by Anya Allyn
“Sure?” Molly scanned the woods.
“Yeah,” he said.
Molly and Sophronia pulled their pistols out. We’d only been able to take two guns from the museum stores—we’d gone back for supplies, food and weapons, but Mr. Calhoun had dogged our every step. Sophronia had only just managed to slip two guns, knives and some ammunition out of the weapons cache. Molly and Sophronia were the best shots, so it had made sense for them to carry the pistols.
Aisha pointed to a patch of orange, just visible behind a distant tree. “There!”
“Whoever that is, they’re small,” said Ben. “Sometimes, they send out kids as scouts—knowing few people are going to shoot a kid.”
"Who are you talking about?" asked Aisha.
"Cannibals," said Ben in a dead voice. "We call them the Eaters."
“So, the Eaters could know we’re here?” Aisha took in a shuddering breath.
Figures appeared from the dark forest line.
“We better go.” Ben pulled a large knife from the back pocket of his jeans.
A thin, high scream shattered the icy air. A child’s scream. A girl of five or six years of age ran out from the forest toward us. Two people who looked like a teenage boy and girl ran and grabbed her. They pushed and pulled her in the opposite direction. A group of five or six adults moved behind them.
“It’s probably a trick,” said Ben. “They’re hoping we’ll follow them.”
The small girl wrestled with her captors. “Missy! Calliope!”
My back froze. “It’s Frances!”
“You know her?” Ben turned to us with desperation in his eyes. “There’s a lot of them—and there could be more.”
Molly started toward Frances, without speaking a word.
"She must have followed us through the refraction," breathed Sophronia.
“Stay here!” I cried to Sophronia, reaching for the knife inside my jacket.
Ben, Aisha and I ran after Molly.
Molly raised her gun as she raced toward Frances. “Hand her over!”
The teenagers that held Frances tilted their chins defiantly. The adults—three men and a woman stood with knives in their fists. I expected to see cruelty in their expressions, but they stared back at us with a dull desperation.
“She’s ours,” said the girl holding Frances. “We found her.”
“She doesn’t belong with you.” Ben held out his knife,
The woman shook her head. “We’ve seen you around here before—but not them.” She glanced around at all of us. “New faces means there’s a stash of food around here somewhere. You girls must have been holed up here with a crapload of supplies. And you’re going to take us to it.”
The men stared at us with sharp interest in their eyes.
“We’re not from here,” Molly told them. “Now give us Frances and we’ll let you go.”
A man with gaunt cheeks and hollow eyes took a step in Molly's direction, a large knife in his hand. “You don’t got bullets. No one here’s got bullets. ’Cept maybe that cop we keep seeing who still thinks he’s on the beat. And this one odd old guy who looks a hundred years old who wanders around out here. There’s all kinds of weird ones out in the forest.”
“Don’t come closer,” Molly warned him.
“Why don’t you just give up now?” he said. “Make it easier on yourself. We don’t like what we do, but what else can we do? It’s the end of the world.” He ran at her.
Taking aim, Molly shot at his legs. He fell to the ground with a howling yell, grabbing his thigh.
“Jake!” A woman knelt beside him, placing a shaking hand on his bloodied leg. She stared up at Molly with hate in her eyes.
“I said, let her go.” Molly pointed the gun straight ahead.
“We’ve all got guns,” Ben lied. “We don’t want to waste them on you, but we will if you don’t give us the girl.”
The teenagers loosened their hold on Frances—Frances not hesitating to bolt from them. Running to Molly, she wrapped her arms around her middle.
A blond man with a scruffy goatee held his knife high, staring fixedly at the blade for a moment as it caught the gray light of morning. Falling to his knees, he plunged the knife into the chest of the man Molly had shot.
The woman screamed shrilly. “Bastard! He’s your friend!”
The blond man wiped sweat from across his face with the back of his arm, then pulled the knife out. “Jake can’t run with us with a bad leg, can he?”
Crying over the still body, the woman slipped the ring from the man’s finger, and placed it on her own hand, next to a wedding ring. I guessed that these two had been married.
