Chapter 14 Arthur
Arthur
We dashed into the trees, the blare of the jail’s alarm slowly fading behind us. A heavy blanket of clouds had obscured the moon and any stars, making the air feel heavy and thick, charged with the promise of an oncoming storm.
“Hurry!” The monster’s urgency pushed me faster into the belly of the Walkers’ orchard.
It was a hell of a gamble to use their land as a shortcut, but we didn’t have much of a choice.
Soon, the cottage came into view. We hopped the low-lying fence and all but slammed into the porch rail, doubling over to catch our breath.
“Just show me the vent and you can go,” Eva panted. “Follow the farm roads down to the valley. Dane won’t expect you to know that route.”
I watched her swipe a curl off her forehead, a strange feeling in my chest. Eva had asked me to stay many times; she’d never asked me to run.
There were no vehicles in the driveway, save my Volkswagen, sporting a newly patched tire.
We hurried to the kitchen door and slipped inside.
The sight stopped me in my tracks. Moss carpeted the floor and walls.
A textured stripe of oyster mushrooms crawled up the cabinets.
Rose vines and greenbrier littered the floor, and everything smelled fecund and floral.
“What happened here?” I asked.
“I happened,” Eva said.
The monster could sense only one other heartbeat in the house. I didn’t know where Izzy had gone off to, but she wasn’t at home.
Eva still wore the overalls she’d had on earlier today, the intricate floral designs embroidered on the pockets now marred by strange dark flecks.
I flashed to the last time I had stood in this room, my mind filling with the cracking sound Jack’s branch had made when the monster snapped it in two.
The way a red-green, almost resinous substance had dribbled from the broken end, smelling of sap and iron.
Did she know she wore her father’s blood?
My camera sat on the counter, a starburst of cracks obscuring my favorite lens. Anger sliced through my gut as I remembered Lenny slamming my camera into the cabinets, remembered the crunch of it under my foot.
Purple envelopes littered the table, the same shade as the one Eva had shoved in my face at the jail cell. My heart gave a lurch.
Mom’s letters.
“So?” Eva asked expectantly.
I picked a path through the mess, carefully dragging a chair to the fridge. At first tug, the vent didn’t budge. “We need something to pry it open,” I grunted.
Eva disappeared down the hall. My eyes followed her, stalling on the open doorway to Jack’s bedroom. I could see the uneven rise and fall of the sleeping man’s chest. Without his leaves, the branches twisting out of him appeared more like the fingers of some eldritch monster.
I shuddered. When Eva returned, I accepted the offered flathead screwdriver, wedging it behind the vent. The metal screeched as I pried it away, and I reached in, hand fumbling.
“Anything?”
I frowned, lifting onto my toes. Jack was taller than me by a lot, but not even he could have reached much farther. Dust caked a slick grime onto my fingertips as I searched the hollow.
But the vent was empty.
I drew back. “It’s gone.”
“What?” Eva tugged my sleeve and scrambled to replace me on the chair.
“Ev, there’s nothing there,” I insisted.
“There has to be!” There was heat behind the sheen in her eyes. I couldn’t even blame her. I’d given her hope and then snatched it away.
“Maybe… he moved it?” I suggested.
“Well, we can’t exactly ask him, can we?” The bite of her words was undercut by the break in her voice, grief clouding her expression.
It hurt to see her so defeated.
But then a new resolve seemed to fall over her, and Eva straightened, tugging on the straps of her overalls as she bit her lip. “The fields,” she whispered.
“What?”
A car door slammed outside, and we whipped in tandem to see a deputy step out of his vehicle.
Eva gasped and ducked out of view of the window.
She snatched her tennis shoes from where they’d been discarded on the moss-covered floor, slipping her feet out of her sandals and stuffing them into socks, then the shoes, urgency in every movement.
When she started rifling through the envelopes on the table, I flicked an anxious glance to the door. Footsteps crunched the gravel outside.
“Aha!” She held up a thick wad of folded paper in triumph before stuffing it into a pocket of her overalls.
“What is that?” I asked.
Eva wore determination in every line of her face. “His atlas.”
