Chapter Eight Shea
Here is a memory: summer, two years prior.
The Thorley house in late August, rosy milkweed growing in tangles along the front walk.
Shea remembers lying on her belly in the grass, her textbook open, unread pages ruffling in the wind.
She’d spent the better part of the afternoon chewing on the metal end of her pencil—watching Asher as he helped his father haul wood.
Beside her sat Poppy, humming a cheery, tuneless hum and weaving loose dogwood blooms into her braid.
She wasn’t reading, either. She was watching Camellia diligently transcribe a section of notes.
The weather was perfect—the trees in bloom and the sky a bold, blistering blue.
The exact sort of day that was meant for daydreaming.
Only Camellia seemed intent on studying.
Out by the fence, Asher stacked firewood into the shed.
There was a smudge of dirt under his eye, the first hint of a sunburn on the bridge of his nose.
The hickeys on his throat had nearly faded.
Every so often, he’d cast a furtive glance in Shea’s direction.
She’d avert her gaze, her heart in her mouth—pretend to be engrossed in her reading.
After about an hour of this, Camellia shut her book with a slam.
“He’s not even doing anything interesting.”
Shea dropped her pencil, startled. “Who?”
“Asher. If you stare at him any harder, your eyes will fall out.”
“I’m not staring at him.”
“Well, you’re definitely not staring at your book,” said Camellia as Poppy hummed a little louder. “If you don’t pay attention, you’re going to fail Mrs. Lennox’s test tomorrow.”
“Poppy’s not studying, either,” Shea pointed out.
“Poppy doesn’t need to study. She has top marks in all our classes.”
Shea rolled from her stomach to her back, throwing her arms wide in the grass. “I don’t see what the point is. I already know I’m not going to Humboldt.”
Only the top-performing students were sent on scholarship to the last surviving college—Humboldt University, down in Boston proper.
They returned home with medical and engineering degrees, just enough practical knowledge to treat a cold and set a broken arm.
Enough understanding of infrastructure to keep Little Hill up and running.
The rest joined the watch—to serve at whatever wooded garrison needed bodies—or else stayed home and married young, popped out the next generation of soldiers and scientists.
Shea would do none of these things.
Her hearing made it so she couldn’t keep up academically, and the watch didn’t take anyone with a preexisting condition. Furthermore, she was a Parker, and no one wanted anything to do with the Highbush boy’s wild daughter. She was doomed, it seemed, to a life between the cracks.
She’d made her peace with it. Mostly. There were some days the fear of the unknown gripped her.
Some days, she worried that she’d be labeled useless and disappeared—shipped off to the stone halls of Gridley’s Sanatorium to be forgotten.
On those days, she sat by the forest and willed it to entice her—to make her a promise she couldn’t resist. On those days, she thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, to give herself over to the Gravewood’s dark embrace.
On those days, she’d think of Asher. I won’t let you die here.
When she peered back at the shed, he was watching her.
“Pop quiz,” sang Camellia, poking Shea with her foot. “What sweet-smelling chemical is found in both plants and decomposing animals?”
“Oh,” said Poppy, dropping the last of her dogwood. “I know.”
Camellia frowned down at Shea. “Shea?”
Feeling peevish, she said, “I don’t see how I’m supposed to know that.”
“It’s trimethylamine,” said Asher, appearing directly in Shea’s line of vision.
His T-shirt was dark with sweat, the sun streaming in behind him.
Shea scrabbled upright, embarrassed by the grass stains in her stockings, the wild bramble of her hair.
“It’s a natural-acting deterrent. Things that feed on blood won’t go after something that smells dead.
And don’t worry, that question isn’t even on the test.”
“Leave,” demanded Camellia, flinging her pen. “This is our study circle.”
Asher dodged the pen with a laugh, adjusting the bundle of firewood under his arm. “Don’t work too hard. None of it matters anyway. They’re just keeping you busy so you stay out of trouble.”
“I’m never trouble,” Shea told him.
His smile stretched wide. “Parker,” he said, “you’re trouble to your bones.”
···
There’s no way in hell Shea is staying behind.
Not with her mother home alone. Not when anyone at all could have stumbled upon her, chained and forgotten in the basement.
Certainly not when Asher Thorley was part of the unit sent to canvass her house.
