An arm stretched from a tree trunk and caught Caroline in the throat. This slammed her flat on her back into the snow, her vision shifting from land to sky in a swift and shocking dislocation.
“Dangerous to be out in the snow, Mrs. Tierney.”
Caroline blinked the tears from her eyes to see a stout man step from between the trees.
“Run, Charlie!” she cried as she tried to bolt to her feet, but the fall had rattled her brain and the man was on her in a moment. She gasped as he caught her from behind in a sleeper hold.
“Time to head back to the Crofts now,” the man told Charlie.
The boy stood a few yards away, still as if frozen, eyes as bright as the moon.
“Don’t want your mama to get hurt, do you? No, you’re a good boy. You’ll come back to the Crofts with me, won’t you?” Spots swam across Caroline’s vision. Though his face was behind her, she now placed the man’s beady eyes and florid complexion. Seward, she thought, the man who lived next to Grams’s old farmhouse.
“No,” Charlie said. The word was only a whisper, but it sparked with defiance. Even with the breath being choked from her, Caroline felt pride. Her little man was strong. He got so much from his father, but he got this from her. This had always been true, even if lately it had become easy to forget.
“Come on, now, you’re a good boy, aren’t you?” Seward asked again, his hot, rank breath on her neck.
He was a good boy, Caroline thought. The best sort: the kind that might not give a parent what they wanted but always what they needed.
Caroline shifted her center of gravity, slammed her heel down hard onto Seward’s foot, and delivered a blow to the bridge of his nose with the back of her hand. It had been years since she’d taken a self-defense class, but still the movements were rote. Seward’s hold broke and his screams were muffled slightly by the hands he’d reflexively pressed over his face. Caroline spun around to knee him in the groin. The man groaned and bent over. As Seward vomited into the snow, Caroline kicked him in the ribs and face until he went down.
Caroline stopped when the man made no further move to stand. She turned to Charlie, and the boy nodded.
But there was no time for self-congratulation: Seward’s first scream had echoed through the forest’s icy corridors. The rest of the villagers would be coming for them now. They had to move faster than ever.
52
As he ran, Charlie tried to see which shadows swayed with the wind and which moved on their own.
It was hard to run for long in the thin, cold air. Beside him, Mom was out of breath, too, her face bright red above her scarf. He didn’t know if the man had hurt her badly, but even if he had, Mom had hurt him worse. She had broken him like she’d broken the house, and it made Charlie proud. But the fight had made her tired, and the hunters were close.
The man’s scream would have told the others where they were as clear as the North Star on a cloudless night. But Charlie knew what to do from The Book of Secrets. He had quickly broken two wide limbs from a red spruce. Dragging these behind them through the cold, dry snow had helped hide their trail through the night. It would not stop the hunters, but it might slow them.
There was a noise, and Charlie turned around to see a flutter of snow fall from a disturbed branch. The villagers would be upon them soon, but he’d finally found what he’d been looking for: an old oak with a hollow large enough to fit a grown man.
“Hurry,” Charlie whispered to Mom.
Once they’d both squeezed into the hollow, he propped the spruce branches in front of the tree’s opening. They could still see through the frosted needles, but they were hidden from the ones who chased them. They had been lucky that Charlie knew this tree, but, then, no one knew the forest as well as he did.
Almost no one.
Mom hugged her arms around his chest as they waited in the close space. The clouds of their breath burst and faded in the weak light.
A branch snapped to the right of their tree, a beat out of rhythm with the sounds of the overhead branches. A moment later, a boot crunched into cold snow to their left. Charlie watched as shadows separated from shadows. Mom’s grip on him tightened.
Three men stood in front of them. Charlie could not be sure who they were. Two of them searched the snow with flashlights, while the third sniffed the air. They spoke to one another in low voices that Charlie couldn’t hear.
Their beams of light crossed over the branches and burned across the white ground. Not long now before they were found, Charlie thought. He wondered if they wanted only him or if they would hurt his mom as the other man had. He began to consider giving himself up. Maybe if he did that, they wouldn’t search the hollow for Mom. Maybe she could get away and bring back help.
But he knew Mom would never let the men take him without a fight. She was a very good mom. If Charlie showed himself, though, it might give them some time. Light from the flashlights gleamed through the tree’s rotted bark as the men examined its trunk. Charlie realized that their luck had run out.
He squeezed his mother’s hand and was about to move aside the pine boughs when the rattling of a stick against a tree sounded through the forest. The beams of light turned toward it, and the two men holding the flashlights ran toward the noise. The third man looked in the same direction and sniffed at the air again. It was this third man who scared Charlie. He seemed human in shape only. He tested the air and moved with the care of a predator. The man took one last look at the trees before following the others. He slid through the night like a fish speeding through water.