Chapter 46
Katana
The van rattles like its bolts want out, the whole vehicle thrumming under us as if it knows what it carries.
My hands won’t stop shaking. Micah drives one-handed, the other anchored on my knee like a vow.
He hasn’t said a word since we left the house.
But his silence doesn’t scare me. It steadies me. Just like his presence grounds me.
We only slow to eat in breathless bites—an apple split between us, a sandwich that tastes bland.
The headlights carve a tunnel through the trees: black trunks, dark gaps, the road a thread we refuse to let go of.
I roll the window down just enough for cold air to slice against my cheeks.
The scent of smoke, pine, and a sour hint of old diesel baked into the van’s bones wafts over me.
A gas station blinks into existence like a mirage.
While Micah pumps gas, I head into the small convenience store to pay. The bell jingles over the door, making me tense. A string of orange Halloween lights sag around the counter like tired smiles.
It must be close to Halloween.
I roam the store like an alien. The bright lights, humming refrigerators, and aisles of food are all jarring after captivity. I grab snacks and sodas. The woman at the register barely looks at me as I pay.
When I step outside, I see a small dark laundromat and beside it, a few houses. In the lights along the street, I catch a glimpse of some clothing swaying on the line—flannel, denim, an oversized gray sweater. No decorations or any sign of life on the porch. The house is dark.
I nod to it when I climb inside the van.
“Already saw it.” Micah pulls away from the gas pump and into the shadows at the edge of the lot. The engine ticks when he kills it; the sudden quiet a living thing.
“Meet you at the store in five minutes.” He nods in the direction of it, and I nod.
“Five minutes,” I whisper.
He nods once. That’s all.
We split. I ghost behind the laundromat. Wet grass licks my ankles, and my breath fogs white. I glance at the back door of the house. It’s dark. Still. Then I move.
The clothes are cold and damp and exactly right.
I take what we can wear and what we can layer: jeans that might fit me, a black hoodie that’ll swallow me, two flannels soft from a hundred washes, and jeans that I hope will fit Micah.
I leave clothespins clipped to the lines, and send a silent apology to a stranger I’ll never meet.
I toss the clothing inside the van, then hurry to the store.
Micah’s already outside the store’s rear door, his palm open, holding the two phones.
My brows furrow until I meet his gaze, then I understand.
I pop each SIM card out with a fingernail, curling it in my fist, and set the bodies of the phones on the cinderblock curb.
He steps once, hard. Glass crunches and plastic gives way beneath his foot.
We toss them in the large, green dumpster behind the brick shop.
Inside, the bell over the door dings. The fluorescent light is bright against my eyes. The place smells like cheap Halloween costumes and décor.
A cardboard tombstone by the register reads HAPPY HAUNTING in glitter. Behind it, a spinning rack of masks and nylon capes squeaks whenever the heater kicks on.
In the restroom, I flush the SIM cards down the toilet.
I grab what we need fast: bottled water, a pack of protein bars, a roll of gauze, antiseptic, a tube of ibuprofen, a small first aid kit with a pair of tweezers and tiny scissors.
A wig hangs limply on a plastic head—dark and blunt-cut with bangs.
I grab it, along with a soft, red scarf, my favorite color.
Because I can’t help myself, I grab a plastic knife and a Michael Myers mask.
I almost laugh out loud as I take my items to the register.
Micah doesn’t need a mask—people become masks around him. Maybe I’m the one who needs it.
At the counter, a crooked sign in orange marker reads: HALLOWEEN BASH — OCT 31. A smaller one under it: DEVIL’S NIGHT SPECIALS 10/30.
“October thirtieth,” I breathe.
The clerk—mid-sixties, eyes like unlit coals—rings me up and slides my things into a paper sack. “That it?”
“That’s it.” I fish in Vale’s wallet, pulling out cash. The bills leave my fingers like secrets. The clerk glances at my frayed sweatshirt, at the bruises blooming along my wrists, and looks away like he didn’t see anything.
Outside, the air bites stronger. I tug the wig over my hair and wrap the scarf twice. Micah stands there with his arms crossed, watching me. His eyes are dark, a storm rolling in his skull. But he smirks as he takes me in.
“It’s Devil’s Night,” I tell him, my voice low.
A smirk curls his lips. “Seems appropriate.”
I hand him the Myers mask and the knife from the bag. He looks at it, then at me, his eye glimmering with hunger.
“Someone got a mask kink, huh?”
I grin. “Something like that.”
We head to the van. As he turns the key and the engine coughs back to life, I tell him about the clothing I took for us. He doesn’t speak, but his hand finds mine on the console. I squeeze once. He squeezes back, a question and an answer rolled into one.
We roll through the small town, and I take in a bar with fogged windows, a church with a plastic skeleton politely seated on the steps, and a hardware store with a single fluorescent tube stuttering itself slowly to death. We keep driving, trees swallowing us again. Miles go by in dark breaths.
