It was night again, and the Chasse family had made it to the lake. Autumn had sent me a selfie of her sunbathing on a lounge chair beside their pool. It was very unexpected, and I wasn’t sure what to say back to her.

  She said, ‘Hope you make it.’

  I could see some sort of drink that I knew probably had booze in it. Autumn and Kayla were probably cutting loose with a few drinks by the pool. Her skin already looked darker, with a hint of red. I could see Kayla right beside her in a similar chair. It seemed like they were relaxed and free of the stress of all the supernatural bullshit this city seemed to spew out.

  I wondered if she’d spill the beans to Kayla about our time together.

  I wanted to finish my hunt; call Carter and cancel the agreement we had so I could be right there beside her. When I was in her room, I wanted to rip that yellow top from her body to expose the rest of her to me. I felt a rush in my mind to get to her. I wanted to see her. I started feeling my mind abandoning the hunt for Peter Grimwood’s ghost.

  The beast was stirring, my teeth were burning through…

  Stop… what am I doing? I’m in control!

  I felt the monster trying to shift my mind and subtly make decisions for me. It was using my own memories to entice and move me in the direction it wanted.

  Was I still being affected? Was Peter still alive, reaching out to me with his unseen power, looking for a crack in the monster’s armor? Or was he looking for a way to unlock its cage? If he were alive… but how could he be?

  I doubted what the Wicklows thought. It used to be all of them who said no one could come back from the dead, and I was the one who denied those words. Now it was them saying death couldn’t keep someone else away, and I doubted. But…if it was true, I had to continue my hunt for Peter.

  The entity told me I had to kill the one that was taunting the monster inside; that he could be a threat. I had to know I was in control. I had to do this for Carter. He had a plan, and I had to stick with it.

  The whole time since they left, I had been underground. I fell beneath the city only minutes after I saw the blacked-out Suburban passing into the cloak of the woods as the rocketed away down the roads out of town. The craggy pathways beneath the city were slick with condensation from the humidity and heat above. Yet, the deeper I traversed the stable stone caverns, the colder it got. I did what I always did; heightened my senses as far as possible without transforming so I could retain my small size and speed. I wasn’t small myself, but compared to the monster I changed into, I was able to navigate certain areas much more easily. Yet, no matter how fast or how far I went, I couldn’t find anyone else. I only ever found traces of scents or footprints that would disperse into the darkness of the caves.

  One scent that I caught just beneath the Lemp Brewery led me to a bizarre oddity that I hadn’t come across underground. Down a cavern tunnel, I followed a trail. It led me through a tunnel that shrank down from a large open void beneath the city to a skinny, man-sized opening in a wall of stone. I had to wedge my body through the stone portal, scraping my face and shoulders across the coarse mineral deposits. I popped out of the other side to a very unusual anomaly. There was a running river beneath the city. When I came out of the hole, I appeared in another large opening beneath the city. The cavern was cylindrical and ran in two opposing directions. The river flowed right down the middle of the stretch of open cave. It was rushing by pretty fast. I wondered where it went… or where it came from.

  I walked into the water with no hesitation. All this water had to go somewhere at the rate of speed the current moved. Maybe this was a one-way ticket straight to the pits. If Peter was there… I had to get there too. I felt my feet leave the rocky river bed, and I floated away. It was only a brief second before it swept me away… violently.

  I smashed my head, my back, legs, and arms against rocks and spikes of underwater stone as the river pulled me into darkness at unimaginable speeds. Wherever it was taking me, I was going fast. The sound of the rushing water filled my head, only interrupted by the grunts of pain from the brutal ride. I changed directions hard, like I was being sucked up into a different path than I started on. Then I changed directions again, and again, smashing into the walls of each tunnel as I went. Suddenly, the pressure I felt from all the rushing water got really tight… and then disappeared. I felt like I was in a new place. I was still underwater, but this was a much slower-moving body of water. I could see a light, dimly lit and gleaming off the surface, very far above me. I swam up to it.

  My head broke the surface of the water, and I sucked in a sharp breath. It smelled like shit. The foul water covered me in its retched odor. I looked up at the darkened sky, only seeing the moon’s light breaking through the smog in the city. That was the light that led me up from the bottom. I knew immediately where I was now. I was back above ground, in the Mississippi River.

  “What the fuck?” I choked out as I swam to the riverbank.

