Chapter 17
Chapter
Seventeen
Time sort of faded.
Delainey let Reece take the lead. He was the wolf out of the two of them; maybe he had secret road-sensing powers.
She wasn’t questioning it. She was tired and hungry, magically shackled to a man she had let finger her in the woods.
She was out of questions and too tired to do anything but trudge forward.
Reece moved a few paces ahead of her at the full length of the manacles’ leash, his broad shoulders cutting a path through the underbrush, the torn sleeve of his shirt flapping loose against his bicep with every stride.
Between one step and the next, the trees disappeared, and a road showed up like magic. Not the magic she performed.
More like a miracle.
It was a simple two-lane highway with gravel on the shoulder and dark asphalt with a faded dotted yellow line down the center. The pavement was cracked in places, and she spotted a pothole large enough to possibly be considered a swimming pool in some counties.
But it was a road, and a road meant cars, and cars meant home. Eventually.
No guardrails lined the edges, and the gravel shoulder was barely two feet wide before the ground dropped off into a shallow drainage ditch choked with weeds and runoff.
She and Reece didn’t need to say a word before they started walking down the shoulder.
She didn’t know if he chose their direction on purpose, but they kept moving, walking and walking and walking.
They must have walked for an hour without spotting a single car.
She might have been worried about the state of disrepair, taken it as a sign no one traveled this path and no one cared to fix it, but that was just the reality of the American highway system.
After another fifteen minutes, Reece froze and stared down the road ahead.
“A car?” Delainey asked.
“Some kind of vehicle,” Reece said without turning, his chin lifted and his nostrils flaring as he tested the air.
They stopped and waited for it to come to them.
It was a gigantic truck on lifted wheels that looked like it might eat small children for fun.
The thing sat high enough off the ground that Delainey could have crawled under the chassis without ducking, its chrome bumper caked in dried mud and a row of aftermarket light bars mounted across the roof.
Reece stuck his thumb out, the universal sign of hitchhiking, and the truck slowed for a moment.
Delainey saw it had those fake exhaust smokestacks coming out of the back of the cab.
She wasn’t sure this was exactly the truck she wanted to crawl into, but the driver got one look at them and sped off.
A gust of hot exhaust and grit peppered Delainey’s shins as the truck accelerated, and the rumble of its engine faded long after the taillights disappeared around the curve.
Well, crap. She didn’t want him either.
“It’s fine,” she said out loud, not sure if she was reassuring herself or Reece. “There will be other cars.”
There were. Two more passed them, one slowing down, the other nearly running them off the road. Was there something off about them?
They were covered in dirt, and when Delainey looked at Reece, his eyes were still glowing yellow, though humans could easily explain something like that away.
She really hoped it wasn’t that they were seeing a black woman with dirty clothes coming out of the woods trying to flag down cars and being all racist about it, because that would not be a kind thing for her neighbors to be.
Reece’s shirt was also torn, and his hair was just as wild as hers.
His dark red waves were matted on one side where he’d slept on the ground, and there was a smear of dried blood across his collarbone where his shirt gaped open.
They might have looked like two extras from a horror movie, so she wasn’t sure she could blame anyone for not stopping.
Twenty minutes later, her faith in humanity, such as it was, was reinstated when an old, beat-up red pickup truck pulled to a stop beside them and a woman rolled down her window.
The truck had a dented rear quarter panel and a cracked taillight held together with packing tape, and the engine idled with a low, uneven rattle.
“Are you two all right?” The woman was older with dark skin, wearing a baseball cap for a team Delainey didn’t recognize.
She was eyeing them like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, but there was more concern on her face than fear.
Her arm rested on the open window frame, a silver watch loose on her wrist, and the truck’s bench seat behind her was piled with folded tarps and a plastic crate of gardening tools.
They had been walking for days. Why hadn’t Delainey used that time to come up with a story? She said the first thing that came to mind and hoped it made some sort of sense.
“We were on a camping adventure day trip. We got separated from our group two days ago. We were near Hobson when we left. Can you take us into town?” She sounded a little panicked, which wasn’t much of a lie.
What if they weren’t anywhere near Hobson? What if this woman didn’t know what town she was talking about? Any town would do, as long as she could get access to a phone.
The woman kept looking at them like she expected Delainey to break and tell her the truth. “You walked all the way out here from Hobson? In those clothes?”
Delainey looked down at her jeans and t-shirt and gym shoes, dirty now, but they had served her well enough.
Her curls were flattened on one side and frizzing wildly on the other, and she could see the mud ground into the knees of her jeans and the raw scrape on the heel of her left hand from where she’d fallen days ago.
She shrugged. Reece kept his mouth shut.
At least he was smart enough to let her do the talking.
“How far did we walk?” Delainey asked.
Please don’t be ridiculous, she silently prayed.
“About forty miles. But I’m heading that way anyway,” the woman said. “Why didn’t you use your phone to call for help?”
Right. Phones. Delainey stalled.
“It was part of the camp policy,” Reece said, stepping up beside Delainey so the woman could see him more clearly through the passenger window. “Only our guides had phones, so we could reconnect with nature.”
If anything, the woman looked more disbelieving. “You can get in the back. Is there any particular place you want me to drop you?”
“Are you going by the university?”
“I can do that.”
Delainey and Reece got into the back of the truck and stayed low as the woman drove them down the bumpy, rattling road into Hobson.
The truck bed was ridged metal with no liner, and every pothole sent a jolt through Delainey’s tailbone.
An hour later, the truck came to a stop, and they hopped out in front of the university welcome sign.
“Do you need me to call anybody for you?” the woman asked. Delainey realized she hadn’t even gotten her name, but she waved her off.
“We’ll be good from here. Thank you so much.”
The woman nodded at the thanks and drove away.
If anything, Reece now looked even more tense. “We need to go to the pack,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Delainey shot back, already turning on her heel toward the sidewalk that ran east along the university’s wrought-iron perimeter fence.
“We’re four blocks away from the coven house.
” She held up her hands and jiggled the manacles.
“We’re going to need their help to get these off. ”
For once, Reece didn’t argue.