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They had to pace themselves, since neither of them knew exactly how far into the Secret Canyon wilderness they’d have to venture before they found the cave Marc had seen in his vision. At least they’d gotten out here early so the morning air was still cool and mild against her cheeks, although Bellamy knew it wouldn’t take long before the sun was high enough in the sky to really start raising the temperatures.

She had been able to tell right away that he knew what he was doing, since he kept his gaze fixed on the trail and moved steadily, negotiating rocky patches with ease and maintaining sure footing the entire time. Yes, he’d told her he hiked a lot, and she’d already seen him in action while they were heading out to the Devil’s Bridge, but now that they were past the Birthing Cave and moving into a section of the trail that wasn’t nearly as well-traveled, she could only be glad that he was her hiking companion today and not someone with a lot less experience.

His dark eyes kept scanning the landscape from behind his sunglasses, and she knew he was trying to see if he recognized any landmarks from his dream. So far, that didn’t seem to be the case, since he didn’t appear inclined to leave the main trail and move onto one of the smaller, fainter ones that branched off every once in a while.

The Secret Canyon wilderness was huge, though, and she knew they’d only hiked about a mile so far. It made sense that the thief would want to conceal themselves way back here, in a place where few people — locals and tourists alike — rarely traveled.

Which sort of begged the question of how they came and went. Did they have a vehicle hidden somewhere, maybe a dirt bike because it would be a lot less suspicious? These trails weren’t designated for motorized vehicles, but rules never stopped some people.

Especially people who seemed to think it was no big deal to break into a house warded six ways from Sunday and owned by the prima of a witch clan.

Bellamy and Marc hadn’t spoken much, but she was fine with that. She knew he was concentrating on the landscape, doing his best to see if anything from his dream jumped out at him. Besides, she’d never been much for chatting while hiking, just because she came out to these isolated spots to be alone with the rocks and the trees and the hawks and ravens that occasionally circled overhead, not to talk about silly inconsequentials that could have waited until they were back in civilization.

Actually, that had been part of the reason why she and one of her previous civilian boyfriends — John Brooks — had split. The guy never wanted to shut up, even when surrounded by the kind of beauty that should have made him want to be quiet so he could drink it in.

Marc, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have a problem with silence, as though he knew all they needed was one another’s company, whether they were talking or not. From time to time, he glanced over at her so he could give her an encouraging look…or maybe to check and see how she was doing…but he remained quiet.

Not that he needed to have any worries about her. She was keeping up just fine, and could do this all day if she had to. Of course, she’d prefer not to, just because in a few hours, it would be truly hot instead of comfortably warm, but she’d manage as long as the water held out.

But then he paused so he could take a swig from the bottle in his hand, and Bellamy did the same, glad of the cool liquid trickling down her dry throat.

“Nothing yet?” she asked, and Marc shook his head.

“Not so far.” He went quiet then for a second or two before adding, “But all my intuition is telling me we’re on the right track. We just haven’t gotten to a place yet where it feels right to go off the main trail.”

Which meant they could be hiking for hours still. She was less than thrilled with that idea, even as she told herself she was the one who’d pushed for this. Marc had wanted to talk to the elders, and possibly Angela and Connor as well, and maybe they could have come up with a better plan.

Or maybe not. Sometimes it felt as if the prima and primus — and Levi, too — had the powers of gods, but the situation wasn’t quite that cut-and-dried. As she’d pointed out to Marc when he woke up from his dream, even they couldn’t teleport themselves into a place they didn’t know. They would have been forced to trudge out here like ordinary mortals.

Just as she and Marc were doing.

Another ten or fifteen minutes passed, and then he paused on the trail, pointing toward a barely visible path that branched off toward the west. “There,” he said.

“You’re sure?” Bellamy responded. Yes, she’d be more than happy to move off the main trail and into a place where they might be getting closer to their quarry, but she also didn’t want them to take a wrong turn and have to retrace their steps.

His head lifted toward the red rocks, eyes narrowing slightly, as though he was comparing them to what he’d seen in his vision. “I’m sure,” he said, and the words sounded confident enough. “I recognize that formation over there, the one that sort of looks like a rooster head.”

She followed his gaze. Yes, that odd little formation with the jagged top and the funny protrusion off to one side did look kind of like a rooster.

Well, if you squinted, anyway.

“Then lead on,” she replied, even as her heart began to beat a little faster. Yes, she’d signed up for this — had even pushed Marc into it, when he’d obviously thought it would be better if they got some advice from the older generation first — but now that they might be getting close, she found herself wondering if maybe going off half-cocked had really been the best plan.

You can, whispered on the wind, and she went stock still.

