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“Which we can’t worry about. If you need someone to keep saying that, Laney, I’ll do it. If you need someone to lock the door and change the code so you don’t go after her, I’ll do that. I’ll be the bad guy here.”
“You’re definitely not the bad guy here,” I say softly. “But you won’t need to do any of that. I’m…” The wind chime flashes and my gorge rises. “I’m not going out again. Like you said, if Garrett wants to keep searching, that’s his choice. We can’t stop him.” I point. “Over there. That bush. I saw the guy’s hand—”
“I see it,” Kit says.
The man’s hand is exactly where it had been, arm outstretched, fingers rhythmically clawing the ground.
“What’s he doing?” Kit says.
“I don’t know. He was doing that before. Like he’s trying to drag himself along, only he hasn’t moved.”
Kit curses under his breath. “He’s definitely hurt then. Mentally, too. Like Sadie.”
Like Sadie.
“Hit on the head,” he says.
No, I don’t think so.I swallow, but I say nothing.
After this, I will tell him what I saw at the gazebo. I will tell him and Jayla, and they can do with that what they will, whether that’sdeciding I’m suffering mental confusion from the hypothermia or declaring there’s a deranged human killer out there or reaching the same unfathomable other conclusion.
That I was not hallucinating.
I can tell myself I was, but I know better.
I saw those severed fingers move. I saw those eyelids open. I saw that woman’s decapitated head try tospeak.
That is not the work of a deranged human killer.
“All right,” Kit says. “Let’s get a closer look.”
He doesn’t add “carefully.” His fingers just tighten on mine, and that says it for him. We are not letting go of each other even to move toward this injured man.
I squeeze Kit’s hand. Then we take a step. A second step veers us around that bush. A third follows, and then we can see the man’s entire upper body, and Kit relaxes a little, as if he’d feared what I first did: that I was only seeing a hand, severed from the rest.
The man’s torso lies on the ground. What looks like a torn tarp lays over him, as if someone covered him up and he managed to crawl just this far from under it before his strength gave out.
There is no question now that he’s injured. Blood smears his shirt and his neck and his exposed forearms. It’s spattered all around us.
Blunt force trauma. That’s what springs to mind. When Kit glances over, I realize I’ve said it aloud.
“A hard blow to the head,” I whisper. “Or a sharp one. That’d explain the blood spatter.”
“And his mental state.”
The man doesn’t even seem to have registered us. He’s still clawing at the ground with that one hand, the other twisted at his side. His eyes are open, his gaze straight forward.
“Sir?” I say, and even as the word leaves my mouth, I mentally smack myself.Sir? Where the hell did that come from?
Yet Kit repeats it, as if acknowledging that this man is older than us. A middle-aged man with gray threads in his dark hair and a goldwatch, and yes, that last shouldn’t inspire respect, but it’s ingrained in me. Like with Jayla and Kit’s parents, when I’d been so aware of their social standing that I’d called them Mr. and Mrs. Hayes for a decade after they insisted I use their first names.
“Sir?” Kit says.
The man stops his clawing. His face turns our way, eyes still blank, but face lifting as if searching for the source of that voice. Blinded by the blow to his head?
I start to crouch, and Kit lowers himself with me, both of us carefully dropping to our knees, hands still clutched together.
Up close, I don’t think this is Dr. Abbas. The light brown skin is obviously a tan, the sort that screams artificial for northerners in October. I could be wrong, of course. I’d never want to make the mistake of presuming a man with a Middle Eastern accent and an Arab surname couldn’t look white. But my gut says this isn’t Dr. Abbas.
