Page 45 of The Lovely and the Lost

Toward the mountain.

Ifollowed Gabriel, hanging back far enough that he couldn’t sense my presence. I should have been thinking about Jude and Free and the game I’d left behind. Butpromisesandworryandlogic—those were just words. They were abstract. Tracking, trailing, stalking, waiting—those were now. I might have started off curious about where Gabriel was going and why, but the act of following him pushed all conscious thought to the back of my head. There was nothing but the hum of anticipation and my own silent, liquid movement through the brush—until we hit the base of the mountain.

I stopped. Gabriel started to climb.

I watched, camouflaged. We were on the near side of Bear Mountain, opposite the place where the copter had dropped us the day before. Soon, Gabriel stopped climbing. He contorted his body, and in the space between one blink and the next, he’d disappeared from sight.

The tracker in me said that no one ever really disappeared, and as I climbed, following the path he’d laid, I knew exactly what I was looking for.

An opening.

A cave.

Cady had said there was a whole system of underground caverns. Multiple entrances—or depending on your intention, multipleexits. My foster mother had estimated that it could take the rangers weeks to map them all. My first thought, when I startedthinkingagain, was that it could take one person—one single-minded, driven person—years.

I almost missed the gap between one rock and the next, where Gabriel had vanished. The opening was small—smaller than the one I’d entered the day before.

Fortunately, this time, there wasn’t a drop.

I squeezed through. What little light followed me told me that it was going to get very dark very quickly, and unlike Gabriel, I hadn’t brought a flashlight. I was far enough behind that I couldn’t even tell, for certain, which way he’d gone.

What are you doing, Gabriel?The question kept me from turning back.Just how well do you know these caves?

I braced my right hand against the wall, steadying myself as I crossed slowly into darkness.

This was probably a bad idea. I was following someone who’d been accused of kidnapping and assault, someone who’d lied to me the day before and was behaving suspiciously now. I was perfectly aware of those facts, but I also knew that Gabriel had been at the Bennett house when we’d arrived. I knew that he’d made another appearance there that night, that he’d been on the property when I’d woken up the next morning, that he’d spent hours that day searching alongside me.

If he’d been the one to stash Bella in the cave, he wouldn’t have had time to move her.

Would he?That thought batted at me as my surroundings went from dark to pitch-black to eerie, velvety nothingness. Up ahead, I heard something. As I inched along the wall and slowly made my way around the bend, the uncompromising darkness began to recede.

Within minutes, I saw it.Light.

I’d found Gabriel. He’d left his flashlight on the cave floor, pointed upward, illuminating his climb. By the time I spotted the outline of his form, he was already ten or fifteen feet overhead.

I had no idea how Gabriel was creeping his way up the cave wall—or why—but as I watched, he reached some kind of landing and pulled himself onto it, stomach first. He inched forward, then disappeared.

Again.

This time, I didn’t follow. Despite what Cady thought, I did know my own limitations. Specifically, I knew that I couldn’t make that climb. I hadn’t grown up on a mountain.

I hadn’t had to fight for survivalhere.

Listening for any indication that Gabriel was on the verge of returning, I heard nothing but a hollow echo and the distant sound of running water. I cocked my head to the side, closing my eyes and absorbing the sound.

When I opened my eyes again, they landed on the flashlight. The human part of my brain said that taking it would be wrong. Girl—buried deep in the recesses of my mind—said that Gabriel had left it.

You had to protect what was yours.

Kneeling down, I closed my fingers around the flashlight. I hesitated only a moment before I stood and did a 360, taking in my surroundings. I could feel the otherness of this place. Even with the light from the flashlight illuminating the space around me, my senses stayed on high alert. Unsure what I was doing—or why—I found myself moving toward the sound of the running water.

Drink. Girl thirsty—

I shook off the memory. I wasn’t dying of thirst. I just needed to know where I was,whatthis place was. The farther I went toward the sound of the water, the colder it got. I rounded another bend, the din of rushing water building. I’d expected a stream or possibly a continuation of the river we’d seen before. What I found wasn’t just water.

It was a waterfall.

The river rushed over the edge into a straight drop, crashing into razor-sharp rocks twenty feet below. I lost track of how long I stood there, watching the water descend into darkness, listening to its deafening roar.