Elise's legs carried her down the hallway before her brain caught up. Splinters and friction burns raked over her knees as she landed on the coarse floorboards, summoning more tears into her drowned eyes. She shook Cadence by her arm, but the girl barely stirred.

     "Come on, Cade, look at me." Elise's voice was a whisper, yet it pierced the air with the vehemence of a blood-curdling howl. Rubbing away what tears would leave her eyes, she rescued one of Cadence's limp hands from the crimson stain that grew across her top. Wet warmth passed beneath her pleading fingertips. "Fuck, no! Come on, Cade, just look at me, please!"

     Choking on a mix of air and saliva, Cadence struggled and strained until she looked at Elise. Her chest stilled.

     "Damn it. I should've known she'd lash out," James said through heaving breaths, one hand clutched around his shoulder. Despite being spoken to the back of her head, the words made sure to reach Elise's ear with a searing sting. "If only you two had just kept your damn noses out of things, we'd all be fine."

     "What happened? Is Cadence okay?" There pulsed an urgency in Florence's flurried questions that had never before graced her tone in Elise's hearing. After lying dormant for so long, the writer was finally awake to the world again, and she was powerful. "What the hell have you done, boy?"

     "I did it for you, Florence," James said, his protesting outburst capturing the attention of the rest of the cottage's occupants. "That burden of a brat is all but gone, and soon you'll be free of those leeching publishers too. Can't you see that?"

     The next drawer was completely bare. As the unit reached the end of its rails, a gaping hole appeared where its rear panel once stood. Elise slid the drawer shut, praying that the key had not become the broken container's latest victim.

     Though racked with sobs, Florence's voice boomed with the same raw, elemental energy as the storm outside. "There's only one leech here!" she roared with enough force to shake the walls. The man inched towards her, and she leaned forward in her seat. "Get out of my sight. Get out and don't you dare let me see your bloody face again."

     "What?" Blank shock settled on the lines of James' expression. "No, no, I – she came at me, Florence. I didn't want any of this. I wanted to help you!"

     "And I want you to fuck off and leave me alone!" Florence cried, spit flying from her lips. Her anger lifted her from her seat without aid, and when she did take her stick in hand, it was to thrust it in James' face. The grip cracked against his jaw, and the blow stoked Florence's flames to a white-hot blaze. "You've killed her. You've killed my daughter!"

     The claim shrieked in Elise's mind. Cadence was not dead. Cadence could not be dead, not when the girl still lived so freely and vividly in the sunniest frames of her memory. Through harm and heartache, she had never given up on Elise, and Elise was not about to give up on her.

     She pinned her eyes on James, who ran his hands through his sweat-beaded hair over and over. "Cade's still alive," she said as she rose to her feet. "But she needs help. We have to get her out right now."

     "I meant well." Though his eyes were open and his movements alert, James did not acknowledge Elise's words. "Why couldn't she see that? Why did she have to get in the way?"

     "We don't have time for your self-pity," Elise groaned, crossing the space and floating firmly within her seminar leader's field of vision. After months of calling her out in class and prying into her personal affairs, she was not about to let James avoid her now. "An ambulance won't make it out here. Where's your car key?"

     "No! You can't leave," James said with a snatch at Elise's frayed sleeve. Framed by the stolen traces of light from upstairs, he fixated on her face like a lost, stranded child. What lay behind his eyes was a core of guilt draped in the magma of anger, encased in a dark, terrified crust. He was beyond vulnerable; he was volatile. "Florence has to finish, else she'll be stuck in her contract until she's too sick to do anything. Then everybody will find out about her condition, and she – she trusted me to help her finish things on her terms."

     Rain clattered against the cottage's roof. Lightning flashed through the windows, highlighting the dark circles that fettered Florence's eyes and the deep grooves through her brow. Familiar as the features themselves were, there was a newfound fragility invested in every wet tear, every crack of skin. She was feeling her age, her condition, the pain of her daughter's battle. She had seized the wild horses of her emotions for the first time since Elise had met her, and it had already taken its toll. She was exhausted.

     But Elise was not. Elise was wired on something too potent for any amount of fatigue or injury to overcome. Elise was furious with James, with Florence, with the world, and surprisingly, yet definitely, with Cadence.

