Stay calm, Cassie.Stay calm and think…
She was in a root cellar.Or some unfinished basement.The kind Margie stored her canned vegetables in.A ladder loomed a short distance away, rising to a square hatch in the ceiling.The door above it was shut tight, not even a seam of light showing around the edges.
Holy hell, her head hurt.She lifted her bound hands, feeling blindly along the pain until her fingers found a swollen, throbbing knot.
Wait…had someone hit her?
She forced her scrambled thoughts into order.Wierswood.Maya.She’d gone to talk to Maya, only to be told Maya wasn’t there.
After that—
The Blue Rooster flickered.
That’s right—she’d gone back to the Rooster to ask Violet about Maya, who’d warned her off searching for the woman.
“You don’t wanna go pokin’ around them places alone,” Violet had told her.“Better off askin’ Ollie for help.”
But Cassie had gone looking anyway, because it had been barely the middle of the day and she wasn’t stupid or helpless.And because she’d figured she’d look around for a couple of minutes, and if she couldn’t find Maya, she’d leave.
The rail yard came back in pieces.
The smell of rotting trash with something sweet and chemical underneath it all.
Rusting, graffitied freight cars scattered along bent and broken tracks.
Burn barrels smoked in a few spots, thin gray columns twisting up toward the sky.
People sat around them on pilfered chairs and makeshift seats while others drifted.
Cassie had spotted Maya a ways apart from the others, slumped behind a battered, half-collapsed freight car, recognizing her first by the greasy blonde hair hanging in tangles around her face.As Cassie approached, a flicker of awareness crossed the woman’s face, followed by a strange little giggle.
“You look like him,” she said, her voice slack, her words blurring into each other.“His eyes…so green.”
Cassie crouched in front of her, ignoring the nearly choking smell of her unwashed body.“Connor?”she asked gently.“You knew him?”
Maya’s eyes sharpened a little, like his name managed to reach some part of her the rest of the world couldn’t.“He’s dead, you know.Gone…forever.”
“He was gonna…get us outta here,” Maya had gone on, her head tipping back against the steel.“He was savin’…some…”
Her words trailed off.
“Maya?”Cassie leaned in a little, watching the woman’s eyes slip half shut.“Maya, what?”
Reaching out, she gave her arm a small shake.“What was he saving?Money?”
Maya’s lashes fluttered.Her mouth moved around something soundless.Then her gaze shifted, sliding over Cassie’s shoulder and fixing there.
Cassie started to turn—
Pain exploded across the back of her head.
And for one sick second she felt herself falling without understanding why—
—right before everything went black.
Cassie sucked in a slow breath, forcing herself back to the present.
Okay, so clearly someone had fucking hit her.
