Stuffed inside the bag were more drawings of Peter Pan and the mysterious tree.
It was a hot night and the cab was stuffy, but the air conditioner in her beat-up truck hadn’t worked since probably before she was born and Wendy didn’t want to roll down the windows. A trickle of sweat ran down her back as she leaned forward. Music would be a nice distraction. She would even take the whiny drone of one of the several country stations if it meant keeping her mind from wandering. She turned on the radio and a voice cut through the crackling speakers.
“An AMBER Alert has been issued in Clatsop County for eight-year-old Ashley Ford, who went missing from her home at twelve forty-five p.m. today—”
Wendy fumbled with the radio to change the station. It wasn’t that she didn’t care—she cared a lot—but she just didn’t think she could handle all of this. Not today, not now. Wendy could already feel the quaking in her chest and it was taking all of her concentration to keep it at bay.
She just wanted to get out of the woods and into her house. Wendy punched another preset on her radio but the same voice came through the speakers again.
“Ashley has blond hair and brown eyes. She was last seen in the front yard of her house wearing a white-and-yellow checkered shirt and blue pants. This comes in the wake of local boy Benjamin Lane being reported missing yesterday afternoon. Authorities haven’t commented on whether the disappearances are related to—”
She spun the tuner dial again. The sound petered out before breaking into loud static. Wendy took a deep breath in an effort to steady herself and peered at the flickering backlight of the stereo.
She knew every twist and turn of the road and could drive it with her eyes shut, so she gripped the wheel tightly with her left hand. She banged her right fist against the radio. This usually fixed most of the truck’s problems, but loud static continued to fill the cab.
Wendy clenched her jaw and glanced up. She knew the wide bend was coming, but the loud crackling was putting her teeth on edge. She looked back at the radio, fingers spinning the dial, but not a single station would come in. She was about to press the AM button when all noise coming from the radio cut off, leaving her with just the steady rumbling of the truck’s engine.
A branch slapped the passenger window.
Wendy jolted so violently it hurt.
A shadow dropped onto the hood of her truck, blocking her view. It was inky black and solid. Dark, crooked things like fingers dragged across the windshield. A terrible screech cut through her ears.
Wendy screamed and the shadowy thing slipped off the hood just in time for her to see a mass in the middle of the road illuminated by her headlights. A shout ripped through Wendy’s throat as she slammed on the brakes. She gripped the steering wheel and her body tensed as she swerved to the right.
The tires spun over loose dirt and the truck jerked to a stop between the road and the woods. Wendy stared out the front window into a tangle of branches. Her sharp breaths robbed the cab of fresh air. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. Her neck and temples pounded.
Wendy cursed under her breath.
She pulled her stiff fingers from where they’d cramped around the steering wheel. With trembling hands, she patted down her chest and thighs, making sure she was in one piece. Then she buried her face in them.
How could she be so stupid? She’d let her nerves get the better of her. She knew never to look away from the road while driving, especially at night. Her dad was going to lose it! And what if she’d totaled her truck? Wendy could’ve gotten herself killed—or worse, someone else.
Then she remembered the mass in the road.
Wendy’s breath caught in her throat. It could be a dead animal, but she knew in her gut it wasn’t. She twisted in her seat and tried to see out the back window, but the red glow of her taillights hardly lit up the outline of whatever she had almost run over.
Please don’t be a dead body.
Wendy struggled to untangle herself from the seat belt. She tumbled out of her truck and immediately looked to the woods. She took a few steps back, watching them cautiously. But they were silent and unmoving in the heavy summer air. The only sounds were the faint breeze through the leaves and her own labored breaths.
Tentatively, she peered at the front of her truck. It was pulled over onto the dirt shoulder of the road, the front bumper dangerously close to a thick tree, but still running. There was a dent in the hood from whatever had landed on it. The windshield was cracked—or, no, not cracked.
Were those scratches?
Wendy brushed her fingers over the lines. There were four of them parallel to one another in a long swipe. What could’ve done that? It hadn’t been a deer or a branch.
And what had she almost hit in the road? Her head snapped to look back over her shoulder to the mass in the middle of the road. It still hadn’t moved.
Wendy jogged toward the figure, trying to balance on the balls of her feet, so as to make as little sound as possible as she crept closer. She took each step slowly, willing her eyes to open wider, to adjust so she could see in the dark. She stood on her tiptoes and craned her neck to get a better look just as a cloud above shifted and a silvery glow was cast over the boy lying on his side.
A shudder racked Wendy’s body and she ran forward, falling to her knees beside him. Sharp gravel pressed through her jeans.
“Hello?” Her voice shook and her hands trembled, hovering over the boy, not knowing what to do. “Are you okay?”
Are you alive?
He let out a pained groan.
She snatched her hands back. “Oh my God.” Wendy scrambled around to his other side to get a look at his face. She’d learned from her mom never to move someone you’d found unconscious.
He was lying on his side with his arms curled into his chest, as if he were sleeping. He was clothed in some sort of material that wrapped around his shoulders and torso, hanging down to his knees. She couldn’t tell what it was in the dark, but it had rough, jagged edges and it smelled like the leaves she dug out of the gutters in spring.
Bracing one hand on the ground, Wendy leaned in closer. Slowly and carefully, she reached out and pushed his wet hair back from his face, brushing her thumb over his forehead. There was something about the way his freckles ran across his nose and under his closed eyes that was familiar …
Before she could work it out, a groan sounded deep in the boy’s chest. He rolled onto his back as his eyes opened and focused on hers.
Wendy’s natural inclination was to shrink back, but she couldn’t move.
His eyes were astonishing. A deep shade of cobalt with crystalline blue starbursts exploding around his pupils.
She knew those eyes. They were the same ones she’d drawn over and over again but could never get right. But that was impossible. It couldn’t be—
“Wendy?” the boy breathed, the smell of sweet grass brushing across her face.
Wendy scrambled back from him. At the same time, the boy’s cosmos eyes rolled back and fell closed again.
Wendy clamped her hand over her mouth.
He was older than the boy from her drawings. His face wasn’t as round and his cheeks weren’t as full as in the dozens of sketches that littered her car, but there was something about the slope of his nose and the curve of his chin that she recognized.
Breaths shook her shoulders and escaped through her nose. How did he know her name? Her heart thrashed against her ribs like a wild animal. She couldn’t recognize him. There was no possible way that the boy she was looking at was the same boy from her drawings.