Page 24 of Dominion

“Do you know how to use one of these?”

“Uh—”

“Skylar, it’s important that you answer. Do you know how to use it?”

“No.” I shook my head for good measure, my eyes wide from fear, visible in the rearview mirror. The darkness around us made the dark circles surrounding my eyes all that more prominent, and the paleness of my skin definitely didn’t help.

“This is the safety.” He pointed at the small tip at the end of the gun. “This is how you put it on and how you put it off,” he instructed, but I was only half-listening. He kept on issuing orders that went in one ear and exited through the other, then he shoved the gun at me, placing it straight into my hands as if I knew what to do with it. “I need to go up.”

“What? Why?” I suddenly woke up, my attention fully on him. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, but they need help. You need to stay in here,” he said with an arched eyebrow, looking straight at me, before he opened the glove compartment, taking out two more guns and a knife. Jesus fucking Christ.

When did my life become an episode of G.I. Joe?

“Stay here,” he commanded, with that softly accented voice, before he opened the door and disappeared into the darkness, rushing in the same direction where the rest of them left earlier. I was still in the same position for at least five more minutes, before it dawned on me that I was completely alone.

In the middle of the forest, close to Winworth, where Danny most probably still hid.

The gun in my hands suddenly wasn’t such a bad idea, but the one that came to my mind would just be another one in the line of terrible fucking ideas I’d had in the last couple of months.

Cillian would have to forgive me.

6

SKYLAR

I underestimatedthe freezing cold outside, and the more I walked up the mountain, going straight through the woods instead of taking the road they all used, the colder it got. The wind picked up at least five minutes ago, and the terror I completely forgot when I decided to go up to the Red Manor, to try and help, was making it so much harder to push through.

I couldn’t see anything, and the clouds that had gathered across the sky made the visibility even lower, hiding the moon behind their dark cloaks. My knees protested as I marched through the low bushes, stumbling over the fallen branches and the low vegetation, wrapping my arms around me, and trying to warm myself up.

It would’ve been smarter if I had stayed back in the car, but I would’ve gone completely mad if I had done that. The theories of what could be going wrong plagued me shortly after Claudio left, and the mental images, where Ash and Dylan weren’t here, but completely somewhere else, were what pushed me out of that car and into the cold.

The gun was firmly pressed between my hands, and in my stupidity to leave the confines of the car, I forgot all about the wild animals living on this mountain. Just a few seconds ago, thesound of wolves howling from afar froze me in my spot, but it lasted all about a second before I started pushing harder through the barely visible forest.

I didn’t have a flashlight or my mobile phone with me. I had nothing except for the gun I didn’t know how to use.

I hoped I was going in the right direction because the last thing I wanted tonight was to get lost in this forest when the temperature was going to be in the negative numbers. I could already hear Cillian telling meI told you so. I didn’t want to hear that.

A branch broke somewhere on my right, making me stop immediately. Apart from the thick rows of trees, there was nothing I could see. I took a step forward and my foot got stuck on one of the branches on the ground. Before I could balance myself, I fell face down, my knees hitting the ground with a painful thud.

“Fucking fuck,” I groaned, trying to lift myself up, as it came—the voice from my nightmares. The voice I never wanted to hear again.

“My, my, my.” Judah’s poison dripped through those words, his voice becoming more and more prominent, and I didn’t dare move. “Little Skylar. My good girl. You came to find me?”

I often imagined what this meeting would be like. Would I scream and shout at him, or would I simply try to kill him. I never imagined that I would be in the middle of the dark woods, alone with him, when nobody knew where I was.

“I missed you, my darling girl.” My gut churned at that saccharine desire evident in every single word. “Did you miss me?”

I swiftly turned to my back, pushing myself into an upright position as fast as possible, trying to locate him.

And there he was, in the flesh.

The same blond hair and blue eyes I once thought looked like mine, but I was so, so wrong. There were no similarities between us. Hell, there were barely any similarities between him and Dylan, and Dylan was his biological son.

My hands tightened around the gun, holding it right in front of me.

“Do not come closer,” I gritted out, hating the shakiness in my voice, but the motherfucker didn’t listen. Of course he didn’t.

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