Part Ten
For a moment, seeing the expression on Thursy’s face, Coalise forgot that
she was almost dead. The sheer hurt and confusion written in those beautiful eyes blotted out the pain raging through Coalise’s shoulder and the dizziness that surrounded her head like a halo.
For that one moment, all she cared about was the fact that she had hurt
Thursy terribly.
She didn’t remember getting lost in the woods, or falling down a hole, or
meeting Scotch, but she had trusted him the moment he opened his mind to
her, and she saw herself through his eyes as if watching herself move in a
mirror. The memories were gone but the emotions were not.
Scotch’s intense desire not to hurt Thursy became her own. Even a few
hours ago, before he had explained to her what had happened, she had seen
Thursy sitting on the couch in the living room and wanted to help her, hold
her, heal her.
And now she was killing her.
"Oh, god," she whispered, lifting her head off Scotch’s chest. Had he just
kissed her? In front of Thursy?
She could feel his arms tense around her, sending a flicker of pain through her shoulder and arm. Maple was pressing the brown-stained cloth over Tish’s face again to keep her unconscious. Standing up, she asked, "Are you ready to go?"
She was either unaware of the fact that Thursy’s heart was breaking right then and there, or else she didn’t care. From the cold expression in her
eyes, Coalise was betting on the later.
"Thursy-" Scotch started to say and she shook her head.
"I don’t know what’s happening here," she whispered. "I think I might have killed Kiria and they’re saying something is wrong with Yared and tomorrow they’re going to execute me. And you’re…"
"Set me down," Coalise said. "Quickly."
He understood without asking and eased her to the floor. She didn’t have to explain that she was freeing his arms to soothe Thursy.
"Thursy, listen," he begged, kneeling in front of her. Coalise wrapped her
coat more tightly around herself, knowing that she was in shock from the blood loss. If she hadn’t been, maybe she wouldn’t have been able to root for Scotch and Thursy.
"I don’t want to listen," Thursy told him. "Everyone has lied to me today,
I don’t know what’s happening anymore."
He lifted his hand to touch her face and she scrambled back against the
wall, the chains attached to her wrists scraping against the cement floor as
she dragged them. "I’m going to get you out of here," he said instead.
"You can’t," Maple said darkly. "Only the human girl."
"Only the human," Thursy repeated. "The one you’re in love with."
Coalise cringed with him to hear the undeniable truth spoken out loud.
"It’s not-"
"Get away from me. You lied to me the same as everyone else. Get out!"
He reached for her again and she clawed him, tears running down her face, saying, "Leave, and I’ll die tomorrow and you’ll be free. You can walk away from all of this and start over with your precious human, and I’ll never
come after you, I’ll never come back because I’ll be dead, my neck snapped
in half, and you’ll never have to lie to me again."
She’s hysterical, Coalise thought, though she had already known it. Thursy had been hysterical most of the night, sitting with her legs drawn up to her chest and her face buried in her knees, rocking, rocking. A drop of reason
had come back into her eyes when she saw Scotch but it was gone now, and
who knew what she saw when she looked blankly around the room.
Scotch caught her hands and held them despite her struggles. When she
finally met his gaze he said, "Thursy, I-"
Her eyes darkened so quickly that he stopped short and Coalise’s breath
caught.
"You don’t love me," Thursy told him in a growl, and she jerked her hands away.
She wouldn’t awknowldge him after that. She curled up into her ball again and rocked herself back and forth on the floor, like an egg a child keeps
trying to balance on its end, until Scotch turned to Coalise with damp eyes
and asked, "What can I do?"
She didn’t know. Maple said, "Take the human and go. If you can get her to the highway, you’ll be safe. I can’t let you take Thursy, people will come after her, but the human is just a human and nobody cares. You two can escape, but only if you leave now."
"Why Thursy?" he asked, as if pointing out the injustice of it. "Why not
me?"
Maple shook her head. "Because that’s the way it is."
Scotch stayed in a crouch at Thursy’s side, his chest rising and falling
quickly. He spoke her name again and touched her tangled auburn. She rocked faster in response.
"I’m sorry," he told her, the tears in his eyes spilling over. "I’m so sorry, Thursy."
He tried to kiss her head but she was moving too quickly, and then she
reached out and shoved him away from her.
He stumbled to his feet, disbelieving. Coalise struggled to stand up and
he helped her almost unconsciously. Maple took it as a sign that she had won and thrust a water bottle into Coalise’s hand. "I refilled it," she said quickly. "Drink all of it, it’ll help you. Go."
