Wither (The Chemical Garden #1)(44)
Author: Lauren DeStefano

Just as I’m realizing I can’t leave him behind, that I need to go looking for him, someone grabs my wrist.

“Rhine.”

I turn, and I’m careening right into his arms. For the second time, in a second storm, he’s come to hold me steady. And there’s so much I want to tell him about what’s happened in this whole horrible month without him, but there’s no time. The wind has picked up, and we can’t make out each other’s words, so we just start running, hand in hand, into the darkness.

The wind sounds like voices. It sounds like my father and mother laughing, and Rowan waking me up for my shift, and Cecily’s baby crying, and Linden saying I love you. I don’t stop to listen. I don’t respond. But sometimes we trip on twigs and snowbanks, and we pull each other back up. We are unstoppable. And then we make it to the gate, which is of course locked.

There’s a panel, but my key card doesn’t work on it.

Did I really think it would? “What now?” Gabriel shouts to me over all the wind. I start walking the length of the fence, looking for the place where it ends, but it soon becomes abundantly clear that there is no end to it, that it must wrap all the way around the property in a circle that’s miles and miles wide.

What now?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

Escape is so close. I can reach through the bars and touch the free air. I can almost grasp at a tree limb on the other side. Frantically I survey our surroundings. The trees would be impossible to climb; the branches are too high; the fence is too icy. I try scaling the iron bars and fail every time. But I try and try until eventually Gabriel grabs me and holds me back. He unbuttons his wool coat and brings me to his chest, and wraps it around the both of us. We kneel together against a snowbank, and I think I know what he’s trying to tell me. There is no way out.

We’re going to freeze to death.

But I don’t feel the acceptance I felt in the hurricane.

I was so sure that night that I was going to die, and yet something told me to keep going and keep going, and when I climbed the lighthouse, I saw the exit. I don’t believe that was for nothing.

I feel Gabriel kiss my forehead. But even his normally warm lips have gone cold. I draw back a little, pull his collar up around his ears. He slides his hands under my hair, on either side of my neck, and we bring warmth back to each other that way.

I take Jenna’s lighter from my pocket, and with the wind it’s almost impossible to spark a flame. I have to wriggle free of Gabriel’s coat, and he cups his hands around the flame so that the wind won’t steal it. It calls to mind a story I read in Linden’s library about a dying girl who lit matches to keep warm. Each new little flame brought a different memory of her life. But right now the only memory is Jenna, her little glowing life flickering in our hands. It’s the only light in all this darkness, and I think I’d like nothing more than to light this place on fire. To watch it burn like those ugly curtains. Light one tree and watch the fire spread to them all. But the wind is too strong. I feel like Vaughn has somehow brought on this blizzard. I’m afraid that tomorrow morning he’ll find Gabriel’s and my body frozen and dead, so hopelessly close to our escape.

It can’t happen. I won’t give him the satisfaction.

Just as I’m considering trying to ignite one of the trees, I hear a voice on the wind. I think I’m imagining it again, but Gabriel looks too. We can just make out a shadowy figure running toward our little light.

I hurry to my feet, pulling Gabriel with me. It’s Vaughn. It’s Vaughn coming to finish us off, or worse, to drag us into his basement to torture us, mutilate us, strap us to operating tables in the same room as Rose’s and Jenna’s corpses. I start to run, but Gabriel stops me. The man gets closer, and it’s not Vaughn at all.

It’s the nervous attendant who took Gabriel’s place.

The one who said I was the nice one; the one who told me to check my napkin for the June Bean.

He’s waving something over his head. A key card.

His mouth is moving, but with all the wind and snow, I can’t hear his words. So we just watch, Gabriel and I, as he swipes the key card across the panel. The gate hitches a little, trying to dig through the snow, but it opens.

For the longest time I just stand there, not sure what to make of this. Not sure if I should trust it. I am still expecting Vaughn to—I don’t know, pop out from behind a tree and shoot us or something.

But the attendant is waving us along, and I think he’s saying, “Go, go!”

“Why?” I say. I move close to him so that I can hear him better. I’m shouting over the wind. “Why are you helping us? How did you know we were here?”

“Your sister wife asked me to help you,” he says. “The little one. The redhead.”

Chapter 27

We run for what feels like all night. It feels like the world could have ended and there’s nothing left but this path, and these trees, and this snowy darkness. We stop to catch our breath, but the frozen air offers little relief to our gasping lungs. We are cold and exhausted, and still the wind rages.

In the library I read a book called Dante’s Inferno about the many circles of a place called hell, in the after-life. In one of the circles were two lovers who were forever punished for their adultery by being trapped in a windstorm, unable to speak, unable to hear each other or have a moment of stillness.

