She swore—up and down, left and right—that no matter what I say, it won't change her mind about me. She really does believe that. I almost believe it, too, as long as I'm lying here.
But she doesn't know yet just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
I wait until the sky lightens from black to gray.
I ease out from under Caroline. She makes a disappointed sound and reaches for the warm spot I left, but then settles back down into REM. I tuck the blanket up over her shoulder, then rise and pull on my clothes. My hip pulls and burns where the graze opened up last night, but it's closed again now, mostly. Tacky. It'll hold.
Wolf lifts his head and looks to me for guidance.
"Stay," I instruct him. "Watch her."
He drops his head back down between his paws, but his eyes stay open, fixed on the lump of blanket where Caroline sleeps. Good dog.
I take the Remington and the binoculars and I go climbing.
While we descended yesterday, I made note of an outlook maybe forty minutes up the ridge from the camp. I climb to it now in the gray dawn, breaking new snow, my breath fogging out ahead of me. The whole world is clean, white, and quiet. The sun isn't up yet but the sky's gone pale enough to see by.
When I get to the outlook, I crouch behind a boulder and raise the binoculars. The valley spreads out below me. I find the logging road first, a gray seam through the trees, then I track south along it until I find the camp.
It takes me a second to understand what I'm looking at.
The bunkhouse is there, just as I remember. The shed, the rusting yarder, the cinder block, all of it. But the trucks are gone. The van is gone. The two snowmobiles that were ready to run yesterday, the lookout, the eight men, the man in the long coat… gone. The whole camp sits empty in the snow, the generator silent, no smoke, no movement. A single tarp flaps loose where the snowmobile used to be.
I lower the glasses and blink, sure I misunderstood.
Then I raise them again and look harder.
But no.
Empty.
They're gone.
I crouch there a long time and let the cold work into my knees as I think about what this means.
An empty camp is worse than a full one. If it were a full camp, I'd know where they are. A full camp means I can watch it, count it, plan around it. A full camp is a problem I can hold in my hands.
An empty camp, though… that means they moved. It means the man in the long coat decided it was time for a new approach. They're hunting.
And I don't know how close they might be.
They could be anywhere on this mountain. Hell, they could be down in Pike Hollow right now, sitting in Barb's diner, asking the trapper in the wool cap if he saw a man and a woman come down off the ridge. They could be sitting on the road we'd have to cross to make it to the highway and get the fuck out of here.
I should have seen it coming. The storm gave them cover. Everything that might've outed them—tracks, sound, smoke—gets swallowed up in the snow. The same storm I planned to use to slip out, they used to disappear.
I rub a hand down my face and feel the cold sweat on it despite the chill.
The smart play would have been to walk out in the dark, in the storm, the second we left the diner. No fire. No camp. No stopping. I knew that. And yet I made a fire anyway, because she was shivering and I'm a fool.
And because, for one night, I wanted to be amaninstead of a weapon.
I let myself have her.
And while I had her, I stopped watching the mountain.
This is the thing I always knew, and no matter how many times I tried to explain it to Caroline, she wouldn't listen: You can't have both. You can't have a thing and keep it safe at the same time. The wanting makes you blind. I've known it for twenty years. I learned it on a county road outside Saratoga Springs.
But I went and did it anyway.
