The Quiet Bones

by V. J. Chambers

  She nodded. “I do.” Her lower lip started to tremble.

  “So?” Hawk’s voice was soft, soothing.

  She shook her head. And then her eyes widened. “Oh, I might know, actually. He, um, his family had this rundown cabin out in the woods. It was on his grandad’s old property. His grandad’s long gone, but that land stayed in the family. It was, like, a hunting cabin or something. Real primitive. He took me out there once, but I refused to sleep there. It’s only a couple rooms and an outhouse. No running water or anything like that. Nobody else ever goes out there. It’s in bad shape. Probably all full of raccoons and snakes, you know? But if he was desperate, he might have gone there.”

  Hawk’s mouth widened into a smile. “Thank you, Caitlin.” He squeezed her fingers.

  “Sure thing,” she said. “I hope you find him.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Back in the car with the directions to this hunting cabin written out from what Caitlin had told them, Reilly couldn’t help but feel a grudging respect for Hawk. He’d had the better approach there, a classic good cop to his bad cop.

  Reilly himself couldn’t have done that. He was too worried, too emotional over the fact that Baldwin was back, and that Wren could be in danger, that Maliah and Janessa and Timmy could be in danger. The fear made his blood pound, and it made him desperate. He had tried to force the information out of Caitlin, but Hawk had simply coaxed it.

  “That was well done,” he muttered, as he backed his car out of Caitlin’s driveway.

  “Well,” said Hawk, “you don’t grow up in a cult without figuring out how to persuade people.”

  “How’d you know she really wasn’t involved with him anymore?”

  “Didn’t,” said Hawk. “If she wouldn’t have started hinting in that direction, then I would have tried a different tack.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” Hawk mused over this. “Maybe that he was safer in jail, that he was going to be hunted down out here, that the police would be gunning for him, that he might get killed. Try to convince her that she’d rather have him alive than dead, even if it meant betraying him.”

  Reilly raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, that could have worked.”

  “Maybe,” said Hawk, chuckling to himself, sounding self-conscious. “I probably should have left it to you. You’re the professional.”

  “Whatever it takes to find Wren and get this asshole locked back up,” said Reilly. He considered that he should probably let someone know where the hell he was going. That way, if things went south, it would be easier to get backup.

  On the other hand, if he did that, then he’d have to explain bringing Hawk along, and he didn’t think he could come up with a good explanation for that. But already, the guy had proved useful, so he wanted him along.

  “It won’t take us long to get to that hunting cabin, will it?” said Hawk.

  “No,” said Reilly. “Shouldn’t take long at all.”

  * * *

  The first thing Wren felt was pain. Her face hurt. Her body hurt. All the injuries that she’d sustained throbbed, and she wished she could lose consciousness again, just for the relief of it.

  She opened her eyes.

  Above her, she could see stars.

  She was outside.

  But she wasn’t lying on the ground, she was down in a deep hole, maybe an old well. There were stones lining the walls and they were covered in moss and lichens, as if it was often damp down here. Above her head, a small, skinny tree was growing up out of the well, its roots clinging to the moss-covered stones on the side of the wall.

  She was alone.

  As near as she could tell, she was, anyway. The circle of night above her was all that she could see of the rest of the world. Oliver could be up there, she supposed.

  Maybe she should yell for him.

  How had he gotten her down here? She felt strongly that she hadn’t just been tossed down, because she thought there was a good chance that she wouldn’t have survived the fall. Hitting her head against the stone could crack it right open and kill her. And Oliver wanted her alive for her bone marrow.

  So, he must have climbed down here with her somehow…

  Aha.

  She could see the edge of a rope ladder up at the top of the hole. That was how he’d gotten down, and that was the way to get out. There was no point in trying to get to it if Oliver was just sitting up there waiting for her.

  “Oliver!” she yelled. Her voice was ragged. She realized her mouth was dry, probably from the way he’d suffocated her.

