Sandman put dust in your eyes.”
“No,” I said, pressing my palms against him. “I wasn’t sleeping. I left. I went away, and I grew up, and I left you in the wall. I left you in the dark.”
I looked up into his eyes—those polished river stones that held all the sorrow of the world.
“I left you alone,” I said, my voice breaking. “And I am so, so sorry.”
I wrapped my arms around him.
I buried my face in the foul-smelling fabric of his coat and I hugged the monster.
Elias went rigid. He stood there like a statue, his arms hovering in the air, his breath caught in his throat.
For a second, I thought he was going to crush me. I thought he was going to snap my spine.
But he didn’t move. He just vibrated.
“I see you,” I whispered into his chest. “I see you, Elias. You’re not a ghost. You’re not a story. You’re real.”
Validation.
It was the one thing Oakhaven had never given him. Not his father. Not the town. Not even me, in the end. We had all treated him like a phantom, a shameful secret to be hidden in sheds and cellars.
“I’m real?” he choked out. The voice wasn’t the Sandman’s raspy growl anymore. It was small. Young.
“You’re real,” I promised. “And you don’t have to be the Knight anymore. You don’t have to protect me.”
“But the Dragon…”
“The Dragon is dead,” I said. “You killed him. Remember? You saved me. It’s over.”
I felt a shudder run through his massive frame.
Slowly, hesitantly, his arms came down.
He wrapped them around me.
He didn’t squeeze. He held me with a fragile, desperate tenderness, as if he were holding a soap bubble. He buried his face in my hair.
And then, he began to weep.
It wasn’t a silent crying. It was a loud, ugly, wrenching sound. Great, heaving sobs that shook his entire body. He cried like a child who has been lost in the woods for a very long time and has finally seen the lights of home.
“I waited,” he sobbed into my hair. “I waited so long, Elara. It was so dark.”
“I know,” I said, tears streaming down my own face. “I know.”
We stood there in the center of the slaughterhouse, surrounded by the dead, holding onto each other. The killer and the final girl. The monster and the muse.
For a moment, the horror receded. There was no blood. No duct tape. No madness. Just two traumatized children clinging to the wreckage of their lives.
“I just wanted to play,” he wept. “I just wanted us to be Kings.”
“We can’t be Kings,” I whispered, stroking his matted hair. “We’re just people, Elias. Broken people.”
Julian was watching us. I could feel his gaze. He hadn’t made a sound. He was witnessing the impossible—the de-escalation of a nightmare through an act of love.
Elias took a shuddering breath. He pulled back slightly, looking down at me. His face was wet, the dirt streaked with tears. The madness had receded, leaving behind a profound, crushing clarity.
He looked at the empty gun on the floor. He looked at Julian, bound to the chair. He looked at the shadowy figures of the victims in the pews.
“I broke them,” he whispered, the horror dawning in his eyes.
“Yes,” I said gently.
“They won’t wake up.”
“No. They won’t.”
He looked at his hands. The hands that had strangled and glued and bound. He looked at them as if they belonged to someone else.
“I’m a bad boy,” he whimpered. “Mrs. Higgins said… she said I was bad. She said I was rotten.”
“You’re not rotten,” I said fiercely. “You were hurt. And you didn’t know how to stop hurting.”
“I have to go to the box,” he said. His voice was flat now. Resigned. “Bad boys go in the box.”
“No,” I said, gripping his coat. “No boxes. We’ll get help. We’ll…”
Woo-oop. Woo-oop.
The sound cut through the air like a knife.
Sirens.
Blue and red lights flashed through the high windows of the mill, strobing against the steel rafters.
Elias stiffened. The softness vanished from his face, replaced by a jolt of animal terror.
“The men,” he hissed. “The men with the lights.”
“Elias, stay with me,” I pleaded, holding him tighter. “It’s okay. I’ll talk to them. I’ll explain.”
“No!” he shouted, shoving me back.
He stumbled away, his eyes darting around the room. The child was gone. The cornered beast was back.
“They’ll put me in the cage!” he screamed. “They’ll lock the door! I can’t go back in the dark! I can’t!”
“Elias, look at me!”
He didn’t look at me. He looked at the gun on the floor.
He dove for it.
“No!” Julian shouted.
Elias grabbed the revolver. He scrambled up, backing away toward the edge of the platform, toward the gaping pit where the old debarker machine used to sit—a dark maw leading down into the river intake.
“You lied!” he screamed at me, raising the gun. Not at me. At the door. At the world coming to take him. “You said we were safe! You said the Dragon was dead!”
“He is!” I cried, stepping toward him. “Elias, put it down!”
“The Dragon isn’t a man!” he wailed. “It’s everyone! It’s all of them!”
The heavy steel doors of the mill burst open with a crash.
“POLICE! DROP THE WEAPON!”
Sheriff Miller.
A wall of blinding white tactical lights flooded the room, erasing the shadows, erasing the intimacy, erasing the moment of grace.
Elias screamed, shielding his eyes.
“Don’t shoot!” I shrieked, throwing my hands up, putting myself between the police and Elias. “Don’t shoot him!”
But the script had changed again. I wasn’t the director anymore.
And the tragedy was rushing toward its final curtain.