Never Fade (44 page)

“Are you shitting me?” Vida said. “The fact that you can even ask these questions means you haven’t fallen to their level and you probably never will. I get it—I mean, I understand why you’re afraid. I do. But you’re missing the key difference between you and those two.”

“What?”

“You are
not alone
,” she said. “You aren’t, even if it feels that way sometimes. You have people who are in your corner, who care about you like crazy. Not because you forced them to feel that way, but because they want to. Can you honestly tell me those other two shitheads have that? Do you think they would have been half as bad if there had been people there to step in and tell them when to stop?”

“I can’t stop thinking about those kids,” I said, tears pricking the backs of my eyes.

“Good,” Vida said. “It’s on you to remember them and what that felt like to come up out of the dark and see what you’d done. Forgive yourself, but don’t forget.”

“And if it’s not enough?”

“Then
I’ll
stop you,” she said. “I’m not afraid of your crazy power. Not anymore, at least.” Vida stood up, brushing her pants off. “I’m going to go take a walk around. When I come back, you better already be asleep, or I’ll knock you out myself.”

“Thanks,” I said. “For listening, I mean.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I waited until Vida was heading down a trail before I turned back to the tent and crawled between Liam and Chubs. I was too tired and too drained to wonder or care if it was a bad idea. I settled down and closed my eyes, letting my thoughts slow and spill into a soft, pale blue dream.

TWENTY-FOUR

I
WAS SO USED TO THE STRANGE
on-off sleep schedule of my life now, I’m not sure what it was that actually woke me up. Not a noise. Vida was back in the tent, humming softly, some old song I half recognized. I watched, disoriented, as she gleefully tore out scraps of
White Fang
’s pages, rolled each into a tiny ball, and threw them one by one into Chubs’s mouth, which had fallen wide open in sleep.

I sat up and rubbed my face, trying to clear the crud from my eyes. “What time is it?”

She shrugged. “Half past who the hell knows? Go back to sleep.”

“Okay,” I said, lowering myself down onto my elbows. Chubs’s rattling snores kept time with the persistent rip of each page. Both he and Jude were sleeping flat on their backs, shoulder to shoulder. I slid back down under the covers, turning onto my left side again. The blanket twisted with me, leaving Liam without an inch of it.

I sat up again, heavy limbs and all, and untangled myself from the soft wool. With Liam’s half of the blanket finally freed from under me, I tossed it carefully back in his direction, watching, with disbelieving eyes, as the pale peach fabric fluttered down through empty air and settled on the ground.

“Where’s Lee?” I hadn’t been awake before. I was now.

“He went out,” Vida said, not looking up from her work.

“Out,” I repeated, the word tasting like blood on my tongue. “Out where?”

“To walk around for a while,” she said. “He said he couldn’t sleep.”

“You let him go alone?” I scrambled for my boots, hands shaking as I pulled them on. “How long ago did he leave?”

“What’s going on?” Chubs mumbled.

“Liam left,” I said.

“What?”
His hands smacked around on the ground until they found his glasses. He shoved them onto the bridge of his nose. “Are you sure?”

“I’m going to bring him back,” I said, tugging on the navy sweatshirt and an oversize dust-smeared black peacoat they’d grabbed by mistake as they left the warehouse in Nashville. “Vida—did he tell you where he was going?”

“Leave him alone, boo,” she said, not turning around. “He’s a big kid. Wears the underwear and everything.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, “he’s
not coming back
. He’s leaving for good.”

Vida’s lips parted as she glanced around, the full weight of realization knocking the breath out of her. “Well…you have the flash drive, right? It’s not a total disaster.…”

“Are you kidding me?” I shouted. Jude sat straight up, blinking, but I didn’t have time to answer any of his questions. “Where would he go? He’d need a car or a bike—did he mention anything to any of you?”

“No!” Chubs said. “I would have told you!”

“Definitely not,” Jude said. “He kept talking about all of us going together tomorrow. Maybe…I mean, he could come back, right? If we give him a few minutes?”

He could be right
. I forced myself to gulp down a deep breath. I pressed a hand, hard, against my chest, trying to ease the fluttering beat of my heart. He could have just gone down to the falls. That was possible, wasn’t it? Liam would never have left without Chubs or some kind of—

I stopped mid-thought, noticing for the first time the tiny sliver of paper sticking up out of his shirt’s front pocket. The button there had been undone, making room for a folded note. I reached over and plucked it out before Chubs could stop me.

Gas station off highway, 2 miles south. Come by 6.

I crumpled the note in my fist, throwing it back at him.

“I didn’t know!” he said before he’d even read it. “I didn’t!”

We had a total of two guns that Vida and I traded off carrying, since both Chubs and Liam refused on moral grounds. The revolver was on the ground at Vida’s feet, and the black semi-automatic was resting on top of the deflated backpack. Which meant Liam had neither.

Of course—
of course
he would go to the one place he had the best chance of being spotted by someone else. What was he thinking? That he’d be fine under the cover of night?

I took off at a stumbling run, shoving the tent flap open. The thick soles of my boots smashed through the snow.

“Wait for me!” Vida shouted.
“Ruby!”

Outside of our small shelter, the freezing air hit me like a bat to the face. In the precious few seconds it took for me to get my bearings and head toward the small road Chubs had pointed out earlier, large flakes of snow had already managed to work their way along my loose hair, down into the collar of my coat. But they weren’t nearly heavy enough to cover the careless footprints he’d left behind.

