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Not a person? What, an animal attacked her and crafted this thing?
No. Not an animal. Not a person. A thing. Something—
Are you hearing yourself? Something?
I silence the screaming voice. I know what I have seen today. I saw Nate move. I saw Kit where Kit could not have been. I saw Sadie running with bone sticking through her flesh. I heard that voice coming from her. I felt those fingers digging into my arms.
Now I am seeing a severed finger move, and I am damned well not leaving until I am sure.
But Madison—
I cannot protect Madison if I don’t know what I’m facing.
The finger has gone still. I count to three, and nothing happens. There. I really was just seeing it move in a stray breeze. I can get back to—
The finger curls up at the joint and then falls again. Up and down, as if it is trying to claw the air, slowly and rhythmically.
Like the man lying on the ground.
I’m stepping back when another finger moves, in that same slow clawing. Then another, and another, and I’m tripping over my feet to get away, backpedaling as fast as I can. When I stumble over a rock, I look down to see the circle I’d noticed in the early hours of the morning, when I’d been out with Jayla, before I fell into the crevice. The roughly drawn circle with hatches. The circle drawn in blood. What seemed to be stick figures of two people. A man and woman, holding hands.
I’m backing away from it when I spot something in the long grass behind the circle. My brain says that something is missing. I take a moment, and then I remember there used to be a spindly tree here. We’d always joked about its tenacity, growing in such an inhospitable place. A lone strip of earth that spawned both a tree and a patch of tall grass. Now the tree is gone, but I can make out the stump of it behind the grass. The stump, and something else.
I pull back the grass, and my knees give way. I drop to the rocky ground, the pain barely registering as I stare at the head of a woman. A head jammed onto the remains of that thin tree stump.
She’s facing me, her eyes thankfully shut. She has dark hair. Dark hair like the bloody clump left on the pillow, and I can see where that clump and more was ripped from her scalp.
She’s white, maybe in her forties. Her head has been ripped from her body, ragged bits of flesh hanging down. I look at her, and I know I should be heaving everything from my stomach, but all I can feel is horror and pity.
Who are you? What the hell happened—
Her eyelids open.
TWENTY-FOUR
I fall back with a scream, landing hard on my ass, scrabbling back as I stare at empty pits where the woman’s eyes had been. The lids flutter. Then her mouth opens and closes, and I—I don’t even know what I do.
The next thing I know I’m on my feet and running as fast as I can, slipping and sliding on the rock and running, tearing down the bluff.
Someone calls my name. Shouts it. I don’t slow. I don’t even process whether the voice is male or female. I just keep running.
Hands grab me, and I twist, flailing and punching as I try to get free.
“Laney! It’s me. Kit!”
I see his face, a flash of beard and dark eyes, and I remember that figure running up the bluff, and I fight harder. It’s not Kit. Another trick. Another trap.
“Laney!” His hands tighten on my shoulders.
“Not you,” I say, barely processing that the words come out loud. “Not you, not you, notyou.”
“Itisme. Laney! Please! Stop!”
I fight harder, clawing and kicking now. I need to get away. Need to get back to Madison and Jayla and the real Kit.
His hands tighten, but he makes no move to stop me from clawing and kicking him. He just keeps saying my name, growing frantic, begging me to stop.
“Provost Steakhouse,” he blurts. “That’s where we went to dinner the first time. After we touched base again. When you came home for Anna. You got a… some huge drink. It was blue, and I got one, and it nearly put me under the table, and then I found out yours was a mocktail. You thought I knew and—”
