Gideon is frowning at a tree, which I get the feeling he does a lot. “Chloe Barnes?” he asks. “Friends of the Chillacouth, Chloe Barnes?”
“Yeah, she founded it, or something,” I say. “She organizes a lot of these headline-grabbing environment things.”
“Was shehere?” he asks, swinging his head around to look at me, and I realize he’s alarmed.
“Yeah, but she had to go back into town because she forgot she also volunteered to help with the canned goods drive at the Hootenanny,” I say. “She was gonna come back, but then it snowed. Shit. I hope she’s okay.”
Gideon hasn’t moved a muscle.
“She left you here,” he goes on, voice oddly flat. “Chained to tree.”
“I have the key,” I point out, because I do. Somewhere. “And I told her she could, it’s not like she just disappeared on me.”
“Chloe Barnes,” he says, slowly, “Talked you intochaining yourself to a treefor a good cause, and then sheleftyou forthe Hootenanny?”
Okay, fine, it does sound bad when you put it that way, but I don’t want to throw Chloe under the bus right now. She’s passionate about causes and a little impulsive, but she’s not evil.
“We should keep walking,” I tell Gideon, and we get back to it without saying anything else.
* * *
“What kind of food?”I ask Gideon’s back, once he seems like he’s calmed down about Chloe.
He grunts, but it’s a grunt with a question mark.
“At the cabin,” I go on, breath frosting in the air, my voice nearly swallowed in the quiet, snowy night. “You said there was food.”
“Canned chicken noodle soup,” he says, over his shoulder.
“Which kind?”
He walks for a few more steps, like he’s focusing.
“Campbell’s, I think,” he says. “The regular one. Not some healthy bullshit.”
“Fuck, that soundsamazing,” I grumble, because it does. “How much further is it?”
I pull out the GPS I’m holding so I can answer my own question.
“We’re close,” he says, still trudging.
I stop in my tracks, frowning down at the screen.
“We’rethere,” I say, because our dot is smack in the middle of the little cabin symbol.
However, I am not smack in the middle of a cabin, so something’s gone wrong. At night in the woods in deep snow, probably with a pack of wolves lurking just out of sight beyond those trees. I don’t think there are wolves in Virginia, but I’m willing to bet some materialized just for this occasion.
I’m sure it’s fine.
“Not quite,” he says.
“This says we—” the GPS’s screen adjusts a little, and our dot is nowpastthe cabin. “Passed it?”
“We didn’t pass it,” he mutters, pulling the second GPS out of his pocket. “Did you see a cabin?”
“I can’t see more than twenty feet in any direction,” I point out.
“These aren’t accurate down to the foot,” he says. “They’re useful as a directional guide, but sometimes they—”
