The Vines by Shelley Nolden (ebook and pdf reader .TXT) 📕

Across the narrow clearing loomed the wall of dense foliage. Searching for where he’d punched through this morning, he swept his light along it. With each second he wasted, his adrenaline surged.

A bolt of lightning fractured the sky, and he spotted a cluster of broken branches. To reach them, he would have to cross the open space, where he’d be entirely at her mercy. Despite her command, he shifted his bag to shield his spine.

Halfway to cover, he glanced back. She hadn’t yet emerged. To buy himself time, he could Frisbee-throw her dime novel. With a storm coming, he doubted she’d leave it there. But even with the detour, she’d catch up. And then there’d be hell to pay.

Instead, he plowed through the thicket. Brambles scraped his arms. The buzzing of insects merged with the groaning of the trees in the wind.

His light lurched from one shadow to the next as he searched for the male dormitory, the last structure he’d passed on his way to the tuberculosis pavilion.

The air trilled, and a blade sank into the earth five feet ahead of him, immediately lost to the undergrowth.

She had to be among the branches above. Instinctively, he hunched his shoulders and covered his head with one hand.

“Keep moving!” she barked.

Lightning streaked across a gap in the tree canopy, flooding his retinas. The toe of his boot caught something hard, shrouded by ferns, causing him to stumble.

“That was a street curb.” This time her voice had come from ahead.

He directed his beam at the trees bordering the ivy-covered lane.

“There must be hundreds like it in Gotham.” She coughed, that gritty sound.

This nightmare was getting more bizarre by the minute. “Come down, where I can see you.”

The air whistled.

He jumped to the side, and a faint chink sounded, barely wide of where he’d been.

Shuffling his feet, Finn continued moving.

The cistern sparked with the reflection of lightning. “One-one-thousand, two-one—” A rolling boom reverberated in his chest. Ahead, he could just make out the maintenance building that flanked his escape route. Launching his kayak in this weather would be reckless, but he liked those odds better than his probability of staying alive here.

He reached the path through the trio of buildings by the docks. The Harbor Unit wouldn’t patrol during an electrical storm, but someone in the Bronx might notice his flashlight and call the police, who’d likely arrive too late. Also, he couldn’t risk tipping them off before fully understanding his father’s connection to her. He turned it off.

A ping sounded from close behind him. He whipped around just as a surgical knife skittered across the cracked pavement. It must have bounced off his canteen bottle.

“What the hell was that for?” he asked, addressing the forest.

“The road at your back, between the two buildings: take it.”

Gladly, he thought and hurried toward the city lights on the far shore. The seawall came into view. Soon he’d be within sprinting distance of his kayak.

“Stop!”

He halted and clenched his jaw to hide his irritation.

“You see that building ahead, with the arched windows? Head in there.”

The morgue and pathology building. Originally, it had been a church, though God had abandoned the structure long ago. “No way,” Finn stated even as he memorized the placement of its windows and door, which would orientate him once inside.

A scalpel sailed past his right shoulder.

“That was intentionally long.”

As soon as he entered that building, she’d once again have him cornered.

He turned to face her.

Just visible from the light pollution, she was standing at the edge of the ivy lane.

“Move it, Gettler!” she barked. “Your dad will be here soon.”

“You didn’t need to lie; you already had me by the balls.”

“I didn’t lie. Not entirely. I did speak to Lily.” She motioned toward the foreboding, two-story brick structure.

Blood rushed to his ears. “So, what did you really say?”

“That she’ll have to find a new boyfriend,” she said, tossing a scalpel toward the brooding sky.

Horrified, Finn reflexively shielded his chest and face.

Catching the knife, she continued, “It may take her a while to realize it, but she’ll be far better off without you. Now get going.”

Clenching the flashlight—his only weapon—he strode toward the dark doorway, suddenly less confident in his conviction that he couldn’t possibly hurt a woman who’d been as damaged as her scars suggested.

1910–1915

May 1910

ora hugged her shins over her shroud and tried to ignore the water lapping the dock below her. Only because of O’Toole, seated beside her with his fishing rod, had she ventured this close to the river in which she’d almost drowned two and a half years ago.

The bacteria density of the specimens collected after her and Mary’s failed escape had almost matched those taken the day before. She hadn’t needed the doctor’s “scientific mind” to deduce that her immunities worked only while on the island. Something—or some being—was keeping her here. She was still trying to figure out what, and why, but she did have a theory too audacious to voice.

Knowing the cause wouldn’t make her existence any less lonely, or the doctor’s procedures any less agonizing. But it might make it easier not to give up. Lately the temptation had been strong.

Three months earlier, after three years of forced quarantine for Mary, the new health commissioner had granted her permission to return to the city, provided she find employment that didn’t involve cooking. Ever since Mary’s solicitor, Francis O’Neil, had taken on her case pro bono a year earlier, Cora had been steeling herself for the loss of her friend. Yet every morning since their tear-streaked good-bye, while drinking her tea alone, Cora had still felt as hollow as the stem of a joe-pye weed.

Similarly, Canne, who’d tossed them a newspaper each morning, then left a shell or flower on Mary’s windowsill each evening, had been acting like a dogwood that hadn’t sprung to life with the rest of North Brother’s ornamental trees and shrubs.

His feelings for Mary had bloomed last winter when she’d learned that Alfred, who in