One

“Welcome to the Yodel Inn,” said the stocky middle-age Black man. “Where there are no dull moments.”

Dahlia tore her gaze away from her phone, blinking at him. She’d futilely hoped for a response from her sister, but only Dahlia’s twenty-plus frantic outgoing texts filled the screen, the last of which was undelivered due to no cell service. After a night of no sleep, a delayed morning flight, and hours of wandering around the mountains looking for the teeny-tiny town of Howling Falls, she knew she wasn’t at her sharpest, but the odd emphasis gave her pause. “I’m sorry. Did I miss a pun?”

He grimaced. “Yodel, no dull? Supposedly it rhymes.”

“Oh!” Now she felt bad she hadn’t caught it immediately. Normally, she was a huge word-play fan, but it’d been a stressful twentyish or so hours. “It does rhyme—clever!” She tried to make up for her initial lack of enthusiasm, but he still looked mopey.

“I wanted ‘Welcome to Yodel Inn, where yo-delight is our delight,’ but I was outvoted.”

“I do like yours better,” she said, finally taking a moment to glance around the small motel office. It looked like a tiny fake log cabin, but it actually smelled like freshly cut pine, which made her wonder if it wasn’t fake or if they just used a really authentic air freshener. The pun-master and front desk clerk was wearing a red plaid flannel shirt with a name tag proclaiming his name was Bob, and the whole scene made her feel like she’d wandered onto the set of a maple syrup commercial.

“Thank you.” Bob looked a little brighter at her approbation. “Do you have a reservation?”

“I don’t,” she said. “I’m Dahlia Weathersby. My sister, Rose Weathersby, is staying here?” She couldn’t help the lift of her voice that turned an optimistic statement into a question. The Yodel Inn and Tavern was the only lodging in Howling Falls, but relief still flooded over her when the man nodded.

“Yes, she checked in early this week. Would you like a room close to hers?”

Although Dahlia would rather make sure her sister was alive and well and then immediately return to her life in California, she knew she’d need to stay at least one night. The sun had been sinking behind the mountains when she’d finally spotted the “Welcome to Howling Falls” sign. Even if her most optimistic dreams came true and she found Rose chilling in her room at the Yodel Inn, Dahlia would still need a place to sleep, and her sister was a horrible bed hog. Pulling out her driver’s license and a credit card, she slid them across the counter. “Yes, please. Just tonight for now.”

He entered her information, ran her card, and then grabbed a key marked with a nineteen off a nail on the wall. She noted that the only missing keys were two, six, and seventeen.

“Which room is Rose in?” she asked, even though she figured she could take an educated guess.

He paused. “Didn’t she tell you?”

“She’s not answering her cell,” Dahlia explained, feeling a sickly dip in her stomach saying the words out loud.

“Well, I don’t think I should give you that information,” he said slowly. “I take our guests’ privacy very seriously.”

Maybe you shouldn’t keep all the room keys behind the desk for anyone to see then? “She sent me an emergency text yesterday, and I haven’t heard from her since.”

Bob looked alarmed. “Emergency text?”

“Our private code that we only use in emergencies. ‘Tell Mom hi.’”

“Tell Mom hi,” Bob repeated slowly.

Practically smelling the skepticism radiating off the man, she repeated, “We only use that in drastic situations.”

“What if she just wanted you to tell your mom hello?”

“She wouldn’t,” Dahlia insisted. “It’s our secret code.”

“Secret code.” He was sounding less and less convinced. “Sure she’s not just out of cell range somewhere?”

Dahlia knew it was highly likely that Rose was fine, just out of cell range or distracted by new people and places. It wouldn’t be the first time her sister had forgotten to check in with Dahlia for days or even weeks. The emergency code couldn’t be ignored, however. That brief final text was the only reason she was here arguing with flannel-wearing Bob at the Yodel Inn in Howling Falls, Colorado, instead of doing a million other things at home in California where she belonged.

