Arise (Book Three in The Arson Saga) (6 page)

Chapter Nine

Emery watched Ruth toy
with the radio dials. The only signals that came in clear were AM news stations, and each channel seemed to broadcast exclusively about the storm. Brief segments bled out intermittently and explained the nature of this particular storm. Reporters used convincing phrases like “dangerous patterns forming” and “get indoors as quickly as possible.” They also mentioned that several roads would be closed off. The static was like a deep itch in Emery’s ears. Every couple of minutes, Ruth glanced back, and their stares caught each other. There were no words, only the thought of words and the fearful reality of the unspoken.

The vehicle embraced the bumps and divots in the road. The winding hills had no chance of slowing the tire’s enormous treads from tearing a path right through the piling snow. At length, Ruth turned off the radio. Another glance. Emery wondered if she’d be able to keep quiet about the tracking devices. If Salvation’s doctors had implanted Adam with more than one chip, new units might be sent out to hunt them down. Emery grazed her legs, her ribs, feeling something crawling underneath. Or maybe that was just her mind making her think that.

She caged her shudders, but Adam’s hand still felt like ice. With no heartbeat, no pulse, no movement, she could almost swear that he was dead. If it hadn’t been for the miracle she’d witnessed Arson perform that hellish morning on Mandy’s beach, she would’ve abandoned all hope of Adam coming to. But she had to keep hoping. She had to. Emery pressed her lips softly against Adam’s hand and prayed Ruth had some hot chocolate in her house. She wanted just to wrap herself in five blankets and watch the snow descend upon the world while safely nestled indoors, warming her hands and feet beside the fire. After all, what cabin didn’t have a fireplace? It just had to have a fireplace.

Maybe she was getting ahead of herself. Maybe she was imagining it all wrong. She kept touching her stomach, her throat, not at all satisfied with not knowing what dark things might exist behind them. Every time the back space of the Suburban moved, the noises getting all rickety, she jumped, wondering if that was the moment her world would shatter again. She glanced down at her defender’s pale face. How would Adam react if he actually woke up?
When, Emery, when
. Would he gasp for breath and thank heaven she was the first one he saw? Would he kiss her? Would he tell her to stop panicking?

She now understood what her dad meant when he said he sometimes woke up shaking. It must’ve been this kind of fear, the kind of not knowing what might happen next that kept him so freaked out all the time. Maybe that’s why he drank, because it stilled his nerves, if only for a little while. Maybe she had judged him too harshly. She missed him. She missed her mother too.

“You have no home.” Emery imagined Adam saying it over and over again. “There’s no home to go back to.” She knew now, after enduring the violent fight at Adam’s house, that if she returned home, it wouldn’t be any different. The same ghosts who had attacked them earlier this morning probably had a cluster of agents circling East Hampton, just waiting for her to come back. The second she walked through the front door, she’d fall face first to the floor with a bullet pinched in her spine—or worse, a tranquilizer that would make kidnapping her once again possible. No home. No ’rents. Just oblivion. Oblivion before the world turned to ashes.

But there was a tug on her soul, a terrible pull. She wanted to know where they were, how they were handling it all. Just one phone call. It didn’t even have to consist of words, if only she could hear them.

“How’s he doing?” Ruth finally asked. But before Emery could respond, the woman answered herself. “Oh, nothing’s changed, most likely. And I’m not making the situation any better for askin’, am I? Just ignore me, sweetie.”

There was no more talking until they reached Ruth’s cabin. A long driveway, which began at the conclusion of a woodsy dirt trail, led them in. It took about thirty seconds to arrive at the end of it. Ruth parked the SUV and got out to open the spacious trunk. Emery hopped out onto the snowy ground, not at all liking the way Ruth kept eyeing the gun. But she knew it was likely because it made the elder stranger uncomfortable, not because she planned to take it. With one heaving motion, Ruth tossed Adam’s thin body over her shoulder and asked Emery to shut the doors as she carried hope toward what looked like a rotting porch.

Every time Emery blinked, the air seemed to drop several degrees. Her eyelids opened for brief seconds, only to close tightly again. The snow came up to her ankles. Before following Ruth up the porch steps and into the cabin, she studied the property. This place made her country Connecticut home by the lake seem like the suburbs. Tall trees scraped the belly of the grey sky with sluggish clouds moving toward nothingness. Their thick branches stretched outward and upward, as if searching or reaching for something unattainable. Trees of all kinds. Trees of all heights and widths. They swayed to the forceful wind, and she knew if the snow piled on heavily enough, some branches would break off and die.

