Chapter 64 My Friend
Grace had spent the better part of two hours lying completely still inside a wooden crate that smelled like engine oil and sawdust, with her knees pulled to her chest and her chin tucked down and her entire body engaged in the singular mission of not making a single sound.
She had planned this. That was the thing she kept reminding herself when her left leg went numb somewhere around the first hour and the edge of a wooden slat began to dig into her shoulder blade with the patient persistence of something that knew it had time on its side.
Grace had planned this carefully, or as carefully as someone could plan something with limited information playing on loop in the back of her mind. She had waited until the house was deep in its nighttime rhythms, until the particular quality of silence that meant everyone had stopped moving and started sleeping had settled over everything. She had packed light, just what she needed, nothing more, and she had moved through the house with the specific careful quietness of someone who understood that the margin for error was very small.
Getting out of the house had been the easy part, as it turned out.
It was the pack border that was the problem.
She'd understood in theory that security would be present. She hadn't fully appreciated what present actually meant until she'd gotten close enough to the perimeter to see it for herself, the patrol rotations, the checkpoint lighting that turned the border crossing into something considerably brighter than the surrounding dark, the guards who moved with the attentiveness of people who were genuinely expecting trouble rather than just going through the motions of a routine shift.
There were more of them than she'd anticipated, and they were more alert, and the easy confidence she'd felt leaving the house had quietly rearranged itself into something more honest by the time she'd crouched behind a storage building and actually counted the bodies moving between her and the outside world.
She'd almost turned back.
Almost.
Then she'd thought about staying but also how going back inside and waiting was simply not something she was capable of.
She'd overheard two pack members talking earlier that week about an outgoing delivery scheduled for late that night—supplies, equipment, something being sent out to one of the pack's external properties. A truck. One that would need to pass through the checkpoint and come out the other side, which meant it would need to be checked at the gate, which also meant that the check, however thorough, happened at the gate and not again afterward.
She'd found the truck parked behind the eastern storage facility and she'd found the crate with enough give in its lid to be quietly manipulated, and she'd made a decision that she was now reconsidering from the inside of said crate with a numb leg and a wooden slat lodged between her shoulder blades.
The truck had started moving about thirty minutes after she'd gotten in. She'd felt every bump in the road magnified through the wooden base of the crate, biting down on nothing to keep from making noise, holding herself as compact and still as she could manage.
When the truck slowed and stopped at the checkpoint, she'd held her breath and gone entirely motionless in a way that was less a decision than a full-body reflex, every voluntary function suspended while she listened to the muffled exchange of voices outside and the sound of doors being opened and checked and closed again.
Then the truck had started moving again.
She'd waited. Counting to sixty three separate times, making sure the distance between her and the pack border was real and not just hopeful before she let herself breathe properly.
She'd made it. She was outside.
The relief had lasted approximately four minutes.
The truck had lurched to a stop with a suddenness that had sent her sliding sideways against the wall of the crate, and then she'd heard the voices, they were close and the particular quality of movement that meant people were coming around to the back of the vehicle with purpose. It wasn’t the casual movement of a scheduled stop. Something had alerted them. Maybe the weight distribution, maybe something she'd shifted when the truck lurched, or it was just plain bad luck, which had always been something she had in generous supply.
Grace was still a prisoner, her only saving grace was the marking Enzo gave her, but if she was found here, inside of this truck, she was sure she would be dragged back to a cell immediately. Because, what explanation would she have for this suspicious behavior.
The back of the truck had opened.
Grace had shoved the crate lid up and moved before she'd finished deciding to move, which was the only reason it worked at all. She'd cleared the truck bed and hit the ground and started running in the same sequence of motion, and behind her she'd heard the shout that confirmed they'd seen her and were coming.
She ran.
The ground beyond the pack border in this direction was rough, it was uneven scrubland that hadn't been maintained, broken up by ditches she couldn't see until she was nearly in them and low branches that came out of the dark at face level with no warning.
She pushed through all of it at a pace that her body sustained on adrenaline alone, her backpack bouncing against her spine, her breathing coming in hard controlled bursts. She could hear them behind her, there were at least two of them, maybe three, moving faster than her because of course they were, wolves were faster than humans. She'd known that and had been banking on the darkness and the terrain to give her enough of an edge to make the difference.
The ditch she didn't see until her foot found the edge of it and there was nothing under her.
She went down hard. Her hands came up instinctively and caught some of the impact but not enough, her left side hit the slope of the ditch at an angle that drove the air out of her lungs and sent pain radiating up from her hip and along her forearm where it had scraped against something that felt like concrete but was probably rock.
