Spirit of a Hunter (11 page)

One truth mushroomed with each of her labored breaths. She could not crack this wilderness code alone. If anything happened to Sabriel, she would be profoundly lost.

She didn’t like being so dependent on him. On anyone. In this thick vastness of the outdoors, she realized just how bleak a prison she’d made for herself
and for Scotty at the mansion. Rather than prepare herself for independence after the divorce, she’d hung on like some sort of remora on a shark. She’d done so with good intentions, for Scotty’s sake, but everybody knew what road good intentions paved.

At least the trail behind them was deserted. Had they lost Costlow?

“Looking back like that—” Sabriel signaled toward the tube attached to the water bladder in her pack and took a sip from his own. “That’s good. People get lost because they don’t look back to see how things would look on the way home.”

She was in the belly of a magnificent, dangerous and unpredictable beast. It could swallow her up without a burp.
Please, Tommy, keep Scotty safe
.

“Being scared isn’t a weakness,” Sabriel said, striding forward again, climbing around a tumble of boulders. “It’s facing reality. You’re out of your element here. It should scare the crap out of you.”

“You must have failed Comfort 101.”

He laughed and the sound was so unexpected and rich that it tripped an echoing rattle in her gut that had nothing to do with the rough terrain. “Yeah, but I aced survival school.”

Knowing that was true helped calm her. “How do you know where to go?”

“I can read the signs Tommy and Scotty left behind.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Wherever you go, you leave a trace.” He stopped and, using his finger as a pointer, he drew a snaking line
in the air to the rising terrain ahead. “Tommy’s path is steady. There, Scotty skips ahead. He stops there, probably to check out a bug on the rock. He sat there on that jut. Tommy sat next to him on the fallen log. Looks like they had some trail mix. There’s a half a peanut and a raisin on the ground.”

“You can see all that?” And she saw nothing. Was he making this up to make her feel better? She knuckled the bony joint between her breasts. It didn’t matter. She’d take his tale—lie or truth. Scotty was alive. He was healthy. He was happy. And Tommy was taking good care of him.

Sabriel turned her around, the hard length of his body a comforting brace behind her. “Look where you’ve been. Can you see the crushed vegetation? The imprint of your boot in the moss? The scratch of your pack on that birch?”

She frowned. The tiny fresh scar on the white flesh, maybe. But the others?

“It took me a lot of dirt time to learn,” he said. “All it takes is practice.”

Sure. Easy for him to say. But she didn’t have time to practice.

She nevertheless hung on to the image of Scotty skipping, safe in Tommy’s care, and pushed on, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other on the moist leaf litter that sucked at her boots.

The silence between her and Sabriel grew as she focused on following his footsteps in the ever changing, yet indistinguishable, landscape.

The smell of evergreen and moss and a biting kind of spiciness that was unique to wilderness scented the air. Giant boulders, strewn cascades of rocks and trip wires of roots bulging out of the sparse ground all conspired to make her stumble on a regular basis.

They came to a slope that seemed to have carved high steps out of the granite. The rock was slick with a trickle of water and her boots scuffed along the slippery surface. She fell down hard on one knee, letting out an
oomph
of breath.

Sabriel reached for her hand, helping her up the odd staircase. A man’s hand, strong and rough. As soon as she was over the obstacle, he dropped his hand, but its warmth lingered against her palm.

What was wrong with her? How could she think of Sabriel as a man when her son was in danger?

Survival, she thought. Her life and her son’s depended on this man. Forming a bond of trust was normal, necessary even. Hadn’t she done the same to survive the streets of Boston after her mother had dumped her?

On the rising ground, her ankles rolled through every possible contortion of their joint. Her feet were so hot they felt on fire. So were her lungs. The pack’s straps cut into her shoulders, numbing them.

Still, she soldiered on. She wasn’t going to complain. She wasn’t going to make Sabriel regret he took her along. They would find Scotty. Soon. Safe. And somehow she would find a way to save him from the Colonel.

The trees thinned and they came to a flat expanse of
bare rock that provided the first view of their upcoming journey. The vast breadth of boundless sky stole her breath away and stamped her mind with the impossibility of the task ahead of them.

