Silas (31 page)

I was afraid that I’d hold
her, and that my body would betray me, like the time when we’d
huddled in the underbrush while the hunters shot at her.

I was afraid I’d hold her,
and that I would want her.

And that seemed to me like the single
most disgusting thing I could possibly do.

Currently, thinking about
sex made me ill.

But for some reason, I
couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I kept thinking about Rolf
and Christa and the way he’d ripped open her shirt. And then I kept
picturing things. How had he done it?

Her legs had been tied to
the tree. When I’d gone dark, her pants had been on. When I’d come
to later, they’d been off.

Had he untied her legs to get her pants
off?

How had he done that?

If he did untied her, did she struggle?
Did she try to kick him?

Was that when he’d hit her
face, split her lip open like that?

He must have forced her legs open
somehow. Had he tied them back up?

How had he tied them?

It seemed so complicated.

I didn’t want to
know.

I
needed
to know.

I couldn’t stop picturing
her against that tree, stripped and spread open. Rolf against her.
Rolf
in
her.

I stayed to the other side of the cave,
as far from her as I could get, clutching my head, trying to rip
the images out of my mind. I was afraid to get close to
her.

Touching her? Being
comforting? That was definitely not an option.

But I couldn’t pretend like
nothing had happened either. Because something
had
happened. And I wasn’t okay with
it.

But I knew that I didn’t
have any right to be freaked out about it, not when she was
pretending to be peachy keen.

I couldn’t
talk
about it.

So, I did nothing. I stayed away from
her, and I did nothing.

And she sat on the other side of the
cave, toying restlessly with an empty Coke can.

And, outside, it got darker.

* * *

“
You don’t want me anymore,
do you?” She was only a voice in the darkness, a tiny voice, quiet
and frightened.

I didn’t answer. I was
sitting up at the door of the cave. Outside, the trees and brush
were all stock still.

“
You know, back in
Morgantown, I was afraid because of how much you wanted me. It
reminded me of other guys, like that guy who ran the brewery. You
asked me if he was my boyfriend, and I said he wasn’t, because I
don’t do boyfriends. But he sort of was. I thought maybe he’d be
different. Like maybe it would be okay to, you know, let him
in.

“
So, I tried,” she
continued. “I let him in little bit by little bit. I thought I was
controlling it, like I was only letting him in as far as I could
handle. But I wasn’t. I was losing myself to him. I liked him, and
I wanted him to like me back.

“
And then one day
he
didn’t
like me
anymore. He said I drank too much, and I flirted too much, and that
he couldn’t trust me, because he thought I’d sleep with other
people besides him. And then it was over.

“
And the way you were
acting, Silas, I was pretty sure you were going to do the same
thing. I knew your type.”

I sighed. “I don’t know,
Christa, I don’t think that was what I was going to do. I wasn’t
thinking very far into the future when I met you, you
know.”

“
Maybe not,” she said. “But
I didn’t know how to get rid of you. You wouldn’t stop, no matter
what I said. You let my brother beat you up because of me, and you
still wanted to kiss me afterward.”

“
I heal fast.”

“
I know,” she said. “But you
made me feel out of control, and I didn’t like that.”

I stared out of the lip of
the cave, feeling dead inside. “I made
you
feel out of control? Christa, I
haven’t been in control of anything since you appeared in my life.
I’ve been falling apart.”

“
No, you haven’t,” she said.
“You’ve been the only thing protecting me.”

I laughed bitterly. “Well,
I’ve done a damned good job at that, haven’t I?”

She was quiet.

I felt cold. I hunched my shoulders
under the jacket I wore.

“
You said it was like a
switch got flipped, and suddenly I wanted to fuck you. You wanted
to know why. You remember?”

“
Yeah.” But it seemed like
another life, when shit like that mattered.

“
It was because I wanted
back in control of the situation. As long as it was my idea,
then…”

“
Like it was your idea to
lose your virginity to three guys in a hot tub?”

“
It was.”

“
Right. And I
liked
being forced to
have sex with Sylvia. I didn’t really have a problem being a
fucking whore. It was no big deal.” I pulled the jacket closer
around my body. “We’re both rewriting history to make it seem like
we weren’t victims, aren’t we?”

Her tone was fierce. “I’m
not a victim.”

“
Christa.” My voice
cracked. “You have
bruises
all over your body.”

* * *

She was crying.

It was sometime in the
middle of the night, and I might have been asleep, even though I’d
promised myself that I would stay awake and keep watch to make sure
that Rolf didn’t come for us in the night.

He’d never come at night
before, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t now.

I needed to be ready.

But I’d fallen asleep
anyway.

And now she was crying.

I crept across the cave to
her.

Tentatively, I touched her
shoulder. “Christa?” Maybe she was asleep.

But she sat up and threw her
arms around me. “Oh god, Silas,” she sobbed.

I couldn’t move.

For several moments, she
clung to me, crying into my shoulder, and I didn’t touch her. Was
afraid to touch her.

And then I forced my arms to go around
her small, soft form, to pull her against me.

I thought about her in my
arms the night before, both of us nude and satiated on each other’s
bodies.

Fear jolted through me. I
was terrified that my body would respond to the sensation of her
pressed into me—her curves and soft heft.

