Run (Caged Trilogy Book 1)

by H G Lynch

  “It would be a very bad game of Hide and Seek, considering I told you where to hide in the first place,” he said, his voice a little too cheery.

  If I hadn’t already known there was something wrong, I might have started to suspect right about then, but I didn’t let on.

  “Yeah, is there a reason you decided to make me stand in one place for fifteen minutes? Because, just to let you know, I get bored very easily.” I tried to sound flippant and wasn’t sure I pulled it off, but Dominic glanced at me sideways, a hint of a genuine smile making his dimple flicker. I relaxed a little—just a very little bit.

  We were almost back to camp, and Dominic’s smile died, but his fingers stayed light on my elbow. “You can meditate for two straight hours, and yet standing on your own for fifteen minutes bores you? You aren’t right in the head, you know that?” he said with a half-hearted grin.

  I shrugged. He was more right than he knew, and way more right than I was comfortable with admitting to myself.

  “And, just to warn you, don’t be scared. You’re about to meet my dad, and he looks a lot scarier than he is. Just…avoid eye contact.”

  I remembered he’d given me the same advice for dealing with Spencer. What was it with these people and eye contact? When I thought about it, none of them really looked me in the eye for more than a couple of seconds at a push. Not even Desmond, who seemed more than comfortable to eye the rest of me for as long as he pleased. Only Spencer ever held my eyes…those piercing blue eyes of his…

  However, as Dominic led me into the centre of the camp, Desmond didn’t leer at me at all. His gaze was steady on my face, but not quite meeting my eyes. He was hovering next to his mother, holding Chris’s hand on his other side. Annie, clutching Sarah’s skirt, peeked out at me, her brown eyes wide and sad.

  Everyone was there, gathered together between the tents, leaving the circle in the middle clear. Well, not entirely clear, because standing in front of one tents was Spencer. He looked as distant and cool as ever, not even glancing at me. In fact, he was somehow not looking at anyone, but staring through them toward the trees.

  Next to Spencer was a tall, broad shouldered man with unruly red hair and a handlebar moustache over a thin mouth, a fuzzy orange beard coating a strong jaw, and fine wrinkles around steely grey-green eyes that I only glimpsed before I shot my gaze downward, as per Dominic’s advice. He was, in short, scary.

  Aside from Spencer, every pair of eyes was fixed on me as Dominic drew me to a halt in front of his father—who loomed over me by about a foot. I wasn’t short, but I wasn’t tall, and the guy made me feel like a dwarf. I kept my head down, partly out of respect and Dominic’s advice, and mostly because I was too scared to look him in the face. My shoulders were hunched, and I had my back to Spencer, but I still felt the back of my neck prickling with his gaze. At least Dominic was still by my side, though he’d let go of my elbow.

  “You must be Tilly. Oh, don’t worry, girl, I won’t bite. Come on, let’s see your face,” Frank said pleasantly, his voice almost as tender as when he’d been speaking to Dominic.

  Perfectly friendly. If I hadn’t heard him yelling just a minute before, I’d never have guessed he was even capable of raising his voice. Not wanting to seem disrespectful, but mindful of Dominic’s advice, I raised my head just far enough that he could clearly see my face, keeping my eyes on the buttons of his shirt, which wasn’t hard because my eyes were on level with a spot just above his collarbones.

  I waited for him to speak, my hands clenched behind my back so only Dominic could see them, and feeling nervous dampness on the back of my neck. I felt like a defendant waiting for the jury to proclaim me innocent or guilty.

  Behind me, I felt Dominic shift a little closer, just a fraction of an inch. Whatever expression was on his father’s face, it was making him uneasy.

  Frank’s voice was utterly unchanged when he spoke again. “So, Tilly, Spencer tells me he found you in the woods. What were you doing out there? Hiding from someone?” his tone was gentle, compassionate.

  The questions seemed appropriate enough from a concerned adult looking to help a lost kid. But they weren’t questions I wanted to answer, not to a stranger, especially not in front of everyone in the camp. I wasn’t quite ready to spill my heart to a scary man who really didn’t want me around, and a whole group of people I barely knew. Most of all, I didn’t want Spencer to know. I don’t know why I was so bothered about him, of all of them, knowing things about me, but I was. Maybe it was because he scared me almost as much as his dad did.