All those trees. All those cliffs. All those mountains. Ridge after ridge of them. Even living in their shadows for eleven years had not prepared her for how far the White Mountains stretched out. Her heart kicked. Scotty might as well be a needle in the haystack of these endless woods.

“We’ll find them,” Sabriel said as if he could read her mind.

“It’s so…big.”

“Tommy’s leaving us the map.”

Nodding, she willed her mind to slow and not jump straight to the worst-case scenario. Sabriel could read the map. He would find them. She had to trust.

Sabriel slipped off his pack and dug out his small stove and a couple of packets of dried soup.

She hated to stop and give the thug a chance to catch up to them. But her energy was flagging and she understood that rest and food would allow her to trek on longer.

She shed her pack and let it drop on the slant of rock. Pinched nerves rebounded, tingling life back into her shoulders. Fatigue settled into her limbs like an anchor.

“Can I help?”

“I’ve got it under control.”

“Back there?” she asked, closing her eyes against the too-broad view that heightened her sense of helplessness. “On the trail where we lost the Colonel’s man? What did you do?”

He stirred hot water into the soup mix in cups and handed her one. The scent of chicken broth wafted to her nose and set her stomach grumbling. “Moving across an area without leaving signs is almost impossible. Especially if the tracker following us has any skill.”

“But I thought you and Tommy were good at disappearing.” She stirred the noodles into an eddy.

He handed her a pack of cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers. “Hiding our trail would take too much time. Especially with our packs. We couldn’t outrun Costlow, traveling light like he was. That left deception techniques.”

“So we’re safe now?” Costlow’s sticky vibe hadn’t grabbed for her neck in a while.

“At best all we managed to do was confuse him.”

Though she shivered at the thought of the thug still on their trail, she was glad Sabriel wasn’t whitewashing the gravity of their situation to spare her feelings.

He took her empty cup and handed her a Jonagold apple.

She hadn’t realized how hungry she was and an apple had never tasted so good—crisp like the sunny autumn day, tart like the breeze; the sweetest thing she’d ever eaten.

Then the image of Scotty on their outing to an orchard—was it only a month ago?—flashed into her memory. How he’d had such a good time filling their bag with Macintosh, Macoun and Cortland apples. How his tongue had poked out the side of his mouth as he’d concentrated on the heavy picker to reach the biggest,
highest apple on a Macintosh tree. How he’d devoured his treasure on the spot, his chin dripping with juice.

Was Scotty getting enough to eat? The tender flesh of the Jonagold stuck in her throat.

“By now the other goons will have run the truck’s plates and figured out we’re who they’re looking for,” Sabriel said, gaze on the woods from where they’d come. “We can expect more company.”

“Can’t your Seekers friend help you? Can’t they stop them?”

“We need them back there, gathering intelligence and evidence. Seekers, Inc. is a private organization. We don’t have arrest authority. We have to work through other law enforcement agencies.”

Sabriel stood abruptly, alert as a deer scenting a coyote. A faraway noise, like the bugle of a ghoul, rose above the treetops and shot an electric eel of alarm up her spine.

“What’s that?” she asked, every instinct shouting at her to flee.

“A tracking dog.”

Chapter Seven

Nora sprang up from the rock where she’d been sitting and swept up her backpack. Her breathing exploded into a ragged whisper. “Dogs? As in a bloodhound that can track our scent?”

“Sounds more like a German shepherd,” Sabriel said, voice as steady as the rock on which they stood. He scoured the landscape below them. “Probably an airscent dog.”

Nora swung to face him, a brick of panic weighing her chest. “What does that mean?”

“For us? Not much. Either way the dog’ll latch on to our scent.”

That did not sound good. “How much time to we have?”

“They’re about half a mile back.” Sabriel frowned. He sank down on the rock as if they had all the time in the world and asked for her pack.

“Shouldn’t we get moving? Fast?”

“I want to pool our scent.” He wrenched the pack from her tight grip and proceeded to empty it.

He knew what he was doing. She shouldn’t question him, but…“Are you crazy?”

“It’ll make the dog pay attention to this spot.”

Her voice climbed through the tight rope of her throat. “Isn’t the idea to make sure that it doesn’t?”

