Chapter 20

Chapter 20

I 'm clinging to Brendan's back like a monkey, arms wrapped tightly around his neck. My sweatshirt is sticking to his sweaty T-shirt, but he's forbidden me from taking it off, to make sure I get properly warmed one more time. He's got the backpack full of our stuff slung across his stomach, and once in a while he even puts Grey on top of it, so that only his head is peeking out. I'm not sure how he can take a single step carrying this much weight. We've been at this for hours; the sun's already past its zenith, but Brendan hasn't allowed himself a single break, just keeps right on going at a merciless tempo, not making any concessions to my throbbing head. At some point, I slump forward and rest my cheek against my upper arm. Brendan's hair tickles my ear, sending tingles down my spine. Part of me's completely exhausted. And I don't mean only physically, though there's not an inch of my body that doesn't hurt after this torturous experience. It's something to do with Brendan. I don't have the strength to fight my feelings for him anymore. And I definitely don't want to start wondering whether what he said earlier was a real promise, or whether he was trying to make me feel better. I can't, I absolutely can't deal with any of it. The fact that I have feelings for him despite everything he's doing to me is so completely insane that just thinking about the massive, gaping hole between those two extremes makes me want to throw in the towel.

I let my mind drift unmoored, settle into the warmth of Brendan's body and his even stride, and watch the landscape change. The gravel gradually gives way to sand, and lush yellow and violet flowers soon emerge amid the grey-green weeds and silvery grass. Fluffy, white umbels of yarrow bloom at the edge of the forest, and grey birds are fluttering around everywhere in search of mosquitos and dragonflies. Beside us, on the river that's gradually turning into a dark-blue lake, a group of loons is following us like they're trying to figure out where we're going. Brendan said he knew a spot where we could cross the water and get to the top again, but it would take days to get there. I hope it takes forever, because beneath this endless sky, I feel weirdly free—its sheer vastness almost makes all of my troubles seem less significant by comparison.

When we finally stop to rest, I'm relieved to hear Brendan say that he didn't make it as far as he was hoping to. He sets me down, and I watch him spread out the sleeping bag and collect wood for the campfire. He doesn't find enough driftwood nearby, so he disappears into the forest, and I don't see or hear him for a long time. He leaves me there with an old can filled with rocks so that I can make noise and scare bears away. It doesn't seem to occur to him that I might run off again. Well, of course it doesn't—he's faster than I am, especially now that I'm injured so badly that I can barely walk.

Later, he whittles himself a birchwood spear and uses it to catch salmon in the shallows, which he roasts over the open fire for us.

I'm starting to feel more like myself again, both physically and mentally, as though I was frozen to the depths of my soul and I'm beginning to thaw again. Brendan gives me his thick down jacket to wear and helps me onto the sleeping bag before sitting in the sand beside me.

The salmon's delicious. We eat in silence, and then just sit there for a while. The night air is as soft and cool as silk, and the full moon overhead casts a dreamy, silvery light over the mountains and treetops. Its perfect reflection sits atop the water, a huge, gleaming diamond flanked by an army of stars. The sight of the moon and the chirping cicadas fill me with the deep sense of peace and contentment I've been yearning for. I can feel myself relaxing. Everything is fine, I don't need to be afraid of anything, not of Brendan, not of my feelings. Not out here. The millions of twinkling lights, both in the lake and in the sky, make me believe in something bigger. Maybe it was my destiny that Brendan kidnapped me. Maybe a higher power brought us together, a power I can't possibly fight against.

With the down jacket draped across my shoulders, I limp to the water and carefully ease myself into a sitting position on the gravel. My gaze sweeps across the lake, to the silent, solemn forest on the far side. After a while, Brendan comes over and sits next to me. I draw my knees in and regard the rocks along the shore, frosted in green moss. My feet, in Brendan's oversized socks, look like foreign objects beside them.

"This is your land, right?" I look at him.

He nods, surprised. "How'd you figure that out?"

"I saw a sign. Private property, no trespassing." I've been wondering all day why I didn't realize it until I saw that wooden sign. It explains why Brendan wasn't the least bit worried that someone might see us at the waterfall, like a tourist or whoever.

"Legally, it doesn't belong to me." Brendan toys idly with a rock. "I'm the leaseholder." He nods toward the see. "That's why I'm allowed to hunt and fish here. Otherwise it'd be illegal—environmental protection and so on."

"So you rented this whole area? How much land are we talking about here?"

"I forget the exact size. I know the boundaries, that's all I care about."