     "Sometimes, the best way to help someone is to listen to them," she said, yanking herself free of James' hold. If she had gained anything from sitting through hour after hour of his lectures, it was the ability to turn his own words against him. "If you're really Florence's friend, then listen to her when she tells you that she doesn't give a shit about the stupid book, not anymore."

     Seized by confusion, James centred his attention on his mentor. Neither of them made a sound, yet a complex exchange played out on the pages of their faces, every line delivered on a level beyond human hearing.

     Elise knew how to write this scene. "Can't you see that all she cares about now is making sure her daughter wakes up tomorrow?"

     All eyes in the hallway fell on James, their blinks muted and hesitant. They watched his face, yet no radiant revelation or pyre of anger lit up his face's shadows. All that eked from his stoic reflection was a string of tense, flat breaths. "Check in the third drawer along. The car's parked just off the entrance road."

     The words infused Elise with the energy she needed to retrieve the key, yet a guttural cry heaved through the space as she found it. Behind her, with one blood-drenched hand swiping at the doorhandle over her head, Cadence dragged herself to her feet. She managed a single step before she stumbled on a slight lip between the floorboards, and she sharply took breath as she barely caught her fall.

     Both Melody and Natalie moved for her side, yet Cadence waved them away. "I'm good," she gasped, her voice little more than a slur of grunts and groans. As she scraped her way into another step, her foot skidded out from beneath her to slam her back into the floor. She cried out, cursed through her sparse breaths, and started picking herself up again. "No, no, I..."

     "You what?" Elise snapped as she stormed to her friend's side. She kneeled to catch Cadence's eye, and heat flared from where her nails pressed into her palms. "You can walk?"

     Sucking in air to quell her pain, Cadence slowly nodded.

     "Then fucking walk!"

     Tears streaming from her reddened eyes, Elise looped Cadence's arm around her shoulders. The knife handle grazed against her side, and she choked down a bout of nausea before meeting her friend's eye. "I've got you, Cade."

     With stuttered grunts, Cadence pressed down on Elise's shoulders. The force crushed down on the little strength that dwelled within Elise's body, and a string of bloody droplets spattered over the floorboards from both their sets of injuries. Defiant, Elise poured everything into carrying her friend down the hallway. She had to get Cadence out. She had to tell her just how stupid she had been.

     They lumbered together as far as the doorway before Cadence suddenly stopped. With a steady, deflating groan, she slumped down Elise's side until she landed on her trembling knees. Hidden in the depths of her greying skin, lights still twinkled in Cadence's eyes, yet one by one they gradually flitted away into the bleak twilight that claimed her. Her final midnight hour was fast approaching.

     "Don't you do this, Cade. Don't you dare do this to me," Elise uttered with a frantic engine firing hotter in a battle to keep her balance. Every step grew hard and heavy in the storm, the wild winds shackling them with the black burdens of doubts, regrets, and fears.

     Drenched in rain, dirt, and loose foliage, the flashes of light from the dark saloon car's headlamps barely breached the night's heavy veil. Elise lifted Cadence to her feet and called out over their neighbouring shoulders. "Get in the car. I'll drive."

     "Are you sure about that?" Melody asked from the shelter of the doorway, worry drawing deep lines over her brow. Through the downpour, she reached out with a composure that betrayed no inkling of the ordeal they had just witnessed. "No offence, but you're not in much better shape than Cadie is."

     "I said I'll drive!" Elise's response blared out over the clap of nearby thunder and battered the strength from her faltering lungs. As her friend's weight pressed down on her shoulder, her anger washed away under a torrent of urgency. "Please, Melody. I'll be okay. I have to do this, and I need you to trust me."

     From the hallway, Natalie approached Melody's side to pass Florence's searching grasp onto the other girl's arm. "It's okay. If Ellie thinks she can do it, then she'll do it," she said as a gentle, apologetic smile strayed across her face. Even from a distance, the soft tilt of her head shone with traces of a reassuring warmth. "I trust her."

     Melody placed her hands over Florence's and stepped, without flinching, into the rainstorm. "Just give us a warning if you're about to pass out at the wheel."

     The car was larger than anything Elise had handled before, a point reinforced by the imposing wingspan of its opened doors. Backed by plush, polished black leather, the seats sank with just the right amount of give to ease the tired bodies of their new occupants. Frantic nerves dictated that Elise reserve the extra space of the front for Cadence, and the girl rolled into the passenger seat without a word of protest. In fact, she landed in the seat without any words at all.