“I’m going to confuse him.”

“How?”

“Olfactory overload.”

Sabriel ignored Anna’s belongings, but zeroed in on the purse Nora had insisted on bringing, rifling through its contents with meticulous care. “What are you looking for?”

“They found us way too fast.”

“You’re thinking the Colonel put a tracking device on me?”

Sabriel didn’t answer, but took apart her cell phone, her keychain and the lining of her purse.

She wrung her empty hands. “Then why didn’t his men get us last night?”

“I don’t know.”

And the admission cost him. “They were at the trailhead this morning. How did they know to start there? The Colonel didn’t see the note.”

“The Colonel isn’t stupid. He’s figured—just like you did—that Tommy went to the mountains. But even the Colonel doesn’t have unlimited resources. He didn’t know which trail Tommy took. He had to wait for us to show him.”

Standing like this, Nora feared she would fall to pieces, the sounds of dog and men—at least two distinct
voices—bounced against trees and granite, reverberating like thunder, getting closer, rattling at her already clanging nerves. She’d led them here, to Tommy, to Scotty. If the goons got to Scotty before she could, it would be her fault. How long would it take the tracker and his dog to catch up? To latch on to Scotty’s scent?

Her son’s smile rose up in her mind and her vision went hot and blurry. Was Tommy lucid enough to fight for Scotty, to protect him against the danger gaining on them?

She couldn’t let the Colonel’s men stop her. She would not fall prey to a convenient accident. She had to remain Scotty’s champion. “Hurry.
Please
. We can’t stay here.”

“Hey.” Sabriel stood and tapped the side of his hand gently against her chin. “It’s going to be okay.”

More than anything, she wanted to believe in the confidence reflected in his green eyes, in him. “We should go. Now. Before they find us.”

He opened his palm, revealing two black dots the size of a sharpened pencil lead.

“What are those?”

“Microdots.” Sabriel unknotted the black bandanna at his throat and carefully wrapped the microdots. “They’re being tested by the Army as a way to locate soldiers downed in battle. The Colonel could have gotten his hands on some through his lab’s R & D department.”

“Wouldn’t something that small be useless out here? We’re so far from everything.” How long had they been planted in her things? How long had the Colonel been keeping track of her every intimate movement? The
thought made the hair on the back of her neck ripple with a chill. Fears weren’t paranoia if they proved true.

“On a battlefield, the range has to be far and broad. Reed, the guy who was getting married when you called, almost lost Abbie, the girl he married, because her stalker was using microdots to track her. And they were running all over New England.”

Sabriel crooked a finger in a come-closer gesture. “I’m not getting fresh, but I need to see if there are any more of these on you.”

She plucked at the polypropylene base layer. “Everything I’m wearing belongs to Anna.”

An almost imperceptible flash of pain flinched through his eyes, then steadied as if bringing up his dead wife’s name shouldn’t be allowed to hurt.
You loved her
, she wanted to say.
It should hurt
. He studied her with X-ray-visionlike intensity, making her wish for a lead shield. “There’s your bra.”

Heat fired up her neck. “Wouldn’t he have to replace the dots every time I washed it?”

His index finger pressed against the lump between her breasts—the oval locket Tommy had given her at Scotty’s birth—and made her aware of the pulse pumping through her heart. The locket held a picture of Scotty as a newborn and another of her son she changed every year.

“May I?”

The touch of his fingers on her nape, as he worked at unclasping the chain, jolted through her faster than the strong coffee the Colonel favored, wreaking havoc
on her senses. She squirmed at the unanticipated rush of pleasure arrowing straight to her stomach. How could his nearness punch her with such lust when Scotty was missing and a tracking dog was minutes away from ripping them to pieces? She reached up to push the torture of his hands away from her neck. “I can do it.”

“I’ve got it.”

The chain parted. Their gazes met and the air between them spiked with something she didn’t want to acknowledge. He quickly broke the spell, taking a step back, and cracked open the locket in the cushion of his palm.

Behind her son’s baby picture, Sabriel harvested a third dot.

She snapped a nervous laugh, trying to stay as calm as he was, trying to make sense of the madness festering in every facet of her life. “How low can the man go?”