Action & Adventure
She drops the rifle to her shoulder. "Like I'd let you run around the forest with a loaded gun." She aims the rifle at the ground, and it occurs to me she's going to fire it. She thinks it is unloaded because that's how she keeps the gun, but I'm thinking about the cartridge I loaded, and I can't get the words out in time. She squeezes the trigger.
I lay on the gritty wooden floor of the filthy shack, frozen with terror. For weeks I had been hearing about the two girls who had disappeared, but I had never in a million years thought that something like that was going to happen to me.
But here I was, tied up, groggy, panic-stricken—and waiting. Waiting for whatever had happened to the girl who had been found "not alive." Waiting for whatever had happened to the other girl.
This couldn't be happening to me.
But it was.
The man stared at her and his brow cleared. He smiled with a kind of wonderment. "You're a healer." A statement, not a question. "I never hoped to find such a one in a place like this."
The moon sailed free of the shredded clouds and, as though drawn to its own likeness, flooded down onto Madeleine's hair, turning her golden curls into a gleaming beacon. She sat with Matthieu in a dinghy, her round, frightened face a pale moon on earth. Féolan was running before his mind had taken in what he had seen. Someone, somehow, had Dominic's children.
