Chapter Twenty-One Shea #2
“I’m starting to think he does this on purpose,” grumbles Lys.
“Let’s move!” Asher’s shout sends a nearby grackle into flight. “We’re on the road in five.”
···
They make it to midmorning before they’re forced to stop for gas.
They pull off the road to navigate, parking at a scenic overlook.
Shea and Poppy curl in the dinette and peer out at the miles and miles of trees, peaks girdled in mist, while Asher and Lys disappear into the back bedroom to argue over the map.
“Have you talked to him?” asks Poppy, keeping her voice to a whisper. “About Paris?”
“I’ve tried.” Shea cuts a glance toward the bedroom, where she can just see Lys’s and Asher’s heads bowed low. “He doesn’t exactly make it easy.”
Asher stalks out of the bedroom a moment later, slamming the door behind him. Shea and Poppy exchange a glance as the engine starts with a weary chuff.
“Reckless fucking—” He shifts into drive, punching the gas with far more force than necessary. “He’s going to get us killed.”
They drive another thirty minutes before Asher pulls off the main road, navigating them into an old factory town.
The houses are in varying states of decay, all of them abandoned to the nearby forest. Farther out, steel mills rise from winter-pale meadows, iron shafts gone black with rust. Smokestacks sit empty against the mid-November sky.
They creep along a street slung with downed wires, finally coming to a stop in the parking lot of an old gas station.
Several bikes sit parked out front, gleaming bodies askew atop the asphalt.
“Stay in the car,” orders Asher.
Shea launches to her feet after him. “I should come with you.”
“Parker, for once—” He rounds on her, steepling his hands in front of his face in an effort to be calm. “Every single place we’ve gone, someone has tried to kill you.”
“Not every place,” she argues. “The Nutmeg Nook was very nice.”
“I liked the little A-frame house,” says Poppy. “I’d go back there.”
Asher gives them both a long-suffering look. “We’re five hundred miles from the Flatwood. The chance that these are Keeling’s men is very high.”
“No one’s going to recognize me on sight,” she says. “Not if Lys isn’t there.”
“I’m not budging on this one, Shea, I’m sorry.’?”
She plants her feet, obstinate. “Who died and made you king?”
“I have seniority.”
“He’s pulling rank,” gasps Poppy. “Oh, Ellie hates when he does that.”
“I’ll get my shoes,” says Shea.
“Parker,” says Asher, “read my lips. You’re not coming. ”
···
Five minutes later, Asher stalks out of the camper with Shea in tow. The sun is little more than a feeble mark in the sky, gridded by clouds. The air is cold and wet, and Shea finds herself rushing through puddles to keep up with Asher’s elongated stride.
The shop’s interior is bare, pegboard shelving picked clean and windows blacked out.
A bell rings as they enter, drawing the eyes of the elderly clerk slouched behind the counter.
A younger man in riding leathers stands off to the side, playing solitaire.
Nearby, a peroxide-blonde woman lounges on an ice cream cooler, a cigarette toggled at her bloodred lips.
The entire storefront is tobacco-stung, smoke swirling in thin gray eddies.
No one says a word as Asher and Shea make their way to the counter.
Tugging the brim of his cap low, Asher fishes through his pocket and pulls out several crumpled bills. The clerk scoops the money into his hand and begins counting it out at an arthitic pace.
“What pump?”
“Three,” says Asher.
“Most customers around here don’t pay with cash,” says the man playing solitaire. He doesn’t look up from his cards. “Blood’ll get you a hell of a lot farther this deep in the forest. But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.”
Asher says nothing as he pockets his change. His bandage peeks out from beneath the sleeve of his jacket, white and obvious. He tugs the cuff into place and drops his hand to the small of Shea’s back.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
“Are you Mercy?” The question comes from the woman seated on the cooler. She’s watching them through a ring of smoke, her eyes heavily lined in blue pencil.
Asher freezes, his hand flat against Shea’s spine. “Sorry?”
“Are you a Mercy Boy?”
He pulls his cap lower. “Uh, no.”
“You look familiar.” The woman slides off the cooler and draws nearer, running her nails along the pegboard shelving in a click-click-click that sets Shea’s teeth on edge.
“I’m sure I’ve seen you before. I wouldn’t forget a pretty face like that.
What about Paris? Are you one of his? A mercenary, maybe? ”
“No. Sorry.” With a nudge, Asher propels Shea toward the door. “Let’s go.”
The bell rings as they slip back out into the parking lot.
