What Lies in the Woods(30)

Our games had been fragile in the days since school. We all sensed an ending, and we weren’t ready to let go. But it was only after the fire that Cassidy suggested the Goddess Game.

The forces of nature were out of balance, she informed us, having gathered us in our usual clearing in the woods. We had to put them right by performing a series of rituals in the name of the goddesses—otherwise, great calamities would befall us.

“What calamities?” I remembered Liv asking.

“Oh, fires, floods, plagues, the usual,” Cassidy said with relish.

“Frogs,” I offered helpfully, sullenly standing with my back against a tree. I was angry about something. I was angry most of the time, back then.

Cass picked out our goddesses and assigned us tasks. As Hecate she would design the rituals, of course, and Liv-Athena would do research for us, and as Artemis the huntress I would find things. Magic things. Important things. Whatever my intuition told me the goddesses needed us to find.

We would need to do seven rituals, she’d said. Liv had objected, and I tried to compromise on four—four was better for Liv and her fixation on numbers as omens—but Cassidy insisted. Seven. No arguments. It would be fun, she said. It would be our game for the summer, and we’d take it seriously. She didn’t say one last time, but we all knew what she meant.

The first few weeks weren’t so different than any of our other games. I brought “treasures” from my dad’s collections or things I found out in the woods—a few things I stole from people in town. Liv read up on myths, and we rewrote them to suit our own sensibilities. Cass led us through the first “ritual,” which involved reciting what she claimed was a genuine prayer to Hecate while walking through the woods in a solemn procession, carrying lit candles.

We almost believed again. We were close. Standing on the edge, wanting to fall forward.

And then there’d been the fight. It wasn’t the first, not by a long shot. They started over any little thing. Liv would fret and try to make peace, and Cass and I would rip into each other.

I don’t remember what it was even about. I do remember the anger, the thorns of it in my veins, the heat of it in my skin. Cass, blond, beautiful, perfect, stood there with her arms crossed, and I wanted to crack her nose with my fist.

“You’re such a stuck-up bitch sometimes!” I screamed at her. “You think you can tell everybody what to do!”

“I’d rather be a stuck-up bitch than live in trash,” she yelled back, eyes fever bright.

I knew she didn’t mean it. She was just trying to get me to break. To hit her, so she could hit me back. There wasn’t anyone else to hurt, and we had to hurt something.

Sometimes I gave in to the fight we both wanted. Today I ran. She shouted after me, but I kept going. I had to spend this energy somewhere, and the other option was breaking her pretty face.

“Naomi, stop running! Come back! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, come back!”

They chased after me. I could hear them crashing through the forest behind me. I leapt over roots and scrambled over logs and ran without paying attention to where I was going. I only wanted to get away.

Hot tears streaked my cheeks. Trash. You’re trash. My lungs burned. I wasn’t Artemis, wasn’t a goddess who could endlessly run through the wilds with her sacred deer. But I couldn’t stop or turn back, because I couldn’t face them.

Trash.

Up ahead was a hump in the earth. A boulder, slablike, mostly covered with moss and trees. Only the face of it was bare, so that it formed a small hill, and beneath it was a gap, a hollow space.

Cass and Liv were catching up. Without thinking, I dropped to my belly and skittered under the boulder. I expected a shallow depression maybe big enough to hide in, but to my surprise the ground sloped away beneath me, and I half fell, half lowered myself.

The boulder formed the bulk of the roof of the space, and tree roots and the flow of water had carved the rest. There was a split toward the far side of the chamber, a gap that let in a narrow shaft of light and illuminated the web of tree roots holding up the “ceiling.” The chamber—cave—was about three feet tall, maybe five feet across, eight feet long. Enough room for a sitting child. Enough room for the body.

I held my breath. It couldn’t be real, I thought—but of course it was. I could have reached out and touched it.

The skeleton lay on its side. Bits of rotten clothing hung from the ribs. All the flesh had been stripped away.

Tentatively I reached out and touched the smooth brow of the skull. My fingers came away gritty. I shuddered.

The skull was cracked on the side of the head. Had that been what killed them?

Liv and Cass were calling. Reluctantly, I turned my back on the body. I pushed myself up the incline and scrambled out from the gap beneath the rock. Liv shrieked as I emerged, caked in dirt, like some primordial beast. Cass babbled apologies, cheeks damp with tears as she grabbed at me, begging forgiveness.

“You need to see this,” I said, and she fell silent.

I brought them down into the earth, Liv frightened, Cass curious. We knelt around the skeleton in awed and nervous silence.

“Who is it? What happened to them?” Liv asked.

I almost said then that we needed to get help. It almost happened that way: us running out of the woods, telling the first person we saw that we’d found a body. A story we’d tell the rest of our lives, the time we found that skeleton in the woods. Maybe none of the rest of it would have happened. No Stahl, no scars, no shattered lives.