“Sera!” Lucas twists, and I can hear the thornbushes crack. “Run!”
I’m not going to run. Not this time.
She takes a step toward me, and I swing my foot around fast, swiping her legs. I fling myself to a crouch. She goes down hard, but she scrambles right back up. She’s not quite to her feet when I launch myself into her.
If I can trap Lucas in the thorns, I can trap her too.
Ms. Brighton dodges the worst of my blow. She spins to avoid the briars, and Lucas is shouting again as I lurch to my feet. This time, when she lifts her knife, she’s not aiming for Lucas. She’s coming for me. Lucas is shouting, but it’s his words from earlier that float through my overloaded mind.
Some hits go bad.
Yeah, they do. Ms. Brighton stabs, and I duck, feeling the flash of sharp metal nick my ear before I lower my head and plow into her stomach. We both slam into the ground, and half her body is sprawled over mine.
I struggle underneath her, squirm and wrestle to get away from her heavy body. I manage to push my head and arms free, and the rain feels warm on my arms.
And then I see the crimson line rushing over my wrist. It isn’t rain. It’s blood.
I writhe like a fish on the bank of a creek, flopping and gasping until I kick myself free of Ms. Brighton’s body. I don’t know where she got me. There’s no pain. I can’t see the knife. I search my arms, my face—find nothing.
Heart still pounding insanely, my hands go still on my back, and my gaze turns to Ms. Brighton. My body is still ready for a fight, but it’s over.
Ms. Brighton is curling in on herself, twitching quietly on the ground. It’s her blood. I can see the handle of her knife from where she landed all wrong. Where her plan fell to pieces.
There is one instant where her face clears, where the insanity recedes and I see my teacher, with her recycling campaigns and indie music and her terrible ghost stories. And then it’s gone. And so is she.
Chapter 34
My insides churn as I stare at her body. The forest is the same. Leaves shiver, dirt settles, and the world keeps turning.
I close my eyes and feel my heart slow even as my stomach rolls. A mourning dove coos softly. Sadly. Rain drips. My hand burns. Nothing is different, and nothing is the same either.
Lucas.
My heart thumps a funny beat as I turn to the thorns where I left him. Where I pushed him. I crawl because I cannot walk. And then I peel back the slender, cruel branches one by one, calling his name. I can barely see him, and every thread I untangle sends four more lashing at me.
“Lucas? Lucas, say something!”
He suddenly moans, rustles like he’s going to try to escape.
“Be careful,” I say, every word a croak. “I can’t get you out. We need tools. Help should be coming. There were flares, and I sent a distress call on the GPS.” I stop myself, thinking of Mr. Walker and knowing there is no way to help him. No way I could make it back down there, even if I wanted to. “Someone will come soon.”
“Where is she? Where’s Ms. Brighton?”
“Gone.” The word takes all my air and a piece of my soul.
He rustles again, cries out, and my breath hitches. “Where are you, Sera?”
“I’m here,” I say.
“Where are you?” he asks again, sounding a little frantic. He’s hurt so badly. And part of that is my fault, isn’t it? If I hadn’t attached myself to him out here, Ms. Brighton would not have—
No. I shove that thought away hard. All the broken bits of things Ms. Brighton believed—that’s what brought her here. She lost someone, but she never let go. It was holding on too tight that drove her to this. Hell, holding on too tight drives a lot of us to the worst places, doesn’t it?
“Sera?” Lucas calls again, sounding on the verge of tears.
“I’m here,” I say again, stronger now. I worm my hand in to the thornbushes, stretching out on the ground so I can reach better. Thorns prick my palm, cut my wrist, then my elbow. It doesn’t matter.
I find his fingers. He curls them around mine, and I rest my face on the soft, wet earth and hold on tight.
The rain fades to a mist and then to nothing at all. Finally, the whomp, whomp, whomp of helicopter blades tells me it’s over. I walk Lucas through everything I see, only releasing him when I see the ropes drop down from the helicopter. Our heroes have come to save us.