A wiry white woman who looked to be pushing seventy entered the office and immediately moved behind the desk to join Bob. She was also wearing red plaid flannel, because that seemed to be the town’s uniform—or at least the inn’s.

“Would you mind calling Rose’s room?” Dahlia asked.

Although he narrowed his eyes in suspicion, he did as she asked while the older woman looked on with obvious curiosity. Dahlia was disappointed but not surprised when he hung up with a shake of his head. “No answer.”

“Any chance we can take a look in her room? Make sure she’s okay?”

His horrified expression told her that the answer was no. There was zero chance he was going to let her into her sister’s room. “Absolutely not. Like I said, I take my guests’ privacy very seriously.”

“Have you seen her today?” she asked.

“I don’t keep track of my guests,” he said with an offended huff. “That would be a gross invasion of their privacy.”

“Rose? That pretty blond girl in Room Seventeen?” The other hotel employee piped up, making Bob groan. “I haven’t seen her for a few days. She’s probably off exploring the mountains. She looks like a real nature-lover, that one.”

“Becky,” Bob huffed. “Don’t be giving out guest information.”

“Did you talk to her?” Dahlia asked, hope surging. “Do you know where she might’ve gone?”

Becky shook her head. “But I saw her heading over to the tavern side a few evenings ago, so you’ll want to have a chat with the bartender. Oh, and Glenn too. He’s always over there, drinking beer and gossiping. Maybe she talked to them.”

“Such a breach of ethics,” Bob muttered.

“Thank you,” Dahlia said to Becky gratefully, ignoring Bob’s grumbling. It wasn’t much information to go on, but at least it was a lead. Someone in this town had to know where Rose was. It was just a matter of finding the person who could lead her to her sister—her healthy, happy, completely unharmed sister. She had to believe that was true, since the alternative was unthinkable.

One side of the Yodel Tavern was connected to the motel, and the other shared a wall with a…taxidermy shop?

“That’s my place,” the fiftyish white man at the bar told her proudly, giving her his business card. “Glenn’s Taxidermy. I’m Glenn.”

“But why next to a bar?” she asked, pocketing his card, even though she wasn’t quite sure why she’d ever need taxidermy services. However if she ever did need something—or someone—stuffed in a lifelike fashion, now she knew she could call on Glenn. “There doesn’t seem to be much potential for crossover business.”

“You’d be surprised,” the bartender muttered.

Dahlia blinked, tempted to ask, but her squeamishness outweighed her curiosity, and she let the subject drop. “I’m Dahlia.”

“Dulce.” The bartender nodded as she continued to slice the lemons and limes on her cutting board.

They were the only three people in the bar, probably because it was still early in the evening. Or possibly because the town of Howling Falls was so tiny that Glenn and Dulce very likely made up a large percentage of the local population.

“My sister’s supposed to be staying here too, but she hasn’t responded to any of my texts since yesterday, and she’s not in her room.” Earlier Dahlia had even peered through the crack between the drapes into Number 17 but hadn’t spotted Rose. Now she pulled up a picture of her sister on her phone and showed the other two. “Have you seen her?”

“Sure,” Glenn said, and Dulce nodded. “She was in here a few days ago. Tuesday?”

“Must’ve been Monday,” Dulce corrected. “I was off Tuesday.”

“What time?” Dahlia asked, her heart giving a hop of excitement.

Glenn tilted his dark head in thought. “Just after four. I had a meeting with my accountant at four thirty, and it was right before that.”

“Did she talk to you? Maybe mention what she’d been doing? Or where she was planning on going?”

Her hope deflated when Glenn shook his head. “Nah, she just swung through like she was checking out the place, but she didn’t stay long enough to chat.”

“She didn’t talk to anyone?” Dahlia asked, disappointed.

“Just Winston,” Dulce said.

“Winston?”

“Winston Dane.” Glenn winced as he said the name, which sent Dahlia from hope to concern.

“Why’d you say his name like that?” she asked. “Is he awful? Dangerous?”

