“We’ve got to get over to the other side of the gully. There’s someone in trouble over there and I need to see if she’s all right. Just follow me and do as I say, understand?”
He kept his voice as steady as possible, but the fear that had blossomed in some small place beneath his rib cage was reflected in his daughter’s eyes as she nodded.
Ben straightened. “Let’s go.”
There was no path down into the steep gully, save a rutted and ferny switchbacking trail carved into the hillside by deer and other forest animals. Ben nearly turned his ankle twice on the descent to the river, while Layla, for her part, flew between the tree trunks, scrambling downhill like a mountain goat and hopping on his back with a giggle when they reached the rushing stream at the bottom.
The water was ice-cold but mercifully shallow despite the recent rain, and Ben made it across soaked only to midthigh. He lowered Layla to the muddy bank and eyed the near-sheer climb ahead, finding the woman about sixty feet up, those wispy strands of windblown hair still dancing out over the edge of the rock.
Ben brought both hands to his mouth and gathered his breath.
“Hey!” he called again. “Can you hear me up there?”
A gust of wind ripped through the gully, but in the silence that followed it, there was no cry of distress. No groan of pain.
Ben pressed a hand to Layla’s shoulder. “Stay here, okay? Please don’t move.”
There was an edge to his voice, and Layla nodded.
Ben forced his lips into a half smile. “It’ll be okay.”
Layla nodded again, and Ben turned to face the cliff.
It was slow going, with footholds that were narrow and slick with dirt, and more than once he slipped, catching himself with a loud grunt and a white-fingered grip on the rocks. It had been a while since he’d rock climbed, and muscles he hadn’t used in a couple of years were screaming in protest, but he continued upward, making gradual, steady progress.
A quick glance down through his boots showed Layla thirty feet below. The drops of sweat beading along Ben’s hairline raced into his eyes as he inched his way closer to the outcropping, growing more and more certain by the second that the woman on the rocks was either dead or unconscious. Surely she would have heard his ragged breaths by now and peered down to investigate if she was lucid.
Ten more feet. Five. Three.
Neck and back screaming, Ben stretched his right arm up and grasped the lip of the rock. He sought one last foothold for leverage and pushed hard, popping his head and shoulders above the ledge with a grunt.
Dead.
She was dead.
For a split second, Ben almost released his grip and tumbled backward, but he held fast to the rock as a wave of adrenaline overcame him, setting his limbs trembling.
The woman’s head was twisted at an impossible angle, one brilliant eye the color of bright caramel wide open and staring straight up at the sky. Her face was untouched, but he could not say the same for the rest of her body.
Ben looked over the corpse, his mind fighting back against the horror of it. The eagle hadn’t done this to her. Something else had. Something bigger and deadlier, with claws like switchblades.
The back of her shirt and pants were torn to ribbons, as was the skin underneath, flayed in deep gashes that spoke of long claws and sharp teeth. Some predator had torn her apart.
Ben forced himself to take a deep breath, and another, pulling oxygen into his lungs as he stared down at the young woman. She was barely twenty years old, if that, with a face he didn’t recognize. Someone that looked like her, as pretty as any of the women on the covers of the teen magazines that Layla was starting to leaf through, would have been well-known in the tiny town of Lake Lumin.
Ben glanced up at the ridge, high overhead. In some tragic hiking accident, some stupid mistake, this woman must have slipped past the wooden fence guarding the cliffside and tumbled to her death.
“Who’s up there?”
Ben swore. He had forgotten that Layla was at the bottom, waiting for him. Watching.
“It’s… it’s a woman,” he called down after a beat. “I think she fell.”
There was a moment of silence before Layla called up, “Is she okay?”
“Baby, I… I don’t know.” The lie tasted bitter in his mouth, and Ben shifted his grip on the rock. He had to get down before his arms gave out. The first thing he had to do was just get his feet back on solid ground, and then he’d figure out what came next. As he adjusted his fingers for a better grip, preparing his muscles for the arduous descent, the wind lifted the woman’s hair again, exposing her neck and the black and purple bruises that ran the length of skin from ear to collarbone.
A curse passed Ben’s lips in a shout.
