Page 81 of Wild Child
He looked beyond me, then shook his head. The scuffles and shouts from the other snivelly rat that now had a broken nose ceased after the last gunshot. Neils had stopped pursuing us to yell at someone else, which likely meant that the other guy was now dead too.
It gave us a few moments to get out of here.
Where was Steve? Kimball? Had they both already been shot? If that other man could appear out of nowhere, so might someone else.
My hand trembled when I put my palm against Devin's cheek and willed him to return to me.Come back,I begged silently.Please come back.Terror filled his eyes amidst a backdrop of war. He struggled inside, I could see that. I wanted to soothe it all away and bring him back. Wanted to melt these horrible men into oblivion and forget they ever existed. Devin had demons now.
Demons onlyIcould fight.
"Dev, it's me. Ellie. I'm here in the mountains with you. You're not in Afghanistan."
He continued to blink.
"Dev! It's me, Ellie."
"Gotta get out of here," he mumbled, then searched around. He stopped, and his erratic movements paused. He stared around us. I grabbed his shoulder to shake him. "Dev! Please listen. It's Ellie. You're not really there. You're in the mountains."
He shook his head and motioned for me to be quiet, then pressed himself all the way to the forest floor.
“Devin Blaine,” I snapped. “You will not go back to Afghanistan, do you hear me? You are here with me, and I need you. We have to get out of herenow!”
Devin turned to stare at me in a haze of misunderstanding. The vague, distant expression had returned to his glazed eyes. He lay right in front of me, but he was worlds away.
"Stop. Talking," he whispered, then mumbled something about bullets and sand. He flinched and ducked.
Fear like I’d never known slipped through me. How did I get through to him? He wanted me to ground him, but what he'd told me to do wasn’t working now. Would he go so far into the hallucination that he'd hurt himself? Me? Neils would catch up to us if we stay here. Kimball probably lay dead somewhere, I assumed, but the sound of fighting continued overhead.Someonehad to be here still. The chaos of this moment was our only chance to get out. I climbed on top of him, then grabbed his arm and forced him to roll onto his back. He snarled.
I slapped him.
The crack of my palm hitting his cheek brought his eyes back to me. Shocked, he stared at me in wordless confusion. My palm stung like a thousand needles. The sensation frightened me. Had I actually justhithim? He gazed at me in blatant question now. I grabbed his face with both hands.
“You arenotin Afghanistan!” I whisper-cried. “You are here, with me, in the mountains. Where you belong. Where webothbelong. I need you, Dev. I need you to come back to me and help me here. I need you and I openly admit it. I want you to stay. And maybe you'll leave after all this. Maybe you won't love me the way I love you, but it's a chance I'll take.” A suppressed sob weakened my voice. "Because Mama was wrong. Not all men leave. Love doesn't have to die. And I can always take care of myself—evenwithyou."
He blinked. Some of the haze slipped away from his eyes.
“Ellie?”
His response was slow and sluggish. The blurry motion of two men grappling in the underbrush came out of the corner of my eye. Steve and Neils? I couldn't tell for sure. They were too close to be safe, so I swiped the errant tear off my cheek, grabbed his arm, and yanked him down the mountain.
“Come on,” I whispered. “We have to go.”
Devin followed my command, but I couldn’t be sure why. My heart felt quick and light with the terrifying sensation of running away, all while my mind threatened to fall into despair. A guttural shout, then another shot, ripped through the mountainside. I flinched. Devin grabbed my arm and pulled me close.
“With me!” he hissed.
He skidded down another precipitous drop with his fingers linked through mine. Dev held me close as we slipped and slid down a slope slippery with thick, fallen leaves. Mossy rocks overgrown with lichen rushed past us as we hurried down another short embankment and came to a stop on hard ground. A waterfall of leaves and rocks fluttered past us when Devin pressed himself against the wall of the embankment and murmured, “Don’t make a sound. They’ll hear.”
Was this Afghanistan Devin or my Devin? I didn’t question it yet. My heart bruised my chest as we waited, not even the comforting twitter of birds overhead. Tender, exposed roots curled out of the dry dirt near my cheek. My heavy breaths sent them drifting back and forth, where they tickled my skin with their gentle touch.
Devin stared at me with seemingly lucid eyes, but I couldn’t tell for sure.
“Am I about to die?” he whispered. His voice trembled just a little, and the fear in his wide eyes broke my heart. “Each time I almost died, you came to me the moment before I thought everything would end. You looked so scared, just like right now.”
The wordseach timeechoed through my mind. How many times had there been? They must have been utterly terrifying to still wreak their havoc now, and I hated the circumstances that put him through this.
I reached a trembling hand to his cheek. “No,” I whispered. “We aren’t going to die. I won't let it happen."
The lie was blatant. At any moment, a bullet could end both our lives so quickly we might never know what hit us. Neils could continue to chase us through the woods and stalk us until he murdered us in cold blood, like the most malevolent kind of predator.