“Nooo?” The way Glenn stretched out the word doubtfully made Dahlia’s worry double. “Just…unfriendly. He’s the local hermit. Doesn’t care for people much. He wouldn’t commit murder or anything like that. I don’t think. I mean, I couldn’t swear on my life that he doesn’t have a stack of corpses in his basement, but it’s doubtful. Sort of doubtful.”

Anxious prickles coursed down Dahlia’s spine. One of the last people who’d talked to her sister before her disappearance was a people-hating, possibly corpse-collecting hermit. What trouble had Rose stumbled into?

The front door opened, making Dahlia jump. A uniformed cop entered, heading toward their small huddle at the bar. Even though the Silver County Sheriff Department had dismissed her concerns when she’d contacted them last night, Dahlia was tempted to ask this police officer for help. She had a sympathetic face.

“Hey, Dulce,” the cop, whose name tag read “Officer H. Bitts,” said when she reached the bar. Her dark hair was pulled back into a severe bun, and her makeup-free brown skin was flawless. “I just picked up Mike Tippley’s golden retriever on Front Street again. Mike’s house is locked up tight, and his car’s gone, so I set the dog up with food and water at the shelter.”

Dulce sighed. “Thanks, Hayley. That Bailey is an escape artist. I’m working here late tonight, but I’ll call Mike, let him know he can pick up Bailey in the morning.”

The cop nodded and turned away, giving Dahlia a quick once-over. “Nice outfit,” she said.

After a surprised moment, Dahlia smiled broadly. Before her flight that morning, she’d just thrown on some favorite jeans—for emotional support—with a chunky red sweater and tartan scarf, but the unexpected compliment gave her a much-needed boost. “Thank you. You have gorgeous pores.”

Officer Bitts blinked. “Thank you?”

“I do makeovers professionally,” Dahlia explained. “My clients would kill for skin like yours.”

“Okay.” Bitts still looked uncertain as she turned toward the door.

“Wait! I’m looking for my sister,” Dahlia blurted out, unlocking her phone’s screen again and holding it out so the cop could see Rose’s picture. “Rose Weathersby. I haven’t heard from her since she texted me our emergency code last night.”

Bitts glanced at the phone screen. “Emergency code?”

“Tell Mom hi.” Dahlia grimaced when the cop’s expression flattened to professional blandness. “It’s our sister code, asking for help, like when a blind date goes wrong, or my model bailed at the last minute…” She let her voice trail off when she saw the skepticism peeking out of the cop’s neutral expression.

“I haven’t seen her,” Bitts said. “Have you filed a missing-person report?”

“Yes, last night, with the sheriff’s department, but they seemed…unconvinced that she was actually missing. I didn’t know Howling Falls had a police department.”

“It’s small. No need to file another report with us, since we’ll get a copy from the sheriff. I’ll keep an eye out for her.”

Forcing a smile, Dahlia held back her torrent of worried frustration and just said, “Okay. Thank you.”

“Good luck,” Bitts said before heading to the exit.

Dahlia watched her leave and then turned back to Glenn and Dulce, who were watching her with sympathetic expressions. “Do you think the antisocial hermit did something to Rose?” she blurted.

“I’m sure he didn’t,” Glenn said, although his doubtful expression blocked any comfort his words might’ve provided. “He wouldn’t… I mean, he probably wouldn’t, although who knows, since they always say serial killers are the quiet ones…” His voice trailed off with a flinch when he saw Dulce’s ferocious scowl directed at him. “Excuse me, ladies. I should go check on something.” He pushed off his barstool and hurried toward the taxidermy shop door.

Once he disappeared inside, Dulce said, “Winston didn’t do anything to your sister. He’s a sweetheart.”

Dahlia turned to the bartender, some of her worry washing away at the conviction in Dulce’s voice. “He’s not a people-hating, corpse-collecting grump after all?”

“Well…” Dulce grimaced. “I wouldn’t say he’s not a grump, and he’s not exactly social, but it’s a definite no on the corpses. I can’t imagine him hurting anyone. He just really likes his privacy.”