That could be us, I think. And the sad part is that we’ve never even had the chance to become lovers. We are just a servant and an unwilling bride who haven’t been granted one moment of true freedom to explore how we feel about each other. I’m even still wearing my wedding band under Deirdre’s cabled glove.

When we’re far enough from the iron gate, we relax our pace and go slowly. I can’t understand why this road is so long. In the limousine it was only minutes that we were on it. Did Gabriel and I take a wrong turn? There’s so much snow that I can’t even be certain we’re on the road at all.

Right about the time I’m deciding that the world has ended, or that we’re in our own circle of hell, there are lights.

There’s a rumbling sound, and then a big yellow truck sweeps past us, plowing up the snow along the city street.

And we’ve made it. We’re here. The lights and buildings all reveal themselves as though a curtain has just been parted for us. There are more plows, and even a few people meandering beneath the streetlights. The cinema’s marquee is advertising an all-night zombie-fest.

While we were in that barren wasteland, contemplating certain death, the world was peacefully going on just a few miles away. I laugh, somewhat hysterically, and I’m shaking Gabriel and pointing and saying, “See? See what you were missing?”

He says, “What’s a zombie?”

“I don’t know. We could find out, though. We can do anything we want.”

We go into the cinema, where it’s warm and it smells like hot butter and carpet cleaner. Neither of us has any money. Even if I’d thought to steal some, I wouldn’t have known where to look. There’s no use for it in the mansion; even Linden doesn’t carry it around.

But the cinema is crowded, and we’re able to sneak into one of the theatres unnoticed. We huddle together in the darkness, surrounded by strangers. We’re anonymous, and in that anonymity there’s safety. The movies are horrifying, the special effects tawdry and silly, and I feel a rush of exhilaration. “This is what Manhattan is like,” I whisper to him.

“People crawl out of their graves in Manhattan?”

“No. They pay to see movies like this.”

The marathon runs all night, one grotesque movie after another. I drift in and out of sleep. There’s no sense of time, no sense of night or day. I hear the screams and howls in my subconscious, but my mind registers that the horror is fake. I’m safe here. Gabriel holds on to my hand. I wake up at some point to him tracing my wedding band with his finger. It has lost its meaning now; I am no longer Linden Ashby’s wife, if I ever even was.

I was always led to believe that for two people to truly be married, the bride would have to speak on her own behalf at some point.

“My real last name is Ellery,” I say sleepily.

“I don’t have a last name,” Gabriel says.

“You should make one up, then,” I say.

He laughs, and there’s his smile again, shy and toothy and brilliant. His face is washed over by the flickering white screen, and I turn and realize the movies are over and the seats around us are empty. “Why didn’t you wake me?” I ask.

“You looked kind of cute,” he says. He looks at me for a while, considering. Then he leans forward to kiss me.

It’s a fantastic kiss, with neither of us worrying about open doors. His hand is under my chin, and my arms move slowly around his neck, and we’re lost in this world of flickering darkness, in a sea of empty seats, and we are absolutely, unequivocally free.

It’s the creak of the swinging door that breaks us apart, and the theatre employee—a first generation with a broom—saying, “Hey, the shows are all over. Go home.”

I look at Gabriel. “Shall we go, then?” I say.

“Go where?”

“Home, of course.”

It’s such a long way home that I have no idea how we’ll get there. There’s no phone at the house, no way to call Rowan and let him know I’m all right. But once we get out of Florida, I’ll track down a pay phone and call the factory where he was working when I last saw him. There’s a good chance he’s still there. I have to hold on to that thought, though a sinking feeling in my gut is telling me he’s already moved on, lost in his search for me.

Outside, the city has settled into the hazy, fleeting moment between falling asleep and waking. It’s subdued, though not entirely silent. There are still cars and plows mashing up the muddy sludge that’s become of the snow. People are still walking here and there, but with less excitement and urgency. The sky is beginning to take on pink and yellow hues, and I know we don’t have much time. It’s nearly morning, and Vaughn will realize Gabriel and I have gone. That’s if he doesn’t know already, if Cecily has covered for us somehow.

Cecily. She sent that attendant out to help us last night. I didn’t trust it. How could I? But there are no flashing police cars chasing us down. There’s no wild hunt. Gabriel and I stand here, hand in hand, staring at a peaceful city.

Why did she help me?

Yesterday afternoon on the trampoline, she used that word. “Help.” I’ve helped you, she cried. And there was such horror on her young face when she realized the opposite was true.

“What now?” Gabriel says, bringing me out of my thoughts.