Where Darkness Blooms, page 25
Bo shook her head. “No. We can’t keep running.” She looked Delilah in the eyes. “There’s only one way out.”
Two years ago, Cori, Ava, and Indigo had done the best they could. They’d found a way out and they took it, but they hadn’t been able to put an end to the curse. Now it was their turn. Now it was Bo’s turn.
Bo knew what she needed to do.
The knife felt heavy in her pocket. She wrapped her fingers around the handle and slid it free.
She would do this for all of the women of Bishop, dead and still living, but mostly she was doing this for them—Delilah, Whitney, and Jude. The Hardings would never take them from her. Ever.
“Come here, Caleb,” she called, her heart pounding in her chest. “I’m ready.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
There was so much blood.
It splattered the sunflower stalks, covering their leaves with scarlet flecks. As Whitney got closer to where she’d heard Jude scream, the blood flecks reached all the way to the petals.
“Jude!” Whitney yelled. She dropped to her knees. Her sister was curled into a ball among the stalks, a pool of dark blood spreading beneath her. “Jude,” she said again, a panicked scream clawing its way up her throat. “Jude.”
Alma broke through the stalks, her breath heavy. Her lips parted when she saw Jude. “Oh god. No.”
Whitney swallowed the urge to scream. She gently placed her fingers on Jude’s neck. Please be alive, please.
Jude groaned. Her eyes snapped open. “Whit,” she said.
“What happened? Where are you hurt?”
“It’s just my leg,” Jude croaked. She tried to push herself upright. “I can still move.” She winced as she dragged her injured leg in front of her.
It was hard to see exactly where Ableman’s bullet had entered her leg, with so much blood and dirt smeared over her skin, but Whitney could tell it was somewhere close to her calf. Standing would hurt. Running would hurt more. “Jude, you don’t have to—”
Whitney paused at the sound of sunflowers rustling. A soft click echoed through the field.
Sheriff Ableman was coming with his gun.
Whitney looked at Jude, her eyes wide. “There’s no other choice,” Jude whispered. “Help me up.”
Together, Alma and Whitney flanked Jude. They lifted her out of the mud and started walking, careful to avoid rustling the leaves as best they could. They’d only gone a few steps when Whitney realized they would never make it. They would never outrun the sheriff and the other cops. They didn’t even know where they were going—Bo and Delilah had disappeared, and the Hardings were surely lurking somewhere close by.
Whitney.
Her name rang as clear as daylight through the smoke. She jerked to a stop.
Eleanor stood before them, wearing the same sweatshirt she’d had on that last night at the bonfire, only now, it was a ghostly white. She was a ghostly white. “Eleanor,” Whitney whispered. Her whole body went numb.
Beside her, Jude pulled in a sharp breath. “I can see her.”
“Me, too,” said Alma, breathless.
The sunflowers shuddered, then shifted to reveal a path opening behind Eleanor. She waved a translucent hand. Follow me.
They followed as Eleanor led them down the path. The sunflowers snapped closed behind them as they pushed forward, creating a thick wall of yellow. Ableman yelled from somewhere behind them, and the footsteps picked up speed.
Every muscle in Whitney’s body clenched as she tried to run. “You’ve got this,” Alma whispered. Whitney nodded, tears streaming down her face, as she pushed forward.
The path opened up to the edge of the clearing. Eleanor stood at the threshold between the open land and the thicket of sunflowers, pointing to something jutting out of the ground.
Jude squinted. “Is that…”
“The weather vane,” Whitney whispered.
She swooped down and pulled what was left of it from the ground like a forgotten weed. That day she’d led them all to the clearing to talk to Eleanor seemed like a lifetime ago. She could still remember the desperate feeling clinging to her like fog when the weather vane had snapped in her hand, cutting her off from her only source of hope. She’d kicked it into the fields when she’d realized it could never be fixed.
But now she knew. It had never been Eleanor speaking to her; she’d just wanted it to be so badly that she’d convinced herself of it. How could she ever have thought Eleanor would be an almost-whisper on the wind? She was here now, and she was so much more than that. She was light, and she was love, and she was all the memories they had made together, tucked forever into Whitney’s heart.
