CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Beads of sweat coated my skin. My chest was tight. Heavy. I struggled to breathe. I moved to lift my arms, and a shockwave of pain exploded like fireworks, shooting from my temples to my toes. My mouth was dry. So dry.
Hands gripped my wrist, the touch forceful and harsh. Fingers pressed into my flesh. Another hand brushed my forehead, unsticking the strands of hair that had gotten lodged in the sweat.
“Go back to sleep. It’s not time to wake up yet.” The voice sounded far away, muffled.
I tried to open my eyes but quickly slammed them shut when a surge of fire pierced my vein and shot through my arm.
My eyes fluttered open for a split second. Then the world tilted, and I fell back into the black, inky abyss.
***
I woke to darkness.
Fire flickered in my peripheral vision. My body ached. I sat up, and that was when the cold air struck me. Everything was sore, and my head felt as though it weighed a ton. A Band-Aid taped over a cotton ball covered the inner crook of my elbow. My stomach curled.
I was moving.
No, not I.
We.
I looked up at the two hooded figures standing above me. They each wore a black robe, and they held a long pole.
A boat.
They were poling a small boat over water.
A tiny trill of fear laced my nerves as I sat up all the way. The hooded figures never strayed from their task. They didn’t even look at me.
Caspian’s T-shirt had been replaced with a thin, white robe—and nothing else. Following closely behind the boat I was on were four other boats. Each of them also had a fiery torch at the helm, two hooded figures and one white-robed person.
Something familiar tugged at the pit of my stomach, like I’d seen this before.
That night at Crestview Lake. All this time I’d convinced myself it was just a dream, but it was a memory. I’d seen Lincoln in his boat, poling just like this in the middle of the night. I remembered as my father held me in his arms, I looked over and saw Chandler and Caspian follow in their own boats. They each had something with them, something else in the boat, something covered in white that they all rolled over the side and into the water.The secrets.
Did they know about this? Had they seen it before?
I hugged my arms around my body to stop the sudden shiver.
In the distance, the shoreline was aglow with dozens of small bonfires and two massive fires in the background. Between the two larger fires was some sort of statue—or shrine—in the shape of a lion. It reminded me of an ancient sphinx. As we poled closer and closer to the bank, panic trickled in a cold line down my back. We were in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but woods surrounded this lake for as far as I could see.
No authorities to douse the fires.
No neighbors to hear the screams.
What in the hell was this place?
We pulled into a boat launch, and two men walked over to the ramp to help me out of the boat. They were shirtless, leaving their sculpted torsos on display. They wore black pants and heavy, silver masks—the Venetian kind you’d wear to an elegant masquerade ball—after it was dipped in malice and carved out of ruin.
I slapped their hands away and climbed out on my own. The hooded figure behind me snickered.
Once all the other boats had pulled in, the hooded figures moved back out onto the water, leaving us there with no way to escape but to run or swim.
On the side of me, there were four other girls about my age or younger. I recognized two of them from different events my family attended. They were like me, well-bred, probably oblivious to the darkness of our world. But they were terrified. I wasn’t. In front of us, there was a crowd of nearly fifty men, all in suits, all wearing hooded cloaks.
This was something you only saw on documentaries. This didn’t happen in real life.