“Jack.”
Abby crawled on her belly toward the place where land ended and empty space began, her fear of heights overcome by a gnawing ache in the pit of her stomach. “Better you than me, right Jack?” Abby sobbed as she inched forward. “Please don’t be dead, tell me I didn’t kill you. Oh please, just a broken leg, something to keep me safe; not dead, you can’t be dead.”
“Abigail—run.” The reverberation of Silas’s voice had gone from a whisper to an insistent hum. “Runnnnnnnn …”
Abby ignored Silas and curled her fingers over the moss-covered stone that announced the cliff’s border. She laid her head down on her arms. In spite of the storm-cooled night air, sweat ran down the back of her neck to meet the chills crawling up her spine. She didn’t understand why she cared about Jack, given what he’d done to her. But the fresh bonds of family were difficult to erase.
Abby lifted her head and inched forward to peer over the sheer drop into the churning river below. On the glimmering water she saw Silas. He hovered above the rapids, reaching out to her, pointing toward Bikers’ Rest and safety. His uniform appeared more tattered, and his mouth opened wide in an O, as if afraid for her. Then he disappeared, sucked away in a wind gust.
The situation itself seemed so bizarre, so out of context from her normal life, that Abby laughed, unable to control her emotions. Again. A weed protruding from the moss tickled her cheek, and her mind flashed back to the touch of Jack’s finger against her face in a rare moment of affection. She shivered. There would always be a place in her heart that cherished him.
She reached forward and found a tree root protruding through the side of the hill. By wrapping her hand around the slippery wood, she braced herself at the rim of the abyss. She took a deep breath and craned her neck to search for Jack in the water or on the rocks below, careful to stay as far away from the rim as possible. If she saw him, she would do whatever she could to get help for him. And never tell them what he had planned.
Squinting, Abby focused on the water, the rocks, and the hillside. “Jack?”
Crack.
A hot shaft of wind tore past Abby’s cheek as a bullet missed her by inches. It lodged in a nearby tree, wood splintering on impact. She froze in place.
A cold, callused hand grabbed Abby’s wrist.
Jack’s contorted face materialized in front of her. One hand clamped on her wrist, the other held tight to a fissure in the face of the cliff. He teetered on a tiny shelf of rock.
“I’m not even close to dead, Cherie,” Jack said through clenched teeth. “But you are.”
“Jack, listen to me. I’m your sister, remember? We can work it all out. Please, listen to me. It doesn’t have to be like this. I’ll never tell anyone.”
Jack paused, features blank for a split second. He searched Abby’s face, as if seeing it for the first time. He shook his head like a wet dog, his eyes glazed, and he tightened his grip. With a flip of his wrist Jack yanked Abby over the moss-slippery stone.
She hung, suspended in the air, legs flailing. A roar echoed in her ears, her pounding heart competing with the crash of river water on stone far below. She felt Jack’s fingers slipping off her wrist, taunting, one at a time; with each loosened finger she slipped further toward oblivion. She closed her eyes, then opened them, aware that Jack’s pale face had become the face of death. And the last thing she would ever see until Silas greeted her in eternity.
Jack cackled, lips curled over his teeth in a horrible grimace. “Au revoir, my dear sister.”
Abby closed her eyes for a final time and went limp. An old Bible verse she had seen in the Munroe Bible drifted through her mind: “Oh death, where is thy sting?” She thought about her father and then Silas. They died, but they didn’t quit. At that moment she knew she couldn’t give up, not yet.
Jack released her wrist. Abby grabbed at the air with her free hand and swung her legs toward the craggy surface of the cliff. She fell several feet in a roller-coaster plummet, before landing on a sapling growing out between the rocks. The slender trunk bowed and swayed, but held her weight.
Abby pushed her foot forward into a crevice in the stone; a sharp pain electrified her sore ankle. Black spots danced in the periphery of her vision, and she fought the urge to faint. She rested her forehead against the cool surface of the cliff. Holding onto the tree with one hand and an outcropping of rock with the other, she willed her heart to slow down.
“What?” Jack bellowed from above. “You have nine lives like your stupid cat. Say your prayers; you’re out of luck.”
He eased his body down the rock face, feet-first. When he got within striking distance, he aimed vicious kicks at her hand, the reflectors on his bike shoe winking in the moonlight. He struck out again and again.
Abby groaned at the assault on her hand. The pain told her to let go.
Silas whispered in her ear, “Hold on.”
Releasing her death-grip on the rock while holding tight to the tree trunk with her right hand, she grabbed for Jack’s foot. Clumps of wet hair blowing into her face and mouth made it impossible to see. Her left hand opened and closed as she grabbed for his shoe. Slick with moisture and mud, the leather slid through her numb fingers. He continued to kick. Their extremities did a bizarre dance in mid-air.
His untied shoelaces whipped her hand, the sharp sting like the torture of a hundred angry bees. Abby reached as far as she could without falling down the cliff, wrapped her fingers in the loose laces, and pulled hard.
Jack lost his balance. He fell past Abby without making a sound; seconds later a thud and a small splash.
Then nothing but the moan of the wind and an empty bike shoe dangling from Abby’s bruised hand.