"Damien? The Damien Jensen? The one I've come to get information about?"

"I guess."

Vanessa shook her head more to clear her thoughts than to disagree with him. "Wait, hold on. Damien Jensen is holding up that school full of kids over in Palm Valley."

"No, I'm not."

"That's the whole reason I'm here! Your prints were on the letters—"

"Well, that's a mystery then."

"If it's not you, then who is it? Who's there?"

It was his turn to shake his head. "Besides Ruby, I don't exactly know. It's something I can't figure out."

"Ruby as in Anabelle Rouge's daughter Ruby?"

Damien flattened his lips, raised his eyebrows; it was answer enough.

"But that's—it's—" Vanessa huffed. She lowered her gun.

"Impossible?"

"No, I guess not." Her jeans pocket vibrated, reminding Vanessa of two things: first, that she was soaked in some foul liquid and second, that every passing moment was potential for concern. She retrieved her phone and dreaded answering Eli's call, turning away from Damien in order to do so. Her old friend's ominous and desperate words nearly brought Vanessa to her knees, but she was lucky to be near one of the folding chairs and able to sink into it. Eli's voice, his continued detailing of this new terror, hummed against her ear, but then she recalled the revelation she'd just experienced. "Listen, I do actually have information.. Damien Jensen, he's—"

The phone was abruptly snatched from her hand and flung far off into the brush.

Vanessa twisted slowly to see Damien standing over her, the sheepish look on his face almost comical. "Look, I'm not your enemy here, all right? We just—we need to talk before you tell him anything."

The woman would've burned a hole in him with her gaze if she could've. "Go and get my phone," she ordered, her voice low, insistent. "Now."

Damien put out his hands. "I will, okay? I will. If you just promise me you'll—"

"Now!"

"Fine! Fine. Just calm down, all right? I'll get it."

Within half an hour, after a quick stop at the motel so Vanessa could change out of her wet clothes, the two of them were settled in Arlo's, alone; the bar wouldn't open for another few hours. Interior lights were off. The bright daylight was enough to illuminate the table at which they sat. Damien had opened a beer for himself, but Vanessa had declined when he'd offered her one only because she needed something stronger. He'd fixed her an Irish coffee.

"Don't think that just because I'm sitting here with you that I in any way trust you, Damien," Vanessa grudgingly snarked. She warmed her hands against the glass mug he'd given her. "I'm still trying to wrap my head around you not being who I thought you were, and then Eli's call . . ." She turned her head toward the window, curled one fist against her mouth and bit her knuckles.

"It was the eyes this time, wasn't it?"

Damien's words were sympathetic, gentle even. Vanessa realized he was watching her keenly and gave in to the deep sigh she'd been holding. "How did you know it?"

He lowered his gaze toward the tabletop. "It's always the same order: teeth, tongue, eyes, ears, and then the bad stuff—but you don't want to know the rest."

"She's done this before, Ruby? Somewhere else? Another school?"

"No."

"But you said always the same order."

"I . . . I don't think all of it's her, exactly. Maybe some. It's hard to tell."

"But what did you mean by always?"

Damien shifted along the bench on his side of the booth. He looked about to speak, then paused to take a sip from his bottle. "Listen, Van—"

"Vanessa"

"Vanessa. This isn't the first time we've been in this bar together."

She shook her black hair off her shoulders. "I was sober last night. I remember."

"No, That's not what I mean. Don't you . . . don't you get the feeling that we've done this before? Sense any déjà vu?"

"What I've sensed is a lot of bizarre behavior from all the people I've met here, you included. Look, all I want to do is try to keep those kids from dying. I'm probably already failing at that if they're getting their eyes cut out." Nausea fluttered through Vanessa's gut; a sliver of pain throbbed at the back of her head, across her shoulder. "I shouldn't even be here. I didn't want to come. A lot of good I've managed."

"Now don't say that," Damien offered, yet his tone held no sympathy. "You get down on yourself every time, but none of it is your fault."

Vanessa took a deep breath and met his eyes. "Every time, hm? You have some real talking to do, and I'm warning you: the second I get bored, I'm out of here because if you aren't the person I'm looking for, I don't know what exactly my purpose is." Her eyes expanded, lit from within. "I can go home!"

"No," Damien assured her, flattening his palms on the table, "no you can't. You think you can, but you can't. You won't."

Surveying him with some serious side-eye, Vanessa frowned. "I don't know what you're thinking, but I'll remind you I have a gun, and I've absolutely used it before."

He laughed. Outright laughed, in front of her, as if they shared some sense of familiarity, as if they hadn't met only the night before and each of their interactions hadn't been weirder than the next.