“Okay,” Dahlia said slowly. “So is this just a guess, or do you know him better than Glenn? Because I got the impression from him that this Winston Dane is part Jeffrey Dahmer and part chupacabra.”

Dulce snorted. “Glenn’s a drama queen. I’d take everything he—and most of the gossipy locals—says with a serious grain of salt.” She leaned over the bar and lowered her voice. “Don’t tell anyone, because Winston wanted to stay anonymous, but he made a huge donation to the Howling Falls animal shelter. He’s the only reason this town even has a shelter. Besides, you only have to read one of his books to know that guy’s a cream-filled doughnut inside.”

Dahlia leaned closer. “Books?”

“Hang on.” Dulce came out from behind the bar and crossed to the bookshelf in the corner. She scanned the small collection before pulling out a well-read paperback. Returning to the bar, she handed the book to Dahlia.

“Dane Winters?” The author’s name rang a bell. “Oh! I’ve read some of his books before. Your scary hermit writes cozy mysteries?”

Dulce nodded. “Cozy mysteries with a bumbling, romantic hero even.”

“Right.” Dahlia smiled as the plot of the books came back to her. “Mr. Rupert Wattlethorpe.”

Dulce smirked at her. “See what I mean?”

Scanning the back of the book—on which the author bio was suspiciously absent—Dahlia slowly nodded. “I do, although I still want to talk to your not-so-scary local hermit about what my sister might’ve told him. Do you have his cell number?”

“No. No one does that I know of.”

“How about his address?”

Dulce snorted. “Yeah, but it won’t do you much good. He basically lives on a secured compound, and even if you could get to his front door, I doubt he’d answer it.”

Resting her chin in her hand, Dahlia gave the bartender an innocent smile. “Oh, I’ll figure something out.”

Picking a padlock with a bobby pin and a lip pencil was harder than Dahlia thought it’d be—which was saying something. She hadn’t expected it to be easy, but she was slightly irritated at everyone involved in making the movie Deadly Beauty II, since the heroine had indeed picked her lock in just seconds. Granted, she hadn’t used a Barbara Whitmore Lip Trick in Iconic Rose sharpened to a wicked point, but Dahlia couldn’t imagine another instrument making things any easier.

Except maybe a key. Yes, a key would be nice.

With a huff, she put her sadly mutilated lip pencil back into her compartmentalized travel makeup bag, peering at her other options in the dim moonlight. Lip tint, eyeliner, serum, moisturizer… She made a face. No one could’ve predicted that her search for her missing sister would mean sneaking into some local hermit’s lair, but not even considering the possibility she might need better breaking-and-entering tools when she was packing for this adventure felt like a lack of planning on her part. Sure, she’d look good while failing to pick this lock, but a glamorous fail was still a fail.

Then the slightest bulge in a tiny pocket of her compartmentalized bag caught her eye, and she yanked out her point-tip tweezers. “Hello, beautiful. I’d forgotten about you,” she crooned in barely audible celebration. Crouching so she was at face level with the lock, she woke up her phone again. The directions she’d found on the internet filled the screen, and she smiled victoriously as she balanced the phone on her leg above her knee.

“I know, random internet lock-picking instructor person,” Dahlia muttered under her breath, “that you said raking the lock is inelegant, but as this is possibly a life-or-death matter, I’m shooting for expediency here. For once in my life—fine, maybe twice—I’m taking the inelegant-but-easy route.” That said, even the so-called easy method of picking a lock wasn’t really easy for her, and it took another several minutes of struggling with her tweezers and bobby pin before the padlock clicked and dropped open.

She stared at the opened lock for several seconds before a satisfied smile curled her mouth. She’d actually done it. She, Dahlia May Weathersby, had picked a lock with just the contents of her—admittedly well-stocked—makeup bag and an internet tutorial. Returning her improvised tools to their proper compartments and zipping up the bag, she grabbed her phone and stood, wincing as blood rushed back into her sleeping feet.

