Page 25 of The Lovely and the Lost

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 blackened, 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 thatjust rainwas 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 wasmine.

“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 shecouldn’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 littletoopleasant 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.”