Chapter 18
Amelia
Amelia’s visible world had shrunk to a small circle.
The fog was thickening—the full moon was no longer drifting in and out of the clouds.
If she looked around, she caught the sensation of ghostly forms reaching for her: the countess from the tapestry; a rock that morphed into a black bear; a spectral form of the real-life owl she could occasionally hear, its wavering whoop darting straight through her chest, every damn time.
So she stopped looking around. Instead, she intently watched her pale sneakers carry her to safety, as if with a momentum entirely their own. Step by step by step.
Another gunshot popped. At the abbey? She walked faster. With each gunshot, she felt a dizzying mix of relief and dread—relief that the last shot evidently hadn’t hit its mark, assuming the mark was Tom, and dread that this one had.
She tried to recall what the moor had looked like in daylight—a billowing carpet of tufted blond grass and prickly shrubs, punctuated by skeletal trees and rocks.
Streams had snaked through the grass and seeped into stagnant pools.
Bleak, for sure, but not scary. She must be near a stream now—she could hear trickling water.
There was a scratching in the shrubs to her left, and she fought the urge to freeze.
Just some critter. Freeze was only slightly better than freak-out in the hierarchy of defense mechanisms. Freezing literally got you nowhere.
Flight, in this case, was the only thing she could do to help any of them.
She rubbed the back of her neck, which felt even colder than her hand, even with her scarf bunched around it.
She should be grateful for the dark. If she couldn’t see out of her fog cocoon, no one could see in.
But she couldn’t shake the feeling that at any second a hand might clamp on her shoulder.
She swiveled, suddenly, as if to catch it in the act, and walked backward for a while, but that just left her shoulders exposed in the other direction.
She turned back. For Tom’s sake, she had to hold her nerve.
He was on his home turf. He would be fine.
If he was pinned by gunfire, he would find a place to hide, she would bring the police, and everything would work out.
Amelia Bennett, saving the day. Who would have thought?
A sharp bang echoed through the skies, and then another: a different sound from the other shots. She started to run, then forced herself back to a fast walk. She had more than five miles left to travel, and the ‘road’ was no more than a country lane—narrow, uneven, and potholed.
She stretched her neck side to side. It felt like it was stiffening. Whiplash from the crash? The fleshy part beside her shoulder felt tender, too. A seat belt bruise.
Something shot past her, and she wheeled, trying to get a fix on it. Vertigo caught her in its current, twisting her into dizzying eddies and whirlpools. She couldn’t be sure if it was her body spinning or just her head.
Get a grip.
It was just an animal: a fox, a hare. Harmless. She took a moment to regain her balance, then upped her pace, forcing her focus back to her shoes. At least fear gave her momentum, and she might as well use it for fuel, seeing as her last proper meal had been some time ago.
A new sound rose. A buzzing, like a gigantic mosquito. It seemed to be in the sky ahead of her, like a flying remote-control car. Or maybe this was just what happened to your ears when you were walking through a moor at night, freaking yourself out.
Ahead, the fog was breaking up, revealing patches of actual clouds.
The moon was still hidden, but Amelia could trace its position from the glow.
As the shadows moved and wove across the lane, they took the shape of a person.
She shook her head to clear the image, but it wouldn’t dissolve: a tall, dark figure striding toward her, coat flapping.
It was coming from the direction of the village.
Why would anyone be on foot on this road at night, unless… ?
She scooted behind a large rock at the side of the road. The buzzing was louder now, as were the footfalls. Could this be the figure she saw on the road before she crashed? She was not seeing ghosts.
The figure passed by, and she breathed out silently. Then it stopped and turned. She could make out no more than a silhouette, but she’d swear it was looking straight at her. She flattened her palms on the cold rock.
“Amelia? Is that you?”
“Omigod, Tom?” Amelia stumbled to him. His features came into focus, pale and drawn in the moonlight, the gun clenched in his hands. “Where did you come from? I thought you were… God, I didn’t know what you were.”
“Sorry, I didn’t want to call out.”
“The gunshots. What happened?”
“Some of them were me, but not all. I thought they’d got you!”
“You firing, or you getting shot?”
“Firing. And missing. Hear that buzzing?”
“Yes! What is it?”
“A drone. It has thermal imaging—it can see in the dark.”