The sun has burned off the remaining clouds and the day is bright.
The puddles shine gold against the asphalt.
There’s no chance of being followed. At least not yet.
Shea rounds on Asher the moment they’re out of earshot, puddle water seeping into her socks.
“That woman recognized you.”
“She must have been confused.” His eyes are on the sky, scanning the trees. “Get back in the camper.”
Uneasy, Shea complies. She keeps watch in the window while Asher fills up at the pump, and then they’re back on the road. Lys appears as Asher coaxes the camper to its limit, bracing himself in the doorway.
“What’s the rush?”
“They recognized him,” says Shea as Asher merges onto the highway.
Lys’s eyes narrow. He’s looking at Asher too keenly. “Did they?”
“I’ll bet you anything we pick up a tail as soon as it’s dark,” she adds.
“It’s fine,” says Asher. “It was a mistake.”
Lys is quiet for too long. Shea can practically hear the gears turning in his head. She doesn’t like the way he’s looking at Asher—with a wariness that makes her skin crawl.
“We should get off the road,” he finally says. “While it’s still light.”
···
In the end, they leave the woods behind entirely, snaking down the mountain roads and driving until they hit the sea.
They camp on the beach, parking the RV beneath a patch of old oaks dripping with moss.
The sky is distended with rain-swollen clouds, their bottoms emblazoned with every possible color.
The road nearby is buried behind a row of flowering loquat, trunks fringed in bitter panicum.
Shea sits in the shade of a palmetto and watches the tide rush out.
Poppy sits beside her, wiggling her toes in the sand.
“I feel like I’m betraying Ellie,” she says, after a long while.
“Being here, I mean. Without her. She always used to talk about going to the beach. Do you remember when she found that old coastal living magazine on the book rack at Brer’s?
She brought it home and cut out all the pages. She made it into a scrapbook, I think.”
“It was a vision board,” says Shea.
She’d made one, too, cutting and gluing everything that caught her eye.
She remembers lying on her stomach in the Thorleys’ living room, her legs swishing through the air, scraps of paper fluttering every which way.
She hadn’t looked up until she’d felt a presence behind her.
It was Asher, his mouth thin as he quietly surveyed her work.
The moment he noticed her looking, he averted his attention to his sister: You’re getting paper everywhere. Dad’s going to lose his mind.
Camellia ignored him, propping herself up to see what Shea had managed to cobble together. We’re supposed to be manifesting, Shea.
I am manifesting.
You’re not. That’s just the Gravewood, and it’s depressing.
Shea swallows the sharp wedge of grief in her throat. Out at sea, a lone gull swoops low over the water. She watches it snatch a fish from the surf and take off with a screech.
“Do you think she’s still out there? Ellie?”
“I do.” Poppy tips her head into the wind. “I have to. The alternative hurts too much.”
Shea thinks of sitting on the cellar steps and waiting for her mother. The way hanging on felt better than letting go. The way hope was a lifeline—something to cling to as she treaded water.
“I can hear you thinking.” Poppy’s smile is dreamy, her eyes shut. The wind teases at her curls. “I get it. I know it’s not logical. And I know it’s not likely. But I have to believe she’s okay.”
The problem with treading water, Shea’s learned, is that you can’t do it forever.
Eventually, you sink.
“And what if she’s not? What if we’re too late? What if I’m the reason she’s—”
She can’t bring herself to say it, but it doesn’t matter. They both know what she means. The word hangs heavily between them. Dead. She could be dead. They could be looking for a ghost.
Poppy is quiet for a long time. Finally, she says, “Have you ever felt so tightly threaded to someone that it hurts when they’re away?”
She has. She does. She is inextricably knotted, her heart pinched so tight it’s gone black and blue.
“Yes,” she says. “I feel it all the time.”
Poppy nods sagely, as if everyone does. As if it’s normal, to be bound so thoroughly to another person that it hurts to breathe without them.
“I think,” she says softly, “if Ellie was gone, my soul would know it.”
They lapse back into quiet, watching the waves rush in.
Shea peers back in the direction of the camper and finds Asher under the lopsided overhang, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders rounded.
She wonders how long he’s been standing there, listening to their conversation.
She wonders if he’s already given up, or if he’s clinging to some secret, quiet hope.
He hasn’t brought up Camellia in days.
She isn’t given the chance to try to parse out the look in his eyes before Poppy is on her feet, tugging Shea up after her.
“Enough of this. If Ellie were here, she’d make us all stop moping and go in.”