If it rained, we were in trouble. Whatever evidence Bella had left in her wake could be washed away.
“I’ve got a ball of dollar bills in my sock drawer that says it won’t rain until noon.” Gabriel didn’t wait for Cady’s response before turning to me. “Sorrow’s Pass and the surrounding woods are bounded by cliffs on one side and ninety-degree inclines on the other. We can beat a wide path around the perimeter and work our way in.”
Our way, I thought, making my best attempt to swallow the implication there. Because we’re partners.
“Sounds like a plan.” Jude adopted a conspiratorial whisper and leaned toward Gabriel. “Good luck getting Kira to shut that ever-moving trap of hers. She’s a talker, this one.”
“I’ll talk enough for both of us.” Gabriel didn’t miss a beat. “If you promise to search for my body when she kills me dead.”
Very funny. The words were on the tip of my tongue, but they wouldn’t come. I was used to Jude whispering conspiratorially to me. I wasn’t used to my people opening the ranks to someone else.
“We’ll cover as much area as we can,” I said abruptly. I wasn’t here to converse—or make friends. I turned my attention to Saskia, leading her to get the scent of Bella’s blood.
“Kira?” Cady waited until I turned back to face her before parting with a final bit of instruction. Jude and Free had made me watch television frequently enough that I knew this was the part where most TV parents would have told us to be careful.
Cady had a different refrain. “Be smart.”
Despite his promise to talk enough for both of us, Gabriel gifted me with silence as we pushed through the woods. There was a chance he was hoping to prod me into speaking first.
Not going to happen. There had been a time in my life when people were convinced I couldn’t talk. If Gabriel was waiting for me to break, he was going to be waiting for a very long time.
It took half an hour to reach the forest’s edge. In that time, Saskia covered more ground than a human searcher could in an entire day—and found nothing. As the tree line broke and the three of us stepped out onto a rocky ledge, I realized that Gabriel hadn’t been exaggerating when he said that the search area was bounded on one side by cliffs.
The drop-off wasn’t just steep; it was deadly. Like the gods had sawed the edge of the mountain off with a knife. Rocks jutted out from the cliff’s side, and a light fog rose up from the valley, obscuring my view of the bottom, a thousand feet below.
Without meaning to, I walked closer to the edge and looked down. My heart didn’t beat faster. It didn’t jump into my throat. I thought about Bella Anthony, about how her story could end with a drop-off like this.
Girl is running. She bolts through the forest. She’s bleeding, stumbling. The memory hit me like a wave, but it was the undertow that pulled me down, down, down—
Can’t look back. Can’t stop. Girl is supposed to stay hidden. Brush bites at her face, arms, legs, but she can’t stop. Girl can never stop.
And then she needs to, and it’s too—
A sharp pain pulled me from the flashback. I looked down to see Saskia beside me, her teeth locked around my hand. She’d nipped once, hard enough to draw blood, but her grip was softer now—solid, implacable, but not painful as she pulled me back from the cliff’s edge.
It wasn’t until an instant later that I realized just how close I’d been standing, the tips of my toes hanging over the ledge. I took a step back, and gravel and dirt skittered over the side of the mountain, dropping soundlessly into the vast nothingness below.
A masochistic part of me held tight to the snatch of memory that had taken over my mind a moment before. I remembered running. I remembered the feel of a predator bearing down on me, the feel of being prey. I remembered skidding over uneven ground.
I remembered falling—and waking up in the ravine below.
Beside me, Saskia yipped sharply—just once, not an indication of anything other than her annoyance at my distraction.
Find. Play. That was what we were here to do. That was the mission.
“Yeah,” a low voice said behind me. “What she said.”
I turned to face Gabriel, ready and willing to make him back off if I had to. But for the first time since I’d met him, there wasn’t a hint of challenge in his expression. I’d known his eyes were dark brown, but standing this close, I could see a lighter ring around the pupil.
“You okay?” he asked.
I wiped my sweating palms roughly over the fabric of my pants. “I’m fine.”
