Near the Bone by Christina Henry (ebook reader color screen txt) 📗

an answer. “Look, let’s leave the packs here and just take some food and water. We can tuck the bags into these boulders and come back for them. That way we can move faster.”

“I don’t know if Samantha can move that fast,” Jen said.

“Then she can stay here with the packs. Or she can run away, if she wants,” C.P. said. He said this last so dismissively that Mattie felt her terror covered over with shame.

Is it so wrong to run? Is it wrong to want to avoid hurt?

“Come on, if we hurry we can catch up to it before it carves Griff up into little pieces,” C.P. said to Jen. It was clear that Mattie no longer mattered, in his opinion, if she didn’t want to come along on his quest to retrieve Griffin.

Mattie did not want to say that she didn’t want to be left alone in the woods, because she was certain C.P. would dismiss her as cowardly.

You’re not a coward. You lived with William all those years. You survived every day as William got crazier and crazier. C.P. doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what it was like.

This sounded like what Mattie thought of as her Samantha voice, that strong and practical self that didn’t seem quite merged with the Mattie she’d known for so long. Everything Samantha thought was true, though. Mattie wasn’t a coward. She wasn’t.

The truth that C.P. didn’t want to face was that there wasn’t much they could do about Griffin. How would they get him back from an animal that was so large, so fierce, so silent? All three of them had seen the size of the silhouette, the length of its claws. And nobody had heard it. They hadn’t even known it was stalking them.

You only hear the creature when it wants you to hear it.

There had been no breaking branches to warn them, no grunt of its breath, no roar echoing through the forest. It had watched them and waited and then it had taken the most vulnerable person, the one who clearly wouldn’t fight back. Griffin.

There’s always a chance Griffin might survive, or that the creature might not harm him. There’s a chance.

She thought this, but she didn’t really believe it. It was more like a hope, or a wish—a little-girl wish. Mattie wasn’t a little girl anymore, and she knew that stories didn’t have happy endings.

Mattie felt a little pang at the thought of the kind-eyed Griffin, the man who’d been so concerned for her to get to a doctor, the stranger who’d attacked William so she could escape.

“What . . . will . . . you . . . do?” Mattie asked C.P., who was busily stuffing things from his pack in his jacket pockets.

“I don’t know. Get Griffin back, I guess, and then figure it out from there.”

“How?” she persisted. “Do . . . you . . . have . . . a . . . weapon?”

“No, I don’t have a weapon,” he said. “I didn’t think I was going to have to battle a gigantic . . .”

He faltered, his voice trailing off. He looked at Jen.

“It wasn’t what we expected. Not at all,” Jen said. She hadn’t moved a muscle since she’d stopped yelling for Griffin.

“I thought it would be more like a Sasquatch, or just a really big bear,” C.P. said. He sounded thoughtful, though there was just a tremor of fear underneath. “But that wasn’t a bear, unless bears are the size of elephants now.”

“I don’t understand how it could sneak up on us like that,” Jen said. “And if it was so big, how can it have been in the trees?”

“Maybe we’ll get a good look at it when we get Griff back,” C.P. said.

“I don’t know if I want to get a good look at it,” Jen said. Her eyes were wide and shiny in the moonlight.

Moonlight. Full dark had come while Mattie had fallen away into a flood of memories set off by a chocolate bar. The nighttime was the creature’s time. And William’s.

“Jen, come on,” C.P. said, grabbing her arm and shaking her. “This isn’t like you. Yes, that was terrifying. Yes, I think I actually peed in my pants when I saw its claws. But if that happened to one of us, Griffin wouldn’t just leave us out there. He’d come after us. You know he would.”

William knew these woods, knew how to hunt. He could stalk Mattie through the forest just as silently as the monster who’d snatched Griffin away.

“I know,” Jen said. “I know. It’s just . . . what can we really do? We don’t have guns or knives or anything.”

Danger was all around her, in every twitching branch and every shifting shadow. She couldn’t stay here alone. But it was utter foolishness to chase after the creature, to go back in the direction of William’s cabin, to put herself in harm’s way.

“We don’t have to fight it,” C.P. said. “I’m not going to have a boss battle on the top of a mountain, and neither are you. We can, I don’t know, sneak up on it or something.”

She should continue down the mountain. She could find the stream, the way she’d originally planned. She could get police, people who could help, and they would come back and rescue Jen and C.P.

If they’re still alive.

“Don’t you think it will be able to smell us coming? Or hear us? Whatever it is, it’s some kind of animal and its senses are probably a hell of a lot sharper than ours,” Jen said. Her voice was rising in pitch with every word.

Yes, the best plan, the most practical plan, was for one of them (me, it should be me) to keep going, to get others to come to the mountain. The rescuers could swarm the mountain and they could catch William in their net and then Mattie wouldn’t have to look over her shoulder for the rest of her life, waiting for him to appear and snatch her away again.

“We’ll just figure something out,” C.P. said. “I mean, first we have to find out if Griff is even still . . .”

William didn’t snatch you away,