Page 30 of Run Rabbit Run

I’ve waited a very long time to hear the sound Wren makes when hers finally goes.

Behind me the mountain waits, seated and patient, every trap in it already dreaming of her.

Two more days.

I've stayed patient for thirty-six years. I can hold that patience through one last stretch of waiting, now that I can see the far end of it.

CHAPTER NINE

Wren

The car comes for me at dawn on Halloween, the way he said it would.

Black, long, and silent.

It pulls up the gravel drive to the cabin while the sky's still the color of a bruise going yellow at the edges, and I'm already outside waiting, because I'll be damned if I let him find me unready in a doorway.

My pack sits at my feet. Everything I could think to bring, everything the rules allow, which is everything, which is the part that should've warned me the most and somehow didn't.

Rue wanted to drive me. I told her no.

I told her a lot of things this past week, and every one of them was a brick in the wall.

The last one I told her was at her truck an hour ago when she wouldn't let go of me in the dark of the cabin lot.

I said I'd call her the second it was over.

I said ten days, coast easy, keep the feed running.

I said I love you, and that one was the only truth left in my whole mouth. I said it hard so she'd have it to keep.

She's not here now. That was the deal I made with myself.

Whatever happens on that mountain happens with her a hundred miles away, safe, and believing a lie I built to keep her breathing.

The driver gets out.

It's the one from the diner, the one built like a door, and he doesn't speak.

Just takes my pack before I can stop him and sets it in the trunk like a man who's done this before with women who weren't coming back.

I get in the back seat myself.

There’s no way I’m going to let him open my door.

Small things. Stupid, maybe. But a person going into a bad place holds onto the small choices that are still theirs, because soon enough there won't be any, and I learned that in the wilderness a long way from here, and I've never once unlearned it.

The drive takes hours.

Pavement, then gravel, then a private road that climbs and climbs into forest I've only ever seen flattened onto a survey map, and seeing it in the flesh is a different animal.

The trees close over the road until the daylight goes green and dim. The temperature drops.

Moss swallows everything, the trunks, the rocks, and the downed logs, a wet green so total it feels less like a forest than the inside of a lung.

I analyze it the entire way.

I can't help it.