On those days, she’d think of Asher.I won’t let you die here.
When she peered back at the shed, he was watching her.
“Pop quiz,” sang Camellia, poking Shea with her foot. “What sweet-smelling chemical is found in both plants and decomposing animals?”
“Oh,” said Poppy, dropping the last of her dogwood. “I know.”
Camellia frowned down at Shea. “Shea?”
Feeling peevish, she said, “I don’t see how I’m supposed to know that.”
“It’s trimethylamine,” said Asher, appearing directly in Shea’s line of vision. His T-shirt was dark with sweat, the sun streaming in behind him. Shea scrabbled upright, embarrassed by the grass stains in her stockings, the wild bramble of her hair. “It’s a natural-acting deterrent. Things that feed on blood won’t go after something that smells dead. And don’t worry, that question isn’t even on the test.”
“Leave,” demanded Camellia, flinging her pen. “This is our study circle.”
Asher dodged the pen with a laugh, adjusting the bundle of firewood under his arm. “Don’t work too hard. None of it matters anyway. They’re just keeping you busy so you stay out of trouble.”
“I’m never trouble,” Shea told him.
His smile stretched wide. “Parker,” he said, “you’re trouble to your bones.”
•••
There’s no way in hell Shea is staying behind. Not with her mother home alone. Not when anyone at all could have stumbled upon her, chained and forgotten in the basement. Certainly not when Asher Thorley was part of the unit sent to canvass her house. Every time she shuts her eyes, she sees him standing in her foyer, his finger on the trigger. The boy who stayed out past curfew and who made her promises is gone. This new Asher has been custom-built into someone who kills without a thought.
How can she forgive him if she doesn’t even trust him?
She waits until she’s certain Lys is gone before she follows. Outside his room, the hall is empty—Tristan nowhere to be seen. The entire lodge seems to have emptied, and she slips into the dead of night without running into another soul. It’s drizzling out—a slow, icy rain that turns the ground to gloss. The sky overhead is veiled in clouds, the moon cast in a funny halo of silver. It bathes the whole of Mercy Ridge in a feeble glow.
She hurries down the front walk, teeth chattering. Her fingers are numb by the time she reaches the end of the larch-lined drive. Switching off her hearing aids, she slips out from beneath the mountain’s shadow and into the wood. She’s met with the silence of her head and the deceptive serenity of the trees. Everything hangs perfectly, precariously still. Even the rain slows, caught in the canopy’s evergreen tangle.
The trail is marked by a painted cross. White, the sign for mercy. The trees along the path have been burned back, their trunks hollowed out and full of ash. It gives the forest a sinister coloring, as though she’s waded out of the waking world and into some sort of lightless hell dimension.
At least here, the trees are voiceless. She keeps her hearing aids off regardless, at ease in the silence. It hones her eyes to a point, brings the night veering into razor-sharp focus. She sees everything. Shefeelseverything. The white-tailed flit of a deer. The hunting swoop of an owl. The leathery flutter of a bat leaving its roost.
It’s near midnight by the time she reaches the old logging tracks. The sky here is a river of dark, and the rain falls freely onto the tracks. There’s no moon left at all. She makes her way hurriedly along the rain-slick sleepers, driven onward by thoughts of her mother.
A head lifts from the mushroomed fall of a tree as she hops between ballasts, her arms thrown out to the sides for stability. She braces herself on one leg, expecting fangs, and finds only a doe, its black eyes dewy with suspicion. There’s a moment of pristine stillness—of mutually held breath. And then the doe takes flight, disappearing with the white wave of a flag. It’s heard something. Something Shea didn’t. The moment she realizes it, the hair rises on the back of her neck.
There’s someone behind her.
She doesn’t run, though instinct tells her to flee. To run is to invite a chase, and she’s come this way often enough to know there’s no outrunning a Mercy Boy. Heart in her throat, she keeps moving, her arms pinwheeling against the dark. Hop. Stop. Balance. Hop. Stop. Balance.
Now that she’s aware of the presence, she can feel him—his footfalls on the ground and the scrape of his boot over stone, the snap of a twig under his heel. The night gives way to his body, crackling around him in nearly undetectable ways. Ways she feels in her skin. Ways she catches, spotting flickers out of the corners of her eyes.
She walks a little faster.
She makes it all the way to the covered bridge before she slips. A patch of black ice, invisible in the dark, is all it takes. Her feet go out from under her and she pitches forward, catching herself on the heels of her hands. It’s not enough to keep her from gashing the tip of her chin open against a ballast.
Her teeth crack together, and her curse sends a nearby nightjar fluttering skyward. She lies there for a moment, her ego bruised and the wind knocked out of her. Eventually, the nightjar returns. It hops to-and-fro along the railing, its beak open. Unleashing a soundless warble.
She thinks, unbidden, of her father in late summer, the grass undulating around his waist. She’d sat atop his shoulders, feeling tall as a giant. His voice rumbled against the back of her legs:Listen. Can you hear that? It’s a meadowlark. There’s a predator nearby.
Clambering back onto her feet, she takes stock of the damage. Her palms are bloody with gravel. Her chin burns, the skin scraped raw. She wipes the grit on a pleat of her skirt and keeps going.
She doesn’t make it far.
There’s a boy waiting at the far end of the bridge.
