Dad was still as stone in his desk chair when I came in with his nightly cup of sharp masala chai. His head was down, the scant tuft of grey and white widow-peaked hair that remained at the top of his forehead all I could see before I set the cup down.

     “Oh. Thank you, honey.” His voice was thin. Thin and a little gravelly like he’d been on the verge of crying. It was like that a lot, even after all this time. It had been a dozen years, but I knew Mom’s death sat resolutely at the forefront of his mind and always would.

     He quickly stowed some papers he’d been looking at, then shut a small blue book, cupping his hands gently around the speckled mug. The silhouette of a moose stood between his fingers, a reminder of the one we’d seen at the foot of Wildcat Mountain when he’d taken me on an enchanting roadtrip through Vermont and New Hampshire.

     We’d gone because I’d wanted to find a new place to start a life that could maybe resemble something less emotionally arduous. A place removed from the overbearing cloud that kept itself darkening our home.

     A place removed from him.

     I swallowed at the thought that made me feel so rotten inside, content at having stayed with him, then kissed the top of his head. “What are you working on tonight?” I asked. “More about your second favorite revolution?” His heart seemed to beat only for his history books these days. It was all that lit him up and got him talking, especially the little details that no one seemed to focus on.

     “Just another dive into Paris. For fun,” he answered, lifting the mug to his lips, then setting it back down. “You know Marie Antoinette was younger than you when she became a queen?”

     His dark eyes glistened when they met mine. He had definitely been on the verge of tears when I’d come in. What about the French Revolution had reminded him of Mom, I wondered, then gave him a half-hearted smile.

     “Heh, am I disappointing you? Should I finally attempt my rise to power?”

     He took in a deep breath, then let it out with a lingering sigh. “You could never disappoint me, Elizabeth Talía.” He nearly whispered my first and middle names—the same as my grandmother’s, her grandmother’s before her. “You wear a crown you cannot see; the crowning achievement of my life.” His fingers came up to sweep through the tousled cordovan waves of my hair where they stopped just above my waist. Something clenched within my chest as he held his heavy gaze on me. Heartache.

     “That crown didn’t do Marie any favors.” I chanced a little joke, dragging my index finger across my throat with a laugh.

     “Well, she didn’t do any favors for the people of France.” I studied him for a moment, hoping for some laughter in return; something more than the serious, frail look on his face, then turned for the office door. “How about we watch Harvey tonight?” he quickly asked when my hand was on the knob, and I could feel the switch in his voice to a warmth I remembered from childhood. There he was, the dad I longed to see and hear. Jimmy Stewart could always lift our spirits in a pinch. “We need a visit from that puca.”

     A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. “That would be—”

     The violent crack of the front door hitting the inside wall stopped me short and Dad abruptly stood, his chair tipping over behind him.

                          **********************************************************

     The fabric at the base of my throat was cold and wet. I sucked in a shallow, shaky breath and took the ramp onto 94, headed west. My Taurus vibrated over the rumble strip on the edge of the freeway as I glanced into my rearview mirror time and again.

     Nothing there. No one there.

     My chest shook, and I tried to calm myself by setting my red-stained hand on my sternum. No one there. Headlights flashed across the mirror as someone passed me in a whipping stream of blurry brightness just as more tears fell and the image of my dad toppling to the floor of his office burned behind my eyes.

     “Aleksander Cain,” I’d heard from the man who’d thrown open one of the glass French doors to the office while I cowered where Dad had hidden me in his tall cupboard.

I’d watched through a narrow crack with one hand clamped over my mouth as a woman rifled through papers and books. Dad had quickly stowed the blue book beneath his rug.

     “We’ve hunted you across the years, Cain,” the man had said with a deep gruffness I didn’t like. “Your time has come.”

     I set my hand on the book in my passenger seat and felt a surge of heat in the palm of my hand. What did he hide it for?

     A truck flew past me, its horn wailing into the night at my unhinged driving.

     My chest ached. My tears fell.

     “Your child is known to all. Where is it?” The words rippled through my head, overlapping each other as I questioned them. Me. I’d been just steps away from the people tearing through my house, my dad’s office.

     The roiling in my stomach deepened, swirling a sickness mercilessly through me as a haunting clack of bones hitting wood echoed in my ears. Dad had let out a breathless groan from behind his desk as the man, shrouded in a dark hood, circled to hit him once again.

     From within the cupboard, my heart sank; the blood blanched from my flesh. They were going to kill him, something told me.

     The woman had kept up her search of everything that cluttered the small office. Papers floated to the rug, masking the small bump where the book sat. A lamp slipped to the floor, darkening the room, its bulb flickering while a cry from my dad resounded in every nerve of my chest, vibrating angrily through me.

