What Lies in the Woods(104)

He closed his eyes. His breath plumed in the air, and for a moment I could feel it, the fantasy shared between us—that we would walk out of here, and everything would be okay.

Then Cody shuddered and opened his eyes, and I saw the moment the fantasy shattered. The moment he realized that he couldn’t protect both me and himself, and made his choice. “Naomi,” he said softly. “I wish I didn’t know what a liar you are.”

I had lived twenty years and change in a body that knew how to survive when the world turned against it. All the sights and the sounds and the sensations of that day were a hopeless slurry, but survival—that, my body remembered. Without the confusion of hope and trust to muddle things, it remembered it perfectly.

I launched myself off the tree before he finished talking, knocking into him. He went sprawling in the dirt. I scrambled forward, clawing the ground before getting my feet under me.

I ran straight forward, not daring to spend the time to turn back toward the road. Distance would save me. Handguns aren’t accurate at long range. Not in the hands of an unskilled shooter. Not with the evening darkness gathering swiftly around us.

Fifty yards and I’d be safe, I told myself, and I knew these woods. Just run.

The first shot hit a tree trunk with an explosion of bark. The second zipped somewhere overhead.

The third shot was the lucky one.

People always asked me what it felt like to get stabbed. Turned out it felt a lot like getting shot. The impact first, not the pain, a punch to the back that took my legs out from under me. I collapsed as Cody tramped toward me. I lay still, facedown. It didn’t hurt. Adrenaline, I thought. The adrenaline was masking it. The pain would find me soon. It knew me too well not to find me. But maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe it wouldn’t have time.

Cody reached me. He stood over me, panting. “Goddammit, Naomi,” he said. He knelt down and grabbed my shoulder. I held my breath, which was easier than breathing, anyway. I didn’t like what that said about what the bullet might have hit.

I stayed limp as he flipped me over.

“Fuck,” he said. There were tears in his voice. It was getting harder to hold on to the world. I risked opening my eyes to slits. He was looking away, wiping at his face with his sleeve.

“Dammit,” he whispered again.

He was crouching down. The gun was in his right hand, resting on his knee. His grip on it was loose. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to leave without making sure that I was dead. And the pain was coming now, around the edges of that blessed numbness that the galloping adrenaline brought with it.

I had nothing left in this world. Not one thing to fight for. Nothing except myself.

It was enough. Somehow, it was enough.

I pushed myself up from the ground, and with the movement came the pain at last, roaring in as blood gushed from the hole the bullet had bored through me. Cody jerked. The moment of shock was all I had—and all I needed. I wrapped both hands around the gun and twisted as he lifted it to fire again.

The bullet ripped through my fingers and tore through the meat of Cody’s leg. Blood burst in a mist; I could feel it on my eyelids, taste it on my tongue. Cody screamed. So did I, a strangled yell as agony ripped its way up my arm. But the pain was mine, and it was proof that I wasn’t dead, so it didn’t slow me. I rolled. Shoved myself up on my elbows.

I half crawled, half staggered away as Cody howled in pain. I didn’t look back. I shoved the bloodied stumps of my ring and pinky fingers against my opposite arm and held my forearm tight to my body to stop the bleeding as best I could, and I barreled forward. It felt more like falling than running.

I plunged through the trees. The boulder was up ahead. I veered for it. I knew where it was without thinking. Without having to look. That dark mouth had been calling to me for twenty-two years. I had forgotten how to listen, that was all. I had forgotten the sound of her voice, but it was all around me now. In me.

The Goddess of oblivion was calling me home.

The darkness of the cave welcomed me. I slung myself beneath the stone and scraped at the soft mud behind me to obscure the slick of blood I left. Gravity won out over my failing strength and I slid down the small slope, coming to a rest on my side, staring at Persephone’s bones.

I could hear Cody moving. Limping along. He called my name. I squeezed my eyes shut. I had to have left a trail of blood. He could follow it if he saw it. But I hadn’t told him about the boulder. I hadn’t told him about the cave. He might not know.

He might not know, and so I would be able to die here, die with the bones of another lost girl. And we would rest, shrouded, together.

“He killed you,” I whispered. He hadn’t meant to. It didn’t matter. He’d let her die and he’d let her be lost, all these years. The secret had stayed lodged under his skin like a splinter, and infection had festered around it. Until we found it, and pricked our fingertips with that diseased bit of wood, and the infection had entered our blood as well. Had wrapped our lives around these bones and wrapped Liv’s fingers around the knife.

That secret had driven the knife into my back. It should have killed me. Cody had no idea as he wept over my bleeding body that he’d set this in motion. Not until Liv’s guilt had driven her to go digging for that splinter, that secret, slicing open the silence. All that pus and rot came spilling out, and the secret had killed her, too.

And there were other infections, too, all spreading from that first push, the crack of Jessi’s skull against the rock.