Chapter 22 #2
God, I don’t want to be on the phone with her. But I can’t do anything other than listen. She goes through the usual guilt trip, accusing me of calling her a bad, uncaring parent, and before I know it, the words I’ve been trying to avoid leave my mouth as a defense mechanism.
“I’m sorry, Mom.” The apology is caustic on my tongue, burning up my throat like bile. “I didn’t mean to say it. It’s just that I’m tired, and a little stressed out. I shouldn’t have made the joke, and I know you care.”
A second apology mollifies her enough for her voice to go back to normal, though I feel like an old-world servant in supplication to a cruel king for having to repeat my words in a slightly different way to get the message across. She doesn’t deserve my apology.
I don’t deserve to feel this way.
“Therapy has been going well.” It’s my olive branch, and I spend a few minutes talking about some of the surface-level conversations I’ve had with my therapist. All the while, I think that they’re my therapy sessions and she has no right to know what I talk about with Dr. Radley.
It takes another thirty minutes for me to completely subvert her anger, and I’m convinced I won’t wake up to passive-aggressive posts about me on Facebook with comments from all of her almond mom friends reassuring her she’s done nothing wrong.
Yet again, I’m grateful I don’t live with her anymore, and that she has her husband and step-kids to keep her too busy for frequent, spontaneous visits out to Whippoorwill Gap.
“I have to let you go, Fern.” The announcement is everything I’m hoping for, and I sag against the fridge in tense relief.
“Nathaniel and I are going to that new Italian place I told you about for dinner. The kids are with Katherine.” I don’t know who Katherine is, and I really don’t care.
She’s probably told me before, but I generally listen just enough for her to think I’m interested when she raves about her life now that Dad is dead and I’ve ‘left the nest’ to be an adult.
“Oh! You’ll have to tell me how it is!” I inject as much false enthusiasm into my voice as I can, keeping my tone light and friendly.
“I don’t know what I’m doing for dinner yet.
Maybe I’ll make pasta now that you’ve brought up Italian food.
” I’m not making pasta …My words are lighthearted enough, though, that it keeps her in a good mood, and finally after another minute, my mom hangs up with promises to try to call more often.
“Sure you will,” I tell no one after I’ve hung up and pushed off the refrigerator door.
“You’ll totally remember to call more often.
” She won’t. The resolution might last a week until she remembers I’m not similar enough to her to be entertaining.
Then she’ll go back to her mom groups and talk about how we’ve reconnected, and how involved she is in my life and recovery.
I’m so busy stewing in my frustration and self-loathing at how easily I caved and apologized for no good reason that it takes almost an hour for me to remember Cairo’s words about not following him into the woods tonight.
Which, naturally, only makes me even more curious about what exactly I’ll find if I do.
Surely he can’t be as much of a monster as he claims. There’s no way he’s out there doing something that would horrify me, after everything I’ve seen from him. He’s not like Tyler or the others.
He’s Cairo.
Gazing down at Moro, I sigh and scuff my bare foot on the floor.
“I don’t even know if I could find him without you,” I admit, though I’m not sure I want to take her if there’s some chance of her being in danger.
If there really is something different about him tonight, I don’t want Moro to pay the price for my recklessness.
Though I doubt he’d hurt her considering how much affection he shows the dog, and the fact he saved her just as much as he saved me from Bluebone Ridge, then got her to my house afterward.
I trust him.
And yet…something about his warning feels off.
But I still feel bad as I assure Moro I’ll be back, probably with her second favorite person on Earth since I’m not willing to give up my reigning title of favorite. But if not, I’ll at least make her a hot dog when I’m back to soothe her disappointment.
I can’t stop my hands from shaking a little as I pull on leggings and a loose hoodie that falls to mid-thigh.
While it isn’t winter here in Washington, this close to the mountains, the nights are almost always chilly, and I’m a delicate flower.
Finally, I tug on a pair of my favorite sneakers, my ankles bare just enough to scandalize any Victorian preacher who might happen to be wandering the woods tonight.
For some reason, I hesitate at the deck stairs.
Armed only with a flashlight and my phone, the night feels more dangerous than it usually does, even though it was less than twenty-four hours ago that I went up to Bluebone Ridge to look around after having a nightmare about that night.
Surely if I can handle a haunted asylum crawling with monsters, then I can handle the woods behind my house.
“You’re fine,” I whisper to myself, while Moro whimpers and paws at the glass door behind me. In theory, any cursed I come across won’t want to hurt me, as long as Cairo isn’t too far away. That one I saw last week hadn’t looked so bad, and didn’t try to chomp on my innards at all.
