Chapter Three
She tried not to panic too much about everything that had just happened.
Because, sure, he was going to be annoyed with her.
But then, she had never known him to be anything but.
Sometimes he crossed the street to avoid having to brush past her.
Once he had been forced to sit next to her during a town hall meeting, and he’d spent the whole thing with his massive arms crossed over his huge chest, fuming.
She still remembered that muscle ticking in his clenched jaw.
So what was he going to do now? Come after her with a shotgun?
It didn’t seem likely.
But just in case, she sped up a little. She put her foot down on the gas. Even though putting her foot on the gas was a little scary while negotiating the dirt road that led away from his shack. It seemed suddenly narrower than it had when she’d driven up there. Narrower, and oddly darker.
Like hours had passed while she’d been in his home.
Instead of what it had actually been: minutes. The clock on her dashboard said it wasn’t even noon. Yet when she peered up through the sunroof of her ridiculous little car, all she could see was shadowy darkness. Not even a glimpse of daylight through the web of interlacing tree branches.
She looked back through the windshield just to stem the rising panic the sight produced. But somehow, straight forward wasn’t much better. She could barely make out the road ahead—never mind the bright openness of the highway beyond.
Despite how close she knew that highway should be.
She’d been driving at almost sixty down a mile-long dirt road.
The whole thing was supposed to be over in under a minute.
But it had been five, and there was still no end in sight.
And now the way through was so tight that branches were starting to claw at the sides of the car.
One lashed against the glass so hard it made her jolt in her seat.
Suddenly her heart was racing. Her breathing was coming too fast.
She knew she had to ease up on the gas.
Yet she found herself pressing down harder.
Panic forced her foot, and the car leapt forward so surprisingly fast that she almost didn’t see the thing in the road.
It just sort of flashed before her eyes, quick enough that she would tell herself later it had been a deer.
But in that moment, she saw that hunched back.
She saw that glistening, sickly skin. She saw the way it looked at her.
Only not with anything resembling eyes.
It seemed to be all teeth, all mouth. And that mouth grinned as she tried her best to yank the wheel to the left. She could still see it in her head when the tires slid and tried to leave the road, and she scrambled, scrambled, scrambled to keep it under control.
Then the car just jackknifed, violently.
And after that she couldn’t do a thing. Her whole world jerked sideways so hard her neck cracked out a sound like a gunshot.
The seat belt seemed to almost thump into her, to the point that she couldn’t breathe.
Then just as it slackened enough for her to gulp down more oxygen, just as she was trying to right herself somehow, the car hit something.
She felt it judder through the chassis. Heard metal and rubber and plastic whine in a way that said this was going to be very bad indeed.
She let out a little no at the sound.
Tried to brace, a split second before it happened.
But there was no bracing for this. The car lurched so fully into the air she almost lost her breakfast. She tasted toast and milky coffee in the back of her throat—and even more strongly when the car spun.
It twirled in the air like a ten-ton metal ballerina, fast enough that she only caught what was happening in snapshots.
The sight of the road through the sunroof, the sudden tunnel of her hair around her face, a spray of glass spiraling in all the wrong directions. It should have been raining down on her, and instead it flew upward, and then sideways, and then finally, finally it started to obey gravity.
Much to her dismay.
When the car lands on its roof the impact is going to kill me, she thought, with a clarity she didn’t know was possible amidst this maelstrom.
But it was, and apparently so was being bitter about the idea.
It took hold, just as the car started to come back down again—not her life flashing before her eyes, but the life she had hoped to one day live instead.
All her simple, small dreams of being loved and loving someone in return, of cotton candy at fairgrounds with someone sweet, of cuddles in the night when she had bad dreams, of being cared for in a way she had only ever been able to imagine.
Even the one instance of someone saving her—from that dreadful place, the fire, the horrors—it just seemed like a hallucination now.
A symptom of the weird delusions she’d had as a teenager, standing in for anything tangible.
