“No!” I scream.
My body shrieks at me for speaking. It’s angry, and a punishing, twisting sensation in my back makes me gasp in pain. The wind rises and whips against my cheek. He jerks his hand away, but the sudden movement causes him to nick his skin with the blade. A welt of red blooms upon his arm, followed by a tiny trickle that winds down his wrist and drips onto a plastic bag at his feet.
The boy stares at me, and I stare at the ruby drops on his skin. This blood does me no good. What I need now can only be found at the bottom of a lake. Blood on land only satiates normal human needs, like lust, or hate. And I am not normal.
“Jesus! What are you doing here?” he asks. The words sound like an accusation. I’m too shocked by the blood to flee or answer. He’s still standing there, unmoving. Fatigue wears on him like a hundred years of rain on sandstone. The backpack gapes dumbly, its half-vomited contents of torn plastic bags strewn about.
“Why did you do that?” I know part of the answer already, but I’m desperate to own the rest.
The words shock him into movement. He hastily sheathes the knife. His body is so tall that even the trees seem respectful of him. His hair is thick and curly, though disappointingly, it is trimmed short. For a moment, I wish I could tangle my nails in it. I shake the thought away.
He pulls his sleeve down, and the droplets of blood seep through the dark green fabric. “It was an accident.”
“But you’re lying!”
He pauses and his head ticks back. “What are you doing here?” he asks again. He’s dodging my answer, as I am his. We’re both stones skipping on the lake, trying to avoid sinking into the depths. It’s inevitable, though. Maybe he knows it, too.
He takes a step closer with a crunching boot, and I take a step back, almost simultaneously. As dance partners do. We’re still the same distance apart, and neither of us has gotten anywhere with this conversation. My heel hits something hollow, and I look down to see a water bottle that must belong to him.
The shard of sunlight that had been brave enough to show itself suddenly disappears, and the grove of spruce becomes shaded within seconds. The NOAA forecast woman’s voice echoes in my mind.
Pressure is dropping rapidly
The air around me begins to change, imperceptibly at first, but then prods me with a knowing gust of cool air. It’s coming. Not a big storm, but big enough I can already feel its strength gathering about me, pressing me to seek the shore. I turn away but hear footsteps in my wake and realize he’s following. The air swirls and hits him straight in the chest. I watch him stagger back and blink dazedly, holding his arms to shield himself from the dirt and dead leaves pelting his face. The water bottle skips and dances over the rough ground, rolling away to clonk quietly against his shoe.
Tell him to leave. Make him go, Anda.
I open my mouth and take a deep breath. Instinct tells me to listen, to do what is right. The pain of resistance twists again in my back, making me wince.
Do it, Anda.
When silence continues to scream inside my brain, she pushes a little harder. The wind whips the dying leaves around us in a slow whirlwind. He doesn’t see her, but I do. The brown leaves rise and take shape behind him. There is a head, a matronly dress. She takes this form because it’s what Father tells me she looked like. She is as motherly as the dead tresses of trees could be.
Anda. Tell him to leave.
“The wa…water.” It hurts to speak. I swallow and clench my fists. “Boil it, or the parasites will eat you alive.”
The leaves fall unceremoniously to the ground in a faint whoosh, the spell broken. I spin around and head to the shore. This time, he doesn’t follow me.
All the way to the lake, I hear nothing but the lamentation of the rising wind and her voice, scolding me.
Chapter Seven
HECTOR
Parasites.
Man, I always worried about the hell that surrounded me every day in Duluth. The school administration, my uncle, my bosses, the punishing winters, the infrequent letters from my dad—they were always trying to kill me, bite by bite. Now I have to worry about being a different kind of victim.
The girl’s footsteps recede into the woods as the wind rudely smacks my face. Well, I guess she’s not trying to kill me. I blow out a breath and pause to touch my sheathed knife when a sliver of pain on my arm reminds me—I’m cut.
I was this close to slicing my arm open on purpose. And then she showed up, and I ended up cutting myself by accident. I actually forgot what had upset me so much, which never happens. The only times I forget are when I black out, but the thoughts that fill the void after that are far worse than what went missing. But this girl—she made me forget myself, in a good way. There’s nothing in my life that’s ever worth distracting me away from…me.
Under my sleeve, the wound is shallow and already wears the darker red stain of dried blood. It stings, though. I’ll have to keep it clean so it won’t get infected. I laugh, and the sound startles me. I can’t believe I care. And yet here I am, trying to survive. The contradictions have always confused me. It’s easier when I have a clear thing to run away from.
Things like my uncle. Him, and everything that house knows—I will always run away from them.
I’ve got to survive until May. I must.
I spend the rest of the afternoon picking through and retrieving the cleanest bits of food left over from the fox attack. I find one of the nearby camping shelters. There’s no bunk bed, just a wooden floor and no mattresses. The front of the shelter is just a screen nailed to a wooden framework. The wind still slices into me just as easily as before.
It’s a roof, at least. Not bad.
It’s not good, either.
One thing is for sure. I need to get more food, or else I won’t have much of a body left to protect this winter. I put all my stuff in the shelter, then leave with my fishing rod and a few obnoxiously colored lures. The gray clouds above are close and heavy, as if they’re too wiped out from the effort of staying aloft. If they slammed to earth and swallowed everything up in fog, I wouldn’t be surprised. I wipe a sheen of sweat from my face. I thought that being outdoors wasn’t supposed to make you claustrophobic.
After a half-hour walk, I’m back at the dock in Windigo. It’s so strange to stand on the wide planks without a single person in sight—a contrast to the busyness only hours earlier. Somewhere out there, the Duluth police are searching for me. For a moment, my uncle’s distressed face fills my head. He’s worried. Genuinely worried. He’s holding his phone, ready to call my dad in Germany to tell him what’s going on. The phone shakes in his hands. But what I hear isn’t him talking to the police. It’s his voice from only a few months ago, after one too many shots of Jack.
You’re my best friend, Hector.