  There was no response.

  “If you’re up there, answer me!”

  Nothing.

  He might have simply left her here, sure that she couldn’t get away. He might have gone home to his family. She was pretty sure that Oliver was married and that he had a kid. He was probably sitting down at a table with them now, eating dinner, pretending like nothing had happened, as though he hadn’t kidnapped his half sister and left her in the bottom of a dry well.

  Okay, assuming he wasn’t here, how was she going to get out of here?

  She banged her already bruised body into the side of the well, hoping to shake down the rope ladder.

  But that didn’t work. The ground absorbed any vibrations she made.

  She cried out, curling up in a ball against the pain.

  She gasped for a few minutes.

  That skinny tree above her head, it reached up through the top of the well. If she could get to that, she might be able to use it to get to the rope ladder.

  She got to her feet and reached up, and she managed to brush the bottom of the trunk.

  But as she touched it, she new she was never going to have the strength to rip it out of the wall where it was growing. It was rooted tight.

  She groaned.

  She collapsed to the ground.

  She rested.

  Moments passed, and she tried to breathe slow and even and think calming thoughts, even though she was panicking inside. He had left her out here, and he had gone off somewhere. He wanted her alive, but this was not the greatest way to keep her alive. This was a very bad place to be.

  She had to try again.

  She had to get out of here.

  She got to her feet again and took hold of the branch. She tugged on it with all her strength, until she couldn’t tug anymore.

  Maybe it moved a little bit.

  She panted.

  Okay, quick break, and then we try again, she told herself.

  * * *

  Reilly parked the car when they got to the end of the road that Caitlin had told them about. The way to the cabin was down an old road, now too overgrown to be traveled by cars. The road was chained off with a big hand-lettered No Trespassing sign hanging in front of it.

  Reilly and Hawk got out of the car and stepped over the chain and onto the abandoned road.

  “You bringing your gun?” Hawk said mildly.

  “Of course,” said Reilly.

  “Do you have another gun?”

  “I’m not arming you,” said Reilly. “It’s bad enough that I’m bringing you out here with me and not telling the department that you’re with me. You shouldn’t be here.”

  “What if something happens to you? You want me to be able to save Wren, don’t you?”

  “No gun,” said Reilly, his voice sharp and firm.

  Hawk chuckled. “You don’t have to get bent out of shape, Detective.”

  Reilly started walking down the road, wading through the knee-high weeds that were growing in clumps every few feet. “Look, let’s get this straight. I’m letting you come along, but I don’t have to.”

  “Well, now that I know where this cabin is, how exactly would you stop me?” Hawk was behind him. He sounded amused.

  Reilly gritted his teeth.

  Hawk fell into step with him. “I’m sorry you’re feeling so threatened by my presence.”

  “I’m not feeling threatened,” said Reilly.
“You don’t threaten me. How would I feel threatened by you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hawk. “But it’s just a vibe I’m getting from you.”

  “A vibe?”

  “Mmm.”

  “You get a lot of vibes? Maybe you see auras? Maybe you have regular spiritual connections with that weird god you guys worship. What’s it called? The Crimson Lord?”

  “Don’t,” Hawk said, and now he was the one who was sharp.

  And, truthfully, Reilly didn’t like the way the words had echoed against the nearby tree trunks. He could have sworn he wasn’t speaking loudly, but that name seemed to cut through the darkness and reverberate against the sky and the stars and the branches crisscrossing the sky above, and now Reilly felt cold. He hunched into his jacket and reached in to touch his gun, comforted by the cold metal against his fingers.

  “Listen.” Hawk was whispering. “You’re a man of the law, and you have to follow rules, but I want you to understand that if Wren’s life is in danger, there is no line that I’m not going to cross, and I can’t say the same about you. I have to be here, because I can’t trust you to put her first, before everything else.”

  Reilly breathed. His breath seemed louder now than it had. “And that’s what you do? You put her first?”

