Chapter 8 - The Forest Floor
The cold mountain air hit me like a wall of ice.
Sleet lashed horizontally across the clearing, turning the dirt and pine needles into a slick, treacherous morass. I scrambled off the wooden porch, my boots sliding in the mud, and threw myself into the dense, black wall of the pine forest surrounding the cabin.
Behind me, the cabin door flew open, spilling a bright rectangle of generator-powered light out onto the porch.
“Khloe!” Julian’s voice bellowed through the storm, filled with murderous fury. “You can’t outrun me out here! You don't even know where the property lines are!”
I scrambled through the underbrush, branches whipping across my face, tearing my jacket and scratching my cheeks. My lungs burned with every breath of freezing air. I kept my hand clenched tightly around Grandma Eleanor’s river stone in my coat pocket, as if its ancient weight could anchor me to the earth.
I could hear them crashing through the brush behind me—the heavy, panicked footfalls of Julian and Victoria stumbling through the dark woods, guided only by a tactical flashlight beam slicing erratically through the falling sleet.
“She went toward the lake!” Victoria’s voice screamed over the wind. “Cut her off by the boathouse!”
My boots slid down a steep, muddy embankment. I caught myself against the rough trunk of an oak tree, gasping for breath. Below me, through the skeletal black branches of the trees, I saw the dark, churning expanse of Lake Naomi, gray-black waves smashing violently against the rocky shoreline.
There was nowhere else to run. The lake formed a natural barrier.
I was trapped.
Footsteps crunched heavily on the frozen pine needles just twenty yards behind me. The beam of the flashlight swept across the tree trunk inches from my head, illuminating the falling sleet like millions of glittering needles.
“Found you,” Julian panted out of the darkness.
I stepped out from behind the oak tree, standing on the edge of the rocky embankment overlooking the freezing lake.
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Julian emerged from the shadows, holding a heavy hunting knife in his right hand, the blade glinting wickedly in the flashlight beam. Victoria stepped out beside him, breathing heavily, her designer coat ruined by mud.
“End of the line, Khloe,” Julian said, taking a slow, calculated step toward me, his face dead and expressionless. “It’s time to go home.”