     And that’s when I’d recognized the shift in me. The shift that told me I was angry at what was happening. Upset and terrified, yes… but anger consumed me in the moment that he was struck in the stomach, doubling over just before another hit connected with his jaw.

     The man above him reached for something in his coat, then. A blade of some kind. A knife. From within the cupboard, I let my palm fall from its place across my mouth. My eyes widened on the narrow strip of silver where it caught on the light from the flickering lamp. It was sharp, but something deep within me was sharper.

     Blazing anger ricocheted through my chest, heat searing beneath my ribs and spreading to reach my shoulders, my arms. My fingers hovered on the groves of the wooden cupboard door. Hovered for just one more second as the man who stood above my dad pushed the point of the long knife against his throat.

     A dark, thick bead of blood burst through Dad’s skin.

     Then fell.

     Something hot seared through my hands like the shock of touching a live wire and I shoved the cupboard door in a burst of rage.

     All eyes connected with me, but I was already primed to hurl myself at the man who held my dad captive on the floor.

     “No! Eliz— no!” he cut my name off in a yell from the floor, but it was too late.

     The frame of the woman shifted into my peripheral view while the anger within me surged to the surface of my veins. Something all-consuming was taking hold of me. My arms pulsed in an angry cry as two hands reached for me from behind and I finally closed the space between me and the man whose knife still pushed perilously into the skin at my dad’s throat.

     Blood spilled from the wound as it grew and the pressure behind the knife made a dent in his flesh. One more tiny move and it would sink in completely, but I was there.

     My shoulder connected with the man’s face where he hovered over my dad as I threw every ounce of weight I had into him. It was like hitting a brick wall. He shifted maybe an inch or two back as I fell on his lap and he grabbed a handful of my hair. One giant tug and he’d wrenched my face back while the woman came to look me over.

     “Definitely theirs,” she said.

     Blue and red lights shocked their colors through my mirror, spinning their warning while a siren screamed from far behind me as I merged onto another highway—this one heading south. I hit the border of Michigan and Indiana, my fingers shaking on my wheel. They were coming for me… they were… the cop car passed in a blur of indigo-washed tears just as I shoved my foot to the floor and kicked up my speed. I needed to get where I was going. Wherever I was going… Where am I going?

     “Find it,” the man had told the woman after identifying me. Her head was down in the shadowed room, but I could see the angles of her face, the slight pout of her lips, the hollow of her eyes as they raked over my frame.

     Her hands were fast as she started tugging at my clothes, the hand still knotted in my hair holding me still.

     “She doesn’t understand anything. Please,” my dad pleaded from behind me while my shirt was torn at my waist. They were checking me for something. I didn’t have anything of theirs.

     Anger still simmered in me while I rocked against the hold, and with that anger heavy in my veins, I lifted my leg and kicked at the woman’s chest. She stumbled back while my hair was tugged again. But then Dad suddenly rose from behind me. He let out a shallow noise, almost a growl, and then his hands were grabbing at the man who held me.

     A desk drawer rattled by my ear. Silver glinted in the dying light.

     “A letter opener, Cane?” The voice above me mocked as I kicked out once more and the woman reached to draw something from her coat. “Just like them. Probably haven’t kept a blade on you in a century. This is what happens when you keep yourself sheltered.”

     And then it all became a blur. A blur of words and fists and cuts and stabs and screams. Of tumbling drawers and hits to every inch of my body. Of fluttering lamplight and boiling anger. Boiling anger that held me, strangled me in a way I somehow liked. Anger that made me see nothing but this heat of death that I needed to inflict. Pain… the pain I needed to inflict.

     I-55. A sign whipped past me and something lit like a bulb in my chest. I veered to follow it.

     The scuffle stirred within that room, and I was back on my feet, reaching the office door just as a hand clamped around my ankle and I fell. Pain ripped through my knee, a crack forming somewhere beneath my skin.

     I turned my head to see my dad stand and scrape his letter opener across the man’s neck while the woman started tugging me back. He hissed and rounded on my dad once more.

     “Did you get it?” he shouted to her, his foot taking both my dad’s out in one quick motion. A thud and a groan following.

     “I will,” she grumbled a reply, centering frustrated eyes on me. Her grip on my ankle tightened and she tugged once more, trying to lift the leg of my jeans with her other hand. What was she looking for? I slammed my foot into her face and she snapped a shout at me, finally extracting a knife from her coat. The tip dragged up the skin she’d exposed. The cut that broke across my ankle pulled a scream from me and I struggled away from her while she raised the blade.