  “Yes,” said Hawk.

  “What’d you guys fight about?”

  “I fail to see how that has any bearing on the situation.”

  “If you’re so devoted to her, why’d you piss her off?”

  Hawk didn’t answer.

  Huh. Well, that had landed. Reilly scanned the road ahead of them. They should be coming up on this cabin soon, and they didn’t want to announce their presence to Baldwin.

  Hawk’s voice coiled out of the darkness, low and lilting. “I got angry because she keeps trying to see me in a way that I don’t want her to see me.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Reilly’s voice was barely audible.

  “She always sees the darkness,” said Hawk. “It’s like her mother, except her mother wanted to use the darkness and Wren just wants to…”

  “What?” Reilly didn’t even understand what the hell Hawk was talking about, but now everything had taken on a sort of half-reality in the darkness. He felt as if somewhere in the woods, they’d crossed an invisible barrier into some otherwhere, and here, things like darkness had weight and mass. They were tangible.

  “Lie down with it, I guess. Wrap it around her like a blanket.”

  “She’s not like that.”

  “You don’t know her very well, Detective.”

  “And you do?”

  “I’ve known her her whole life.”

  Reilly stopped walking. He turned on Hawk. “It was a mistake bringing you out here.”

  “I would have come anyway,” said Hawk. “I would have found a way.”

  Reilly took a breath. He meant it to steady him, but instead, it seemed to only chill him, icy air invading his lungs and freezing him inside and out. He shivered. He started to move through the darkness again, images of Wren splayed out on the ground by that damned fire pit where they’d found the little Smith girl playing in his head. Wren’s head thrown back, covered in something dark and inky and smothering. Wren’s eyes rolled back in her head.

  Reilly didn’t like it out here.

  And then the hunting cabin came into view.

  It seemed to materialize out of the night, even though Reilly knew that what had happened was that they’d gotten close enough to see it. The effect of it simply coming into existence was unnerving. It was small and dilapidated, with a half-collapsed porch held up by rickety wooden posts, and patches of plywood nailed over various places on the walls and roof, probably to patch holes. It looked like a kids’ fort, barely held together, but also squat and old and vaguely insane somehow, as if it had been too long away from civilization and lost its mind out here in the woods.

  Reilly reached out a hand to stop Hawk from going any further. He hunched down and tugged the other man down too.

  “We can’t just go up to the front door and knock,” he whispered furiously.

  “Of course not,” said Hawk. He pointed. “We come up from the back. You have the gun, you go first.”

  “Okay,” said Reilly. It was a good plan, but it meant they had to go into the woods and leave the road, and Reilly found that the thought of going between those dense tree trunks filled him with dread. He couldn’t falter, however. Wren needed him. Still staying low, he crept across the road and into the woods.

  Hawk was right at his back.

  They moved slowly through the woods, doing their best not to make noise. Of course, with the dead leaves on the ground and the multitude of branches sticking out haphazardly, it wasn’t possible to be completely quiet. However, he didn’t think they did anything to announce their presence. They were quiet enough.

  The cabin was completely still and quiet.

  Reilly began to wonder if there was even anything inside.

  Worse, he began to think about something moving behind its dark windows, something antlered, made of black smoke and ash, something with blackened teeth.

  He shook himself. He wasn’t going to let that stupid god of the Children get to him. It was all in his head.

  When they finally got close to the cabin, he drew his gun.

  They crept up towards the house, both in a crouch, moving as stealthily as they could.

  When he reached the side of the house, he inched his way up, bringing his gun with him, to peer in the window.

  But he couldn’t see anything. It was too dark, and the window was cloudy and dirty.

  “Well?” whispered Hawk.

  He only shook his head.

  Hawk inched up to try to look in the window himself. But in a moment, he came back down, also shaking his head. He motioned that Reilly should keep going.

