Page 139 of Death is Familiar

“I brought my phone, not a compass.”

“Phones don’t work out here, idiot.”

“I’m aware of that now, Warden.”

“Madame’s going to have our balls for this. The key and Three are out here, and all the dogs have tracked are sticks.”

“Apparently, the dogs don’t work out here, either.”

It was obvious from the way they bickered that they too, were not only tired, but afraid. Disoriented, they’d come up with nothing, and were about to get punished for not only failing to find us, but for not adhering to protocol.

Sucked to be them.

But not as much as it sucked to be us.

“Come on, then,” all but one of the men turned north-east and began to trudge through the sludge, “or we’ll be out here all night. There’s no way they’re moving in this dark, and we need to be back on the hunt by first light.”

The man who stayed behind placed a reflective tack in one of the trees.

“Hurry up, Warden!”

“I’m doing my job, Warden, keeping track of our path. Maybe if you kept your mind on yours, we wouldn’t be lost.”

I wasn’t sure which of the men were speaking now, their voices growing distant and blending beneath the ambience of the forest. “This whole thing has been a cluster-fuck. If Warden White had done his job, we wouldn’t be out here in the first place.”

“Madame trusted him to watch the key.”

“And he couldn’t even do that.”

“Give the guy a break, we’ve been out here for eighteen hours, and we haven’t got a clue where they are. We need to give the key more credit.”

“We’re chasing two girls. It should be easy. But no, we’re being bested by someone who is pregnant and barefoot!”

“Maybe one of the other teams had more luck.”

“We would only know that if our phones worked out here!”

Slowly, but surely, their presence, along with their bickering, faded into the distance.

As anti-climactic as it was, my choice not to move had saved us. For now. But the close call meant a change in plans. And more time in the wilderness.

Yay.

32

Going to the nearest town would have been what the men expected us to do, so the rest of the night I watched the hazy glow of civilization give way to day, as my dreams of a quick and swamp-less escape went down the drain.

We needed to stay in the wilds a while yet. Skipping the nearest town in favor of traveling further was a far more unpleasant path, but the lesser of two dangers.

The farther we got in the woods, and the longer it took to pick up our trail, the wider the net the Wardens would have to cast. And I wanted that net to be stretched so thin and threadbare that it left a Delilah and Three-sized hole right at the edge of it.

Getting thwacked with branches left, right, and center, I tried to stay positive. I really did. It was my plan after all, but every single part of me hurt. My feet, roughly bandaged, hurt. My joints hurt. My back hurt. Behind my eyeballs hurt.

To top it all off, Three and I were supposed to be playing the quiet game, but she gave up on that some time ago and had begun humming her prophecy song.

Squabbling with her was a losing battle, it took too much time and energy to get her to quiet when there wasn’t an active threat nearby. And I didn’t want to become the woman-who-cried-wolf and have Three fail to silence when the danger was real.

Doing my best to ignore the tune, I managed to forage persimmons, pawpaws, chicory, dandelions, wild grapes, and hickory nuts, to supplement our granola bar rations, but the portions were meager, and worked only to delay the hunger that gnawed at our insides.