We backed away. The blond man and another hauled Jake away on their shoulders—almost reverently, as though it were a funeral procession. The woman and the teenagers followed behind. I shuddered to think what they would actually do with his body. The teenagers stared at us with dazed expressions. I was glad I didn’t know them—they hadn’t gone to my school. But how many of the kids I’d gone to school with had ended up roaming the forests like this?
Molly crouched down to Frances, hugging her. “Those people almost took you away. What are you doing here?”
Frances’ small body quaked in her plastic boots, jeans and orange parka. “I didn’t want you to leave me behind. You were asleep for so long and then you woke and I didn’t want you to go away from me again.” Her words came out in a rush of remorse.
“You have been following us the whole time?’ Sophronia asked Frances gently.
She nodded. “I thought if you saw me, you’d send me back. So I hid myself, like Ethan taught me to do when we had to leave the museum to look for food.”
Molly breathed out a stream of condensed air. “Let’s go. Before any more people come.”
We walked back to Sophronia—Sophronia holding out her arms to catch Frances in a hug.
Snow began to drift down as we all started out again, together. I was glad of the snow fall—it would cover our tracks.
A few times, I wondered if Ben had lost his way as we zigzagged the trees. But he seemed to keep finding his path.
After about half an hour of walking, he turned to us. “Okay, we just need to head off to the left for a bit, if you guys want to see Raif.”
Aisha looked around at everyone. “Please.”
“But what if he tries to stop you from doing... what you came here to do?” A look of concern visited Molly’s clear blue eyes.
“Maybe he can come with us, help us—what if there’s more of those Eaters around?” Aisha looked over her shoulder for emphasis.
“How far, Ben?” asked Molly.
“Only about ten minutes. We’ve been staying close to the Fiveash house—there’s a food source there, and blankets.”
Molly nodded to Aisha. “None of us have much family left. I understand you wanting to hold onto who you have left. Let’s go.”
We followed Ben. The trees and bushes grew thicker here, and the clouds moving over the pale sun grayed and darkened the woods.
Sophronia tapped me on the arm. “Perhaps we should not do this. This world changes people. Ben may not be the person you remember from school.”
I gazed ahead at Ben’s long, thin frame. What if he were leading us into a whole colony of Eaters? I glanced at his freckled profile—downy hair sprouting on his chin and his brow drawn down and determined.
As if by instinct, Molly glanced over at us.
“I’ll go with Aisha,” I told Sophronia and Molly. “The rest of you should wait here until we get back. Anyway, Soph is struggling to walk the distance as it is.”
I continued on with Ben and Aisha, praying that Ben’s estimation of a quick ten minute walk was accurate. It was easy to lose track of time out here, and I started to worry that we’d already been walking too long.
Ben pointed ahead at a set of boulders rising from the snow. I couldn’t see any kind of dwelling there at all.
Stepping over to the boulders, Ben k
nelt. He pulled away snow-covered branches from between two towering boulders. A dark space revealed itself beneath.
Ben shrugged. “Sorry, but you kind of have to crawl through here.”
When he saw our hesitation, he moved onto his belly and crawled through.
“I’m going in,” said Aisha.
She disappeared inside. The next second, I heard her gasping cry.
I clenched my fists, uncertain of what to do. Our mission to see Jessamine was more important than anything else. I couldn’t risk anything stopping me from making my way back to her.
Dropping to my knees, I tried staring in—but the passage was so low and dark I could see nothing.
Ben’s face appeared before me, his grey eyes large and confused. “Cassie, you have to come in so that I replace the sticks. Can’t have anyone finding us here.”
I remembered that same expression on his face at school, when he stared at Lacey from the pool at Ladies Well—when he was trying to understand who she was.
“What’s up with Aisha?”
“You’ll see,” he told me.
Drawing a long breath, I crawled in—Ben helping me through and onto my feet. Inside, lamps lit the small space and the biting cold of the outside went away. A low ceiling of hard, packed ice spanned overhead. Pieces of furniture and cushions sat on a floor of carpet—I recognized some of it as being from the Fiveash house. Everything smelled wet and musty, mixed with old food odors.
