Protector of One

Gage hesitated.

“Gage, please.” She needed something, anything, to right her reeling world.

“He heard a couple of gun shots tonight. From the same general direction where we found our vics.”

That was not what she needed. Not to set her world right. All it did was cause her to teeter more.

“Two women,” she said. “One is dead. The other wounded and running.” Her voice rose, almost to a keen. “Oh, God, Gage. We have to get out there! She’s running and alone!”

The convoy built as Gage led the way out toward the place where the murders had happened. Deputies and state police pulled off their routes and out of bed created a steadily lengthening train behind him. Kerry, in the backseat, leaned forward and looked between Gage and Adrian toward the dark hulk of the mountains ahead of them.

“Keep watching to the right,” she said suddenly. “The women had a campfire. You might catch a glimpse of it.”

“How far right?” Adrian asked.

Kerry closed her eyes. “One or two o’clock,” she said finally. “I’m not a hundred percent certain, but that’s what I keep seeing.”

“You got it.”

“Tell me about the dream again,” Gage said quietly.

“I already did.”

“I might pick out an important detail that I missed before.”

“All right.” Cold to the bone, despite the blast from the car’s heater, she forced herself to summon the images that had scared her awake.

“Two women,” she said. “Friends. They camp a lot together. They were waiting for someone who was delayed.”

“Any idea who?”

Kerry started to shake her head then. “My God! I think they were waiting for the men who were killed. One of them was worried, but the other wasn’t. As if…as if these guys are often late getting back to camp.”

Gage looked at Adrian. “That’s a link we didn’t have before.”

Adrian nodded. “Anything else, Kerry?”

“Just the same thing as before. I saw the side of a woman’s head explode. Then the other one was hit in the arm. She started running, away from the shots. She’s cold and terrified, and I think…I think she’s hiding. I think she found a place to hide.”

“Is she still being hunted?”

Kerry squeezed her eyes shut, reaching even though she didn’t want to, trying to pull more substance out of the nightmare that had torn her from sleep. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Gage pressed on the accelerator. “Then we’d better move even faster.”

Radios crackled back and forth throughout the trip, ideas shared, plans for the search worked out. No one seemed very hopeful they could find anything before dawn. The night was too dark, and once they got into the woods, it would only become impenetrable.

But dawn was no longer far away.

Ten minutes later, just as it seemed they were about to enter the abyssal darkness of the woods, Adrian leaned forward in his seat. Then he spoke above the radio chatter. “I think I see a campfire. About two o’clock. I can only catch it out of my peripheral vision, though.”

Kerry understood. Once you began operating on night vision, the clearest images were peripheral. She’d first noticed that when studying the sky at night as a girl. Some stars were so faint that you could only see them when you looked far enough to the side.

“There’s a fence road up just ahead,” Gage replied. “I’ll take a right turn on it. Tell the rest of the crew.”

The message passed by radio. Two minutes later Gage turned them onto a track that clearly served no other purpose than to allow a pickup to ride along a ranch fence.

“Chester McNair’s place,” Gage said, as if giving a travelogue.

“That’s where the others were found.”

“I know. I know. But you’ve seen Chester and his kids. The only way they could be involved in this is because they let hikers traverse the ranch where it abuts the state forest.”

“Why does he do that anyway?”

“Because above that point the terrain gets really difficult to cross. Besides, Chester thinks it helps keep the wolves away from his place. He might be right. Those wolves are so damn shy it’s hard to know how many of them we have up there.”

Kerry spoke, trying to cling to normalcy even though her heart had begun to hammer. “I have a friend who works in the zoology department at the university. She says they just about despair of finding a number anywhere close to exact.”

“They can range these mountains from Texas to Alaska, and beyond,” Adrian agreed. “Good for them. We never should have hunted them in the first place.”

Kerry decided this reserved ex-lawman could be likable as well as sexy. The thought shocked her, seeming as it did so out of place under the present circumstances. But there it was, as if her brain and body were trying to remind her that life was good, that life continued, that whatever lay up ahead, it didn’t have to uproot her from her own reality.

A soft sigh escaped her, because she suddenly wished she could believe her life would ever be normal again.

“There it is,” Adrian said, now pointing to the left. Somehow the road had turned them around.

Kerry looked, but wasn’t certain she saw more than a dull orange glow up the mountainside a bit. Almost as soon as she looked at it, it vanished.

