Page 47

Tayla’s the first one to take off again.

Obscured behind the weeds and wildflowers, Kiara struggles against her bonds.

She’s been lashed to the tree trunk so tightly that she hasn’t been able to get free, but it’s obvious she’s tried hard from the angle of her arm, bent awkwardly behind her.

I shudder to think how long she’s been forced to hold that position.

There’s a dingy silver rag hanging from her neck that must have been used to gag her, which explains why she wasn’t able to scream for help earlier.

Despite her predicament, relief surges through my belly. She’s alive. She’s safe.

I glance up at the chalky smudge of the moon peeking between the trees overhead. For now.

Tayla grunts as she works the knots out of the rope. She doesn’t say a word; she’s that intent on the task in front of her. Her singlemindedness has become something I’ve learned to appreciate about her.

I crouch by Kiara, brushing the hair out of her eyes. “Are you okay? Did you see who did this?”

“Was it the roots?” asks Evan.

“ People use ropes,” Radhika reminds them.

“Something grabbed my ankle. It must have been a root.” Kiara nudges her foot in our direction. “It gripped so tight, flung me over the edge. It all happened too fast to know for sure.”

“Didn’t you hear us yelling your name?” I ask, tucking limp strands behind her ear. Her hair is greasier than I’ve ever seen it, her skin has an oily sheen, and her eyebrows are wild without her usual painstaking care. And yet despite that…My eyes drop to her mouth before flitting away guiltily.

“I think I passed out. When I came to, a guy was there. My ankle was sprained from the fall, and it hurt to put any pressure on it, so he said he’d take me back to his camp then go search for my friends.

He seemed to know what he was doing, and he wrapped my ankle and didn’t seem like a creep, so I… ” She looks ashamed. “I went with him.”

I cup her jaw and gently ask, “Then what happened?”

“Well, he took forever to come back. And he didn’t bring any of you with him.

He didn’t seem too concerned with getting help, and whenever I tried to push him to go looking, he always had some cagey reason why he couldn’t: it was getting dark, he didn’t want to leave me alone, it was better for us to stay in one spot so you could find us . ”

Tayla intensifies her efforts with the ropes, expression thunderous.

“He snuck away after giving me water and I thought I heard him talking to someone, so I took my chances. I ran. Next thing I know, he’s in front of me, looking more scared than I was, and before I could beg him to let me go I got hit from behind.

I woke up here. Haven’t seen him since. I thought he might come back with food, water… but…”

Evan reaches out and gently cradles her head. Kiara flinches when their light fingertips find the bump. “I feel it,” says Evan. “It’s a nasty one.”

Kiara laughs weakly. “Yeah. Now can you please hurry up so we can get out of here?”

“Going as fast as I can,” says Tayla. Her fingers pick at the last knot with renewed strength.

“At least you got the gag loose,” I say. “Without that, we might not have found you.”

“I’ve been trying to get free, but every time I got close, the ropes got even tighter.

” She worries her lower lip with her teeth.

“Couldn’t figure out what was going on until I remembered I was hexed.

” Her laugh is bitter. “A couple of the butterflies returned to keep me company, but the rest kept out of sight.”

“They helped us, too,” I say quietly.

“Guess we had to run into far scarier shit to realize that the butterflies weren’t so bad,” Kiara says with a weak smile.

“When I was little, my mom told me that black butterflies were angels. The souls of the departed watching over us on their way to the afterlife. Nothing to be scared of. But my dad’s family believes it’s a premonition of death if black butterflies enter your house.

I like my mom’s version better. I didn’t remember any of that until I thought I would die here and never see them again. ”

“They also represent rebirth and change,” says Evan. “Courage, tenacity, and hope.”

“Uh, hold up. If you knew that, why didn’t you say?” I ask sharply.

They shrug. “It didn’t seem relevant.”

“It didn’t seem—!” My eyes bug out. “Evan, couldn’t you see how freaked we were?”

“Nova, it’s fine.” Kiara wiggles against her bonds until she can place her hand over mine, a placating gesture I’d seen Dad give Mom whenever he had to go back into the forest. It has the intended effect even now.

My annoyance zaps out of me like a fly hitting a lightbulb.

My arm tingles all the way up to my elbow with the aftereffects.

Flustered, I look up. It’s easier than looking into her eyes.

Above, the trees have grown thick and close together, but they’ve left enough space for moonlight to shower part of the glade in a pearly glow.

