Page 9 of Forest Reed (Seals on Fraiser Mountain #8)

Zoe

Midnight on the mountain tastes like metal and secrets. The animals were either sleeping or hiding.

I park Forest’s truck a quarter mile below the Timberline switchback, turn off the lights, and let the darkness settle in.

My breath forms a ghost in front of me. The trees are black cutouts against a star-filled sky, and every sound feels too loud, as if the night is holding its breath to see if I’ll mess this up.

I should give Lane a call, she is, after all, the Sheriff on Fraiser mountain.

“Check,” Forest’s voice murmurs in my ear. Throat mic. Low. Steady. “Comms good?”

“Loud and handsome,” I whisper back. “How’s the nest?”

“Fifteen yards upslope. Net’s rigged. Your ‘come alone’ line is live.”

I pull my hood up, shove my hands into my pockets to look small and cold, and start up the trail.

We spent the last hour turning their tricks into ours—Forest stringing the net we stole across a narrow pinch in the path, blending it as if it grew there.

He set a rattle-can alarm forty feet back to give us a head start if someone came from behind.

He left me a small talisman at my hip: a tiny vial of pepper gel he called “city bear spray.” I told him I didn’t need it. I took it anyway.

The switchback sign floats out of the dark like a ghost. I stop beside it, deliberately in the open. My phone’s dead on purpose. The burner in my pocket buzzes once—silent vibration against my thigh—and then again. I let it buzz a third time before I answer.

“Hello?” I make my voice flat, bored. A cop who has no idea she’s walking into a trap.

“You came,” a man says, smooth, confident, and utterly sure I’ll follow his dots wherever he paints them. Not Harris. Older. Colder. “Alone?”

“Like the text said.” I tip my head back. The stars don’t blink. A gust of wind brings me pine and something faint and chemical—machine oil. “Where’s the part where you monologue and confess everything?”

A soft laugh. “You brought a friend last time. The pier? The man with the hateful hoodie.”

“Yeah,” I say, casually. “He has strong opinions about brine.”

Leaves whisper uphill. Not wind. Feet. Two sets. Maybe three. “You like games,” I add. “You left me an unlogged phone. Cute.”

“Consider it a professional courtesy,” the voice says. He’s close enough that he should be fogging the air. He doesn’t. He’s on a relay, talking from somewhere else while his people do the dirty work. “Step forward ten paces. Set the bag down.”

“What bag?”

A pause. He hadn’t liked that. Good.

Another sound joins the night—a faint buzz I now recognize on instinct. A drone. I keep my face lazy and my body loose and tilt my head like I’m hearing crickets.

“Detective,” the voice purrs, “we’re going to keep this simple. Hands up.”

I lift my hands. I’m not stupid; I want to live long enough to be annoying in a courtroom.

A figure emerges from the trees to my right, gray jacket, forgettable face—Ravine Guy—with two more ghosts behind him. One aims a net gun at my legs. The other has a stance that suggests he’s been paid to stand in doorways and get in the way since high school.

“Alone,” Gray Jacket remarks, eyes sliding past me into the dark where he can’t quite see Forest. “How brave.”

“Brave is showing up to a first date with mustard stains,” I say. “This is just Tuesday.”

He smiles, small and mean. The drone dips closer, red light winking. My skin tries to crawl off my bones. Forest’s breath is a warm shadow in my ear, not words, just presence. Waiting for my mark.

“Turn around,” Gray Jacket says. “Hands behind—”

“Actually,” I say sweetly, “how about you go first?”

I step right. It’s an inch, a whisper of motion, nothing. It’s also enough.

“Now,” I whisper.

The forest answers with gravity.

The net drops like a hungry mouth, rope and lead swallowing Gray Jacket and his net-gun friend in one greedy gulp. They flail, cursing. The third ghost jumps sideways, stumbles into the rattle can, trips, and kicks it—metal screams, birds explode out of a tree like confetti.

I dive low as the net-gun misfires and tangles its owner’s legs. I may have chuckled. Forest hits the slope in three silent bounds, a shadow with teeth. He hits the drone out of the air with one clean snap of his wrist—it pinwheels, sparks, and dies in the pine needles.

Gray Jacket grabs for his knife. I’m faster. I slam my palm into his wrist, twist, and feel the knife go where knives go when they meet the ground at speed. He snarls and drives his shoulder into me. The world flips; bark kisses the side of my face with sandpaper affection, before I drop him.

“Forest,” I hiss into my radio.

“Copy,” Forest says, and there’s something like a smile in it.

The third guy lunges with a taser that crackles blue. I pop the pepper gel and paint his face at arm’s length. He screams, blind, and I kick the taser into the dark with the satisfaction of a woman who has definitely had dirt in her bra today.

Forest hauls the net’s cinch rope, flips the mess, and suddenly Gray Jacket and Friend are upside down, trussed against a pine like misbehaving raccoons. He ties a knot I’ve only ever seen in boats and nightmares. It looks permanent.

