By the time I parked at the head of the White Wolf Trail, I had told Wheeler everything I’d been holding back with the exception of Jonas Kron being my backer. I turned off the ignition and looked at him. He stared straight ahead, saying nothing. I handed him the flashlight—I only had one—and clipped a leash to Blitz’s collar.
“Ready?” I said, reaching for the door handle. Blitz scrambled around in the back of my car, eager for an adventure. He exploded from the backseat as soon as I opened his door, but Wheeler remained where he was, his arms stubbornly crossed.
“This is crazy,” Wheeler said. “It’s crazy and it’s dangerous.”
“I won’t argue with that. Are you coming, or do you want to wait here alone in the dark?”
Wheeler cursed loudly as he got out of the car, clicking the flashlight on with a huffy sigh. “I still don’t understand why we had to bring the dog,” he muttered. “It’s not like he’s trained to track a scent or protect us or anything actually useful.”
“You don’t give him enough credit,” I told Wheeler. “If he hears or smells something strange out there, he’ll let us know. That’s good enough for me.”
“What do you think is out there?” Wheeler scanned the trees, as though he suddenly felt eyes watching him from the darkness.
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” I said, heading down the White Wolf Trail. The straight black torsos of the trees closed us in. Blitz attempted to bound ahead, but I kept a tight hold on his leash. At the sanctuary, the wolves were howling, and I could tell the sound put Blitz on edge. Wheeler trained the flashlight beam on the forest floor two feet in front of us. Luckily, the moon was out and round, and provided wan yellow light to break up the inky darkness.
After about half a mile, Wheeler halted abruptly. “Did you hear that?”
We stood in silence, listening. Blitz strained against his leash, and I reeled him backward.
And then we both heard it, somewhere up ahead: the distinctive, broken-bone snap of a branch.
Blitz roared a bark and lunged toward the sound, nearly wrenching my arm from the socket. I lost my grip on the leash, and an instant later Blitz was gone, tearing through the underbrush.
“Blitz!” I called over and over, but the sound of his paws galloping across the ground quickly grew faint. I ran after him, and heard Wheeler’s footsteps pounding the ground behind me, his flashlight beam jouncing wildly. I leapt over a jutting root that tried to catch my foot. Wheeler stumbled and went down on his hands and knees.
I stopped to drag him to his feet. I didn’t want a repeat of my separation with Gemma the day before. We stood together, listening for the sound of Blitz’s paws or barking or anything to tell us where he was now. But there was only silence.
“What do we do?” Wheeler asked, looking helpless and angry. “Danny is going to fire me. I’m so screwed.”
“He’ll come back when he’s finished chasing whatever he’s chasing,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “Don’t worry. He’ll find us. But we have to keep going.”
Wheeler sighed. “All right.”
We backtracked until we reached the trail, and set off again in the direction of the cottage.
“Thank you for coming out here with me,” I said after we’d walked for a few minutes in a tense silence. “I thought I could do this alone, but I can’t. This sounds lame, but I miss being a part of a team, even a pretend one.”
“You’re doing fine,” Wheeler said, still sounding irritated. “If the things that happened to you over the last couple of days had happened to me, I would be long gone by now. Turns out I don’t just play a coward on TV. I really am the ‘Shaggy.’”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I protested weakly. It was definitely true.
He looked at me. “If I had any guts, I would have stood up for you all those times Danny yelled at you. I would have told him I quit, too, when he fired you, or said I was out when he decided to come up here and fuck with your investigation. And I sure as hell would have told you no when you said we should bring Blitz out here. But I didn’t do any of that. I just went along with it.”
I squeezed his arm and smiled at him. “You’re out here with me. That matters.”
His return smile was tentative, but I could tell he appreciated the praise. He got precious little of it from Danny or the Bullsh?t Hunters fans, who enjoyed abusing him online almost as much as they had me.
Ahead I spotted the diagonal line of a roof. “There it is.”
As we entered the cottage I felt my nerves crackling with foreboding at what I would find inside. The interior was cramped, the windows boarded up, but moonlight found its way in through the gaping hole in the roof where the tree had fallen on the house. I shone the flashlight around.
