Wind

• • E I G H T E E N • •

Gently, she placed her hand on my chest, and she pushed me so I was lying on my back. My mind told me to run, but no signals went through to my body. She crawled on top of me, moving her face close to mine, and an unsettling and eerie calmness settled in. Her stomach brushed over my waist, and her breasts pressed against my chest.

And then she was kissing me. I breathed heavily. I felt her tongue inside my mouth, running over my teeth. She bit my lower lip lightly and moved her hands along my body—over my arms and my chest and then towards my waist. As if I was suddenly released from being frozen, my body moved. I placed my hands on her as well, feeling her warmth beneath my fingertips, electrifying me with heat.

Suddenly, with her mouth still glued to mine, her hands shot to my neck, and she squeezed. A wave of panic coursed through me. What was going on? I struggled to get her off me, but I was pinned down. I pried at her fingers, but my hand slipped uselessly, and she wouldn't release. I coughed, gasping for air but unable to find it. She pulled her face off mine and glared down at me, still keeping her hands around my throat. My lungs burned like they were on fire, and my eyes watered in terror.

"Harper!" she screamed my name without moving her mouth.

I choked and gagged. Splotches of black spotted my vision.

"Harper!"

Everything went dark.

Something shook me. I rolled onto my side. I gagged. A wet glob dripped out of my mouth. It rolled over my lips and slipped down my cheek. I coughed and spat.

"Fuck," a voice said.

I coughed again, spitting what tasted like bitter vomit onto the ground. I heaved a few heavy, wheezing breaths, and then I rolled back over to my back in exhaustion.

"Fuck you scared me."

I opened my eyes. Jeremey stood in front of me, shining the flashlight down at my face. I was in the forest again, not the forest in the eye, but the real forest. The one I fell through to get to the other one.

"What..." I started to ask.

"You passed out," Jeremey interrupted me. "You were choking on your own vomit." He paused. "I shouldn't have left you..." His voice trailed off as he got down on his knees and shone the flashlight on my leg. He winced and stood up.

Wind gusted through the trees around us, and they shook threateningly. My leg throbbed painfully. Nausea clenched at my stomach, but I didn't throw up again.

"I brought the car around," Jeremey said. "Come on, we need to get out of here."

I tried to push myself to my feet, but my body wasn't responding to the signals. I could barely get myself onto my elbows. Jeremey gave me his hand and pulled me up. He placed my arm around his shoulder and put his around my waist, and then I limped along as best I could as we walked through the forest.

"You're freezing," he told me, but I didn't feel cold. I still felt the heat from the eye of the storm, burning somewhere far beneath us.

My feet passed over sticks and needles, my vision faded in and out of focus, and then we were on a road.

And then I was sitting in a car.

Jeremey started the engine. I asked him to put the windshield wipers on. He told me it wasn't raining. I'd meant the headlights. I didn't tell him that, and he didn't put them on. We drove silently through the dark.

We got to the house.

Jeremey helped me limp inside.

He made me lie down on the couch, and then he went into the kitchen and came back with a towel. He pushed the leg of my pants up and looked at the bite in the light.

"How bad is it?" I asked as he wiped some of the blood away. The pale blue towel turned a deep red. A thin stream of blood slithered down my leg like a snake, replacing what he had cleaned.

"It's not as bad as I'd worried," Jeremey finally said. "There's a lot of blood, but it doesn't look like it's very deep." He pressed the towel against the wound, trying to slow the bleeding. "I should take you to the hospital."

"No, I'm fine," I said, trying my best not to grimace as pain pulsed through my leg.

"You passed out. You aren't fine."

"You said it didn't look so bad," I argued. "I'm starting to feel all right now." That was an exaggeration. I could make sense of what Jeremey was saying and respond, but my head was still in a fog.

"I said it wasn't as bad as I'd worried," Jeremey said. "I didn't say it wasn't bad."

I thought about the girl in the basement, about how she had begged us not to involve the cops. About how Joshua would kill her. I thought about the dream too, and a shiver ran down my spine. I tried to push those thoughts away. It was just a dream. I'd passed out and had a nightmare. That's what it had to be. "I can't go to the hospital," I finally said.

"Harper," Jeremey started to argue with me.

"They'll have questions," I interrupted him. "What will we tell them?"

"The truth. That you got bit by a dog."

"Please, no hospital." I couldn't risk it.

Jeremey groaned. "If it doesn't stop bleeding after fifteen minutes, we're going."

He didn't give me the option to argue further. He told me to press the towel against my leg, and then he got some rubbing alcohol and gauze from a first aid kit he kept around the house. He cleaned the bite, and I clenched my teeth together, pretending it didn't sting like it was on fire.

Finally, Jeremey wrapped the gauze around it. It bled through at first, but the red splotches slowly stopped growing, and the bleeding subsided.

Jeremey didn't say anything else to me. He went over to the chair across from the couch and sat down. He watched me for a bit longer. I tried to pretend the pain was more bearable than it was. Finally, his eyes drifted towards the window, and mine drifted shut.

My entire body felt heavy and weak. I tried to peel my eyes open, but I was too tired. The last thought on my mind before I fell asleep was the girl in the basement, and her ice-cold but beautiful blue eyes. As I drifted away, the vision of those eyes shifted to another—the white, empty eyes of the same girl, but from my dream.

The girl at the center of the storm.