The stalks parted as Ableman and the other two cops trampled through. As soon as he saw them, he raised his gun. “Come on now. Let’s make this simple.”
Alma moved so quickly that Whitney didn’t have time to think. She dropped Jude’s arm and lunged toward the sheriff, clawing at his skin and forcing his arm to jerk up toward the sky. He pulled the trigger. The gun let out a bang as he stumbled back.
Whitney swung.
The weather vane cracked against Ableman’s skull, his canvas hat only softening the blow slightly. His eyes rolled back before he dropped to the ground.
Jude limped forward and scooped up his gun.
The two cops trailing him froze. “Put your hands up,” Jude snarled. Their hands lifted in the air, eyes bouncing between the three girls. Whitney, with the weather vane still clenched in her fist. Alma, with the sheriff’s blood caked under her fingernails. And Jude, pointing the pistol in their direction, her finger hovering over the trigger.
They stayed like that until Whitney snapped. “GO,” she yelled.
Slowly, the cops stumbled backward, until they must have felt safe enough to turn around and run full speed ahead.
Whitney let out a breath. She glanced at the endless green and yellow around her. Eleanor’s ghost had disappeared, the path had closed, and they were in the middle of nowhere.
She heard the rustle of someone moving through the flowers.
“Come on, Bo, it doesn’t have to be like this.” Caleb’s voice. It was close.
Whitney hunched down and crept through the stalks, listening, as Alma held up Jude while they trailed behind her. Pieces of Bo came into view from several feet away. A sliver of matted blond hair. Dirty T-shirt. The glint of the knife in her hand.
The flowers groaned as Caleb came closer. “Why are you making this hard, Bo? You know I’m gonna find you,” he said, though the wobble in his voice didn’t sound so sure. Whitney watched Bo’s hands tighten.
“Just make it easy already. You don’t have to fight everything. If you would have just stopped fighting that night, it would have been a whole lot better for the both of us.”
Bo released a feral scream as she lunged. There was the glint of the knife and a blur of motion and a thwick, thwick, thwick sound as Caleb screamed and screamed until he stopped.
More footsteps, heavier this time. “Caleb?” William called. “What’s going on? Oh my—”
Bo didn’t hesitate. The sunflowers shuddered as she lunged again, the thwick, thwick, thwick of the knife echoing again through the field. Whitney felt the earth reverberate beneath her feet as the second body dropped to the ground.
The only sound was Bo’s breathing, haggard and shaky.
Whitney wove through the stalks until she found Bo, hunched over in a tiny ball in the dirt. She glanced up. Her hair was matted with blood, her face splattered with it. Whitney crumbled at the sight of her. She would help Bo wash the blood away, but the marks it would leave behind would last forever.
“Bo,” she said softly.
Bo started to cry.
Whitney ran to her. She wrapped her in her arms and held her close to her chest. After a moment, another pair of arms surrounded them, and another, and another.
Delilah pressed her cheek to Bo’s, tears cutting through the dirt on her cheeks. Jude leaned on them, draping herself across their backs like a blanket, and Alma curled up close to Whitney, her nose pressed into the nape of her neck.
They stayed like that for a long time.
CHAPTER FORTY
The sunflower fields were even denser than Jude had imagined. They stretched on forever as the five of them marched silently toward a destination they couldn’t picture.
At some point, the smoke began to fade as they left the fire behind them. Alma was the first to find the gravel path. “Look at this,” she said, stepping onto the path that cut through the sunflowers like a river. Jude followed, leaning heavily on her sister, as the pain in her calf streaked through her like lightning. Pebbles stuck to the bottoms of her blood-soaked shoes.
She knew this path.
They followed it until it led them straight to a dilapidated old structure in the middle of a field. It was smaller than Jude remembered, more worn around the edges. It had never even been painted—the wood siding was sunbaked and warped, the single window in the front covered with a plastic tarp.
