Page 64 of No Place Left to Hide

My head throbs, worse this time, and when I reach back, my fingers come away wet, and my knuckles scrape against a rock beneath my hand.

I try to sit up and the whole forest spins in a wild, wobbling circle.

A flutter of rocks rains down on me, followed by the soundof someone trampling down the hill. The panic returns full force. I manage to roll to my stomach and get my knees beneath me, but when I try to stand, I’m too dizzy and stumble to the ground again. My fingers dig into the earth, clawing my way further from the hill as fast as I can crawl.

A hand closes around my ankle and yanks me back. My arms fall out from under me, and my sweatshirt and turtleneck drag up my stomach, exposing my bare skin to be scraped raw against the forest floor. I cry out and he lets go, only to roll me onto my back again with the toe of his boot.

When I look up, Brandon towers over me with a foot on either side of my knees, breathing heavy. That fucking mask casts an ominous glow on the trees around us.

My scream echoes through the trees and I try to kick him in the knees, but he’s reaching for me, so I get him in the forearm instead. He lets out a robotic yelp and I scramble away from him.

In a flash, he crouches down and grabs fistfuls of Dylan’s sweatshirt and lifts me into the air. My feet dangle off the ground, and the sweatshirt fabric pulls painfully tight beneath my arms and around the back of my neck.

He tugs me close until we’re almost nose to nose. The pink light is so bright it hurts my eyes. His fists tighten in the fabric, and he shakes me until it feels like my teeth are going to rattle free from my skull.

“What is wrong with you?” he screams in my face, the mechanical twist on the voice making it clipped and emotionless. “Why won’t you admit what you did and let this be over? Her family deserves to know what really happened!”

He stops shaking me, and it feels like my brains are scrambledin my skull. My heart is beating so fast it’s almost like one solid pulse rather than individual thumps.

The mask looms in my face.

“Say it!” he screams. “Admit what you did!”

“I didn’t do anythi—”

He shakes me again and lets out a growl of frustration. “You always have to do everything the hard way!”

The forest spins in circles around me. I keep clawing at his hands, but the sweatshirt is cutting off circulation to my arms.

Something’s dripping down the back of my neck. The edges of my vision go dark, blocking out whole patches of fluorescent pink.

Fear like I’ve never felt before coils in my gut.

I’m going to die out here.

“Brandon—” I choke out. “Please.”

The shaking stops and the robot voice laughs. “Sorry. Not Brandon.”

What?

His grip releases and he chucks me to the ground. Blood rushes back into my arms and I clutch them to my chest and roll into a ball on the ground, gasping through the pain.

He takes a step toward me, and I hear something move behind my head.

Suddenly the dude in the mask is screaming bloody murder. I watch in shock as he stumbles back and drops to his knees, grabbing at his face.

Jena drops down beside me, with one arm over her eyes and her pepper spray key chain in her other hand. My eyes immediately start to water. The air is thick with capsaicin.

Jena fucking maced him.

“God, I’m glad that…worked through that mask,” she says, coughing through her sentence.

She hauls me to my feet and pulls me toward the embankment. We wordlessly race to put as much space between us and the overspray as possible, but we’re blindly groping at the ground at best and the damage is already done. My eyes are on fire, and I can still hear Brandon—or whoever the fuck that is—screaming and thrashing around in the trees. It sounds like he fell further down the embankment.

My eyes are burning and watering so badly it’s hard to open them, but we know where the road is, so we just climb.

“There’s water in the car,” Jena gasps beside me. “We can flush our eyes.”

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