Action & Adventure
All I could think was that I was in over my head again. The guy had one hand tight on my throat and I was pinned down. The other hand held a knife. He was snarling at me but I couldn't make out anything. Then I looked in his eyes and noticed that he was as scared as I was. He was breathing hard and he was trying to say something.
"You tell, I kill," was what I finally made out.
The door opened and two guys with ski masks on walked in. One walked straight to me. The other went straight to Lacey at her register. As they approached, I saw the guns come up. Lacey, Cam and I froze. The room suddenly went dead quiet except for the sound of hamburgers sizzling in the back and the buzz of the overhead fluorescent lights. I'd never even noticed the hum of the fluorescent lights before.
She drops the rifle to her shoulder. "Like I'd let you run around the forest with a loaded gun." She aims the rifle at the ground, and it occurs to me she's going to fire it. She thinks it is unloaded because that's how she keeps the gun, but I'm thinking about the cartridge I loaded, and I can't get the words out in time. She squeezes the trigger.
I lay on the gritty wooden floor of the filthy shack, frozen with terror. For weeks I had been hearing about the two girls who had disappeared, but I had never in a million years thought that something like that was going to happen to me.
But here I was, tied up, groggy, panic-stricken—and waiting. Waiting for whatever had happened to the girl who had been found "not alive." Waiting for whatever had happened to the other girl.
This couldn't be happening to me.
But it was.
The man stared at her and his brow cleared. He smiled with a kind of wonderment. "You're a healer." A statement, not a question. "I never hoped to find such a one in a place like this."
The moon sailed free of the shredded clouds and, as though drawn to its own likeness, flooded down onto Madeleine's hair, turning her golden curls into a gleaming beacon. She sat with Matthieu in a dinghy, her round, frightened face a pale moon on earth. Féolan was running before his mind had taken in what he had seen. Someone, somehow, had Dominic's children.
The bear lowers its head. When a dog looks like this, it means you could get bitten. When a bear looks like this, it means you could be lunch. The bear's eyes harden, as if he has lost patience with us. We're on his trail and he wants us off. The bear opens his jaws. Big jaws. Really big teeth. His jaws make a smacking sound.
I whisper, "He's going to eat us."
