Squeezing my fists around my dead brother's still-warm blood I gave myself over to the feelings I'd shoved into the darkest corners of my mind. Hot rage filled me, burned my skin, radiated from me until it seemed the snow around me would melt.

I turned on my father with my chin held high.

"You justify what you did with your righteous venom. You could have chosen another path. You could have put us in the car and taken us away."

At some point, he had dropped the gun. Now, he backed away from it, moving closer to his truck, but again he reached into his pockets. "It wouldn't have mattered if I left here. He's everywhere. I had to teach you to fight him."

The snow did start melting then. Steam rose from the blacktop and the pavement itself began to split. "If you loved us, you wouldn't have tried to make us choose. Your mother understood that. Your wife understood it. You're a fool."

My father drew his left hand out of his pocket and showed me a detonator. It looked just like a movie prop to my Hollywood-trained eyes, and some small part of my mind wondered that, even at that point, the lines between reality and tv were so beautifully blurred. "Don't make me do this, Jessica. I don't want to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you."

My jaw ached with the pressure of my clamped teeth. Between my father and me, the earth ripped open and black, sulfurous smoke belched out. Behind me, the dozen onlookers moaned in a hundred lust-filled voices.

"Do it, old man," the Mindy-thing commanded.

He looked down as if surprised to see himself holding onto anything. He flipped a switch on the side of it and stuffed it back in his pocket. "No. If it's what you want, it's got to be wrong."

"Coward!" I screamed and the gulf between us widened. He stumbled backward away from the edge.

"Don't do this, Jessica."

Once, when I was a little girl, I visited a lake in midwinter. The air had been so cold it hurt my face and wrought tears from my eyes. When I inhaled, the tiny hairs inside my nose grew rigid and itchy. Ice patches had grown around the edges of the lake, but while we were here, the water temperature hit the freezing point and a top layer of ice formed across the surface so quickly we heard it growing. It made a sound like crystal, crushed by a mortar and pestle.

Just as fast as that, my blood changed from fire to ice. With eyes I knew were solid black I glared at my father. "You don't get to tell me what to do anymore."

Because I willed it to do so, the yawning maw of hell opened wider and consumed both my father and the truck he'd rigged to explode. Flames shot up from the nether and detonated the bomb. Fire and smoke belched outward, devouring everything it touched.

Mindy Peters slipped her slender hand into mine and thanked me in the moment before Lot 72 fell to the center of the earth. At last, the release I had always wanted was mine.

I was free.