Tyler used up every drop of fuel in his lighter to light every candle that was on the altar. all two hundred and nine of them. and for each dancing flame he prayed a different prayer.

please let her live.

please kill chase

please kill me instead

please let her escape

please let her be unharmed

please let us find chase

And after that he kneeled in front of the cross and stayed without moving for at least a half hour, praying although he didnt know how and thinking and hoping he would think of something to help Maddie. Then the idea hit.

"Pogue, you have the book that Gorman gave you?" "Yeah." He pulled the small leather-bound book from his pocket and tossed it to Tyler. "Why?"

"Because something in here might help us understand why he brought us here." He skimmed the pages, flipping madly through the diary until pages started loosening and falling out. And all it took him was the memory of something that chase told him to trigger the clue.

"You dont love her, all you do is hurt her."

"He knows... about her curse, and about everything!" Tyler exclaimed, letting the book drop. He had just read a page describing how the curse had side affects, that the thing that the cursed loved most would cause him pain.

"Her ancestor loved god more than anything, so the church hurt him, thats why were here. And now he wants to hurt her to hurt us so he brought her to the one thing she loves most and that hurts her most..."

"Which is?"

"I... dont know." He finished. He bent over and picked up the book. "I have no idea."

He let himself sink to the floor. He had found out exactly what Chase's plan was. And where he was keeping Maddie, and how he was torturing her. But there was no way of finding out the one little detail that made all the clues fit together. He couldnt find out what she loved most to save his life. or hers, for that matter.

"well lets proceed by reasonning, and try to come up with an educated guess.

Her family?"

"Dead." Tyler said bitterly, remembering the obituary about the death of her father.

"Her best friend?"

"She's been rooming with her for the past three years, if she caused her so much pain she would have moved out by now."

"Her beauty? clothes? hair? car? house? books? painting, drawing, reading..." Pogue kept rambling and named a few more random items.

Meanwhile Tyler had buried his head in his hands and was desperately trying to recall all the details of everything that she had ever told him in the past two weeks. He could remember her face, the colour of her eyes, the scent of her perfume and the dimples in her cheeks when she laughed, but nothing she said made sense, it was all a blur.

Nothing she said mattered. he thought bitterly. Nothing that she ever told me will save her life. Then he flashed back to her face, pale and sickly with grey eyes circled with red and leaking tears strayed with mascara as she sobbed and hiccupped and hedidnt give a damn.

"You are a horrible person! dont you ever care about anyone else than yourself? You think that the world will always bend to your need and everyone will always do what you say! and youre too stupid to realize all the little things that are so easy to see that make things what they are! youre like a child! no, youre no child, because when i was a kid the children i knew werent as mean, they didnt concentrate their lives on hurting you and pouring salt on the fresh wounds they made! No child ever hurts purposely, no, when i was a child i was happy because the world was and there was no cruelty! and then you start blaming me for the curse? you think i wanted to be able to see everyone i know die in front of my eyes? you think i deserve it? that i like it? well i dont and when it started i died!"

And he remembers the pain on her face and the grief shining through the tears in her eyes and when she opened her mouth to say something else but gave up before even uttering a sound, and she closed her lips and gave him a look of such sadness that now it breaks his heart. and she walked away without saying anything.

And that was the last time he ever saw her.

And the way things were going the last time he ever will.

He raised his head from between his hands and looked at the gloomy inside of the church, Pogue looking grim, standing with his hands in his pockets observing the carvings on the walls.

When he turned his head he noticed the single unlit candle between all the flickering flames. He scrambled to his feet, ran to the altar and with desperate flicks he revived one final flame from his lighter. He stuck his arm in the altar, ignoring the other flames that were licking his skin, and lit the two hundred and eleventh and final prayer candle.

Please God let her know I'm sorry.

"When it started I died!"

Her sentence repeated itself for the enth time in his head.

The two of them hadn't moved from the church in the past hour. Pogue was getting irritated, pacing around and trying to coax Tyler into moving.

"Fuck off." Was his only response to whatever he said.

"I died!"

He buried his face in his hands.

"I died! And now I'm dying again because you can't save me!"

Every time he closed his eyes her face would appear, and every other moment her voice would come into his head, more desperate, more pleading. And sometimes he would hallucinate and she would appear in front of him and scream.

"Maddie…" he moaned. He hit his head against the altar.

