Their tracks were clear and easy to follow. Mattie saw the cluster of their footprints—her own, C.P.’s, Jen’s—and just beside them she recognized William’s boots, one of them dragging in the snow.
They were at the cluster of boulders where they’d stashed the bags sooner than Mattie thought. The walk had seemed terribly long in the dark, all three of them afraid and huddled together.
“Awesome,” C.P. said. “That only took like fifteen minutes. Just give me a few minutes to transfer some stuff from Griffin’s bag and we can go.”
They climbed down the boulders and stood in the same place where they’d stood the night before—a lifetime ago, Mattie thought, when they were four instead of two and she ate a Hershey’s bar that had tasted like a miracle.
C.P. rummaged in Griffin’s pack, digging out the camera and a notebook, then transferred the items to his own pack. He slung the bag on his back, adjusting the straps.
“Ugh, I forgot how heavy this thing is,” he said. “Okay, let’s go.”
One moment he was smiling at her and the next moment he was on the ground, and only then did she register the sound of the rifle that had fired a moment before.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Thought you could get away, didn’t you, you little slut?”
Thunk-drag, thunk-drag, thunk-drag.
Behind her. He was behind her and C.P. was on the ground. She didn’t see blood but that didn’t mean anything. C.P. could be bleeding to death while she stood there, paralyzed, unable to help him or to turn around, unable to face the specter that she’d called William.
“Found those bags last night. I knew you’d come back for them. I thought I’d catch up to you before that but I made a note. You can’t outsmart me, Mattie girl.”
Think. Move. Run.
（No, don’t run. If you run he’ll shoot you.）
He’s going to hurt you anyway. If you run he’ll shoot and if you stay he’ll use his fists and no matter what he’ll find a way to drag you back to the cabin, to the place you thought you left forever.
She heard his footsteps coming closer and closer, thunk-drag thunk-drag thunk-drag, but she couldn’t make her body obey the screaming in her brain that was telling her to move, to run, to get away before his hands were on her.
Move, Samantha!
Yes, I am Samantha, I am brave and strong, I am not little Martha mouse and he’s not going to take me back to that place, not again, not ever.
She turned to face him, and gasped.
He was a few feet away from her, and she didn’t know how he could be walking at all.
His right leg had been torn by claws, long deep gashes that swept from his hip down to his knee. The gashes were clotted over but his pant leg—or what was left of his pant leg—was coated in dried blood. There were tears in his coat, too, at the shoulder and over part of his chest, and Mattie could see the wounds underneath the ragged flaps of clothing.
And skin, she thought with a sickening realization. Some of those flaps are his skin.
But his body wasn’t even the worst of it. The creature had swiped its needle-sharp claws over William’s face, tearing the flesh from his hairline to his jaw on the right side. The eye was sealed shut by black clotted fluid.
He should have been dead, or at least immobile. His wounds would have stopped a normal man. But William was not a normal man.
And he would do anything, anything, to capture her again, including roam half-dead through the woods in the night. She knew that. In William’s mind, she belonged to him, and he wasn’t about to let his possession go.
“I’m quite a sight, aren’t I, Mattie girl?” he said, and grinned. His grin was hideous, his teeth coated in blood, the claw marks contorting his face. “And you’ve led me on quite a chase. But you should have known better. God made you my wife, and a wife must submit to her husband and obey. You’ve defied the will of God and the will of your husband, but the Lord made certain I would find you again. He knows where you belong, even if you don’t.”
“I’m not your wife,” she said, backing away as he approached her, her hands raised to ward off an attack.
Why hadn’t she taken some weapon from the cabin—a knife, the axe, anything? Why had she let herself think that William might be gone forever? He would never be gone. He would always be there, following, if she tried to run.
“You are my wife. You have lived as my wife ever since you became a woman.”
“No,” Mattie said, and her voice was stronger than it had been a moment before. “You stole me. You killed my mother. You never married me. You only told me you did, told me I belonged to you, told me if I tried to leave someone would only return me to you. You beat me and starved me and made me think that everything I knew, all of my life before, was a dream, something that never happened.”