Page 112 of What Lies in the Woods

I writhed in pain. My breath rattled, and there was a slurping feelingevery time I gasped. The stones above me fractured into light-dappled branches.

“What are you doing?” Cassidy screamed, her young voice high and furious.

“I can’t. I can’t. I can’t,” Olivia chanted.

“We have to! You promised!” Cassidy yelled.

The knife flashed. I raised a hand to ward it off, striking out weakly at the person looming over me, but a firm hand caught my wrist and held it. “It’s okay. We’ve got you. She’s down here!”

Memory ceded reluctantly to the present. Cass’s hand, Cody’s, Oscar’s—they collapsed into reality, brown skin and a solid grip.

I blinked blearily up at Officer Bishop. “I’m starting to think I should have just arrested you,” she told me. She pressed her palms to my abdomen, sending a fresh wave of pain through me. I coughed and tasted copper.

I had to tell her about Cody. I tried to speak, but I only coughed again, and she shushed me.

“Just keep breathing,” she told me. “Just stay awake and keep breathing. You’re going to be okay.”

For once, I didn’t mind being lied to.

I stayed awake. I fixed every moment in my memory as best I could. I wouldn’t forget again. I might die, but if I lived, I would remember this.

Ethan was there when they hauled me out, strapped to a backboard. He tried to talk to me but the words were all slushy. I wanted to tell him I forgave him for lying, but the EMTs got testy when I tried to talk and then they were putting me in a helicopter.

“You’ve really got to stop doing this,” one of the EMTs joked, yelling over the sound of the blades.

“Last time, I promise,” I mumbled, and he shushed me again.

And then, despite my best efforts, I faded.

Consciousness seeped back slowly, punctuated by the soft beeping of a monitor. With my eyes closed and my body cocooned in the half oblivion of morphine, I might have been eleven years old again. Except this time, my dad was there when I woke up.

“Hey, kid,” he said when he saw me open my eyes.

“Hey,” I replied weakly. It came out like a shoe scraping over asphalt. “I’m not dead.”

“Go figure,” he said.

I looked down at my right hand. Even with the thick bandages, the shape of it was obviously wrong, the last two fingers gone almost entirely, the middle finger ending at the second knuckle. “Thought I still had that one,” I said, irrationally irritated at its absence.

“The surgeon wanted a souvenir,” Dad said. I gave him a blank look,unable to process the humor. He cleared his throat. “It was damaged. They had to amputate.”

I hadn’t even noticed. “What about the rest of me?”

“I hope you didn’t have an emotional attachment to your spleen. And a sizable piece of intestine. You’re basically a soup of antibiotics and narcotics with a few chunks of meat to provide texture, but you’ll live.”

“That’s good,” I managed. I tried to wet my cracked lips, but my mouth was just as dried out. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

“I mean after. Did they—is Cody—”

“He’s been arrested,” Dad said. “Even these chuckleheads have managed to put two and two together. Plus you kept saying ‘Cody Benham shot me’ over and over again.”

“That part I don’t remember,” I confessed.

“Yeah, you were pretty loopy,” Dad said. He leaned forward and patted my good hand. “Anyway. Glad you’re not dead. You, ah. Should really stop getting hurt.”

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