Authors: Beckie
back to look at me. I’m assuming she’s checking that I’m still behind her, and that I haven’t been eaten by whatever creatures she thinks stalks these woods at night.
It’s a shame that I’ve had to trick her, but I couldn’t think of any other way to get her to agree to come with me. With every step she takes away from the shack, she steps closer to my truck and
the closer she gets to my truck, the closer I get to all that money. That’s why I’ve dragged her out here. I don’t want to hurt her or scare her; I just want the damn money. I shove my hand into my
back pocket and feel the small, crumpled piece of paper that has a list of all the things I’m going to spend the money on. Top of the list is a holiday with the boys. I haven’t yet decided where it is that we’re going to go, but it’s got to be somewhere that has clubs, beer, and plenty of bikini-wearing women.
“What animal was it that you saw anyway?” she asks, interrupting my thoughts.
I move my eyes from off her backside and focus on the back of her head. Shit. What animal
could it have been?
“It was a small bear,” I say with false confidence.
She stops and turns to me with a frown on her face. “A bear?”
I nod. “Only a small one.”
She shakes her head. “We don’t have bears in these woods.”
Really? “You do,” I say, hoping I sound like I know what I’m talking about. “I’ve seen loads of
them before when I’ve been hunting.”
Her eyes travel across my face in a panic. I can sense that she’s knows I’m lying.
“There are no bears in these woods, Kaiden.”
“There are.”
She shakes her head at me. “There are no bears. I know because I’ve lived in these woods for
nearly fifteen years and if there had been bears, then I would have seen them before now.”
I take a deep breath. “Well, it must have been something that just looked like a small bear
then.”
She frowns, but turns back around and carries on walking. I realise I don’t have much time
and start to loop the rope in my hand.
“Why does it feel like you’re lying to me?” she asks.
I don’t look up and I don’t answer her either.
“There is no animal, is there Kaiden? You’ve lied.”
She’s smarter than I thought. I shake my head whilst trying to figure out how to keep her
from running from me. There’s no way I could keep up with her if she chose to run. “Why would I lie to you?”
“I don’t know,” she says, “that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out this whole time.”
Shit. I have to do something….now. I lasso the rope and flick my wrist so it flies through the
air and over her head before skimming down her shoulders. Her head snaps around when she feels
the roughness of it against her skin. Her gaze slices right through me, but I ignore that little twinge in my chest that I feel when I see her sad, disappointed eyes fixate on me. When the rope gets to her waist, I yank it so that it tightens and pull her down to the ground. She yelps and scuffles. Her legs are kicking out so quickly that I don’t dare go anywhere near her. I watch her mesmerising green
eyes look up at me, full of pain and wonderment. I stare at her silky, long blond hair that’s getting dirtier with each thrash in the dirt and instantly regret what I’ve done to her.
“Calm down, Serena. You’ll hurt yourself if you keep doing that,” I say, trying to placate her.
“You lied and you tricked me. Why would you do that?”
She starts to cry and whimpers like a puppy.
I have to look away. “It’s for your own good really. Trust me.”
“Who are you Kaiden and what do you want with me?”
She’s still kicking and clawing at the dirt. I stand back, breathing heavily as I watch her
struggle, kick, and scream for an entire ten minutes.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Serena.”
Her screams have calmed to nothing more than sobs. She sounds so sad and beaten that I’m
almost tempted to remove the rope and let her run back home.
“Let me go,” she sobs when she’s calmed down enough to speak. “Please, let me go. I have
to get back to Elodie. You can’t take me and leave her there all on her own. What will she do? How will she feed herself?”
I need to remember why I’m doing this. I’m not here to care about her, or Elodie. I’m here to
take her and then claim my reward. I need to block out all of these guilty thoughts that are whirling around in my head. “You’ve got your Mother; she can look after Elodie.”
“No, no, no, she’s away for another eighteen days,” she says desperately, and I know she
speaks the truth.
“Where is she?” I ask, wondering why their Mother would leave them for so long.