  I swallowed against the dryness in my throat, and murmured, “I was running away.” I sounded like a silly, scared little girl.

  I could feel the weight of everyone’s eyes on me, their attention lying heavy on my shoulders. Two sets of eyes felt particularly intense—the man in front of me, and the boy far behind me. Frank and Spencer. For all their disdain of each other, I wondered if they knew how much they were alike in body language. It was as if they were both coiled a little bit tighter than the rest of them.

  “Running away from whom? Where are your parents?” Frank asked.

  I shook my head, hesitated before choking out the words, “Dead. My parents are dead.”

  The pause was brief, but heavy. My lungs felt tight, constricting. I didn’t want to be standing there, answering those questions. I wanted to run, run away from there and those people, who suddenly seemed strange and prying. I wanted to run away from my past. My legs ached to do it, to take me away as fast as possible. I forced my knees to lock, and gripped Dominic’s fingers hard enough to break them. He didn’t try to stop me, didn’t even twitch.

  “So who are you running away from?” This time, it wasn’t Frank who asked. It was Spencer.

  I felt him move up behind me, and I tensed. Instinctively, I bristled at his nearness and his soft tone. “None of your business,” I spat through gritted teeth, my stomach lurching.

  I sensed him smiling at the back of my neck. “I thought we already had this conversation,” he said, his voice low and surprisingly intimate, as if we were the only two people there.

  My fingers tightened further on Dominic’s, and I heard Spencer make a small chuffing noise that wasn’t quite a laugh.

  Dom’s voice spoke in my ear, almost a whisper. “You don’t have to answer him if you don’t want to. It’s okay.” To Spencer, he said, “Spence, I think you should take a step back. Before she tries to bite your head off.” Dominic sounded as calm and cheery as if there wasn’t a crushing amount of tension in the air.

  I wondered for a second what the rest of the group thought of the interaction, my obvious dislike of Spencer, and his comment. I thought we already had this conversation. I could practically hear the speculation going on inside their heads.

  Then Frank interrupted, chuckling, apparently amused. “Well, it’d be interesting to see her try, but Dom’s probably right. Back off a bit, Spencer.”

  Spencer backed away, though I could still feel his eyes on my neck, and I got the impression that he wanted to rip my throat out right then. I swallowed, forcibly loosened my grasp on Dominic’s fingers, and sighed silently.

  “Does that mean Tilly can stay?” Dominic asked quietly.

  A moment of hesitation, then, “Yes, she can stay. For now. But Dominic, you’re in charge of taking care of her.”

  As if I was a pet, not a person. I was too eager to get out of there, and too relieved that I wasn’t being tossed out on my ear, to take offence at it.

  “Okay,” Frank said loudly, and the tension snapped, everyone shifting their attention to him, instead of me. “Everybody pack up! It’s time to go home!”

  Chapter Six

  ** Tilly **

  As it turned out, ‘home’ was a collection of pretty wooden cabins not all that far from where the group had been camping. The cabins were large and spaced far enough apart that my first impression was of some sort of holiday resort dumped in the middle of the woods. You couldn’t see on
e cabin from the next, but a short stroll in any direction would bring you to your neighbour. Each of the cabins had neat little porches out front, and a set of small steps leading up to them. Aside from the glass windows, you’d have thought they’d had just grown out of the ground naturally, they were so quaintly organic looking. Trees clustered around them, wildflowers pushed up against the walls, and strings of ivy wrapped the porch banisters.

  The last cabin on the tour—and it had been a tour, because Dominic had been quite zealous about showing me around—happened to be Dominic and Desmond’s. For some reason, it surprised me to find that they had their own cabin, as opposed to living with their parents. I supposed when your kids’ home was just a five minute walk away from any of the adults’ cabins, it was hardly a big deal to let them live alone. Silently, I wondered where Spencer lived, seeing as Dominic hadn’t mentioned anything about him sharing the cabin with him and his brother. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Spencer had his own cabin. I couldn’t imagine him sitting eating breakfast cereal and watching Friends reruns in the morning with his brothers.

