of the hill.
“Kenzie …” She moans but staggers along as I squint into the darkness. I can’t see two feet in front of me and Molly can barely walk, let alone run.
“Just be quiet, Molly,” I tell her. “Don’t make noise if you can help it, and force yourself to run.”
She folds over again, her knees buckling. “Can’t. Sick.” She pukes again and my heart rips in half, but I don’t give in to the urge to comfort her.
“Come on, Molly.”
She’s starting to collapse, so I scoop her up by the armpits, making her groan and give me an ineffective swat. “I swear you’ll thank me if we live through this.”
I wrap an arm around her and drag-walk her about twenty or thirty feet, my shoulders already aching from the effort. As we near the middle of the incline, I remember my phone and steal a glance in the general direction of where Jarvis threw it, praying for a miracle.
Like, that it would ring at that moment and I’d see it light up.
“Molly, do you have your phone?”
She shakes her head and moans. “He took it.”
I can’t afford to stop and look for mine, so I stumble us both farther down the hill, hauling Molly, who somehow manages to get one foot in front of the other.
I follow the path as best I can, finally on soft pine needles and not sliding on leaves over stone. After what seems like an eternity but is probably only thirty seconds, I risk stopping, giving Molly a chance to bend over and throw up again. After a second, she moans, wiping her mouth.
“Where are we?” she asks.
“Nacht Woods. It’s Jarvis, Molly. He’s not dead. He’s crazy. He’s some kind of assassin. I stabbed him but he’s not dead.” I seize her arms and squeeze.
“I’m so sick. I’m so …” She closes her eyes as a wave of nausea passes through her. “I can’t.”
“You have to.” I pull her along. “We have to get out of here before he kills us both.”
Her eyes focus enough for me to know I got through to her. “ ’Kay.”
“You can do this,” I tell her. “One foot in front of the other and stay standing.”
She gives me a limp, pathetic nod and I swell with sympathy and regret. I shouldn’t have involved her. She almost died … because of me.
“Come on,” I say again, urging her forward.
She allows me to help her, her arm over my shoulders pressing on my sore neck, still bruised from being strangled.
She’s whimpering in my ear as we head down a path I’m relatively certain will get us back to the road.
I can’t believe I didn’t kill that son of a bitch. How did he get away from me?
The path narrows and there’s another split-off that I don’t remember because I was so distracted when Jarvis made me drive here. Which way do I go? I hesitate just one second and think I hear—no, I do hear footsteps. Fast and furious and getting louder.
“Molly,” I whisper frantically. “We have to move.”
She looks at me, silenced for a moment; then her eyes widen as she hears the footsteps, too. We both run a little but the path is narrowing quickly, the trees coming together like a wall of evergreens.
How will we get through that? I look around, my eyes slightly adjusted, my ears completely in tune with the footsteps that could be fifty feet behind me … or five.
And then I see the tree—a tree that’s not a tree. It’s a telephone pole, and it has the two-by-four steps leading up. I stop and lean back to see how far up it is—oh, Lord, far—and squint into the starlight to catch a glimpse of a zip line.
A zip line that would take me over the trees and far away fast. Surely a man bleeding from a knife wound wouldn’t have the strength to follow us up there and get on that line.
“We’re climbing,” I say to Molly.
“What?”
I don’t explain but drag her to the pole and place her hands on the closest piece of wood. “Up!” I order. I have to go behind her so I can push.
She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind but I just shove her up the first step. “Go or die!”
That works. She starts to climb, slowly, but then I get on the ladder rung under her and shove her butt up each rail, refusing to let her slow down.
She pauses just long enough to turn