Don't Forget Me Tomorrow(100)

The sticky awareness that made my stomach bottom out.

Did Dare know? Had he found out? We’d been so fucking careful. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. Still, I pushed myself harder, barreling across the soft grasses that dented below my feet.

“Stop right there!” I shouted.

The fucker didn’t slow. He tossed himself right over the top of the wooden fence at the back of my property.

Behind my house was a section of woods before it opened up into another neighborhood on the other side. I only had a split second before he would disappear, a million places for him to hide in the overgrown bushes and brush, and I threw myself over the top of the fence, too.

I landed crouched on my feet, ready to spring back into the hunt, only when I propelled myself forward, I was met with the blunt force of a metal rod. It whirred through the air so fast that I had no time to prepare myself.

Pain splintered through my brain.

Piercing.

Blinding.

It dropped me straight to my knees.

Blood poured from the wound at the side of my head, weaving an erratic web across my face.

Another crack landed low on my back. I cried out as it bowed me forward, and I slumped onto the ground on my stomach.

I struggled to stay lucid.

To fight the darkness that pressed in at the edges of my sight.

Consciousness ebbing in and out.

My nostrils filled with the acrid smell of damp soil and newly fallen leaves that had just begun to decay.

But it was the scent of the foul and the filthy that crawled over me, the treacherous voice that uttered the warning at my ear. “Just a friendly reminder from Dare not to forget your place.”

The boot that landed in my side came swift and from out of nowhere, and I wheezed in agony as the breath was knocked from my lungs.

As the world spun and the darkness enclosed.

Terror clamored over me like demons. Specters that played over my body.

The metal bar cracked down once more in the center of my upper back, and I couldn’t stop the agony from gurgling out of my mouth.

A second later, heavy footsteps faded into the distance while I struggled to breathe, to force the air into my lungs.

Lungs that were on fire.

Every part of my body in flames.

And my eyes kept drifting closed.

Succumbing.

Falling toward unconsciousness.

“Ryder? Ryder?” Dakota’s frantic voice suddenly carried through the night. “Ryder? Are you out here?”

Her name bubbled in my chest, but it bottled in my throat, silenced on the torment that congealed all hope.

Except that hope didn’t give up, and I could only faintly make out the clattering of the back gate before she was croaking, “Oh my God, Ryder!”

Fumbling to my side over the fallen branches and exposed roots, she dropped to her knees. Her fingers trembled and trembled as she brushed back the hair stuck to my face.

An anguished cry gushed from between her lips. “Oh God. Ryder. What happened? I’m…I’m going to call an ambulance.”

She went to stand, but somehow, I managed to grasp her around the wrist. “No.”

“You’re…bleeding.” She said it like she didn’t want to let on how bad it was.

But I already knew how bad it was.

So much worse than she could ever imagine.





FORTY-FOUR





DAKOTA





Horror chugged through my senses, a disorienting panic as he pulled at my arm.

“You’re bleeding.” I could barely force it out.

God. He was bleeding, and there was so much of it, his face covered in rivulets that streamed in cragged lines from a gaping gash at the side of his head.

Dirt and hair were caked in it, and even beneath the bare light, I could see glistening, dark fluid continue to ooze from the wound.

But it was his eyes that pierced me.

The whites exaggerated in the night. Filled with so much fear that it spurred a riot inside me.

“Are you okay? Oh, God. Ryder. What happened? Are you okay?”

He didn’t respond, and instead he pushed up onto his hands and knees. A discordant moan rolled from him as he tried to get his bearings. To climb to his feet.

“Let me help you.” Frantic, I leaned down so I could get an arm around his waist and help him the rest of the way up. He swayed when he stood. His entire being swerving and lurching as he struggled to find balance.

“Lean on me,” I told him, and I knew the shape he was in when he did. His big body was heavy as we staggered back over the rutted terrain and through the gate. How we managed to get across the lawn, I didn’t know, our movements slowed as we trudged through the violent foreboding that saturated the atmosphere.

I could feel it.

Feel it pulsing and throbbing around us. Could feel it as Ryder was bent at the waist as we stumbled up the porch steps and through the back door.

Felt the oppression of the ghosts that tormented his being.

“Lock it.” It ricocheted a warning. The sliding metal a gunshot in the night as I engaged the deadbolt.

“Let me call Ezra.”

“No,” he said again.

I gulped the words down because I wanted to argue but somehow, I knew Ryder meant it.

That he wasn’t acting like this wasn’t a big deal.