“Wha—”
She cut me off. “Come with me,” she said, circling her fingers around my wrist as she dragged me to the cellar door and pried it open with a squeak. Her thumb was warm and rough against the tendon there, just a nudge from my pulse. It sent a shiver down my spine.
No one else could touch me like this.
The cellar was old, used mainly for storing camping supplies and bottled fruit.
The instant Eva opened the door, a solid wall of cold rushed up the stairs.
Eva descended first, steps creaking. I instinctively curled my toes in my shoes as I followed her down, gripping the rail for balance, braced for a rogue spiderweb to find my face at any moment.
The tug of a chain bathed the sparse gray room in yellow light. I closed the door behind me seconds before a loud knock came at the front door. Panic ran through me. “Is there another way out?”
“Yes.” Eva rushed to the camping shelves and heaved a tent bag off and into her arms, stirring dust.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
Eva unzipped a hiking pack and began stuffing things inside. She tossed a look to the sleeping bag on the top shelf overhead. “Get me that, will you?”
“Eva—”
“I promise I’ll explain!” Her hands shook as she yanked the zipper closed and hoisted the backpack over her shoulders, the tent curled under her arm.
When I plucked the sleeping bag off the shelf, Eva nodded to the back wall of the cellar.
Unlike the other walls, made from heavy stones, this one contained a slanted hatch made entirely of wood and iron braces, with steps leading up to it.
I remembered this door now, an old, steep-angled entrance we’d never used, and rarely saw, because it had always been covered in greenery. I moved up the steps and tried the handle, but it was locked.
Overhead, we heard the squeak of a floorboard. I sucked in a breath. That wasn’t the heavy groan of Jack’s feet, or the click of Izzy’s heels. A chill swept over me.
The deputy was in the house.
“You got a key?” I pressed.
“Dad kept it in a turtle, I think.” Setting the tent bag down for a moment, Eva crouched and rifled through the keepsakes on the adjoining shelf. Ceramic clinked too loudly. I winced, glancing back in the direction of the stairs.
“Hurry, Ev!”
“I’m trying!” She rattled something loose and thrust it into my hand, turning her attention to the lock.
My fingers smoothed over the glossy ceramic figurine. “This is a frog.”
“That is not helpful.” Eva shoved the key into the lock, gritting her teeth. When it clicked, she let out a laugh. “Here, help me lift the door.”
Together, we shouldered open the escape hatch.
It took effort at first. The door hadn’t been opened in years, and weeds had grown over the edges.
As we forced it open, the popping sound of roots filled my ears, and loose sediment spilled into the cellar.
I held my breath as I peered outside, anxious that I could see neither the road nor whatever backup the deputy had brought to the cottage.
Eva rolled the heavy tent bag out onto the grass and looked at me. “Get your keys ready. We’ll run to the van.”
“They’ll catch us.”
Eva’s mouth pinned down in a fine line of determination. “No. They won’t.”
And maybe it was just an echo of all that stood between us, unhealed, but it felt, in some way, as it had years before when she’d asked me if I trusted her. I took a breath, fishing my keys from my pocket. “On my mark. One, two—”
“Fly.”
“Run!”
We bolted toward the front of the house.
“FLY!” the monster sang again. It breezed through me, giddy at the wind rushing through our fingers.
Someone called out to us, but I didn’t look back as I yanked the driver’s door wide and tossed first the sleeping bag, then the heavier tent bag inside.
Eva leapt into her seat and slammed her door. “Go! GO!”
I jammed my keys into the ignition and turned.
As the van coughed to life, the man Dane had called Grayson burst out the front door, flanked by two other deputies.
Eva swiveled in her seat, and in my rearview mirror, I watched the earth buckle under one of the patrol car’s tires.
Weeds slithered up and around the wheels as Grayson yanked the car’s door handle, surprising him so much that he cried out and jumped back.
I laughed in disbelief. “Was that you?”
“I’m sorry!”
“Don’t be sorry! That was… wow.” I’d never seen her use her magic with such precision. The sight of her power, of the forest bending to her will, stole my breath.
Eva flushed a violent pink. “I guess it comes in handy sometimes.”
I turned my attention back to the road, feeling suddenly lighter. “I guess it does.”