“Note to self,” she whispered at a barely there volume, “next time you pick a lock while breaking into some weird mountain man’s property, don’t crouch. Kneel.”

With that decided, she removed the padlock and unwove the chain as quietly as she could manage. The eerie silence of the mountain night made every clink of metal against metal sound like an air-horn blast, but she told herself she was being paranoid. She couldn’t see a house, which meant the mountain guy couldn’t see her…hopefully.

Unless he’s hiding behind that pine tree over there, her extremely unhelpful brain offered, but she shut down that nonsense immediately. “Knock it off.” Despite her words, her growl was almost soundless, just in case someone was lurking close by. “Quit trying to psych yourself out.”

Just because this guy had all—well, most of—the residents of the tiny mountain town of Howling Falls, Colorado, terrified of him, just because he lived in the middle of nowhere, just because there was nothing around but snow and dark cliffs and trees and moonlight shadows shaped like monsters and wailing wind and a brutal-looking fence topped with razor wire didn’t mean that she should fear for her life. Mr. Winston Dane, Hermit, surely was a rational person who would be happy to talk to her about whether or not he’d played a role in her sister’s disappearance.

Dahlia shivered. “Okay, that’s enough thinking.”

She did her best to shut off her brain as she slipped through the opening in the gate. She mentally debated ease of exit over disguising the fact that the gate was unlocked—just because she couldn’t see any cameras didn’t mean they weren’t there—and decided to rewrap the chain but leave the paddock open. She doubted her ability to pick a lock a second time, especially if she was in a rush.

Turning back to the thick stand of trees, she blew out a breath and straightened her shoulders. “The things I do for you, Rosie-Toes.”

She started walking on what she couldn’t really call a driveway, since it wasn’t even gravel, much less paved with comfortingly civilized asphalt. It was more two strips of dirt about six feet apart, worn down by driving a car—no, not a car, she mentally revised, but a pickup, one of those loud, jacked-up monsters—back and forth until the two grooves were formed. Snow dusted the ground, but she was grateful she didn’t have to trudge through drifts up to her knees. Her black boots were, relatively speaking, practical, chosen for breaking and entering, but they weren’t anything real mountaineers would wear or anything. Even just a few inches of snow would’ve made things very uncomfortable for her.

The moon was almost full, just slightly rounder on one side than the other, but as the trees thickened, their branches stretching above the driveway to form a natural tunnel, things got dark. After tripping over a protruding rock for the third time, Dahlia chose comfort over caution and pulled out her phone again. Turning on the flashlight app, she directed the illumination to the ground right in front of her. The edge of the light caught on a sign, and she paused, turning her makeshift flashlight so she could read it. NO TRESPASSING.

There were no threats, no murderous implications, but the sign still felt ominous. Reminding herself that she was doing this for Rose, Dahlia braced herself and walked on. The eeriest part of the walk, she decided, wasn’t the dark shadows turning the trees on either side of her into yawning caves where serial killers were bound to be hiding. Instead, it was the silence. Except for the continual groan of the wind and creaking branches, there was…nothing. No traffic, no other humans, no buzz of electronics, no life noises at all. That lack of background sounds was strangely terrifying.

Dahlia bit back a laugh. I’m confronting a hermit in his potentially heavily armed hideout, and that’s what I find terrifying? The quiet of nature?

It wasn’t just the silence beneath the drone of the wind that made her uneasy, though. It was the complete lack of civilization. In the city, she was surrounded by people at all times. There, one shout would bring at least some of them running if she ever needed help. Out here, it was just her and one scary-ass mountain man. She could scream her lungs out, and no one would ever hear.

“Enough of that,” she muttered, needing to stop freaking herself out immediately. She focused on the track ahead, tilting her phone to send the light farther in front of her. All she could see was more snow-dusted driveway and infinite trees. This driveway—as pathetic as it was—apparently continued for miles.

