Undone: The Complete Duology, page 17
Mac frowned, then dropped the pliers and just held her hand and forearm, giving me space to work.
I got back to sawing.
Water rose up past my ankles as I stood over Miss Gladys’ head, stance wide, attempting to remove her hand.
“I don’t think that saw is going to work,” he said.
I gave a frustrated groan. “I don’t know! I don’t eat meat.”
“Well, I don’t eat this kind, for sure.”
I laughed at the disgusted look on his face. “Just the non-human kind?”
“Can’t beat a slow cooked, falling right off the bone pulled meat sandwich.”
I made a face and then attempted sawing again. The teeth of the blade tore at her flesh, widening the wound, but it did little more than scrape at her bone.
“I just need a finger,” I said with a growl. “I’d take a toe, even.”
“Owls are wise,” Mac said.
I lowered the saw and stared up at him dumbfounded.
“We could use owl bones.”
Miss Gladys’ face bobbed at the surface of the water now up my calf. My teeth chattered with every gust of wind that swept over the grave.
“Do you think we could just wrench a finger free?” I asked, ignoring his comment.
“I have never contemplated the viability of such a thing,” he said like we were talking about gardening.
I started sawing again.
Mac jerked upright, nearly losing his grip on Miss Gladys’ arm. He stared beyond me into the cemetery.
I looked behind me into the shadows. Could he see the demons? They hadn’t made themselves known yet, but I didn’t doubt they lurked out there somewhere.
“I think someone’s in the cemetery,” he whispered.
“Fuckin’ Brian.” I brandished the saw like I would take out the mayor’s son with it if he showed his face. “You said he’d been snooping around you before.”
“Shit, yeah.” Mac looked down at Miss Gladys in her cold jacuzzi. “Should we just…take her?”
I wrinkled my nose.
“We’ll bring her back. Missing a hand, but she isn’t using it anymore.”
I glanced back at the shadows of the cemetery. We couldn’t risk being discovered here. I’d been on the receiving end of what happened when the town didn’t like where you’d been.
It was less pleasant than being down here in a grave trying to saw off a corpse’s hand.
“Jesus, fuck, okay.”
I tossed the saw up over the edge of the grave. Mac boosted me up and I crawled through the mud away from the unstable edge before pushing to my feet. I went to brush off the mud from my legs, but it made no difference. My hands, my shirt, everywhere on me was covered in mud.
I grabbed a tarp from the jeep, a leftover from when I had relocated Bobby—I still needed to check on him, god dammit—and returned to the grave as Mac wrestled Miss Gladys out of her coffin. He hoisted her up against his chest, like a dead lover, then raised her over the edge of the grave. I grabbed her arms, tugging her into the mud. Mac pushed himself up over the edge and together, we rolled Miss Gladys in the tarp.
He took the foot end and I took the shoulders as we carried her to the jeep. Mud from my clothes and hands smeared over the backseat as I crawled backwards through, guiding her in, Mac bearing most of her weight. We folded her at the knees and tipped her head, still inside the tarp, so we could close the back doors.
After we gathered our supplies, we sat in the front seats, panting and staring straight ahead.
Mac turned his head against the headrest to look at me. “Dates with you are a little too exciting. Next time, can we just do a movie and popcorn?”
I guided the jeep towards the cemetery gate, keeping watch for anyone who was spying on us. The night remained quiet, but it wasn’t empty.
I could feel eyes on us.
Miss Gladys bounced a little in the backseat, the tarp rustling, and I pushed out the visual of her coming alive and ripping off our faces.
Once Mac had latched the gate behind us and ducked back into the jeep, I turned onto the road.
Headlights behind us flipped on, cutting through the storm.
My breath caught. Squinting into the rearview mirror, I tried to make out the car behind me.
It was a small red sports car. No one in Thorn Tree drove anything like that.
This couldn’t be good.
I floored the gas.
22
GRACE
The jeep rocked forward as we careened down the street, heading towards my house. The little red sports car behind us remained right on our tail. Between the dark around us and the tint of the windows, I couldn’t make out who was behind the steering wheel.
All I knew was Thorn Tree had never experienced a high-speed chase until now.
The buildings sped by us on either side then faded into countryside as I held down the accelerator.
My jeep wasn’t meant for speed, but the red car wasn’t meant for terrain. I jerked the steering wheel, sending Gladys headfirst into the door as the jeep took to the rocks. It powered up a gentle incline, throwing us back and forth. The sound of the tarp rattling underscored the jostling noises of the jeep climbing.
The red car hit the incline and revved as its tires spun. They found traction in the rocks and the car rocketed forward after us.
Gritting my teeth, I wove the jeep through the trees. The car followed, defying expectation. If this was sand, the tires would have been buried, but it would take a minute before the car gave out on the rocks. It wouldn’t come out of this unscathed, but the driver didn’t seem too concerned about that.
“Who the hell is that?” Mac asked, twisted in his seat to stare out the back window. He placed a hand on Gladys’ body to keep her from sliding off the seat.
“I have no fuckin’ clue,” I said, focused dead ahead as I maneuvered through the trees. Branches caught the sides of the jeep and tapped against the roof louder than the rain.