A pile of firewood sat by a shed on the far right. And a fence, which she could only imagine allowed a farm animal—a horse, maybe—to roam. She looked back at the road that had ushered them in, and it seemed so far away now that maybe it didn’t even exist.

How far am I?
Blink.
How far now?

Her neck turned swiftly back toward the front of the cabin. Ruth’s home appeared to be strong, despite its porch, which Emery perceived as a gateway that couldn’t grasp its own importance. In the few fairytales she could remember from childhood, the images painted in her mind from the stories—images of what a grandma’s house should look like—sort of resembled this cabin. But a lurking sad sensation rippled through her belly just then because she knew that fairytales, however beautiful and wondrous and magical they were, often ended with a scene painted in blood.

She hoped this storm would protect them. She hoped that in this fairytale, the rescuer might wake from his deep, dark sleep.

A plume of smoke billowed into the air above the roof. A fire had already been started inside. Perhaps Ruth had been prepared to entertain young guests. Emery stopped her thoughts. The attempt to refer to Adam, if only in her mind, as a young person, was just plain stupid. Ruth probably didn’t suspect a thing, though, completely oblivious to the idea that the scrawny boy she had thrown over her shoulder like some duffel bag was in fact a man full of years and brimming with supernatural power.

Emery felt the wind whip her hair every which way as she closed the Suburban trunk and followed the footprints in the snow all the way up to the cabin’s front door. The rooms were large, open. Adam lay on a leather couch near the fireplace, wrapped in a blanket. Ruth was in the kitchen, about twenty feet away, rummaging inside her cabinets for medicine.

“I don’t think giving him a Tylenol is gonna wake him up,” Emery said under her breath. The frantic woman didn’t hear. She simply asked Emery to close the front door so the cold didn’t creep in.

Every step Emery took was a borrowed one. Every minute she had air in her lungs seemed like a gift. She balled her hands into fists, feeling as though she had just spent the last five minutes clawing at concrete. Soreness walked across her fingertips.

“Sit down and try to relax, Emery. I know it’s hard, but try. The fire’s goin’ nice. I’ll get you some blankets in a minute,” Ruth said, stirring a pot of—Emery didn’t know what—as her eyes quickly scanned the bottles of the dozen or so over-the-counter drugs she had collected. This stranger was good at multi-tasking, a skill Emery envied.

“Do you have a phone?” Emery asked, noticing there wasn’t a television or even a computer anywhere in sight.

“You can try the landline over by the sofa, but I doubt it’ll be functioning. Lousy hunk of junk never seems to wanna work when there’s even so much as a snowflake on the ground. Livin’ in the peace and quiet has its occasional drawbacks, I s’pose.” Ruth continued to riffle through packages of bandages and ointments and several bottles of pain medication. “Tell you the truth, I don’t much miss it all, though. The hustle and bustle and all that keepin’ up with the Joneses nonsense.”

Technology isn’t nonsense,
Emery wanted to scream, but didn’t. She sauntered toward the sofa where Adam lay—so still it was creepy. Before picking up the phone receiver, she paused and experienced what felt like a hundred scenarios. A few stuck out. What if this seemingly kind stranger were a plant, someone sent by the asylum to pick her up and bring them to this cabin, where each of them would be drugged and taken back? What if the phone were tapped? She’d never know. Was she being overly paranoid? Emery studied Adam’s movements, knowing there were only two real options: Either she could take a risk and, in that risk, possibly hear her parents’ voices again, or she could leave the phone exactly where it was and start working on her best Jason Bourne impersonation. She let her fingers kiss the metal of the gun once more, and it gave her a sense of security, however flimsy that sense actually was.

“Did you get a signal, sweetheart?” Ruth asked, still obviously flustered. Unease began to multiply. Emery glanced at Adam and thought,
He could die, and either way I could die too, but after all that’s happened, I have to at least try.
After all, this moment, this day, could be all that was left.

