Page 81 of Dangerous Deviance
“But there is a record.” He held my shoulder. “Ellie. Your sister. She’s—”
“Missing.”
“Dead,” he finished. “She’s dead. She’s not here anymore.”
My head dropped, my gaze falling to my lap. I stared at my hands. My sister and I had different fingerprints, but we had gotten our long fingers from our mother.
And now they were both gone. My mother. Now, my sister. And even my dad.
I was the only one left.
No. That wasn’t possible. Not after everything I had been through.
But as I turned to Wil to argue, I saw her instead. Her head looking to the side, those blank eyes, her yellowed skin, her body decomposing. The scent of rotting meat. The flies that hung around us. The dirt inside of her nose. Her lips and skin blotchy and purple. The dried up blood on the edges of her cut flesh. The dirt underneath her, darkened with her insides. And Dr. Bates’s heavy hand on my shoulder. As if his touch could make it better.
As if Wil thought he could make this better.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. Wil’s eyes pleaded for me to understand, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t let myself. He might have always told me the truth, but this was different. This was my life. My purpose. The only thing that I had held onto since our parents died. Making sure that Julie was safe.
So no. I wouldn’t accept it. She wasn’t gone. She wasn’t dead. She was—
“Ellie,” Wil said. He held my shoulder. “You’re right. That’s just what the records say. We won’t know for sure until we—”
“What do the records say?” I hissed. “Tell me. The exact words.”
He narrowed his eyes at my tone, but I didn’t care. Kill me now, I thought. I didn’t care. If he was telling the truth, then what difference did it make?
“Deceased,” he said. His features softened, and he let go of his grip on me. I rubbed my shoulder where his hand had been. “Resigned. Like I said, that’s just the record. But you’re right. We won’t know until we find her.”
What he meant was that we wanted to find her body. I bit my tongue until it bled, and I tasted the copper in it, knowing that I had so much blood, and that if Wil was right, if those nightmares were real, then Julie didn’t have any left.
“Let’s go find her,” he said. He stood, then held out a hand for me. “The file had coordinates for her last known location.”
Those woods. The tall trees. The sprinkles of light shining through the branches.
I felt empty. I wouldn’t let myself feel anything. Not until I knew for sure.
I hated myself for accepting his offer, but I had to know.
I took his hand.
Wil tried to make conversation on the way back to Brackston, but I couldn’t stomach the words; they made me nauseous. At one point, he put a hand on my thigh, his hand inching closer to my pussy, but when he saw that I wasn’t interested, he stopped. Maybe he thought it would be a welcome distraction from the pain like it had been in the past. But this was different. This was a truth that I wasn’t sure I’d ever be prepared to handle.
The sights of the town were familiar, cast in the golden light of sunset. But instead of going past the camp into the woods like he had that morning, Wil took another freeway off to the side, then drove for ten minutes, before taking the off-ramp. A splintery wooden sign statedShadow Hillsin white paint, the frame cracked, showing the park and the surrounding area hadn’t been kept up in years. The hills were covered in dusty white stalks of grass. And there wasn’t a shadow in sight.
We parked in the small lot. Wil walked forward, his eyes searching the ground. I went past him, knowing instinctively where she was. Wil followed closely behind me. And I thought that maybe if I saw her there, everything would make sense. That this was all just a bad, messed up dream, and Julie was actually safe. She might have gone to the Skyline Shift, but she wasn’t stuck there forever. She was here. Sneaking out with a friend. And this was all just an elaborate prank. She had gone too far this time, and I would scold her for it.
In the distance, there was a hill followed by a patch of short, but thick trees. My steps grew quicker until I ran toward it. When we got there, I lifted the branches and crouched underneath them.
A long, gray bone, with dark dried up flesh. Another. One broken in half. A set of ribs darkened like the rest. A skull with vacant cavities.
I kneeled down and touched the skull, stroking the brittle flesh. The texture was like dried up food, left to decay in the trash. Had animals scavenged this body? Had the insects had their fill? I picked up the skull, turning it over a few times, observing the shape of the head, the chin, the forehead. Those empty eye sockets. This wasn’t my sister. These were just her bones.
They were her bones.
I held her face close to my chest, hugging it there. A tightness ballooned inside of me, and I screamed, the sound echoing around us. Wil’s shadow stretched to the side. I couldn’t stand it, this silence. Julie had been such a talkative person, and now, her tongue was gone. Decomposed by bacteria and insects and ravaged by animals until there was nothing, absolutely nothing that I could do to save her anymore.
It should have been me. Julie was young, so damn young, and yes, I was young too, but she had so much to give this world, so much to explore, and all I had wanted to do was to keep her safe. To guard her against the horrors. And I had completely failed. She was the one who was supposed to explore. Who was supposed to see more of this world than I ever cared to see. And now, she was gone.
