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Her progress was slow going.
The chains around her ankles felt like they were weighed down with bowling balls, and she barely managed a few steps before having to stop and take a breather. Each step was like a marathon, and though she hadn’t come far, she was certain she was already lost. Everything looked the same—identical trees and fallen logs, and patches of moss or bundles of ivy. Clumps of brambles caught her skin and clothing, branding her with scratches. Clouds of midges followed her, reminding her of those cartoons where the main character constantly had a black raincloud hovering above their head. Absentmindedly, she clawed at her skin, so used to the constant itch of mosquito bites now that she barely even noticed them. She wasn’t even sure she was heading in the right direction. She was going to go from dying in the clearing to dying out here without even the murdered women to keep her company. She might die while being only a matter of a short walk from rescue, only for the pilot of the plane to never have known she was there.
“Help!” she shouted, though her voice was weak. “I’m over here! Please, help me.”
How long had it been since she’d heard the plane land? She’d lost her ability to tell the passing of time. There were moments where she wasn’t even certain she was conscious, her mind drifting off into thoughts, until she snapped back to reality and realized she hadn’t connected with the real world for a while. Still, she continued to call out. She had no idea if anyone could hear her, but if they did, it might give them an idea about which direction to head in. She might not be physically capable of finding the plane, but whoever had been flying it could still find her.
Her hand throbbed, and she kept it cupped to her chest, not wanting to risk banging it against a branch or rock. Every bump or jolt was like someone had poured liquid fire over her hand, and she was forced to pause, her teeth gritted, tears in her eyes, until it faded back to a steady throb.
She stopped to fish in the bag and pull out the remains of the bottle of water. She took a couple of sips and forced herself to put the lid back on and put it away again. As much as she wanted to drink it all, the thought of being out here with no water again was enough to make her conserve it. She considered another Twinkie, but decided on the trail mix instead. The snack would contain protein as well as sugar from the M&Ms and the dried fruit.
Cass kept going, tossing handfuls of fruit, nuts, and candy into her mouth as she walked. She didn’t think she’d ever appreciated how good food tasted before now, and she doubted she’d ever eat anything again without being truly appreciative for having it. The trail mix was a hell of a lot better than bugs. In between chewing and swallowing, she continued to call out and listen for any sign of either people or the plane. Was it possible that she’d gone in completely the wrong direction? She’d tried to keep the sun on one side of her, but this deep in the woods, the tree coverage was enough to block it.
She had to skirt around a large boulder with a crack down the middle, and then a fallen tree trunk. Was this the same tree trunk she’d fallen over on the way out here? It might have been, but then she didn’t remember the boulder. That didn’t mean it hadn’t been there, of course. She’d been drugged up and terrified at the time, so there was a good chance she didn’t remember every part of the walk up here.
Or you’ve made a horrible mistake and are walking in completely the wrong direction?
The chains around her ankles had chaffed her skin raw, so every footstep hurt. They grew heavier with every passing minute, and she wished she’d put more effort into finding the key to unlock them. Her walk was barely more than a shuffle, her feet dragging through the carpet of dried leaves.
A male voice suddenly cut through the buzzing of insects and twittering of birds.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
Her heartrate skyrocketed. Had she heard that? She wasn’t imagining things.
“Yes! I’m over here.” She gave a sob of relief. “Please, I’m hurt. I need help.”
She picked up her pace, hurrying in the direction she’d thought the voice had come from. It must be the pilot of the plane. She was dizzy with anticipation.
The person called again. “I’m on my way. Hang in there.”
She stumbled and staggered in the direction she’d heard the voice coming from. Was someone really going to help her? She almost couldn’t believe it was happening. She felt like she’d been alone forever.
Her vision was blurry, but movement came up ahead. She heard the crack and crunch of someone moving through the trees and bushes. For a moment, she thought of the bear and prayed it wasn’t him, but then she reminded herself that bears couldn’t talk.
A figure emerged through the trees, and Cass yelped in relief. The man was in his forties, with a baseball cap pulled down over his forehead. He was of a medium build, with thin lips and serious dark eyes. He frowned at the sight of her.
“Please, you need to help me,” she cried, falling toward him. “I was kidnapped by a man. He brought me here and was going to kill me. He chained me to a tree, but then he died. I almost died, too. I’m bleeding. I need help.”
She was aware she was babbling, the words pouring from her lips. Other than the imaginary women, she’d hadn’t spoken to another person in days.