How had she trusted Bennett so much that he had been able to convince her that this was the hospital? She wanted to believe Bennett had cast some spell on her, made her see things that weren’t really there. But the truth was, she had wanted to believe it. Some part of her thought if she believed this little lie, then it would be easier to believe that he really did love her, too.
Whitney stood beside her as they paused in front of the building. “This is where they took me,” she said. It wasn’t a question. It was a confirmation.
“Yeah,” Jude said. “This is it.”
Whitney let out a little puff of air. “How—”
“I don’t know, Whit,” Jude said. Tears pricked the corners of her eyes. “I didn’t … I couldn’t see him clearly. I really messed up.”
Jude’s sister turned to her. She chewed her lip. “It’s going to take me a minute to forgive you, you know.”
A tear streaked down Jude’s cheek. “Yeah. I know.”
Whitney nodded, then threw open the door and stepped inside.
The innards of the building were just as pathetic as the frame. It was a single room, with a freestanding cabinet and an old cot in the corner. If Jude looked at the floor hard enough, she could almost see speckles of rust-colored blood in the grooves of the floorboards. But she tried not to look at that. “There’s got to be some kind of bandages in here,” she said.
Jude popped open the cabinet. It was filled with rolls of gauze in neat little rows, bins of peach-colored pill bottles—oxycodone, Tylenol, codeine—and IV bags topped off with saline solution. There was even a pair of crutches propped up against the cabinet, ready to use in case the Hardings ever brought someone here who needed them to keep up their charade.
All those times the cops had picked up half-dead women and rushed them out of town for treatment, had they taken them here, too? Drugged them so they wouldn’t question the sunlight bleeding through the cracks in the walls or the way the unfinished floorboards left splinters in their feet, and then left them here to die?
Or tossed them into the fields like feeble prey for a monster.
“Sit,” Alma said, guiding Jude toward the cot.
She limped toward it and sat, gripping the frame so she wouldn’t sink into the center. Whitney guided Delilah to the cot, too, and forced her to sit. The left side of Jude’s body pressed into Delilah’s right side, their legs and arms so close they were almost entwined. Bo sat in the corner closest to the door, her arms wrapped tightly around her dirt-streaked legs.
As Alma and Whitney dug through the cabinet for supplies, Jude turned to Delilah. “I wish I could explain everything, but I can’t. I don’t know why I did the things I did, or why I was willing to risk our relationship over Bennett.” Jude swallowed. “All I know is that I’m so, so sorry. And I don’t expect you to ever forgive me.”
Delilah looked at Jude. “I know what you mean. About Bennett. He just … was really good at making people see what he wanted them to see.”
“Do you think it was because he was a Harding?”
Delilah sighed. “Yeah. But I also think it was because he was Bennett.” She pressed her shoulder against Jude’s. “We’re okay now.”
Jude touched her temple to Delilah’s. They sat like that as Whitney and Alma came back with trays of antiseptic and bandages and rows of pills. “I’m going to see if I can get the bullet out,” Alma said, picking up a pair of forceps. “It’s close to the surface, and it’s in the muscle so it might not bleed as much.”
“Okay,” Jude said, pinching her eyes shut. She felt Delilah’s fingers squeeze hers.
The pain was white hot and sharp at first, but then it dulled into a persistent ache. Delilah never let go of her hand as Jude clenched her jaw, trying to stifle a scream.
“There,” Alma said, letting out a long breath. There was a clang. Jude opened her eyes to see the bullet, covered in her blood, lying in the corner of the metal tray. Alma let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you for all those medical shows, shitty satellite TV.”
The room grew silent as Whitney and Alma worked, except for the occasional groan from Jude while Alma tried her hand at stitching her up, along with Whitney’s Sorry, sorry, sorry whispers as she applied antiseptic to Delilah’s neck.
Alma pressed a small white pill into Jude’s palm, and then Delilah’s. “It’s going to be painful to walk, and I don’t know how far we have to go. This’ll help.” They swallowed the pills down. “And you’ll definitely need these,” Alma said, handing Jude the crutches.