Grace lay at the bottom of the ditch for one terrible second where her body simply refused to do anything and her vision went briefly dark at the edges.
Then she heard them getting closer and forced herself move.
She crawled to the far side of the ditch on her hands and knees, got her feet under her, and pushed herself into the darkness on the other side where the scrubland gave way to denser cover, which were trees, actual trees that were close enough together to swallow her if she got into them quickly enough.
She got into them.
She moved through the trees at a stumble that was the best she could manage, favouring her left side, one arm held close to her body because the forearm was bleeding in a way she could feel even if she couldn't see it, and she put as much distance and as many direction changes between herself and the ditch as her legs would carry her. She changed direction twice, then again, losing the linear logic of a chase and replacing it with the irregular movement of someone simply trying to be somewhere other than where she'd last been seen.
The sounds behind her faded but she kept moving anyway. She kept moving until the sounds had been absent long enough to mean something, until her legs finally made a convincing argument that they were done for the immediate future, then she stopped with her back against a tree trunk and slid down it until she was sitting on the ground and tried to remember how to just breathe.
Her forearm was bleeding freely. She could see it now that her eyes had properly adjusted, there was a ragged scrape that ran from just below her elbow toward her wrist, dark and messy in the low light. Her hip ached with the deep, insistent pain of a bruise already forming over a large area, and when she tested her weight on her left leg it held but unhappily.
‘How many times have I broken bones just in the span of a few months?’
Thankfully, she wasn’t fully human. She sat there for a while and breathed, trying to think.
She had gotten out. She was outside the pack, outside the border, in a patch of trees somewhere in the dark with a bleeding arm and no immediate plan and the adrenaline beginning to recede enough to let the pain fully introduce itself. She had accomplished the primary objective and absolutely none of the secondary ones, because the secondary ones had assumed a somewhat cleaner exit.
She couldn't stay here. That was the one thing she was certain of. If they were still looking, staying in one place was worse than moving. And even if they'd given up the chase, the temperature was dropping, she was hurt and sitting at the base of a tree until morning was not a plan anyone would endorse.
She thought about where she was and tried to construct a map from what she knew—the direction the truck had been going, the distance they'd covered before it stopped and the direction she'd run. It was imprecise and she knew that, but it gave her something to work with.
Molly's house was on Fernwood Drive. She'd heard her talk about it randomly and had filed it away without knowing she was filing it away in the specific way that certain details get retained because something in you recognises they might matter later.
Molly was the only person she could think of right now who existed outside the pack's reach and wasn't connected to anything Grace was trying to run from.
It wasn't a perfect option because she had no idea if Molly was still abroad or not as she had no idea about her whereabouts.
Even if she was home, it still wasn't a good option, really, showing up at someone's door in the middle of the night bleeding and unannounced was not something that fell within the range of normal social behaviour. But normal social behaviour had stopped being available to her roughly the moment she was kidnapped that night, so she adjusted her standards accordingly.
She wrapped her forearm in the spare shirt from her backpack as best she could, tying it awkwardly with her teeth and her good hand.
‘It’s got to heal, right? I’m supposed to have the genes too.’
Then she got up, tested her weight and decided she could manage, then she started walking in the direction she was mostly sure was right.
It took her the better part of an hour. She came out of the scrubland onto a proper road and followed it with the particular grim determination of someone who has run out of other options, and her arm throbbed steadily through the makeshift bandage. The night was cold in the way nights get in the early hours when the temperature bottoms out and the dark feels most complete.
Grace knew she’d arrived when she began to see the nice houses and lovely yards. Fernwood Drive was quiet. Most houses had their lights off, sleeping, and Grace moved along the footpath checking the numbers until she found the right one and stopped in front of it. And surprisingly, their light was on.
She stood on the path for a moment and looked at the door.
‘What if she isn’t home? I should try at least, Grace looked down at her appearance. Someone’s home and hopefully they’ll be kind enough to believe I’m a friend of Molly.’
Then she walked up and knocked.
It was a moment before she heard the sound of footsteps, then the particular pause of someone checking before they opened, and then the door swung inward and Molly stood in the frame in her pyjamas with her hair loose and her face carrying the residual puffy evidence of days of crying. Her eyes going wide as they moved from Grace's face to the makeshift bandage on her arm and back up again.
"Grace?" Molly's voice came out small and bewildered.
Grace almost felt her leg give out in relief, “Oh, thank the Lord that you’re home.”
“What happened to you? What are you doing here?"
Grace stood on the doorstep with her backpack on her good shoulder and her hair tangled from the trees and blood seeping through the shirt tied around her forearm.
"I need help," she said finally. "I'm sorry. I didn't have anywhere else to go."