Sneak Peek Fairest #2
She got there just in time for him to open the door – he had to put his shoulder into it since the collision had bent the frame of the car. He got out, unscathed, and Luma looked at him wide-eyed and speechless.
Antonio put his hands on her shoulders, their eyes locking as he said, “Your stepmother ordered me to bring you out here and kill you. I’ve been going over it in my head for the last three hours, trying to imagine a world in which I could do that, and I just can’t.”
Tabitha wants me dead?
A jolt of fear ripped through her, followed by a twinge of relief. Antonio said he couldn’t do it - so where did that leave them? Standing next to the smoking remains of Luma’s car, that was where. No matter what else happened, they weren’t going to be driving out of there.
“Listen carefully,” Antonio said. “You met with the modeling agency yesterday. They sent you on a go-see and that’s where you were going today – you were driving alone, a deer jumped in front of your car and you crashed.
You must have been disoriented – maybe you hit your head.
You wandered into the woods and no one heard from you again. ”
“But Antonio-”
“Tabitha has her eyes on your trust fund,” he continued. “You know that, right?”
“I know she hates getting an allowance from my father,” Luma said, swallowing hard. “But this is about the modeling contract, isn’t it?” He shook his head and Luma had never seen him so serious. “She really wants me dead?”
“I’ve been her right hand for ten years,” Antonio said. “I know her better than anybody and I know when she’s serious about something. Luma, you have to disappear or she will kill you.”
“What about my dad?” she asked. “Let’s call him, or-”
Or the police, she thought.
“I can’t do that,” Antonio said, glancing at the car. “You don’t know what she’s capable of.”
“I think I have some idea,” Luma said, crossing her arms over her chest. She had no phone, no money, and no idea where she was. If she screamed at the top of her lungs right now, no one but the birds and other forest animals would hear her – and Antonio, who’d already made up his mind.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You really don’t. Trust me, Luma, for your own safety – and mine – you have to let Tabitha think you’re dead. If you come home, she’ll kill you and then she’ll kill me for not doing the job myself.”
Luma’s mouth dropped open as she attempted to process all of this, trying to formulate a response that never materialized.
“Just disappear, Luma,” he said. A tear ran down his cheek and he added, “I’m sorry.”
He turned and started walking back toward the road, and Luma called after him, “Antonio.” When he turned around, she asked, “Are you planning to walk home?”
“I’ll figure something out,” he said. “So will you.”
Shit. Antonio turned around and headed back up the dirt path to the highway, and Luma just stood in the forest for a minute, trying to wrap her mind around what just happened.
She tilted her head back, feeling a headache coming on. The forest was actually kind of beautiful, shafts of sunlight breaking through the evergreens and highlighting the pine needle-carpeted forest floor.
A bird chirped, unseen, in a tree somewhere close and Luma thought it sounded like a cuckoo. Her high school biology teacher had been obsessed with birdsong and Luma had a lot of them memorized even though she’d rarely heard them in real life. Cuckoos weren’t city birds.
“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” she asked the forest, and because the trees didn’t talk and birds rarely sang their songs in English, she received no answer.
She went over to the car and tried the key in the ignition, but the engine was shot and it wouldn’t turn over.
She went through the glove compartment and the trunk, looking for anything that could help her, but she’d never been more than a phone call away from AAA.
The glove compartment held nothing helpful and Luma was all but useless without her phone, anyway.
She was stranded and she had no choice but to start walking.
Her heels kept sinking into the loamy forest floor as she picked her way back up the overgrown dirt path and she was actually relieved when she got to a paved road.
Her kitten heels weren’t made for hiking, but at least she could get her footing on the road.
At least I’m alive.
That was not a thought she expected to have that day. She kept walking, trying not to focus on all of the questions stretching out on the road in front of her. Where am I going? What will I do when I get there? Do I go to the cops? Will Tabitha retaliate against Antonio – or even my dad – if I do?
They were all unanswerable, insurmountable problems.
And then Luma started to hear pine needles crunching in the forest beside the road. She turned her head and for a fleeting moment, she wondered if Antonio had a change of heart and was coming back for her.
Or coming back to finish the job. Tabitha always did have an otherworldly ability to know when her demands were not being met.