I swallow back a gasp. Suddenly, I realize that I can make out what evaded me earlier this evening.

The branches have grown in such a way that their outstretched limbs create a luminous outline in the shape of a bird, wingspan unfurled to its limits.

The space within is gleaming silver, like one of the signs of wonderment Dad would believe in a heartbeat.

It can’t be real. It can’t. I blink, but it’s still there.

The tip of the bird’s beak is an arrow pointing the way, pure starlight.

“There!” Tayla lets the ropes fall to the ground with a satisfied expression, like she’s just barely holding herself back from saying Ta-da! with an air of pomp. It promptly sours when she sees Kiara’s hand atop mine.

“Thank you.” Kiara tries to rise, but her legs don’t cooperate.

“Let me,” I say quietly.

Trying not to dwell on how intimate it is, I massage the upper thigh closest to me, working my way down to her calves. Evan does the same while Radhika tugs off Kiara’s boots to examine the bandage that’s been wrapped right around her ankle.

“He did an okay job with this,” says Radhika. “I mean, from what I can tell.”

“She needs a hospital,” says Keiffer, who’s finally made his way over. “Fuck, look at her wrists.”

We do. The ropes have broken skin, leaving behind ugly circles, red and raw.

Kiara glances down at her ankle. “How am I going to make it back to town like this, though?”

Nobody has the answer to that, so with a sigh, she puts her boots back on and hobbles upright, using the tree and my shoulder for balance. A whimper later, it’s obvious it hurts too much to walk on.

“Did you find the well?” she asks, blinking past the pain.

This time, everyone knows the answer, but nobody wants to say it.

It should be me, I realize. If it wasn’t for me, none of us would be here. This is all my fault.

Just like how seven years ago was my fault, too.

It all comes back to me.

“I’m sorry. We tried,” I say, and the others all nod.

“Oh.” She looks dejected for a moment, then she squares her shoulders and looks me in the eye. “We’ve come all this way, and we still have a couple of hours until midnight. We can’t give up yet.”

“Who said anything about giving up?” slinks a voice from the darkness. It’s the first voice from the night before. His manner of speaking is unmistakable.

A man steps out from behind a barricade of trees. Strangely enough, he wears a suit. The pants show wear and tear, but some effort has gone into mending the jacket. Shiny black patches have been sewn on with red thread in childish, uneven lines.

Evan sucks in a breath. “Nova, that’s my poncho.”

I wait for Kiara to tell us he’s the one who found her, but other than her tense face, she gives nothing away. Well, maybe it was one of his friends. God knows he had plenty of them.

Click, click, click. Now the others emerge, eerie smiles on their otherwise young, handsome faces.

They’re all dressed exactly alike, from the fraying, yellowed collars of their once-white shirts to the scuffed dustiness of their black leather shoes.

Like everything else in the glade, they look pristine and decayed at the same time.

The unsettling realization sinks deep into my bones.

“There some backwoods black-tie event going on here?” snarks Tayla.

Instead of it raising his hackles, the man laughs like he finds her amusing, like he wants to put us at ease. “Something like that. Looks like you found our hideout, kids.”

Kids sends a shiver down my spine. They’re not that much older than us.

“You’re still here?” asks Keiffer, stepping protectively closer to Radhika.

My knees are quaking, so I’m proud that his voice doesn’t wobble, too. Proud that Tayla didn’t think twice about mouthing off, even though she’s gotta be as scared shitless as the rest of us.

I can finally put my finger on what the glade reminds me of.

A yard sale full of things that were once sparkly and sentimental but are now just junk, all the shine long gone.

Everything here is old. Though their skin is firm and unlined, the look in the men’s’ eyes is as though they’ve lived lifetimes.

“We’re always here,” says the man, the only one who’s opened his mouth so far.

“Now, I know you and your pretty girlfriend remember us, but let me introduce myself to the rest of your party.” He looks at each of us in turn, a genial smile curling his lips.

“I’m Jeremy. And my buddies here are Colin, Gary, and Kyle. ”

“Don’t forget Mickey,” Colin pipes up. Voice Four.

“Right. Of course, we could never forget Mickey.” Jeremy seems to find this funny. “Why don’t you kids introduce yourself to Mickey? He’s right behind that tree.”

None of us move. If this creep wants us to do something, it can’t be for any good reason.

He gives an exaggerated sigh. “No? Well, all right.” He lunges, hands outstretched.