"Ty." Pogue said "I'm heading out to find Caleb and Reid. If you need us gimme a ring."

Tyler grunted. Pogue sighed walked out of the church, leaving Tyler alone with his thoughts in the church, amongst the pews, sculptures and candles, whose flames were starting to die out, one by one, along with Tyler's hope and sanity.

"Why the fuck can't I save you!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. He grabbed an edge of the altar and lifted it up, throwing it towards the pews with an amazing display of using-assisted strength. It shattered the dark wood of the pews, row by row, and slid to a halt. He screamed in rage again, and flung a crucifix towards a stained glass skylight, shattering it into thousands of colourful glass pieces that rained onto him mixed with the real rain.

He fell to his knees under the rain, sobbing and slamming his fists into the ground, over and over, until they were bloody from the glass that he had inadvertently stabbed into his skin.

"I died! I died! I died because of Tyler Sims!"

"Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up!"

"I died! Because of you!"

"I know!" he sobbed louder, burying his face in the shards of glass in his palms. "I know! I'm sorry… I'm sorry!"

The hallucination let out a blood-curdling scream and disappeared.

"Please forgive me, please, please…" He buried his face harder in his hands, the colourful glass shards piercing his skin. "I want to save you… I want to I just don't know how… I need help…" He sobbed.

"When I was a child I was happy!"

The voice was just as pained, just as angst-wridden and sad as it was before.

"I was happy!"

Tyler lifted his head from his hands. He looked around at the inside of the empty and damaged church, and stared in awe at his realization.

"When I was a child I was happy!"

"Your childhood…" he whispered.

It all made sense to him now. How she tried avoiding talking about her past, her childhood, not for emotional reasons but because of the immense physical pain it caused her. How she avoided socializing, not because she was shy but because if she came to love someone too much their presence would cause her pain. How much she cried the last time they spoke when she spoke of her childhood and how happy she was.

"Your fucking childhood!" he screamed. Blood leaked from the small cuts the glass had made in his face, into his mouth and he tasted the metallic taste. "fuck, fuck fuck!" He swore loudly.

"How the hell am I going to get to your childhood!" He stood and screamed up to the empty hole in the skylight. "I can't just travel through time!"

He stopped and thought for a second, catching his breath as the rain washed the blood and tears from his face. Chase had gotten to her childhood somehow, and was currently causing her immense pain through it. Since Chase couldn't travel through time either, there had to be some way of accessing her past without physically getting there.

Her memories. Duh.

But Chase couldn't force her to think about her past.

But he could help.

Tyler paced around the church quietly, stepping over bits and pieces of pews and crucifixes and candles. Wax had hardened under the rain, and uneven puddles were forming in between the creases that the hard wax had made. Tyler stared himself down in a puddle for several moments, drops of water or blood occasionally rippling and disrupting the balance of the water.

Her house. Her friends. Her family. All her past could be recollected with the right prodding, whether it be things she saw, smelled or felt. If Chase knew enough about her to know about her curse than he must know where she lived as a child and what her parents looked like. How her mother packed her lunches in elementary school, who her first pet was and the lullabies that used to be sung to her. Chase had the knowledge of all the little quirks of her childhood that she loved, and he was going to use it against her. Starting with her childhood home.

"That's written in the file." Tyler said to himself. The file did indeed state her date of birth, place of birth and pictures of both her parents, as well as information about her elementary schools. Chase must have gotten his hands on the file, and now Tyler had to if he was going to save Maddie.

"She lived in London." He said aloud. "London. Fuck that's far."

He sat angrily on one of the intact pews. London was a long way from Ipswich, Massachusetts. A few hours in a plane and even more by car, and there was the ocean to cross. But Chase must have known that, and found a way of countering it somehow.

"Think, Tyler, think."

Chase didn't have a car, yet he still managed to move from one end of town to another when no one was around. So Chase had some sort of power that permitted him to transport himself certain distances. But it couldn't be unique, since all the covenant had the same power unless some was willed to him, the only thing that changed was the quantity and not what they could do with it.

So technically Tyler could teleport himself to London, England. But that would take an incredible amount of power, and how weak he would be after using it all what completely up for debate. It was a huge risk, he didn't even know how to do it.

"I died!"

"I'm coming to save you!" He yelled at the skylight. "I'm coming to kill Chase Collins and save your life even if I don't know how yet!"

And with that he ran out the church into his truck and drove to Spencer academy to find her file and address.