“She’s in the city getting supplies for us.”
Now I feel bad. I can’t leave that little girl in that rickety old shed all on her own. She’ll die.
“Please, Kaiden,” she begs again, “please just let me go back to her. I won’t tell my Mother
about any of this. Just let me go back to Elodie. Please.”
“Just be quiet for a minute,” I snap. I need to think. I need to figure out what to do. Maybe I
should tie Serena up here and go and get Elodie. I start to pace, running my hands through my hair.
Shit. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to care about Elodie or about what Serena thinks. I’m supposed to be an idiot and a heartless pig, so why am I standing here even thinking
about this?
“Kaiden,” she starts.
I snap my head around and look at her and the way she’s curled up into a little ball in the
dirt. “What is it, Serena?”
She blinks up at me. “I’m scared. I’ve never been scared before.”
Oh God. I don’t need this. I don’t need guilt tripping. “Please be quiet,” I whisper, “I need to
think.”
I walk around her still body. I can feel her eyes watching me as I walk, but I don’t look at her.
Whenever I look at her beautiful face, my reasons for doing this start to blur. She’s so pretty that it’s hard to actually think about anything else but kissing her and touching her when I look at her. I know she hates me now. She’s not the first person to despise me because of something that I’ve done to them and she won’t be the last.
“Are you going to kill me?” she whispers.
I lower my head. I can’t believe I’ve actually terrified a young, clueless girl. I’m the lowest of the low. “No,” I breathe, “I wasn’t ever going to kill you. I would never hurt you. I’m not that bad.”
“You’re pretty bad right now.”
I nod. “I know and I’m sorry.”
“I don’t think you’re sorry at all,” she grunts.
I stare at the ground for a long, long time. Serena doesn’t move or speak to me again while
I’m thinking. I have no idea what to do now. I just know that I’m the coldest that I’ve ever been in my entire life. I knew the woods got cold at night, but I didn’t expect them to be freezing.
When I hear Serena gasp into the darkness, I have just about enough time to snap my head
up and stare into a pair of bright orange eyes that lunge through the air towards me.
“Wolf!” she screams as the animal’s paws hit my chest.
I freeze. I can literally feel the blood turning cold in my veins as the animal forces me to the
ground. Shit. Fuck. Shit. I’m going to get eaten by a wolf. I can’t believe I’ve dragged her out here and now I’m going to be the one that gets eaten alive.
Maybe I deserve it. That’s what people will say when my death hits the news. The animal
leans forward, crushing my chest and pinning me to the ground with its weight while staring into my eyes. My breath shoots out of my mouth in short spurts, making the cold air in between me and the animal mist. I try to lift my arm to push it off, but the wolf is too heavy. I had no idea there were wolves out here, and even though I can smell its rancid breath, I still can’t believe there’s an actual wolf on top of me, eyeing me up as its dinner.
I think about my friends and what they’ll do at my funeral. I think about my parents and my
brothers and how none of them will be surprised that I died doing something that I shouldn’t have been doing. My heart has never beaten so fast before. It’s making my lungs inhale and exhale more air then it ever has before. I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack. I’m not sure I can cope with being eaten alive.
I spread my hands, scrambling around the dirt to try to feel for my knife, but it’s nowhere near
me. The fall must have knocked it from my hand. I do the only thing I can do and lift my head off the ground, head-butting the animal in its nose. It yelps but doesn’t get off me. As pain shoots across my forehead, I begin to see black dots swirl in the front of my eyes. I shut them closed for a minute.
When I open them again, the wolf’s bared teeth are centimetres away from my nose. It’s
growling and snarling, causing slobber to spit out of its mouth and onto my face. It steps forward onto my shoulder and that’s when I hear a ‘pop.’ The pain that slices through my shoulder makes me feel instantly sick. I gag, sucking in as much breath as I can, panting. I can’t believe out of all the bad things I’ve done in my life, it’s actually going to be a smelly fucking wolf that kills me. That’s when I stop breathing. I close my eyes and wait for death.
