One Was Lost(68)

“Do you have the keys?” he asks.

“What keys?” I follow his gaze to the quad, and there are no keys in the ignition. Did I pocket them? God, how could I not know this? How could I flake out about this?

I pat my pockets, front and back, and swear, digging in each one to be sure, but I don’t have the keys. I don’t remember taking them out of the quad. I search the ground and look around. Nothing.

“Oh my God, Lucas. I left them in the quad. They should be there.”

“It’s OK,” he says. “Just breathe.”

Oh, I’m breathing all right. I’m gulping air so fast and hard that my cheeks feel fuzzy and my vision is graying at the edges. I reach for a tree and slow down.

I just need to think. The keys have to be here. I just need to open my eyes and look. I take a slow breath, and something shuffles ahead of me in the trees.

Wait.

My eyes pop open, and Lucas shifts behind me. He’s behind me.

“I saw something up there,” I whisper.

Lucas goes stone-still, and we both search the trees beyond the quad. The rain is falling harder now, heavy drops plopping into my hair, onto my shoulders. Another shuffle, and my eyes catch on a shadow.

There’s a flicker of movement behind the quad. The jangling sound of keys that sends my heart into freefall.

My face goes cold as the shadow emerges, stretching into an arm. A hand. My throat cinches shut as fingers wrap around the trunk of a baby maple. I catch a glimpse of purple nails and one charred, bloody stump.

A stump where Ms. Brighton’s finger should be.





Chapter 32


“It’s her,” I say, still breathless. Panting out every word. “Ms. Brighton is Hannah’s stepsister. She did this to us.”

Ms. Brighton’s mud-dyed shirt is stained with things I can’t look at. Her smile twists, and my head swims. Spins.

“Do you see how the forest brings the rain again?” she asks. “It was my sacrifices. I pledged my devotion, and look what the forest gave me.”

It’s a little kid voice, shrill with delight. Like the one I heard in the valley. God, it’s really her. Even after reading Ms. Brighton’s name on Hannah’s memorial card, I couldn’t quite swallow this. Now I have no choice, and the truth is going down like fishhooks.

“Your finger,” I say. “That’s a sacrifice?”

She inclines her head. “And the deer.”

“You’re alive,” Lucas says, a bit of wonder in his face.

I bump my back into him to hold him away from her because he doesn’t know. He hasn’t put all the pieces together yet, but I have. Lucas and Madison didn’t see Ms. Brighton’s body, and neither did we. She killed a deer and skinned it. That’s what we saw.

Lucas moves, and I snag his arm to hold him back. She is not here to save us.

“I can’t believe you’re alive,” he says again, obviously confused. He’s probably in shock.

“I’m full of lives,” she says. “We are all full of lives. Do you feel yours now? The past stays with us, even when we wish it would go.”

She scowls and is transformed. Her quirky crystal earrings dangle like broken teeth. The streaks on her hand-dyed shirt look more like blood than earth, and that mouth that once smiled so easily now gapes like a maw.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Lucas asks. He shifts on his feet, tries to move past me.

I pull at the back of his shirt. “Lucas, don’t.”

Ms. Brighton laughs. I can see black grime caked under her nails and marker stains on her fingers. The rain is sending filth running down her arms and legs in murky rivulets.

“Let him come, Hannah. Let the forest find its justice.”

“I’m not Hannah.”

“But you were last time. You were Hannah, and he was Brodie. I’ve waited for the forest to show me who defiled you all those years ago. And it did, darling. It did.”

Darling. The word sends snakes slithering in my chest. She lifts a hand, and I spot a flash of metal in her fingers. A knife. Old-looking, with an antler handle. That’s what she used to cut her own finger off.

I take a step back, and Lucas comes with me, stumbling.

“What is this?” he asks. “Who cut off her finger?”

I can practically feel him trying to wrap his brain around what’s unfolding in front of us.

“She cut it off herself,” I say, swiping rain out of my face. “She did this, Lucas. All of it, for some twisted version of justice for Hannah. She thinks we’re the reincarnation of those four kids. That’s what the papers were about. I’m Hannah and you’re Brodie.”

Ms. Brighton is moving around the quad. “I don’t think it. Look at yourself, Sera. Look how you love to direct the tragedies, the plays where someone dies at the end. Look how you know to avoid men. You know who you really are.”

“Holy shit, she’s crazy,” Lucas says.

I don’t respond because I’m trying to find a way out. The path that leads down to Mr. Walker is beside me, but that’s a dead end. She’s by the quad, trapping us from the direction we came. The only way out is to go on ahead, to just run up the cliff side and hope to God we find a way around the mountain and to the road.