     And then my dad called out from the floor of his office once more. The cry was different this time. No pleading.

     I looked just as the woman did. Watched as blood washed the pale rug from a deep wound in my dad’s chest. Still, he struggled, only looking at me, worried for me.

     “This is for Etna,” the man spat at my dad, who grimaced in pain beneath him. “You can take one of us, but we’ve whittled you down to nothing. Look at you now! What’s left of you.” He nodded his chin at me.

     Tears clenched my throat, paralyzing it while my arms trembled with fury as I heard my dad choke through a cough. I kicked the woman from me and winced at my knee as I got to my feet. The French door quaked on its hinges while I tried to slam it in her face.

     If I can buy some time, I can get to the phone. I can get a kitchen knife. I can… I can still save him. Save us. Another cough from him twisted my stomach.

     The thoughts I’d had—those wishful, naive thoughts—pressed themselves back into my mind while I cut through the night. My Taurus lurched as my chaotic driving became more and more reckless and the worst of images flooded my vision.

     I was whipping carelessly through the night now as I left the freeway and cut onto a small highway, then made turn after unplanned turn. A maze of country roads tugged me through the unending darkness, my lungs and throat raw with the fiery breaths I’d forced through them with every relit clove cigarette I’d placed between my teeth.

     My heartbeats pummeled against my ribs while tears rushed down my face once more and the flash of another scene rocketed into my view.

     The door opened again as I took just one step, a rattle of its glass panels shaking my gut while I tried to run for the kitchen, but was instantly dropped right outside the office by grasping fingers. And that’s when I turned to look back.

     The knife that had already cut into my dad was raising up. The man above him said something unintelligible as I screamed, and a rush of hot tears poured from me. My unhinged fury had muddled now with pain, everything surging through me in a shocking rhythm. A ticking in my ears. The time bomb of my heart.

     Tick tick tick.

     I could hear it once more as I careened through the night.

     Everything seemed to slow as I scrambled to my feet and lunged for the room.

     “Talía, no!” Dad called me by my middled name, his eyes connecting with mine just as the knife broke through his ribs and punctured his heart.

     And in that instant, I could feel it. Death. I could feel his death; feel the end. The last part of me that kept itself anchored and breathing and yearning for some kind of life within the darkness of our home. It was gone. It was leached from me and was replaced with a drowning ache I had never known, not even when my mom had died.

     The ache spread thick like honey into my arms, rippling and coating that anger in something too real for me to understand. Too visceral for me to fight.

     My tiny world, my broken world, snapped into focus while the pulsing anger tore through my throat, and I shouted my pain at the woman whose eyes had widened at me, who now pushed to close the door between us.

     That anger welled in my lungs, sloshed through my stomach, cut in harsh and searing slices right through my heart.

     My eyes narrowed at her through the glass, centering on her chest, my veins seized violently within my arms, my ears rang with a terrible pitch, I bit hard into my lip…

     And in a motion I could hardly believe I’d made, my hand flashed backward, then pierced the air in front of me as a single, heavy thump resounded from within my ribcage. CRACK. The glass between us erupted in a shower of splintering shards, though no part of me had touched it. My fist shook in front of me while everything hovered, defying gravity, defying my belief and all I’d ever known of the world. Her eyes stilled on the glass while mine sought the quaking little organ within her chest.

     And then I opened my hand.

     The rough and wicked shards of glass shot through the tension of the air, sinking into her body in dozens of deep stab wounds. A strangled gasp lifted from her throat and her eyes paled right before me.

     Beyond her, the man released his knife from its deeply sheathed state, shouting and lunging for the body that had dropped in a heap on the other side of the door. He went to her side, his shadowed, dark eyes connecting with mine just once—watery and confused. My hands dropped at my sides, though they shook with the force of what they’d done. What I thought they’d done. Then quickly, he swept her from the ground and took her out.

What had I done? What had my hands done? How could I have done it at all?

     That little light that had burned inside me glowed its painful, radiant glow like its light was made of fire. A flame was being fanned in the deep recesses of my body while I hooked around a curve and I shook with the rush of tears that choked the base of my throat. My heart beat faster as signs took me farther and farther, through hours of following nothing but a feeling.

     Keep going. Almost there.

     The pulsating anger still kneaded at my veins while they billowed with unsung rage. The man had gone, but to where? Some part of me hungered to hunt him down. To kill him too, though I couldn’t reconcile with the fact that I had somehow killed this woman without ever touching her.

     But no. I couldn’t go after the man. Dad.

