AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Lucy’s hand trembles in mine. Her eyes are wide. She suddenly looks like layers of her have been peeled away. Decades. She is a child, shivering beside me.
“We have to go,” she says. “We have to get away from here. He’s coming.”
“Who’s coming?” I ask, but her hand has slipped from mine, and she’s running. Vanishing between the trees.
I see her—or is that her, there? Lucy and an echo of Lucy, Lucy and a memory of Lucy. A child and—and whatever she’s become. Both of them running.
I run after.
Lucy!
That voice. It booms between the trees, impossibly deep andimpossibly loud. Footsteps crash, thunderous, and I think of the beast, but when I look back there is only a young man in a formal shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, his hair mussed. He looks like her.
Lucy, come back, you idiot child!
She’s beside me, but it isn’t her—it’s the wrong her, the echo-memory, the child as thin as tissue paper.
“We have to go,” she tells me. “He’s going to catch us.” She reaches out to take my hand, but I flinch back. Echo-child. Not real. Not right.He’s coming.Each step takes him six feet, ten, the ground crawling to bring us together, and before I can move, he catches her.
He seizes her by the shoulders and he bears her up, and slams her back against the trunk of a tree, onto the jutting spike of a broken branch and he pushes her back to pin her there, the wood sliding bloodlessly through her middle, and she screams and she thrashes but he presses farther still.
She stops screaming. She hangs limp. He steps back, as if checking to make sure that the picture he’s hung is level, and then he turns to me.
She’s such a brat. Do you understand?
“Sara.” My name hisses between clenched teeth. Lucy—the real Lucy—is up ahead, crouched at the base of a tree, her whole body shaking and her eyes wide with terror. “Sara, this way. Quick.” She beckons, her hand outstretched.
I dash around the man. He lunges for me, but his grip strikes my shoulder and slides right off. Lucy holds her hand out tome, and I can see every muscle of her body tensed, desperate to flee.
I catch her hand, and together we sprint between the trees. They tilt, folding in toward us, like a trap snapping shut in slow motion, and still his footsteps crash behind us. The pale ribbon of a patch of road gleams between the trees, a promise of safety—or something like it—but it’s so far away. We aren’t going to make it. He’s going to catch us. Unless—
Ys. We have to get to Ys, I think, as I have been thinking as often as I can remember, but I shift the thought in my mind.Focus on me, I think.Not Lucy. Me.
I direct the thought at—I’m not entirely sure. The road, I suppose. And I feel something hungry turn toward me. It’s all mouth and tooth and wet. The forest falls away abruptly, and the crashing footsteps vanish, knife-cut quick.
We stumble to a walk. We aren’t in the forest any longer, but a park. A familiar one.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy says. “That old fear lives in the body. I thought I’d left it behind, but I suppose it still has power.”
I’m not listening; my eyes are fixed on the path ahead. It leads up to a bridge, and beyond that the stones of the road, but between us and our destination a girl and a boy stand on the bridge.
Me. And Anthony.
“What, it’s all my fault?” the other me asks, glaring at him.
“We all loved Becca,” he says.
This is the way it happened. That night on the bridge. This is the conversation we had.
“It doesn’t matter,” the other me whispers. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“No. It doesn’t,” Anthony says. “Because whatever happened then, I’m here for you now. I don’t know if this is a prank or a trap or if there’s really something hiding out in the woods, but I’m not letting you go alone.”
“And what about the others?”
“If you ask them, they’ll come,” he says.
The other me shakes her head. “They won’t. Especially not if they know—”