I step in close and pat Gray Jacket down one-handed, very professional, very calm. His breath saws, pepper-hot and furious. I pull a phone, a key fob, and a little rubber stamp from his pocket—a pine tree. Of course.

“Cute,” I say, showing him the stamp. “You guys going to do matching tattoos next?”

He spits at my feet. I lean out of the way and smile like I’m the most patient person alive. “Tell your boss his ‘professional courtesy’ needs work.”

There’s a crackle in my ear. Not Forest. The burner in my pocket vibrates again. I put it on speaker and hold it up, because if this man wants an audience, he can have one.

“Detective Brewer,” the voice says, still smooth, a small thread of irritation now woven through it. “You’re not following instructions.”

“Neither are your employees,” I say, and angle the speaker so the trussed raccoons can glare at it. “They forgot to bring flowers.”

A pause. Then: “Mr. North will be displeased.”

There it is. A name. I file it away, underlined, starred, and circled. “K. North?” I ask, casual. “Briar Logistics? Pier Nine? Your coordination game is rusty.”

Gray Jacket’s eyes snap to mine. Fear, quick and bright. He hadn’t expected me to have the ledger. Good.

The voice goes silk again. “You’ve wandered off your trail, Detective. You belong in the city.”

“I disagree,” I say lightly. “The coffee’s better up here.”

Another buzz overhead. Forest’s hand clamps on my arm, firm. “New drone,” he murmurs. “Bigger. Back.”

We melt under the switchback berm as a larger quad hovers in, this one carrying a canister like a soda bottle. It releases from twenty feet, arcs, and lands where I’d been standing with a soft thud and a hiss.

“Gas!” Forest snaps.

We’re already on the move. Mountain rules: don’t run downhill on loose pine needles unless you know where you’ll stop. We run sideways, then up, zigzagging, breath timed, eyes watering as the sweet-sting of CS gas drifts across the trail. The two tied-up men cough and curse like a Greek chorus.

“Detective,” the voice says, calm as a lullaby through the burner. “Last chance. Leave the map on the stump. Walk away.”

“Hard pass,” I say, gagging, and cut left where Forest had shown me the escape line earlier, a deer track you had to know to see. He takes the rear, body between me and the drone, one arm banded around my waist, when the ground goes treacherous and tries to ice-skate me into a ravine.

We burst into a small, protected pocket of trees below the gas line. Wind takes the cloud the other way. I cough until my lungs stop complaining and lean hard into Forest because it’s either that or keel over.

“You good?” he asks, thumb quick at my cheekbone, checking pupils like a medic and a man who cares with the same hand.

“Fine,” I rasp, water falling from my eyes.

We circle behind the switchback, flanking the drop zone.

The big drone hangs for a beat, uncertain, trying to find us.

That’s its mistake. Forest lifts a weighted line, swings it once, and snags a rotor.

The drone wobbles, overcorrects, and kisses a fir with enough enthusiasm to fall in love and then to the ground. Sparks. Silence.

We move fast before whoever’s on overwatch decides to stop playing with toys and try bullets.

At the stump where the voice told me to leave the map, Forest lifts the lid on a shallow cache.

Inside: a manifest sheet laminated against the weather, three burner SIMs in a rubber band, and a bright-blue wristband like the kind you get at a festival.

I slide the manifest out. The column headers are lies—“Syrup,” “Kegs,” “Dry Goods”—but the route codes hum like the truth. P9 → TL → SB2 → DS → ML. Pier 9 to Timberline to Switchback 2 to Devil’s Stair to… “Mirror Lake,” I breathe.

Forest points to the time column: blocks of midnight run every other night for the next ten days. Besides tomorrow’s: DROP: 0200 / HAND: N.

“North,” I say softly. “He’s coming himself.”

“Or he wants us to think he is,” Forest says. He slides the SIMs into a pouch, tucks the wristband away. “Either way, we’re not letting this go.”

A twig snaps behind us. Not loud. Not close. Enough to remind me we’re not in a vacuum.

“Showtime’s over,” Forest murmurs. “Hug the trees. We peel low and loop to the truck.”

I nod. “And the raccoons?”

“Sheriff can pick them up off the hook. I texted the coordinates on a Blink app before we came in.”

“You and your mountain apps.”

“Don’t knock what keeps you from explaining nets to Internal Affairs.”

We move. The gas has thinned. The stars feel closer. My eyes stop burning enough to see the cut of Forest’s jaw when he smiles without meaning to, adrenaline and relief tripping over each other.

“You realize,” I whisper as we slide into the trees, “you owe me dinner times seven for tonight.”

“Seven?” he murmurs.

“Net. Drone. Net again. Gas. Taser. Raccoon handling fee. And more I’ll remember later.”

He squeezes my hand once, quick and hidden. “Deal.”

The burner buzzes one more time in my pocket. I don’t look. Forest does. The screen glows with a new message—short, sharp.

SEE YOU AT THE WATER.

—N

I tuck the phone away and square my shoulders against the cold. “Good,” I say, voice steady. “Because I’ve got questions.”

“And I,” Forest says, low and certain, “have answers he’s not going to like.”