     Elise shook Cadence by the arm as she fastened her friend's seatbelt. "Are you still with me, Cade? Still holding on for me?"

     Cadence lay still and soundless.

     Slamming the passenger-side door shut, Elise rushed into the driver's seat and spurred the car into motion. The rear-view mirror reflected the swing of the cottage's front door, and James stood on the cusp of the entrance landing's shadows. He stared through the vehicle, enraptured by the storm that swallowed the land. A dense, unseen weight carried him to the floor as Elise rolled the car onto the entrance road and pulled away.

     Debris littered the road. Racked by the lashing strikes of the forest's fallen foliage, the road surface spluttered and sank beneath rivers of brackish rainwater. A wet, rotten stench spread between the trees, and its tang breached the car's walls to fester in the throats of its riders. Banks of dense cloud shut out the moonlight, casting all but the traced silhouettes of nearby trees into a depthless darkness. The tyres squealed for extra grip, but none came.

     Shaking off the dizziness that throbbed through her head, Elise clenched the steering wheel and stamped her foot on the accelerator. Her gaze flitted between the road ahead, the tall trees looming in all directions, and the numb swaying of Cadence's body between the sides of her seat. Sat behind her daughter, Florence receded into her blanket, her glazed eyes fixed on the chaos beyond the glass of her window.

     A brief wisp of blue light penetrated the woodland's gloom. It vanished in an instant, and as Elise searched for its source, another star flashed through the trees, and another after that. Smothered by the rustle of whipping tree branches, the oscillating bass of a repetitive noise blared from the forest's outer limit. They were sirens, and they hurtled towards them with unwavering urgency. Matt had come through after all.

     At the first glimmer of approaching headlights, Elise flickered the vehicle's lamps and slammed her palm on the centre of the steering wheel. The car's horn boomed out into the forest, banishing the rain and darkness to allow the fronts of two police cars and an ambulance to emerge from the mist. Their wheels screeched over the flooded road, coming to a halt on either side of the slowing saloon car.

     Elise threw herself out of the car as it coasted to a stop. "Stop, please!" she yelled through the pangs that blurred her vision and clouded her thoughts. With a flap of her arms, she called the occupants of the marked cars out into the storm. "Stop!"

     A man in a forest green fleece jacket hopped from the ambulance's passenger-side door. From his shoulder, a wide fabric strap led down to a bulky green bag that bounced off his hip. He followed Elise's direction to the saloon car's passenger side, his eyes widening at the sight of Cadence's fading features.

     The driver's door of the nearest police car cracked open, and a woman in a dark blue windbreaker ran across the road. "Are you alright, miss?" she asked, steadying Elise's staggering body on the hood of the saloon car. "What happened? We received a report about some people trapped out here."

     "There's a cottage further along this road," Elise replied through wheezing breaths. As she tried to wrangle her words into a coherent order, the buzzing ache at the back of her mind swelled louder and louder. "The man there, he took us all and...and he hurt my friend. I have to make sure she's okay!"

     "Christ, what on earth..." the officer muttered as her gaze passed over the heavy blood streaks that stained Cadence's seat. Though visibly shaken, she recovered enough professionalism to meet Elise's eye. "We've got your friend now, alright? My colleagues will get you back to town and sort you all out. You're safe now."

     "But I need to be with Cade," Elise said, her girl's name lingering on her lips long after the sound fled with the wind. She lunged forward and gritted her teeth to shrug off the mounting heaviness that possessed her head. "I have to be there when she wakes up. I have to!"

     The police officer reached out to hold Elise back. "Slow down!" she cried through the rain, and tangible notes of concern wrapped around her tone the longer she received no response. "Can you hear me, miss?"

     While Elise did hear her, the sound arrived from an impossibly far distance. The officer's speech echoed around the expanding cavern of Elise's mind, shifting and warping to the shocks of pain that assaulted her in quick succession. With a flare of red, pulsing light, she suddenly heard nothing, saw nothing, and felt nothing but the dull ache that shut her every nerve down. She was numb. She could not stop herself slipping away.

     She could only give in to the blissful peace of surrender.