Keiffer makes a sound like a wounded animal. Radhika moans and buries her face in his chest.

But the rest of us can’t look away.

Because Jeremy is holding what looks like a human skeleton.

Next to me, Tayla’s breathing is raspy and harsh, and Evan trembles.

At first, I don’t understand what I’m seeing.

Plastic from a party supply store, maybe.

I can’t make sense of it. And then it sinks in, like rainfall in parched, cracked, desperate earth.

Realization floods, waking me from my stupor.

The bones are dull, but there’s still withered flesh clinging to the eye sockets.

It’s wearing the same suit, but it hangs off the bones in only marginally better condition than the other four men’s.

Around its neck is a white sash, similarly discolored, that reads Groom in curling black script.

The wrists and ankles are tied with thick rope.

More rope around his waist, looped over and over until it’s a coil.

“See, this clown thought he was better than us,” Jeremy says pleasantly. “The only one to get out of our shithole town, make something of himself. Real college boy, ladies’ man. Thought that all he had to do was snap his fingers, and just like that, the whole world would fall at his feet.”

He snaps his fingers to make a point, and we all flinch.

His friends bray with jackass laughter.

Malice seeps from Jeremy’s smile. “Met himself a pretty little psychic, proposed to her with a big-ass diamond ring he bought with his fancy job money, didn’t he?”

Everything feels hot.

Aurora. Her engagement ring that was never joined by a wedding band. Why she keeps coming back to Prior’s End…

She’s just like me. She’s waiting for someone she loves to come home.

I want Jeremy to stop talking. He does not.

“Invited us to his bachelor party. Didn’t want strippers and liquor, did he?

No, he wanted to do something fun. Something unforgettable.

” His grin stretches slow and sickening across his face.

“We gave him that, right, boys? He wasn’t laughing when we tied him up and told him we were leaving him here, was he?

Too bad his fiancée didn’t see that coming, hmm? ”

When his friends’ whoops and hollers die down, Jeremy’s face loses all trace of fake friendliness, the mask of humanity slipping off to reveal the monster underneath.

“Except we couldn’t find our way out after that.

Which is where you come in.” He nods at us.

“You’re going to take us to the wishing well. ”

“W-what?” Kiara’s voice cracks. “I don’t know how to—”

“I wasn’t speaking to you , stupid girl.” Jeremy scowls. He points at me. “She’s going to do it. The blond. His daughter.”

“Dad?” Without meaning to, my gaze lands on the backpacks. The blue ones. One of them could be his. “You’re talking about Jules Marwood? Is he here?”

Jeremy laughs and pulls his tattered jacket aside to reveal a radio tucked into the ragged waistband of his once-formal trousers. It’s bright orange with nicks across the surface, but it still works perfectly fine when he pulls it free and speaks into it.

In a voice that sounds nothing at all like I imagine my dad, he croons, “Nova, it’s me. Help me, Nova. Go to the wishing well, I’m in trouble!”

Sick horror bubbles up in my gut. It was never my dad at all.

“It was you!” I burst out. “You tried to trick me!”

“It usually works a charm. Terror comes easy out here. You probably know that by now. If people take a little longer to abandon their campsite and their shit…we lure them away with these.” He dangles the radio in front of him, smirking.

“We place them all over the forest. I used to work at one of those haunted houses when I was in high school, so my sound knowledge came in handy. Though you wouldn’t believe how many batteries we run through. ”

Any dwindling hope of finding Dad turns to mist. It was never him reaching out to me. It was someone’s caricature of him, traveling on a frequency and snaking through the trees from some distant radio, all set to the same channel.

Even though I always knew this was a long shot, at least I had hope in that long shot.

There’s now only a dull hollowness where that hope used to be.

Every time the forest made me feel closer to Dad’s spirit or whatever, it was a lie.

And I, that desperate ten-year-old daughter who missed her father, fell for it.

Jeremy throws a disgusted glance at Kiara. “And it would have worked on you, too. But instead, we have to chase you all over the forest looking for this one.”

“If I messed up your plan so badly, then why am I even here?” Kiara cries. “Why did you and your evil roots and your…your goon kidnap me?”

He casts her an irritated look and doesn’t deign to respond. “One of you is injured, and except for the stud over there, none of you stand a chance against us. Now, we can work together or…” His smile is sinister. “We can show you how well we treat our friends.”