My hand freezes. I decipher the words we’re alone, but a raven’s raucous call erupts overhead. An unsettling thought prickles in the back of my mind.
Then, nothing. Only the wind whistling through the pines and the water slapping the rocks. Even the raven sounds like it dropped dead. Good. Maybe they’re gone. I heft the backpack onto my lap and scrounge up my chemistry book. I flip it open and attempt to focus.
From above, Melody’s voice rises. The other person must’ve already managed to piss her off. She’s shouting, words too jumbled to decode, and my irritation climbs. I fumble for the backpack, wondering if I left my earbuds inside.
But then a new noise—a shrill squeal—tears through the trees, stopping my heart. “Hel—” Melody cuts off abruptly, the shriek ending in silence.
A thread of panic spirals through my head, making its way down my spine and out to each limb. Was that a scream for help? Over by the log, the other voice speaks quietly. I can barely make it out over the trickling water, but it sounds like “Shh, it’s okay now.”
My heart spasms. I swing my head around, searching frantically for Gideon. But he’s still off trying to send that text.
Maybe he heard the call for help and he’s rushing back. I listen for footsteps, for the voices, but the raven’s caw—ominous and piercing—starts up again.
Gideon’s too far away. I should scream at the top of my lungs. But my jaw is bolted shut, throat obstructed. My heart is working again, pulsing faster than ever before and sounding like gunfire in this tiny space. But the rest of me is paralyzed.
My thoughts and vision blur. Everything darkens. Breathe. Lifting my chin, I suck in a deafening breath. Then I grab my phone, remembering with a sickening sense of dread that I won’t have a signal.
I have to find Gideon. I have to get help. But one thought punches through the others, drowning all reason:
I have to get out of here.
Because I know the other person up there, the one whose hushed voice drifted over from the log and into our sanctuary.
He and I planned this murder together.
2
My heart jolts. Someone’s up there, branches cracking underfoot.
“Cass?” Gideon. I exhale. It’s been hours since he left. Or maybe minutes? I have no idea. When I look down, the heavy textbook still rests on my lap, its pages now mangled between my fingers. Gideon drops into the hideout, looking the same as when he left. Like he has no clue the world just flipped itself over on us. But his eyes widen as he takes in my crouched, frozen figure. “What’s going on?”
I release the book and grab his bare wrist, fingernails digging into his flesh. “I don’t know.” But it’s a lie. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Gideon stares at me like I’ve lost my mind, which would be better than the alternative—that I drank a couple beers, spouted off an angry fantasy to a guy I barely knew, and then it all came true.
It’s not possible.
But those sounds Melody made—that scream for help—were as real as my trembling hands and chattering teeth. My mind flashes to the little silver notebook with the gold trim. To the conversation scribbled in its pages, half in my handwriting, half in Brandon Alvarez’s. Like an instinct, I slide my hand inside the unzipped pouch of my backpack, feeling around for it. But my fingers don’t find its smooth cover.
A new wave of panic surges through me. I rifle around in the backpack as silently as possible, dumping half its contents into the dirt.
My notebook isn’t nestled beneath the textbooks like usual.
Gideon places his hand over mine. “Cass,” he whispers, voice hoarse with worry, “talk to me.” His phone drops to the splintery ground and he pulls me to my feet.
“Melody.” My voice barely rises above my heartbeat. I point in the direction of the creek, beyond this wall of trees. Gideon came from the opposite direction; he wouldn’t have seen anything. “She might be in trouble up there.” We have to get to her. Now. “She needs help.” And we can’t call 911 from this useless place. I shove my phone into my back pocket. “Come on.”
He rubs at the marks I just made on his wrist. “Cass, I don’t hear anything.” He’s right. There’s only lapping water. Maybe Gideon’s voice scared the guy off.
Or maybe it was nothing. I heard Melody in some sort of lover’s spat. That’s all.
But my mind spirals back to the notebook. Get her to the abandoned sawmill. What if they’re quiet because he’s taking her somewhere else to finish the job? I climb onto the crate with shaky feet, motioning for Gideon to follow. “Hurry.”
He sighs, his breath riffling my T-shirt. I heft myself out of the hole and he clambers up next. “Wait,” he says, his voice resigned as he skirts past me. “I’ll go first.”
I practically push him through the trees. When I see the log, with its scabrous bark that sloughs off in patches, my mind floods with the sound of voices, talking and laughing one moment and silent the next. Snap out of it. The ground is heaped with broken twigs, brown crumbling leaves, and dirt, like the rest of the forest.
And Melody’s gone.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Gideon asks, brows skewed.
“I don’t know.” Proof she’s in trouble. Proof I imagined everything. “Maybe there’s…” Not blood. There wouldn’t be blood.
Gideon points at some indentations in the dirt. “These marks could be fresh, but I don’t get it, Cass. What did you hear?”
The sound of my darkest desire materializing.
I tug anxiously on the hem of my T-shirt. “She screamed for help. And then it got really quiet.” My eyes well up. I keep reliving those sounds Melody made, and my mind flashes to that party with Brandon. To the words I wrote in the notebook.
The notebook that isn’t tucked inside my backpack anymore.
Gideon lays a gentle hand over my arm. “We could barely hear anything from the hideout. Are you sure she wasn’t laughing?”
“I don’t think so.” But there’s no proof. I look over the dead leaves and endless rows of trees, powerless.
Then something snags my eye. Behind the log, strewn amid the pine needles. A glass bottle. Normally, this wouldn’t seem out of place. Except this one is raspberry flavored. More words flash in my head. Load her up on raspberry wine coolers flavored with a little something extra. My stomach turns. He couldn’t have actually gone through with it.
But there’s the bottle. At the exact location I scribbled down. It’s all line for line so far, minus the scream. Something must’ve gone wrong. Maybe Melody caught him slipping something into the bottle. I clutch my abdomen and take a staggering step back. “We have to call the sheriff,” I say, and Gideon frowns.