The man stopped short, his eyes widening. His gaze flicked up and down her body, eventually alighting on her face. “My God.”
Cass fell against him, grappling his arms to hold herself upright, all the strength going out of her legs. His hands were on her arms, helping her.
“A man’s dead?” he asked. “What man?”
“I don’t know his name. Only that he’s been killing women, and I would have been next.”
Her rescuer still had hold of her. He hooked one arm across her back to clutch her opposite shoulder, and wrapped his other hand around the biceps of her other arm. “Come on. I need to see what you’re talking about.”
He turned her around, and then they were moving again. He was taking her back to the clearing.
Panic exploded through her.
“No, please. I don’t want to go back there.”
She tried to pull back on him, but she was weak and unsure of herself. This was the first person she’d seen for days, and she needed for him to help her. She didn’t want to anger him so that he decided she was more trouble than she was worth and abandoned her out here.
He didn’t even pause or glance down at her as he spoke. “I have to see what you’re talking about, or we might not be able to find it again.”
She didn’t want to find the clearing again. But the women were all buried there, and their families all had a right to know the location of the final resting places of their loved ones. The police would need to know, too, and it wasn’t as though she could give them directions. She didn’t even know their current location.
“Please, I need—” she tried again, but he interrupted her.
“It’s not far. It won’t take long.”
He marched her back the way she’d come. She stumbled but he held her upright. This wasn’t how she’d imagined her rescue going. Why weren’t they headed back toward the plane? She understood that he needed to know where the place was so he’d be able to describe its location to the police, but surely knowing it was within a certain distance from the landing strip would be enough, wouldn’t it? She really didn’t want to go back there. Not only was she struggling, physically, but she was also unsure if she could cope with coming face-to-face with the Magician’s body and that fucking tree all over again.
“Are people searching for me?” she asked between gasps for breath. He was moving too quickly for her, so she was forced to shuffle her chained feet. “How did you know to come out here?”
“I spotted you from the air.”
He’d been surprised to see her, but not glad or relieved. This man hadn’t been out here searching for her, she realized. He’d come out here with a purpose, but that purpose hadn’t been to look for her.
They stepped out into the clearing, startling a couple of crows who’d been picking at the body, thinking, mistakenly, they’d been left in peace. The birds let out caws of annoyance at the interruption, wings flapping in the air as they took off into the trees to call out their irritation from a lofty height. With dismay, she realized how little progress she’d made on her own, and how slowly she’d moved. Of course, her ankles were still chained, and she’d been through hell, so it was hardly surprising. She must have walked in a big semi-circle when she’d been trying to find the plane, and he’d just cut straight across the shortest part.
She swallowed hard at the sight of the Magician’s body lying on the ground. Flies buzzed and swarmed around the body. The stink of death permeated the air, and she turned her face away. She hadn’t realized how bad it was when she’d been chained here, but now she’d gotten a taste of fresh air again, the stench made her nauseated. She’d hoped she would never have to see this place again, and yet here she was, right back here, only perhaps only an hour after leaving—she couldn’t be sure of the time.
Her rescuer still had hold of her, and he firmly guided her toward the body of the Magician. They stopped together, staring down at it. Flaps of skin had been torn from his face, exposing pale flesh below—the result of the crows’ meal, she assumed.
“Ah, shit,” he said, frowning and shaking his head. There was a strange resignation in his tone, as though he’d just come across a neighbor’s cat found dead in the road after being hit by a car.
She dared to speak, but her voice came out as a strangled whisper. “Do you know him?”
He gave her a strange look. “No, of course not. Why would I know him?”
She stuttered. “I... I don’t know. I’m not thinking straight.”
Cass glanced over her shoulder, back the way they’d come. “Can we go now, please? I need to go to the hospital.”
She almost said she needed to go to the police and stopped herself just in time. She had the innate feeling this man wouldn’t like to hear any mention of the police.
Her mind whirred.
His plane... he must have landed exactly where the other plane had touched down. He said he hadn’t come here searching for her, and that he’d spotted her from the air, which meant he’d come here for a different reason. Had he already known that small strip of land existed, or had he seen it from the air as well, and spotted the other, now abandoned aircraft?
But then he’d walked directly to the clearing, and he’d known it wasn’t far, even though she’d never told him the distance. These woods spread for miles, and he could have headed in any direction. Only, he hadn’t. No more than an hour had passed since she’d heard the plane land, which meant he hadn’t wandered off course, or dallied, wondering where to go. Even if he’d spotted the clearing from the air, surely he would have still spent a little time finding it.