  I swam to the edge, clawing my way up through the muck and grime on the side of the river. I was just south of the city, not very far from downtown. If I was human, getting out of all the grown and brush with sopping-ass wet clothing would have been a bitch. Luckily, I had stamina for days, but even still, I kept tripping over stuff on the side of the river. It took me a minute to get out.

  I didn’t know what had just happened. I couldn’t explain it. How had I gone from deep underground to being spit out in the river far above? How did that subterranean river flow up to the surface?

  The caves and everything below the city was beyond me. It was like things were keeping me from finding anyone or anything down there. It seemed like it didn’t matter what I did; I couldn’t find my way into the pits.

  I had given up for the night and walked towards home. The nightlife sprawled and crept across the city as all of the younger generations hopped around from bar to restaurant to bar again. There was a smell in the air on nights like these, and a noise that accompanied the scents. It was a low hum across the whole city. It was voices, music… it was life. They were all looking for something as usual. I wasn't looking anymore; I had found what I wanted. They were all at the lake.

  Then, for the first time in a little while, I had shameful thoughts about what I was doing. I started to think of Vicky… my wife… Thinking of her hurt me, especially when I knew my thoughts and actions regarding Autumn. I had abandoned Vicky and my entire family after I was transformed. The way I was acting and staying near the Chasse family felt increasingly wrong the more I thought about my own family. I had always felt this way a little, but more so lately after I returned to them, accepting me as a monster. Who’s to say my own family wouldn’t do the same…

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  What am I doing?

  I started to wonder if Vicky, Seth, and my family knew I was alive and living with another family… what would they feel? What would my parents think? I started feeling a knot in my throat. That’s when I pictured Caydee dressed as silly as Delilah was in her floaties.

  I pictured sitting at the beach like when I was a kid. Right on the beachfront in one of the rental houses we’d always get for our whole family. I pictured looking out to the ocean in the sand as I watched Caydee and Delilah playing in the shallow water. I imagined both families together in a massive gathering, linked together by an inhuman creature that lurked between them.

  A thought crossed my mind for the first time in my whole life, and it scared the shit out of me. I tried to push it away as soon as I felt it. I tried to convince myself that it was just a passing thought, but I knew deep down that it was already eating away at my resolve to stay true to my decisions. I thought… what if I revealed myself to my parents… to Seth, and Vicky. What if I could meet little Caydee in person? What would her little voice sound like when she was old enough to speak?

  Tears snuck from the corners of my eyes as the knot in my throat tightened even harder. The thoughts came out of nowhere and shook my mind in a way I hadn’t prepared for.

  Jon, the original Jon, told me that I would live for a long time. He had many people he cared about through the years, it seemed, so why couldn’t I? What would I gain if I stayed away from my family for the rest of their lives until they died? Then I’d never have that time again… The thoughts were deep and hard to process. I had time to think about them.

  I wasn’t sorry for what I felt for the Chasses or the whole extended family. They were like an addition to my original family. I wasn’t sorry for what I felt with Autumn. The thought of abandoning Vicky, before letting her know what I had become, was what saddened me. I never gave Vicky a chance. I never gave any of my real family a chance. In the beginning, it was impossible, but now the comfort of my situation and the acceptance of my true self had me thinking that, if this was possible with the Chasses, why not my real family? I started doubting the resolve I had just spoken about to Carter, Frank, and Autumn.

  I looked up at the smoggy sky as soon as I saw a flash of lightning. A storm had begun brewing again after I fell beneath the world for a while. When I came back up, it was a distance away, but it seemed like it was raging. I paced through the city towards my hidden home, watching the darkened clouds on the horizon twist and disperse into one another as the bolts of electricity arced and jumped between them.

  I needed to call it a night. Once morning hit, I would reassess my hunt for Peter. After all of the searching with no success, I was coming to a quick conclusion that I wouldn’t find anything without someone else’s help. I might have to talk with the Wicklows. Maybe together we could find him.

  I walked slowly towards my home, and in about an hour, I was only a few minutes from my house. I was stepping through an open field that was only fifty yards or so from a highway. The field led into the woods that merged into the greater forest area. Those trees hid my home from the rest of the world. I stepped through the soft, uneven terrain as I made my way beneath the storm.

  I could feel the thunder shaking my bones every few minutes. The lightning would arc across the city, looking like it had originated from somewhere across the world and was merely passing through St. Louis, on its way to the great beyond.

