The flames flickered in the dying fire, imprinting images of all sorts in my mind, until every shape I saw became sinister and scary. I closed my eyes and concentrated on feeling Marcus’ warm body next to mine; the soothing thump of his heart beating against my back made me want to turn and press my heart to his. Where did these feelings come from? I told myself it was just because he’d saved me from doom, and I was grateful, nothing more. Then why did I get a tingle when he stirred slightly, flattening his hand out on my stomach? The kind of tingle that makes your heart stop beating for a second then flutter back to life; the kind of tingle you don’t want to end.
“Are you still cold?” he asked, stirring the hairs on the back of my head with his breath.
“No. You?”
“No.”
A few moments passed.
“Marcus?”
“Yeah?”
“What made you decide to come and look for me?”
He didn’t speak for a long moment. I held my breath waiting for his answer, and then he said, “You were gone too long. I thought you might be lost.” He paused. I heard him swallow. “And it was getting dark.”
“Oh.” Funny how he had been the only one who noticed I was missing.
“Thanks again for finding me,” I said softly. In answer, his arm tightened around me, and I fell into a dreamless sleep in the light of my protector’s arms.
Chapter Nine
I awoke shivering. The morning air had a chill to it that nipped the skin on my lower back where my T-shirt had hiked up. Sometime during the night, Marcus and I had both turned. I was curled into a ball now against his back. My head lay on the moss, and … oh, my God … my arm was around his waist. His arm was on top of mine, his hand around my wrist, holding it closely to him.
My eyes sprung open to darkness. My face, which was buried under the flannel shirt, was pressed up against Marcus’ black T-shirt. My mind raced back to the previous night, searching for a reason why I would be hugging him, but my last memory before waking up was of falling asleep, facing the fire with his arm around me.
Careful not to wake him, I eased my arm out from under his. When I heard a soft groan, I stiffened, my hand hovering an inch above his side. When he didn’t move, I retracted my arm and rolled onto my back. It was then that I felt as if I had been beaten and left to die.
Every muscle in my body ached from the fall—and sleeping on the ground hadn’t helped. I clamped down on my teeth and sat up. Marcus stirred and looked over his shoulder at me.
“Oh, sorry. Did I wake you?” I asked, before I could think of something not stupid to say.
“Yeah,” he said with a morning rasp to his voice, “and I really wanted to sleep in today too.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Well roll back over then, and I’ll wake you at what … noon?”
“I’d appreciate it, thanks,” he said in a sleepy whisper. His head rolled back away from me.
You can’t be serious, I said to myself when it looked as if he really was going to go back to sleep. When I saw his shoulder twitch with a silent laugh, I smiled to myself.
I rubbed my eyes and looked at our surroundings for the first time. A thick accumulation of mist made it difficult to see the tree tops. Other than that, the forest didn’t seem as frightening in the morning light.
The raw dampness raised goose bumps on my arms, though, and I shivered again. I shoved them back under the shirt, not wanting to come out from under it just yet. To the left of me, our little fire that had once kept me warm and safe from the darkness was reduced to a pile of ash. On the other side of the ash, through the pathless forest, the well existed somewhere—or did it? I began to wonder if it was really there when no one was around to see it.
Get a grip, Brooke. You need to get out of this place and back to civilization. If that’s what you would call it.
I glanced down at Marcus again. His back warmed my legs. His breathing had become steady again. “Are you seriously going back to sleep?”
“Just five more minutes,” he groaned.
I huffed in disbelief, threw the shirt off my legs and with a few muffled grunts and groans, pushed myself into a standing position. Marcus rolled lazily onto his back, stretching himself out. His head fell into the indentation in the moss where mine had been, his eyes still closed.
In a way, I wished I hadn’t gotten up. I wanted the chance to wrap my arm around him again, feel him against me and let him sleep if he wanted to. Already, as I stood stiffly hugging myself in the chill air, the memory of the warmth between us faded.
