Chapter Twenty-Seven #5
“There!” Sharise’s lips said, although Imani couldn’t hear anything except her heart’s forceful hammering. Imani followed Sharise’s pointing finger.
The Beast had changed direction, but Imani saw a snow hump racing uphill, zipping between two tree trunks.
Still only ten yards away, but left of her now.
She ejected the casing. Reloaded. Tracked the moving hump with the rifle’s sight.
Twenty yards. Her arms were steady. She had it.
Eyes open and focused this time, Imani fired.
The trigger clicked. The rifle was empty.
Imani’s scream, this time, was raw and primal. She’d had the Beast, and it had gotten away. She had wasted a shot by closing her eyes. And now it was gone, and Mom was gone. Mom was a sock in her pocket. If Imani could have, she would have clawed herself out of her life, out of the world.
“Imani—come on!” Sharise said. “We have to get far away!”
But Imani couldn’t move, except to shiver violently.
She couldn’t remember the fearless version of herself who had barely flinched when the Beast had reared to hiss at her, its breath like decomposed meat.
And its yellowed teeth, those daggers crowding its monstrous mouth.
Webbed arms splaying wide, revealing Mom’s empty tomb.
“Imani!” Sharise grabbed her hand to force her to move. Imani’s fingers were so cold that she barely felt her sister’s touch. “We have to hide!”
Imani threw the useless rifle into the snow. Then she patted her pocket to make sure she could still feel the sock. Mom’s sock. The small lump was there. She pressed her hand against it.
All but their freshest tracks were fading in the snowfall. With that Beast stalking them, they couldn’t follow their tracks back to the lodge. Now the Beast was the only living being who knew exactly where to find them.
Sharise pointed out the sheer gray cliff face at the edge of the pine forest, misty in the snowfall. “What about over there? Maybe there’s caverns. Somewhere we can climb to.”
Imani whispered, “It climbs too. Daddy said it was in the tree. It does whatever it wants.”
Sharise fixed her tear-streaked face to try to look hopeful. “Just because it doesn’t still have Mom—”
“Shut up!” Imani said.
Sharise shook Imani’s forearm, hard. “It doesn’t mean she’s dead. Okay? Don’t give up.”
“You never thought she was alive!” If Imani was about to die, she would die telling the truth. “You were just playing along!”
Sharise sobbed. “So what? I knew I could be wrong. I want to be wrong. She’s my mother too.” Sharise could barely finish her sentence, bent over from a sob.
“She was supposed to have a baby,” Imani wailed. Why did the newest thing feel the worst? The baby’s tragedy was the biggest pain she could catch hold of long enough to feel.
Sharise hugged her. “I know…” she whispered. She rocked with Imani long enough for Imani to notice her sister trembling too. “You did so good, scaring it away. I’m in fucking awe. But we have to hide, Imani—or no one might ever know what happened to us.”
It wasn’t a cheerful reason to feel energized, but it was the truth. Dying wasn’t the worst. The worst would be if no one ever heard the story of what their family had faced together on this mountain.
Imani sniffled. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s look for shelter.”
This climb was rife with downhill detours and passages tucked in snowy corners of the ascent.
The rocky escarpment fifty yards beyond the pine forest did not offer visible places to hide, and the terrain would be dangerous in snowboard boots.
A river with rocky shores snaked east of the rock face, its burbling muted by ice.
Climbing to that river would be hard too because of the large boulders, although the sight of it made Imani realize that her throat was screaming from thirst, not just grief.
She cursed herself again for not bringing a water bottle, the thing they needed most. She had water-purification tablets in her survival kit, but nothing to collect the water.
Besides, they didn’t have time to find water now.
The downhill grade just west of them would be faster, across that carpet of untouched snow, but the Beast would easily see them in that clearing before they reached the next grove of trees. Tree cover was thinner in that direction, not denser.
Tendrils of panic tightened across Imani’s skin. Where could they go?
She scooted out on her snowboard, changing her view slightly beyond the closest pine trunks—and saw the dead tree.
She blinked to make sure she wasn’t imagining it.
Instead of a thin pine tree, this was a large, broad tree with a tangle of gray branches like jutting thorns growing tall, bordering the creek near a rocky ascent.
The trunk had a tear-shaped hollow, a beacon. How hadn’t she seen it before?
Sharise followed her gaze and saw it too. She gasped.
“Will we fit?” Sharise asked.
“We might.”
Might was a miracle.
It could be an optical illusion, Imani knew.
The tree was at least twenty-five yards away.
The shadowed hollow was dark and prominent against the snow from this far, but once they got closer, they might learn that the trunk was only damaged, not truly hollow.
Or the gap might be only big enough for one of them to curl inside.
But the sisters swerved their snowboards to race toward the dead tree like salvation.
In that moment, all they cared about was that the hollow looked too small for the Beast.