She looked up at the shifting sky. “How can you tell?”
“Because we sold the bloody Pritchards one of ours. For pre-dawn deerstalking. I tried to shoot it down, but it’s been a long time since this gun could shoot straight, if it ever did.”
“The drone can see through the fog?”
“Not as clearly as if there was none, but yes, it’ll find our heat signatures.”
“And it’s armed?”
“No. They’ll locate the target with the drone, close in on it, and then switch to the thermal scopes on their rifles. It only has a range of a mile, maybe a mile and a half, so they’re not far behind.”
“They’ve found us?”
“Not yet. It’s still sweeping back and forth. If they’d found us, it’d be hovering. But it won’t be long.”
“We need to run, get to the village.”
“We can’t outrun them, Amelia, not on this terrain, not over six miles, and don’t forget they have the pickup. Plan B—we hide out overnight while we come up with a Plan C.”
“Not keeping track but I think we’re up to Plan L or M.” She looked around, not that she could see much. “There are a few rocks. I haven’t seen any with overhanging ledges to hide under but…”
“Not out here. It’s too exposed. Our best chance is to get back to the abbey.”
“The abbey? No. Tom—no. We’ve got this far, we need to keep going. How about… Don’t moors have, like, prehistoric stone huts? Little caves? We could hide out for a couple of hours, and then—”
“Not this one. There’s no shelter out here, not from above, not for miles. It’s a matter of time before they find us. They’ll start with the road and sweep out from there. They can cover far more ground than we can.”
She gazed along the road in one direction, and then the other. “But they could be anywhere.”
“The position of the drone gives us a clue. It comes into view occasionally. But we don’t need to outrun the drone so much as the guy with the rifle following along behind. One of them will be operating the drone, the other shooting. Hard to do both.”
She looked along the lane. “If we go straight back to the house, they’ll definitely find us.”
“We’ll loop back through the moor. It’s a longer distance, but we need to keep at least a couple of hundred meters between us and the road. Plus, there are deer and wild sheep. Their heat signatures will act as decoys, to a point.”
“So, what? We’re supposed to go back to the abbey and hide in the dark and wait for them to just appear in the room and…?” She broke off. If she kept going it would be obvious that she’d started to cry.
“Amelia.” He took her arm and drew her in. “I know the idea of that freaks you out. But I will keep you safe—”
“You can’t!” she said, shaking off his arm. “You can’t keep me safe. A bullet will slice through you just as easily as it slices through me. Don’t promise me that.”
“You didn’t let me finish. I’ll keep you safe as best I can.
That’s as much as I can promise. The abbey has hiding places within hiding places.
We’ll hunker down for the night and come up with a new plan in the morning.
If we’re lucky they won’t even know we’re in there. You said safety is relative, yeah?”
“Yes, but—”
“We’ll be safer trying to make it back to the abbey rather than continuing along the road. Relatively.”
“If it’s all a risk, I want to risk going for help. They might not catch up to us. They don’t know for sure we’ve left. We could split up—I go along the road and you through the moor. They can’t follow us both.”
“Amelia…”
She halted and turned toward him. “I can’t go back, Tom.
I can’t hide, knowing they could appear at any time.
I’ve made it this far. I was just starting to feel like I was out of danger, relatively.
Now you’re here and we might as well keep going, together.
Please, Tom.” She held out a hand. “Hiding is freezing. I don’t want to freeze.
I’ve spent a year frozen and freaking out, and I’m over it. I need to keep moving.”
“You can’t compare this to the robbery. With the robbery, you had no options.
You had a gun to your head. Your ability to control the situation was taken away, and nothing you could have done would have made it turn out differently.
With this, we can buy ourselves time and options. But we need to keep safe.”
She started walking, already feeling like the argument was lost. He was just another factor out of her control. “Every step we take to the village gets us closer to safety.”
“Then why are you heading back to the abbey?” he called softly.
She halted. “What do you mean?”
“You’re walking towards the abbey.”
“I am not. The abbey is that way.” She pointed along the road behind him. “The village is this way.” She indicated the direction she was heading.
The buzzing crescendoed. Tom caught up to her and took her hand, which was still outstretched. “No, Amelia, it’s not. I just came from the abbey.”