Gemma wasn’t here. No one was here.
I put a hand to my head, shaking it. I had brought us out here in the middle of the night and had possibly lost Blitz, which could get me sued and Wheeler fired, and it was for nothing. Maybe I was wrong about Jonas. Maybe he was the perpetrator who had abducted all those women. Maybe Gemma was dead. Maybe @AnnikaKron was just some troll having fun with me.
Either that, or I was still missing something.
Unlike a typical set piece, which would be torn down at the end of shooting, the Wolf King’s cottage was sturdily built, which was probably the reason it hadn’t crumbled years ago. Kron intended his sets to last. The dirt floor was littered with dusty, broken bottles, crumpled chip bags, faded candy wrappers, and one lonely-looking used condom, shriveled like an abandoned snakeskin.
I stepped toward the chalk mural on the back wall to examine it more closely, and as I did I heard a groan from behind us. Wheeler and I turned at the same time to see the cottage door swing shut.
We looked at each other with wide eyes. My mind desperately grasped for a best-case scenario. It was the wind. A sudden gust of wind blew the door closed, that’s all.
Then from outside the cottage came a sound that made my guts drop: a sharp pounding, a hammer striking a nail and driving it into wood.
I rushed toward the door and tried to push it open, but it wouldn’t budge. Someone strong held it fast on the other side as they continued to drive nails into the wood. This, like so much else in Stone’s Throw, was a familiar scene. Jack and Joelle had done the same thing to two of their classmates in The Girl and the Wolf, trapping them in the cottage and threatening to burn it to the ground.
Wheeler and I hit the door at the same time. Together we shoved against it with all our weight. The wood shifted slightly but did not open.
The hammering stopped suddenly, and I smelled the oily, distinctive odor of gasoline just before glass shattered against the outside of the door, and I heard the whoosh of fire bursting into existence.
Wheeler and I stumbled backward, sharing a look of alarm. Wheeler’s eyes were wide and bulging.
“The windows!” I shouted, and we broke in two different directions, heading for windows on opposite sides of the cabin. I banged my palms against the wooden boards covering one of the windows and bit back a yelp at the pain that shot up my arms. The boards were thick, nailed down solidly. They didn’t even rattle when I hit them.
I pulled out my gun and unloaded five rounds into the wood, then tried shoving against it again, hoping the boards would bend and break. But the bullets did nothing but make a few tiny peepholes.
Wheeler was still pounding and pushing against the boards on his window, but I could see they weren’t going to break loose. Whoever had nailed them there, they hadn’t done a shoddy job. I checked my cell phone and saw a single bar. I dialed 911, but the call ended less than a second after I hit SEND. Wheeler was now trying his phone as well, and apparently getting the same results, because he began to shout “Come on, come on, come on, come on” at the screen.
“The roof,” I said, grabbing his arm. His eyes rose to the hole above our heads. Smoke began to obscure what we could see of the sky around the trunk of the fallen tree, turning it the color of dirty cotton.
“I’ll boost you up,” Wheeler said grimly.
“Who’s going to boost you up?” I had to shout to be heard over the roar and crackle of the fire eating through wood.
“I’ll figure something out.” He knelt, linked his hands together, and signaled for me to climb on. “Once you’re out, run and get help, or run until you find service.”
“I’m not leaving you here!”
“You have to! I can’t squeeze through. I won’t fit.”
I shook my head. Wheeler wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me. He should be the one to get out and run for help. But I saw his point. The space was barely big enough for me to wriggle through.
“Liv,” he said, turning his head to cough out a lungful of smoke. “Let me do this.”
Without waiting for permission, he grabbed me around the waist and hoisted me up toward the hole in the roof. Even though I knew it should be me who remained behind, I grabbed on to the edge of the ragged hole. I had logged enough torturous hours at CrossFit to ensure I could do at least one real pull-up. I did that one, and lifted myself high enough that I could wrench my body through the hole, the trunk of the fallen tree scraping down my back. I felt the roof bow under my weight, and for one terrible second I thought it would collapse on top of Wheeler. I spread myself out flat so my weight was equally distributed, and swiveled to peer down into the hole at Wheeler. I held out my hand to him. The roof bowed another inch.
