Chapter Thirty-Eight. Cleo
THIRTY-EIGHT
Cleo
Cleo strains her ears, listening for the distant flapping of wings. She doesn’t want to be alone in the hush of the forest, and certainly not in a pile of bodies.
She crosses her arms over her chest, holds her breath, concentrates.
There is only the silence now. She lets out the breath, filling the silence, but it can only fill so much.
Silence might be familiar to her, but she’s never liked the darkness, never felt comfortable in it.
Even when she would hide from Delphine, it was in a well-lit room. Maybe she’d shrink behind a velvet drape, or huddle behind a marble statue, but it was never in a dark room.
Darkness has always felt like quicksand.
Deep in the forest beneath the cursed sky, she has that feeling now. Like the forest is pulling her under.
How long does she have to stay here?
And then it seeps in, the realization that she doesn’t have to.
She belongs to no one. Maybe she never did. Maybe she stayed with Delphine because she thought there was no other choice. But she knows better now.
If she has free will, then she doesn’t have to stay here.
There is nothing to stop her from walking right out of this forest and disappearing into the Land of Oz, somewhere no one knows her, where no one expects anything of her.
Maybe she’ll go to a place where she can speak without the pressing terror of being heard.
She pushes off the large oak and takes a step.
Crack.
A branch snaps behind her.
Without thinking of the consequences, she whirls around.
But there’s nothing there.
No movement in the shadows. No forest animal passing by.
Only the strewn bodies of the dead monkeys and the man who—
Wait.
She rushes forward, stumbling through the darkness to the place where the man named Rook once lay.
The body is gone.
The only thing that remains is a mosaic of bloody leaves.
She turns in a full circle, scanning the darkness, finding nothing.
She doesn’t know what this means, but she knows it cannot be good.
She turns to the west and runs.