It doesn’t come. Instead, I hear footsteps and then something moving through the air,
followed by a loud, heavy thud. I can suddenly breathe. My eyes snap open but there’s no wolf. My chest is free. My eyes snap onto Serena, who is wrestling with the wolf on the ground next to me. I shuffle onto my feet and wince when the pain of my shoulder shoots down my arm. My fingers
tingle like they’re being pricked by pins and needles, but I can’t think about them as I watch a human girl and a wolf fight it out in front of me. I can feel my eyes darting, trying to keep up with their rapid movements.
My stomach is clenched from fear and anticipation, making me feel even more nauseous than
I already did. She’s so fast and strong that I can’t believe what I’m actually seeing, and it also makes me wonder why she was lying on the floor and whimpering. Was she even really crying or was it just some trick?
I don’t have time to think about that right now as I watch her tumble and punch the wolf,
which snaps and snarls at every opportunity that it has. The sounds echoing around the trees around me make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Suddenly, a gleam of silver catches my eye.
A noise like a carpet being ripped up from the floorboards sounds out around us and the wolf flops to the ground in front of me, its tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth. It’s still panting and forcing out big, heavy bursts of air, but as its dazed eyes furiously blink at me, I know that it’s dying.
Serena screams and drops to her knees with a huff. I stand as still as a statue and watch her
cradle the wolf’s head in her hands until it finally exhales its last breath. She pushes the wolf’s eyelids shut and wipes her face with the back of her hand.
I stand and watch her crying over the wolf and shake my head. She’s absolutely
unbelievable. She killed the wolf, even though it could have easily killed her. I also can’t believe she just risked her life to save me. I shake my head again. I owe her my life. How can I do what I was planning on doing now?
I take a tentative step towards her but the dry twigs underneath my shoe crack, alerting her to
my movement. Her head snaps up. Her sparkling green eyes look sad, scared, and pissed off all at
the same time.
“You!” she growls. She scrambles to her feet and points the knife at me, waving it through
the air as she marches towards me. “This is your fault! You’ve just made me kill an animal! An animal that was doing nothing but what nature intended it to do!”
I stare at her and the anger that I can see resonating off her. She looks really, really mad.
“You saved my life,” I finally whisper, the shock clear in my voice.
“I don’t know why I bothered,” she spits. “I should have just let it eat you.”
I take a step back away from her but don’t say anything. She’s right; she should have just let
it eat me. If the roles had been reversed, I’m not sure what I would have done.
“I’m sorry,” I say and truly mean it.
She takes a deep breath, putting the knife into the back of her trousers. “I don’t want to ever
see your face again, Kaiden.”
I nod.
“I’m going back home to Elodie.”
If she’s testing me to see if I’m going to try and stop her, then she’s wasting her time. “Okay.
I’m sorry.”
She stares at me and then snorts. “I’d always imagined meeting someone else. I know the
world is full of people, but I never imagined that they’d be so stupid.”
So she thinks I’m stupid. That’s not exactly a new one. “You’re right, I’m stupid.”
She doesn’t say goodbye. She simply pumps her arms and moves her legs until she disappears
from my view. I stagger back and lean against a tree so I can try to figure out what the hell has just happened.
My eyes fixate on the dead wolf. I think about tying it up and dragging it back to my truck to
show my Father, but then I think about Serena and how unhappy she’d be about it. I sigh and take
the first steps towards the long walk back to my truck.
I’ve taken exactly ten steps when I hear her scream. I freeze. The breeze through the woods
stills around me. I turn my head back around, trying to figure out if it was her, when I hear her high-pitched cry ringing through the trees again. I start to run.
“Serena!” I call out. “I’m coming, just hang on.”
She cries again, but doesn’t call out my name. I run towards the noise of her sobs until I find
her crumpled on the ground, blood covering her face.
“What happened?” I ask, crouching down beside her.
She turns her face away from me and that’s when I notice her hand hugging her ankle.
“Is it your ankle?”
She nods. “I feel dizzy. Everything has gone blurry.”