“Naomi, stop running! Come back! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, come back!”
They chased after me. I could hear them crashing through the forest behind me. I leapt over roots and scrambled over logs and ran without paying attention to where I was going. I only wanted to get away.
Hot tears streaked my cheeks. Trash. You’re trash. My lungs burned. I wasn’t Artemis, wasn’t a goddess who could endlessly run through the wilds with her sacred deer. But I couldn’t stop or turn back, because I couldn’t face them.
Trash.
Up ahead was a hump in the earth. A boulder, slablike, mostly covered with moss and trees. Only the face of it was bare, so that it formed a small hill, and beneath it was a gap, a hollow space.
Cass and Liv were catching up. Without thinking, I dropped to my belly and skittered under the boulder. I expected a shallow depression maybe big enough to hide in, but to my surprise the ground sloped away beneath me, and I half fell, half lowered myself.
The boulder formed the bulk of the roof of the space, and tree roots and the flow of water had carved the rest. There was a split toward the far side of the chamber, a gap that let in a narrow shaft of light and illuminated the web of tree roots holding up the “ceiling.” The chamber—cave—was about three feet tall, maybe five feet across, eight feet long. Enough room for a sitting child. Enough room for the body.
I held my breath. It couldn’t be real, I thought—but of course it was. I could have reached out and touched it.
The skeleton lay on its side. Bits of rotten clothing hung from the ribs. All the flesh had been stripped away.
Tentatively I reached out and touched the smooth brow of the skull. My fingers came away gritty. I shuddered.
The skull was cracked on the side of the head. Had that been what killed them?
Liv and Cass were calling. Reluctantly, I turned my back on the body. I pushed myself up the incline and scrambled out from the gap beneath the rock. Liv shrieked as I emerged, caked in dirt, like some primordial beast. Cass babbled apologies, cheeks damp with tears as she grabbed at me, begging forgiveness.
“You need to see this,” I said, and she fell silent.
I brought them down into the earth, Liv frightened, Cass curious. We knelt around the skeleton in awed and nervous silence.
“Who is it? What happened to them?” Liv asked.
I almost said then that we needed to get help. It almost happened that way: us running out of the woods, telling the first person we saw that we’d found a body. A story we’d tell the rest of our lives, the time we found that skeleton in the woods. Maybe none of the rest of it would have happened. No Stahl, no scars, no shattered lives.
Almost. But then Cass gasped.
“Look,” she said.
There, around the skeleton’s wrist, was a loop of nylon, threaded through cheap plastic beads with letters stamped on them. It was hard to read in the dim light, the letters mostly worn away. But you could still make it out enough to figure out what it said.
Persephone.
“What now?” Cass asked. We’d climbed out of the cave, brushed the dirt from our clothes. The sunlight through the branches cast ragged shadows over our faces. “She isn’t here, Naomi. What now?”
Where else would Liv go? She’d gone back to Persephone. The flowers proved that. But Persephone wasn’t the only sacred thing in these woods. I pulled the stack of photographs out of my pocket. The path ended here, but the photos kept going.
“What were the other rituals?” I asked.
“What?”
“The Goddess Game. There was the prayer, and the flowers for Persephone, and then—what was next?”
“The burial,” Cass said reluctantly.
It rushed back to me. Cass made me sneak into the mill and take some of the burned wood from the fire. I’d gotten caught almost immediately. I could still feel the weight of Big Jim’s hand on my shoulder.
“What are you doing, kid?” he’d asked, his voice baritone and unamused. It was late, after sunset. I remembered the glow of the interior light in the second-to-last car in the lot as Natalie Carey got in, giving me just a brief look of sympathy before she started up the engine.
I couldn’t remember what lie I’d concocted, only that it made Jim roll his eyes and send me on my way with a charred plank. We’d buried it and consecrated the ground with what Cass claimed was holy water.
I sifted through the photos. There—a circle of stones. We’d put them around the burial site, to mark it. I flipped to the next image. The pond. Water glinted off its surface. “The water was next,” I said, and Cass nodded.
“We have to prove our commitment,” Cass had said all those years ago. The pond was no more than hip-high almost everywhere, but at the eastern edge was a place where the ground dropped away.
We would stay under as long as we could, Cass had decided. That way the goddesses would know we were dedicated to them. And so we’d slipped beneath the water. I remembered the shocking cold of it, and the silt that made it hard to see and stung my eyes, though I’d forced myself to keep them open so I could watch Cass. So that I could be sure I wouldn’t be the first to break the surface. We’d glared at each other, each determined to outlast the other. Cass broke first. I was half a second behind her.
We’d been so busy gulping air into our starved lungs that it took us far too long to realize Liv hadn’t come up yet.
How could I have forgotten it? The limp weight of her body as we hauled her out. The way she coughed and gagged and spluttered and finally drew in ragged breaths. How she’d begged us to let her go back, that she needed the goddesses to know that she was committed. That she was good. I’d held her, pressed my lips against her forehead, and tasted that silty water on her skin, and I’d promised her she was perfect.
It had been the fourth ritual. Olivia had believed in the power of fours and sevens. She still did.
“I think I know where she is,” I said.
“She’s fine. She’ll come home,” Cass said, but she sounded nervous. “Why are you so convinced something is wrong? This is Liv. She wanders off. It’s what she does.”
My throat constricted. I didn’t know how to explain it to her. Liv’s call, her absence—they were worrying. But they weren’t the only reason that I hadn’t been able to get the bitter taste of fear out of my mouth since I left Kimiko.
I should have died that day. I should have died here—almost exactly where we were standing. And ever since, I’d had this feeling like the woods weren’t done with us. What had begun that day had gone unfinished. We couldn’t escape it forever.
“Where’s the pond from here?” I asked.
Cass sighed. “I’m not sure.”
“We’ll have to backtrack to the trail,” I said.
The hike was easier on the way back, following our own path of trampled underbrush, but we still had to stop and reorient ourselves a few times. Back in the nineties it had been basically a straight shot from the road, but with everything so overgrown since then, our path was a winding one.
Liv probably wasn’t even at the pond, I thought. She had plenty of places to go when she didn’t want to be found. She would call soon enough, and I’d feel foolish, dragging Cass all over like this—brambles in our hair and dirt smudged on our faces like when we were girls.