‘I agree,’ said Connie, shooting David a look that made him fall quiet. ‘To me it always seemed like . . . like he was marking his territory.’
All three of us turned our heads towards the woods, and a sensation of dread trickled down my spine. A shadow moved in the trees. Shifting light. Wind stirring branches. But it was easy to imagine something else at work. Something alive and ancient that had lived among these trees since they were saplings.
Everett’s territory?
Or the territory of something he worshipped?
Chapter 15
Frankie and Ryan sat beside each other on the swings. The scratches on her back from the tree branches were sore and her ant bites itched. Neither of those things really mattered, though. Not now.
At some point on the walk home her phone had pinged. She must have walked through a pocket of cell signal. She hadn’t checked it until her dad had gone to reception to get the first aid stuff.
She showed Ryan now. It was another message received through Instagram. An image of a girl falling from a horse, accompanied by a message, blocky white letters on a crimson background: Maybe next time you’ll break ur neck. That was followed by several crying-with-laughter emojis.
‘The message arrived about ten minutes after I’d fallen.’
Ryan looked at the message, then at Frankie, then back at the screen. ‘Did you see anyone?’
‘No. But whoever it was must have been there. Following me.’
‘Following you? Are you sure?’
He was annoying her. Why, for once in her life, couldn’t someone simply believe what she was saying? It was the curse of being a teenage girl. Everyone always questioned you. Everything was because of hormones or social media or just being young and being a girl. It was infuriating.
‘I’m sure, Ryan. I think they fired the gun and then followed to see what would happen.’
She heard a groaning sound and realised she was making it herself.
‘I’m scared they’re going to do something worse,’ she said. ‘Like, next time they won’t just scare the horses.’
‘But why are they targeting you and not me?’ he asked, visibly shaken by her words. ‘It wasn’t your post.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe they think I’m an easier target. And anyway, the rabbit was left outside your place. They’re probably after both of us. They might be following you too.’
He blinked, his mouth forming a frown, like he’d remembered something.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Has something happened to you?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just . . . a couple of times I’ve felt like I was being watched. Like, you know how you can feel it when there’s someone behind you? That’s happened two or three times but when I turned around there was no one there.’
Something else struck her and she jumped down from the swing. She raked her hands through her hair.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘My Hydro Flask. I swear to God I usually watch that thing like a hawk. But it’s possible I put it down for a minute and they took it when I wasn’t paying attention.’
They were both quiet for a minute.
‘Deleting that post clearly wasn’t enough,’ Frankie said. ‘They might not have even noticed it. I think we need to talk to them.’
‘What? You mean, like, DM them?’
‘No. I think we should really talk to them, face-to-face. Apologise and get this over with.’ Even as she said this, it sounded like a terrible idea. But what else was there to do?
He was chewing his thumbnail. She wanted to slap his hand, get it away from his mouth. His knee was bouncing up and down too, and she realised something: he was scared. Maybe even more afraid than her.
‘Who are we going to talk to?’ he asked. He poked a finger at the message on the screen. ‘We don’t know who sent this.’
‘I think I do. I think it’s those freaky kids,’ she said. ‘The ones who said we were trespassing.’
Whenever she pictured the boy, with his close-cropped hair and hollow eyes, a little chill rippled across her skin, making the hairs on her arms stand on end. The girl, surely his sister, wasn’t much better.
‘What makes you think that?’ Ryan asked.
‘Just . . . the way the threats are written. The stuff that was taken. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing adults would do. And did I tell you I saw them again?’
‘Wait, when?’
‘Yesterday. They were on the path behind me. Here, at the resort.’