* * *
As the morning wore on, the sky darkened overhead like a canvas painted in shades of black and blue and gray. Gabriel and I made our way from the cliffs inward toward the vertical incline of solid stone, stretching up in the direction of the mountain’s peak.
The terrain under our feet got more uneven, but I didn’t slow my pace, and Saskia didn’t slow hers. I could hear the crunch of Gabriel’s boot against gravel behind me, but I focused my senses outward and threw everything I had into forward momentum.
The rain was coming. It was only a matter of time.
Saskia looped back to check on me. She didn’t need me to tell her to keep going. And I didn’t need to stop for so much as a drink.
Chrrrrrk. Without warning, a rock shifted beneath my feet. I pitched forward. Fingers caught my arm and hauled me up. Breath on my neck. No space. No room. I heard noise but barely recognized that it was Gabriel talking. His grip on my arm wasn’t tight, but it didn’t matter.
My body was mine.
Instinct washed away everything else. I saw red. I felt my fingernails digging into the flesh of Gabriel’s forearm, hard enough to draw blood. On some level, I was prepared for him to fight back. I was ready for it, but instead, he let go of me.
It was three seconds—six heartbeats—before I processed that there was no retaliation forthcoming. It was another two seconds—three heartbeats—before I pried my fingers loose from Gabriel’s arm. My ears still roaring with white noise, I managed to focus on the outline of Saskia’s form beside me.
One second. My breathing slowed, and the sounds of the real world came slowly back. One heartbeat.
Gabriel’s gaze traveled down at the marks I’d left on his arm. I tried to find the words to ask him not to tell Cady. I was better than this. I had more control.
He found his voice before I found mine. To my surprise, he aimed his commentary to Saskia. “My apologies,” he told her as my canine partner stared him down. “It is understood that if I touch your human again, you will have no choice but to eat my face.”
Saskia seemed to find that acceptable.
“We good here?” Gabriel asked, finally glancing back at me.
My voice caught in my throat, but I pushed the words out. “We’re good.” I felt like I should say something else, but I’m sorry wouldn’t come. Instead, I knelt to Saskia’s level. “Find Bella.”
Saskia took off again. Gabriel and I set off in the same direction.
“I’m game to ignore the drop of rain I just felt if you are,” he informed me a few minutes later.
I upped my pace. “I’m game.”
The rain picked up. A clap of thunder sounded overhead, and I felt it, all the way to my bones.
“I don’t like the look of those clouds,” Gabriel told me. “I’m not saying we have to head back to base camp. I’m just saying that most people with smaller self-destructive streaks than mine would probably agree that we should.”
I stopped listening to Gabriel and started listening for Saskia. Horizontal lightning cut across the darkened sky. I brought my index fingers to my mouth and let out a sharp whistle. I trained my gaze in the direction Saskia had gone, waiting.
Nothing.
“Saskia should have checked back by now,” I said.
Gabriel scanned our surroundings and diverted from the path we’d been on a moment before. “She came this way.”
We moved fast and in tandem. The sky blacken
ed, like ink spilling onto a page. On the radio, the call came in for us to take shelter.
It’s just rain, I told myself. But that just rain was suddenly pelting us hard enough to leave marks.
Gabriel pressed past me, taking the worst of it as the wind beat against us.
“I don’t need you to protect me,” I bit out.
Saskia was my responsibility. Not Gabriel’s, not Cady’s—mine. Four years earlier, someone had dumped a bone-thin and bleeding adolescent husky on our property. She’d bristled if you looked at her, skittered backward if you stepped forward, and snapped when you got too close. Cady had managed to treat her wounds but ordered Jude and me to stay away.
I hadn’t. From the moment I’d seen her, from the moment she bared her teeth at me—Saskia was mine.
“Did you hear that?” Gabriel’s face was lit by another bolt of lightning—closer this time.
I froze, listening. Second after second ticked by—long enough for me to think of all the predators who lived in the mountains. Long enough for me to remember what Saskia’s coat had looked like, knotted with blood.
