Chapter 96 Once A Year
Tying Zion felt different and she was honest with herself about why. She used two ropes, which were objectively sufficient, and was slightly more careful about the angle of his arms than she had been about Enzo's. She sat back on her heels when she finished and looked at his face.
He had been on her side. That was what she kept coming back to. From the moment Enzo had grabbed her outside the restaurant, Zion had been the consistent presence arguing against the things Enzo was doing and taking the physical consequences of that argument without backing down. He had told her not to help Enzo. He had said Grace had already run from him once and there was a reason.
He was also, and she acknowledged this reluctantly, the most objectively good-looking person she had been in close proximity to in her entire life. This had been true at the restaurant when she thought she was on a date and it was still true now with him unconscious and tied to a gymnasium pillar, which said something about the persistence of observation in the face of all other concerns.
She stood up and decided to go back to the car, she wasn’t looking and almost tripped over Enzo’s feet, she blamed him and went to look for tape to put over his mouth before going to the car.
She drove it west for forty minutes, out of the town entirely and onto the secondary roads that ran along the river. She found the bridge at Coster's Crossing, which was old and narrow and sat over the deepest part of the river in this stretch, and she pulled over just before it and got out and stood at the edge for a moment looking at the water.
This was going to destroy her mother's car.
She got back in, put it in neutral, and aimed it at the bridge railing.
She drove it through the railing as it made a sound of bent metal. She jumped out before the water could completely cover her, and then she heard the longer sound of falling and then the water receiving it.
She kicked off her shoes thing the laces together and hung them on her neck as she proceeded to swim back to the bank.
The river was cold since it was already late-season, it wasn’t freezing but it was cold, and she went in at the shallowest entry point and started swimming before she could talk herself out of it. She was a good swimmer and she knew she was a good swimmer; she had the medals in a box under her bed to confirm it in case she needed confirmation, the cold was unpleasant and the current was present but manageable and she crossed to the far bank in four minutes and stood dripping on the other side.
She wrung out her jacket and put her shoes back on and walked.
She didn't use her phone for transport. That had been a deliberate decision made before she left the school because she understood that phone records and transport records and camera footage were the things that made people findable, and she did not want to be findable right now. Not by her mother and not by whoever her mother might direct toward her.
She walked until she found a residential street with lights still on in a ground-floor window and knocked.
The couple who answered were in their sixties and looked at the wet seventeen-year-old on their doorstep with the expression of people who were deciding whether this was a problem or a situation requiring help.
"I got left behind," Molly said, and let herself look as pathetic as she actually felt, which required no effort. "My friends pranked me. I've been walking for an hour. Could you possibly drive me to the town centre?"
They agreed and drove her to within a mile of the school and she walked the rest.
The gymnasium was exactly as she had left it.
She came in through the back door and stood in the dark for a moment letting her eyes adjust and then moved to the wall where she had left them and confirmed that both of them were still where she had put them and still in the condition she had left them in. Unconscious and upright and secured.
She walked back out to the female lockers to take a shower while letting her clothes dry on a vent. She found a towel to wrap around herself and went back to the equipment storage again and pulled out a gym mat and dragged it to a point on the floor that was far enough from both pillars to feel like a reasonable distance and not so far that she couldn't hear if something changed, and she lay down on it and looked at the ceiling.
The school clock rang midnight. She counted the strokes.
Twelve.
She lay on the cold mat in the dark gymnasium on the night before they'd find her mother's car at the bottom of a river and listened to the building settle around her and thought about what tomorrow looked like, which was not a thought she could complete because tomorrow had too many variables and she was too tired to manage them.
Her eyes went to Zion's face in the dark.
Even at this distance, even in the low light that came through the high gymnasium windows, the fact of him was undeniable. She looked at his face against the pillar and thought about the restaurant and his eyes and the way the conversation had been before it shifted gears.
She looked at him for a moment longer than she should have.
Then she squeezed her eyes shut.
The tears came quietly, without drama, the kind that didn't ask permission, and she let them go because there was no one to perform composure for. She was on the floor of a school gymnasium with her birthday ticking over in the dark and two unconscious werewolves tied to pillars and her mother's car at the bottom of a river, and somewhere out there Grace was running toward something Molly could not follow her into, her brother was dead, and she was here.
Nobody had told her that turning eighteen felt like this.