Near the Bone(55)

Mattie closed her eyes so she wouldn’t be distracted by the shadows she thought she saw around the stream. She listened hard, tuning out the sound of C.P. and Jen breathing, the scrape of their sleeves against their jackets. She felt like she was stretching out her hearing, extending it over the stream and into the woods beyond, like she was a sensing bat.

Mattie opened her eyes. There was nothing. No William.

Was the creature there? She couldn’t hear it, hadn’t seen anything like its gigantic shadow. That didn’t mean anything, though. It could hide in the trees. It could make itself soundless and invisible if it wanted.

It’s not natural, Mattie thought, and she wondered, just for a moment, if William was right and it actually was a demon.

William isn’t right about anything, she told herself. Not a single thing.

“So do you think it’s okay to cross or what?” C.P. whispered. He and Jen had ranged themselves on either side of Mattie, and she felt like a very small book between two oversized bookends.

Mattie’s eyes had finally adjusted to the shadows, and there was a pale cast of moonlight over the clearing. She realized then that they were standing in roughly the same place from which the creature had emerged a couple of nights before, when Mattie was curled up on the bank of the stream. That meant that they were very close to the traps and the path back to the cabin.

We didn’t get very far at all, she thought. I thought we were so far away from William, from the cabin, from the life I wanted to run from.

It had seemed like they’d walked and walked, but Mattie supposed that it had only seemed like that because their progress was so slow. They’d been dragging Griffin along at the end.

Griffin. It already seemed like days since the creature snatched him away and disappeared.

“Carefully,” Mattie whispered. “Follow me.”

She stepped out of the trees and immediately wished she hadn’t. She imagined this was how a chipmunk felt, dashing from the cover of one bush to another, always hoping not to catch the eye of a hawk or an owl.

Except the hawk that would catch you has claws the size of your face.

Mattie couldn’t even dash—she was far too weak to run. Her body protested every step, all the bruises that William had inflicted over the past days crying out. She was tired and hungry and none of it mattered because they had to survive. If she was uncomfortable, if she was in pain, then what did it matter? It meant that she wasn’t dead.

Jen and C.P. huddled close to her on either side. She heard C.P.’s breath coming in harsh pants, and Jen gripped Mattie’s arm.

They’re relying on me, she thought in wonder. They think I can keep them safe, that I know what I’m doing.

The idea made her want to shrink away. She couldn’t be responsible for their lives. She didn’t know what she was doing or how they would find Griffin or how they would escape the creature when they did. She wasn’t even sure if they should go back to the cabin. William could be waiting there, secretly, waiting for her to walk through the door so he could grab her and put her in the Box.

She thought of the money she’d hidden under the couch. If she had that money, if she could get off the mountain, then she could use it to buy something like freedom. But it wasn’t worth it to risk the cabin just for that. It was the weapons, and maybe the knowledge she could gain once she opened the trunk.

Maybe inside the trunk there was information about Heather.

Mattie needed to know if her sister was still alive, if Heather was somewhere waiting for her. She needed to know if she had a home to go home to.

They reached the stream, and Mattie pointed out the place where there were some rocks to cross and indicated they should follow her.

“C-cold,” she said. “Don’t . . . fall . . . in.”

“Yeah, because I’m really worried about hypothermia or frostbite at the moment,” C.P. said as he followed behind Mattie.

“You should be,” Jen said, the last one to cross. “It’s not a joke.”

“I know it’s not, but hypothermia is kind of low on my list of things that could kill me. A gunshot wound seems more likely.”

C.P. was the one who’d suggested going to the cabin but he seemed reluctant now. Mattie didn’t have time to soothe him, to make him feel better about his choice. She walked along the bank of the stream until she found the place where they kept the snares. No one had checked them in the last couple of days, and there were two dead rabbits in the traps. One of them had tried to gnaw its foot off but bled out before it finished. A dark stain of blood was visible against the snow.

She indicated that the other two should follow her. “Stay . . . close. No . . . light.”

The deer path was obvious to Mattie, who’d walked it so many times, but she knew it wouldn’t look like much to those unfamiliar with it. She didn’t want to lose one of them in the dark.

Jen followed Mattie, and C.P. behind. The path was wide enough to admit two side-by-side but Mattie stayed close to the edge of it, hugging close to the trees. She had a vague idea that this made her less obvious, that anyone (anything) watching the forest would have trouble deciding if it was her or a tree they’d seen.

It was hard not to remember the last time she’d walked this trail in the dark, how the creature had moved in time with her, how it had stalked her so silently.

It’s not there now, she told herself. You would know. You would feel it.