As Regis bends down to grab the wallet, the man takes off running. Regis flips it open, quickly shuffling through the contents,then holsters his weapon. “Wait here,” he admonishes, frustration deepening his voice, and takes off after the hiker. “Sir! Sir, your wallet! Please, wait. I’m a cop!”
As he brushes past me, I stagger, dumbfounded, bewildered, a daze of toxins flooding my system. It was him. Iknewit was him. The dream. The feeling that he was near, that he heard my call. The flashes of forest like the one I’m standing in now. I shake my head to clear it, turn at the sound of a duck’s call from the water, blink in rapid succession.
Something isn’t right. My instincts keep pumping adrenaline through me, but the wires are all crossed, the signals wrong. I stare off dumbly down the trail where Regis went. And then I turn slowly until I feel a shudder deep inside. I realize I am facing the direction of the motel, of Aunt Myrtle. Dread rises in me like vomit, and I run.
30Hiding
I am gasping as I trek to the cabin behind the motel, a sensation I don’t recognize slicing through me like heartache. The flashes of forest I saw in the park gain eerie familiarity with each step. The burn to kill is still so alive in me it hurts, and the hunger is returning already, a craving for more poison than I can keep down, as if I could eat my way through this entire forest. But there’s a fresh spasm of misery I can’t trace. My eyes must shine like traffic lights, the witch in me so consuming she can no longer be contained.
I’m alarmed to find Bart at the base of the porch stairs, his head resting on his paws, eyes heavy with unspoken emotion. The front door stands open above him. I know I closed it behind me, left it locked. Did she escape?Please,I think. Tell me it’s not worse, not what I think, what I feel like acid bubbling in my heart.
“What’s the matter, boy?” I ask, tripping up to him, but he doesn’t wag his tail or lift his head. He just cuts his eyes at me, round and dark and sad.
“Myrtle?” I call as I stomp up to the porch, step quietly inside. “You still here?” It’s a silly question, one that implies she was in here of her own free will, but I don’t know what else to say. I have resolved not to fight her this time. She can kill me if she wants, if she must. As long as she is safe. “Myrtle?”
I round into the living room and see her, legs sprawled andbare, half off the couch where I left her. All that dark hair dripping over the side like syrup. Her face is turned up to the ceiling, eyes wide and unblinking. A thin red line ropes her neck just beneath the chin like a scar, a necklace of angry flesh.
I step closer and see the feather, sparkling green along one side, laid atop her breastbone.
My hand plummets into my pocket, hoping against hope, but the feather I had is there, a little crushed from my palm but whole. This one is new. An answer to my call.
My eyes fall closed. I am too late. The Strangler heard me, came for me, but I wasn’t here. The mixed signals I felt by the lake snap into suffocating focus. Instead, he found Myrtle in my place, bound and helpless, an easy victim because I left her that way. Alone. Defenseless.
She is dead. The venery will come for me now to perform the last kiss. There is nothing I can do to save myself. It is what I deserve.
And then I hear Regis calling.
I rush out of the cabin and down the steps, throwing myself at him, pushing with all my force, my hands flattened against the polyethylene plates across chest, the vest he wore beneath his shirt for protection.
He looks baffled, pained. “Acacia, what the—where did you go? I told you to wait. I told you to meet me on the trail. We scared that man half to death.”
He tries to pull my hands off him, but I jerk them away and step back.
“You have to leave,” I blurt.
“What are you talking about?” he asks, brow wrinkling in confusion.
“Leave!” I shout, twisting my hands together. “You can’t touch me anymore. I’m not safe. Go anywhere you want. Just not here. Not for a while, alongwhile.”
He looks stricken, and I realize I must sound and look unhinged,with my radioactive eyes, hair tangled around my face, knees and hands dirty from the forest floor. “What’s happened?”
I take a breath, steel myself. “He beat us.”
Regis’s eyes narrow. “What?”
“The Strangler, Regis! The man we were hunting,together,has won. Okay? He beat us. He was ahead of us the whole time. I don’t know how, and right now I don’t care. I will take care of him. But you can’t stay here.”
He peers over my shoulder toward the cabin, to Bart’s lonely silhouette on the porch.
“I was wrong to bring you into this,” I carry on, ignoring his confusion. “I thought we could help each other, but I see now that this is something I have to do on my own.”
“What are you saying?” He focuses back on me.
“You’re a distraction,” I tell him. “One I cannot afford. One that has already cost me too much. I love you”—the words come as much of a shock to me as they do to him—“but my love is deadly, and I have a job to do. It’s time I stop playing games.”
“Piers,” he says quietly. “Don’t do this. Don’t turn away from me, fromus.It’s the only place either of us makes sense.”
I shake my head, tears hot and bitter on my cheeks. “I don’t make sense anywhere,” I tell him. “With anyone. I see that now. But Idolove you, and I can’t do this if I don’t know you are safe. Do you understand? If you don’t do what I ask, then he will keep winning—they all will, men like the Strangler, and Henry, and the guy with the blue truck—and we will lose. Both of us. Permanently.”