As if he sensed me staring down at him, his eyes flew open and they were aimed directly at mine.
“Good morning,” he said.
Crap! I did a casual sweep of the area around him, hoping he hadn’t noticed me staring at him. “Does this mean you’ve decided not to sleep in?”
“It’s too cold to sleep now. It was much warmer a few minutes ago.”
I felt my face flush and turned away.
Shy all over again, I changed the subject and said, “Which direction were we going in when we stopped?”
He sat up and raked a hand through his tousled hair. “That’s the way back.” He pointed to woods that looked the same in every direction, but his confidence gave me hope. “How’s your ankle?”
I flexed it, teetering on my other foot. “Hurts a little, but not as bad as it did.” Despite the pain, there was no way I was going to be carried out of the woods in front of Sammy and all her friends like some prissy city girl—even though that’s exactly what I was.
Marcus stood up and stretched as if he’d slept in the woods all the time. “Here,” he said handing me the shirt when he saw me hugging myself.
I took it from him, appreciating the warmth still lingering from our bodies, and slipped my arms into the sleeves.
“Well, should we have breakfast first, or wait till we get back?” I joked.
He laughed. I gave a little laugh too, mostly at the irony of the situation.
“I could skewer us a squirrel if you’d rather eat now?” He looked at me with adorably messy hair and a cute grin.
“I think I can wait, but that’s good to know.”
The stiffness gradually left me as I walked, but my ankle still hurt. I tripped now and then in the thick fog, even though I was usually quite coordinated. Marcus caught me from falling more than once. He offered many times to piggy-back me, but I refused, claiming that my ankle didn’t hurt that much anymore. The truth was, it hadn’t hurt that much when I’d first woken up, but all this walking made it worse.
“I can just imagine what those guys are going to say when we walk out of the woods together,” I said, starting to get a nervous twinge in the pit of my stomach.
He chuckled, as if he looked forward to hearing everyone’s opinions.
“Are you worried about what Evan will say?” he asked with an undeniable note of interest in his tone, accompanied by a hint of sarcasm.
“Um, no more than anyone else.”
“He’ll be mad you know. He has a childish sort of temper.”
His sudden seriousness took me off guard, and I got defensive. “Well that’s his problem. I’m not his property.”
He flashed a curious eye at me. “You like him, don’t you?”
This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have with Marcus. I couldn’t believe he was putting me on the spot like this. I wanted to tell him, he was the one I liked, not Evan, but I didn’t have the guts to say it.
“It’s complicated,” I said after a pause. Although Marcus stared straight ahead, his pace slowed, as if he were waiting intently to hear more. “I think he’s misunderstanding our friendship.”
He stopped to hold a tree branch out of my way, but before I could take a step through the spot he’d cleared, he looked straight at me. “Is that what it is … friendship?”
A spark surfaced in his eyes, a shimmer of hope maybe, and in that moment, I couldn’t get my legs to work. Like me, he too se
emed to have stopped breathing.
I looked at him, almost apologetically. “That’s how it started.” And then I turned my head away and walked past. Behind him, I heard the tree branch swoosh back into place.
But the interrogation didn’t end there.
“And now?” he asked, coming up beside me.
I stopped and shot a frustrated glance at him. “Why are you asking me about this?”
He shrugged. “Just curious.”
As uncomfortable as I was with the conversation, I felt compelled to answer Marcus. I felt the need to put his mind to rest.
I resumed walking. “Well, to be honest, I didn’t think it would get this serious.”
“So it’s serious then?”
I threw my hands up in the air in frustration. “No, that was the wrong word. I think he thinks we’re a couple—”
“And you don’t?”
My frustration escalated. It was clear to me that he was beating around the bush, with more serious questions on his mind.
“If there’s something you want to know, just spit it out, because I’m getting really uncomfortable with the interrogation,” I said, angry now. He stayed quite. “Look, I didn’t plan on Evan and me becoming a couple, but somehow, it seems to be happening anyway.”
