At least they still had that. With the disappearance of her pack, they’d lost one of their sleeping bags, their first aid kit, and half their food. Too stressed and frustrated to speak without sniping at each other, they’d stopped talking altogether.
A strip of bark flared, then caught flame. Eva blew on the ember to make it grow. They still had an hour of daylight left, but the mountains got cold at night this time of year, and Eva needed to busy herself with a useful task to distract from her spiraling thoughts.
It could have been an animal.
But wanting something to be true didn’t make it so. If an animal had smelled the food still in the backpack and dragged it off, wouldn’t there have been some kind of mark in the soil? Eva hadn’t seen any tracks. It was as though the pack had disappeared intothin air. She thought of the sheriff, who certainly would have pulled together a search party. But if Dane and his deputies had tracked them down, they wouldn’t hide in the trees or steal supplies. They wouldn’t keep their presence a secret.
She could make neither head nor tail of it, but the sensation of being watched made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She cut a glance over her shoulder to the trail of wildflowers she’d left in her footprints. Anxiety buzzed inside her.
This forest was unlike any other she’d been in. Eva couldn’t put her finger on what about it unnerved her, exactly, only that it seemed somehow more… conscious. Not like an animal butmorethan any stand of trees she’d ever come across. The communal hum of roots beneath the surface had started to grate against her skull.
She needed to shut down her brain. To stop catastrophizing.
It was hard not to let her father’s stories creep back in. As she worked on their fire, Eva’s memory drifted back to other hearthside moments in their cottage, when Dad would gather both his girls on his lap with a giant bag of chocolate-covered popcorn and tell them stories about his fictional honeyman.
“He used to be an average-sized sort of fellow, until magic stretched him into a giant.”
That one had made Eva giggle, and Dad had tickled her ribs.
“He spoke the languages of trees. He knew the sounds they made when they were happy”—Dad had pointed to the crackling log in their fireplace—“and when they were in pain.”
A flame caught and licked across the lichen-covered log Eva was hovering over, pulling her from the memory she’d all but forgotten. She moved back, giving the fire space to grow as she stuck a finger in her shoe and lifted her heel out to give the growingblister some relief. Usually, such wounds healed faster than this, but even her quick healing couldn’t quite keep up with the torment of too-small shoes over miles and miles.
A zipper whined behind her. She turned to see Arthur kneel inside the tent and unroll their single sleeping bag. When his back muscles flexed taut, her mouth went dry.
At least they’d switched packs, or else they wouldn’t have the tent at all.
The kitten had curled up like a pill bug in the grass. The cans of chicken they’d planned on giving her had been in the pack too. Eva had peaches, but she was pretty sure she’d read somewhere that cats shouldn’t have peaches. So, for now, her sandwich bread would have to tide the kitten over.
Guilt wormed inside her as she wondered again if they’d made a mistake. Between Arthur’s stitches, the rough terrain, and the kitten’s hungry mewls, it certainly hadn’t been the strongest start to their quest.
Worse was her father. Eva hadn’t told him goodbye. What if his body gave out before they could return? Had she surrendered her last days with him for nothing?
No. No, they could still do this. They just had to get to the wildflower fields.
The fire hit a water pocket in the wood and sparked a bright scarlet. Eva dug a few cheese sticks out of her pack. Tonight, they would eat and rest. Tomorrow, Arthur would be well, and together they would finish the trek to the meadows.
They had to.
The tent door fluttered in the breeze as she approached.
“I can sleep outside,” Arthur offered cautiously.
Snapshots flicked through her mind: the withering branches ofher father’s tree, the depression in the grass where her pack should have been. “It’s not safe,” she said carefully.
“It’s not safe for me to be inside either.”
“You won’t hurt me.”
It felt like a confession to admit she still believed that, despite the ache of the last eight years. It also felt a little bit like a lie. They both knew hehadhurt her, his absence a bruise that time couldn’t fade.
“You won’t,” Eva said more firmly, unsure which of them she was trying to convince.
Arthur’s eyes dropped to the kitten. “I could hurt Bug.”
She blinked. “Bug? What are you…?” She glanced at their furry companion. “You named the cat!”
Arthur flushed. “No.”
