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Lucas conjured a pocketknife and started carving out a small hole in the tree. Meanwhile, the rest of us gathered dry leaves and small twigs. Once the hole was large enough to hold a few leaves, Lucas carefully laid tinder inside and conjured a lighter. The fire went out almost immediately, and we tried again.
“Hey, Grant, can I see your water bottle?” Lucas asked. He pulled the cap off and took the straw out of the inside. He lit the tinder again and used the straw to gently blow air at the fire. The fire glowed a bright orange, and he continued adding tinder until the fire finally grew hot enough to light the edges of the hole.
“It’s working!” Talia cried.
“I’ll need to keep tending it,” Lucas said. “You four should rest. We’ll take turns.”
I was really tired, and only one of us needed to work the fire at a time. “All right, but it’s my turn once I wake up.”
“Fair enough,” Lucas said.
“I’ll stay here, keep you company,” Cooper offered.
Talia took my arm. “There’s a moss bed over there, and it’s nice and shaded. It’ll be a good place to lie down.”
Talia led me over to the moss bed, and Grant and Miles followed. We weren’t far from Lucas. My stomach sank a little, because I hated leaving him there to do all the work while we slept. It would take us forever to burn the center out of that tree, but we had to.
Miles lay down first and was already snoring before the rest of us got settled in. Grant and Talia snuggled tightly against one another, her head on his shoulder. I lay on my side, wanting nothing more than to cuddle up to Lucas—or at the very least, pull Isa close in my arms. I wondered how she was handling us disappearing the way we did. I hoped she wasn’t worried.
We’d get out of here… we would.
I couldn’t quite get comfortable on the ground, so I rolled over—and shrieked. A mere inch from my nose lay a human skull. I scurried backward, nearly squashing Talia and Grant behind me. They startled and grabbed me, trying to calm me down.
“Goddess, Nadine,” Miles said, sounding a bit annoyed that I’d roused him from his sleep. “It’s like you’ve never seen a human skeleton before.”
“Not right in my face!” I forced my breathing to slow as I took in the full skeleton. The human remains were nothing but bones, which were covered in dirt and looked quite old.
Lucas came tearing through the forest. Cooper floated along behind him, looking worried. “What happened?” Lucas demanded breathlessly.
“I’m fine,” I assured him. “Really. I just didn’t expect to see…” I gestured to the skeleton.
“Oh, yeah.” Cooper sounded guilty. “That’d be mine. I should’ve warned you.”
“Yours—?” I practically choked. “That’s your body?”
Cooper shrugged, like he was used to it by now. “That’s what happens when no one comes to rescue you.”
I gaped. “You should be laid to rest!”
“Don’t bother,” he said. “You’ve spent all night digging. You don’t have to waste your energy on my grave.”
“You deserve a funeral!” I protested. “Lucas is a reaper. He can help you cross over—”
“I don’t want to,” Cooper interrupted. “I’m serving my purpose here by scaring people away from this place. I’m not leaving.”
He said it so firmly that there was no arguing with him.
Lucas took my hand and guided me away from Cooper’s remains. He laid me gently on a bed of moss and kissed my forehead. “We’ll help him cross over once we get out of here. Sleep well, my miracle.”
“I’ll try,” I told him, and that’s all I remember before exhaustion overcame me and I drifted off.
When I woke hours later, the sun was already in the western sky. It had to be early afternoon, and I was parched and hungry. I looked over to see Miles and Grant still sleep. I could hear Talia’s and Lucas’s voices off in the distance.
I was achy this morning from sleeping on the ground, and it took me a while to actually get to my feet and walk over to them. As I got closer, I saw the glowing embers of our fire inside the tree. There weren’t flames; rather, the fire burned in a circle, eating away at the wood from the inside out. The hole was bigger than before, but there was still a long way to go until we reached the center. It wasn’t exactly a quick solution, but it was the best tool we had.
Talia tended to the fire, blowing through the straw to feed it oxygen. Every now and then, she added leaves or twigs to make it burn hotter. Cooper stood by watching, and Lucas sat on a log, sipping water from Grant’s water bottle. I didn’t know where he’d gotten it, because I thought we’d finished off the water last night. His eyes drooped, and bits of dirt stuck to his sweaty skin. He looked absolutely exhausted.
“I want to see Tyler do a punk rock cover,” Lucas said with a laugh. “I think he’d be really good at it.”