An extension of the stories she used to write, before her father forced her to put all that away.
I wasn’t even allowed my made-up version of romance, she thought.
Then closed her eyes for the fate she knew was coming.
She knew, she knew, she knew, and she accepted it.
She accepted it so hard and so totally that she kept waiting for the crunch, even as the car seemed to hang in the air for far too long.
It almost drifted, in a manner she would have noticed more if she hadn’t been so resigned to her fate.
But then the car seemed to come to a complete and gentle stop, and she was forced to accept it.
She wasn’t dead.
More than that, in fact: the roof of the car didn’t even seem damaged. She squirmed in her seat and tried to look up at it, and could barely make out a dent. Though admittedly, making out anything was pretty hard.
She was upside down.
Completely upside down. She could feel all the blood rushing into her head. Her hair hung away from her, like someone had attacked it with ten thousand staticky balloons. And she could feel her knees trying to drop toward her belly.
If her legs hadn’t been slightly trapped by the dashboard, she felt pretty sure she’d have been folded double by now.
Though either way, her position was incredibly awkward.
The seat belt had probably saved her life; now she could hardly breathe around it.
It dug into her belly, her chest, hard enough that she suspected she’d have bruises tomorrow.
And there was no way out of it.
She reached for the release, and at first found only a mess of crushed plastic and metal. She had to dig and twist her hand to reach what felt like the button, but somehow it just wouldn’t depress. She pushed and pushed, one hand held above her to stop any immediate falls to the ceiling of the car.
And got nothing.
She was well and truly trapped.
No way out. No chance at grabbing her phone, now far away in the passenger side footwell.
No opportunity to call out for help while this far from civilization.
If she even tried, the only person likely to answer was Mr. Jackson, and Mr. Jackson probably still wanted to kill her after all that business in his house.
So her untimely death by car explosion didn’t seem like something that would particularly bother him.
Most likely he would welcome it. Or even hurry it along somehow.
That might have even been his horrible mangled dog you glimpsed , she thought.
Sent to send you careening off the road.
All of which was mad, and she knew it.
But it seemed significantly less so when she heard an extremely familiar sound. A crunch, of the kind a heavy boot might make on rough ground. Followed by another just like it, and another. Slow and inexorable, and all the more frightening for it. Because why was he creeping up like that?
She was holding her breath before she even saw one steel-toe cap.
Then she did, and god, god. It looked enormous . Like something you could use to cave somebody’s head in. And he was still going so slowly and not saying a word, and none of that seemed good. It was definitely the kind of thing you’d do if you were debating whether to quietly murder someone.
But she tried to stay calm.
She didn’t scream when he finally crouched down.
She just tried to smile as that heavy-jawed and very hairy face came into view.
Framed by the upside-down window, half-lit by the backwash from the still-glowing headlights.
Every shadow beneath those dark eyes deepened, every angry line was suddenly more pronounced.
She couldn’t blame herself for barely managing a flicker of her lips. Or for letting out a little breathy “Honestly, I’m fine.” But then he reached in, and she could blame herself for her reaction to that. Because he did it very carefully, in truth. He barely came close to her.
Yet she flinched away all the same.
She almost scrambled back.
Like he’d done something awful and terrifying, instead of nothing at all. He hadn’t even grabbed her. He didn’t even get close. The second he registered her reaction he drew back, whip quick. And oh, the look on his face.
It was pure sinking realization.
“You’re afraid of me,” he said, in this wondering and soft way that she would never have guessed could come from him if she hadn’t seen him in front of her.
The man didn’t know how to be soft. He didn’t know how to be gentle.
And he certainly didn’t know how to sound just a little bit broken over something.
But for just a second, she wondered if she’d heard that in his voice, too.
She even had the urge to reassure him suddenly. Then was glad he got there before she could. That hand dropped; the expression on his face now seemed resolute, sure of himself. And his voice was firm and deep again when he spoke.