I hadn't seen it happen, but I had heard it. I had heard Richie's voice, sudden and deafening in the heavy silence of the afternoon, and I'd turned, stricken, toward the sound. There was no mistaking his voice, no mistaking why he would be shouting, and I was moving before I could think about it, sprinting silently toward where I was terrified I would find nothing at all but blood.

Regan's father beat me there and scooped Eddie up as he all but collapsed and I wildly looked for Richie. What I saw instead was a smear of blood on a tree and Richie's glasses lying in the grass, the sun glinting off the lenses.

I wasn't really there as we started to move. Somehow my hand found Eddie's, but everything was numb and all I could think about was that smear of blood and I kept imagining the crocodile lumbering through the trees. Different creatures, I tried to remind myself, but maybe it didn't matter. The ache was the same. I heard Richie shouting to divert the creature's attention to him instead of Eddie. I saw Sal putting herself between the crocodile and Charlie. People I loved protecting the others I loved.

"It isn't," I said in a hoarse voice. My legs wobbled, but I made my way toward Eddie before they gave out and my knees hit the floor in front of him. I had seen so much death, witnessed so many friends taken apart, I had dug their graves with my hands, but that didn't change the horror of it. Or this. But it also wasn't Eddie's fault.

I touched his shoulder with my numb fingers, slid them toward the back of his neck.

"It isn't."

I could say that a thousand times and it wouldn't change Eddie's mind. I knew because I still blamed myself for Sal and for every lost boy before her.