There was nothing that chafed him more than Westie pestering him to take his mask off. And there was nothing that gave her more pleasure than chafing Alistair. Picking on him was the distraction she needed.
“You should take a drink of that cool water I packed in your canteen. This trip’s going to be a long one—don’t want to dry up without Nigel’s medicines around,” she said.
Alistair’s head bobbed lazily with his horse’s stride as if he were agreeing with her, which he was not, at least not openly.
“Take that damn thing off,” she said. “Don’t be such a stubborn ass.”
She wanted so badly to see her old friend.
“I’m quite all right, thank you,” he said in a metallic voice that reminded her of the idling purr of a steam engine. “Speaking of drying up, perhaps you should be more worried about yourself. You’re looking a little sober. Shouldn’t your face be planted in Henry’s mane by now? I mean, since you’re drinking again.”
She snarled, wanting to spit an insult back at him, but he had a point. If she was to face the nearly three-day round-trip journey to the cabin where her family died and the memories that went along with it, she’d need more courage than she had.
Reaching into her bags, she shoved her clothes and food aside, but found only leather at the bottom.
“Alley, where’s my flask?” It had to be a mistake. She’d packed it the night before, she was sure of it. “Alley?” She looked into his eyes for answers, for guilt. There was no guilt, but there were secrets. Her next words came out like a coiled snake ready to strike. “What did you do?”
“What I should’ve done years ago,” he said.
Suddenly she felt every step Henry took, every hobble, every bounce. Her head was thick with desperation. Like Alistair’s presence, sobriety had not been part of her plan. She strangled her reins and dug her heels into the gelding’s sides to catch up with Bena.
When she reached her, Westie’s neck was hot, but not from the sun. Bena rode with a swayed back, her eyes scanning the forest around her, stoic like the braves of her tribe.
“Alley shouldn’t have come,” Westie said, wondering what she had done all those years ago to push him away. She remembered the day it had happened, but not the event, or the words she’d said that had led to the demise of their friendship.
It was on her fourteenth birthday. Alistair was a month from turning seventeen. Nigel had insisted on inviting all the teenagers from town to her party, saying she and Alistair spent far too much time alone together and hadn’t been properly socialized. Westie knew most of the kids from her short time in school, but Alistair had been homeschooled and never met any of them.
They all went down to the swimming hole. Westie was splashing around with Isabelle when she noticed Alistair sitting on the bank alone, wearing his mask to hide his scars from the others.
“Alley? What are you doing over there alone? Come swim with us,” Westie said. She splashed at him, but the water didn’t reach.
He stood up and headed toward her, but before he made it, a boy came up behind her, grabbed her waist, and dunked her. By the time she rose from the water, Alistair was gone.
She left the others to go look for him and eventually found him in his room, alone, staring out the window. Standing in the doorway, she knocked. When he turned to look at her, his eyes were impossible to read.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. His mask hissed. “Did someone say something about your mask? ’Cause if they did, I swear I’ll knock all their teeth out.”
She smiled at him, hoping to see his eyes squint, but they remained emotionless. He took several steps toward her. Thinking he was going to go with her back to the party, she took a step back, but instead, he closed the door without saying a word.
Months went by before he spoke to her. Eventually, he started talking to her again, but it was never the same. He stopped taking his mask off, and they no longer swam at the hole, or lay in the field at night counting stars. Every time she’d try to touch him, he’d shrug away from her.
He’d been her rock, her only source of comfort, and then he was gone. They lived in a big house like strangers. Each day of silence caused her heart to break a little more until the pain of her loss turned into an old friend. In Alistair’s absence, the nightmares of her dead family returned, and Westie got into the habit of hiding from them behind a bottle. It was also when she became determined to leave Nigel’s mansion and seek the cannibals who had killed her kin.
Westie felt a deep ache from the memory and looked down so Bena wouldn’t see it reflected on her face.
“Alley’s a distraction,” Westie said. “If we come across creatures and I die, it’ll be because of him.”
Bena didn’t even pretend interest. She was Westie’s oldest friend, but when it came to matters of the heart, Bena was as deaf as Alistair was mute.
“Many travelers have taken this road recently,” Bena said, ignoring Westie’s outburst.
“Is that bad?”
“Could be if they’re bandits. We should avoid the road. I know a path.”