Page 30 of What Lies in the Woods

And then there’d been the fight. It wasn’t the first, not by a long shot. They started over any little thing. Liv would fret and try to make peace, and Cass and I would rip into each other.

I don’t remember what it was even about. I do remember the anger, the thorns of it in my veins, the heat of it in my skin. Cass, blond, beautiful, perfect, stood there with her arms crossed, and I wanted to crack her nose with my fist.

“You’re such a stuck-upbitchsometimes!” I screamed at her. “You think you can tell everybody what to do!”

“I’d rather be a stuck-up bitch than live in trash,” she yelled back, eyes fever bright.

I knew she didn’t mean it. She was just trying to get me to break. To hit her, so she could hit me back. There wasn’t anyone else to hurt, and we had to hurt something.

Sometimes I gave in to the fight we both wanted. Today I ran. She shouted after me, but I kept going. I had to spend this energy somewhere, and the other option was breaking her pretty face.

“Naomi, stop running! Come back! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, come back!”

They chased after me. I could hear them crashing through the forest behind me. I leapt over roots and scrambled over logs and ran without paying attention to where I was going. I only wanted to get away.

Hot tears streaked my cheeks.Trash. You’re trash.My lungs burned. I wasn’t Artemis, wasn’t a goddess who could endlessly run through the wilds with her sacred deer. But I couldn’t stop or turn back, because I couldn’t face them.

Trash.

Up ahead was a hump in the earth. A boulder, slablike, mostly covered with moss and trees. Only the face of it was bare, so that it formed a small hill, and beneath it was a gap, a hollow space.

Cass and Liv were catching up. Without thinking, I dropped to my belly and skittered under the boulder. I expected a shallow depression maybe big enough to hide in, but to my surprise the ground sloped away beneath me, and I half fell, half lowered myself.

The boulder formed the bulk of the roof of the space, and tree roots and the flow of water had carved the rest. There was a split toward the far side of the chamber, a gap that let in a narrow shaft of light and illuminated the web of tree roots holding up the “ceiling.” The chamber—cave—was about three feet tall, maybe five feet across, eight feet long. Enough room for a sitting child. Enough room for the body.

I held my breath. It couldn’t be real, I thought—but of course it was. I could have reached out and touched it.

The skeleton lay on its side. Bits of rotten clothing hung from the ribs. All the flesh had been stripped away.

Tentatively I reached out and touched the smooth brow of the skull. My fingers came away gritty. I shuddered.

The skull was cracked on the side of the head. Had that been what killed them?

Liv and Cass were calling. Reluctantly, I turned my back on the body. I pushed myself up the incline and scrambled out from the gap beneath the rock. Liv shrieked as I emerged, caked in dirt, like some primordial beast. Cass babbled apologies, cheeks damp with tears as she grabbed at me, begging forgiveness.

“You need to see this,” I said, and she fell silent.

I brought them down into the earth, Liv frightened, Cass curious. We knelt around the skeleton in awed and nervous silence.

“Who is it? What happened to them?” Liv asked.

I almost said then that we needed to get help. It almost happened that way: us running out of the woods, telling the first person we saw that we’d found a body. A story we’d tell the rest of our lives,the time we found that skeleton in the woods. Maybe none of the rest of it would have happened. No Stahl, no scars, no shattered lives.

Almost. But then Cass gasped.

“Look,” she said.

There, around the skeleton’s wrist, was a loop of nylon, threaded through cheap plastic beads with letters stamped on them. It was hard to read in the dim light, the letters mostly worn away. But you could still make it out enough to figure out what it said.

Persephone.

“What now?” Cass asked. We’d climbed out of the cave, brushed the dirt from our clothes. The sunlight through the branches cast ragged shadows over our faces. “She isn’t here, Naomi. What now?”

Where else would Liv go? She’d gone back to Persephone. The flowers proved that. But Persephone wasn’t the only sacred thing in these woods. I pulled the stack of photographs out of my pocket. The path ended here, but the photos kept going.

“What were the other rituals?” I asked.

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