Vanessa stood, pouting. "This is ridiculous. You're ridiculous. I don't have time for it."

She made to scoot out of the booth, but Damien grabbed one of her wrists. "You're right about that—we don't have time. We can't keep doing things this way; I know it, now. Everything gets more fucked up every time I try to fix it."

The woman was unable to decide how she felt about Damien's hand around her wrist, and the look she shot him seemed to deliver that conflicted message. He released her, folded back into himself, withdrew a cigarette and a lighter from somewhere within the flannel he wore open over his same Alien Sex Fiend tee and lit up. Calming, Vanessa inhaled what Damien exhaled, trying not to make it obvious that she appreciated the scent, which reminded her of her father, for some reason (had he smoked? a question to answer some other time). "You talk as if there's some sort of Groundhog Day thing going on, here."

"Groundhog Day?" He smirked skeptically.

"It's a movie. A stupid movie. Bill Murray?" Damien shook his head, and Vanessa sank back onto the bench. "It's not important. Just so you know, I don't believe in time travel or time loops or any of that sort of thing."

"Doesn't matter if you believe it or not."

"Damien—"

"You think you'll leave. You'll feel like you're leaving, but we'll be back here having this conversation again real soon. We probably already are having it, over and over. I've been able to count only seven, but there's no guarantee I haven't missed more. Sometimes when we sit here, I don't tell you anything, hoping that'll help, but it doesn't. Those kids all die. And once I stayed away from you entirely, but they died then, too. Last time I can remember, I told you all of it, everything, but you didn't believe me and called your contact, and they all died. They always die, Van. Every . . . fucking . . . time."

"I think there's something wrong with you."

"I know. But if you care about stopping this, you'll listen to me."

"I do care! It's the whole reason—"

"Good. Then stop talking. I've already gone through all this with you once, and it didn't help, so . . ."

Damien took a meditative breath, appeared to gather his thoughts. He squeezed his right hand into a fist and released the pressure several times, stretching his fingers. Vanessa watched this gesture in some amusement but reminded herself of the severity of the situation and how erratic this man was being and chose not to say anything sarcastic. Instead, she waited patiently.

"When I was around seventeen or eighteen, I figured how to play around with time, going backward a little here, a little there. Never very far back, and not forward, just backward. I know how that sounds, but put aside your mockery and just humor me. I didn't do it much at first, just a couple times before I realized quick it only made things messy. I started simple, just trying to go back again and again to get some dogs familiar with me, to try to find the way to acclimate them, see if it affected how they acted in the present. Every time one got aggressive I'd go back and try a different approach. Just simple. But once I tried something a little bigger, and it ended with a murder-suicide. So that turned to shit, and the dogs just seemed to get annoyed with me, like they knew I was messing with them. I did other things, too, to get out of trouble, to avoid the police if I needed to, but like I said, I realized resetting things always had some sort of outcome I didn't count on, a lot of the time bigger than the thing I'd gone back to change. One time it was my mother dying. Another time, it was Ruby catching me with those dogs. When something happened, I'd try resetting that, but then those things would stay and something else would happen. It was like a neverending blackhole, where everything I did just tore more holes in what I was trying to fix. So I just had to stop. I'd never get things perfect, only change them in unpredictable ways.

"So I let it go for a long while, but somehow . . . something changed. It's like I've repeated it too many times, now, to know which was meant to be the original storyline, and there's more to it than that, but . . ." Damien dropped into a bit of a reverie, closed his eyes and rubbed his jaw.

Vanessa didn't know what to make of him. What he was saying made no sense at all, not in the real world. Damien was describing a sort of butterfly-effect scenario, making small changes that had unforeseen repercussions. "Supposing you're telling me the truth," she said after a quiet moment spent wondering whether he was actually going to speak again, "what does your messing around with time have to do with the school takeover?"

Opening his eyes, Damien produced a bitter half-laugh. "Eyes always on the prize, aren't they?"

She pressed her lips together but said nothing.

"It goes back to Ruby, somehow," he sighed. She's there, now. She's always been involved, whatever the story, which I've told you at least five times."

Vanessa knit her brow. "Tell me again. You met her so long ago. Why would she be there, now?"