“Go!” Wheeler shouted.
I would not let Wheeler die in this cabin. I slid on my butt to the edge of the roof, lowered my body over the side, and dropped the remaining five feet. My boots hit the ground, and I ran around to the front of the cabin to see if there was any way I could put out the fire. But flames had consumed the front of the structure. Luckily, the wood, already charred in so many places, was not burning as quickly as it might have. It bought us time.
“I’ll be back soon!” I shouted, but I didn’t wait for his response.
I ran through the woods in the direction of the wolf sanctuary, where I knew they had a landline. Without a flashlight, the forest was a gauntlet of branches trying to tear my face off, clothesline me, knock me on my back. The ground was just as bad, roots and ill-placed stones catching at my feet. I fell once, hit my knee hard on a jagged rock and tore open my jeans, but I was up again in an instant, hurling myself forward with blood soaking my leg. A sharp branch caught my cheek and razored across it, so close to my eye that the shock made me freeze in my tracks. With my heart exploding and my lungs shredded, I clapped a hand over my right eye, feeling blood pool in the palm. When I dared to take my hand away, I blinked and assured myself that I had not just gouged out my own eye. I tentatively fingered the tear in my skin, and my stomach rolled at the depth of the cut, a trench stretching two inches, soaking the right half of my face with warm blood. But it was fine. It didn’t matter. I’d deal with the cut later. I already had one massive scar on my face. What was one more?
It was as good a place as any to check my cell reception, just in case. I took out my phone and almost started to cry when I saw there was still only one bar, but when I dialed 911 this time an operator picked up.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
My knees almost buckled in relief. I opened my mouth to answer her, and then I heard a familiar, shrill shriek that turned every nerve in my body into a live wire. It was Tocsin, the mountain lion. I must be near the sanctuary again. A chorus of lowing wolves joined the female shriek of the mountain lion. The combined sounds made me feel like I was losing my mind. Howling and screaming. Screaming and howling.
“My name is Liv Hendricks,” I said. “There’s a fire in the Wolf King’s cottage. I don’t have an address. I don’t think there is one. It’s in the woods off the Dark Road—I mean Dag Road. The house is on the White Wolf Trail. There’s someone trapped inside—”
That was as far as I got before a figure moved into view ahead of me, a statuesque woman with hair so blond it was almost white. She wore dark jeans and a black jacket. There was a long black gun propped in her hands.
“Helene,” I said, and took an automatic step backward, away from her. There was a series of beeps in my ear as I lost the call. I lowered the phone, keeping my eyes on Helene as I pressed the button to redial. But this time the call ended immediately.
The Norwegian woman’s narrowed eyes moved from my bloody face to my bloody knee and back to my face again. “What happened to you?”
“Why do you have a gun?” I countered. My right hand inched toward the Glock in my coat pocket.
“It’s a tranquilizer gun,” she said. “For Tocsin. The wolves are howling and upsetting her. Sometimes it is the only way to make her stop her cries.”
Her method of quieting the mountain lion seemed excessive, but I didn’t have time to worry about animal cruelty at that moment. Wheeler could already be unconscious—or worse—from smoke inhalation.
I took a step toward Helene again and raised my phone to redial. “Helene, there’s a fire at the cottage in the woods. My friend is trapped inside. We need to get the fire department out here as quickly as possible. Will you please run back to your office and call them on your landline? Tell them what I told you?”
Helene nodded but didn’t move. She took a deep breath and sighed. Then she pointed her tranquilizer gun at me and pulled the trigger.
There was a sound like someone spitting out a seed. Then a hard, sharp sting in my thigh. I looked down and saw a dart sticking out of the front of my jeans.
“I’m sorry,” Helene said. “I didn’t want to do this.”
I blinked once. Dropped my phone. Dropped to my knees.
And then I was gone.