She draws her weapon without a word.
I approach from the side, soundless on the soft ground, and she follows, veering off to the other side to get a good vantage point as we near the rotting porch. Climbing the stairs, I keep sniffing the air, but the closer I get, the more certain I am that she hasn’t been here. The door is closed but not locked, so I push it open with one hand.
“Clear.” I curse, disappointed at not finding her curled in a corner despite my nose already telling me she wouldn’t be.
“Shit.” Lisa sweeps the room with her flashlight, the light falling on two camp chairs, beer cans on a battered table, and an ashtray heaped with cigarette butts. “Do you think she was here and left?”
I stand still in the middle of the room and let my nose do what my eyes can't. Half a dozen scents layer on top of each other, but none of them are children, just adult men who know each other well enough to share a cabin and not bother emptying ashtrays.
Hunters, trappers, the handful of off-grid types who run lines up in the high country would never leave a place like this. These men aren't any of them.
"She hasn't been here,” I grumble, ready to move on and find the next possible hiding place. “Let’s go.”
"How do you know that?" Lisa asks, brows furrowed and holding her hips in the middle of the room, scanning the small space for any signs someone’s sheltered here.
I take a beat too long to answer. “Because if she found shelter like this on a cold night, she’d have stayed.”
It's a reasonable answer.
I push past her, back out into the dark. "Come on."
“But…” She follows, her boots crossing the threshold behind me. She draws a breath to ask me something else, and I’m bracing for the question when the wind changes.
It comes from the east. A small shift, no more than a breath, but it carries something with it that stops me dead as every sense snaps to attention at once.
I turn my head into it. Inhale, slow and deep, with every bit of focus I have, while Lisa watches from the periphery of my vision.
There.
"Beau?"
Lisa steps closer, her sweet smell pulling my attention, but I force my bear to focus, to concentrate, when the wind shifts again. The scent fades. Returns then fades again.
East.
“Beau, what are you doing? What’s going on?”
I take one step in that direction, then another, as the world narrows to the thread of a scent in the air, before I take off at a sprint, trusting Lisa to be able to follow, afraid that the already faint trail will vanish with the next gust of wind or the rain that’s starting to fall around us.
11
LISA
Beau is gone before I've worked out what’s changed.
One moment he's beside me at the cabin door, but the next, he's taken off at a sprint, plunging through the undergrowth. I scramble after him, calling his name, but he doesn't slow down or look back.
"Beau, wait!"
He’s going to fall and break his neck running through the forest so fast without anything to light his way.
The rain has started in earnest now, fat cold drops working their way through the canopy and down the back of my collar. My headlamp bounces wildly as I run, and the beam catches nothing but his back, already too far ahead, branches whipping back into place behind him.
He's locked onto something, and without understanding what’s happening, the only thing I can do is try to keep him in sight.
It’s two hundred yards, maybe more, before he stops.
I crest a small rise, lungs burning, and find him dropped to one knee beside the remains of what looks like an old tool shed.Half-collapsed, the roof sags into the back wall, and the front door is long gone, now covered with a tangle of brambles.
