AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Where?”
“By the river. I slipped on some rocks and dislocated my shoulder crossing the river. When I finally got to the other side, I found this bag on the bank. So I took it.” I’m not even sure why I’m lying to him. All I know is that he knows Mark, knows him well enough to wonder why I have his bag. If he finds out I hurt Mark, regardless of the circumstances, I’m not sure what he’ll do to me. Until I have a better idea of who, and what, I’m dealing with, lying seems like my best option.
“How’d you get beat up?” Caleb asks. “If you never saw Mark?”
“That happened before I found the bag.” I keep my voice even, my gaze steady.
Caleb watches me as the shadows grow longer in the fading light. He probably thinks his silence will force me to speak, that I’ll be so desperate to fill the void I’ll tell him things I’ve promised to keep to myself. But he doesn’t know me. I may not be a very good liar, but I’m an old pro at silence, forever listening for my cues and keeping what I really want to say buried deep. I can match silence with silence any day of the week. It’s when I let my temper get ahead of me, when I open my mouth, that things usually start getting tricky.
“And when you took the bag, you didn’t see anyone around?” Caleb asks when it becomes clear I’m not going to talk first.
I shake my head. “What’s the story with this Mark guy, anyway?” I ask, fighting to keep my voice casual. “Is he a friend of yours?”
“I know him,” Caleb says, and although his face doesn’t give anything away, I can hear him measuring his words the way I’m measuring mine. It reminds me of those first days with Bishop, when I tasted each word before it left my tongue. “He went out hunting a few days ago,” Caleb continues. “He never came back.”
“Well, I can’t help you,” I say, trying not to think about Mark, the look on his face when he was hunting me. “I never saw him.”
Caleb knows I’m lying. I can see it in the flare at the back of his eyes, the way his body is still slouched in the chair but his fingers tighten on the arms. But he can’t prove it, not without Mark here, and so I hold his gaze as the sun slips behind the house and bathes us both in dusky shadow.
Sometime in the night Caleb leaves, and Ashley takes his place. She brings water with her and rations it to me in tiny sips so I don’t get sick trying to gulp it all down in one huge swallow. She brings a small piece of rabbit, too, greasy and tough.
When I wake in the morning, she smiles at me, unlike Caleb, and sits on the edge of the bed, her legs curled up beside her. More like a companion than a warden, but it doesn’t make me any less nervous. She has a wicked-looking knife dangling from her belt, and although her face is friendly, I don’t doubt that she could gut me in a second if she felt threatened.
“We found you passed out in the road,” she tells me. She hands me a small bowl of blueberries and another glass of water. I think I could drink for a month and still be thirsty. “You didn’t even make it ten steps after you left this house.” She lets out a little laugh. Her voice is deep for a girl’s, her laugh scratchy to match. “Which is probably a good thing, since Caleb had to carry you back here.”
Caleb carting me around when I was unconscious is not an image I want to dwell on. “You were the ones watching me?” I ask. It’s comforting to know I wasn’t imagining it, that my survival instincts are in proper working order. “Caleb and you?”
Ash nods. “We didn’t mean to scare you. But we had to see if anyone was with you, what you were doing, before we showed ourselves.”
“Are you two alone out here?”
“No, we’re part of a larger group. But Caleb gets restless,” she says with a grin. “He likes to get away sometimes, so I tag along.”
“So you don’t live here? In Birch Tree?”
“Nope. In the warmer months we actually have an outdoor camp. When it gets colder, we settle into a town. But not this one. Ours is closer to the river.” She smooths out the blanket on my legs. “You can come with us, if you want,” she says. “Back to our camp. It’s hard to make it out here alone.”
I still don’t know if I can trust them, but she’s right. I’m not going to survive alone. There is strength in numbers, even if you’re unsure of the people making up those numbers. “Okay,” I say.
“Good.” Ash smiles, tucks her hair behind her ears. “I don’t even know your name,” she says. “Caleb said he told you I’m Ashley. But I go by Ash.”
“I’m Ivy.”
“Nice to meet you, Ivy.” Ash holds out her hand for a brief shake, her fingers gentle around my injured hand. “Where are you from?” She must see something in my face, because she’s quick to add, “You don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to.”
“Yes, she does,” Caleb says, back to lurking in the doorway. I take the opportunity to glare at him. He glares back.
“I grew up in Westfall,” I say, my heart squeezing in my chest at the words. “It’s a town not too far from here. And they put me out. I’m not sure exactly how long ago. Maybe about a week.” Ash looks from me to Caleb and back again. “Have you heard of Westfall?” I ask. I’m pretty sure neither of them is from there. Their faces aren’t familiar to me, even vaguely.
“We’ve heard of it,” Caleb says. “We’ve never had the misfortune of going there.”
Ash clucks her tongue at him. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“I know they chuck girls barely old enough to take care of themselves out into…this.” His sweeping hand encompasses more than this dusty room, seems to take in the whole wide brutal world beyond these walls. His hand turns into a pointing finger, aimed right at Ash. “And I can’t believe you’re defending that place.”
“My parents were born in Westfall,” Ash explains at my questioning look. “They put my mom out when she was sixteen. She refused to marry the person they picked for her. My dad followed her, decided he’d rather take his chances out here with her than live there without her.” She tells the story with a kind of well-worn pride, her own personal fairy tale with her parents in the starring roles. My mind wanders to thoughts of Bishop, what it would’ve been like if he’d come after me, but I sever that idea almost as quickly as I think it. Life is painful enough without my own brain making it worse.
“Is that why you were put out?” Caleb asks me. “Because you wouldn’t marry who they chose for you?”