Funny how it doesn’t feel much like salvation at all.
Still, when I hear the steady hum of voices shouting, I am grateful we aren’t alone. Grateful, too, that there will be someone else to climb down that hole to check on Mr. Walker. To find him bloody and used up and hopefully, hopefully, still alive.
“We’re here!” I cry out. “Over here!”
“That’s them?” Lucas asks, and I can tell he’s only half-conscious. He’s slurring his words, but it could be worse. My gaze drags to Ms. Brighton’s body. It could be much worse.
“Yes,” I say finally. “Yes, that’s them. It’s over.”
He laughs inside that tomb of thorns, and I startle at the sound.
“See? Told you you’d rescue us,” he says.
It starts as a laugh but ends with tears. I am still crying when the rescuers find us. They wrap me in a gray blanket and untangle Lucas with pliers and gloved hands and soft voices. They keep us apart, and I let them because the rest can wait.
There is a woman with me though. She has dark skin and close-cropped hair. Her hands brush over me, warm and dry and so beautifully clean that it’s hard not to press them to my nose and breathe deep.
She tells me the park rangers found the rest of us shortly after, and they’re getting the help they need. They’ve been looking for us all day because our parents worried after the rain and when the signal check-in didn’t follow the right path. I nod along, only hearing half of what she says.
Things happen, and I let them. I’m lost in a blur of dark pants and simple questions and warm blankets and trees moving overhead as they take me through the forest. Then, quite suddenly, a patch of gray sky grows between the trees. The branches crisscrossing over my head are gone, and there are misty clouds marching in my vision. I blink, and there are still more clouds, and after that, the phantom strobe of red emergency lights that grows stronger with every heartbeat. I take a breath that tastes like rain and diesel fuel.
Like a road.
I open my eyes wide as someone clicks down the wheels on the stretcher. When did they put me on this thing? Where is Lucas? I want to ask, but they roll me swiftly across the two-lane road, and the words get lost in the noise.
So many noises. Voices, engines, and the groan of doors opening. It’s been a thousand years since I’ve heard these sounds. I want to cry and laugh at the same time, but I only manage to lift my head, searching for Lucas, wondering if he hears them too.
The doors on his ambulance are closed. The taillights move down the ribbon of black, and I hold my breath until they dip below the next hill and out of sight.
Chapter 35
It’s all very anticlimactic at the fire station. Hayley was airlifted all the way to Columbus for emergency surgery, and Madison and Lucas were transported to our hospital back in Marietta. Jude, Emily, and I were lucky enough to score the fire station evaluation and treatment center while we wait for more ambulances to arrive. Madison was moved to mine. Apparently, emergency vehicles aren’t falling from the sky here in the middle of godforsaken nowhere.
They’re making calls, they’ve assured us. Two ambulances within reasonable distance, nine parents on the way to various meeting points. The three of us are all stable, so who will go first when the cavalry arrives? It feels like a real-world math problem, and I can’t help but wonder what Mr. Walker would think.
Mr. Walker wouldn’t think anything. Not anymore.
My grip tightens on my musty
fold-out cot. The rest of the room smells like stale coffee and sweat—a mix of odors that zaps my appetite. But I sip at my plastic cup of Gatorade and keep my head ducked so I won’t be tempted to ask questions. The last time I asked a question, I found out Mr. Walker didn’t make it. They carried me out on a stretcher. They carried him out in a bag.
My gut clenches, and I look right, where the same woman who helped me turns Emily’s wrist over when she checks her pulse. Her gaze trails over the word on her wrist—police officers took dozens of pictures of us already—but stops on the finger-length bruises that are fading to gray-green on her upper arms.
When she releases Emily’s hand, her eyes stay warm, but her smile is tight. “Your vitals look very strong,” she says to Emily. “Now you hold tight. I’ll be back soon.”
