Free The Lost by Sarah Beth Durst

me someplace private to cut me to pieces and feed me to your teddy bear? Just curious.”
    The girl looks at me with her wide eyes. “My name is Claire. And my teddy bear is not hungry today.”
    “That’s...good?”
    Claire skips over rotted cardboard boxes and sashays around sodden trash. I hesitate, weighing my options: follow the little knife girl or break out on my own. I think I can outrun her, but so far she’s done nothing but help. She beckons me. I’ll trust her, I decide. The decision makes my head feel light and dizzy. Or maybe that’s the stench. The alley stinks as if a dozen cats have died underneath the piles of junk. Following Claire, I hold my sleeve over my mouth and breathe through it. It doesn’t help. The stench makes my eyes water. Worse, the ground squishes underneath my feet. I feel as though the smell is clinging to me. After a while, I stop looking down. I don’t want to know what I’m stepping in.
    The alley stretches for far longer than should be possible, given the size of the town. A town this size shouldn’t have an alley at all. As we turn a corner, Claire puts her fingers to her lips. We creep past an open door. I hear voices, loud male voices, but I can’t distinguish the words. They may not be English.
    I follow the little girl in silence as the alley twists and winds. Oddly, there are no intersecting streets. Only narrow, trash-choked alleys. We’re hemmed in by apartment buildings, each ten and fifteen stories tall. Some are brick and have balconies strung with laundry and cluttered with old bikes and dead plants. Others are sheer concrete, defaced with spray-painted bubble letters and symbols. I don’t know how I failed to see them from the center of town. It’s as if Main Street hid a portion of a city behind a small-town facade, which shouldn’t be possible, given the height differential of the buildings.
    Two lefts and a right later, Claire leads me to a set of basement steps. I halt at the top, which forces her to stop, too. “Exactly where are we going? Because that looks ominous to me.” I try to sound light, as if this is a kid’s game, but I hear my voice shake.
    Claire releases my hand and trots down the steps.
    “Claire, wait. Why are you helping me?”
    “Because you tried to leave, and then you came back,” she says.
    She knocks on the door twice slowly then three times fast, as if in a code. I hear footsteps approach the door. I bend my knees, prepared to run if I have to.
    “You came back,” she says. “You weren’t led back. The Finder didn’t bring you. Well, he did the one time, but not all the times you tried. I watched you. You didn’t see me, but I saw you.”
    “The Finder? Who’s the Finder?”
    With wide, innocent eyes, Claire says, “He is.”
    The door opens, and a man is silhouetted in the doorway. Light spills from behind him, and his face is shadowed, but I know him anyway. It’s the man in the trench coat who pushed me through the storm. “Nibble, nibble, gnaw. Who is nibbling at my house?”
    Laughing, Claire scoots under his arm and disappears inside. “I want cookies.”
    He looks at me, his face unreadable. “I know you, Little Red.”
    “She brought me,” I say.
    “Unusual.” He opens the door wider. “‘Will you walk into my parlor?’ said the spider to the fly. ‘’Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy.’”
    “The spider eats the fly,” I say, and do not move.
    “And the wolf eats Little Red.” He smiles at me as if we share a secret, and I feel caught in his smile like a fly in a web. He is as stunningly beautiful in the darkness as he was in the storm. “Of course, in this case, the role of ‘wolf’ will be played by feral dogs.” He nods at the alley behind me, and I hear a growl. I turn and see a mangy dog leap onto a broken crate. “They hunt in packs.” His voice is conversational, as if making a semi-interesting observation. “Dogs are lost every day. You may want to come