“Ted had a place,” I say finally, my voice as small as the glove compartment.
“An old hunting cabin. My mom used to call it Dead Pine—because the trees there look like black matchsticks against the sky. Nobody goes that far out unless they have to. Very rustic. No neighbors. A road you almost miss even when you’re on it. ”
Micah glances over. I see the calculation in his eyes. He taps the steering wheel once, thoughtfully. I hear his thoughts without him saying a word. Remote. No eyes. Good.
“Ashwood Hollow,” I add, because the name rises up anyway, the one the kids at school used whenever they dared each other to drive the ridge at night. “Locals call the stretch that. Feels like the woods breathe differently there.”
He nods. His thumb strokes once over my knuckles like a thank you.
We stop once more at a hardware store that’s closing.
The kid at the register is too busy texting to care that we’re buying a couple of lanterns, two thermal blankets, a small hatchet, duct tape, a can opener, and a pack of bungee cords.
Before we go to the register, I snag a box of matches and a folding pocketknife hanging by the door.
Cash leaves my hands. The kid mumbles “Happy Halloween” without looking up.
The road to Ashwood Hollow is more a memory than a map.
My stomach drops when we pass a rusted gate that leans wrong, images of Ted haunting me.
I push through it, telling Micah to turn.
He does, watching me with eyes that see too much.
I give him a reassuring smile and squeeze his hand.
He’ll replace every bad memory I have of Ted.
Gravel rumbles under the tires. Branches scratch the side of the van like fingernails. The sky feels lower. The trees lean in. The world becomes narrower.
“Up there,” I say, pointing at a cut in the trees that looks like a mistake.
He takes it. The van creeps along the narrow lane.
We pass three dead pines, standing like black matchsticks.
The cabin hunkers behind them, small and sullen, its roofline dipped, its porch slouched.
Someone nailed a tin star to the door a lifetime ago.
It hangs crooked, tapping against the wood in the wind.
Micah parks behind a screen of scrubs so the van isn’t visible from what little road there is. He kills the lights. The night swallows us whole.
For a second, neither of us moves. It’s not fear. It’s that awful, aching emptiness after you stop running and your body hasn’t figured it out yet.
“Come on,” I whisper.
He opens his door, and the cold climbs in like a cat. He comes around to my side before I can step down and lifts me. It’s ridiculous. It’s perfect. I protest on principle; he ignores me. We are who we are.
The porch complains under his boots. The lock is a joke: rusted and flimsy. Micah sets me on my feet and works at it with the pocketknife and the patience he never shows anyone but me. The latch gives with a sigh.
Inside, it smells like cedar, dust, and mice who moved on.
We share the same breath as he leads me deeper into the room. He squeezes my hand, his voice low. “Stay here.”
“I can—”
His index finger presses against my lips. “Stay. Here.”
He turns and heads out to grab our things. When the door bangs shut behind him, I look around the small space and smile. It isn’t much, but it’s safe. It’s not concrete, a mad scientist’s lab, and chains.
Micah comes back inside, his arms full of clothing and bags with our purchases. He dumps them on an old, wooden table in the small kitchen. His eyes meet mine in the darkness before he fishes one of the lanterns from the bag. He strikes a match, and the room comes into focus.
It’s a square consisting of a small bed, an old TV with a DVD player, a woodstove with a belly of ash, and a couch that’s seen better days.
I peel the scarf away from my throat. He pulls the gauze and the first aid kit from the bag and gestures to my wrists. I hold them out. His hands are careful and warm. He cleans my wounds, then wraps me like I’m something he can keep from coming apart.
“You’re safe,” I tell him, because I need him to hear it even if he doesn’t need to. “We’re safe tonight.”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. We can communicate without words.
He ties off the gauze, lifts my bandaged hands, and presses his mouth to the inside of each wrist like a seal.
I gesture at his arm. “I need to clean that up.”
He nods, stripping his sweatshirt over his head.
I try not to admire the planes of muscle that rise over his arms, chest, and abs like indentations in a mountain.
He notices, a smirk playing on his face.
I roll my eyes, then focus on his wound, wincing as I clean it. “I hope you don’t need stitches.”
“I don’t.” I meet his dark eyes. “I just need you.”
As I wrap his wound, a thought nearly makes me smile. It’s absurd that wrapping him like a wounded animal makes me feel steadier.
Outside, the wind threads through the pines, making them shake, the sound like an ocean.
Tomorrow, the world will keep turning like nothing happened to us. We’ll decide what we burn and what we keep.
But tonight, we light the stove, curl under the thermal blankets on a small bed that creaks, listening to Ashwood Hollow breathe.
Micah curls me against him, his head tipping against mine. His weight is an anchor, and for the first time since the basement, sleep finds us like mercy we didn’t earn.
We close our eyes, not fearing Devil’s Night. We’ve been through worse. Much worse.
We can handle whatever comes our way.