"I screwed up with her every time. I've stopped trying to change that part, now, cause it only got worse. She was obsessed with me, when we were younger. Really fucking annoying, from time to time. But I knew she had a thing for me, and I—I took advantage of that. I took her virginity, and I didn't go about it nicely, I'll just say. But it was the afterward part that I couldn't figure out. She ended up getting mad at me no matter what I did. Furious, really, so that she ran off and ended up with some cult, as far as I can tell. I tried to change what happened with her. I couldn't undo meeting her, could never go that far back. And once I fucked her, I couldn't undo that, either. That wouldn't go. But I tried to make her hate me. I tried to hurt her, even, to make her mad, to show her I was an asshole. I tried to ignore her. but no matter what I did, it went wrong, every time. She ended up even more infatuated with me. Jesus, Van, I even tried . . . I tried to kill her, once. I thought maybe if I got rid of her, those kids would live. But . . . I couldn't bring myself to do it."

"Well that was probably the moral thing to do."

He looked up at her, no doubt because he'd sensed her sarcasm, but whatever poisoned his expression was anything but humored. "I don't apologize for what happened with her. I am what I am."

"Did you ever think to be nice to her, maybe?" Vanessa asked, unable to hold the rebuke from her tone. "To try to love her?"

Damien reached a long hand toward an ashtray by the window, pulled it toward him and made use of it. "She wasn't the kind of girl who would've understood that."

Vanessa scowled in disgust while Damien dipped into his thoughts. In spite of herself, she couldn't help admiring the long, dark lashes curling over his black eyes, which were plastered on the beer. What had she heard of Damien's parentage—that his father was of Native American descent? Yes, that was right. Damien looked it, too, now that she reflected on his features. The cropped hair had somewhat led her astray, given him less of the look she'd expected from the old photo of a young man with a shimmering sheet down his back. His straight, strong facial features, the angles of his beardless jaw, the high, smooth cheekbones rising beneath his eyes . . . it was possible she had seen him before, or . . . no, probably not. It wasn't likely familiarity stirring within. It was something else, something she'd not felt much. And she was angry at herself for experiencing any attraction at all to this man who'd self-admittedly mistreated a sad, lonely girl.

"I'm not remembering things so well, anymore," Damien suddenly interrupted her thoughts. "I feel like, almost as if someone else is altering things."

Vanessa snapped to attention. "Bill Taylor, he told me that Arlo Kirk was dead but that it was something he hadn't known before, that it was something new." She hesitantly met Damien's eyes. "Did you . . ?"

"Kill him? No! Arlo died a long time ago. Ruby found his body. I heard it from—" Damien suddenly gasped. His chin dropped; his fingers left the bottle and gripped the edge of the table. "I never knew that, either! This is the first time I remember Arlo being dead! I don't think he ever was, until . . ." He stood up, stubbed out his cigarette. "Did you see the name of the bar when we came in?"

"No. It's Arlo's, right?"

"How could it be if he died all that time back? Last I knew, he opened this shithole five years ago with some money he got from a modest gambling win—I took it over from him when he OD'd last Christmas."

Damien walked out the front door. From inside, Vanessa watched him through the window, saw him lean back and scrutinize the signage. His expression morphed into one of disbelief, and when he re-entered the bar, he threw up his hands. "It's Annabelle's. Says Annabelle's on the sign, now." Rather than sit back down, Damien turned and unexpectedly kicked a chair over, growling and cussing as he did so.

Vanessa hesitated before speaking again, just watched him shove things and yell. This man, she reminded herself, was volatile. She didn't know him. Whether she'd met him seven times or zero, her understanding of his nature was anything but clear. The madness he spoke was nothing she recalled, even if it were true. Everything he said to her could be a lie. For all she knew, he wasn't Damien Jensen but actually Arlo Kirk (who was supposedly dead but maybe wasn't) or someone else, someone who was purposefully attempting to mislead her, to buy time.

"Fuck me!" Damien at last wrapped up his tirade. He turned to Vanessa, panting, sweeping the accumulating sweat off his forehead. "Someone's fucking with things. It's not just me, now. God dammit! I've felt it for a while, but I figured it was impossible. Shit. I can't remember things the same way, anymore. There're bits changing that I'm not the one changing. I don't know how to fix this, and every time they go nuts and wipe out that whole building, it resets, all right? We start over. It's like—like someone or something wants us to fix it. Like I'm the one that fucked it up, and I'm the one that's supposed to fix it. But you play some part here, too, Van. Every time you show up, it's like it starts a clock ticking. We don't have a lot of time, and we can't leave. It won't let us. You've shown up here seven times, now, and it's never quite the same, but you try to help, and those kids die anyway."

"All of them?"

"Every single one."

Vanessa licked her lips. "How much have we got?"

Damien turned away.

"How much time have we got?"

When the man looked back to her, she knew the answer. "They'll all be dead by tomorrow night."