“Thanks to your damn fool brother, there’s no other way to go.” Dawnie shook her head in disgust. Eva-Jo swallowed hard but nodded.
“Kin come first. Say it,” Dawnie ground out.
“Kin come first,” Eva-Jo repeated dutifully, and her face settled into a look of dull resignation.
“There’s my girl.” Dawnie smiled at her. It would be all right. She’d fix things, she always did.
“If he gonna die anyway, why can’t I hunt him?” Percy whined.
That earned him another mighty smack from Dawnie, and he roared with rage. “Because we ain’t gonna hurt no cub!” she snapped at him. “I said I don’t want him to feel nothin’! I give him some nice chocolate cake with my special herbs, he falls asleep, that’s the end of it.”
She walked over to the door and rapped on it with her knuckles.
“Gummi?” she yelled. “Come on out now. It’s all right, I ain’t mad with you, I just need to see that Ethan’s all right.”
Gummi never could say no to her. She’d lie to him, tell him she was taking the boy home, and he’d hand Ethan over.
But nobody answered when she knocked. She knocked again, yelled at the top of her lungs. Finally, she kicked at the door and it flew open.
A quick search of the cabin showed that it was empty.
She looked at her kids with dismay and then shook herself. “It’s all right. Gummi would never turn us in. All we gotta do is find them before anybody else does.”
Gummi was a creature of habit. He would go somewhere that he knew. Unfortunately, there were a few dozen spots that the family laid claim to—caves, old cabins, empty mines. And he could be at any one of them.
“Let’s go,” Dawnie growled. “We ain’t going to sleep until we find him.”