Aisha stood with her arms wrapped around a male. He raised his eyes to me. It was Raif. His cheeks had hollowed, and he looked older. Not like a boy anymore. Aisha took a step back from him, turning to me with wet eyes and cheeks.
Raif wore no shirt—I guessed he had been washing himself by the look of the bowl and sponge on the floor. He turned slightly as he reached for a jacket. His right arm was missing—a concave hole where his shoulder should be. I now knew why Aisha had cried out when she’d seen him. He shrugged the jacket on, not bothering with any kind of shirt.
The last time I’d seen him, he’d been so angry, hating me for sticking up for Ethan. I could tell he’d remembered that last heated conversation he’d had with me—a slightly sheepish, incredulous smile spreading across his face. He held out his arm and I crossed the small space to hug him.
“Cassie Claiborne. I thought you died, along with my sister.” A frown deepened in his forehead and his expression grew serious. “Bloody hell, where were you girls all this time? Whoever it was—take me to him, and I’ll kill him.”
“Raif,” said Aisha softly. “We’re okay. I’ll tell you what happened, but not right now.”
I moved back, nodding at Raif.
“No, you tell me now.” His eyes were large as he stared at us. “I need to know. You can’t just walk in here and not tell me where you’ve been.”
Aisha wiped tears from her face. “Please understand that it’s going to take a long time to explain, and time is something we don’t have.” She wrung her hands together. “Please—Ben wouldn’t tell me—are Mum and Dad—?”
Her words stopped midair as Raif shook his head. “They’re gone. I’m so sorry, little sis’.” He paused. “When everyone else left the river camps, we stayed on. We weren’t going to leave... without you. Three months after everyone left, Dad had another stroke. Mum died of exposure to the cold a week later.”
Aisha’s features trembled. She folded her arms in close to her body, tears flowing again. Pain cut through me— like a re-sharpened blade. I remembered the desolation I’d felt when Ethan had told me that he’d found my parents together out here in the forest. My parents and Aisha’s had died trying to find us.
Raif fumbled to button his coat.
Awkwardly, I gestured toward his empty left sleeve. “What happened?”
“Frostbite.” He sat on a chair. “After my parents were gone, I stayed on. I couldn’t leave the place my sister had disappeared. I didn’t want to leave her behind. One day, the Eaters got me. They got hold of me and took me back to the place where they kept... people. They tied me up and threw me outside on the ice with the others they’d captured. They didn’t care if we lived or died—the ice would keep us fresh.” He looked up at Ben. “That night, out of nowhere, a scrawny kid came out of the forest. He cut all the captives loose, including me. That kid was Ben.” His gaze dropped to his shoulder. “Ben and I decided to team up. But my arm went bad—it went black from lying on the ice all that time—like just rotting away from gangrene. So Ben... Ben dosed me up with a crap load of booze from the crazy guy’s mansion, and he cut off the arm with an axe.”
I sucked in a lungful of air.
Aisha eyed Ben with an open-mouthed look of horror and wonder. “Thank you.”
Ben nodded a quick acknowledgment. “We better get back to the others.”
“There’s others?” Raif raised his eyebrows.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Aish and I don’t have time to explain it all, but there’s something we need to do.”
Raif pushed his back into the chair. “You girls are going to get revenge on whoever took you, aren’t you?” His eyes flashed with anger. “I’m coming too.”
“No, that’s not what we’re here to do,” Aisha told him. “You’re going to have to trust us.”
Raif pulled himself to his feet. “I’m coming anyway. I’m not letting you out of my sight again.”
I knew it was pointless to argue—and besides, maybe he and Ben could help us get through the forest in one piece.
We made our way through dense patches of foliage, ice shaking loose from the branches. Relief flooded Molly and Sophronia’s faces at the sight of us.
