Regardless of the possession issue, it is definitely a nice couch. On a normal night, I'd be settling into it right about now to watchNaked & Afraidand smash a pint of Talenti Gelato (tiramisu flavor, obviously). Wouldn't that be nice? I check my Apple Watch for the time and?—
Shit. I forgot. That's dead, too.
The mosquito on my forearm, however, is not dead. It's actuallythriving,which is extremely rude under the circumstances. I smack it so hard I leave a bloody smear shaped like a skull and crossbones.
"Good," I snarl at it with no remorse. "Tell your friends."
Then, with a sigh, I keep walking.
Afon Satyrin.What a thing to try to find. I don't know him that well, which is to say I basically don't know him at all. But I don't think anyone reallyknowshim, you know what I mean? Like, the man is kind of fundamentally unknowable. Existentially speaking.
I know I'm not making sense. That's partially the sleep deprivation and the dehydration, as well as the frustration of a six-month-long goose chase. But I really do mean what I'm saying.
He's the silence between two heartbeats. The pause before bad news. The temperature drop before the storm starts, and also kind of in some ways the storm itself.
I've only met him three times. The first was when I buried my murdered parents. He stood in the back, dressed in all black, and didn't say a word to anyone.
The second was in my father's study three weeks later, when he handed me a manila envelope and told me, in that gravelly, baritone voice of his, that if I ever needed anything, I should call.
I wanted to, but I didn't have the guts to do it. So when I happened to see him at Cassandra's cousin Dani's wedding in May, I told myself that I'd walk up to him and ask him the question he's clearly been waiting years for me to ask.
But before I could, he vanished.
I caught a glimpse of his silhouette slipping through the exit door, and by the time I caught up, the city had swallowed him entirely, with not a crumb left behind.
Cut to six months later, and I'm prepared to die on this godforsaken mountain just to find him.
Needless to say, this wasn't Plan A. Plan A was ask Afon's nephew, Matvei, where to find him. But Matvei had no clue. He just knew that his uncle had left New York after a lifetime of service to the Lazarev Bratva and had no intentions of coming back. Afon's old bosses, Kir and Lukas Lazarev, co-pakhansof the Lazarev Bratva, were similarly clueless about where their former fixer had gone.
Plan B involved a private investigator with the unfortunate name of Guns McTaggart. Whether his parents hated him at birth orhe had just suffered enough blunt force trauma to the head to decide that was a cool D.B.A., I'm not sure, but he really did have that printed on his business cards.
Anyway, Guns took my money—lots of it—only to eventually leave me with nothing but a vague crayon sketch of the Catskills on the back of a bar napkin and a half-hearted, morale-boosting departing phrase of "Good luck, kiddo."
So, here I am.
Plan Z.
Hunt down Afon myself.
I crest a ridge and the woods open up just enough for me to see the sky. It might be beautiful if it weren't so bleak and black tonight. Only a thin ray of moonlight peaks through the thick clouds.
My stomach rumbles, an unnecessary reminder that I'm very hungry and have only a single granola bar left.
I sit down on a rock to relieve my aching feet and sit down to unwrap it. As I chew, I ruminate—not for the first time in these last six months—about how fucking stupid I am. I brought one of these bad boys—one!—because I had this insane idea that I would find Afon and be back at the trailhead by lunchtime.
If the Caroline of Today could meet the Caroline of Yesterday, she'd punch her right in her dumb, smug little mouth.
It's only when I'm done licking the wrapper and have begun folding it into a tiny square—because my mama raised no litterer, even in extremis—that I see exactly the kind of Hail Mary I've been praying for.
Smoke.
A thin, faint, barely-there curl of smoke, rising through the trees about a quarter mile to the northeast. I'm not exactly Girl Scout of the Year, but I know deep in my bones that that smoke came from a chimney. It just has a quaint, domestic, log cabin feel to it. Don't ask me how I know.
And if there's a chimney, there's a house. And if there's a house…
…There's a person.
"Oh, thank God," I whisper, to the various woodland flora and fauna paying witness to my despair, to my dead parents, to the Big Man Himself, with whom I am willing to negotiate a temporary ceasefire pending further review of the mosquito issue. "Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God."