Emily nods, two spots of pink high on her cheeks. As soon as the woman is away, Emily utters a word that makes my head snap in her direction. I can’t believe it came out of her mouth, but it did. My eyes drift to her bruises, and by the burn in her stare, I know she catches me.
I look to the other side, where I hope Jude will say something. He’s the one who’s talked to her most since we’ve gotten here. Whatever happened with all of us bonded the two of them. But Jude’s got a man in a flannel shirt asking him to follow a flashlight with his eyes. So I guess I have to say something.
“I’m so sorry,” I say softly. It’s the first thing I’ve said in a long while, and it feels wrong. Maybe I should keep pretending I don’t see the bruises.
Or maybe I should stop pretending we haven’t seen the ugliest things imaginable in the last three days. I want her to know I can handle whatever is behind those bruises.
I try to pore through my brain for her family situation. It’s a small school. I should know her. I should know more. My mind finds an image. A tiny woman—much older—behind the wheel of a large SUV. A thin man with big hands and a hard face. He has Emily’s eyes.
Her father? Did her father do this to her?
I force a smile for Emily. It won’t pass any tests, so I let it fade. “So, who’s coming to take you home?”
“My dad.”
“Oh.” I can’t pick the right expression fast enough, so my face falls. Emily’s eyes narrow, and my chest goes tight with panic. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“You’re wrong,” she says. “You’re wrong about him.”
“I…” My gaze drifts to the bruises. Her father’s the one I pegged as dangerous. I think of the word on Lucas’s arm, and my breath catches. Things aren’t always what they seem.
“Your grandmother,” I say.
It’s a guess, but she stiffens as soon as my words are out, her face going tight and her hands balled at her sides. I can’t imagine it—that tiny, stern woman. It’s hard to believe she’d be capable of leaving bruises like that.
“But you thought it was him,” Emily cries, tears brightening her yes. “Just like everybody else.”
Is that why she doesn’t tell? Because she wants to protect her dad from the accusation?
I get the motivation. Isn’t that why I ran away from Lucas all those months ago? I thought if I could be reliable enough, different enough, from my lovesick mother, maybe I could protect my father too.
But the truth about Lucas and me will come out now. There will be interviews. Discussions. I will have to tell the police that Ms. Brighton came after Lucas and me because she thought we were together.
No. Because we were together and still are together, and all those things I told my dad he’d never have to worry about with me? Yeah, it’s going to be different.
“You were wrong about Madison too,” Jude says, jerking my attention back. He’s at her side now, his arm stretched to accommodate the tube leading to a bag of fluids. “The next time Hayley woke up, she was crying for Madison. Emily’s got good instincts. She was right.”
“Yeah, you do,” I tell her. I want to tell her I hope her instincts will prompt her to talk to someone, but I don’t. I want to tell her I’ll be there, but I still don’t know how it’s all going to work when we get back home.
Will it ever be the four of us again? Will we even talk? I have a sudden raw aching to stay here with these people who are anything but strangers, but the nurse is back, and that means one of us will go.
The door at the end of the room opens, and two men in blue paramedic shirts enter. A radio on one man’s hip chirps, and I think of the speaker in the woods and bark stinging my hands, and all these memories are a hive of hornets, buzzing and buzzing with no meaning for me at all.
“It’s OK,” Jude says.
His words snag my attention like a hook. I turn my head just a little, just enough to see Jude’s hand rest on Emily’s shoulder. She’s trembling. His eyes meet mine, and there’s zero mistake he knows I’ve heard or that his next words are for me.
“Things are different now,” he says. He never breaks my gaze, but when he nods, I nod back. This isn’t normal friendship. It’s stickier and darker, but I don’t think I’ll wash my hands of it either. It’s harder to wash away things once they’re buried this deep.
“Looks like you’re up, Sera,” the woman says.
I whirl to the paramedics, an argument sputtering on my lips as they mention my elevated temperature and the infection in my hand. They will take me to Marietta too. My dad will meet me there.
Dad.
