Chapter 77 Something Stinks
The car had been moving for twenty minutes before Grace noticed something was wrong.
She had been sitting in the back seat with the folded map in her lap and Molly's phone in her hand, it was open to the navigation app, she listened to her gut and was tracking their progress. She watched the blue dot on the screen and watched the road outside the window and for the first fifteen minutes, both things matched up well enough that she had let herself relax into the seat and think about what she was going to say when she found him.
Then they turned.
Grace looked at her phone. Looked at the window. Looked at her phone again.
"This isn't the right direction," she said.
Molly's mom’s eyes moved briefly to the rear view mirror and then back to the road. "Shortcut," she said. "I know this area. The main road gets complicated further up."
Grace looked at her phone again. The blue dot was moving away from the pinpoint on the map where Maddox's location had registered, not toward it. The deviation wasn't much yet but it was consistent and it was deliberate, and the part of Grace that had been lied to by enough people in enough different ways over the past several weeks recognised the quality of Mrs Marsh's answer. It was too smooth, too ready.
She didn't say anything else immediately as she just sat with it and watched the road, then looked at the phone. Slowly, the unease began to build.
Molly was sitting beside her in the back seat, her hands in her lap, looking out her own window. Grace glanced at her. Molly's jaw was slightly tighter than it needed to be for someone sitting quietly in a car. Her shoulders had a set to them that Grace knew and had seen before, the specific posture of someone managing what they were showing.
Grace looked back at the phone then narrowed her eyes slightly at Molly.
As if sensing her, Molly looked up at her then at the phone, “Um, Ra-ra, if I could just have my phone—”
The sirens reached her before she consciously processed what they were, one look was enough to silence Molly. She heard the sirens through the glass, distant and moving, multiple units by the sound of it, her eyes narrowed further because the direction they were coming from was the direction the phone said Maddox was.
She knew that sound. It was the sound of something already in motion.
"Stop the car," she said.
"Grace, we're nearly—"
"Stop the car." Her voice came out different the second time, it was stripped of the politeness she'd been maintaining. "Those sirens are going toward him. Right now. That's the direction we should be going and we are not going there."
Mrs. Marsh kept driving. Her hands were steady on the wheel and her eyes stayed on the road ahead and she said, "I told you, I know a better route."
"There is no better route." Grace looked at the screen in her hand and then looked at the road outside the window and then looked at the back of Mrs. Marsh's head and felt the pieces she'd been holding separately come together with a very loud click.
She thought about the amount of time it took Molly to return and how devastated she looked when she finally returned. Grace knew Molly didn’t tell her everything but at the time she thought she didn’t need to push further.
‘Why would Molly’s mom reveal something she had kept secret for Molly's entire life, in the middle of the worst week her family had ever had, just to help find someone she had no connection to?’
She wouldn't. Not unless she had a reason that had nothing to do with helping Grace.
"Pull over," Grace said.
Mrs. Marsh didn't.
Grace looked at Molly.
Molly had turned to continue looking out the window, her hands in her lap had tightened, the knuckles just slightly more visible than before, and she was not looking at Grace, which was the thing that confirmed it. Molly, who always looked at her, who had known her long enough that avoidance was the one thing she was bad at performing around Grace, was staring at the window with the fixed concentration of someone who had decided that if they didn't make eye contact then the conversation couldn't fully arrive.
"Molly," Grace said.
Molly turned, and her face did the thing it did when it was trying to be neutral and couldn't quite get there.
"You knew," Grace said, her voice came out quiet. "This whole time. You knew what she was doing and you let me sit in this car and bleed into a map and you didn't say anything."
"Grace, it's not—"
"You used me." The quiet broke. "You used me to find him so you could send the police there. That's what this is. That's why she suddenly decided today was the day to tell you about being a witch, because she needed something from me and you helped her get it."
"It's more complicated than that," Molly said, and her voice cracked on the last word.
"How is it more complicated?" Grace's voice was rising now and she wasn't stopping it. "How is it complicated? You told me we were going to find Maddox, you sat in that room and you suggested it, you made it sound like you were helping me, and the whole time—"
"He killed my brother," Molly said, and the words came out stripped of everything except the fact of them, no framing, no softening. Just the raw thing underneath all of it, finally said out loud. Her eyes were wet. "His face was on that paper, Grace. Maddox Barker. Ryan identified him as the shooter. He killed Daniel."