Jude slid off the couch and tucked the crutches under her arms. She wobbled over to Bo. “It’s your turn,” she said.
Bo lifted her head from her knees. The skin beneath her eyes was puffy and purple. “I’ll be fine.”
“Bo, come sit,” Delilah said, gesturing toward the cot.
Bo grumbled as she pulled herself to her feet, but she didn’t fight them any further. She dropped onto the edge of the cot, her gaze on her shoes, but really she was somewhere else entirely.
“Can I touch you?” Delilah asked softly.
Her eyes fluttered shut. She nodded, but when Delilah’s fingertip gently grazed her temple as she tucked a strand of matted hair behind her ear, Bo flinched. “This looks like it hurts,” Delilah said. Bo didn’t say anything.
Whitney grabbed a chemical ice pack from the cabinet and snapped it so it would start to grow cold. She handed it to Delilah, who gently applied it to the swollen purple knot jutting out of Bo’s head. Alma grabbed a pen flashlight and turned on the light with a click. She trained it over Bo’s right eye. “They taught us how to check for head injuries at the Nursing Care Center, in case anyone fell in their rooms,” Alma said, moving the light across her face. “It looks like you might have a concussion.”
Bo just nodded. She wasn’t all here, and it wasn’t only because of the injury.
Jude squeezed between the girls and sidled up beside Bo on the cot. She wrapped her arms around Bo and pulled in her so close that she could smell the sweat and earth and blood on her skin. Whitney went back to the cabinet and retrieved a towel and a bottle of water. She poured half of it into the towel and gave the other half to Bo, who absentmindedly drank from it while Whitney tried to wipe the bloodstains from her skin.
“We should get going,” Bo said after a while. “They’re never going to stop looking for us.”
Whitney slowly stopped dabbing at Bo’s skin. Delilah’s eyes flicked to Jude’s. Does she even know what she did?
Bennett had been smashed in the head with a shovel. William and Caleb were dead. Ableman was probably dead, too, and the cops who had been with him were sniveling cowards who weren’t about to risk their lives to chase the five of them out of town. Especially when there was a fire raging and they could be heroes by helping to put it out.
“Yeah, we’ll get going,” Jude said. “Why don’t we just take a minute, though—”
Bo jumped off the cot before she could finish. She headed out the door of the makeshift hospital without another word.
The girls scrambled to take whatever they could fit in their pockets—aspirin, antiseptic wipes, bandages. They each grabbed what was left of the water and tucked them under their arms, with Whitney carrying an extra bottle for Jude, before following Bo into the miles of sunflowers surrounding them.
The ghosts had all but vanished, and the berating voices that used to plague Jude had disappeared with the wind. Now it was just them, and the flowers, and the heaviness of what they had done hanging in the air around them like a fog.
They walked in silence for what felt like hours. As the medicine threaded through Jude’s veins, she forgot what the stinging in her leg had felt like back at the building. Now it was more like a memory; she could feel the niggling sensation of something being off around her calf, an echo of pain, but not the pain itself.
She kept going.
The sun crested over the horizon, the morning sky bleeding into lavenders and corals. It was becoming more and more difficult for Jude to maneuver the crutches around the thick stalks as her entire body began to ache with exhaustion. They would have to stop somewhere soon.
And then they just … stopped.
One minute Jude was in the field, and the next she wasn’t. She stared at the expanse of dusty land yawning open before her. There was another clearing, and up a little farther, a road. A real road—one that had been paved smooth, like someone had actually expected people to drive on it.
“I don’t … where are we?” Whitney asked, hugging a half-empty water bottle to her chest.
“Where are we supposed to go now?” Bo stepped into the middle of the road, which stretched through the field in both directions.
Jude followed her. She looked one way and saw nothing but flowers and corn. She glanced the other way. Nothing but more of the same.
“Look,” Delilah said softly.
Sunflower petals whispered on the lightest breeze. They wafted from the field, parading past them in a single line, and continued floating down the road.
