Page 86 of A Killing Cold

“Nick,” I say. My voice comes out strained. My legs wobble. “I told you. I’ve never gone by Teddy. It’s just Theo.”

He takes a half step forward, still filling the doorway, still blocking my way out. I could shout, I think. How far would my voice carry? Would anyone who heard it come to help?

“It was such a cutesy nickname. Mallory’s little teddy bear. Rowan—your name is Rowan Cahill,” he says. He shakes his head. “I thought it was a coincidence. I thought it couldn’t possibly be you, and I told myself not to be paranoid. Rowan Cahill’s dead, I told myself. I can’t believe how long it took me to see.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, but it’s only a whisper. The walls feel close. The smell of the hanging meat is suddenly overpowering, and my stomach lurches.

“Why did you come here? Why go after Connor?” he asks, giving me a puzzled, inquiring look. “Did you just want to mess with us? Did you think you could get something from us?”

“I don’t want anything from you.” My hand drifts toward my pocket. My arm feels heavy. So does the rest of me. My mouth is cotton-ball dry, and my heartbeat is slow, very slow. My fear feels like a voice calling in the distance. I can’t quite make it out.

“You should never have come back here,” he tells me, and takes another step forward—or is it two? He’s right in front of me now, and it’s like I’ve lost the seconds in between.

Gave her a sedative, to help her calm down, I think. The tea. Stupid. Should have been more careful.

“Whoa there,” he says, under his breath, reaching out to grab myarm. I try to pull away but my knees half collapse instead, and I pitch forward, brace myself against his chest with one hand. He looks down at me. It’s too dark in the shed to read his expression.

“What did you do to my mother?” I whisper.

“I did what I had to,” Nick says, and there is not an ounce of regret in his voice.

I open my mouth to scream—but he claps a hand over my face, muffling the sound. My limbs are weak, the air like Jell-O. He shoves me to the ground. I don’t have the strength to resist. I finally make a sound, a bark of pain as my back hits the ground, and then his knee is digging into my stomach, his weight on my chest, and I can’t get a breath to scream as he grabs my arms. The wound he stitched up less than a day ago flares with pain, but even that feels muted.

It’s like I’m a doll, limp-limbed, his to manipulate. He grabs my wrist. I try to pull free, but it’s barely a tug, and then he has the other one and something thin and hard is tightening around them both—a zip tie. I shove upward, trying to buck him off me, but he doesn’t even seem to notice.

His weight lifts for an instant—I draw a breath to scream—and he crams a foul-tasting rag into my mouth. He seizes my hair at the root, right at my hairline, pulls my head back to look at him. “Enough,” he says, like he’s chastising a dog. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Not yet, he means. He uses a cord to tie the makeshift gag into place, and then he shoves up to his feet.

“That should do,” he says. It takes me a moment in my sluggish state to realize he isn’t speaking to me. Someone else. Right outside.

“Move her. You have a few minutes. Put her in Dragonfly, I’ll be by shortly.” It’s Magnus’s voice.

Nick’s shadow moves toward me again, blocking out the light, and as the darkness falls over me, whatever sedative they’ve given me pulls me under—not all the way, but enough that I can’t stop my eyes from drifting shut. Enough that moments become unglued from each other, and I’m reduced to sensations—

A shoulder digging into my chest. A hand rummaging in my pocket—not the one that holds the knife, not that, at least—and the shudder of a motor starting up. It takes me far too long to fit together the pieces of a coherent thought,I’m on the sledge on the back of the UTV, and then all I can think of is that Magnus uses this thing to drag the bodies of deer to where they’ll be butchered, and then time skips and I’m not outside anymore, I’m being carried up a set of stairs. Dumped out on a wooden floor.

I’m in the main bedroom of Dragonfly. I lie on my side, facing the vanity. Nick is framed in the mirror.

“You really shouldn’t have come back.” He says it like this is my fault. Something inevitable, a regrettable thing he will not in fact regret. He crouches down. I turn my head, every movement requiring careful, conscious thought, and squint up at him. “You were supposed to be dead. This shouldn’t have happened at all.”

I’m so tired. So unbearably tired. I try to keep my eyes open, but they drift shut, and my ears fill with a sound like buzzing—like the droning wings of an insect, and it’s the last thing I hear as I slip away from consciousness.

The girl lies on the floor, her cheek pressed against the wood. It’s cold in here, but not as cold as it was before. She can’t feel her fingers. It’s hard to open her eyes, but she does, and when they focus, her mother is lying across from her. Her neck is a dark red; the red is cracked like river mud. There’s a strange furrow in the skin at her throat, and more blood soaking her sweater, all that crimson blooming from the hole in the middle of her chest. Her eyes are open. She doesn’t see the girl.

The girl tries to speak, but her voice doesn’t come. She tries to reach out, but she’s still so cold, and her arms won’t lift, and the girl knows with deep certainty that this is what it feels like to be dead, because dead is when your body doesn’t work anymore and they bury you in a hole and cover you up with dirt and she doesn’t want to be buried,she doesn’t want to be covered in dirt, and she starts to cry, a thin little breathy sound—

“What the hell?” Footsteps. A new face appears in her vision. A man crouching down. “You alive, little one?”

A foot jostles my shoulder. I try to open my eyes, then curl inward instinctively against the onslaught of the light.

“Welcome back,” Nick says. He crouches down. “You dipped out for quite a stretch there. I was worried she gave you too much.”

I flex my hands. The zip ties bite into my skin. At least they’re in the front, not twisted around the back. He watches me, chewing on his lip.

“I want to ask you something,” he says. “I’m going to take off that gag. Don’t yell. No one would hear you, and it’ll just make things unpleasant for you. Got it?”

I nod. Anything to get this thing out of my mouth. He grunts and reaches around, fumbling with the cord. He gets it undone and pulls the rag out of my mouth. He sits back, leaning against the wall with one knee up.

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