The car was still moving.
Grace stared at Molly and felt the information land she also felt the immediate rejection of it rise up just as fast.
"No," she said.
"The picture was—"
"No. Molly, listen to me." Her voice was urgent now, pushing through the emotion. "The shooter tried to kill me. They came after Enzo and me in that hospital. Someone sent that person to kill me. Maddox would never do that. He would never try to kill me."
"You don't know what he's capable of, Grace, he's been—"
"He’s been what, Molly, huh? I know it wasn't him." She said it with a certainty that went bone deep. It wasn't about logic or evidence but about the specific knowledge of a person you had grown up next to, whose hands you knew, whose voice you knew, whose way of being in the world you had memorised without meaning to. "Whatever that picture showed, it wasn't him doing what they're saying he did. The shooter was sent after Enzo and me. Maddox has no reason to want me dead."
Molly was crying now, silently, tears moving down her face, and she looked at Grace with an expression that was mixed with grief and doubt. She looked like she didn’t know what to believe.
"Stop the car,” Grace said quietly, turning to the front seat.
Mrs. Marsh's jaw tightened, but she ignored her and kept driving, “Stop the car, Mrs. Marsh.”
No response.
“I said. Stop the car right now!" The car shook due to a violent energy ripple that ran through it.
Molly's mom gasped and turned to Grace with wide eyes, “You…”
Grace stared at her blankly and reached forward.
She wasn't fully sure what she intended, but the intention of it was enough because Mrs Marsh made a sound of protest and immediately stepped on the brakes, causing Grace’s hand to halt mid-air. The car had stopped.
Molly was staring at Grace with wide eyes while her mom could not stop shaking with her hand on the steering wheel.
Grace said nothing but grabbed her bag and shoved Molly’s phone in her jeans' back pocket. She made sure to take the map that had her blood on it as she didn’t trust Molly’s mother, then she pulled the door open and got out.
Tears streamed down Molly’s face, “Grace—”
Grace slammed the door shut, cutting off her words as she began to walk away from them and the car.
The sirens were louder now that she got out of the car, she could hear them as she walked closer. She had committed the route to memory. She knew where to go so she started running.
She heard Molly call her name from behind her and her mom saying something sharp to Molly. She ignored them both and kept running.
Her hip still ached from the ditch two nights ago and her palm was wrapped in bandaging that pulled slightly with every pump of her arms, but none of it mattered because her legs were carrying her in the right direction and the sirens were getting louder. The adrenaline of the car and the argument and the cold clear anger of having been used pushed her past what her body would have managed on a normal day, the streets passed around her in a blur of lamp posts and parked cars.
She knew something had happened in that car but she couldn’t quite place it, but she knew it was the same thing that had happened with Dylan and his friend.
Grace pushed all of that to the back of her mind and kept running.
She smelled it before she saw it.
The smell arrived first, carried on the air from ahead of her, and it stopped the breath in her throat.
Blood.
And it wasn’t a small amount either considering it reached her from a distance, she could also smell smoke, and underneath that was something wild and charged that she had learned, since entering this world, to recognise as the aftermath of wolves in conflict.
She slowed from a run to something more careful as the edge of the town came into view.
The entrance was not guarded. There weren’t any people around.
She moved through the entrance and her eyes took in the scene in pieces because taking it in whole was not something she was able to do.
Bodies. Several of them were scattered across the open ground between the buildings. Most lay in gruesome positions, some in uniforms that she recognised as police. Some not.
Further in, the sounds of the active fight were coming from multiple directions at once, which meant it had spread beyond whatever starting point it had had and was now distributed through the town in pockets.
Grace stood at the edge of it and felt fear, but she needed to find Maddox, she couldn’t be scared now. After all, she’d already come all this way.
She didn't think about how she was going to do that or what would happen after. She just started moving, navigating around the bodies on the ground and the overturned furniture from maybe a celebration that had apparently been interrupted mid-progress, plates still on the long tables, cups knocked over, food scattered across the ground.
She was maybe thirty feet in when a man stepped in front of her.
He was large, she knew he wasn’t an officer because he looked wild and rough, not judging from his appearance but the air around him.
He smiled. He looked almost pleased with himself.
The man tilted his head slightly, like he was reading something in the air around her, and the smile deepened.
"Well, well," he said. His voice was low and cruel. "I smell a witch."