Page 86 of The Wild Zone

“Too late,” I mumbled.

“Just keep an eye on the treetops,” she said. Then she added, as if mostly to herself, “It can’t be the same one. But if it is…”

Harper followed Zuri’s advice. He scanned the treetops, holding his sword in both hands with the point up, as if the monster might be considerate enough to drop right on it and impale itself.

Benny kept examining the ground. “I don’t see any more tracks. It’s been a few days since Grant disappeared, but I was hoping there’d be some sign of him.” He glanced up at me.

“You were here last night, right? Has anything changed?”

I froze.

I’d told them the ring gave me bad visions. I hadn’t mentioned anything about my fight with the possibly real/possibly imagined hooded figure.

“Uh…it took me a while to find this place yesterday,” I said. “By the time I did…”

Then I saw it.

Benny’s flashlight was illuminating a spiky patch of briars. Suspended in the middle of the vines, like a meatball in spaghetti, was a black-and-white sneaker with a swoosh on one side.

My heart climbed into my throat. “That’s Grant’s shoe!”

I shoved branches aside to grab it, ignoring the bloody scratches the thorns left on my hands.

“Is there a foot in it?” Zuri asked.

I glanced back at her. “Gross!”

Then, as I extracted the sneaker, I prayed, “Please be empty. Please be empty.”

Thankfully, it was.

But it still wasn’t great that it had been separated from its owner.

Harper peered over my shoulder. “No blood. That’s good, at least.”

“And the outside’s in mint condition, except for a few scratches,” Benny added.

He sounded like he was appraising it for resale, which told me he’d been spending too much time with the Stoll brothers.

“Plus, it’s fully laced,” Zuri said. “Either it got caught in the vines and came off during a struggle—”

“Or Grant could have kicked it off himself,” I speculated, turning over the sneaker. “As a clue? To let us know he’s still alive?”

Zuri looked dubious, but Benny gave me a hopeful smile.

“Maybe,” he said. “At the very least, this is proof Grant didn’t go home on his own, unless he did it with only one shoe. We should keep looking. Where’s the fissure where you found the ring?”

I pointed upstream and then led the group back along the path that Grant and I had followed.

I didn’t have a watch. I couldn’t check the time on my phone, either, since demigods couldn’t use them. (Mobile phones + demigods = terrible, horrible, no good, very bad. Long story. Don’t ask). It felt like we’d been in the forest for about thirty minutes already. Finding Grant’s sneaker was a good start—or an ominous one, depending on how you looked at it—but we needed more.

Finally, we reached the fissure—a jagged line that wove across the ground for about fifty feet before disappearing into the underbrush on either side. I remembered it being bigger and more sinister; in the glow of Benny’s flashlight, the crack looked unremarkable.

“That’s it?” Harper asked.

“I—I think so,” I said.

“But you said Grant put his arm inside,” Benny recalled. “That doesn’t look wide enough.”