“What is it?” Marc said. He’d begun to take a step down the new path but had paused, clearly catching something in her expression.

“I heard them,” she replied.

“The voices?”

“Yes. They said, ‘You can.’”

His mouth curved upward at the corners. “Well, I’d say that was a vote of confidence. Ready?”

What could she do except nod?

He began walking down the trail, not moving too fast, still conserving his energy since they didn’t know how far they would need to go. Bellamy followed in his wake, ears straining to see if the winds had anything else to say, but they seemed to believe they’d done enough by delivering that one encouraging message and were now content to sit back…if they were even the kind of beings who could sit…and see what happened.

It was much rougher here than the ground they’d covered already, the trail riddled with rocks, some of them big enough that they had to detour around the things before they could continue on their way. Most likely, these trails were only maintained once a year, if even that. She was sure the people with the Forest Service did their best, but of course they would focus on the paths hikers tended to use the most.

Because although it was beautiful out here, with the clear blue sky overhead and the red rocks soaring above them in almost every direction, there were plenty of other spots around Sedona that weren’t quite so off the beaten path and probably showcased more important rock formations, the sorts of landmarks people would want to show up on their Instagram feeds and their TikTok videos.

But because Marc kept forging ahead, Bellamy knew she couldn’t do anything other than that as well. The sun climbed higher as they walked, now beating down on their heads in earnest. He didn’t seem to mind too much, but she slid her pack off her shoulder and pulled off the foldable field hat she’d stored in there earlier, then zipped up the backpack and hoisted it into place again.

As her dad Jordan had said on multiple occasions, being outdoorsy was great…as long as you protected yourself from the sun and didn’t allow it to turn you into a wrinkled little raisin.

Bellamy had no wish to shrivel into anything, and she knew the fair skin she’d inherited along with her red hair meant she needed to take more precautions than most people. Maybe the hat looked kind of silly, but it did the job.

After all, she knew she didn’t have to worry about impressing Marc anymore.

Now he’d stopped a pace or two in front of her, again with his head up as he surveyed their surroundings. She didn’t see anyplace where the path branched off again, but it didn’t seem as if he was too concerned about that.

“Over there,” he said, this time pointing to their right, which she thought was roughly northwest.

“There isn’t a path,” she replied. And okay, she knew she sounded dubious, but wandering from even the faint trail they’d been following seemed like a recipe for disaster.

“No,” he said. “But I can tell someone’s come this way. See all those bent stalks in the dry grass?”

And he pointed toward the place where he’d been looking.

Sure enough, it did seem as though something had come through here, something big enough to bend the grass. And when she squatted down to look at the dry red earth, she saw something else.

“Footprints,” she said briefly. “Hiking boots, I guess, because I doubt anyone’s stupid enough to come out here in tennis shoes.”

Marc flashed a smile at her, then leaned down to look at the prints in question. “You’d be surprised. I’ve seen people trying to scale rock walls in flip-flops. But you’re right — the tread on these does look more like hiking boots.”

“So…what now?” Bellamy asked, even though she thought she knew the answer.

He straightened, then settled his pack more firmly on his shoulders. “We find out who left those tracks.”

The going was harder than he’d thought it would be, just because he had to keep stopping and peering down at the ground to make sure he hadn’t lost the elusive trail of those hiking boots. Also, whoever had gone this way hadn’t walked in a straight line, but had looped back and forth, sometimes backtracking, sometimes wandering to either side before returning to their original route.

An attempt to throw any pursuers off the scent?

Marc was inclined to think so, even though they hadn’t seen a single soul for the last forty-five minutes and he guessed no one other than the thief…minion…whatever you wanted to call them…had left these tracks.

Or maybe that was too easy. For all he knew, they were following the trail of someone who’d come out here to commune with nature and would be rightly annoyed to have their spirit walk interrupted.

But his instincts were telling him that wasn’t the case at all. More and more landmarks appeared, the same ones he’d seen in his dream. Not just the “rooster” rock, but one that almost looked like the hoodoos in the Bisti wilderness in New Mexico — no, he’d never been there, but he’d seen pictures online — with a rounded rock sitting on top of an impossibly thin column, seeming as if it was going to topple over at any moment. Or there was the one with the sheer, fluted face, looking almost like the red rock version of Half Dome in Yosemite.

All this reassured him that they were headed where they needed to go, even if it felt as though the journey was taking forever. Sure, he’d guessed that their quarry would be hiding out in the middle of nowhere. He just hadn’t understood exactly how far out in the middle of nowhere it would actually be.

