Page 77

Chapter thirty-five

When You Can’t…

P oppy’s plan to rescue herself had been perfect. Perfect.

Or it would have been perfect, if she had looked where she was going.

She blearily opened her eyes again, staring out at the landscape from the meager shade she’d created with her canvas umbrella and the open car doors.

It had seemed so beautiful the day before, when she was painting it.

So colorful and full of life. Now it seemed bleak, faded, oppressive.

She could hardly see any shadows out there, which meant it had to be almost noon.

Or just after noon. She’d check her phone, but she’d turned it off when it had started overheating, tucked it inside the cooler in hopes the vague remnants of iciness would make it usable again.

If she could have fit in the cooler, she’d have joined it there.

Was this how it had felt to Rai, each time he’d gazed out at the desert? The feeling of shriveling, wasting, fading? How had he managed to smile so brightly, love so deeply, when he was dy—

She didn’t finish that thought. She refused to finish it, refused to let the d-word take root in her head. Rai was alive, somewhere safe and damp, and she was alive, too, and she would stay that way. She was not, not, not going to leave her mother alone in the world. Not ever again.

She just needed a new plan. One that only required one functional foot.

Her first plan had started off great. She’d remembered her parents’ advice when she was packing to come out here, brought twice as much water and food as she’d thought she would need, so had been able to spend the hottest parts of the early afternoon aggressively hydrating, eating the perishable food from the cooler and saving the granola bars just in case.

She’d lain on the back seat of the car, arranging her umbrella to ensure she was in shade and keeping the doors open for fresh air, alternating with sitting on the ground outside on a folded tarp she’d dug from the back of the trunk, lightly stretching to keep from stiffening up.

And when the sun had started to dip toward the horizon and the insane heat had begun to fade the tiniest bit, she’d finished the last of the warm water—better in her belly than on her back, she knew that much—and set off down the rocky dirt road with just her cell phone, her solar battery pack, and the huge umbrella for shade.

She’d made it ten steps before innocently stepping on a rock that had looked securely planted in the dirt.

It had not been secure, not at all, and in the ensuing wobble, her ankle had given out under her.

She’d flailed her arms and dropped her umbrella and done her best to break her fall, but she’d still stumbled off the graded road into the ungraded wilderness, where there were more rocks, ones that were even less stable, and she’d fallen the rest of the way, blinding pain lancing from her left ankle and a dozen other places where the rocks she’d landed on were particularly…

rocky. Pointy and protuberant and possibly evil. They’d felt that way, at least.

In her first few moments lying there, the only thought that had existed in her head beyond ow and no and fuck was good thing I didn’t land on the prickly pear.

It had been a lovely prickly pear, the one thickly spread out ten inches from her head.

Very prickly. Not very pear-y, unfortunately—only a few stubs of fruit remained on the ends of its paddles, looking thoroughly nibbled.

But it was pretty. Maybe she should paint it, out of gratitude for not breaking her fall.

Most of her injuries were bruises, she’d determined after she’d slowly, painfully crawled back to the road.

Her arms and ribs and head weren’t happy to have landed on rocks, but apart from being abraded in places and tender when poked, there didn’t seem to be any serious damage.

She’d never had a concussion, of course, and she couldn’t Google symptoms from the zero-bars wasteland, but she hadn’t felt like she imagined a concussion would feel.

The same had not been true for her ankle.

It had swelled like a fucking Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, and when she tried to stand, the pain had sent her right back to the ground.

She couldn’t even hobble, had been forced to crawl ignominiously across the dirt, collecting her belongings as she went, until she’d made it back to the car, which was no more useful than a rock but at least was large enough to cast a little shade and had surfaces slightly softer than rocks to sit on.

After a few minutes in the car’s dubious shade, she’d managed to heave herself onto the back seat again and prop her injured ankle on the front headrest. She might not have had ice—the icepack in the cooler having long since gone tepid—and she might not have had any way to compress the injury, but rest and elevation she’d had covered, fifty percent of the RICE method, and that had to mean something.