But he hadn’t. He’d come directly here.
Cass’s blood ran cold.
He’d already known about this place. He hadn’t known he’d find her here, but he’d known what else was here. And there was only one way that was possible, and that was if he’d been here before.
She struggled to keep hold of her grip on the world, sensing her reality trying to tug away, like an unruly child pulling on the hand of a stern mother. She became aware of how hard his fingers dug into her shoulders, of how rigid his body was beside hers. Maybe she was wrong, and this man had nothing to do with the deaths of the other women. Maybe he was genuinely here to help her, and that he only wanted to get a lay of the land so he could report it back to the police. But alarm bells jangled inside her, so loud she couldn’t hear herself think. The way he’d touched her, grabbing her arm and pulling her along, hadn’t been the caring embrace of someone who was worried about a woman out here alone in the middle of the woods. He hadn’t asked how she was or made any attempt to offer her anything to make her feel better.
He’d been coming out here to spend time in the place he’d created for himself, surrounded by the bodies of the women he’d murdered. He hadn’t expected to find her out here, or the other man.
He was out here because he was the killer.
She thought back to the man who’d taken her—the same man who lay dead on the ground before her now. The way he’d told her about the other girls had been strange, as though he was recounting events without any emotional attachment toward what he’d been saying. Now she understood why. She’d thought he’d been telling her the stories of each of the other women because he hadn’t had anyone else to tell, but now she understood how wrong she’d been. He hadn’t been recounting the stories because she was the only person he’d been able to tell. He’d been recounting them like that because he was the one who’d heard the stories from someone else. Someone else had told him how the girls had died, and what they’d been like during their final moments. The man whose body she’d been chained up beside had never been the one who’d killed them all.
She didn’t know how the two men had met. Perhaps he’d got talking to this real killer in a bar one night, and the murderer, desperate to finally speak to someone about his accomplishments, had told the other man everything, including where he took the girls to kill them, and where the bodies were buried. The knowledge had been enough to reasonably copy the real killer.
Cass gasped.
Memories of when she’d been taken and the hours leading up to that moment burst into her head. She’d been going in to work that morning as usual. It had been early, with no one else around. She’d gone around the back of the coffee house and let herself in through the rear door. Everything had been just as it always was, and she’d set up the coffee shop in preparation of opening.
Then she’d gone to the front door and unlocked it. Only someone had been waiting on the other side. The moment she’d unlocked the door, it had burst inward, throwing her off her feet, and someone had landed on top of her.
She’d felt a stab in her arm, followed by the almost immediate effect of the drugs, the world fading away.
The next thing she’d known, she was waking up inside the small airplane.
But that wasn’t all she remembered.
You asked for this, the first man had told her. At the time, she’d thought he was just making a generalization about women, but now she realized he’d said it in a more literal term.
There had been a reason she’d been the one he’d chosen.
It all came back to her—those hours before she’d been kidnapped.
Her depth of self-loathing had reached its lowest point. She’d read an article online about all the women who were suspected to be victims of the Magician—photographs of their faces, with small summaries of what kind of person they were beside it. They’d all seemed so perfect—career women, and cheerleaders, mothers, and high school prom queens. She’d stared at their faces, imprinting them to mind, and asked herself why it was those kinds of women who fell prey to men like that. What had they ever done to deserve it, when women like her were still getting up and going to work in the morning like usual? She was a no one. Even her own parents wouldn’t know or care if she was missing. It should be women like her the Magician was taking, not these innocents.
And when, in her moment of self-hatred, and on a self-destructive spiral, she’d posted on social media inviting the murderer to come and kill someone who deserved to die anyway, the copycat had seen it and decided to take her up on her offer.
Perhaps, in his obsession with the real killer, wanting to emulate everything he did, he’d done a search and come across her post. It would have been easy enough to see where she worked—she had it on her profile—and watch the coffee shop for when she came in.
But she didn’t want to die. She knew that now as surely as she’d ever known anything. Her brother’s death had been an accident, and no amount of blaming herself changed that or would bring him back to life. Her parents had blamed each other, and ultimately that had destroyed them. She’d lived her life in the wake of all that tragedy, never pushing herself, never creating a connection with anyone important enough to miss if something happened to them.
She had asked for this, but she knew how wrong she’d been now. She wouldn’t have wished this upon her worst enemy, and certainly not herself. What had happened hadn’t been her fault, and she deserved to have a life, just as much as anyone else.
Cass had thought the killer was dead.
She was wrong.