One Was Lost(63)

I hold my breath. It has to work. It has to—

The motor starts, and I nearly collapse with relief.

Lucas’s smile is as wide as I’ve ever seen it. The engine is an almost deafening roar, and when he revs it, I laugh, my spirit lifting like birthday balloons. A hawk takes flight from a nearby maple, and my laughter catches in the back of my throat, sticking on sudden fear.

We aren’t alone out here. And that engine was probably heard for miles.

“We should go,” I say.

Lucas climbs off, grinning, then his eyes catch on my hand, and he frowns. I check the bandage, which is red in a few places. I’m bleeding through.

“I should probably see someone about that.” I laugh, but Lucas’s expression is grim.

“Yeah. Sooner the better.” He nods at the trailer. “I’m going to grab the first aid kit just in case.”

He dashes inside before I can argue. I can hear his heavy feet thunk-groaning on the sloping floor. My insides tighten, praying for it to hold. All around me, the leaves twitch and flutter. Birds flit at the very edge of my vision, leaving me jumpy.

“Lucas, I really want to go.”

He reappears in the doorway, grin in place. “Keep your pants on. Mr. Walker isn’t going to catch us on this thing.”

I try to smile, but I’m shaking too hard. It slides right off my lips. “Let’s just get moving.”

He chuckles on his first step out of the camper, and I see it before it even happens. The stair wobbles, and then his left foot searches for the next step, but a huge chunk is gone. Missing from where he kicked the cinder block out yesterday. I can’t even scream before it’s happening. He’s falling.

His balance pitches, and the first aid kit flies. Bandages flutter like moths as Lucas hurtles down. His fingers flail for the door frame, but he misses. The impact is awful, shoulder first into the dirt and limbs falling every which way.

Everything is screaming. Me and Lucas and the engine of the quad, still idling, ready to carry us to safety. I crouch beside Lucas, afraid to look or touch anything. He rolls over, face twisted in agony. When he tries to sit up, he’s gone ash-gray. Something’s really wrong. I look for a head wound first. No. It’s his shoulder. It’s crooked or his arm is too low or—

Oh no.

His eyes are screwed shut, and he’s pulling his arm across his middle like that will fix this, but it won’t. I’ve never seen a dislocated shoulder, but I’m pretty sure that’s what this is. And it’s way beyond fixing with the yellowed bandages and boxes of rolled gauze in our first aid kit.





Chapter 28


“Lucas,” I say, feeling close to tears.

His eyes pop open, searching the sky and finally landing on my face. “My shoulder.”

“I know.”

He groans, then lets out something that’s supposed to be a laugh, I think. “Escape a killer, get taken down by a stair.”

Technically, it was the absence of a stair, but it’s not important. I touch his stomach, afraid to get anywhere near his misshapen shoulder. “What do I do? What do we—”

He grits his teeth and braces his good arm on the ground, and I can tell he’s going to try to stand up. “We get the hell out of here.”

“You can’t drive like this,” I say.

He laughs, not looking like he’s inclined to disagree.

My face goes cold, lips numb as I stare at the rumbling four-wheeler. “I have no idea how to drive that, Lucas.”

“You can do anything, Sera,” he says, and he believes it, so I have to believe it too. “I’ll tell you how.”

My hands shake as I help him onto the seat. My whole body is rattling when I settle in front of him. I will do this. We don’t have any options left, so I follow his instructions and put it in gear.

We keep it in lower gears because there isn’t a trail. There’s barely enough space between the trees to weave in and out. At first, it was awful—I was bad with the clutch and worse with the brakes, and Lucas gritted through cries that made me flinch.

I learned fast. Maybe I’m not doing it like a pro, and maybe I’m going slow, but we are crossing through the forest fast enough to let the wind hit my face. We climb straight up when it gets steep. I tried to take it at a diagonal, and Lucas hollered about that right away. Too much danger of rolling. Instead, we have to stand up and kind of lean forward. It was uncomfortable for me, so I can’t even imagine what it was like for him.

At the top of one crest, I catch my first glimpse of the road, a winding gray snake with a yellow stripe, cutting its way through the green mountains. My heart bubbles up. It’s really happening. Help is one mountain away. We just have to get there.

The forest isn’t making it easy on us. The backside of the mountain is treacherous, stone ledges rising up so sharply, it’s hard to find a path down from the rim of the peak. In other spots, the mountain drops off a cliff and into nothing.

I turn left around a line of rocks that jut up like a hobbled fence. We’re completely turned around—this is not getting us closer to the road. I tighten my grip and try to ignore the stabbing bolts of pain shooting from my hand to my armpit. I also ignore the tightening in my chest because I know panic won’t help. There has to be a way through. I just need to find it.