I went to him, my face all wide-eyed innocence, even as I surreptitiously palmed a knife and dropped it down by my side. Owen crept toward the man standing at the back of the pack, while Sophia eased a little closer to the side of the pit and hoisted her shovel up onto her shoulder, as though she were taking a break.
The leader held his hands out to his sides, like he was welcoming me with open arms. I stopped in front of him and gave him another empty smile. He lunged forward, grabbed my arms, and yanked me up against him, grinding his body against mine.
“Hey!” I cried out in a mock-helpless voice. “What are you doing? Get your hands off me, you creep!”
“Oh, I’ll be putting more than my hands on you in a minute. You go ahead and scream as loud as you want to, honey.” The man sneered into my face, his breath smelling of sour moonshine. “We like it better when they scream, don’t we, boys?”
“Really?” I purred. “That’s funny, because I was thinking the exact same thing about you. No, that’s not true. I actually like it better when you just
I brought my left hand up and slammed my knife into his throat. He died with a choking gurgle, spraying blood all over my hand, face, and clothes, but I didn’t care. Because the warm, sticky drops told me that I was finally doing something to help Sophia—like killing these bastards where they stood.
I shoved the dying leader away, stepped forward, palmed a second knife, and rammed both blades into the next man’s chest. By this point, the others realized that I wasn’t the innocent little Bambi that I appeared to be, and they raised their guns once more.
But Owen and Sophia didn’t give them a chance to fire at me. Owen put his pistol up against the back of the man’s head in front of him and pulled the trigger twice.
Thanks to the silencer I’d given him, the gun barely made a sound, and the man was dead before he hit the ground.
Meanwhile, Sophia whipped the shovel off her shoulder and slammed it into the knees of the guy closest to her, causing him to howl with pain. He toppled over into the pit, and Sophia whacked the shovel against his head, caving in his skull with a satisfying
That left one man standing. He looked around at his fallen buddies, his eyes wide with confusion and fear, wondering how they’d all died so quickly. He drew in a breath to scream, but my knife in his throat cut off that concern.
Less than a minute after it had begun, it was over, and all five of Grimes’s men lay dead at our feet. A good start but not enough. Not
I walked over to the edge of the pit, bent down, and held out my hand. Sophia clasped it, and I pulled her up and out of the trench. Up close, the stench was even more putrid and overpowering, the bodies bloodier and more rotten than I’d imagined. How had she managed to stand it? Both now
Sophia swayed forward, and I held her until she was steady on her feet. Owen stood off to one side, watching our backs.
Soot and ash flaked off Sophia’s once-white dress, which hung in burnt tatters on her back, while the heels had snapped off her shoes. Her black hair was a singed, tangled mess, while blood had soaked through the white bandages that had been placed over the gunshot wounds on her left arm and thigh. But the worst part was her skin, which was red, raw, and blistered, from her fingertips all the way up her arms. Her throat and face were as bright and shiny as a ripe tomato, her cheeks puffed up from the burns so that they seemed like they would pop if you so much as looked at them too hard.
Every single part of her had to just
“Jo-Jo?” Sophia rasped in her broken voice.
“cooper healed her,” I said. “At least, he tried to. I don’t know how well he did. Maybe he’ll know more about how she’s doing when we get back to his place.”
Worry glimmered in Sophia’s black eyes, but she nodded.Then the dwarf did something that she’d never done before in all the years that I’d known her: she threw her arms around me and hugged me tight.
“Thank you,” she whispered in my ear.
I would have hugged her back if I didn’t think that it would have caused her even more pain. “You are more than welcome. Now, come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Sophia nodded and pulled back. She leaned down, grabbed her shovel, and used it as a sort of walking stick.
Together, with Owen, we headed toward the woods and our escape route.
Chapter Eighteen
Warren stepped out of the trees and met us at the edge of the forest, still clutching his rifle.
“Anything?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not a peep so far. I don’t think that anyone in camp heard what happened here, but it won’t be too long before Grimes or some of his men come to check on the others. We need to disappear into the woods before they spot us—”
It was as if his words summoned up all the bad, capricious luck that I’d been expecting ever since we’d first set foot on Bone Mountain, because one of Grimes’s men chose that exact moment to run into the clearing.
“Hey,” he called out, still jogging forward and waving to someone behind him. “Go get Stewie, and come help me. Mr. Grimes changed his mind. He wants the woman brought back—”
He turned around and stopped short at the sight of Owen, Sophia, Warren, and me standing to one side of the clearing. His gaze zoomed in on the dead bodies of his buddies sprawled among the worn tombstones. The guy sucked in a breath, but he did the smart thing and didn’t approach us. Instead, he did something far, far worse: he pulled his gun out of the holster on his belt and fired three quick shots up into the air.
I cursed and started forward, ready to kill him, but Warren beat me to it. The old man raised his rifle to his shoulder and put a bullet in the other man’s forehead.
But the sharp, staccato sounds of the revolver and the rifle echoed around the clearing, then bellowed through the trees and rattled farther out into the main camp.
Shouts rose in the distance, indicating that Grimes, Hazel, and everyone else would descend on the area in minutes, if not sooner.
“What do you want to do, Gin?” Owen asked. “Make a stand here?”
I shook my head. “No. There are too many of them.
They can easily outflank us, and they have more weapons than we do. Now we run.”
Sophia hurried forward, but after a few yards she pulled up short and hissed in pain, despite the shovel that she’d been using to support herself. A bit of blood trickled down her bare leg.
“How bad is that gunshot wound in your thigh?” I asked.
“Just bandaged,” she rasped. “Not healed.”
That’s what I’d feared, but there was nothing to be done about it. So I put an arm under Sophia’s shoulder, taking some of her weight. Together, we headed for the trees.
We didn’t even make it into the woods before a couple more of Grimes’s men raced into the clearing, guns out and firing at us.
“You take Sophia!” Owen shouted, raising his own weapon to fire back. “Warren and I will cover you!”
“Do it!” I yelled back. “But stay close to us! We can’t afford to get separated!”
Owen nodded, and he and Warren let loose with another volley of shots. Their guns would be more effective than my knives at this range, even though all I wanted to do was turn around and throw myself at Grimes’s men.
Together, Sophia and I hobbled into the woods and back up the faint path that Warren had made earlier
