What Lies in the Woods(92)

“Wrong kind of Green. Green Mountain Services is the name of the Barneses’ old consulting company,” I said. I stared at the words like they might rearrange themselves into something that made more sense. Marcus Barnes had paid us off, but Jim Green had claimed credit? How did that make any sense? If either one of them had done it, they wouldn’t be covering for the other. They hated each other. Famously. “You didn’t know?”

“I wasn’t exactly detail-oriented at the time,” he said, shuffling his feet.

Marcus Barnes. It didn’t make any sense. My mind reeled. Could it have been Marcus in the woods? But what possible reason would he have to attack me? None of it made any sense, and I couldn’t remember. I must have seen something. I must have heard something, sensed something—but it was all lost in the fog.

Or maybe I just hadn’t tried hard enough, too afraid to go back to that place. Too afraid to remember.

“Where are you off to?” my father asked. I was already past him, already on my way out the door.

“I have to go,” I said.

“I got that part,” he grumbled, but I didn’t indulge him. If I stopped, if I faltered, I would fall apart.

I had to go back to the start.



* * *



Light lay like fragile lace across the trees, afternoon tumbling into evening. I didn’t follow the trail this time. I walked off the path and straight in among the trees in my funeral dress. I was past sense. Past logic. I wanted a magical incantation that would sort the world into its proper order. I did not want to reach the end of the road I was traveling and find what was waiting there. I wanted to go back. Back before I’d seen that piece of paper, back before I knew Ethan had lied, back before the blade made constellations of scars on my skin.

So let me go back to the beginning. Let me stand in the woods where I’d bled, where I’d almost died, and let me unweave everything that had followed.

Start again.

This time, I walked as if I knew exactly where I was going. Past the hidden places where we’d tucked our treasures, past the props and backdrops of our dramas. Our voices echoed through the trees, and my own ghost walked beside me. I stumbled in my sensible heels, the wet of the woods seeping in and leaving my feet numb, but I never slowed.

Here. This had been the spot, more or less. I’d been sitting on that rock, eating my lunch. We’d had some little argument again, Cass needling me with insults guaranteed to make me run or make me fight. This time I’d chosen to run. I’d sat alone, stewing on my anger and eating my peanut butter sandwich, and then—

But the memories shredded into the same confusion as ever. Stahl’s face falsely imprinted over reality. Ragged gaps where pain had obliterated all else. The babble of voices—Cass’s and Liv’s, the voices of rescuers, weaving in and out of each other impossibly, without any sense of time line.

I strode blindly away from the clearing, chasing my ghost backward through memory. The slip of a girl in her oversized sweatshirt, marching angrily through the woods. Clambering out from under the boulder.

They’d been here. I lay on my stomach and wriggled through the gap, and then I turned back, peering out at the woods. You could just see the rock where I’d sat. Where the attack had started. They would have been able to see it—see all of it. Oscar or Big Jim or Marcus Barnes, whoever it had been.

I turned away and wrapped my arms around my knees. The sun slanted down on Persephone’s bones. Jessi’s bones, I reminded myself. She was never Persephone. She was never anything but a corpse. She couldn’t protect us, couldn’t heal the wounds of the world the way Cass claimed she could. The way we tried so hard to believe that she would, if only we did what she asked of us.

Liv had believed it most of all, as she always did. And looking back, she was the one who needed to believe it. It wasn’t the world that needed fixing, it was her. And Cass had promised her that Persephone would give her the kind of peace she so desperately needed.

And so we’d done the rituals. We’d made the offerings. And all along, she’d been just some poor dead girl who’d dreamed of escape just like we did.

I picked up a string of beads, flinging them angrily away from the skeleton. We’d turned her into this thing, an altar for our own unhappiness. We’d never treated her like a person. Like someone who would be mourned and missed. If we’d told someone what we’d found, her family might have answers by now.

Liv might still be alive.

I clawed at the other offerings. Moldering playing cards, a brooch, an earring missing its mate, four wave-polished stones. I gathered them all, moving first mechanically, then with manic energy, shoving them into a pile at the back of the little cave.

I grabbed something smooth and wooden. At first I thought it was just a stick, something that had fallen down here among the bones, but then my thumb brushed against a bit of metal. I looked at it in the slanting light. It was a folding knife. I flicked it open. The blade was caked with something dark. The wood was stained with it, too.

My breath hitched. We’d never left a knife here. It wasn’t the sort of thing Persephone would have liked.

I lifted the edge of my shirt, and set the tip of the blade against my skin. Against the ridge of scar tissue just below my ribs.

If I’d been dead, they might have been able to make casts of my wounds and learn exactly what shape the blade had been, but inconveniently, they’d had to stitch up my flesh, had to widen some of the cuts to operate and to check that nerves hadn’t been damaged. The exact blade had remained a mystery, so they couldn’t match it to any of Stahl’s preferred weapons. Not inconsistent had been the most they could prove.