Behind him, Bellamy plugged away, following him over the rocky terrain without a single word of complaint. She’d pulled a floppy army green hat out of her pack and put it on her head, probably doing what she could to fend off the sun, which grew hotter and brighter by the minute. The thing made her look absolutely silly and positively adorable at the same time, and he wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her and tell her again how much he loved her.

He didn’t, though, because the same instinct that was driving him forward was also sending the signal that he needed to remain focused. Plenty of time to kiss Bellamy — and a whole lot more — once this was all done.

The ground rose steadily as they walked toward a large rock formation, one that was almost its own small range of hills. Even from this distance, he thought he could see shadowy spots on the red rocks.

Caves?

Sure looked like it to him, although the ones he’d spotted were shallow enough that he guessed they wouldn’t provide any kind of real shelter. Still, if the geological conditions here had allowed for the formation of small caves, then it seemed to him there might be bigger ones somewhere among those rocks, places where a person could hide themselves for days if necessary.

He stopped and pointed at the closest of the caves, barely more than a carve-out in the sheer rock face. “See that?” he said, although he kept his voice down. Yes, it seemed as if he and Bellamy were utterly alone here, but that wasn’t any reason to take chances.

“I see it,” she said in a similar undertone.

“None of the caves on this side of the formation are probably big enough to be hiding our thief,” he went on. “That’s why I think we should circle around to the west and see what we find over there.”

“Do the tracks go that way?” Bellamy asked. Her voice wasn’t quite doubtful, but he got the feeling she didn’t want to go marching off into even more nothing without some kind of indication that they were going in the right direction.

He hadn’t checked, but when he looked down, he saw the faint boot prints curved around to the north of the giant formation. “Yes,” he said. “Harder to see because the brush is even taller here, but I think I should be able to find them.”

“Then lead on, MacDuff,” she told him, then grinned in response to his blank look. “You never did Macbeth in high school English?”

“ The Merchant of Venice, ” he said briefly, and she tugged at the brim of her floppy canvas hat.

“Well, that was probably more fun. Anyway, let’s get going.”

He tilted his head in acknowledgment, then kept plugging away, following the tracks as best he could, sometimes having to double back and check again when it seemed they were going astray. The only good thing was that it seemed the thief had given up on obscuring his trail, because, although it followed a meandering course as it avoided clumps of cholla and clusters of juniper, it wasn’t looping all over the place the way it had been a little farther back.

From time to time, Bellamy would send a wary glance up at the sky. Marc wasn’t sure why, since he hadn’t even spotted a hawk this far out, but maybe she was just worried about the two of them being so exposed. Their clothes were in natural colors, khaki green and light tan, so it wasn’t as if they were wearing bright pink or something that would stand out against the landscape — especially now that Bellamy’s coppery hair was mostly covered by that silly hat — but still, they were the only two people out here. If their prey was standing up on that rock formation someplace where they couldn’t spy him, he’d probably be able to see them pretty easily.

But they’d already set out on this course, so there didn’t seem to be much point in turning around. Either they’d come all this way for nothing…or they hadn’t.

Right then, Marc wasn’t sure which option was less appealing.

But he kept plugging away, doggedly following the faint trail the thief had left behind. As they walked, he noted how another red rock formation gradually came into view, not as tall as the one they’d been using as a landmark.

However, this new hill — or whatever you wanted to call it — was pocked with even more caves, several of them much deeper than the ones he’d spied earlier.

“He’s in there,” Bellamy said, coming to stand next to him.

Marc glanced down at her, a little surprised. “How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“Did the voices tell you that?”

At once, she shook her head, although her face, shadowed by her hat, showed nothing but confidence. “Not in so many words. But I think they would have told me if we’d gone astray, so I’m pretty sure we’re on the right track.”

From your lips to God’s ears, Marc thought, although he didn’t say anything. He knew the McAllisters were pagan and seemed to give most of their allegiance to the goddess Brigid, while the de la Paz clan was still firmly Catholic even hundreds of years after emigrating from Mexico. His parents had been nominally religious at best, although they dutifully took the clan to midnight mass on Christmas Eve and to services on Easter — probably to appease the elder ranks of the family more than anything else.

He nodded, and they continued on their way. Even if the voices hadn’t directly told Bellamy that their thief was hiding somewhere in those tall, jagged, red rocks, her certainty helped boost his spirits a little, especially since only a few minutes before, she’d been looking pretty dubious about the route they were taking. And this path felt a little more protected, thanks to the way junipers grew on either side, shielding them from unfriendly eyes.

With any luck, those shields would hold until they could get the jump on the guy.

Wishful thinking, maybe, but Marc had a feeling that was about all they had to go on right now.

So they’d keep going until they found him…or he found them.