Page 23 of The Lovely and the Lost
“Standard operating procedures,” Jude translated, whispering in my left ear. “And in case you can’t tell, our good friend Gabriel doesn’t appear to deal well with authority figures, our own dear grandpapa excluded.”
Mac didn’t rise to the bait. “The dogs needed to rest. So did Cady.”
“Cady can take care of herself.” My foster mother strode past Mac to address Gabriel directly. “You know this mountain?”
“I spent a lot of time out here growing up,” Gabriel stated. “Then again, from what I hear, so did you.”
Free chose that moment to lean forward and pluck a stray leaf from Cady’s hair. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like crap.”
Now that Free had mentioned it, I could see the strain on Cady’s face, the wear. She’d sent me home to sleep, but the dark circles under her eyes told me that she hadn’t gotten any herself.
“Last I checked,” Mac told Cady mildly, “pacing the scene, badgering the rangers, and waiting for your kids to arrive doesn’t qualify asresting.”
I expected Cady to put Mac in his place, but a flicker of emotion took hold of her features. “Mac? You don’t need to tell me that when people get tired, they make mistakes.”
What mistakes?I thought.What people?
Cady supplied zero context for her words. “One hour off,” she told Mac. “For both of us. That’s all we can afford. In the meantime…” She knelt down to greet the dogs. “Jude, Free: See if the bloodhounds can pick up the trail and follow it as far as you can. Kira, I want you and Saskia to give the hounds a wide berth. We’ve got weather headed in and need to cover as much ground as we can before it gets here.”
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 tome. 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 Icouldn’ttalk. 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.