     My hands frantically grasped my dad’s sweater, the yellow fibers dyed the same plum-red that pooled beneath him. “Dad?” I’d tried to shout, but the garbled sound cut off as I coughed my tears onto his chest. “Dad.” A shaky whisper now. It was all I had left of my voice.

     My elbow grazed the book he’d hidden and I hesitantly dug for it, easing away from him to hold it against my shuddering body as I wept for longer than I could measure. I thought through the night, the bits and pieces of every word these strangers had uttered. The papers that now littered the floor.

     I grabbed at them, standing and wheeling around the room as my eyes searched a top page. Etna. The name was scratched on some rough sketch that almost resembled a map. I wheeled once more, the sticky, red edges of every page settling behind the book as I shook my head. What was it they’d come for? Why had they asked about a child? I picked up more and more, gathering anything the woman had touched, pulling it all together with trembling hands.

     And then I went for the drawers, but the front door snapped shut once again and I stiffened, dropping the papers, but clutching the book, as the man came hurtling back into the darkened room and strode across it.

     He looked at me hesitantly for a few seconds. I could only make out his eyes from under his hood, the thick brow that shadowed them. His fingers shook as he eyed me like a deer in headlights before slowly dropping to his knees by my dad and slipping his arms under his body.

     “No! Don’t TOUCH him!” My strangled voice filled the small office and he flinched as he lifted my dad like he was weightless. He stood and found my eyes just once more, crossing in a large stride and quickly snatching the book from my grip, then hurrying from the room. “No, don’t—” I took a running leap toward the hall, my foot catching on a puddle of the woman’s blood and sweeping my legs out from under me.

     And then he was gone. Both of them. The man and my dad. Gone.

     The cold moon spotlit a new road for me like it wanted me to take it, so I veered hard to the left, then wound through the trees going further south than I’d ever been in my life.

     Soon, my panicked hands had filled a box with the papers and everything my dad had had in his desk, even some things that seemed important on his shelves. My eyes scanned this and that. Words blurred, scrolled endlessly as I searched for anything to show me what this night had been. Who these people were. Etna? Who was Etna?

     My hand hovered on my cell as I made to call the police, then snapped it shut once more.

     But no. No, I couldn’t do that.

     The blood that seeped across the rug came from two directions. Two people had died here. They’d know. They’d know from this much blood. They’d ask what had happened. This is what investigators did. The glass had killed her. I… I had killed her. Somehow. And Dad was gone. The bodies were gone.

     I couldn’t explain it. Not to them… and certainly not to myself.

     Within minutes, I’d filled my car with bags. Anything that mattered to me. Anything I’d need. To do what, I didn’t know. But I was leaving. Leaving our family home.

     How could I leave?

     Tick tick tick tick. Blood pounded in my ears.

     I looked across the dining table where we’d sat for countless meals, just the two of us. My parents’ wedding picture stood in its pewter frame on the mantel. My fingers passed over it quickly, lifting the hinged door in the back and pulling the picture from it to tuck inside my jacket.

     The door snapped shut behind me and I froze on the front porch.

     Just go, a shallow voice said. Not mine—his.

     That moon hung above me like a magnet, pulling me to it while still, I wove blindly through my unknown maze.

     The beats in my chest were like a war drum now, driving me, pushing me—telling me to follow, hammering out the pain of losing him—my last parent, the last of my family.

     Everything I was feeling was more, was heavier, was something too thick to sift through as it threatened to break me. My hands trembled at the wheel, one hand holding a crumpled, crimson-soaked corner of paper that read ETNA.

     Tick tick tick tick… thump thump thump thump…

     Heavier, still, it beat in me, a quickening pace that grew as I found new paths and cut through county lines again and again. Hours of roaming, listening to the singing inside of me.

     “What is it?” I asked nobody. There was nobody to tell me what this feeling was. I had no one. “What is this?”

     THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP…

     The darkness of the countryside consumed me, engulfing my car in silence as I surrendered myself to the night and its deep, arresting call. The thundering beats set my veins on edge, while everything hammered more loudly, more furiously.

     Another turn, then another.

     THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP

     Then in a quick shift, my foot eased off the accelerator. The light within me settled into a warm, steady glow. The flame encapsulated me in tender, cradling comfort.

     One final turn.

     thump  … thump …  thump  … thump

     A sign came into view as I left the winding road that I could continue on to reach Tulsa. My heart slowed ever more, my car crawling to a stop beside the wooden sign and its soft floodlight.

                                                                               OWLTON

                                                                      population 1,046

                                                                           Oklahoma’s

                                                                          moonlit town