Chapter XXVI #2
When Vic shouldered open the massive front door, her car sat in its original spot at the base of the stairs like no time had passed.
She clambered in, back rigid, and fought the urge to run back inside.
She couldn’t look back at the castle, couldn’t say goodbye, couldn’t force herself to stare at the bald face of her own failure.
Vic knew she would look at the empty passenger seat every few minutes on the drive south, expecting to find someone sitting there.
She would scan rooms as she entered and see Henry out of the corner of her eye in the apartment they had shared for so long.
But it would be a trick of the light, because he was a thousand miles away and her memory was playing tricks on her.
She sped into the darkening forest without slowing.
Vic did not watch Avalon Castle disappear behind the trees. She did not look back to see the branches knit themselves together to conceal it.
When the driveway yielded to the rural road they’d come in on, Vic pulled the car over and wrenched up the hand brake.
Pressure in her throat warned her she was about to start crying, and she regretted leaving more than she had ever regretted anything.
She looked back the way she’d come, but Vic saw no break in the line of trees.
She could not distinguish one patch of forest from another. There was no going back.
She did not belong there, Vic reminded herself. She didn’t belong with Xan, or Sarah, or her brother. Here was another piece of incontrovertible proof.
The sky above her windshield didn’t care that Vic was falling apart. Crimson and ocher and the pale pink of fresh-dipped cotton candy taunted her with a display more vibrant than any sunset Vic had seen since arriving at Avalon. Even the heavens celebrated her departure.
When Meredith had left, the life Vic had known vanished.
Beyond the next hour, or the next twelve, Vic saw only empty space.
She didn’t know how she would get the bills paid, or how she would stop anyone from separating her and Henry, or how she would hold herself together on her own.
But she had. She’d done it all, and now she would do it again.
Vic could survive hard things—the worst day of her life had already happened. She could do it again. She had to.
She could break down later. In about three hours, Vic would hit the town she’d picked as her stop for the night. She would raid the minibar and cry until her eyes puffed up. She’d curl up under the sheets of another new and unfamiliar bed and let all of this overwhelm her.
But for now she would drive.
The sun dipped below the hills in front of her, and Vic flicked on her headlights, though the sky still held the glowing aftermath of the sun’s dramatic exit.
It started to snow. Wisps fell on the windshield, and Vic clicked on the wipers with a frown.
Her time in the Northeast had given her a burgeoning hatred of snow.
A black shape streaked in front of the car.
Vic slammed on the brakes.
She realized her mistake an instant after she made it.
The tires locked on the icy road. The car slid as the rubber failed to find purchase.
Vic clutched the steering wheel in panic.
Should she turn in to the spin? Turn away?
Let it spin itself out without fighting it?
Vic remembered hearing that she should do one and absolutely, under no circumstances, any other, but she couldn’t remember which was which.
The car swung into a snowbank, and the bumper jammed against a thick mound of ice. Vic’s chest constricted against the seatbelt with the impact.
It lasted only a couple of seconds.
Vic stared at the snow in front of her. Her hands gripped the wheel as her breath came and went in shallow heaves.
She was fine.
The air was knocked out of her, and she was scared half to death, but she was fine.
The car? Vic was less sure.
She didn’t think she’d hit anything except the snowbank.
She hadn’t felt any impact before the crunch.
The front of the hood and the bumper were consumed under a tall heap of snow.
The headlights, her only source of light aside from the dying sky, peeked out of the ice.
With shaking hands, Vic put the car in reverse and tried to pull it free.
Tires spun with a grind, but the car didn’t budge. She was stuck.
Vic didn’t know what that animal had been. A dog, most likely. Or a wolf. Vic bet they had wolves in this part of the world.
It might have been something else.
The thought came uninvited from the part of Vic that had spent weeks holed up in a castle studying monsters. She wasn’t far from Avalon, thirty miles at most. How far-fetched was it to wonder if an Orcan had found a home in the forest nearby?
