What Lies in the Woods(46)

Jessi Walker’s niece wasn’t sure when she’d actually gone missing. Sometime after April, two years before my attack. I’d looked up how long it would take for a body to become a skeleton, and my best guess was that it would have happened within a year or two of lying in the Grotto, so that matched. And that was the “quiet summer.”

It was all just guesswork. How had Liv figured this out?

I started to bookmark the page and close it out, and then I froze. I hadn’t looked at the username the niece had created to post on the message board.

Persephone McAllister.

The name on the dead woman’s bracelet wasn’t hers. It was her niece’s. A remembrance of the girl she left behind but never forgot.

I pulled up the case entry again, heart beating fast and hard. The attached photo showed a young woman in a cotton sundress, smirking a little at the camera. She had brown, wavy hair and a slender build—Stahl’s type. The look in her eye hinted at an urge to wander, a restlessness that had wound its brambles around my own heart.

It was her. It was Persephone.

“Found you,” I whispered. She smiled that coy little smile at me, her weight balanced on her back foot, entirely aware of the camera. I almost felt like I recognized her. Like if I passed her in the street, I would have waved. I’d been nine years old when she left home, and she was nineteen—a decade older, not someone I would have spent any time with.

A decade younger than I was now. Had Stahl offered her a ride? Had he dragged her into the woods, hidden her away where no one could find her?

I shuddered. I understood what Cass meant, now, when she said she wanted to tell Persephone that she’d had a daughter. He’s dead, I wanted to whisper to those bones.

I’d found Persephone, just as Liv had, and this must be how Liv had felt, too, like she had searched the underworld for her ghost and sighted her at last. Jessi wasn’t Persephone but Eurydice, and Liv was Orpheus, guiding her back toward the surface only to—foolishly, inevitably—look back as she had been forbidden to do, and now both of them were lost below.

Or had Orpheus been lost with his bride? I couldn’t remember anymore. We’d known all the stories by heart back then, small-town girls who could recite the names of all nine Muses and the lineage of ancient heroes, but that was a long time ago.

I rubbed my hands over my arms, suddenly cold. Her name was Jessi. She wasn’t Persephone at all. Inexplicable grief passed over me like a shadow—mourning for the thing we’d imagined her to be. She hadn’t been our talisman, our goddess, our protector. She had been a girl, so much younger than I was now, who died in the forest and was lost. Who was missed. Who was mourned.

My first instinct was to call Liv. My second was to call Cass. But Liv was gone, and Cass—I’d told her I wouldn’t go looking. I’d broken my promise.

My fingernails dug at the scar on my wrist. Persephone, Persephone, I thought, and the voice in my mind was the voice of my childhood self—and Cass’s and Liv’s, too, echoing together in that tiny space with our hands clasped in a ring.

Speak to us, Goddesses. Tell us what to do. How to please you. Hecate, Artemis, Athena, Persephone. The air thrumming with the power of our belief, our wanting to believe. You go first, Cass had told Liv, handing her the knife. We would each cut ourselves, just enough for a few drops of blood. The fifth ritual. But Liv’s hand shook, and I took it from her. I’ll do it.

I’d cut too deep, the knife skating up the side of my wrist with startling speed. It was just supposed to be a few drops. Liv had screamed. I’d started panicking.

Cass, though, stayed calm. She wrapped her jacket around it tight and we ran to my house, where we could be sure no one would be paying attention. Cass cleaned it with hydrogen peroxide, then sewed it up with a needle and fishing line while I bit down on a dishrag. Liv hovered on the other side of the room, hands pressed over her ears, trying not to retch. She hated blood.

Cass bandaged it up, and I’d hidden it under my sleeve while it healed. At first Cass had said she and Liv would do their cuts later, but eventually she declared that my sacrifice was enough to complete the ritual.

Part of me had wondered, later, if that was where things had gone wrong. We owed the Goddesses our blood, and if we didn’t give it willingly, they would claim it.

But there had been no Goddesses. No Persephone. Only a girl, long lost.

I shut the computer and its image of Jessi Walker. I jolted out of my chair. My fingers skimmed over my skin, bumping over scar tissue, a half-conscious inventory of old wounds. I combed my hand through my hair, pulling hard enough to hurt, and there was relief in the pain. It was simple. Stimulus and response, a clarity of causation that was better than the mire of my mind.

I gulped down a breath. This was the point at which I should call someone, but I had no one to call. My therapist, I supposed, but I hadn’t talked to her since Stahl died, and the idea of explaining everything made me feel ill. I wanted Liv.

I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes. I couldn’t breathe.

I dropped my hands and strode to the door, my thoughts half-formed and wild. I walked the few steps to room 4 and knocked before I could think better of it.

Ethan answered the door, looking concerned. “Naomi. Are you okay? What’s up?” He’d lost the cozy sweater he usually wore and was down to an undershirt and jeans. The sweater had hidden a surprisingly muscular build and a tattoo on his left shoulder—a solid black ring about four inches across. He rubbed a thumb across it absently as he spoke.