Shadow's Kiss (Monstrous Hearts: Fleur's Story)

Chapter Four

It was after nine when they left, having found the keys in one of the vases in the living room. Fleur had never driven a car as twitchy as Hayley's silver Porsche, and even once she'd grown used to the responsiveness and settled into the flow of traffic, unease pulsed in the back of her mind.

Hayley chased away the silence with blasting the radio and making constant phone calls, creating a whirlwind of noise that Fleur felt was safe to ignore. As the red taillights of surrounding cars glowed like eyes in the dark, she found herself trying to remember the last time she'd been out at night. Was it really when she'd gotten lost in the woods?

Well, "lost." Tricked and kidnapped was a better description, although she barely recalled how the witches had separated her from Alice.

"So, what's it like being a missing person?"

"What?" Fleur's attention snapped over to Hayley, and for an absurd moment, she wondered whether the other girl had read her mind.

Hayley glanced between her phone and Fleur's face, looking bored more than curious. "You know. The thing that happened right after we stopped talking. You went horseback riding and got lost with some others, right?"

"Twelve people, including my sister. We were the only ones who were found." Fleur stared at the cars ahead for a few moments. "My sister found her way out of the forest first. I did the same later that night."

"Yeah, but what happened?"

Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. It was impossible to keep the memories from flashing back into life. The moldy wooden cage she had been trapped in. The stinging of scraped, filthy fingers from trying to break her way out. The smells of blood and terror while figures circled a bonfire on a distant ledge.

And then—two wolves appearing from the gloom. One turning into her sister, rimmed in moonlight like something from a fairy tale while reassuring Fleur that they would get her out and to safety.

Sometimes, Fleur tried to convince herself that was all she really remembered, but the rest of her mind knew better. It hadn't happened at first, but what took place at that fire often appeared in her dreams. Things her eyes couldn't have seen. A stained altar. A pile of discarded bodies. A woman sucking on a heart, squeezing it to coax more blood out.

The smallest details were viciously clear, too much so for a mere nightmare. Bone-deep, she knew these images were real and it scared her to have them in her head. Not just the horror of what they contained, but that they appeared to her at all. As if that night had somehow tainted her existence, like blood staining fabric.

Aware that she hadn't replied, she forced herself calm before Hayley noticed anything. Luckily, "What happened?" was a question she had been asked many times, and she could recite the safe version of her answer like a robot. "I never saw what spooked the horses. We all got separated. Then I got thrown off, and I guess I hit my head because everything gets blurry after that point. I kept walking until I saw a ranger station."

"That's it?"

Fleur felt like screaming. No, that wasn't it. That wasn't nearly it. But that was all she was willing to talk about and even think about.

The things she had seen and learned were too overwhelming. To acknowledge them meant changing her view of reality, and she found that life sucked enough as it was. But sometimes, when it was very quiet at night, she still heard echoes of the screams Alice had urged her away from. Sometimes, the night seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat, reminding her of the danger of looking into the darkness and realizing it stared back.

Hayley focused on her phone again. "What about food? Did you have to eat any weird things to survive?"

"No. It was just one night. I guess the worst thing was that—"