Page 94 of When the Snowman Whispered

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I looked down.

The bloody trail had ended.

I peered into the snow and spotted no one.

It was only silence and snow. The trees had ended next to us, right where the blood trail stopped. Now there was only an expanse of snow that spread out to the beginning of the mountains. Nothing walked in front of us. No creature howled, hooted, or squeaked.

No footprints lay in the snow.

Just silence.

An eerie, haunting silence.

That didn’t make sense. Nature was never silent. It was constantly making noise, no matter what time of year. Birds chirped. Acorns fell from branches. Bugs buzzed. Squirrels disrupted trees. Wind blew through branches. Snow melted and drip-dropped onto rocky ground. Things always breathed and moved.

The woods never stayed quiet.

“Is Faith near?” I got to Addie Mae’s side and scanned the space.

“Yes. She’s here. I can feel him and her all around us,” Addie Mae whispered. “Probably, right in front of us.”

And then someone punched me hard in my face.

Chapter 18

Daniel

I

fell back into the trees. “Fuck.”

My skin met bark.

Pain crashed through my neck and spine.

A man’s voice filled the air. “If you knew, what I knew, you’d help me kill her.”

I searched around, looking for the person. No one was there, not even Addie Mae. The buckets had dropped to the side.

The flowers had spilled out and rolled around like bowling balls in the snow. The huge blooms remained closed with their tongues inside. But they spun around all over the space as if hungrily catching a scent of something sweet to eat.

Where is she?

Addie Mae’s words rose in my head.

“Keep the bucket close to you,” she’d said. “The cold won’t harm the flowers. We just need to get them close to where he could be, and it’ll lick and suck his spirit away. And then I can fix all of this.”

I rose from the ground, formed my hands into fists, and stayed close to those big blooms. “Remy?!”

A whisper sounded from my right. “Only my friends call me that.”

I punched at the air.

Nothing.

I had no knowledge of this odd world Addie Mae and Faith had brought me into.

Can I punch him if he can punch me?

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