Scotch’s eyes remained glued to Thursy’s closed form. Maple grabbed his chin harshly with her hand and forced him to look at her. "Go," she said.
"It’s now or never."
So they went.
Up the stairs, through the living room, out the back door and around the
wide circle of houses that made up the village. Into the woods so dark Coalise couldn’t tell the trees from the ground where the underbrush rustled with nightlife and Scotch near carried her in a trance between the boulders.
Half an hour after leaving the house, his trance broke and his body began shuddering. Coalise stopped walking and turned so that she could wrap her functional arm around him while he cried into her hair.
"Was it my fault?" he asked bitterly. "Did I do this to her?"
She wished she could tell him, but she didn’t know. Somehow it all had to be related to Coalise’s arrival, but the memories weren’t there.
"She’s going to die hating me," he said. "I’m never going to get a chance
to fix this, to tell her I’m sorry."
"You did what you could," Coalise told him. She ran her fingers through
his hair and kissed the tears off his cheeks. She was crying, too; in some
strange way she loved Thursy as much as he did.
"It wasn’t enough."
"No, but it was all you could do."
Her mouth met his for a brief second, just a comforting brush, and she saw the whites of his eyes in the dark. She couldn’t make out his face but she
knew that he was looking at her with his keen cat eyesight, studying her.
She felt ashamed then of her selfishness. "I know I’m not worth half as
much as she is."
His quick, "Don’t say that," surprised her. The sadness returned to his
voice as he added, "I just wish I could have saved her."
Coalise nodded, this time ashamed for having cheapened him in her mind, and he began leading the way through the woods again. Her shoes grew soaked with freezing dew and her ears burned with cold as they hiked further and further.
After an hour, Scotch said he saw a light up ahead. Another thirty minutes and Coalise could see it, too.
The spotlight caught them before they reached the highway itself, and a
team of men and women in white clothes ran toward them. Scotch started to
dash away but Coalise caught his hand and held it hard.
"Callie Edison?" a megaphone burst out.
"Yes," she called weakly. From a hundred feet away, there was a dim cheer.
The four people dressed in white reached them. They all carried boxy
duffel bags and two of them were hauling a backboard.
"We’re the paramedics," a woman explained quickly. "Are you hurt?"
Coalise couldn’t reply, she was so stunned. "Yes," Scotch managed to say, "she was bitten by a puma on the shoulder."
"Jesus Christ," one of the other paramedics exclaimed. "Lay down, hon."
As she slowly sat down on the backboard, another asked, "Your name is
Elise, right?"
"No," Scotch told him, "Coalise. Coalise Hastings Edison. Is she going to
be all right?"
"We’ll do everything we can, son. Are you hurt?"
They carried her the hundred feet to the highway as a group, Scotch walking beside the body board so that he could hold her hand. Two ambulances, three police cars, a news van, and Coalise’s parents were waiting at the turnpike.
Walkie-talkies crackled with static as a forty-person search party was
called back, and bloodhounds were wrestled back into their kennels.
"How did you find me?" Coalise asked her mother, as the cursing paramedic snapped a plastic oxygen mask over her face.
"We got an anonymous call saying that you were on Mount Aurora, injured. Oh, god, honey, we were so worried."
The paramedics transferred her to a stretcher and loaded her into the back of an ambulance, taking her blood pressure and her temperature and spitting medical jargon back and forth. "I think she's going to make it fine, mam. We’ll meet you at the hospital."
They let Scotch ride in the ambulance at Coalise’s insistence. His eyes
were wide and he jumped constantly at the barrage of human scents and
dialogue, but she held onto his hand. The paramedics cut away her coat and
part of her shirt and made sure that her shoulder was immobilized, then
covered her with a wool blanket.
Scotch sat behind her head, leaning forward so that he could see her face
as the ambulance bounced along. "Are you in pain?" he whispered.
"Not so bad now." The reality that she was out of danger was just beginning to hit her, and she thought she might burst into tears at any second. To distract herself, she asked, "Who do you think made the anonymous call?"
He shook his head. "I don’t know. I guess sometimes having insane luck is a good thing."
"Yeah." She couldn’t help herself, she was going to cry now. "Maybe a
little of it rubbed off on Thursy, right?"
He leaned down and kissed her forehead. "Maybe so."
And the next morning was the botched execution of Thursy West.
The trilogy will continue with Thursy's Story, which is finished and set to post soon. Check back!