Cemetery Boys(118)

The tires spun over loose dirt and the truck jerked to a stop between the road and the woods. Wendy stared out the front window into a tangle of branches. Her sharp breaths robbed the cab of fresh air. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. Her neck and temples pounded.

Wendy cursed under her breath.

She pulled her stiff fingers from where they’d cramped around the steering wheel. With trembling hands, she patted down her chest and thighs, making sure she was in one piece. Then she buried her face in them.

How could she be so stupid? She’d let her nerves get the better of her. She knew never to look away from the road while driving, especially at night. Her dad was going to lose it! And what if she’d totaled her truck? Wendy could’ve gotten herself killed—or worse, someone else.

Then she remembered the mass in the road.

Wendy’s breath caught in her throat. It could be a dead animal, but she knew in her gut it wasn’t. She twisted in her seat and tried to see out the back window, but the red glow of her taillights hardly lit up the outline of whatever she had almost run over.

Please don’t be a dead body.

Wendy struggled to untangle herself from the seat belt. She tumbled out of her truck and immediately looked to the woods. She took a few steps back, watching them cautiously. But they were silent and unmoving in the heavy summer air. The only sounds were the faint breeze through the leaves and her own labored breaths.

Tentatively, she peered at the front of her truck. It was pulled over onto the dirt shoulder of the road, the front bumper dangerously close to a thick tree, but still running. There was a dent in the hood from whatever had landed on it. The windshield was cracked—or, no, not cracked.

Were those scratches?

Wendy brushed her fingers over the lines. There were four of them parallel to one another in a long swipe. What could’ve done that? It hadn’t been a deer or a branch.

And what had she almost hit in the road? Her head snapped to look back over her shoulder to the mass in the middle of the road. It still hadn’t moved.

Wendy jogged toward the dark figure, trying to balance on the balls of her feet, so as to make as little sound as possible as she crept closer. She took each step slowly, willing her eyes to open wider, to adjust so she could see in the dark. She stood on her tiptoes and craned her neck to get a better look just as a cloud above shifted and a silvery glow was cast over the boy lying on his side.

A shudder racked Wendy’s body and she ran forward, falling to her knees beside him. Sharp gravel pressed through her jeans.

“Hello?” Her voice shook and her hands trembled, hovering over the boy, not knowing what to do. “Are you okay?”

Are you alive?

He let out a pained groan.

She snatched her hands back. “Oh my God.” Wendy scrambled around to his other side to get a look at his face. She’d learned from her mom to never move someone you’d found unconscious.

He was lying on his side with his arms curled into his chest, as if he were sleeping. He was clothed in some sort of material that wrapped around his shoulders and torso, hanging down to his knees. She couldn’t tell what it was in the dark, but it had rough, jagged edges and it smelled like the leaves she dug out of the gutters in spring.

Bracing one hand on the ground, Wendy leaned in closer. Slowly and carefully, she reached out and pushed his wet hair back from his face, brushing her thumb over his forehead. There was something about the way his freckles ran across his nose and under his closed eyes that was familiar …

Before she could work it out, a groan sounded deep in the boy’s chest. He rolled onto his back as his eyes opened and focused on hers.

Wendy’s natural inclination was to shrink back, but she couldn’t move.

His eyes were astonishing. A deep shade of cobalt with crystalline blue starbursts exploding around his pupils.

She knew those eyes. There were the same ones she’d drawn over and over again but could never get right. But that was impossible. It couldn’t be—

“Wendy?” the boy breathed, the smell of sweet grass brushing across her face.

Wendy scrambled back from him. At the same time, the boy’s cosmos eyes rolled back and fell closed again.

Wendy clamped her hand over her mouth.

He was older than the boy from her drawings. His face wasn’t as round and his cheeks weren’t as full as the dozens of sketches that littered her car, but there was something about the slope of his nose and the curve of his chin that she recognized.

Breaths shook her shoulders and escaped through her nose. How did he know her name? Her heart thrashed against her ribs like a wild animal. She couldn’t recognize him. There was no possible way that the boy she was looking at was the same boy from her drawings.

Peter Pan was not real. He was just a story her mother had made up. She was just freaking out and her mind was playing tricks on her. She couldn’t possibly trust what her gut was telling her.

Even though every fiber of her being screamed to her that it was him.

It didn’t make any sense. Her imagination was getting the better of her. She needed to get him help.

Wendy tried to focus and ignore her swimming head. She dug her hand into her pocket and pulled out her phone. The screen was blurry and, in the back of her mind, she realized her eyes were watering, but she was able to call 9-1-1.

As soon as the ringing stopped, before the dispatcher could say a word, Wendy choked out, “Help!”