“I don’t hear anything.” The words felt rough against my throat.
Gabriel held up one hand. I stilled—and then I heard it. Faint but audible.
Saskia. Within the span of a heartbeat, I’d taken off running toward the distant sound of barking, toward her. The closer I got, the harder I ran.
Be smart. Cady’s admonition was there in my brain, but all I could think about was the fact that Saskia hadn’t come back. I’d called, and I’d whistled, and she hadn’t come back.
And that meant that she couldn’t.
I called her name again, and Saskia’s barking took on a more desperate quality. She wanted to get to me as badly as I wanted to get to her. Following the sound, vaguely aware that the rain was coming in sheets now, that I was bone-soaked, the ground beneath me was growing slicker by the second, I hauled myself up onto higher ground and found myself staring at rock—solid rock.
The mountain.
I could hear Saskia, but I couldn’t see her. All around me, stony crags too steep to climb jutted out of the ground.
“Kira!”
I turned. Gabriel was standing maybe fifteen feet away from me. He knelt to the ground, his gaze locked onto…something. I started making my way toward him, but as I did, the sound of Saskia’s barking grew fainter. Everything in me said to turn around, but I didn’t. It wasn’t until I was right on top of Gabriel that I saw what he’d seen—a break in the mountain, an opening large enough for a single person to squeeze through.
I crouched down to get a better look.
“Caves,” Gabriel said. “My brother used to insist that they were out here, but I spent an entire summer looking and never found one.”
I braced my palms against the rocks on either side of the entrance. I couldn’t see very far, but what I could see included a drop—a steep one. I stepped forward.
“Hold up there, princess.” Gabriel moved to block me. “Let’s not do anything rash.”
I squeezed past him, through the opening in the rock, and jumped down. I could hear Gabriel cursing behind me as I landed roughly on the cave’s floor. Lightning flashed behind me, allowing me to see—for an instant—that the cave stretched out for a dozen or so paces, then took a sharp turn to the right. I glanced back.
The entrance was a good seven or eight feet overhead. If Saskia had come this way, she wouldn’t have been able to make it out.
I reached into my pack and took out a flashlight. By the time I’d turned it on, I wasn’t the only one in the cave—and Gabriel wasn’t what I’d call happy about it.
“Does insanity run in your family?” he asked me, his voice a little too pleasant and his jaw clenched.
I held up my flashlight, then jerked my head toward his pack. Before he had his own flashlight out, I was already off and around the corner.
“Saskia?” I called, my voice echoing through the space. I heard her before I saw her, nails against the stone as she came barreling toward me. I knelt, the flashlight falling from my hand as my arms locked around her.
“Good girl,” I told her, my voice shaking as I ran my hands over her fur, assuring myself that she was all right. “That’s a good girl. I’m here, Sass. I’m here.”
She snuffed once, shook me off, and then barked.
Once. Twice. Three times.
“She found something,” Gabriel stated.
With barely a glance in his direction, I followed Saskia as she led the way deeper and deeper into the cave. I heard the sound of running water—an underground river?—but kept my focus on the here and now, the band of light cast by my flashlight illuminating the steel-gray ground beneath our feet.
The cave hit a dead end, and Saskia barked again, three times. Find. Recall. Re-find.
I knelt to jostle her back and forth, to scratch behind her ears, even as my left hand aimed the flashlight past her. There was a red windbreaker on the floor. I stood, angling the flashlight to get a better look as Gabriel did the same with his.
“Bella!” I called the little girl’s name. If she’d found her way down here, like Saskia, she might not have been able to find her way out. “Bella? Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
The ground shook with a roll of thunder, close enough to set my teeth on edge. I turned back to Gabriel.
“She was here,” I said.
Gabriel let his light roam over the area around us and stopped it on what appeared to be some kind of makeshift fire pit. He knelt next to it, dipping his fingers into the ash and studying the way the brush was scattered.
Then he looked back up at me. “Bella was here,” he echoed. “And she wasn’t alone.”
