Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,93

up, staggering a little under the weight of it, but soon it’s on and we’re heading out of the office. Not a backward glance, not until we hit the kitchen and I check to make sure none of the other girls is following.

Empty space, and the sound of screams. We need to hurry.

Reese crosses to the emergency exit door, the sign above it dark and cracked. I follow, and she goes first, opens the door just a few inches, and looks out.

“Seems clear.”

I laugh a little. “Either way, we’re going.”

She holds out her silver hand to me, and I take it. “Stay with me,” she says, “and I’ll stay with you, yeah?”

I close my eye. Raxter behind me, and who knows what ahead.

CHAPTER 24

The door spits us onto the south side of the grounds. Strong sunlight through the clouds as the morning fills out. Lawn empty ahead of us, just a few stands of coastal pine between us and the ocean. To my right, across a hundred yards of frost-dusted grass, the fence, and the way out.

“If we get separated,” Reese says, “find my house. I’ll meet you there.”

“And then what?”

“My dad’s boat,” she says. “More like a dinghy, I guess. It’s hidden along the shore somewhere.”

A crash from inside the house, maybe one of the doors giving way, and I hear the other girls start to shout. I squeeze Reese’s hand. The jets are coming, I think. I hate how it sounds like an excuse.

“Count of three,” Reese says. “Break for the gate.”

I nod, and together we whisper, “One. Two. Three.”

We sprint, so quick I lose my breath, let my mouth go slack as I throw everything into my legs. Overhead the first flurry of snow, stinging against my cheeks. The backpack is too loose, jerking from side to side, and I stumble, but Reese won’t let me fall.

“Almost there!” she yells.

The fence coming up quick, but I can’t stop. I’m tired, so tired, and my legs go loose, my stride turning wild. But at last, the gate.

We stagger to a stop. My hand is throbbing, and Reese is leaving bloody tracks in the snow, but adrenaline is sharp and bitter in my mouth, the cold waking against my skin. I’m alive. I’m here and I’m alive.

I tighten the backpack straps as Reese slides the pistol out from her waistband. The gate open ahead of us, and she bites her lip against the pain as she lifts the pistol, her stance and firing hand switched like I taught her, and aims it into the shadow coating the trees beyond the gate.

“Just to be safe,” she says.

I almost laugh.

We take a different route to her house. Keep out of the wilds, stick to the spidery deer paths that run through the trees, both of us keen to face the danger we know instead of the danger we don’t.

The woods are strangely quiet, even for Raxter. Snow speckled on the ground, falling more thickly than it usually does this early in the winter. We scan the ground closely for tracks, but every time we find some they’re heading away, toward the school. If we’re safe out here, it’s at the other girls’ expense.

Eventually, the ramshackle shape of the Harker house is visible ahead. I blink the snowflakes from my lashes and hurry forward, eager for a bit of rest.

Reese goes in first, wipes her feet at the door absently, and it makes something clench in my chest. And then she gasps, lets out a sob, and of course, I forgot. Mr. Harker. The body.

I rest my working hand on her shoulder, step up next to her, ready to offer some comforting words. But they won’t do anything, because crowded around what’s left of Mr. Harker are three gray foxes, their mouths dripping black as they rip into his torso.

“Get away from him!” she yells. Lifts the pistol and fires between the foxes, no aim to speak of, stance in shambles. “Go!”

One darts through a hole in the house wall, disappearing into the reeds, but the other two just lift their heads and look at us. Reese doesn’t care, though. She stumbles toward the body, batting my hand away from her as I try to hold her back. Drops to her hands and knees at her father’s feet, one of his boots unlaced, the other with a striped sock peeking above it.

The foxes regard her calmly, almost like she’s one of them. But when I approach they skitter away with