She was a woman of means and beauty – or at least she used to be – and it was pretty rare that anyone dared to disobey her.
Did Antonio call her after he crashed Luma’s car?
Did he cave already and admit that he hadn’t done what Tabitha asked of him?
Then all of those worries dissipated and Luma’s heart arrested in her chest.
A fat black bear was lumbering toward her out of the forest, no more than thirty feet away.
It turned its head sideways at her, wondering how it had gotten so lucky that its next meal had delivered itself to the woods.
Its mouth opened, a hint of long, sharp teeth poking out from under its lips, and then Luma was running.
The bear emerged onto the road, looking like it didn’t mind chasing down its dinner. Luma ran as fast as her feet would carry her, and when one of her heels fell off, she barely gave it a thought. She limped a few steps and then kicked off the other shoe, hardly losing speed.
She made it about fifteen yards away and then a second bear emerged from the woods, standing in front of her. If a bear could speak, this one would have said, Gotcha.
Are you freaking kidding me? Luma thought.
When the bear in front of her growled, she ducked off the open road and through a tangle of what turned out to be pricker bushes.
They cut into her bare arms and legs, but Luma fought her way through them.
Her stepmother put a hit on her, her father was away on business, and Antonio had just smashed her car.
She was not about to be eaten by bears on top of everything else.
Luma didn’t turn around to find out if the bears were giving chase.
She didn’t acknowledge the pain of each pine needle stabbing into the tender soles of her feet, or the scratches and pinpricks of blood covering her arms and legs.
She just ran until her lungs burned and her thighs ached, until she had to stop or else she’d fall down in exhaustion.
When she finally did stop, leaning against a tree and panting to catch her breath, Luma looked back. There were no bears, and there was no visible path back to the road. She couldn’t see the road at all anymore, and she couldn’t even say with any certainty which direction she’d come from.
“I’m lost,” she said to the forest, tears springing to her eyes. “I am lost in the woods.”
She might not have spent much time in the forest before, but Luma knew from her schooling that it went on for hundreds of miles. People got lost in the forest every year, some of them died, and Luma was no Girl Scout.
She sank to the ground, her skirt riding up her thighs as more pine needles jabbed into her skin.
She put her head back against the tree and her long black hair snagged against the rough bark.
She looked up. The only thing she had going for her was the fact that it was spring, the days were getting longer, and she still had a good five hours of daylight left – not that she had any idea what to do with it.
Then, above the tall trees, she noticed a thin tendril of smoke in the distance.
Luma watched it for a minute or two, expecting it to disappear, but it persisted – it was a sign of life and her best shot at survival. She got up, brushed the pine needles off her skin, where they were stuck to her by a thin sheen of sweat, and started walking.
Limping was more like it, and she winced with every step. Her shoes were lying on the side of the road, or perhaps had become a bear’s new chew toys. She had no choice but to pin all her hopes on that tendril of smoke.
If she was lucky, it was the smoke from someone friendly’s fireplace.
What she found, at least an hour and many, many painful pine needles later, was a cottage in a clearing.
It was all by itself in the woods, no sign of civilization nearby, and the smoke trail Luma had followed was coming from a large brick structure outside the cottage.
It was about six feet square – a fireplace of some sort closed on all sides with a large steel plate on the front that looked like a door, plus a chimney on top.
“Hello?” Luma called. Her voice echoed softly against the trees but no one answered.
She left the fireplace and walked around to the cottage door. Someone had swept the dirt around the perimeter of the building, a welcome reprieve from the pine needles that had rendered Luma’s feet numb.
She knocked on the door, waited and listened for a minute, then called, “Hello? Is anyone home?”
No one answered. Luma tried to peek in the windows, but they were covered with a film of dirt and she couldn’t see inside. If it wasn’t for the smoking fireplace, she would have thought the cottage was abandoned.
She knocked again, then tried the doorknob.
It turned easily and the door swung inward. Luma called again, “Hello? I’m sorry to intrude, but I could really use some help.”
There was still no answer, and she glanced back toward the forest, then down at her own scraped and dirty limbs.
It was either stay outside and risk another encounter with those bears or go inside and hope the cottage had a telephone.
At the very least, she could get cleaned up and dig the pine needles out of her feet.
Luma inched her way inside.