She gathered her wits and picked up the phone, pressing the plastic to her ear. The only audible thing transmitted was a sharp clicking sound. Emery gritted her teeth, frustrated. She hung up, picked it up again, and this time tried to dial her father’s cell. Same result.

“You were right. Dead signal.”

“Rats. I’m awful sorry. Technology and I have been at war since the beginning of time, it seems.”

“Do you have a computer…a tablet…Wi-Fi, anything?”

“Wi-Fi? What’s that again? All these tech terms make a girl feel old.”

Emery sighed and dropped the phone in the cradle. It was no use. Hard to imagine this old woman survived out here without the usual amenities. Was it too much to ask for a phone call? Just one call? She studied the areas in the cabin that she could see clearly. The lower level extended beyond the kitchen by at least thirty more feet, but past that, it was all black. Maybe keeping the majority of the lights off was normal practice out in these woodsier parts of New York. Or maybe Ruth wasn’t ready to let them in that much.

Emery’s heart fluttered when she caught a full breath of what was cooking. She smelled pasta. A quick meal, sure, but always capable of satisfying voracious appetites. Bubbling water could be heard from where she sat—then kneeled—beside Adam. Heat from the fire licked at her lower back as she applied some ointment to the open wound on his head. She gave her thoughts escape while simultaneously accepting her role as nurse. Her imagination recreated all the cheesy pasta sauce commercials she’d seen over the years. What she would give for an evening out at a quaint Italian restaurant with the ’rents. Her mouth practically watered, and she couldn’t help but feel somewhat primitive. But going months without a proper meal had really messed with her.

Ruth emerged out of the shadows moments later with a blanket, and Emery came out of it. “Here ya go, hon. This should get you warm. Once we put some food inside that body of yours, you’re more than welcome to take a shower or a bath or whatever ya like. K?”

“Okay.” Emery shrugged, half smiling but deliberately avoiding eye contact as much as possible. Before cloaking her chilled shoulders in the wool blanket, she placed the gun on a coffee table near Adam’s feet.

“Sure you still need that?” her host asked.

“Yes,” Emery snapped, skittish as she reached for it again the way a child reaches for a toy. She realized her behavior was strange, but caution was necessary. Adam would have commended her. Three months locked up, a daring escape, and the morning from hell had created this newer, darker specimen. “Please…just don’t…” her voice trailed off.

“Right. Pasta’s almost done,” Ruth said, the color completely gone from her cheeks. She looked much like a woman who handled pressure well but rarely encountered it in her day-to-day life. Remorse climbed into Emery’s throat. She regretted bringing the pressure today.

“I read the backs of every one of these drugs, dear,” Ruth continued, “and I don’t see how any of them are gonna help your friend.” Hopelessness invaded the creases in the woman’s forehead. “That makes me think: Are you sore? Is there anything I can get you for your cuts or bruises? I hate seeing you like that.”

Emery was thankful she no longer needed a mask. “Most of the blood,” she started, “was his.”

“Oh,” was all her host said before stirring the pot of boiling pasta. “You’re quite good at applying the bandages. Who taught you?”

“My mother was a nurse.” Emery paused and glanced at the gun. If she were to put the cold steel against her temple and fire off a shot…

“Oh. You miss her, don’t ya?”

Emery didn’t want to answer. Instead she asked a question of her own. “Is he gonna wake up?”

“How can we be sure he’s even still with us? Alive, I mean.” When Ruth’s words left her mouth, the woman’s eyes explored several new shades of darkness and concern.

“I…wish I knew for sure. Truth is, I don’t have a freaking clue. He stopped…” Emery fell silent for a second then continued, “He stopped breathing a while ago. Hasn’t even moved.”

“What would the authorities think of my doing nothing to help that boy? I can’t just let him die in here on that sofa. Good Lord, what have I done?” She paced the floor. “Maybe I should never have asked for it. Nah, I shouldn’ta done it. The two o’ you never should’ve come here.”

Brushing the hair out of her face, Emery stood up. “Fine. We’ll leave.” Maybe it was for the best.

Ruth took offense. “Hold on. Wait just a second, dear.”

“Again with the ‘dear.’ Look, I’m not blind. I see the way you keep looking at me.”

“What way is that?”

“That scared, full-of-pity way. Or maybe it’s the look like you’re afraid you might get caught. Sorry to interrupt your life like this!”