I paused, and closed my eyes while I uttered a silent prayer for Marc. Then I looked up to find Parker alternately staring at me and the road. “What?”
He hesitated. “Do you really think we’ll find him either of those places?”
“I certainly hope not.” I spent most of the rest of the drive giving my dad another, somber update, pretending I didn’t hear hopelessness in his every exhale.
At Marc’s house, I used the restroom and traded my leather jacket for a heavier coat I found in his closet, then grabbed a box of protein bars and several bottles of water from the fridge. As I split the supplies among two backpacks, I heard voices speaking softly from the front yard.
Through the front window, I saw Ethan and Parker standing side by side, each stuffing something into the backs of their respective vehicles. Rolls of black plastic. Ethan held an unopened roll of duct tape, and the handle of a shovel stuck up over the backseat of Parker’s car when he closed the back hatch.
I was hoping for the best, and they were preparing for the worst.
Sighing, I blinked unshed tears from my eyes and kicked the kitchen cabinet closed, then joined them outside, where Dan stood on the porch, both hands stuffed into the pockets of his own light coat.
“I think you’re right,” he said, steadily holding my gaze. “I think Marc’s still out there somewhere, alive. But you can’t blame them for bein’ ready, in case we’re wrong.”
“I don’t blame them.” I handed one of the loaded packs to him. “But we’re not wrong.”
I waved goodbye to Parker and Dan as we pulled out of Marc’s driveway, a better map of Mississippi on my lap, the heater blowing full blast into my face.
“You okay?” Ethan glanced at me briefly, then back at the road.
“No.”
He sighed, lips pressed together, hands gripping the wheel so hard his fingers had gone white with tension. “Faythe, I know you want to believe Marc’s still alive. And I hope to hell you’re right. None of us can handle losing him. But you need to be prepared for the possibility that he’s really gone. Or that Yarnell’s right, and we may never find him.”“That won’t happen.” I clenched my hands in my lap to keep from putting a fist-shaped indentation in his glove compartment. “I’d know if he were dead, Ethan.”
“How?”
I closed my eyes and ground my teeth together. Damned logic… “I just would. Wouldn’t you know if something were wrong with Angela?”
Ethan chuckled. “Yeah. She’d call every five minutes, like she’s done all day long.”
“Your phone’s on silent?” I couldn’t resist a grin.
“Vibrate. Twenty-two missed calls.”
I raised one brow in amusement. “Maybe you should call her back.”
“I will. Once all this is over.” Ethan frowned. “She’s so…normal, I can’t talk to her about relationship stuff while I’m on Pride business. It feels too strange. Does that sound weird?”
“Yes, but I know what you mean.” That whole worlds colliding thing…
Ethan glanced my way again, bright green eyes shining with insufferable sympathy, and I realized I hadn’t gotten away with changing the subject. “I just want you to be prepared for the worst, Faythe.”
Clearly we were done talking about Angela.
“Fine. I’m prepared.” I crossed my arms over my chest and stared out the window. “End of subject.” My brother frowned again but didn’t push the matter.
I loved him for that, almost as much as I loved him for being there with me, considering what he thought we’d find.
Dense forest raced past in a blur, casting long shadows on the highway. The clock on the dashboard read four-thirty. The sun would set in less than an hour, and we’d be hiking through the woods in the dark, in below-freezing temperatures.
But at least I had a coat. In the twenty-eight hours Marc had been missing, the temperature hadn’t yet risen above freezing, and he didn’t even have that much. I knew that for a fact because his coat was draped across the backseat behind me. I’d been hauling it around all day, along with his own ironically unused first-aid kit, just in case we found him.
I sat in silence until Ethan turned from Highway 33 onto 563, headed south toward Wilkinson, at which point my heart started thumping in my chest and I sat straight in my seat, scanning both sides of the highway. We’d find a break in the trees soon. We had to.
In a three-mile length of two-lane highway, we came across two cars abandoned on the side of the road, where they’d slid off the pavement during the ice storm several days earlier. Wrecking crews had been working overtime for days to haul off all the deserted vehicles, but they obviously hadn’t made it this far out of town yet.
