“What the fuck?”
He put Finley down, and she immediately ran back to the dead woman’s body.
That girl in the shadows; he’d know her anywhere. It wasn’t just the moonlight of her skin or the ice of her eyes. It wasn’t just the twisted spools of her fire-kissed hair, or the delicate lines of her neck. It was her scent—something grassy and clean; it was her essence. He’d come to know her as he etched her picture into the delicate flesh of Finley’s body. Abigail, the oldest of The Three Sisters.
There was a deep intimacy to ink work, especially when he worked with Fin. He saw what she wanted him to see. And when he put the needle to her skin and inked those images onto her flesh, he was closer to her than he was at any other time. She trusted him, opened herself to him. She let him mark her body with total faith in their connection. Even when their other connections—as lovers and friends—were strained, that remained. In that bond, Abigail dwelled.
“You’re not real,” he said. “I’m losing it.”
It was the cold, right? Hallucinations as hypothermia set in?
Abigail just smiled.
“Finley,” Rainer said, his own voice sounding wobbly and scared.
But Finley was in her own world, lost to him.
“Fin,” he said again, louder still. “Will you wake up?”
Then he was following Abigail, because there was just no way not to follow. She danced like a sprite through the trees, and he found himself running to keep up. He’d see a flash of red, a starburst of white, hear the bells of her laughter. Even though he knew that she was leading him away from Finley, he followed anyway. Even though he knew that Abigail was a bad girl and not to be trusted, he found that he couldn’t help but play her little game.
He’d had a friend like that when he was growing up, Scott from three doors down. Rainer’s folks weren’t always around. His dad worked nights, slept days. His mom worked days and wasn’t usually home until right before dinner. But there were rules and chores, and he knew his parents loved him. Scott, on the other hand, was a stray dog. He never seemed to have to answer for where he was, skinny, rangy, dirt under his nails. He was smoking by the time they were ten, got Rainer his first beer when they were twelve. He was the kind of kid who said, “Hey, let’s go set these bottle rockets off in that abandoned warehouse.” And even though you knew it was a bad idea, you did it. With Scott, Rainer shoplifted, drank, smoked, explored a condemned building, and nearly got stuck inside an old refrigerator. Scott was dangerous; Rainer knew there was no bungee attached to that kid, nothing to pull him back from the hard landing of ugly consequences. Still, Rainer followed. There are always going to be people like that, Rain, warned his dad. They open dark doorways and invite you to walk inside. Just remember that you don’t have to go.
But that was the problem. Rainer wanted to go. He wanted to find the edge and push it, see how far you could go before you broke the seal and fell through. He always believed that he could pull himself back—just in time. And so far he had. He eventually graduated from high school, though several of the kids he hung with did not. He wasn’t dead like Jeb or in a wheelchair like Raife, who got into an accident drag racing. He wasn’t in jail like Scott, who was serving time for grand theft auto. It was like Finley always said about The Three Sisters, that she suspected they couldn’t get her to do anything that on some deep, dark level, she didn’t want to do herself. Rainer didn’t want to go all the way down. He just wanted to peer over the edge and see what was waiting below.
But this time, as he chased Abigail through the woods, the ground beneath his feet gave way. And he fell and fell, knocking against protruding objects on his way down and landing hard. He could barely comprehend anything but the surprise of it at first, his stomach lurching as he knew he was falling, calling out for Finley, who he knew couldn’t hear him. The pain, the fear came later.
And now, here he was in the darkness. He could hear the dripping of water somewhere, but that was it. And his own breathing. The ground around him was cold and wet, and he thought that if he died here no one would ever find him. Maybe a few years from now, some kid out in the woods with his friend would fall as he had and find Rainer’s broken bones down here far beneath the ground, the rest of him long ago eaten away.