I can barely hold back tears at the idea. Paramedics help me onto the stretcher and chatter about how long it will take and what their names are… I don’t listen to any of it. I smell the sharp tang of trees and close my eyes tight against an onslaught of memories I’d rather forget.
Chapter 36
It seems like sleep will never come, but it does, and it sticks hard. I doze the entire way home to Marietta, waking when the ambulance doors fling open and drifting off again when I see bright-white rectangles—ceiling lights, I guess—whipping by above me.
I sleep until my dad is there with quiet words and gentle hands, until the cops come with their questions, until Sophie and Liv leave flowers and ask my dad if I’m all right, until I’ve heard all the updates about Lucas being fine and Hayley making it and, of course, that Mr. Walker didn’t. I already knew, but it’s still a sucker punch when they say it again.
I don’t tell my dad how much I saw Mr. Walker endure or that I was the last person who heard him speak. It will come out, but I’m not sure he can handle that now, so I close my eyes like all the news exhausts me. It’s not a lie.
The next time I wake, the room is dim, and there are two people sitting in the chairs across from me. Neither is my dad. One of them has a plastic tub, and there’s a faint smell of cologne in the air.
“Jude?”
My voice scratches, and my vision stretches everything like I’m underwater. I blink until it clears, and then their faces sharpen. An ache swells in my chest, and I don’t know what that means. I barely recognize them, clean like this. I guess I’m clean too now.
I was in the shower so long, Dad knocked on the door to check on me. After I was out and dressed, he helped me comb my hair. He’s never done that before, not even when I was little. But he did today, and I let him. I stared at my freshly scrubbed, still-scratched face in the mirror while he brushed my shoulder-length hair into a gleaming ribbon of black.
He told me I was beautiful.
He did not tell me I look like my mother.
“How are you feeling?” Jude asks.
“Cleaner.”
Jude smiles. He’s back in his element, in an outfit that’s crisp and clean and probably worth more than my bedroom furniture. Aside from dark circles under his eyes, he looks good. Emily looks good too, though there are still scratches on her left cheek.
There are three of us, but there should be four. Six if you count Madison and Hayley, but I don’t, even if I k
now that’s not fair. I can’t feel their absence, but I can feel the space Lucas would fill. The emptiness of having him down the hall.
“Hey,” Emily says, shifting the basket on her lap.
I scooch up in the bed, reaching for my plastic mug of water. What time is it? My eyes find the digital clock above the TV. Three thirty in the morning.
I sip some water because my throat’s parched. It’s lukewarm through the plastic straw, so I must have slept awhile. I spot a note on my end table. Dad. Home for a nap because the nurses begged him. I begged too. He looked so tired. Still, he insisted on waiting until I fell asleep, and the note promises he’ll be back before I wake up.
“What are you doing here?” I ask the others. “I didn’t know they released you.”
“We weren’t admitted,” Emily says.
“I was deemed healthy, but they wanted to keep her longer,” Jude says, eyes narrowed just the tiniest amount.
“I’m fine,” Emily says, but the circles under her eyes tell me otherwise. “Just couldn’t sleep much.”
Her grandmother made her leave the hospital? Makes me wonder how on earth she’s here at zero-dark-thirty in the morning.
“She’s a deep sleeper,” Emily says, reading my mind. “I snuck out.”
“So you’re here to visit?” I don’t sound convinced.
Jude swallows hard. “Not exactly. We thought we should take them off together.”
I’m not sure what he means, but then Emily tucks her hair behind her ear, and I see the Damaged on her arm. My eyes flick down to the Darling on mine. It didn’t come off in the shower. I think I’d take a wire brush to my skin to see it gone, so I nod.
Her plastic basket includes bottles and cleaning supplies. One that looks like nail polish remover and another I think is bleach.
I frown, worry pricking at the back of my neck. “Is that safe to mix?”
“We’re not mixing them,” Jude says. “We looked up recipes. We’re going to try a few. Can you walk?”