No, wait, hadn’t there been something else they were saying you were supposed to do now?

MEAT, that was it. Movement, exercise, analgesics, and…

treatment. Well, fuck. She didn’t have any of that, unless she’d left some ibuprofen in the glove compartment.

And if she had, she couldn’t reach it, not while she was resting and elevating, and didn’t have any water to swallow it with.

So she’d kept on half-RICEing it the rest of the afternoon, pondering her other options for getting back to Tucson, or at least a paved road where people were more likely to drive past, every so often testing whether her ankle was able to bear her weight.

Hoping against hope that there was someone else in Southern Arizona stupid enough to come out to this particular middle of fucking nowhere.

Or maybe even a cow. A cow that had gotten loose from the ranches before they’d gone out of business and she could ride it back to civilization…

It said a lot about her situation that by the time the sun had fully set, Operation Cow was still the best new plan she’d been able to come up with.

She’d slept fitfully on the back seat—awkwardly closing the car doors when the yips and howls of coyotes had come a little too close for comfort—and awoken with the dawn, her ankle somehow hurting worse than it had the night before.

Maybe she’d banged it against something in her sleep, having been curled up to fit.

It didn’t matter. It just hurt, and she still couldn’t walk on it.

She was beginning to suspect it was something worse than a sprain—broken, maybe, or…

or… What else happened to ankles? The only thing she could say for sure was that it hadn’t been severed. Small mercies.

She’d finally managed to swallow a dry granola bar to stop her tummy from grumbling, despite the lack of anything to wash it down with, and now she was sitting on the folded tarp on the ground trying to come up with another plan, something she could put into action before the afternoon compounded the heat.

She didn’t think she could wait until sunset, not with the weather as hot as it had been.

She was already feeling loopy—she was probably in the first phases of heat stroke.

The thought made her giggle darkly. All the times her mother had warned her about heat stroke, worried about her, and she’d rolled her eyes at the drama of it, and yet here she was.

The thought of her mother sobered her, cleared some of the wooziness. She needed to come up with something. Anything. She had to get home.

What would Buffy do?

No, that wouldn’t help. Buffy had superpowers. Poppy just had people-powers. She needed a people-powered solution. She cast about in her mind for a better role model for her situation.

But all she could think of now was Rai, sitting by her side to watch TV, gravely discussing the most ridiculous bits of Buffy lore as if they were deadly serious.

They hadn’t finished the series before he’d left, had just been getting to her favorite parts.

Had he kept watching without her, wherever he was? The thought made her smile sadly.

Rai would never have given up on rescuing himself, or her.

He’d been dogged, persistent, single-minded above all else.

And while she’d always side-eyed the rom-com trope that persistence got the girl, she had to admit that if Rai had not persisted, if he had not so determinedly pursued her, she would have never found out his sweetness.

The part of the himbo trifecta that she’d needed most, his pure heart.

Nor the magic he embodied. She would have never known of the faerie haven beneath the human world, never have learned to fly.

Never have had the sheer chutzpah to throw Brendan’s crimes back in his face.

Now, there was an inspiration to get back to civilization.

She hadn’t checked back on Instagram after dropping her truth bomb in the middle of Brendan’s promotional campaign.

She had to survive this so she could find out if any of the shrapnel had hit home.

That was a good goal. Spite was an amazing motivation.

Though love was a better one. And god, her mother must already be beyond worried.

She’d call the police, of course, probably already had, but…

Poppy tried to remember what she’d written on the note.

Had she even said she was going to go painting?

No, she didn’t think she had. She definitely hadn’t left a map or any good clues.

And if she didn’t have service, they wouldn’t be able to track her phone, either.

Even if people started searching. Even if they did manage to follow her data trail to the point where service had vanished.

That ha d to be miles away from here, and they wouldn’t know what direction she’d gone or how far she’d traveled after that.