Everyone wanted to keep moving—it wasn’t time to stop and talk. Our party of four had grown to seven, and it seemed cumbersome. Deep within, I felt a focus, a need to see things through to the end. Something was growing inside me, something I couldn’t explain. I was almost afraid of the intensity I felt.
No one spoke much for the next half hour, except for the muttered conversation between Raif and Aisha.
A wintry house came into view—patches of roof tiles gray under a blanket of white. The windows were all boarded up, snow lining the windowsills. In this world, the house hadn’t been destroyed.
The doors hung open, just as they had in my vision underneath the black water of Biscayne Bay.
Molly and Sophronia stood still for a moment.
“So this is it. The Fiveash house,” said Molly.
“This is it,” said Ben. He turned to us in concern. “You’re not going to just walk in there are you? The guy who lives there seems a bit of a nutjob. He could be armed.”
“We’ll be careful,” Molly told him. “We can’t thank you and Raif enough for showing us the way, but you should go now, for your own sake.”
A frown indented the space between Raif’s eyebrows at he stared at Molly. “Say what? You want us to go?”
“Yes,” she replied. “We wouldn’t want to bring anyone else into this.”
“You’ve got a snowflake’s chance that I’m leaving my sister’s side,” said Raif staunchly.
Ben nodded. “You girls aren’t getting rid of us that easily. There can’t be worse in whatever you lot have planned than the things I’ve seen.”
Sophronia shook her head. “Trust us when we say there’s nothing more you can do for us.”
Raif glared at her. “Look at you—you’re a tiny girl—with a limp at that. How on earth can you look out for yourself?
She smiled slightly. “Perhaps I am small. But I could take you on in a fight, and I would win—even if you weren’t disabled with the loss of your left arm. I trained for years with the best—can you say the same?”
He eyed her with a mixture of doubt and wonder.
“We’ll all go in,” I said quickly. I eyed the boys. “But you two please stay back.”
We crossed the doorstep and made our way in. Frost dusted the paintings along the stairwell. Wallpaper hung and drifted from the walls like
lonely ghosts.
In the living room, a man sat slumped on the armchair, a bottle of spirits in his hand.
A drunken smile slid across his face as he saw us. “I’m seeing things. Think I need to drink some more.” He leaned his head back and guzzled some alcohol. He sighed heavily. “Nope, you’re all still here. “Missouri, Calliope, Sophronia, Angeline, little Philly...“ He squinted at Ben and Raif. ”But you, neither of you are Evander. Who the hell are ya and what right do you have to invade my illusions?”
“None of us are illusions, Henry,” I told him.
“What the stuff is going on here,” demanded Raif. “This weirdo gave you all new names?” He glared at Henry. “You kept all these girls prisoner, didn’t you? Mate, you’re gonna get what’s coming to you.”
“Raif, no, you’ve got it wrong,” urged Aisha. “It wasn’t him. Not exactly.”
Ben blew air out between his teeth, glancing at Molly and Frances. “You’re Molly Parkes, aren’t you—the runaway who disappeared here back when I was a kid. And you, you’re Frances Allanzi—the little kid who went missing from her family. Right?”
Molly gave him a stiff nod.
Henry raised his bottle of spirits to Raif. “Come and get me, kid. Everyone else has had a piece of me—why not you?” He leaned his head back on the couch. “I’m born of generations of ancestors who lived the high life in a castle off the coast of France. You hear that? A bloody castle. The people of that castle used me to keep and feed the girls here for years. They took all my inheritance. There was a motza of gold and diamonds down there in the dollhouse—and they came and took it all, just after the freeze. Then they wiped their hands of me. This is all I got left.” He spread his arms out wide. “This is my castle. Ain’t no one’s gonna take this away from me.”
“We didn’t come here to take the house from you,” said Molly coldly. “We don’t want it.”
He gazed at her, his eyes barely focusing. “Then why in hells bells are ya here?”
“We came to talk to Jessamine,” Molly told him.
His expression grew distant. “Jessamine... haven’t seen her since the Freeze—maybe a year ago. Maybe longer.”
“He cannot help us,” said Sophronia quietly. “We should try the dollhouse.”
