“You think I didn’t know what you were doing in my study? Digging like the untrustworthy little bitch you are. Trying to steal my work. To ruin my good name.”
Sam slapped at William’s iron grip on her throat. She kicked and thrashed. Somewhere in the back of her mind she couldn’t believe this was happening. She’d read that all people who were about to die felt this incredulity—But I was driving to my sister’s house! But I was going to have the good salad for lunch!But this was William. Silent flowers bloomed before her eyes, white, then black.
One of William’s hands slipped, maybe because Sam’s neck was wet. Sam heaved up out of the tub, choking in a huge breath. She tried to crawl out and past him. But he grabbed her braid, pulled her back, pushed her down into the water, his hands resuming their deadly work.
“If I let you go,” he said, “you’d probably die fairly quickly, but what if you didn’t? What if? I can’t let you send me back there, Simone. To the mountain. To the mist. To the place I was before I became William Corwyn. The writing, the books, that is how I escaped that terrible place. Pen helped me. By dying she gave me her book, and by her book she gave me life. You know the sayingGive a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime? Pen taught me to fish. The other women, they’re my catch. And I need them because I have the talent, the words; what I don’t have are the What Ifs, the stories. I never did. I can’t invent them on my own. Even when we were children, Pen had the ideas and I had the talent. A cruel division, don’t you think? Jayne called me a vampire, but that was mean; I’m more a literary diabetic, unable to produce on my own what I need to survive. I’ve accepted it and found a workaround and given back, and I thought, I hoped and prayed, with you it might be different.”
Sam twisted and bucked. William’s face was an inch from hers, red and quivering with effort, a thin white line of drool dangling from one side of his mouth. His eyes were like black raisins, his expression neutral, as though he were reading the paper.
“I loved you so much that I stuck with you when you stopped writing our book. So much I gave you another chance after you tried to steal my life for your so-called thriller. So much I even ignored the fact you’re a thief. So much I even invited you into my home,” he growled. “If only I’d trusted my instincts. If only I hadn’t let you back in. If only you could be trusted. I warned you, numerous times. You brought this upon yourself, Simone, my darling...”
His voice grew faint. The black flowers had eaten most of Sam’s vision. Her hands fell, beating against the bottom of the tub, a finalspasmodic jerking. Her right fingers touched something on the slick surface, a long cylindrical object.
“I love you, Simone,” William was saying sorrowfully. “But now our story must end—”
With the last of her strength and consciousness, Sam made her fingers close on the object and swung it up and out as hard as she could. William’s grip slackened, then dropped, and as Sam struggled to breathe, to force air into her swollen throat, she saw what was sticking in William’s: her fountain pen, which must have fallen out of her braid, now lodged in the side of his neck.
Chapter 40
Into the Woods
The pen looked so wrong jutting out of William’s throat that Sam had a hard time believing it was real. She had more urgent matters to deal with, like trying to suck oxygen through an airway the size of a pinhole, but while she fought for breath, clawing at her own neck, she kept blinking in disbelief at the pen.
William, too, seemed to be having a hard time comprehending recent events. He raised his hand to his throat, which was jetting blood in time with his pulse, and touched the pen. More blood sheeted down his parka, drip-drip-dripped silently into the snow. William glanced at his red hand, and then back at Sam in bewilderment, and somehow this broke Sam’s paralysis. She pushed past him, up and out of the tub, and ran.
Or the closest thing to it a person could do in thigh-high snow. Breaking trail was hard work. It was nearly impossible when you could barely breathe, when air sawed in and out of your throat like a serrated knife, when you were dizzy and felt vomity and your head throbbed and your vision was still consumed by black dots that expanded and contracted with your heartbeat, when you had only frozen socks on—at some point, Sam must have kicked off William’s other sodden boot. Still she floundered on, her eyes on the woods. She could see it now, so the snow must be getting lighter. She didn’t know what she would do when she reachedit. All she knew was that she must get there. She must reach the trees.
“Simone.”
William sounded different now too. His voice was garbled, had a terrible wheeze like an organ pipe with a hole in it.
“Come back here, Simone.”
Sam did not turn. She threw herself forward. Her clothes, soaked in the tub, were already starting to stiffen and seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Just get to the trees. There would be something there. A branch. A rock. Something—
“You stabbed me, love. You tried to kill me with your fucking pen, you little bitch.”
William’s terrible new voice sounded closer now. Sam didn’t want to look back. It would scare her more. Slow her down. And it didn’t matter how close he was. He’d move as quickly as he’d move, and the only thing Sam could do was move herself. She looked. Whipped her head around—her throat screamed—to cast a terrified glance over her shoulder. William was lunging after her, threshing through the snow, two feet behind her. Now a foot. Closing in on her. Was the pen still in his neck? Yes. Was the blood still spouting? No. But pumping down his neck in a river. Sam pressed on.
“I told you we could do this gently,” William said. “Now look. Look where we are.”
Sam was yanked backward off her feet by the hood of her sweatshirt—Zoop!The collar dug into her swollen throat and she tried to scream. She produced only a little whistle. William threw her down in the snow and Sam tried to backpedal, her icy socks scrabbling for purchase that they didn’t find. William bent, staggered, fell to one knee, and seized her ankle, pinning Sam in place. His hood had come off and he was bareheaded, the wind sieving through his hair. The mortal mineral stench of blood, wet iron, was overwhelming. “I was clear with you,” he was growling, “I was very explicit about what would happen.” He dragged Sam toward him with a businesslike I-told-you-so look as she thrashed and silently howled and his blood pattered onto her legs.
Suddenly there was movement behind him, a large shadow running up in the snow, and William turned. The shadow hit him on the head, and William crumpled and fell, mercifully face down. Blood pumped from a new wound on his temple. One of Sam’s feet was trapped beneath him, and she wrenched it away with a horrified grunt that lanced her hurt throat, then scrabbled backward, using her hands and heels to propel herself away from William’s prone body, sobbing soundlessly and without tears.
The shadow came toward her. “Hey,” it said. “It’s okay now.”
Sam stared up, uncomprehending and terrified. The shadow materialized into a woman who crouched over Sam, hands on knees, her own hair whipping around her face. She was in a ski jacket and pajama bottoms and she, too, was injured, a gash on her forehead, drying blood forming a crust down her cheek. She was breathing hard.
“He won’t hurt you anymore,” she said.
Sam looked at William, the full length of him in the snow. Blood spread around his head in a dark, uneven halo, steaming.Is he dead?she asked, or tried to. Her throat hurt too much, and no sound came out. She put a hand on it.
But the woman seemed to know what Sam was asking. “I think so,” she said.
They both crept a little closer. The woman got on her knees next to William. Oh God don’t do that be careful—was all Sam had time to think before William’s hand shot out. It grabbed the woman’s arm. She and Sam both stared at it as William reared up, blood-soaked, eyes bulging with purpose—and Sam grabbed the thing the woman had clocked him with and hit him again, herself. On the top of the skull, where the bone was thinnest. There was a horrid sound like one pool ball hitting another, and he collapsed again, a fresh indentation in his skull that Sam did not want to look at.
Oh my love, she thought.
