Chapter 50 Audrey
Audrey
You’re okay,” Stranger tells me. She helps me up, pulling me over to a wide-trunked tree and propping me against it.
Barry checks me over delicately, and I don’t care that his muzzle leaves swipes of blood across my clothes.
I run a hand over his shoulder, knocking loose bits of safety glass, and lean my head back. My whole body hurts.
“Why did you do that?” I ask. My voice is hoarse, throat bruised. She looks puzzled. “Why did you take the gun?”
Her expression clears, understanding. “You don’t want to have killed someone,” she says. “Trust me.”
I blink. I can’t seem to quite get a full breath, but I don’t think my head hit the ground too hard. Mild concussion, maybe. I’m alive. More than I can say for the Hills. “I’m sorry,” I say. Melinda’s body lies where it fell, her head turned away from us.
“It’s not your fault.”
“I went looking.”
“Not your fault there was something to find.” She smiles a little and tucks my hair behind my ears. There is something in her eyes, a look half familiar and frightening. I seize her hand.
“Stay,” I say, on instinct.
She stares at me, her expression strange. “Not this time,” she says. “There’s another cage waiting for me if I do.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
She laughs. “Maybe the justice system will agree. Eventually. But I’m not risking it.”
“But where will you go?”
She looks to the side. Wind stirs her hair. The faintest trace of red roots shows under the blond. “I don’t know. It feels like you can go just about anywhere from here, doesn’t it? Maybe I’ll even make it.”
“You’d be surprised,” I whisper, “how easy it is to disappear.”
She puts a hand to my cheek. The blood in the creases of her palms is already drying. She starts to stand, but I grab her wrist, and she stills. I stare into her eyes. Green eyes. I almost recognized her, the day we met. Almost.
“Janie,” I say, because I can’t bear to form the full question. “I called her Stranger. When we were kids.”
Her lips part ever so slightly.
“ ‘My name is Stranger.’ You wrote that,” I say.
Silence. And then she shakes her head. “It was already written there,” she says.
“Then she—-”
“She’s gone,” Stranger says gently. “They’ll be here soon. I have to go.”
“Don’t leave me here,” I beg. Her head cocks to the side, almost as if she’s listening to something, and she shuts her eyes. At the tree line, Meghan appears, hovering.
“You’ll be okay, Audrey,” Stranger says. She leans down. She presses her lips to mine. It is a soft, certain kiss—-not fleeting, not lingering. A goodbye.
She stands. She walks toward Meghan. Her arm goes around the girl’s shoulders, drawing her in. They confer a moment, and then, with one last glance toward me, they move away together.
I want to follow, but I’m too badly hurt. And maybe part of me doesn’t want her caught. Not again.
In the distance, sirens blare. I wonder if they’re for me. I wonder if she’ll make it, where she could possibly go.
But somehow, I know she won’t be found. She’ll fade into the woods. Blood on her hands and the soft clinking of beads in her footsteps.
Barry climbs gingerly into my lap, weighing me down with his massive forequarters. His head bumps against my chest, and I wrap my arms around him. He whuffs against me.
You’ll be okay, Audrey.
Except, I realize, my thoughts half a slurry with exhaustion, was that what she said?
Or did she say Oddity?
You’ll be okay, Oddity.
I can’t tell which one it is anymore. Can’t tell which one I want it to be.
With Barry’s steady breath matching mine, I wait to be found.