A memory flashes through my mind. I see me and Brendan standing by the camper in that mysterious evening light, right before he knocked me out. "When you said you spent the whole summer traveling... you were always here, on this land of yours?"

He nods.

"How many summers?"

"Three."

I think back to a conversation that feels like it happened a thousand years ago, even though it probably hasn't been very long at all. "You've been coming here since you accidentally killed that guy."

He gives me a serious look. "You're quick."

"I don't have much else to think about when I'm not trying to plot an escape."

He doesn't acknowledge the last part. He just crosses his legs and rests his elbows on them. His face takes on a distant look. "I guess I wanted to get away. To leave everything behind. To forget everything."

I regard him thoughtfully from the side. "What do you mean, ‘everything'?" This time I'm not asking so I can understand him better. I'm asking because I find it interesting. I find him interesting.

"Fights. Life in the slums."

I swallow. "You're from the slums?"

He raises his eyes and casts a melancholy glance in my direction. "Not originally. I fled to the slums. And then, yeah, I lived there for a couple years."

I'm not sure what to say to that. If he was fleeing to the slums, the place he was coming from must have been hell. "So where are you from, then?" I ask cautiously.

"Los Angeles. I was twelve when I finally managed to run away from home. I'd tried a bunch of times, but the police kept finding me. Eventually, I realized I'd be safer in the slums, because not even the cops wanted to go there."

"Safe in the slums?" I shake my head. "That's as crazy as crossing a river when you can't swim."

"I see the parallel, yeah." His short, strangely painful laugh shatters the stillness of the night. We lapse into silence again, and I go back to staring out at the moon reflected in the lake. A group of ducks swims past, a safe distance from the shore.

It takes me a minute to screw up the courage to ask my next question. "So what were those fights, exactly? Were they always for money?"

He nods. "A fight scout discovered me."

"A what?"

"They sort of spy on street fights and stuff to pick out the strongest guys and recruit them for the underground fighting circuit. There's a lot of money in it. Tons of money." He picks up a handful of gravel and starts tossing it into the water, piece by piece. "It's different from regular MMA. There are no rules, except that you can't use weapons. Which is why it's illegal—there are no limits. People bet massive amounts of money... and only the winner decides what happens to the loser."

I furrow my brow, baffled. "What do you mean? What happens to them?"

Brendan grimaces. "You mean besides the risk of getting killed in the fight?"

I nod silently. I'm still trying to work this new information into my understanding of Brendan. Fleeing into the slums, that's nuts, right? As nuts as testing knockout drops on yourself!

"There are a few popular traditions..." He glances at me and then away. "Trust me, you don't want to know."

I decide not to push it. "Have you ever lost?"

He rubs his face. "No," he says quietly.

"Never?" I raise an eyebrow in disbelief.

"Never."

"Which is why you could afford to lease this land."

"It's illegal money. I've got a guy who washes it for me."

"Oh..."

His eyes darken when he looks at me. "I'm not a good person. I told you."

I hold his gaze. "Have you ever decided to make something terrible happen to a guy after you beat him in a fight?"

"Never. I swear."

"Must have been awful, living that way," I remark softly.

He shakes his head. "Not for me. Violence and poverty, they were both better than what I'd been living in."

For the first time, I start thinking it might actually be better not to stir up his traumatic past. I try not to let it show how much this story is affecting me, because from what I know of him, pity is the last thing he wants. "So you quit once you had enough money, I guess?" I ask, making an effort to sound composed.

Brendan nods. "When I was eighteen, I rented myself a proper apartment. But I would have kept on living that life if that... incident hadn't happened. That was when I realized what I was doing." He sighs deeply. "I never wanted to kill anyone else, but I didn't care one way or the other about my own life."

"You didn't care about your own life?" I echo, not sure why I'm surprised to hear it after everything else I've learned about him.

"I had nothing to live for." He stares at the shimmering surface of the lake. "Maybe that was why I was so good. Fighting didn't scare me at all. I risked everything, every time. Death was always an acceptable option. I never really came out of the darkness... until I found you."

He turns his face toward me. The deep sadness in his expression is like nothing I've ever known in my own life. I wish I could erase all of that for him, so that he can break free of his past. Suddenly, I want to know everything. Everything about him, and everything about him and me.

"When was that?" I hasten to ask before he can decide he's revealed enough about himself. I can't let him slip away from me now.

