She wished she could explain properly but her throat still hurt. She hated that she couldn’t speak to them, hated that her first moments with people other than William were limited by this. And deep down she was afraid they would think she was simple, or broken, because she couldn’t make complete sentences without choking.
“How long has it been since you had chocolate?” C.P. asked.
“Since . . . before,” Mattie said. “Before . . . William.”
“So, twelve years, right?” C.P. said. “That’s what they said on the news.”
Twelve years. Mattie knew a lot of time had passed, knew that she’d been with William on the top of that mountain since she was a child, but William didn’t celebrate birthdays or keep track of the days so she’d never been completely sure how long it had been.
I lost my childhood, she thought. I lost my mother and my sister and my childhood.
Now that the subject of the news program had come up again, there was something she wanted to know.
“Heather,” she said. “On . . . the . . . news?”
“Heather?” C.P. asked, and looked at Jen, who shook her head.
“Sister,” Mattie said, tapping her chest. “My . . . sister.”
“They didn’t say anything about a sister,” C.P. said. “Not that I remember.”
Did that mean that Heather was still alive? Or did it mean that she was dead and C.P. just hadn’t been paying attention during the broadcast?
“The only thing they talked about was your mom, how she was . . . well, you know. And about you and how nobody had any idea what had happened to you. The tone of it kind of made it sound like you were dead.”
“You have zero tact,” Jen said.
“I’m just repeating what I heard!”
“Zero.”
It happened then, so fast that Mattie wasn’t sure what she’d seen.
An enormous shadow loomed out of the trees. Shiny claws gleamed in the darkness. A paw swooped down from the top of the boulders, curled around Griffin’s shoulder and yanked him up, over the boulders, into the trees.
A second later Griffin was gone, nothing left of him except his scream that lingered in the air.
All three stood still for a moment. Then Mattie backed away a few steps from the boulder, her eyes searching for any sign of the creature. Would it return? Was it just stashing Griffin somewhere so it could come back for one of them? Would they all end up as part of its collection?
Mattie remembered the animals hanging from the trees, imagined Griffin’s body dangling from one of the branches.
The old familiar panic bubbled up—the longing to hide, to make herself small, to go away someplace where there was no pain and no fear.
Don’t let it come for me don’t let it take me don’t I can’t I just got away from William and now there’s this what did I do why does this keep happening to me why was I not allowed to be happy and free.
“Griffin!” Jen shouted, standing up and staring into the space where he’d disappeared. “Griff, answer me!”
Jen’s voice made Mattie start. What is she doing? Is she trying to bring the creature down on us again? We have to leave. We have to escape before it comes back for us.
Mattie grabbed Jen’s shoulder so the other woman would look at her. “He’s . . . gone. The . . . creature . . . took . . . him.”
“What do you mean, gone? What’s it going to do to him?”
Mattie didn’t know for certain but she had a pretty good idea. Jen and C.P. should have the same kind of idea. They’d seen the inside of the cave. They knew what the creature kept there.
“We . . . run,” Mattie said. “Before . . . it . . . returns.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We’re not going to run. We have to go after him,” C.P. said. “It’s going to take him to the cave, right? So it can mutilate him?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. “Look, let’s leave the packs here and just take some food and water. We can tuck the bags into these boulders and come back for them. That way we can move faster.”
“I don’t know if Samantha can move that fast,” Jen said.
“Then she can stay here with the packs. Or she can run away, if she wants,” C.P. said. He said this last so dismissively that Mattie felt her terror covered over with shame.
Is it so wrong to run? Is it wrong to want to avoid hurt?
“Come on, if we hurry we can catch up to it before it carves Griff up into little pieces,” C.P. said to Jen. It was clear that Mattie no longer mattered, in his opinion, if she didn’t want to come along on his quest to retrieve Griffin.