“Well if you don’t like him that way, you should tell him,” he said frankly.
I quickened my pace, taking the lead again. Now I didn’t know whose side he was on, mine or Evan’s. He was right though. I continued on in silence. Marcus didn’t ask any more questions.
About an hour into the walk, the fog had lifted. Not long after, I saw a clearing up ahead on the other side of the trees. My heart pounded in my chest. Instead of being ecstatically happy, I was extremely nervous. If I was being honest with myself, I would rather stay here, in the forest with Marcus forever, then face everyone knowing what would be on their minds when they saw the two of us walk out if the woods together, but it was unavoidable.
“Wait,” I said.
I stopped suddenly and took a deep breath. Somewhere in the low shrubs that grew on this part of the Island, birds sang their morning songs to one another. Marcus turned to face me. His serious expression had softened since our last conversation.
“What is it?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him how I felt about him, but the words wouldn’t form. I swallowed them and looked away.
“Just tell him the truth.”
I looked back at him. “What is the truth?” I held my breath waiting for his answer.
And in a soft, serious voice he replied, “You tell me.”
Was he waiting for me to make the first move? I pursed my lips, my frown deepening. I looked down and realized I still had his shirt on.
“Here, you’d better take this; don’t want to make it look worse than it already looks.”
When he reached for his shirt, his T-shirt sleeve hiked up exposing the bottom swirls of the double spiral tattoo on his arm. We hadn’t talked about it yet today. My eyes lingered below the hem of his sleeve.
“I wonder how they’re connected, the tattoo and the pendant. Or if there even is a connection.” I said the last part more to myself than to him.
But he shrugged and answered simply, “I don’t know.”
The tenderness in his voice made me look up at him. And with all the vulnerability I could spare, I took a few seconds to look from one eye to the other, and then back to the tattoo.
Marcus pushed his sleeve up exposing the whole design imprinted across his biceps. He looked at it briefly and then glanced at the pendant. I longed to touch the spirals. My fingers twitched at the thought, then he let go of the sleeve and it fell, covering the tattoo once more. I looked away.
My own double spiral was cradled in my palm. “Do you think it means something good or bad?”
He shrugged.
“You must have an opinion,” I said when he didn’t answer my question.
He took a step closer and held his hand out. I dropped the pendant into his open palm.
Without lifting his eyes from the object he held, he took a deep breath and asked, “How’s your ankle doing?”
I pursed my lips and stared at him, waiting for his opinion. He must have had one, and I wasn’t going to let him change the subject.
By now the back of his hand rested against my chest just above the neckline of my T-shirt, sending a feathery soft tingle across my skin. With his other hand he pulled the neck of my T-shirt out and let the pendant drop inside, where it rested comfortably.
“Maybe you should keep it hidden.” Then he lifted his eyes to mine and answered my first question. “I honestly don’t know, but I have a feeling we’re going to find out.”
“So you think it is significant in some way—the whole symbol and the meaning of it?”
“The equinox, when day and night are equal?” he said. “Maybe we represent day and night.”
My eyes widened. Now we were getting somewhere. “Yes. Maybe that is it, but I still don’t understand.”
“The equinox is in a couple weeks. Maybe we’ll find out then.” He shrugged an eyebrow.
“I hadn’t thought of that.” I had the strongest feeling then that moving to Deadwich was fate rather than an unlucky circumstance.
I wondered how much of a mystery this was for Marcus. For me it concerned creepy Maggie, the bad dreams I’d been having, and now the whole pendant, day and night thing.
I closed my eyes for a second and wished I was back in Boston, waking up in my own bed. When I opened them back up, Marcus gave me a grim smile and then turned away.
We continued on toward the clearing, but slower than we’d been traveling all morning. It was as if neither of us wanted this time to end.