"About a year ago." He smiles, like he's glad to hear the question, not scared like I'd have expected. He picks up another handful of gravel and closes his fist around it, as if it were memories he was clinging to. "Three years ago, I moved out of my apartment and bought the camper. I just drove off, all I cared about was getting away, and I had enough money to make it happen. After a month, I landed here, and I stayed the whole summer."

"What about in winter?"

"I spent the first two winters in a small town, and last winter here. There's an old log cabin on the property, right by the lake. It's small, but it's enough to survive."

"Why didn't you bring me there?"

He smiles again. "I'm going to."

I swallow hard, glancing down at the fistful of gravel in his hand.

"It's too cold to live in the camper in winter," he adds. "You asked about that a while ago, remember?"

"Yeah, of course." Back when I found the supplies.

"It's right by the lake, you can only get there on foot. It's pretty far away, even more isolated than here. I spent four months there last winter."

I can hardly begin to imagine what kind of life that was. "Had you already found me then?"

"I had a laptop. The Internet connection was pretty bad—I only got a couple of hours a day, and the generator kept going on the fritz from the cold. But winter here was an absolute paradise. I sat there thinking about how I'd show it to you one day."

I picture Brendan sitting alone in a snow-covered cottage, looking at my summer photos. The thought doesn't scare me to death the way it used to.

"When the lake by the cabin freezes, you can hear it singing itself to sleep. For days on end, these haunting melodies fill the cove—like whale song, like a giant blowing across glass bottles. And then these high, crystalline glass-harp tones... and noises like enormous water droplets falling onto the floor of a cave. And the fog is an army of ghosts dancing across the ice in time to the music, and the wolves howl in the background."

"Sounds pretty," I grudgingly admit. "And kind of spooky."

Brendan's expression turns dreamy. "Around the winter solstice, the sun is so low in the sky that it casts shadows two hundred feet long, turning the twinkling ice crystals to ruby-red glitter dust. And when the first snow falls, it reflects the moon and the stars and lights up the night." He looks at me again, and I can't help imagining him, tall and dark, walking across a frozen white sea, his endless black shadow trailing behind him like coattails. "This place gave me peace and security. Up here, I could breathe again, I finally stopped having nightmares every time I went to sleep. But I was also alone."

I take the hand he's clutching the gravel in, holding it between both of my own. "Didn't you ever have friends? Or a girl you liked?"

"Relationships leave you vulnerable to abandonment. I can't stand being abandoned, so I put up walls."

"But you don't have them up around me?" I open his fingers, and the gravel tumbles to the ground. His empty hand lies there stiffly between mine like a dead man's, like maybe he's afraid to move it.

"No," he whispers.

"Why not?" I whisper back.

"Because I made sure you can't leave me, so I don't have to protect myself as much. The minute I saw you, everything was different. It was like I could see things through your eyes... life and stuff, I mean. You were a ray of sunshine in a dark cave." He takes a deep breath and tries to clench his hand into a fist, but I hold it tight to keep him from doing it. "If I could go back, I'd do everything differently." He swallows hard, returning the pressure of my fingers. "I wouldn't kidnap you, I wouldn't drug you... I wouldn't touch you... but it's too late, I can't go back. I don't want to lose you. Especially not now that I've gotten to know you. At first I just hoped you could make me happy. Now I know you do."

I want to cry. This is all too much for me. Brendan and his story. Brendan and the singing ice. Brendan and me. It's like I'm being torn in two. Half of me is pulling Brendan in, the other half is pushing him away. But the truth is, I don't want to push him away anymore. I want to pull him toward me, to feel the way my heart races when he puts his arms around me and holds me close. I want to know how those unrelenting lips feel on mine, what his tongue tastes like. I want him to press me down onto the sand on my back, so that I don't see or hear anything but him. I want him to fill every inch of me and never stop.

But he promised not to touch me, so if I want him, I have to take the first step. And I can't. The divide between us feels way too wide to jump across. Because if I jump, there's no going back. Everything will change, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that.

I watch him from the side as he stares toward a point in the distance. Looking at him, I feel something like homesickness, but I'm not sure why.

"Bren." I release his hand gently. "I don't think you're a bad person."

He gazes at me. His eyes are as lonely as the land around us.

"Besides kidnapping me, I mean."

He smiles, but it's not a smile of agreement. It's a smile that could also be tears. At that moment, I realize that I believe him. If he could do it all over, he wouldn't kidnap me, he would ask me out.