  “Ah, home sweet home. It’s not really big or fancy or anything, but it’s lovely all the same.” Dom grinned at me, sweeping an arm wide to present his cabin.

  Desmond, behind me, snorted and pushed past both of us, loping up the steps. They creaked faintly under his weight. He paused at the door, presumably unlocking it, though I hadn’t seen him take out a key, and the door swung open easily. Desmond stepped inside and slammed the door behind him without looking back at Dominic and me. He appeared to be sulking. Was he unhappy that I was being allowed to stay with the group?

  Dominic shook his head, curls twisting in a faint breeze. Slithering shadows cast a pattern on his face from the late afternoon light coming down through the leaves. “Don’t worry, it isn’t you he’s upset with,” he said, as if reading my mind. His eyes darted to me, impossibly bright and glinting in the softening sunlight. “I think he’s actually annoyed at Spencer for his attitude toward dad earlier. Des is all about respecting our father, and Spence is all about, well, not respecting anyone.” He sighed, smiling ruefully.

  I looked up at the cute cabin, with its gently sloping roof covered in fallen leaves and the friendly looking shutters, painted cobalt blue and swung wide open, inviting. It was beautiful, the kind of place I’d always wanted to live. The kind of place my mother had promised me, when I was small, that we would live one day. Then she’d gone and died, and I’d spent the last eleven years in a big, cold manor house on the outskirts of a new town.

  I just knew my mother would have loved it there in the woods. I felt a deep, searing pain in my chest, a deeply buried grief I hadn’t felt in a long time. I’d gotten used to pushing it down, because it hurt too much to think about. The memories were bearable, so long as I didn’t have to feel them. My eyes stung with tears, even as a wistful sort of smile curled my lips.

  “Tilly? You okay?” Dominic asked quietly.

  I blinked back my tears, turning to him with a soft smile. I nodded at him. “Yeah, I’m okay. Just…thinking about my parents. They would have liked it here.” Saying it aloud didn’t make my lungs constrict and my throat burn the way talking about them in front of everyone else had. I didn’t mind telling Dominic so much. His kind smile eased the small ache in my heart like a balm on a burn.

  “Well, how about I show you to your own cabin?” he said, splitting into one of his cheery smiles. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a shiny gold key with a little blue fob in the shape of a crude wolf, or maybe it was a fox.

  I stared at it glinting in his hand. “I get my own cabin?” I asked, amazed and excited by the prospect.

  He nodded. “Yup, your very own, all to yourself. There are actually three free cabins you could choose from, but I thought you might like the one closest to mine and Desmond’s. It’s not as big as the others, but hopefully you’ll like it just the same.” He shrugged casually, starting off into the trees behind his cabin.

  The cabin Dominic led me to was just barely out of sight of his. In fact, I could see the glow from the windows of his cabin in the fading daylight, a faint smear of light through the trees. It was, as he’d said, smaller, but plenty big enough for one person, even two people. The outside was a little run down, probably because nobody used it. The blue paint on the shutters was faded, there were nests of cobwebs over the door and windows, and one of the boards on the steps looked rotted through. But still, my own cabin! Privacy!

  When you lived with witches, who could unlock your door with a flip of their wrists when they felt like it, privacy was practically nonexistent. The tent I’d been sharing with Sarah and Annie was hardly private either. A cabin with four walls, a roof, a door that locked and nobody could open unless I chose to let them in, it was a home, however temporary. I didn’t care what it looked like on the outside, or the inside.

  Metal jingled by my ear and I flinched in surprise, turning to Dominic, who was rattling the key by my face. I meant to glare at him, but instead I was grinning. I threw my arms around him, only the second time I’d really hugged anyone in a long time, and both times it had been him.

  He didn’t seem so surprised by my embrace that time, and he ruffled my hair, chuckling. “Glad you like it. Wait until you see inside,” he said.

  I didn’t let go. I must have been crushing the air out of him, but he didn’t complain. He just let me hug him until I got myself back together enough to pull away.

  Then he gave me an odd look, soft and considering. I smiled shakily at him and wiped at the stupid tears that had escaped my eyes, feeling my face redden. “Sorry. I just….” I shook my head, unsure how to explain how much all of it meant to me. Not just the cabin, or him defending me to his father to let me stay, but his friendship. I’d have to find a way to make it up to him, do something for him—maybe for his half-brother, too. Spencer did save me, and he did sort of defend me. Sort of. In his quiet, strange way.