“Marcus, have you had any weird dreams lately?”
“Weird dreams? How weird?”
He might as well have said yes, because he had just unwittingly confessed to having weird dreams of his own. There was no way I was going to tell him I dreamed about him every night, or my thoughts on Maggie. No, I couldn’t risk him thinking I was crazy. He looked over his shoulder at me. I had to give him something.
“Every night since last Monday I’ve had a nightmare, and I wake up at twelve midnight, sharp.”
He nodded as if he knew. “And are you surrounded by darkness in your nightmare?”
I barely heard him over the crunch of the forest floor beneath our feet. Maybe he hadn’t wanted me to hear. But I had.
My eyes widened. “You too?”
“No. What I mean is—”
Our conversation came to an abrupt end.
“Hey, Brooke, where were you all night?” I looked past Marcus, to see an excited Sammy scrambling through the bushes toward us.
I stopped in my tracks. Marcus stopped beside me. I had been alone in the woods with Marcus for so long that seeing and hearing Sammy felt like an extreme invasion of privacy.
She looked as if she would explode waiting for my answer. “Um.” That’s all I had. I hadn’t thought of what I was going to say. I looked to Marcus for help.
“Brooke got lost. By the time I found her, it was so dark we couldn’t see to get back, so we waited till morning.” Marcus’ voice was steady, as if his line had been well rehearsed.
“How convenient.”
I stiffened at the sound of Evan’s voice. He appeared behind Sammy, stopped beside her and looked at me accusingly.
“I’ll bet he took real good care of you, too.”
Marcus took a step out in front of me, almost protectively. He opened his mouth to say something, but I had other ideas.
I came up beside Marcus again, and passed him by a step. This was my chance to break off whatever little thing there was between Evan and me, so cutting Marcus off before he began, I blurted, “As a matter of fact, he did take good care of me!”
I looked at Evan, daring him to defy me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Marcus wince ever-so-slightly.
?
??Well lucky for you,” Evan shot back.
“At least he came to look for me.”
I felt my face redden with anger, and despite my sore, abused ankle, I left Marcus’ side and stomped past Evan and Sammy, who stared open mouthed, and hurried the rest of the way out of the woods to the beach, which I could now see between the trees.
Chapter Ten
Brooke, wait up!” Sammy yelled after me, but I was too mad to stop and wait for her. I needed to get out of the woods—it was getting crowded.
Finally, I reached the beach. When I passed the last tree, making my entrance back into society, all eyes were on me. The first person I saw was Megan. She was shaking the sand out of a blanket. I didn’t turn my head in her direction, but I felt the hatred radiate from her as I walked past.
A few obscenities were called out as I walked across the beach toward the wharf. I didn’t stop to acknowledge anyone. I just wanted to bury myself in the sand. By the time I’d reached the wharf my ankle throbbed, but I couldn’t baby it yet. I jumped down onto the deck of the cruiser, twisting it, hurting it further.
I glanced over my shoulder. Evan and Sammy came out of the woods followed by Marcus, who received a round of applause when he emerged. The brothers were having a heated discussion. I saw Evan jab his finger into Marcus’ chest several times before Marcus shoved him. Someone grabbed them and pulled them apart, just as they were about to go at each other. Overwhelmed with a medley of emotions, I turned away and went inside the cabin.
Someone had pulled the little curtains across the portholes inside. The darkness was welcoming. I sat heavily on the unmade bed and let my head drop into my hands allowing a few tears to escape down my cheeks.
“Ohhh.”
An ungodly moan came from deep within the blankets. I jumped and wiped my tear-stained face with the backs of my hands. A head covered in messy, dark, curls emerged from under the covers.
Robyn sat up, moaning, holding on to her head, as if to keep it from exploding. She looked at me under heavy lids, her hand shielding her eyes from the thin shaft of light coming from the slightly open cabin door. It cut across the bed on an angle, nowhere near her.