Later that evening, he carries the backpack into the woods and hangs it in a tree so the scent of our food won't draw any bears. After that, he sets up his own bed for the night, next to my sleeping bag. As much as I'm longing for him, I'm also relieved that he doesn't join me in the sleeping bag, because I'm way too agitated to handle that kind of physical closeness. Either he senses it, or he's just keeping his promise about not touching me. Even Grey leaves me in peace tonight, and settles down near the fire beside Bren.

I lie there wide awake for a long time, watching the countless stars pulse above me—the entire sky is flickering with their light, creating a magical dimension between light and darkness. The longer I spend looking at it, the more lost I feel. I'm not sure what to feel anymore, what's right.

"Lou?" Brendan suddenly whispers. "You still awake?"

"Yeah."

"You always wanted something to happen, right?"

My pulse immediately begins racing. "How do you mean?" I ask, already starting to suspect the answer. I keep my eyes fixed on the stars.

"I told you once that there was a second reason why I kidnapped you." He pauses. "You wanted something to tear you out of your life and lift you up into the air like an eagle. You wanted something to turn you inside out, leaving you a completely different person, unrecognizable. You wanted something to make your heart light up... isn't that about how you put it?"

I can't respond. The seconds tick by. I lie there, stiff as a board, waiting for the stars to come crashing down onto me.

"I just wanted you to know that, Lou."

And I want to laugh and cry and scream all at the same time, but I don't do any of those. I can't move.

Suddenly, a gleaming red veil flutters across the sky, like a goddess's scarf, curling and billowing as though drifting on some invisible wind. The stars abruptly disappear.

"Northern lights," Brendan says quietly. He sits up, but I stay lying there, I can't help it. I stare up at the sky, hypnotized, watching a sea of fiery red light gather around us, illuminating everything. The edges of the sea tremble, and tendrils of it break free and soar away like phoenixes. I get goose bumps down my back, not from the cold this time. Soon the sea above us shifts into a series of deep-red bands, arching as far as the eye can see. Near the horizon, a pale-pink fog swims over the mountaintops; green light flows into the swirling red, which is gradually turning to deep violet. I'm breathless with awe. I've never seen anything so magnificent, so beautiful. The patterns transform again and again, bathing everything in shimmering hues for minutes on end. Finally, different-colored rays spread in every direction; the violet dissipates, leaving behind the pale, clear green. It flits across the sky like a gentle, dreamy whisper, and then wafts away.

My heart is pounding. It's like I've had a spell cast on me. The stars reappear. I look over at Brendan, who's standing at the lakeshore, head tilted way back. The magical display we've just witnessed almost feels like some kind of sign. I look up again.

You wanted something to happen...

Light and darkness blur together overhead. Maybe right and wrong aren't as far apart as I always thought. Maybe they really are simply two sides of the same coin. Otherwise, how would what Brendan did feel so right and so wrong at the same time?

When I wake up the next morning, everything's still. I feel the cool air on my cheeks, and I sit up, yawning. Grey immediately comes bounding over with a joyful yelp, and I scritch his furry ears absentmindedly as I think about last night, about the northern lights and about all the things Brendan and I said. I'm still slightly dazed, but it's a nice feeling, one I wouldn't mind holding onto for a while. Still lost in thought, I glance over at Brendan. He's lying on his side with his face buried in the crook of his elbow, seemingly still asleep. I don't want to wake him... after all, he's the one who has to carry me the entire day.

Silently, I stand up, grab the pot, and hobble to the lake to fetch water. My ankle stings with every step I take, but it's better than it was yesterday. I kneel at the shore, where tendrils of fog are billowing up from the smooth surface of the water, enveloping the sky in the same otherworldly magic that I sense inside myself. The mountains are glowing a hazy orange red, like the ridge on the back of a burning dragon. The image makes me think of one of Jayden's old stories. I dip the pot into the water, wondering what my brothers are up to right now. Is Avery making scrambled eggs this morning? Is Ethan reading the paper? Is Liam balancing underneath the apple tree again, while Jayden hammers away at his computer keyboard? A strange pain wells up within me, but it's totally different from how it was at the beginning, almost like a beautiful piece of jewelry behind glass. Have they gotten over losing me, or was it too much for one of them to bear? Are they back to their old routines yet? I'm not sure why I'm thinking about them now, of all times. Maybe because I feel so estranged from them right now, as though they were characters in a story. Like that girl whose deepest desire was to turn some potatoes blue so she could get into some stupid club. I can barely remember that girl. I do remember the little girl in the white nightshirt, though. It feels like she and I have a lot more in common.