But other than the roadside wreckages and turnoffs onto several small roads, I saw nothing of note in the tree line. I’d just decided to have Ethan turn around when we got to the next town, so I could scan the other side of the road, when my gaze caught on another stranded vehicle and my heart jumped so hard it lodged in my throat.
“Stop!” I shouted, startling Ethan so badly he jerked, twisting the wheel toward me. The car lurched to the right, but he corrected quickly, stomping on the brake in the process.
“What?!”
“What did Dad say Adam Eckard drives?”
“A black Explorer.”
“Like that one?” I pointed out the windshield toward the vehicle stopped on our side of the road, about two hundred feet ahead.
Ethan squinted. “Are you sure that’s an Explorer?”
“An older one, but yes.” My eyes are better than his. That’s been well established.
“Eckard’s is a 2001.” Ethan drove us slowly past the SUV, and I noticed two things immediately. First, it was empty—no sign of either Marc or Eckard. And second, when the Explorer had slid off the road—which it had clearly done—it had smashed head-on into a trunk on the edge of the tree line.
“He went off the road!” I shouted, too excited to manage a calm volume. “Marc’s not dead, he’s just lost in the woods.” And bleeding. And freezing.
But what had happened to Eckard? Neither his boss nor Kevin had seen him, and we’d found his wrecked car abandoned on the side of the road. Could he and Marc both be lost in the woods?
“Faythe, don’t get your hopes up….” Ethan warned. “Marc lost a lot of blood, and it’s twenty-eight degrees outside. If he’s still…out there, why didn’t he come back to the car for shelter? Or call someone?” He made a sharp U-turn, drove us back past the Explorer, then turned again and brought us to a stop on the narrow shoulder, behind the Explorer.
“Because he knows that if he got away, they’d send someone else after him. It’s not safe in Eckard’s Explorer.” I was out of the car before he’d even turned off the engine. “And he didn’t call because he doesn’t have his phone. Dan called me from it, remember?”
“Faythe, wait!” Ethan’s door slammed shut, but I was already at the Explorer, peering through the back hatch. “Best-case scenario, he’s out there somewhere, injured and freezing, and probably still bleeding. And for all we know, Eckard could be chasing him. We should Shift—”
“No.” Since cats can’t track by smell, there wasn’t much point in Shifting. Though we could hear much better with cat ears… But in the end, I shook my head. “I can’t help him without hands, Ethan.”
“Fine. But the worst-case scenario isn’t—”
“Nooo!” I moaned, my face pressed into one of the rear windows, one hand up to shield my eyes from the crimson glare of the setting sun. The cargo area was too shadowed for me to see much of, but the backseat was well lit. And draped across it was a ratty blanket, covered in blood. “No!”
Ethan pulled me back and glanced through the window. He sucked in a sharp breath, then regained control and turned toward me, taking me by both arms. “It might not all be his,” he insisted, peering into my eyes. “If Marc fought him, some of that could be Eckard’s.”
Please, please let some of that be Adam Eckard’s blood. Most of it. Because there was surely too much for one man to survive losing. There was so much blood soaked into that blanket and the cloth-covered seats that if we’d been in cat form, we would have smelled it, even with the car doors shut and the windows rolled up.I jerked on the rear door handle, desperate to get inside. To identify the blood and prove to myself that Marc could still be out there. But the door was locked, so I moved on to the front door. It was locked, too. They all were. Why were they locked?
Whatever had happened there the day before, someone had left the vehicle with the presence of mind to click the locks.
“Here, wait a minute.” Ethan pulled me away from the Explorer and slammed his elbow backward into the rear window. The glass shattered, shot through with a thousand icelike webs, but remained in place. One more blow knocked the entire cracked pane into the backseat, where it slid onto the stained floorboard.
I didn’t bother opening the door. I just stuck my head in the window and sniffed.
The scent of Marc’s blood was everywhere. It couldn’t have been stronger if I’d been wading in it, and my heart throbbed, my lip trembling in devastation. But then I sucked in another breath through my nose, and a fainter scent caught my attention, a morbid mercy.