“He was trying to protect her,” Cat said.

As Eureka rushed toward them her mind scrolled back to the thousands of times Dad had protected her: In his old blue Lincoln, his right arm flinging across Eureka in the passenger seat whenever he hit the brakes hard. Walking the New Iberia cotton fields, his shoulder shielding Eureka from a tractor’s dusty wake. When they had lowered Diana’s empty coffin into the ground and Eureka wanted to follow it, Dad had shook with the effort of holding her back.

Gently she lifted his arm off Claire.

“The wave picked them up and threw them on the rock and …” Cat swallowed and couldn’t go on.

Claire slithered free, then changed her mind and tried to crawl back to Dad’s arms. When Cat held her, Claire flailed her fists and wailed, “I miss Squat!”

Squat was their Labradoodle. The twins mostly used him as a beanbag. He’d once swum against the current through the bayou to catch up to Eureka and Brooks in a canoe. When he’d arrived on shore and shaken out his fur, he’d been the color of weak chocolate milk. God only knew what had become of him in the storm. Eureka felt guilty that Squat hadn’t crossed her mind since her flood began. She studied Claire, the raw fear in her eyes, and recognized at once what her sister dared not say: she missed her mother.

“I know you do,” Eureka said.

She checked Dad’s pulse; it was still pulsing, but his hands were white as bone. A deep bruise discolored the left side of his face. Ignoring the stabbing pain in her wrist, Eureka traced her father’s temple. The bruise spread behind his ear, along his neck, to his left shoulder, which had been deeply sliced. She smelled the blood. It pooled in the sandy crevices between the rock’s grooves, flowing like a river from its source. She leaned closer and saw the bone of his shoulder blade, the pink tissue near his spine.

She closed her eyes briefly and remembered the two recent times she’d awoken in a hospital, once after the car accident that took Diana from her, and once after she’d swallowed those dumb pills because life without her mother was impossible. Both times Dad had been there. His blue eyes had watered as hers opened. There was nothing she could do to make him stop loving her.

One summer in Kisatchie, they’d taken a long bike ride. Eureka had sped ahead, joyful to be out of Dad’s view, until she wiped out while rounding a sharp bend. At eight years old the pain of skinned elbows and knees had been blinding, and when her vision cleared, Dad was there, picking pebbles from her wounds, using his T-shirt as a compress to stanch the blood.

Now she unbuttoned her own wet shirt, stripping down to the tank top she wore beneath it, and wrapped the cloth as tightly as she could around his shoulder. “Dad? Can you hear me?”

“Is Daddy going to die like Mommy?” Clairewailed, which made William wail.

Cat wiped the blood from William’s face with her cardigan. She gave Eureka a bewildered WTF-do-we-do look. Eureka was relieved to realize William wasn’t physically wounded; no blood flowed from his skin.

“Dad’s going to be okay,” Eureka said to her siblings, to her father, to herself.

Dad didn’t stir. There was so much blood soaking through Eureka’s attempt at a tourniquet. Even as the rain washed swells away, more flowed.

“Eureka,” Ander said behind her. “I was mad and my Zephyr—”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. None of them would have been here in the first place if Eureka hadn’t cried. Dad would be home battering okra over his oil-spattered stovetop, singing “Ain’t No Sunshine” to Rhoda, who wouldn’t have been gone. “It’s my fault.”

She remembered something one of her therapists had said about blame, how it didn’t matter whose fault anything was after it was done. What mattered was how you responded, how you recovered. Recovery was what Eureka had to focus on: her father’s, the world’s … Brooks’s, too. But she didn’t know how any of them could recover from a wound so deep.

A longing for Brooks swept over her like a sudden storm. He always knew what to say, what to do. Eureka was still struggling to accept that her oldest friend’s body was now possessed by an ancient evil. Where was Brooks now? Was he as thirsty, cold, and afraid as Eureka was? Were those shades of feeling possible for someone welded to a monster?

She should have recognized the change in him sooner. She should have found some way to help. Maybe then she wouldn’t have cried, because when she had Brooks to lean on, Eureka could get through things. Maybe none of this would have happened. But all of it had happened.

Dad breathed shallowly, eyes still tightly closed. For a few seconds he seemed to rest more easily, like he was detached from the pain—then the agony returned to his face.

“Help!” she shouted, missing Diana more than she could stand. Her mother would tell her to find her way out of this foxhole. “How do we find help? A doctor. A hospital. He always keeps his insurance card in his wallet in his pocket—”

“Eureka.” Ander’s tone told her, of course, that there would be no help, that she had cried it away.

Cat shivered. “My alarm clock is going to go off any second. And when we meet at your locker before Latin, and I tell you about my insane dream, I’m going to embellish to make this part a lot more fun.”

Eureka scanned the barren mountains. “We’re going to have to split up. Someone needs to stay here with Dad and the twins. The other two will look for help.”