But it didn’t.

It felt nice to hold her.
Good, even. But there wasn’t anything sexual about it. It was
comfort. It was closeness. It was safety.

I wasn’t hurting her. I
wasn’t doing anything inappropriate.

I was just holding her.

So, I did.

I held her until her sobs
quieted.

And then I let her curl up against me,
and I stroked her hair over and over again. Gently.
Reassuringly.

Until she fell asleep.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

When I woke up, she
wasn
’t in the cave.

I walked in a quick frantic
circle, trying to make sure that she wasn’t hidden somewhere in the
shadows, still lying down. But all I found were our four empty Coke
cans and the leftover trail mix and beef jerky.

Had Rolf been here?

He’d said that he was going
to hunt us down and do it all over again.

No.

I couldn’t handle that. She
couldn’t handle that.

I tore out of the cave,
images that I’d conjured up swimming through my brain. Christa
against that tree—bleeding, naked, legs spread…

She was sitting by the stream. She had
one of the backpacks, and she had gathered several branches. She
was using a pocket knife to whittle the edges into sharp
points.

I collapsed next to her.
“What the hell?”

She held up the pocket
knife. “Look what I found in the backpack.”

I snatched it from her and
set it down. I took her by the shoulders and shook her.
“
Don’t
run off
like that. I thought…”

She wrenched the knife away
from me. “Have a coronary, why don’t you?”

“
I thought he found you
again,” I said. “I thought he had you, and he was—”

“
Well, he didn’t.” Her
nostrils flared. She picked up the knife and went back to
whittling.

I ran a hand over my face. My heart was
pounding. I took deep breaths, trying to calm down.

“
I found something else.”
She dug in the backpack and came out with a folded up piece of
paper. She handed it to me. “It’s a map.”

I unfolded it. It was
hand-drawn, with various scrawled labels like, “waterfall” and
“holding cell.” I squinted at it.

She leaned over, pointing.
“We’re around here, I think.”

“
So, there’s a map,” I said.
“What good does that do us? And why are you making… stakes? You
planning on killing vampires or something? These aren’t long enough
for fishing.”

“
They aren’t for fishing,”
she said. “And they aren’t for vampires either. They’re for Rolf.
I’m going to kill him.”

This was too much to take in. The last
thing I remembered, she was a sobbing mess in my arms. Now, she was
making weapons?

She pointed on the map. “See
that?”

I read out loud the label
she was pointing at. “Hunting cabin?”

“
It’s close,” she said.
“It’s just down from the cellar we were in the first night. That’s
the ‘holding cell,’ see?”

“
It took us days to get
here,” I said. “Besides, we don’t even know what ‘hunting cabin’
means.”

“
It’s where he is,” she
said. “And it did take us days, but that’s because we all went out
this way, remember?” She gestured on the map. “Emmett told us to go
east, so we went way into the woods. Then we started towards the
power lines, and we came all the way back this way, along the
stream.”

I cocked my head, considering. She was
right.

“
I figure we could get to
his cabin by nightfall tonight,” she said. “Just follow the stream
up to the waterfall and then go this way.” She pointed.

“
Maybe,” I said. It wasn’t a
bad plan.

“
I’m doing it,” she said.
“I’m killing him.”

“
No.” I shook my
head.

“
You want him
alive?”

“
Of course not,” I said.
“But Rolf’s mine. This whole mess got started because I wanted to
kill him. And so I’m doing it.”

“
No, you’re going to let me
do it.”

“
How do you propose to do
that?”

She held up the sharpened
sticks. She had about four of them already. She was working on a
fifth. “It’s just like what you said when you were talking to
Emmett. Rolf has to sleep, right? So I’ll sneak into the cabin,
find him in his bed, and stab him.”

“
Christa, you don’t even
know how to kill people.”

“
I’ve killed two people in
the past few days,” she said.

“
But that was luck,” I said.
“You need to let me handle this.”

“
Maybe it was skill,” she
said. “Maybe I’m a natural.”

This was ridiculous. “You
aren’t a killer.”

“
Sure I am. I’ve killed two
people. That makes me a killer.”

I sighed. “You have to let
me do it.”

“
No, I don’t.”

“
I have to do it for
Sylvia,” I said. “And for you. And for me. You can’t take this from
me.”

She shrugged. “Sorry, but
you have to let me do it.”

“
It wouldn’t be good for
you. You’ve been through too much. I’m used to killing people. It
won’t bother me.”

“
I’m already pretty damned
bothered. The only way I’m going to be sure that I’m safe is if I
do it. If I’m sure he’s dead, then I’ll know he can’t ever come
after me again.”

“
No.”

“
Silas, you’re going
to let me kill him. Me. Because when he was…” She looked up at me,
her jaw twitching. “When he was jamming himself in and out of me, I
kept scraping up against the tree behind me. The bark dug into me,
and I was bleeding. It hurt. And it just kept going
on and on.”

I turned away.

“
You’re going to let me do
it.”

I couldn’t look at her.
“Yeah. All right.”

* * *

I didn
’t have any intention of letting her kill Rolf, but I had
nothing to say to that. So I let it go. If she thought she was
going to kill him, fine. But when it came down to it, she wasn’t
going to be able to pull it off.