I reach for my pendant, but even before my hand closes around emptiness, I know I've lost it. It's somewhere in the wilderness, amid the nettles and the willow herb.

Despite this dreamy feeling I have, tears still spring to my eyes—partly from the loss itself, partly because I didn't even notice it until now, which strikes me as a kind of betrayal. Is having feelings for Brendan making me care less about my brothers? No, of course not. I love each one of them as much as ever, and until two days ago, I wanted nothing in the world more than to get back home... except so much has happened in the meantime. Not just that I nearly froze to death, either. It's like I'm a totally different person inside. Which makes it seem like a whole lot more time has passed.

I scoop the pot out of the water and stand up, blinking back tears. When I get a chance, I decide, I'm going to have to ask Brendan if I can let my brothers know I'm alive. That would make a lot of things so much easier to bear. I don't know why I never thought of it before.

Just as I'm about to leave, I spot a mother elk and two calves on the opposite shore of the lake. My heart starts pounding nervously, despite the fact that I know they can't do anything to me. She's looking straight at me as she plucks at a single willow tree to break off a thin twig. Chewing, she sizes me up as if trying to decide whether I could pose a potential threat to her babies.

The moment she lets me out of her sight, Grey comes barreling up from behind me, making a ridiculous racket—barking, yelping, yowling, somewhere between wolf and dog noises. Immediately, Brendan jumps to his feet and hurries over after him.

"Mama elk and two calves," I tell him, even though he's got two perfectly good eyes.

"Hm." He knits his brow thoughtfully, but doesn't look at me. "I wonder if we should start keeping Grey on a leash. Don't want him scaring the animals."

"But wolves belong in the wilderness," I retort, watching the elk retreat into the thicket.

"Exactly." Brendan trudges off, and then it hits me: he's afraid that Grey will leave us.

The sun rises and sets, rises and sets. My sense of time is officially gone for good. It might be September already. Maybe school has already started again in Ash Springs, except without me. I wonder if Ava and Madison still think about me. Or Elizabeth and Emma. Out here, all of that seems a million miles away. The only real things here are me, Brendan, Grey, the river, the trees, and the huge, clear sky.

A tender intimacy is developing between me and Brendan, along with something I can't quite put into words. It's everywhere, between the things we say and the things we don't. It's in the looks we exchange and the glances we steal, in the accidental touches and the necessary ones. It's in the air around us, and even when we sleep, it floats over us like a finely spun web, like a dream catcher. It's huge and powerful, but infinitely vulnerable as well. One wrong word, one badly phrased remark, and it could evaporate. It reminds me of Grey, the boy in Jayden's story, and the names he gave the stars. Speak them aloud, and they'll shatter like glass.

By the time we stop to rest today, it's already late afternoon. We've found a perfect spot to camp: a tiny cove by the lake, just big enough for a campfire and a spot to bed down, framed by a semicircle of dark spruces, slim birches, and one gigantic weeping willow whose silvery-green branches dip into the water as though they're drinking.

Brendan's already built a crackling fire out of a few rotting branches, and I'm boiling our drinking water over it while he searches the forest for more firewood. Once I've fed Grey, he bounds off after Brendan. I can hear the two of them poking through the underbrush. Brendan says something to Grey, who replies with a single bark.

While I wait, I explore our campsite a bit, and discover a couple of raspberry bushes beside the willow tree. Raspberry leaves make good tea—Brendan showed me that yesterday—so I bring a cloth bag over to the bush and start carefully picking leaves, along with the occasional berry.

I need to hurry. The sky is already bathed in the embers of the setting sun, trailing a veil of small, dark clouds.

I'm so deep in thought that I barely register the soft splashing in the distance. Must be from that group of loons. At the back of my mind, I realize that it sounds different, more rhythmic. But there are so many other water birds I don't even know... or it could be otters.

As I'm gathering the cloth bag at the top to knot it closed, I hear voices.

At first, I think I must have imagined them, but then the water washes another swell of chatter and laughter over to me.

I freeze mid-motion. My whole body goes numb, and the bag slips from my hands. Now I understand what that rhythmic splashing is: oars hitting the water and being lifted out again. My mind is completely blank for several seconds, although I finally manage to remember how to move. I take two or three mechanical steps toward the shore, until I'm just behind the hanging willow branches.

They're still far away, gliding with the current through the dark-blue water. Three canoes, two men in each. They're not speaking my language—Germans, maybe?—but I bet they'd understand "Help" and "Kidnapped."