He whistles.
A low, eerie sound.
Two men step out of the corn.
My heart stops when I see the teardrop tattoos on their cheeks, three on the man on the left of me and five on the man on the right. They grin at me, teeth yellow and jagged, like wolves that haven’t eaten in days.
I start to fight for real.
Kicking, punching, yelling for help, but it’s no use. They’re too strong. Too fast. Together they cage me in. One grabs me and holds me down by my arms while the other gets my legs.
Once I’m immobilized, Jackson crouches beside me, laughing again. A sound made for nightmares.
“Predict this, bitch,” he says, right before he punches me in the side of the head.
The world goes dark.
Chapter thirty-two
Carrson
The first clue something’s wrong is the silence.
Not quiet, just empty.
The steady pulse of Laurel’s tracker has been in my ear all night. A low, rhythmic beat, background noise I’ve learned to rely on without realizing it.
Until it cuts out.
I sit bolt upright. The bonfire crackles at my back, its warmth suddenly meaningless. Drunken laughter rings out from the field, where students jostle in line for the hayride, blissfully unaware thatsomething’s just gone very, very wrong.
I yank the monitor from my pocket. A small, battered square, almost like an old flip phone. The screen glows faintly, but the sound is dead. No pulse. No signal. The blinking green dot that should show me Laurel’s location is just…gone.
I shake the damn thing, smack the side of it, hard. Once. Twice. Nothing.
“No, no, no,” I mutter, already moving.
I shove past the drunk idiot blocking my way, ignore his slurred protest, and start running toward the maze. Leaves crunch beneath my boots. My heartbeat drowns out everything.
I pull the comm microphone to my mouth. “Eyes on Laurel?” I bark. “Anyone have eyes on Laurel?” There’s a second of static that echoes in my earpiece, but no response. “Sam? Thomson? Where the fuck is she?”
The silence stretches too long. Too loud. It curls tightening around my throat like a noose.
Finally, Thomson’s voice crackles in. “My unit’s not registering her. Yours?”
Samantha joins the conversation. She sounds short of breath, like she’s already running. “I’ve got nothing here. I was staring right at it when it suddenly went blank. Last ping from her was in the dead center of the maze. I’m entering from the west side now.”
“I’ve got east side,” says Thomson, activating the emergency plan we mapped out for a situation like this.
“I’ll take north,” I snap.
When I had the farmer come to make the corn maze this year, he’d been surprised. Instead of the pattern the fraternity has always used, I’d had strict instructions. “I only want three openings for people to enter and exit.Three. No more.”
“You sure about that?” He’d looked at me with a perplexed frown. “We usually do six entrances, sometimes more. Easier for the kids to come and go. Won’t three make it harder for people to find their way out?”
“Exactly,” I said and nodded, knowing that control of the exit points was crucial to make sure my plan worked. I’d tried to think of everything, every possible scenario to keep Laurel safe. Fewer ways in meant fewer ways for Jackson to slip past me.
Now I realize that I’d built a cage for a monster…and trapped Laurel inside with him.