But Cairo was right there , my brain reminds me sourly.
He’s not here now . Not that I can see, anyway.
Still, I make myself walk down into the yard, feet crunching in the grass.
I take a breath with my eyes on the dark trees in front of me.
Considering my luck, I won’t even be able to find Cairo.
I’m just one person, and the forest back here is huge.
There’s no trail for me to follow, and after about forty minutes of wandering around, some part of me relaxes. I’m sure now that there’s no way I’m going to find him back here. No way I’ll just magically stumble across him, or?—
Something screams, sending a tremor up my spine and making me stumble to a stop. The trees loom ominously overhead, and I clench my teeth together until my jaws ache. The sound comes again, echoing through the trees, though I can’t tell if the sound is human or animal.
Please, God, be an animal.
My mouth opens, and for a moment I think about calling out. But just as Cairo’s name forms on my lips, I lose my confidence and the sound dies before it can truly form. The flashlight shakes in my hand, and I force myself to head toward where I think the echoing sound came from.
Again the creature cries out, a pained, agonized scream that bounces from tree to tree before sinking into me and pulling up a wave of nausea from my stomach.
I breathe in through my nose, wanting to clasp my hands over my ears at the sound, for all the good it’ll do.
But the trees only seem to crowd closer to me as I walk, and when I look around, it occurs to me I have no clue about where I am.
Worse still, when I check, my phone has no service this deep in the woods.
I’ve absolutely fucked up now, I realize, and I groan softly, a wounded sound in the back of my throat.
I have no choice but to follow the noise, though the next cry wanes a little in the darkness.
It hasn’t quite finished ringing in my ears before something flashes in the illumination of my flashlight, and I dip the beam down to focus on dark black splashes on the grass in front of me.
Blood.
There’s nothing else it can be, some rational part of me thinks.
Only blood would look like this, the red color washed out in the darkness from the trees and the pale white lights of both my light and the moon shining down from above.
Thankfully, the clouds from earlier have disappeared, because without the moon, I’d be a lot more panicked than I am.
Even though the branches block out the majority, letting only eerie bars shine down on the underbrush to strike across it like bars, it’s better than nothing.
But that’s undoubtedly blood. The splashes get bigger, and closer together. When my light starts to shake, it takes a few seconds for me to realize that it’s because my hand is shaking, not the light malfunctioning.
“You can do this,” I breathe, though Cairo’s warning replays over and over in my head. He won’t hurt me…I hope. God, I hope my faith in him isn’t misplaced, and that I’m not following something else entirely.
The scream comes again, cutting through my thoughts, and it’s close enough that I jerk my flashlight up to scan the trees around me.
“Cairo…?” What I wanted to be a loud call through the trees comes out as a whisper from my lips.
But I don’t stop moving; I continue to follow the blood trail that’s now forming drag marks in the crushed grass.
Even though my body is begging me to stop, to turn, to run, I tell myself that I’d know if what I was hearing is human.
So, it has to be an animal.
It has to be.
Gurgling noises find my ears, and I stop, too afraid to do anything but stare down at an illuminated patch of dirt. I can hear the sounds so close to me I know if I look too far ahead, I’ll see whatever is making them.
Maybe it’s not Cairo, I tell myself. Maybe it’s something else. Someone else. While I wanted to find him, now I’m not so sure. Not now that the sounds are much less animalistic and so much more human.
I hear a soft, gasped plea, though it’s broken off with a snap and one last breathy sound before the woods grow silent for only a moment.
Then I hear the undeniable tearing and ripping of flesh; it takes everything in me to drag my gaze up from the dirt to look at the space between the trees in front of me.
Cairo is on his knees over a man’s body, who I belatedly recognize as Whippoorwill Gap’s least favorite, most inappropriate drunk.
He’s not looking at the body, however. Cairo is staring at me with a snarl on his lips, and there’s nothing human in the way his eyes reflect the glare from my flashlight.
He bares his teeth in a bloody snarl, as gore drips from his mouth, and he leans forward almost territorially across the body below him.
“You shouldn’t have come here, little bird,” he grates out, voice slurred from his fully extended fangs and what’s in his mouth.
“Cairo…” my voice trails off, and my hand tightens on the flashlight as I take a step back, only to stupidly trip and fall on my ass on the dirt with a soft, pained gasp.
“I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to—” When he sits up, I see his chest is bloody in the glow of my light, and once again he bares his sharp teeth. I’ve never seen him look less human.
Less safe.
“You should never have come here,” he repeats as he leans down to the body of the man under him and tears into his chest.
And then, as I watch, Cairo eats.