  Dominic was still giving me that indecipherable look. “You don’t get a lot of kindness, do you?” he asked it very gently.

  I felt my eyes fill again, and pushed away the tears. Swallowing, I shook my head. “I ran away for a reason,” my voice was barely a whisper.

  Dominic nodded, sighing, and took my hand. He squeezed my fingers lightly. “Come on, I want to show you inside. How do you feel about portraits of birds?” He let go of my hand and moved up the steps to the cabin door, batting away streamers of cobwebs and probably really, really angering the spiders.

  I was about to follow him up the steps when the fluttering of a small bird in a nearby tree caught my attention. It was a little blue tit, with a white mask on its face and a crown of soft blue spilling down its back. I smiled at the cute little birdie, and very slowly reached out my fingertips to see if it would come to me. The movement startled the bird, and it chirped sharply before taking off in a flutter of blue and gold feathers. I was staring at the spot it had vacated, a little disappointed, when I noticed something through the clustered branches—another cabin.

  I could only glimpse it in small puzzle pieces, and I leaned forward, pulling a few branches out of my way to get a better look. It was dark and even more run down than the cabin I was going to be living in. There were no lights on, and shadows gathered thick around the porch. The railing had been smashed or had rotted away, and just a couple of drunken posts remained to show there had ever been a railing at all. Yet, there were no cobwebs over the door, and the locks—more than one, I noted—all appeared to be brand new, shining brass in the darkening woods.

  “Tilly!”

  I jerked and spun around when Dominic called my name, and saw him leaning forward over the porch railing of my cabin, looking concerned and a little panicked. Had he thought I was going to wander off into the trees or something?

  With a final glance at the possibly abandoned cabin, I walked back to my cabin and climbed the little wooden steps. The top one creaked quietly, and then I was on the
porch, with Dominic looking at me with laser-like green eyes. I hadn’t realised how dark it had gotten until then. His face was entirely in shadow, and the trees surrounded us in total darkness, but for the shine of light from his and Desmond’s cabin a little ways away.

  “Is that other cabin over there abandoned, or is it used for something?” I asked, innocently curious, pointing in the direction of the dark cabin.

  Dominic’s mouth tightened for a second, and his normally cheery face set into a surprisingly serious expression. It made me wish I hadn’t asked. Slowly, he shook his head, but it seemed to be a warning rather than an answer to my question.

  “You can’t go near that cabin. You hear me, Tilly? Never go near that cabin. It’s…not safe. If you hear or see something at night that scares you, stay inside and lock your doors. The woods are dangerous at night. You never know what could be lurking out there.”

  I nodded, stunned and a little scared by his seriousness. “You know,” I said carefully, “Spencer said the same thing. About the things lurking.”

  I couldn’t tell what his reaction to that was, because he turned away and began unlocking the door with his head bowed and shadowed by darkness and his curls. He turned the handle, handing me the key, and the door swung open. A puff of stale, musty air swept out, and I sneezed. When Dominic glanced back at me, he was grinning again, as if he hadn’t just warned me in a stone hard voice not to leave the cabin at night. He flipped a switch on the wall, and the dark cabin lit up with a warm orange glow that had me blinking against the brightness.

  When I stopped squinting, I could see the whole cabin, and my lips parted in amazement at the perfect, adorable décor. The living room was open plan, pouring out into a kitchen at the far end of the room, behind a high breakfast bar ringed with tall, wooden chairs. The clean white fridge nestled between a clunky stove and the Cyclops that was the washing machine. A dining table ringed with elegant chairs took up most of the space in front of the kitchen, which was on the left side of the room. The living room, on the right, was comprised of a low, comfy looking brown leather sofa in front of a cheery stone fireplace filled with damp, rotting firewood. The place was lit by a plainly shaded bulb over the dining table, and one over the dust matted red rug in front of the fireplace. There was another bulb, bare and unshaded, over the kitchen. Dominic went to touch the wall next to the microwave, and the kitchen bulb lit up, making the silver sink shine through its coat of dust.