Chapter 45
Chapter Forty-Five
For hours, Raven ran. Shadow ran with her.
They did not stop to eat. They did not stop to drink.
They ran on and on, terror and grief chasing at their heels.
Shadow could have outpaced her easily. He could’ve been miles away by now. He stayed with her anyway. Sometimes beside her, sometimes ahead of her. Sometimes visible, sometimes not.
At times, he loped at her side, head down, ears and tail drooping in sorrow. At other times, he disappeared for an hour or more, scouting ahead.
The woods were grim, dark, and wild. Branches slapped and stung her face. The air was dense and close and smelled of wet earth and ozone. Her fear chased her, close as an expelled breath on the back of her neck.
Every muscle in her body ached. Every cut and bruise pulsed with pain. Her throat throbbed. Like knives scraping flesh, but she could move, she could run through the hurting.
That’s what mattered. The only thing that mattered.
The only thing she was certain of—if she fell, she wouldn’t get up again.
The thought flared through her mind: the map. The cabin nestled deep in the forest. The cabin she could never find without the map Vaughn had stolen.
It was lost. All of it, lost.
As she ran, her stricken mind drifted away from her body. The cabin faded in her mind with every step she took. So did Haven.
She couldn’t think of her lost home, of her dead father, or the animals she loved left behind.
She shut it all out of her mind lest the immense weight of it crush her.
She thought only of escape. The single-minded focus of survival. Staying alive for one more minute. One more hour, one more day.
Every so often, she checked her compass to ensure they were traveling in a general northerly direction, but she kept slightly northeast to remain within the relative safety of the woods of the Oconee National Forest.
Eventually, the thunder dissipated. The rain ceased. The towering black clouds shrank and diminished. The sky remained gray as ash, gray as death, as if the heavens were in mourning with them.
It was late afternoon when white flashes popped before her eyes. Heat flushed through her, then icy cold like lead in her veins. She felt like she was going to faint. Her legs turned to jelly, her bones melting to a puddle of nothing.
She faltered, nearly collapsing.
Shadow loped up to her and whined in concern. He nosed her thigh urgently.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m okay.”
Though she wasn’t okay. She wasn’t okay at all.
She paused to pee beside a hickory tree, using a branch for balance, and then drank what felt like a gallon of water before pulling out the first aid kit and tending to the cut on her neck.
With trembling fingers, she disinfected it and bandaged it as best she could.
It had stopped bleeding. That was a good sign.
Raven continued onward. After a while, Shadow ran off and disappeared into the darkening shadows of the forest.
She forced herself to put one foot in front of the other. On and on and on. Through woods into meadows and farmland and rolling pastures. A few houses dotted the horizon in the distance. She avoided them, passing several two-lane roads, blank and silent and emptied of all forms of human life.
The hours passed. The day began to die slowly and then all at once. Twilight descended. She veered off the dirt road she’d been following and headed back into the safety of the woods.
Eventually, Shadow appeared from behind a rocky outcropping and trotted to her side. He halted. His ears pricked, his head turned to the side.
She stopped, her hand pressed against her ribcage, like that could reduce the fiery pain. Her legs felt like rubber, her thighs were trembling. Blisters had formed and then burst on her heels and toes. Fluid oozed in her hiking boots.
She looked around blearily. Trees, trees, and more trees. Still, the forest was somehow comforting, not threatening, not like the men who hunted within it. The woods closed in, hiding her. Protecting her and the black wolf.
“What is it, boy?”
His tail drooped, his head bent. He whined. Then, he turned and loped off, headed up the steep ridge to the east.
As night fell, the shadows deepened into a bruised purple-black. The trees grew taller, darker. Night creatures scurried and slithered in the underbrush.
She withdrew the flashlight from her pack. The beam cut through the dark creeping shadows as she shuffled up the hill after Shadow.
Near the top of the ridge, the wolf yipped softly. He looked back at her over his shoulder, beckoning her to follow. His form silhouetted against the rising moon.
He led her along the ridgeline to a tiny clearing in the center of a ring of spruce trees.
A sheer rock face towered at least forty feet above her head.
At its base was a jagged crevice, with a narrow, mossy opening about three feet high and ten feet deep.
Several bushes clustered at the entrance, concealing the crevice from the casual observer.
Her throat thickened with unshed tears. She was so tired she could barely stand. Her legs trembled. The painkillers had worn off hours ago. Her face was one big bruise. Her ribs throbbed with white-hot flame.
“Thank you,” she said. Shadow watched her intently.
Grimacing, she lowered herself to her hands and feet and crawled between the bushes beneath the ledge of stone. Shucking off her rifle and backpack, she drank more water and adjusted the pack beneath her head as a makeshift pillow. She kept the rifle next to her, within easy reach.
The rock was hard beneath her. The air was chilly and smelled of earth and dust. A spider crawled along a ridge of stone near her face.
Still, the ledge would shelter her from rain and wind and the worst of the cold, as well as conceal her from whatever might be lurking in the woods.
Her eyelids drooped. She felt like she could sleep for a thousand hours.
Dimly, she realized that Shadow had not entered the shelter with her.
“Shadow!” she called hoarsely.
She waited. He didn’t come.
Despite the protests of her exhausted body, she crawled out of the crevice, switched on her flashlight, and searched for the wolf. She couldn’t bear to be alone. Not tonight.
A few hundred yards along the ridge, she came to a long shale outcropping that jutted from the top of the ridge. Far above, the stars glittered like hard diamonds flung across the cold black canvas of the sky.
Beyond the outcropping of rock lay eternal darkness. No lights glimmered from the multitude of towns she knew were sprawled somewhere below her. No tiny orange glow from vehicles crawling along winding highways.
There was only the night. The night and Raven and the wolf.
The black wolf stood at the edge of the outcropping. He threw back his head, raising his muzzle toward the vast star-studded sky, and howled.
It was a haunting, mournful sound. A sorrowful song, clear and pure as a bow drawn across a violin.
It was a requiem. An elegy. A howl of grief for the lost mate who wasn’t coming back. Shadow howled his sorrow and pain and loss for Luna.
Raven turned off the flashlight. She stood still in the dark and listened. Her heart felt like it was cracking wide open. The pieces of herself splintering, shattering. The hard shell of her soul, broken wide open to reveal the raw, pulsing center of her heartache.
The grief and pain and loss of her own, which she’d buried deep since her father died. Since long before then. Since her mother had abandoned her. Since she’d first realized her father couldn’t love her like she needed to be loved.
Since she’d started to believe that perhaps that was what she deserved—to be alone. To be utterly lonely, forever.
The pain flowed through her. A dark river of sorrow drowning her from the inside. She grieved for Zachariah. She grieved for her father, whom she’d loved desperately, resentfully, bitterly. But still, she’d loved him.
She grieved for her mother. For the broken woman she’d rejected without understanding that brokenness came from a monstrous darkness deep inside her mother that couldn’t be fixed. She understood it now.
In that grief, in her understanding, lay something like forgiveness.
She grieved for the animals. How she hadn’t realized how much she’d needed them until they were gone. For Gizmo. For Shika, Titus, Echo, and sweet Suki. For regal Vlad, who didn’t deserve the disease or the death coming for him.
And for Luna, beautiful, loyal, honorable Luna. Who’d made a human part of her pack. Who’d sacrificed her own life to save Raven’s.
Her eyes burned. Tears glittered in her eyes.
For the first time in three years, she let them fall.
Standing there in the center of the dark, unknowable, empty universe, Raven wept.