“Where can we lose them?” he asked.
I lifted my chin to acknowledge that I’d heard him but couldn’t reply. I had to focus. An idea was blooming in my brain, but I had to make sure I didn’t lead us too far: either to where the forest came alive, or to Bobby’s new address.
“Is she still on us?” I asked, focused on anticipating every turn, keeping the jeep on a steady course.
“Falling behind,” he said, but he didn’t sound relieved.
Would a team of heavily armed men burst from the car and mow us down with machine guns? I had no idea who the Reverend had let into the town or why, but they’d made it clear Mac and I were the target.
Up ahead, the forest dropped a few feet down to the rocks. Gripping the steering wheel, I aimed for the fall. My stomach hit the roof of my mouth as first two, then all four, jeep tires were airborne. We hit the rocks with a jolt that slammed my teeth into my tongue. Blood tinged my spit. I spun the jeep in a sharp U-turn and tilted it off the next ledge. Down we went, in nature’s uneven stairs, making our way lower through the mountains.
Above us, the car parked with the nose over the fall. No one stepped out. Then the car backed up and disappeared.
When we reached a level surface again, I slammed on the brake and sat forward, forehead against the steering wheel, panting.
Mac flattened his palm against the center of my back. “That was some moves, baby.”
I jerked back, ire flooding through me. “What the fuck is happening now? No one visits Thorn Tree unless they want a used toilet. Why this? Why now? Do they know that I’m going to end them? Is this their last effort to stop me?”
Mac cupped my face with both hands, staring at me with sincerity. “It doesn’t matter. They won’t stop you—they can’t. We got the rest of your spell back there, right?”
He nodded towards Miss Gladys’ deceased form.
“There’s one more.”
He blew out a breath. “Oh, Jesus.”
“No more dead bodies though.”
Well, that wasn’t true. There would be one more, but that was neither here nor there anymore. I had come too far. There would be no going back.
On the full moon, Bobby Bruno would give his life to save us all.
“Don’t leave me,” I said in a rush, then pressed a hand to my mouth.
I shouldn’t set Mac up like that.
“I’m not,” he said, breathless. He leaned forward and rested his forehead against mine. “I’m here with you. Nothing you do can make me change my mind.”
His words left me cold. He had no idea what he was agreeing to.
I swallowed down the urge to cry.
“Should we take her into your house?” he asked, looking back at Miss Gladys in the tarp.
I grimaced. “Absolutely not.”
“So, we just bring power tools into the forest? Do you have a chainsaw? A generator?”
“No saw. No generator. If we can find a saw, we can take her around back, behind the house. There’s an outlet back there.”
Mac stared up at the incline, where the car had been. “What if we run into our friend again?”
He had a point.
“Okay, we’ll leave her here, get the tools, then figure it out.”
I’d known getting that ring was going to be the easiest of the elements, but I hadn’t anticipated any of this.
“I don’t want to be that person,” he began.
I sighed, throwing myself back in my seat. “What?”
“We don’t know if Brian is still on our trail, and we don’t know who or how many are involved with that red car.”
“What’s your point, Mac?”
“If they scour the woods, they will find her. I think we should bury her, at least give us a fighting chance.”
I groaned and flopped against the driver side door. My body couldn’t handle much more of this. Everything in me hurt, muscle, heart, and soul.
“I can do the shoveling,” he said.
The image of when I slammed said shovel into his brother’s head flashed in my brain. I reached up and smacked the side of my head before I caught myself.
Mac scowled. “Grace?”
“I’m fine.” I sat up and pushed open the door. “Let’s get to digging.”
We dug another grave for Miss Gladys, even though she had a perfectly serviceable one back in town. True to his word, Mac did most of the work, even though I tried to wrestle the shovel from him. This was my battle, after all.
He didn’t seem to think so. He was all in, without knowing what that meant.
As I watched him move dirt, I realized I had only two choices: I could free Bobby, or I could accept that I was going to kill Mac’s brother.
That meant I had no choice at all.
No matter how much fierce love welled in me every time I saw Mac, every time he tried oh-so-sweetly to comfort me when he had no idea the depth and depravity of my pain, I simply could not trade Bobby for anything. Not even Mac.
After we covered Miss Gladys in her new, albeit shallow, grave, I gathered rocks the size of cantaloupes and piled them up at the base of the tree by her head.
I’d done this before, buried a beloved soul in the forest and piled rocks as markers. I’d cried the entire time, then curled in the alcove where Bobby now resided. The blood on my hands had stained the interior walls of the cave, but those had long washed away.
The memory had not.
Neither had the memory of the days to follow: beaten and dragged through town, door to door, forced to apologize for a crime I did not commit.
I never did apologize. And the town never forgot that, either.
“Grace?”
Mac’s voice brought me to the present, and I found I was kneeling on Miss Gladys’ grave, crying, face cupped in my hands, shoulders shaking.
He knelt beside me and touched my shoulder. “It’s a lot, I know.”
I glared at him through my fingers. “You don’t know.”
