“Better your pack than the rest of you.”
“Where’s Jackson?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He was ahead of me, and then I couldn’t see him anymore.” She raised her head. “Jackson! Jackson, where are you?”
No answer. “Hunter!” Scott shouted.
“Shelby!” Lily called. She whistled and clapped, but the snow absorbed all sound before it went very far.
“We can’t go on without Jackson and the dogs.” Her voice was tight with fear.
He gripped her arm. “Jackson probably just ran ahead of us. Maybe the dogs are with him.” He was trying to comfort her, and himself, too. After all the trouble they had gone to to find him, surely they couldn’t have lost the boy now.
Snow continued to fall, hard. Lily turned a complete circle, peering into the wall of white. “How are we ever going to find them?” she asked, sounding as if she might burst into tears.
Scott nudged her. “We need to get out of here before someone comes looking for us. It won’t be difficult for them to find us.” Even with the heavy snow, they were close enough to the top of the ridge that it probably wouldn’t be that far for whoever had fired those shots to come after them.
“What if they have Jackson?” she asked.
“Then we can’t help him if we let them find us, too.”
He reloaded the gun, then led the way down the slope, moving in a zigzag path from the cover of tree to tree. Periodically they stopped, and he strained his ears, listening for sounds of pursuit. But the woods around them were silent except for the occasional soft “whump” as a tree released its burden of snow. At least the continued snowfall did a good job of erasing their tracks.
They headed steadily downhill, stumbling and stopping to help each other up. Scott searched for any sign that Jackson and the dogs had come this way, but found nothing.
“Stop!” Lily called when they had been trudging along for a quarter of an hour. She pulled her pack to the front and began rummaging in it. “I’m going to call the sheriff and let them know what happened, see if I can find out where our rescuers are.”
“Good idea.” Scott looked around them, seeing nothing in the swirling snow. He felt half naked without his pack. Maybe he’d made a mistake, sacrificing it that way. He hadn’t had any food left in it, but he had first aid supplies and his sleeping bag.
“I can’t find the phone.”
Lily’s words jerked him out of his stupor. “What do you mean you can’t find it?”
“It’s not in my pack. I swear I stowed it back in here after I spoke with Mike.”
“Where did you put the phone?” Scott asked.
“In the outside pocket.” She indicated the pocket.
“Was it unfastened like that?” Scott asked.
“I thought I closed it, but it was open when I went to look for the phone.” She met his gaze. “I fell a couple of times. Maybe it came out then.”
He looked back the way they had come, at an expanse of smooth white, their tracks already buried under fresh snowfall. Finding a phone that had fallen in all that could take hours, or even days. And they still might never find it.
“What are we going to do?” Lily looked at Scott, her expression bereft.
“I don’t think we can risk going back to Pandora,” he said. “I think the kidnappers were probably the ones shooting at us. They probably figured Pandora was the closest place for us to seek shelter and stationed a guard on the ridge to watch for us.”
“But the sheriff and his officers should be in Pandora soon,” Lily said. “They should be able to deal with the kidnappers.”
“Maybe the snow has delayed them,” Scott said. “They could be waiting on a SWAT team or other reinforcements.”
“I’m not sure I want to find them if we have to tell them we lost Jackson,” she said. “What if the kidnappers found him first? What if they hurt Jackson? What if they hurt the dogs?”
He put his arm around her. “The only way we’re going to get out of this is to stay calm,” he said.
She leaned into him, head on his shoulder. She was trembling slightly—was that from cold or fear, or something else? After a moment, she looked up at him. “When you were in the army did you ever feel scared and hopeless?”