I ran. Through the flurries of snow, the morning misty haze, the overgrown trails, until I found the highway. The blanket of snow on the road wasn’t nearly as thick-skinned as the layer covering the forest floor. I lost sight of his trail just as I skidded onto the icy blacktop, the stitches pulling so tight in my back it momentarily knocked the breath out of me. I staggered forward, lungs burning. The sun was rising in the east; it was the only reason I knew how to set my feet toward the south.

It was another twenty minutes, a whole lifetime of poisonous terror, before the small strip of businesses took shape down the misty highway and I spotted the gas station they must have passed on the way in.

I was out of breath, my lower back screaming in pain each time I swung my leg forward. The paved road disappeared into slushy dirt that splattered up onto my shins. The half dozen gas pumps had been knocked face-first into the torn-up pavement.

There were a couple of vehicles parked behind the station, one—a truck—with its hood propped open, as if someone had just taken a look. If he had found something wrong with it, there was a chance he was looking for a part in the service garage.
Or food,
I thought, turning back toward the building.
Stocking up before he runs
.

The back door of the station was unlocked; if I were being technical about it, the lock and handle had both been blown right off. It creaked as I opened it, and I slipped inside.

The store was bigger than I was expecting it to be but in worse shape. Someone had done a fairly thorough job of cleaning the joint out, but here and there were jumbo bags of chips, and a soda dispenser was still glowing and buzzing with last gasps of electricity. The gun stayed in my hand, cold and solid, trained on the glass doors of the drink refrigerators and the endless graffiti tagging that masked from view anything still inside.

I followed the line of the shelves as they flowed past the cash register and empty cardboard candy containers, around the front of the store to a fairly new-looking section of the building labeled
FULL SERVICE
.

The short hallway between the store and the mechanic garage was decorated with photos and posters of old cars with bikini-clad girls perched on top of them. I took in a slow, steadying breath. It was all rubber, gas, and oil; no amount of time or bleach was going to scrub that stench from the air.

There was another entrance into that section from the outside. The sign on the glass door was still flipped to
OUT
—
BACK IN
15, and it directed visitors to kindly inquire at the back garage if it was an emergency. There were chairs, photos of vacant-eyed employees lining the wall, and model tires—but no footprints, no noise, no Liam.

A spike of fear cut through me as I shouldered the door to the mechanic shop open. I turned, trying to catch the heavy thing before it could slam shut, and that was the mistake—I knew it even as I turned, even as Instructor Johnson’s favorite saying rang out in my ears:
Don’t turn your back on the unknown.

There was a tingling sensation at my back that I recognized a second too late. A burst of pressure slammed into me, throwing me forward as if someone had tackled me from behind. My forehead cracked against the door frame. My eyes flashed black, white, black as I crumpled. The gun clattered away, skimming across the cement, out of reach.

Then, a warm, familiar voice, pitched with fear: “Oh my God! Sorry, I thought—” Liam’s pale form burst out behind the hollowed-out car frame in the middle of the garage. “What are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here?” I demanded, looking around for the gun under the workbenches and tables. There were tools and parts scattered everywhere, collecting dust and even more grime. “You came out here alone, without any kind of way to protect yourself—”

“No way to protect myself?” he repeated, raising a brow.

“You know what I mean!” I crouched down, blinking back the dark spots in my vision, and felt under the metal table until my fingers closed around the barrel. I waved it toward him for emphasis. “What were you going to do against one of these?”

He turned back to the car, his mouth pressed tightly into a line of disgust. “I disarmed you pretty easily. What would the instructors say about
that
?”

It stung more than I expected it to. I watched in silence as he flipped the hood of the skeletal car back open, the tool flashing silver in his hand. But he wasn’t working; instead, his hands were braced against the green frame. The leather jacket clung to his shoulders as he leaned forward, hanging his head. I kept my back flat against the door, a silent guard against anything that might come in.

“So you found me,” he muttered, his voice strained. “I suppose I have Chubs to thank for that?”

His mind was turning through a wild range of emotions, flipping between what felt like hot anger and murky guilt and crushing hopelessness in a matter of seconds. It felt like his mind was calling to mine, like it was screaming for me.

I pressed the back of my hand against my forehead. Ever since I’d given in and stopped trying to fold them away, my abilities had been quieter. Settled, even. Now was not the moment to lose that bit of calm.

“I know—” I began, licking my dry lips. “I know you can take care of yourself. But we don’t know anything about this town. We don’t know who could come by, and the thought of you out here alone…”

“I
wanted
to be alone,” he said, his voice gruff. “I just wanted…I just needed to clear my head. Away from them. Away from
you
.”

I stared at him, trying to take what he had just said and align it with the look of all-out desperation on his face.

“Look,” I began, “I get it. You don’t like me, but—”

“I don’t like you?”

He let out a low, flat laugh. One fell into the next, and it was awful—not at all him. He was half choking on them as he turned around, shaking his head. It almost sounded like a sob, the way his breath burst out of him.

“I don’t like you,” he repeated, his face bleak. “I don’t
like
you?”

“Liam—” I started, alarmed.

“I can’t—I can’t think about anything or anyone else,” he whispered. A hand drifted up, dragging back through his hair. “I can’t think straight when you’re around. I can’t sleep. It feels like I can’t breathe—I just—”

“Liam, please,” I begged. “You’re tired. You’re barely over being sick. Let’s just… Can we just go back to the others?”

“I love you.” He turned toward me, that agonized expression still on his face. “I love you every second of every day, and I don’t understand why, or how to make it stop—”

He looked wild with pain; it pinned me in place, even before what he had said registered in my mind.