Page 42 of The Lovely and the Lost

Not a woman. Not bleeding.

Gabriel.

I was used to the forest haunting my dreams, used to shades of memory bleeding over into the light of day. But this was different.

This wasn’t the forest.

This wasn’t Girl.

My breath was coming quickly, my heart hammering in my chest as I knelt next to Gabriel’s body. He lay facedown, his head turned to one side. My hand crept toward his face. It was only after I’d felt his breath, warm against my palm, that I realized why I’d reached out.

To make sure he was breathing.

To make sure he was alive.

I could see now, the way his chest rose and fell. He let out another low-pitched moan, and I understood what I should have assumed from the onset—he was sleeping.

How many nights had I spent on the floor instead of pinned down under covers in a bed? How many times had I woken, a strangled cry dying in my throat?

And yet, when I’d seen him lying there, I hadn’t thought that he was sleeping.

I shouldn’t be here.

In the months after Cady had found me, that feeling had been with me constantly. Even once I’d accepted that I was Kira, that I was human, that I waswanted, the white-hot realization that I wouldn’t ever fully belong in this world could hit me in an instant.

Get it together, Kira.Bales had said the day before that Gabriel wouldn’t thank me for having overheard their conversation. I doubted he’d be any more charitable finding me crouched over his sleeping body.

I stood and backed away in a single, liquid motion. I turned toward the door, intending to flee, but as I did, I caught sight of the wall I’d reached for when I’d stumbled backward. My hand had hit paper, and now I could see why.

The surface was covered, ceiling to floor, with notes and maps, photographs and pins. I recognized bits and pieces from the missing persons reports I’d read over, but that was nothing compared to the whole.

An eight-foot-by-ten-foot map of Hunter’s Point and the adjacent mountain hung in the center, marked up so thoroughly with black marker and flags that I could barely make out the words underneath. Smaller maps broke the rest of the Sierra Glades into quadrants.

Seven hundred and fifty thousand acres,I thought, reaching up to press my fingertips gently against the map in the center. In a lifetime, Gabriel couldn’t cover that much ground.

But he could try.

Bales had claimed that Gabriel knew the mountain better than anyone. Now I understood why. I thought back to the way that Gabriel had helped me find Saskia when she’d gone missing.

Caves,I could hear him telling me.My brother used to insist that they were out here, but I spent an entire summer looking and never found one.

Based on what I’d seen on Gabriel’s wall, I was willing to bet he’d spent longer than one summer looking. In fact, I would have bet the clothes off my back that he’d spentyears.

“A quiet Kira bodes well, I always say!” Jude plopped down beside me. I was sitting with my back up against the tree I’d slept under our first night in Hunter’s Point.

“Is this an ‘obsessing over the fact that I’m stuck here instead of out searching’ quiet or a ‘meditating on what was in those files’ quiet?” Free asked, jumping to catch hold of the tree’s lowest branch and pulling herself effortlessly up. “Or an ‘I should have taken Free with me to talk to Gabriel’ one?”

Jude stretched out his mile-long legs and laid the folder of information we’d obtained from the librarian delicately on his lap. “I have always felt, deep down,” he said once it became clear that I wasn’t going to answer Free’s question, “like I might be the second coming of Sherlock Holmes.”

Jude had also, at various points in time, claimed to be the second coming of Ann Landers, William Shakespeare, and Princess Di. I said as much out loud, and my foster brother adopted a serene expression.

“I have layers.”

Above us, Free positioned herself on the branch, allowing her legs to dangle down. “And what, oh second coming of Sherlock, are your finely honed instincts telling you about our missing persons?”

Jude pressed two fingers on his right hand to his temple, like a medium communing with the spirits. A look of intense concentration settled over his face.

“Now would be a good time for you to say something,” he told me in a stage whisper. “Propose a theory, and I will do my Sherlockian duty and tell you why you’re wrong.”