The person was still pressed against the tree trunk, staring at Aria with a shell-shocked look on his or her sooty face. “Come on,” Aria wailed, starting to run. “We have to get out of here before we’re dead!”
31
RISING FROM THE ASHES
Emily, Spencer, and Hanna sprinted out of the barn, running as fast as they could away from the flames that had erupted around them. The air smelled thickly of smoke and burning trees. Emily’s lungs burned as she ran.
They waded through a bunch of thick shrubs, ignoring the burrs that were affixed to their sweaters, skin, and hair. Then Hanna abruptly stopped and pressed her hands to the top of her head. “Oh my God,” she wailed. “Wilden. I saw him the other day at Home Depot, loading a bunch of drums of something into his car. It was propane.”
Emily felt nauseated and dizzy. She thought of how Jason had stared right at her the other night, after he’d left Jenna’s house. How Wilden had glared at them at the party. They knew.
“Come on,” Spencer urged, pointing through the trees. They could see the outline of Spencer’s windmill ahead. Safety was close.
The wind kicked up, blowing ashes everywhere. Something flat and square fluttered past Emily, coming to a stop at the foot of a small, knobby tree. It was the picture from the Ali shrine, the one of Ali wearing a Von Dutch T-shirt and the four of them surrounding her, laughing. The corners of the photo were charred from the flames, and half of Spencer’s head had been burnt away. Emily gazed into Ali’s joyful, bright blue eyes. Here they were, running through the very woods where she’d died, with quite possibly the same people who had killed her trying to kill them, too.
They burst into Spencer’s backyard, coughing the noxious smoke out of their lungs. The Hastingses’ windmill was on fire, too. Each of the old, wooden blades broke off and clattered to the ground. The bottom part, which had LIAR written across it in bloodred spray paint, was lying flat on the grass, seemingly burning the brightest.
A thin scream emerged from the woods. At first Emily thought it was a fire engine siren—surely they were on their way. Then, she heard another scream, shrill and terrified. She grabbed Spencer’s hand. “What if that’s Aria? Her new house is one neighborhood over. She could’ve cut through the woods to get here.”
Before Spencer could answer, two figures tumbled out from the thick, burning trees. Aria. Someone else was behind her, someone dressed in a bulky hooded sweatshirt and jeans.