Page 45 of The Night Before (Savannah 1)

Oh, he was never any help. None at all. “For God’s sake, run!” she yelled, trying to propel Griffin into action. “Get help! Go to the lodge!”

Charles groaned. Blood oozed from the corners of his mouth. Though he was staring straight at her, his eyes dulled, as if he couldn’t see. Snow was beginning to cover his face.

“Go!” she screamed, turning to look over her shoulder at Griffin, but he’d disappeared into the thickening curtain of snow. As quickly as he’d come. The space between the saplings suddenly dark and yawning.

There wasn’t any time. She had to do something. She had to try and save her brother. Swallowing back her fear, she gripped the arrow shaft hard and pulled. It didn’t move; her fingers slid up its slick sides. She wrapped her fingers around it again. Closing her eyes, she yanked with all her might, heard a sickening sucking sound and then she was holding the shaft aloft, the arrowhead bright with blood in the light from the rising moon as night stole through the forest.

But it was too late.

Charles’s breath rattled one last time.

He let out a horrid wail that reverberated through the trees and then was silent.

Silent as death.

No! He was so still. Unmoving. She scrambled away from him, flew to her feet and began to run.

Faster. Through the naked birches.

Faster. Across a frozen stream.

Faster. Up the hill toward the family’s hunting lodge in the Appalechians.

Her lungs were on fire, her feet slipping on the icy ground. The forest was dark. Looming. Seemed to close in on her as snow and ice pelted from the heavens. It covered the familiar paths, clung to her eyelashes, stung her cheeks and chenged the surrounding landscape so that she had no idea where she was, from which direction she’d come.

“Help!” she cried, the arrow frozen in her hand. “Please! Help!”

“Caitlyn?” Berneda’s voice was as brittle as a winter branch.

Caitlyn couldn’t see her mother through the curtain of snow. “Mama? Where are you?

“Caitlyn? Come here this instant!” her mother hissed.

Running again, trying to locate the sound, Caitlyn suddenly broke free of the woods. Gasping, her heart drumming, she finally saw the rambling old hunting lodge with warm patches of light in the windows, smoke curling from the chimney and icicles gleaming from the eaves. The door was open, music drifting into the night. Her mother stood in stark relief against the bright backdrop. A tall, dark angel glowering down upon Caitlyn as she raced up the short rise to the porch.

“Help. We have to get help. It’s Charles, he’s hurt!”

Berneda’s face was the color of the surrounding snow, her eyes blazing with accusation as she noticed the arrow in her daughter’s hand. Her splayed fingers flattened over her chest. “Oh, my God, Caitlyn,” she whispered, “what have you done?”

Caitlyn’s eyes flew open.

She was alone, lying upon the canopied bed that had been hers during the years that she’d occupied this room. The flowered canopy was faded now and the afghan she’d pulled to her neck smelled of must and age. She’d been tired after the funeral, had taken her mother’s advice and rested, here, in her old bed.

She swallowed hard. Remnants of the dream still lingered: the sucking sound of the arrow loosening from Charles’s flesh, the cold whistle of the wind, the horrid accusations in her mother’s voice. This recurring nightmare had chased after her since she was a child, ever since the day when she actually had found her brother dying in the snow.

If only she’d listened to Griffin. If only she hadn’t panicked and pulled that damned arrow from his chest.

But she had. So many years earlier.

It had been the day before Thanksgiving, and most of the family had gathered at their hunting lodge in the mountains of West Virginia. Her father had been alive then, and Charles had been out hunting by himself. Caitlyn, Kelly and Griffin had been playing hide-and-seek in the woods when Caitlyn had become lost and wandered farther from the house, deeper into the forest. Calling for her twin, she’d stumbled upon the half-frozen body of her brother. That was where the dream parted from reality, or at least she thought it did because from the moment she’d seen Charles lying faceup in the snow, she couldn’t remember a thing, only that she’d somehow ended up back at the lodge, blood streaking her coat and insulated pants, the deadly arrow clutched in one mittened hand. She’d been catatonic for days . . . unable to talk, withdrawn inside herself. The entire episode was now a black hole, a void she could only fill in the middle of the night when her subconscious would call up a nightmare as bleak and stark as the

sky on that icy November day.

“God help me,” she whispered, trying to get a grip on herself. Her nerves were shot, her memory filled with holes, her life careening out of control. She couldn’t let this happen. Not again. Flipping on the bedside lamp, she noticed the crisp business card that had fallen from her purse.

Adam Hunt

Ph.D.

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