I held very, very still as sensation returned first to my fingers and toes.
Above me, Seth began to spout scripture as he held me half-submerged in the arctic flow. “‘For we were all baptised by one Spirit to form one body…’”
I tuned out his zealous babble, gently clenching the muscles in my feet, feeling the pull in response, then seizing the ones in my calves, forearms, and thighs.
My body was coming to life, not through God but through science and my sheer will.
I was going to get free.
I would not die here with this madman. I would not leave Loulou, not my niece and nephew, not the club I called my home.
I would absolutely not leave Priest without his heart, once more a dead man walking through his life without love.
“‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!’” Seth finalized my baptism with a flourish of raised voice, plunging me completely beneath the freezing waters.
I held my breath and sent a quick prayer to my God that I would survive this.
Then I moved.
With still reawakening arms, I shoved violently at Seth’s hands on my shoulders. He was unprepared for any movement, so immediately, his grip slipped. My hand found a large rock by his knee and pushed off against it, propelling me down the river.
Spluttering, I breached the surface for a gasping breath and saw Seth powering through the currents after me. I prayed as I was pulled beneath the surface that God would make the waters quicker than the man.
When I scrambled to the surface again, I was three metres away.
Then four.
Then six.
The river bent, taking me around the corner and out of sight of Seth. I fought my uncooperative limbs, trying to make it to the river bank. The rocks were slippery in my weak hold, the cold water robbing me of breath even when I surfaced to gulp it into my tight lungs. The effort exhausted me, but I was able to drag myself over the rocks to dry ground. I lay panting for only a moment before I heard the shush and splash of Seth still chasing after me.
I didn’t hesitate.
Priest had told me once that people seemed the most lucid in those moments right before he killed them, even if he’d spent hours decimating their minds and bodies. A clarity and calmness overtook them, and they submitted almost peacefully to their imminent doom.
I felt the clarity, but I fought tooth and nail against the inevitability of my doom.
I pushed my numb limbs and started to run, straight into the dark forest.
The crunch of snow beneath my feet, the hard bite of cold into my soles, and the icy fingers of air clutching at my wet hair and my drenched clothes—none of it registered. As I tore over the ragged terrain and sharp branches of bare alder trees slashed my skin like tissue paper, all I could see was hope dangling at some interminable point in the distance, drawing me forward. My breath was a steaming hiss in the cold as I forced myself faster, harder.
I had to escape.
I had to.
He would kill me, I knew, if not the moment he caught me, then soon after. There was no reasoning with madness, no words I could use that would properly translate into the language of his insanity. He was gone to it, as lost in his own mind as I was in the thicket of dense, dark trees.
Behind me, the sound of crunching snow under his heavy tread and the sharp crack of tree limbs giving away to a moving force. He was gaining on me.
I started to shout for help, my voice breathless and too shrill to carry. It was my last hope. My body was flagging, feet dragging through the snow. I couldn’t feel them anymore in the cold, and my head was spinning from the exertion and the remnants of drugs.
I wasn’t surprised when the harsh puncture of heaving breath broke through the air behind me, and a few seconds later, after dodging around a tree to outmaneuver him, a heavy, cracking weight settled against the back of my skull.
My legs crumpled beneath me, my torso impacting with the cold ground before I could get my hands out to catch my fall. The air shot from my lungs in a painful, bursting exhale.
The next second, he was on me, pressing his full weight into my back, my relatively recently healed ribs aching with the pressure.
“You can run, Bea, but you are God’s plan for me. There is no escaping that,” Seth cooed into my ear even as he tried to pin my hands behind my back.
He was close enough I could reach him with my teeth. I lunged before he could process the movement in the dark, clasping my teeth over the edge of his jaw and jerking hard. Flesh came away in my mouth; his coarse cry blasted in my face before he reared back and away.