She flicked on the overhead light and reached across the front seat for her bag. Her phone had service—not much, but she could make a call.
But Vic didn’t know who to call.
No one in the castle could answer, and they were gone anyway.
She could get a tow truck, but she didn’t know if there was anything wrong with the car.
For all she knew, it was stuck on a patch of ice and she could free it.
People who lived around here probably knew how to get out of a situation like this.
They probably kept something in the trunk to fix it, dry up the ice until the tires got traction, but Vic had nothing.
She didn’t even have a proper flashlight, for fuck’s sake.
Maybe she could wait. This was a public road. Eventually someone would pass, and she could wave them down. Get help unsticking the car. But in the time that Vic had been driving, she hadn’t seen another person.
A tow truck, she decided. But they would ask if she could drive it away under its own steam. They would tell her to check.
If the car was busted, she needed to know. And that meant getting out.
Vic gave herself exactly three seconds to feel fear before steeling herself and cracking open the door. The chill plunged into the warmth of the cabin and slapped Vic in the face. She wanted to slam the door shut.
Her sneakers crunched on the ice as she climbed out, and all her layers did little against the frigid wind.
She resolved to make her inspection as quick as possible.
Vic turned on her phone’s flashlight and trod carefully on the slick ground to the front of the car. With one hand on the hot hood for balance, she bunched her sweater over her fist and knocked away the ice near the left headlight.
The bumper had dented when she hit the snowbank, but Vic couldn’t see any signs of serious damage. She cast the phone’s light under the car and saw nothing except ice and asphalt.
No smoke. Nothing leaking. No evidence of an emergency.
On either side of the road, the black forest loomed. The sun had gone, and night fell like a stone on the wilderness. An aching darkness full of awful possibility grabbed Vic’s attention before she could pull her gaze away.
This was good, Vic reasoned. She would get back in the car and wait for the engine to melt the ice. She had most of a tank of gas.
Vic turned back toward the car. Her fingers closed around the top of the door to steady herself when she heard—“Vic!”
She froze. The shout came from the woods behind her.
“Vic!” It came again, more desperate now. Torn from the throat in panic.
Vic recognized the voice. She would know it anywhere. She knew that voice better than any other.
It was Henry. Calling to her from the woods.
“Vic!” Henry called again. “Please!”
Vic stood frozen at the side of the car, her heart in her ears as she stared into the forest.
Henry was in there.
Or was he?
He wasn’t. He couldn’t be. He had gone to a secure location with the Order, like Sarah said. They had taken him somewhere safe, and that’s why he hadn’t been in the apartment.
But what if they hadn’t? What if he hadn’t abandoned her at all—what if something had taken him?
Vic knew some Orcans could borrow human voices. Many cultures had myths of monsters echoing human speech, using the cries of loved ones or children to lure victims.
“Vic!”
He sounded like he was in pain. Vic took a step forward.
She stopped, paralyzed by fear and indecision and the terrible weight of what was happening.
It couldn’t be Henry in the woods. It couldn’t be.
Vic knew it was probably a trick—she wanted it to be a trick.
There was something in the woods, and that thing was trying to draw her into their depths.
But these creatures couldn’t conjure human voices from nothing.
They needed a source. They needed to have heard it before.
This thing, if it wasn’t Henry, had heard Henry speak. How? Was he here? He couldn’t be.
But what if he was?
“Vic, help!”
His voice had moved farther away.
Vic stood motionless, and decision dawned hard and heavy, as it always did.
It might be a trick. It probably was. But it hardly mattered in the end.
If there was even the smallest chance that it was Henry in there, Vic was going to chase after it.
If there was even a remote possibility that Henry was in trouble, that he needed help, Vic was never going to leave him.
She was never going to get back in the car and ignore the sounds of her brother screaming while she waited until she could drive away.
It didn’t matter that she didn’t have any magic and that whatever that thing was would probably kill her. If Henry was in there, she was going to help him. She was going to try.
Vic gritted her teeth and ran into the forest.