“I see,” Gage said. He immediately pulled the SUV over beside the rusty fence and put on his flashers. Then he aimed his spotlight up toward the woods.

“Roof flashers,” Adrian suggested. “In case the woman can see us. To reassure her.”

Gage nodded and hit the switch. Instantly, swirling red and blue lights joined the spotlight glare. Behind them, more than a dozen other vehicles pulled to a stop and followed suit.

Gage turned on the seat and looked at the two of them. “I don’t want to leave Kerry here alone, so you stay with her, Adrian.”

“No,” Kerry said, astonishing herself. “I have to come with you. Whatever’s up there, I need to see it for myself.” Because it would verify her vision? Or because she hoped to find out she was wrong and could stop worrying about visions altogether? She didn’t know. “Besides, I may be able to help find the survivor.”

Gage looked as if he’d swallowed cod liver oil, but after a couple of beats nodded. “Okay. Just stick close to the two of us, no matter what.”

“I’m not crazy. But I have to see.”

And she didn’t feel as if she could fight what was happening any longer, not if a woman was out there hiding, wounded and terrified.

She’d left her house dressed warmly, and wearing jeans and hiking boots, as if at some level she’d known this would come. At this point she couldn’t have said for certain whether her clothing choices had merely been practical in response to feeling cold, or whether something else had guided her.

For better or worse, something had taken over her life. She just hoped it was temporary because right now she felt as if she blindly climbed onto a roller coaster and now all she could do was endure the ride to the finish.

They used the bullhorns first, the amplifiers on the cars, announcing they were police, and they were coming into the woods. Some objected on the grounds that they might scare off the killer. Gage remained firm.

“We have reason to believe there’s a wounded woman hiding out there. At this point she’s my top priority.”

Kerry gave thanks that no one asked how Gage had come by his information. Of course, she realized, word of her vision might already be spreading. Cops gossiped like anyone else.

Regardless, after announcing repeatedly to the dark woods that they were cops, they picked up flashlights and shotguns, spread out and began to climb in a carefully spaced line toward the dull glow of the dying campfire.

With their arrival, the forest had silenced itself, except for one annoyed owl that complained from a treetop up the slope. The distance to the fire’s glow didn’t seem that great, but the climb was taxing and slowed them down considerably. Not far in space, Kerry thought as her nerves stretched tighter and tighter, but endless in time. The owl continued to comment from the sidelines.

“We probably scared all the little critters into their holes,” Adrian remarked to Kerry. “His dinner vanished.”

“Most likely.” She leaned forward and grabbed a rock for support as the ground turned even steeper for a short distance. The darkness thickened around them, and the flashlights seemed less and less able to penetrate it. Her sense of foreboding deepened with every step. Her heart, already accelerating with exertion, began to hammer.

The law officers, men and women, periodically called to one another, keeping themselves together when a flashlight would suddenly disappear from view behind a boulder or in a gully. They only quieted when they paused to listen for human sounds. A cry for help maybe. And sometimes, as if it appreciated what they were doing, the irritated owl fell silent with them.

But no human voice called out to them. The woods, fragrant with pine and spruce, might have been empty except for them and the owl.

Kerry’s reluctance grew. The urge to turn and flee kept rising from the pit of her stomach even as something seemed to keep pulling her forward. She didn’t want to be part of this. She wanted to be somewhere else, tucked safely away in sleep, unaware that such ugliness and horror shared the planet with her. Vain wish, she knew, but reading it in the papers was a far cry from this. Dread marched beside her in a way it never had before.

Finally the glow of the campfire came into clearer view. Steps quickened, and from along the whole line of searchers, people gasped for air as they hurried up the steep slope, Kerry among them. Each and every one of them was propelled by the hope of arriving in time to save a life. Any other thought faded into inconsequence.

At the last second, though, Adrian grabbed Kerry and turned her away from the fire, pressing her face into the shoulder of his nylon parka. “You don’t want to see,” he said.

A part of her wanted to agree with him, but that pressure inside her head was back, demanding, calling, urging. She could no more resist than she could have vanished from the spot.

She pulled her head back, reluctantly stepping out of the protective circle created by his arms. “I’ve already seen,” she said unsteadily.

“Not in real life,” he argued gently.

“I think I have.”

Turning, she faced the glowing campfire and stepped forward. She sucked a shocked breath.

Not because of the scene, but because she had already seen it so accurately. It was real.

The world darkened, leaving only a pinpoint of light, then even that turned black.

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