He retracted his hand, hesitating with words on his lips.
“Don’t tell me you understand,” I said, voice thick with barely contained rage. “You don’t know everything.”
He rose to his feet, and I knew he would leave then. Turn and walk away, as he should have done when they’d invited him to Thorn Tree to look for Bobby.
Instead, he offered me his hand. “But I’m still here now.”
I stared up at him with burning eyes, tears and snot wetting my face. Even the rain couldn’t wash that away.
He was here now. He was no knight in shining armor, but I didn’t need or want that anyway. All I needed, and wanted, was him.
And he was here.
I took his hand. Together, we walked back to the jeep.
The jeep couldn’t climb up the way we had come down, so we had to go the long way around to reach the forest above again, level with my house. Mud flung up on either side as we made our way through the trees. We broke through the tree line in front of my house in the darkness.
My heart jolted. I cut the headlights and threw the jeep in reverse, back into the trees. Within their shelter, Mac and I watched, spellbound, as a silhouette cloaked in shadows and a drawn hood burst out my front door. The door flopped in the storm as the silhouette darted into the driver side of the red car parked outside my house. The car reversed, then bolted towards town.
Mac turned his head towards me, all color faded from his face. “Gracie…what were they looking for?”
23
MAC
Gracie barely looked away from the spot where the red car had been. “I have no idea.”
I had to wonder about the sincerity of her reply. As much as I loved her, we had already reached an understanding that she had not told me everything about her relationship with the people of Thorn Tree.
She got out of the jeep, leaving the vehicle parked in the trees, and I followed her towards her house. She caught the front door as it swung back and halted in her doorway.
I stopped behind her, my chest against her back.
The couch had been flipped, drawers empty, papers strewn everywhere. The kitchen cabinets had been emptied, all the dishes and small appliances in random heaps on the floor. Glass was strewn between tile and carpet.
She picked her way through the clutter and headed down the hallway. The hall closet had been emptied, containers pulled open and dumped. The bathroom hadn’t been spared either.
In the bedroom, the bed had been stripped of blankets and sheets, and the mattress sat at an angle, half on the floor. Her closet had been pulled apart, clothes draped and piled around the room.
Determination creased her face. She stormed back towards the kitchen. The dresser that stood next to a door I hadn’t been through—it probably led to a basement—had been dumped as well. She searched the ground and retrieved a pistol from the clutter.
I jerked back.
Grace kept a gun? Not that it should surprise me. It wasn’t uncommon in this part of the country.
Wordlessly, she unlocked the back door and I followed her out, past an overturned bucket, to the shed in the back. The door wasn’t locked, and she yanked it open. I flipped on my phone light, relieved my phone hadn’t been destroyed in the deluge yet, and held it up while she surveyed the interior. Both her gaze and the light landed on a power saw tucked on a homemade plywood shelf.
She reached for it, then halted and held up the cord. Distinct rodent bite marks had chewed down to the wire.
“What else can we use?” she asked, more to herself than me.
“Can you borrow one? Oh, wait.”
I caught myself too late.
No one in Thorn Tree was going to loan Grace a saw and in this case, I couldn’t exactly fault them. It wasn’t like she was preparing firewood for winter. Even if they didn’t know that.
However, I could borrow one. I still had good standing with this town, at least for now. I wasn’t sure how long that would last once everyone realized I had sided with Grace, but according to her, that was what they wanted, or at least the Reverend did. Then he could convert me over to his side and I would dutifully bring Grace. That was the plan as far as I understood it.
I intended to be out of this god forsaken town before then.
My heart skipped a beat. I still hadn’t found Robert. If I hadn’t by the time Grace invoked her spell, I was going to have to do the worst thing I’d ever done in my life: I would have to leave my brother behind. How could I stay here, knowing what I knew now, once given the chance to leave? It might be my only opportunity.
I couldn’t fathom what had happened to my brother, but at this point, I had to suspect the town of foul play. I wasn’t sure how he factored in their plan. Surely they couldn’t have known I would fall in love with Grace and become instrumental in their plan to convert her back to their little…cult.
That was what this was. I hadn’t placed it until now, but standing out here in the rain, staring at the damaged power saw that would be our only hope of collecting the bone we needed for a catastrophic spell, all the pieces fell together.
I’d stumbled into a cult. The entire town was a commune of sorts. I didn’t understand the mechanics of the bewitched forest or the Reverend with the fire in his hands, but the rest of the dynamic stood before me. Thorn Tree was a cult, and Gracie was the sole individual to push back against their authority.
That meant my father was either an escapee from the cult or, more accurately, a pardoned defector. He kept their secret, and they didn’t murder him and his family—including me—in cold blood.
Grace had somehow upset them to the point that no such privilege would be bestowed on her.
This also meant my brother was a cult member. Somehow, in a way I couldn’t quite explain even to myself, that made perfect sense. He’d always been awkward in the outside world, like he didn’t belong there.
Because he didn’t.
He’d grown up under the Reverend’s rule, in a town with a forest that was, apparently, sentient.
His mother had bartered his freedom, but like a true brainwashed cultist, he had returned home.
