AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I don’t turn back to him. I can see the undergrowth moving ahead, and it tells me where she is, and I don’t dare look away. I wave overmy head for him to follow me. Then I steer inland, farther from the treacherous rocks.
I reach the bush just as Kit catches up.
“Sadie!” I shout, the word snatched up by the wind.
I’ve lost sight of her. She’s past the patch of undergrowth and somewhere farther down. I take a second to turn to Kit.
“I saw her!” I yell. “I saw Sadie.”
His lips form a curse, and he bears down to run alongside me. We keep going until we’re past that undergrowth. Then I stop and peer around. There’s nothing here. It’s rock with some shrubby trees.
I didn’t see her. I couldn’t have. There’s no place for her to—
“There!” Kit shouts.
I follow his finger. He’s pointing past the edge of the rock. It drops off to a bit of stone-covered shore, and I catch a blur of movement down there in the shadows.
We run to the edge. The rocks jut only five feet above the rocky strip, and we scramble down easily.
We’re on the west side of the island now. The wind is driving from the east, and this cove is quiet, the water only lapping at the stones. I can barely see, though, and I look up to see black clouds rolling in fast, shoving aside the gray ones.
Kit turns on his flashlight, and I do the same with the one I’d grabbed from our stash. There’s no sign of movement, but there are dozens of places to hide along here, where the water has worn into the rock, leaving tiny pockets and caves, each of them black as night.
“I saw her,” I say. “I’msureit was her. I could see her face.”
He nods. “I only caught a glimpse of someone moving, but if it wasn’t Sadie, it was her doppelgänger.”
I exhale. We are agreed then. Nothing to prove. No need to hedge in case I was mistaken.
We walk along the shore with our flashlight beams crisscrossing as we check each cave-like divot big enough to hide a person. WhenKit spots something, it’s a piece of fiberglass with looping script on it. A single word: “Wicked.”
The Wicked Witch of the North.That was the name of our boat, a joke between us.
We continue. We’ll reach the end soon, just after the shoreline curves to our right. We take one step around that curve and a figure appears.
It’s Sadie. Undoubtedly Sadie.
She’s poised on a rock. Perched like a gremlin, knees bent and splayed, arms hanging down. One arm hangs wrong, the palm unnaturally facing out, as if her shoulder is dislocated.
We can’t see her face under the shadows of an overhang, but it’s her, from the pale heart-shaped face to the heavy pendant necklace to the sopping-wet blond hair. There’s something on her cheek. Something red and ugly. With a gasp, I realize her cheek is torn open to the bone.
“Sadie!”
I leap forward. She turns and takes off, and I stop, blinking. The way she’s running, bent over in a lurching lope… It’s like the uncanny valley of movement, where I see what looks like a person moving but my brain screams it’s not right. The muscles, the bones, nothing is moving the way it should.
She’s hurt. I can see that arm swinging, and I’m sure the shoulder is dislocated. One of her legs keeps buckling too. And her cheek—dear God, it wasrippedopen. She is badly injured and has suffered some kind of head injury that numbs her to what should be agonizing pain.
Despite her horrendous injuries, she clambers up the rock and disappears as we race after her.
“She’s hurt,” Kit says, as if we’ve been thinking in tandem. “She’s badly hurt, and she’s confused.”
I nod. “We have to get to her. She needs help.”
She needs a doctor. She needs ahospital.And how the hell am I going to give her that?
Someone blew up the boat, and she was on it. She heard or sawsomething and had time to jump, but not enough time to escape the concussive wave of force.
I start climbing the rocks.
