At the river, the finger is gone. My stomach tries to stuff itself into my throat as soon as I see it. Or don’t see it, I guess. There are flies buzzing by the string but nothing else.
“Did he come back for it?” I ask.
Lucas shakes his head. “Birds probably.”
Birds. I hear them in the trees up on the rise, big heavy things with dark bodies and talons that scrape at the bark on the branches. My eyes pick out a few individuals. One bobbing its head, another fanning its dark wings wide. A third turns its head, and I spot something stringy dangling from its beak. I turn away with the sting of bile in my mouth.
“What are they?” I ask.
“Turkey vultures.”
Scavengers. And obviously, they’ve found something to pick clean. Someone?
Lucas is waiting for me to say something, but I’m not going to. I can’t. I look down at the stream, and my head swims like the river below, brown and slick and moving fast.
“OK,” I say. It’s not OK. I take a step, and the world tilts.
My hand catches on a tree, and there’s a weird, gray humming behind my ears. I hold on tight. Breathe slower.
“Hey, you all right?”
Lucas. He’s closer. I catch a whiff of something earthy, but I think of spiked punch and that night this summer when his eyes held me hostage at the cast after-party.
He is not what I’m supposed to want. He is long hair and ripped jeans, and none of it matters when his smile curls above the rim of his plastic cup.
I can’t just stand here staring. I should thank him, as the director, because he did his job.
Lucas lowers his drink to his thigh when I get there. Condensation rolls down the side, right into a hole in his jeans, just above his knee. I have the ridiculous urge—
Stop it! Just…I have to stop this.
I raise my Coke. “The set was amazing, Lucas. You outdid yourself.”
“You didn’t give me much of an option, did you?”
I bite back a smile. “A good director gets what the show needs.”
“What about what you need?”
My chest and neck go from warm to hot. I look to my friends, who are too busy with an impromptu sing-along to look back. “I should go.”
Before I can, his hand is around mine, fingers at my wrist. I’ve been thinking of this more than I want to admit. His hands are even bigger and rougher than I thought. Better too.
“Sera?”
His look rises up through me like steam from a shower. He crooks his head toward the kitchen, toward the back door. And I follow because even I know what this means.
“We can just go back,” he says, dragging me back to the present. But we can’t go back. Not from that night at the party and not from this either.
I open my eyes and look up at him. He is not conventionally pretty, but I’m not the only girl who can’t seem to help looking.
“I’m sorry.” My voice cracks on both words.
Lucas sighs. “Let’s just head back. We can go up the path, maybe make double time.”
“No, we have to check on them,” I say. “If Ms. Brighton is dead, then they’re alone. Probably terrified. We have to try.”
“That river is still dangerous,” he says, voice low and gentle. “And those birds are telling us everything we need to know about what’s going on over there.”
My stomach constricts as I think about the stringy bit I saw dangling. “We can’t be sure unless we go. I’ll never forgive myself if—”
“Sera, be serious.”
“I am serious. If one of them is hurt, if they can’t talk and we just—we can’t just—” A sharp breath severs my words. Tears smear my vision, but I refuse to even acknowledge them with a swipe of my hand.
“Shit.” He swallows hard and throws up his hand, mouth going thin. “OK. We’ll try. Be heroes or whatever.”
Something swims up through my chest. I’m not sure if it’s relief or terror or something else. I swallow it down.
“But I don’t trust that current,” he says, “and the bridge is out of the question.”
“So what do we do?”
He looks around, hand at the back of his neck. “All right, I’ll loop my belt around that tree. I’m going to keep a hold on that, and you’re going to hold on to me. If the water goes over either of our knees, we’re done. If it’s freakishly shallow, we’ll…”
“Let go?”
He looks like he hates the idea but shrugs. “I guess that’s the only way to do it, yeah?”
I nod and try not to watch as he shucks his belt, briefly revealing one hipbone and the hollow in front of it. He finds a tree right on the edge of the river and secures the belt through the buckle around the trunk. One hand on the leather strap, he steps into the water.