Every time she shuts her eyes, she sees him standing in her foyer, his finger on the trigger.
The boy who stayed out past curfew and who made her promises is gone.
This new Asher has been custom-built into someone who kills without a thought.
How can she forgive him if she doesn’t even trust him?
She waits until she’s certain Lys is gone before she follows.
Outside his room, the hall is empty—Tristan nowhere to be seen.
The entire lodge seems to have emptied, and she slips into the dead of night without running into another soul.
It’s drizzling out—a slow, icy rain that turns the ground to gloss.
The sky overhead is veiled in clouds, the moon cast in a funny halo of silver.
It bathes the whole of Mercy Ridge in a feeble glow.
She hurries down the front walk, teeth chattering.
Her fingers are numb by the time she reaches the end of the larch-lined drive.
Switching off her hearing aids, she slips out from beneath the mountain’s shadow and into the wood.
She’s met with the silence of her head and the deceptive serenity of the trees.
Everything hangs perfectly, precariously still.
Even the rain slows, caught in the canopy’s evergreen tangle.
The trail is marked by a painted cross. White, the sign for mercy. The trees along the path have been burned back, their trunks hollowed out and full of ash. It gives the forest a sinister coloring, as though she’s waded out of the waking world and into some sort of lightless hell dimension.
At least here, the trees are voiceless. She keeps her hearing aids off regardless, at ease in the silence.
It hones her eyes to a point, brings the night veering into razor-sharp focus.
She sees everything. She feels everything.
The white-tailed flit of a deer. The hunting swoop of an owl.
The leathery flutter of a bat leaving its roost.
It’s near midnight by the time she reaches the old logging tracks. The sky here is a river of dark, and the rain falls freely onto the tracks. There’s no moon left at all. She makes her way hurriedly along the rain-slick sleepers, driven onward by thoughts of her mother.
A head lifts from the mushroomed fall of a tree as she hops between ballasts, her arms thrown out to the sides for stability.
She braces herself on one leg, expecting fangs, and finds only a doe, its black eyes dewy with suspicion.
There’s a moment of pristine stillness—of mutually held breath.
And then the doe takes flight, disappearing with the white wave of a flag.
It’s heard something. Something Shea didn’t.
The moment she realizes it, the hair rises on the back of her neck.
There’s someone behind her.
She doesn’t run, though instinct tells her to flee. To run is to invite a chase, and she’s come this way often enough to know there’s no outrunning a Mercy Boy. Heart in her throat, she keeps moving, her arms pinwheeling against the dark. Hop. Stop. Balance. Hop. Stop. Balance.
Now that she’s aware of the presence, she can feel him—his footfalls on the ground and the scrape of his boot over stone, the snap of a twig under his heel.
The night gives way to his body, crackling around him in nearly undetectable ways.
Ways she feels in her skin. Ways she catches, spotting flickers out of the corners of her eyes.
She walks a little faster.
She makes it all the way to the covered bridge before she slips.
A patch of black ice, invisible in the dark, is all it takes.
Her feet go out from under her and she pitches forward, catching herself on the heels of her hands.
It’s not enough to keep her from gashing the tip of her chin open against a ballast.
Her teeth crack together, and her curse sends a nearby nightjar fluttering skyward. She lies there for a moment, her ego bruised and the wind knocked out of her. Eventually, the nightjar returns. It hops to-and-fro along the railing, its beak open. Unleashing a soundless warble.
She thinks, unbidden, of her father in late summer, the grass undulating around his waist. She’d sat atop his shoulders, feeling tall as a giant. His voice rumbled against the back of her legs: Listen. Can you hear that? It’s a meadowlark. There’s a predator nearby.
Clambering back onto her feet, she takes stock of the damage. Her palms are bloody with gravel. Her chin burns, the skin scraped raw. She wipes the grit on a pleat of her skirt and keeps going.
She doesn’t make it far.
There’s a boy waiting at the far end of the bridge.
She slows, wary—unable to make out his features in the dark.
He doesn’t announce himself as she approaches.
Instead, he stands perfectly still, his arms hanging slack.
Down in the ravine, a narrow river runs hard and fast, broken sheaves of ice bottlenecking along the shore.
She clicks on her hearing aids and is immediately met with the rush of running water, loud enough to drown out the murmuring forest.