“Paisley!” I heard Cassidy hiss. I wrenched my feet from the ground and trudged off in the opposite direction. “Come on, Tor!” Cassidy called after me. “She’s only joking! We’re sorry!”
Four trucks parked at varying distances formed a semicircle around the growing fire. Their headlights illuminated pockets of the field, casting long shadows that stretched into the darkness. I cut across the beams and walked swiftly around to the passenger side of a red Ford.
I was so eager to disappear into the truck and wait out the rest of the night that I nearly rammed into an open door where someone was rummaging in the backseat. I tried to back away, but Knox’s head appeared from within the truck’s cabin before I could make it a single step. A silver bottle opener glinted in his right hand. “What are you doing over here?”
Behind the curtain of truck lights, the surrounding field behind us was thick with blackness. The truck’s cabin light glowed softly beside him.
“Sorry, just getting some air.”
“You’re in the country. The air doesn’t get much fresher.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” I said, feeling more and more irritated with people’s inexplicable fascination with being outside. I rocked back on my heel and moved to leave in the direction I’d come from, but Knox caught my wrist.
His mouth cast a ghoulish shadow when he smiled. “Don’t have to hurry back so fast, do we?” The cabin light had snapped off, and it was just me and Knox with the scent of beer and cologne hanging between us.
“I think we do,” I said evenly.
I tried pulling back again, but he held firm, not enough pressure to hurt, not so much that it might not be mistaken for playful, but enough to send a small tingle down my back. “Come on, the others won’t miss you. Besides, I was just joking, you can wait in my truck.”
I couldn’t see through the tinted windows, but I thought of the locks and the four metal doors and of Knox, and waiting inside no longer seemed like such a great idea. “Like you said, there’s plenty of fresh air out here.”
He took a step into me so that I could feel warmth radiating off his chest. “Stay, chat…” I could sense a definite ellipsis after the word chat that turned my stomach sour. “I’m on the football team.” He stressed the last two words like they were supposed to mean something to me.
“And I won’t hold that against you, but still I better get back to the party.”
Knox inhaled as though ready to retort when a scream broke through the expanse of black that stretched out into the unseen reaches of the field. I stiffened. Another high-pitched screech. There was a commotion. Someone was screaming and it continued in short panicked bursts. Adam. My lungs stopped working.
“What was that?” Knox leaned over to look around me, but I didn’t stop to answer. I took off into a headlong sprint. Others from around the campfire were snapping to attention. Some were already hurtling on ahead of me.
My eyes flitted around for any sight of Adam, but I couldn’t find him. As fast as my legs would take me, I followed the cries. “Help!” A girl. The urgency was clear. This wasn’t a joke. I broke into a run. Why had I left Adam alone? What if something had happened? I followed the forms up ahead, running in the same direction, and closed in on Cassidy, who was surprisingly quick while intoxicated. I stumbled along the uneven ground, pushing aside stalks of grass that grew as high as my stomach.
“Over here.” This time it was a boy’s voice. Husky. Choked. Not Adam’s. I didn’t dare feel relieved.
I scanned the area and found two hunkered shapes beside a thin, bone-cragged tree trunk. A ring of people crowded around. I pushed through and there, to my relief, was Adam. He caught sight of me at the same moment, and he took three decisive steps over, grabbed me by the shoulders, and pressed me into his chest. He said “Victoria” into my hair, and I felt a flood of gratitude. “I thought you were hurt.”
“I’m fine.” I shook my head and let him squeeze me to him for another moment longer, even though his grip was too hard, and when he released me, I rubbed at the spots where his fingers had surely left marks.
When we separated, it was to find Emily O’Malley kneeling and crying in the dirt. Her boyfriend, Mason Worth, stood frozen behind her.
“Is Emily hurt?” Now it was Cassidy. She huffed and put her hands on her knees to breathe. Knox showed up in the small circle of onlookers, too. It was then that we saw it.
Or rather him.
The body leaned against the trunk of a sycamore tree. Someone aimed a flashlight at the lifeless form, and a gasp shot through the gathered crowd. The copper teeth of a bear trap closed around his calf, leaving scores of dried blood and flesh torn from the bone. I swallowed hard. Patches of red stained the grass beneath him. The opposite side of his shorts dangled, shorn just below the hip. Sinewy threads clung to the base of the fabric, hanging on to nothing. The boy’s right leg was completely missing.