Page 97 of Mazywood

Sharise shook Imani’s forearm, hard. “It doesn’t mean she’s dead. Okay? Don’t give up.”

“You never thought she was alive!” If Imani was about to die, she would die telling the truth. “You were just playing along!”

Sharise sobbed. “So what? I knew I could be wrong. I want to be wrong. She’s my mother too.” Sharise could barely finish her sentence, bent over from a sob.

“She was supposed to have a baby,” Imani wailed. Why did the newest thing feel the worst? The baby’s tragedy was the biggest pain she could catch hold of long enough to feel.

Sharise hugged her. “I know…” she whispered. She rocked with Imani long enough for Imani to notice her sister trembling too. “You did so good, scaring it away. I’m in fucking awe. But we have to hide, Imani—or no one might ever know what happened to us.”

It wasn’t a cheerful reason to feel energized, but it was the truth. Dying wasn’t the worst. The worst would be if no one ever heard the story of what their family had faced together on this mountain.

Imani sniffled. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s look for shelter.”

This climb was rife with downhill detours and passages tucked in snowy corners of the ascent. The rocky escarpment fifty yards beyond the pine forest did not offer visible places to hide, and the terrain would be dangerous in snowboard boots. A river with rocky shores snaked east of the rock face, its burbling muted by ice. Climbing to that river would be hard too because of the large boulders, although the sight of it made Imani realize that her throat was screaming from thirst, not just grief. She cursed herself again for not bringing a water bottle, the thing they needed most. She had water-purification tablets in her survival kit, but nothing to collect the water. Besides, they didn’t have time to find water now.

The downhill grade just west of them would be faster, across that carpet of untouched snow, but the Beast would easily see them in that clearing before they reached the next grove of trees. Tree cover was thinner in that direction, not denser.

Tendrils of panic tightened across Imani’s skin. Where could they go?

She scooted out on her snowboard, changing her view slightly beyond the closest pine trunks—and saw the dead tree. She blinked to make sure she wasn’t imagining it. Instead of a thin pine tree, this was a large, broad tree with a tangle of gray branches like jutting thorns growing tall, bordering the creek near a rocky ascent. The trunk had a tear-shaped hollow, a beacon. How hadn’t she seen it before?

Sharise followed her gaze and saw it too. She gasped.

“Will we fit?” Sharise asked.

“We might.”

Might was a miracle.

It could be an optical illusion, Imani knew. The tree was at least twenty-five yards away. The shadowed hollow was dark and prominent against the snow from this far, but once they got closer, they might learn that the trunk was only damaged, not truly hollow. Or the gap might be only big enough for one of them to curl inside.

But the sisters swerved their snowboards to race toward the dead tree like salvation.

In that moment, all they cared about was that the hollow looked too small for the Beast.

Twenty-Eight

MOMENTS EARLIER

KEEP GOING. TURN BACK. KEEP going. Turn back. Left foot. Right foot.

Johnny’s feet were at war with themselves, at war with the snow. Pure stubbornness had kept him on the trail when the snow began, dimming his hopes of finding his family. Twenty minutes later, the patterns he followed were mere ghost tracks, vanishing and reappearing, a maddening peekaboo beneath falling flakes. In truth, he was guessing more than tracking. The lines had faded almost beyond recognition for the past thirty strides, probably more if he had been counting his steps. But his head didn’t have room for counting with the war raging within.

He should have gone back. He knew that now. But his feet still plowed ahead.

Johnny’s only luck manifested when he reached the next stand of pines—at least he thought the tracks were leading him there—and he saw that the tree cover preserved more evidence of the tracks. Two distinct sets of footprints congregated at a large snowdrift strewn across several pine trunks like a wall. The new snowfall hadn’t covered large holes in the snowdrift that Johnny told himself might have been the girls looking for Tasha. Or looking for the monster.

Was there blood? Johnny jabbed at the snowdrift with his ski pole and swept the softer snow aside, searching for anything like the blood streaks in Imani’s footage from the deer’s head, or what he’d seen under the unlucky Jeep parked in front of the lodge.

“No blood,” he whispered aloud, so grateful that he wanted to sink to his knees.

But he wanted to sink to his knees, period, gratitude or not. Johnny had never been so weary. He had run a marathon in his thirties, but although he had limped the final stretch and barely been able to walk for days, his muscles hadn’t felt sodden with the dread and memories he carried now. His feet, his legs, had turned to stone.

But rediscovering his daughters’ trail filled Johnny with new vigor. This wasn’t his daughters’ burial mound, the end of his journey—the end of everything. He still had a chance.

Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. His thoughts clanged, urgent.

A rifle shot pealed from somewhere north of him and then floated everywhere with an ethereal call-and-response. Despite the distance, the sound vibrated through him.