  So, Reilly did, creeping up around the corner of the front of the house, to the half-collapsed porch. The wood was bloated and gray. He didn’t see how it could even take anyone’s weight, even on the part still standing.

  But he crawled up onto the porch, Hawk right behind him.

  His gun at the ready, he tried the doorknob.

  It turned in his hand, and the door creaked open.

  From behind him, the distinct sound of a shotgun being pumped. “Not even going to knock, Detective Reilly? That’s pretty rude.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Reilly stilled, going tense and ready. He waited to hear a sound, to see something out of the corner of his eye, anything that would indicate movement, and when it happened, he sprang up, turning, leveling his gun to shoot.

  But the shotgun went off instead, and it startled him.

  He pulled the trigger, but he wasn’t aiming at anything, and at the same moment, a hole splintered through the door, inches from his head.

  “Now, look what you made me do,” said Baldwin’s voice. Movement, streaking through the darkness, and Baldwin had kicked Reilly’s gun out of his hand.

  Reilly recoiled, bringing his hand back against his chest out of instinct. He was stung, but not badly hurt.

  Hawk launched himself into Baldwin, uttering some kind of strangled noise.

  Baldwin screeched, turning the shotgun and mashing the butt of it into Hawk’s noise.

  Hawk grunted.

  Baldwin struck again, harder.

  Hawk slid to the ground, unconscious.

  Baldwin brought up the shotgun, aiming at Reilly. “Hands on your head, Detective.”

  Reilly put his hands on his head. He glanced down at Hawk, also looking to see if he could spy his gun anywhere. It had skittered off into the darkness. He had no idea where it was.

  “You got a cell phone?” said Baldwin. “A walkie-talkie? A beeper? Anything you got, you hand it over to me.”

  Reilly sighed. He gave him his phone. He didn’t have anything else on him to call this in. He wasn’t even officially here. “Where’s Wren?”

 
“Who?” said Baldwin.

  “Come on,” said Reilly. “Wren Delacroix. You took her.”

  “You think I’m a fucking idiot?” said Baldwin. “All I wanted to do was get out of here clean. I didn’t take anyone. I’m holing up in this cabin until I can get fake papers, not that I’ll be able to use them now, not with you here. I don’t even know what to do. I could kill you, but they’re all coming, I imagine.”

  “You don’t have Wren?” said Reilly.

  “Shut the fuck up,” said Baldwin, jamming the shotgun into Reilly’s cheek.

  Reilly’s voice died in his throat. His heart was starting to pound. This was bad. This was all bad. He didn’t understand how he kept ending up in these shitty situations. Just a few weeks ago, he’d been held captive in Kyler Morris’s basement, at gunpoint. Now, here he was outside this hunting cabin, at the other end of a gun.

  During the whole span of his career before this, he’d never been held at gunpoint once.

  This task force job, it was intense.

  “If I kill you, then they’ll never stop hunting me down,” said Baldwin, more to himself than to anyone else. “Then I’ll be a cop killer. A guy who held up a liquor store, they might forget about him. But a cop killer, never. So, damn it, I can’t kill you.” He moved the shotgun away. “Okay, okay.” He gestured with the barrel toward Hawk. “Go through his pockets, give me his phone and everything else.”

  Reilly sighed. “Look, you just said you weren’t going to kill me. So, what if I refuse?”

  “Then I’ll shoot off your damned hand, Detective,” said Baldwin. “Don’t think I won’t.”

  Whatever. Did he want to make going through Hawk’s pockets his line in the sand? Pushing Baldwin probably wasn’t smart, especially considering that he didn’t have Wren at all. So, whatever was going on here, it didn’t have anything to do with Baldwin. But that meant that there was something else out there, and he was going to be preoccupied with this Baldwin business.

  Everything was shit.

  And he was more worried about Wren than ever.

  Also, Baldwin really might kill him, and Reilly wasn’t particularly interested in dying. So, he knelt down and stuck his hands in Hawk’s pockets.