I tried to radio in what we’d found, but between the weather and the fact that we were inside the mountain, reception was shot.
We found Bella’s windbreaker. I ignored the roiling emotions gnashing inside me and focused on rehearsing what I would say when we finally got through. There are signs of a campsite. Bella isn’t just lost. Someone took her.
“You’re pacing.” Gabriel was leaning against the wall of the cave, standing guard over the evidence. Saskia lay at his feet, surprisingly docile. “Afraid that whoever has Bella might be coming back?”
Fear wasn’t something I felt about possible threats. Fear was here and now, fight or flight. I wasn’t afraid.
I was angry.
“Some crimes make sense.” I didn’t pause to think about how that comment might sound. “Taking what you need, even if it belongs to someone else. Striking hard and fast and first.”
But this? I stopped walking and stopped talking, because taking a child, hurting a child in any way?
“This doesn’t make sense.” Gabriel said the words for me.
Restless, I crouched, my weight on the balls of my feet and my fingertips braced against the cave floor. The scene looked no different from this angle. The harder I stared at the physical traces Bella had left behind, the further into my own mind I retreated.
Girl presses herself back into the darkness. Wet. Cold. Her throat burns. Can’t move. Can’t make a sound—
“Kira? Come in. Kira and Gabriel, come in.”
My hand tightened around the radio as I fought my way through the flashback, lashing out against the memories, tearing at them in my mind. The real world came slowly into focus.
I lifted the radio to my mouth. “Bella was here.” I’d practiced. I was ready. But somehow, the rest of what I needed to tell them wouldn’t come.
Gabriel squatted beside me. “We’ll give them directions,” he said quietly.
“We’ll give you directions,” I repeated. My grip on the radio relaxed slightly, and I continued, my eyes on Gabriel. “We found a cave. There are signs of a campsite.…”
* * *
It was another half hour before the rescue crew reached us. In the last few moments of quiet before the chaos descended, I made myself look at Gabriel. “B
ales was right. You know this mountain.”
That was the closest I could come to thank you.
Gabriel, apparently, wasn’t a person who liked to be thanked. “We both know who the real hero here is, and it’s not me. There’s no trace of hero in my DNA.” He nodded to Saskia. “All credit goes to her.”
Saskia was the one who’d found this place. She’d gone in blind. She’d taken the risk. It meant something that Gabriel recognized that, when most people couldn’t look past the wolf in her eyes.
“Kira!” Cady called my name from somewhere near the cave’s entrance.
“Here,” I called back, moving toward the sound of her voice. “Sass and Gabriel, too.”
A beam of light, brighter by far than what my flashlight could offer, flooded the entrance. Cady’s hair was soaked, her clothing dripping. Mackinnon Wade crouched beside her. With unnatural calm, he surveyed the situation, then dropped down into the cave himself. He let out a low, soothing whistle and held out a hand to Saskia.
My dog’s blue eyes studied the large man intently. After several long seconds, she approached.
“What do you say, superstar—how about we get you out?”
Gabriel snorted. “Saskia has a counteroffer. She would like to eat your face.”
To his credit, Mac didn’t seem to take offense. “Will she let me pick her up?” he asked me. “I can hoist her out without much fanfare.”
“Will she let a large man wrap his arms around her and constrain her?” I rephrased Mac’s question. The answer was obvious, but this was our chance to prove to Cady that my girl and I could work with a team.
“She trusts you,” Mac responded. “You need to trust me.”
“Kira has a counteroffer,” Gabriel started to quip.
I shot him a disgruntled look. “Shut up, Gabriel.”
Gabriel seemed to prefer being told to shut up to being thanked. As I turned my attention back to Mac, my pulse jumped slightly, and I tamped down on the part of me that had gone vigilant. Cady trusts Mac, I told myself. I pictured the photograph Free and I had found. Cady knows him.
My breathing evened out, and I knelt in front of Saskia. “Sit,” I said. I gestured, palm to the ground. “Down.”
The Lovely and the Lost Page 7