  The storm seemed powerful, and it reminded me of what Annabelle had said. She thought that it could be something… or it could be nothing. However, this storm seemed to be only rising in power and intensity with every step I took.

  I thought I could smell the rain coming as the winds picked up. I was almost to the trees, and I figured there would be an excellent place to hide from the rain, so I wouldn’t get drenched. I picked up my stride as I tried to make it to the cover of the forest.

  Then, I saw a flash of light so bright that it reminded me of one of Carter’s silver bombs that deafened and blinded. The concussive blast was so powerful that it shook my brain inside my skull. The light was blindingly bright, not just a flash, but a heat that touched the surface of my skin. I stumbled to the ground just out of reach of the woods. I didn’t get struck, but it hit just behind me. It was so close.

  That’s when it happened. I felt another flash. Except, this one hit me where I stood. The lightning strike shot out of the sky from directly above and plowed me into the dirt with unforgiving force. I felt my body turn to jelly as the raw energy collided with me. The thunderous crash that accompanied the painful arc shook every cell in my body. It felt a way that almost reminded me of the being from the fields, but nowhere near as powerful.

  The physical pain was so great that my body actually went numb. This wasn’t like when I did that intentionally to block out my emotions. This was like my body’s defense mechanism to protect my mind from the amount of pain. It was coursing through every fiber and cell of my being. I flopped and writhed in painful agony at the edge of the woods without anyone near me to help. The tree line was distant enough from the highway that even if a passerby had seen the lightning strike, they wouldn’t have bothered to stop. Nobody would stop and get out of their vehicles on a road where seventy miles an hour was the speed limit.

  My inside burned like nothing I had ever felt before. Every time my body convulsed and shook from the discharging power, I felt like every cell in my flesh had a little knife attached to it. They were all stabbing me from within my own tissues. This wasn’t like the constant burning of the unquenchable hellfire; this was power so intensified that the English language failed to produce a word strong enough to describe it. I was in hell. The pain never stopped, nor did it slow. The ever-present torture burned my body from within as the storm raged directly overhead.

  Then, slowly but surely, the pain disappeared. I sucked in a breath as quickly as the agony was gone. I could feel my body stitching itself back together, already healing the damage. I panted heavily in the coarse grass of the untouched field by the highway. I waited patiently as the pain regressed. I breathed slowly, almost starting to laugh.

  “Damn,” I spat out in a full breath.

  I couldn’t believe what I had felt. That wasn’t like anything I had ever experienced in this life. The pain I was being put through wasn’t like any other feeling I had ever experienced before since becoming the monster. Maybe if I got struck by lightning more often, I might be able to feel something. Could it kill me?

  I felt a force behind me, something familiar… and powerful. I couldn’t put it together in my head before I could turn around. Yet, when I did turn around, I saw two figures standing relatively close to me. They were too far away for my eyes to recognize after the lightning strike. My brain was still fuzzy from the energy's impact. But I knew I saw them… both of them. I eyed them for a moment before my eyes fully healed themselves, trying to focus. I saw a skinny silhouette raise a hand in my direction.

  A voice from where they stood yelled out with a maniacal scream, straining to put in all the effort they could muster into something. That’s when another lightning strike appeared above me, rocketing down to the earth at my feet in a flash. Everything I had felt before… intensified. It was ten times as bad as the first. The two people standing near me were somehow summoning power from the sky. They were attacking me with the passing storm… calling out to it somehow.

  I was lying in the dirt after the quick surge of energy that cut through me like a razor. I was numb to the world after the second blast. The only reason I was still conscious and aware was because of the power of the monster. It anchored my physical form to the world, which kept my soul from passing into the next life. The beast would not let me go; he wouldn’t allow me to die.

  As I lay burning, I felt enveloped by some kind of pressure. It opened up and swallowed me whole… taking me. The ground on my back was the only thing I had as a reference, as my senses had been burned away, but the pressure that surrounded me took me from the ground, moving me somewhere else.

  I couldn’t feel the earth at my back anymore. In an instant, all I felt was a pit in my stomach, similar to a feeling I remembered as a kid riding a rollercoaster. I was falling… fast. My senses healed and returned to me fairly quickly, only to realize that I was plummeting from the sky, back to the city below. I was rushing through the clouds of the night sky like a meteor crashing to the earth.

  This was going to hurt.