“You’re such an asshole,” I said, and started again. “There’s a girl that I was sent here to… you know, before the farmhouse lab. And I need to know what the mission was, and why she was part of it.”

“Where’s ‘here’?”

“Trademarr, Illinois.”

Trev cursed.

“What?” I said.

“I can be there in less than an hour.”

That was close. Closer than he should have been.

“Where can I meet you?” he asked.

I told him the name of the bar and where he could find it.

“Stay there. I’ll be in town soon.”

All the warning bells in my head were going off. It was like a fucking holy hour of bells.

Something wasn’t right. Staying put was probably the last thing I should do.

’Course, if anyone was good at doing the exact opposite of what should be done, it was me.

18

ELIZABETH

I PULLED THE GABRIEL BOTTLE FROM the shelf and popped out the cork. I took in a deep breath, and that night came flooding back in disjointed images.

The woods. The moonlight. The branches snapping at my feet and snagging my hair. The log that tripped me. The dry leaves rustling as I rolled over.

And finally Gabriel.

Nick.

“Take care of it,” someone shouted.

The gun was pointed at me.

In the dark woods, the barrel was darker. Black. Empty. Bottomless. It was like staring into an abyss.

Nick whispered, “Say nothing. Do you understa—”

He cut himself off, and I whimpered at his feet. We were in the middle of nowhere. There was no one but Nick and the man in the distance. No one would hear my screams, so there was no point wasting my energy.

Nick shot. I was squeezed so tightly into a ball when the gun went off, I couldn’t breathe. A ragged, choked sound escaped me.

The bullet sailed over me. I wrapped my arms around my head. Every part of my body hurt. Fire in my veins. And fire in my lungs. My side was slick with blood. My chest, too. If Nick didn’t kill me, I’d be dead anyway. I was dead if he left me here.

“Stay here,” he whispered. “I’ll be back.”

His footfalls sounded like thunder in my head.

“Go,” he told the man. “I’ll take care of the body.”

“Decapitation, remember? Carry her back to the warehouse,” the man said. “Wrap her in this, so you don’t leave a trail of blood.”

The ground smelled like coming winter. Like the end of everything. Or maybe that was just me and my dying, bloodless body.

The word decapitation kept running through my head like a flashing red marquee.

The man made a call on his cell. “It’s taken care of,” he said, and left, the leaves rustling as he walked away.

Nick reappeared with a roll of plastic. “Wait until he’s farther out,” he told me. “No sound. None at all. Got it?”

I nodded.

I was shaking so bad by that point, I felt like gelatin.

Nick took his coat off and wrapped it around me. Pine and musk and cinnamon and something else woodsy and sweet. I focused on the smell of his coat, dreaming up another life, another scenario, where I wasn’t this girl slowly dying on the forest floor.

We waited so long, I swear I saw the moon tick through the sky. Until it was nothing but a speck of silver far below the tops of the trees.

Without warning, Nick scooped me up, his arm tight around my waist, the other sturdy beneath my knees. I cried out. Tears leaked from my eyes. I wanted to die in that moment.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said. “I promise. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

I capped the glass bottle, and the images flashed away. The pain was a distant memory, but the hopelessness, the need for the whole ordeal to end, was with me still to this day.

In my closet, I ducked down and pulled out an empty bottle from the box Aggie bought me the last time we’d been at the New Age store. I grabbed my treasure trove of oils. Some high-grade essential oils, some cheaper fragrance oils.

The new bottle needed a base of musk. I filled it halfway and added the rest on top of it. A third of the bottle was vanilla. Then bergamot. Pine. And finally, lavender. I stirred it with my glass stick and took in a breath.

Perfect.

Last to go on the bottle was a label. I wrote Nick’s name on it in cursive, then plugged the neck with a cork.

I set it on the shelf behind the GABRIEL bottle.

A knock sounded on my door. Aggie ambled in. “Brought you some cookies.” She put a plate with three cookies on my desk.

“Thanks.”

“They turned out better than the last batch. Nice and gooey in the center. Just how I like them.”

She paused in the middle of my room, and I got the distinct feeling she wasn’t here to share cookies.

“What is it?” I asked.

“This boy…”

“Nick.”

“Nick.” She sat on the edge of my bed. I leaned against the desk. “You don’t really know him from school, do you?”

I shifted and looked at the floor. “No.”

“He a good kid?” she asked in a way that said she already knew the answer, but wanted to hear my opinion. Aggie was a fan of letting me make my own decisions. Freedom to grow and make your own mistakes, she’d often said. At first, I’d felt constricted by the freedom, as if there were too much of it, too many choices, for it to actually mean something.