Rose, she reminded herself. My sister needs me. Maybe. Probably. Or she might be perfectly fine, like that time she decided on the spur of the moment to fly to New-freaking-Zealand and forgot to let me know for three days, or that other time, when she spent two weeks at that monastery in Iowa with no cell signal or internet so she could learn how to make elderberry wine. Quite possibly, I’m risking my life for no reason. Maybe Rose’s 911 text wasn’t an emergency after all. Despite these optimistic thoughts, just the slight possibility that her sister was in trouble was enough to keep Dahlia in sister-rescue mode. With a silent sigh, she trudged on.

Her fingers were starting to ache with cold, so she switched the phone to her left hand, shaking out her right and jamming it into her jacket pocket to warm up. As the light bobbled with the motion, she saw a reflected gleam and came to an abrupt halt.

Was that an eye? Every predatory animal she’d ever heard of living in Colorado—bears, mountain lions, coyotes, wolves… Wait, are there wolves here?—flashed through her mind in a second. Aiming the flashlight with a shaking hand, she slowly focused the beam back on the spot where she’d noticed the reflected light.

There! To her utter relief, it wasn’t the light bouncing off the homicidal eyeball of a carnivorous beast. It was simply a piece of shiny trash that’d ended up on the ground. Maybe Mr. Weird Hermit himself had tossed his gum wrapper out of his truck window.

That didn’t seem quite right, however. Dahlia cocked her head and moved closer to study the object. It almost looked as if it was suspended off the ground. Crouching down, she peered at what was definitely a wire—as thick as a guitar string—stretched across the entire width of the driveway, about six inches off the ground.

“Are you a trip wire, Mr. Shiny?” Dahlia asked under her breath, using the light from her phone to follow the path of the wire. Straightening her legs but staying bent over, she moved to the side of the driveway and between two evergreens, expecting to find the end of the wire tied around a sapling or something similar.

Instead, there was a disconcertingly sleek arrangement of wire and pulleys that looked completely out of place next to the rough trunks and scrubby brush surrounding them. With the light, Dahlia tracked the wire’s progress as it moved through the system and up to the dark canopy over the driveway. She turned her phone to the branches above her and had to grin at the sheer campiness of what she found.

“An enormous net, Mr. Weird Hermit?” she whispered, trying very hard not to laugh out loud. “Someone’s been watching too many Scooby-Doo reruns. Or has a Spider-Man obsession.”

Still internally snickering, Dahlia stepped over the wire with exaggerated care. Now that she’d seen the trap, it would be extra humiliating to be caught in a huge net like some cartoon villain just because she’d been careless and caught the wire with the toe of her boot. To make doubly sure, she stayed to the far side of the path, at the very edge of the net suspended above her, and hurried to put that particular trap behind her.

After just a few rushing steps, however, she forced herself to slow, sweeping the light from side to side over the driveway, looking for any sign of another trap. She thought of all those rocks she’d tripped over before she’d decided to use her flashlight app and cringed. It was sheer luck she hadn’t triggered something and had sharpened spears flying at her or a giant mace swinging toward her head or stumbled into some other Temple of Doom-like…well, doom.

Shaking off her distraction, she focused on the ground in front of her. Every so often, she’d shift the light to the trees lining the drive, but she hated those moments. The light from her phone barely penetrated into the gloom, and it just activated her already overstimulated imagination.

She paused, running the light across the driveway in front of her. It was hard to tell because of the dusting of snow blowing across the space, but it looked like the two tire tracks jogged to the left slightly before returning to the center. For the paths to be worn as smoothly as they were, Mr. Weird Hermit would’ve had to have taken the same tiny detour every day for months—even years—so it wasn’t just that he’d gotten distracted texting one time and swerved slightly off-center. No, this would’ve had to have been a pattern, and a pattern meant there was a reason.

Moving a little closer—but not too close—Dahlia swept the area with light, searching for anything that didn’t belong. Now that she was looking for it, the slight impression jumped out to her quickly, the straight line not fitting the natural surroundings. It would’ve blended just fine into a sidewalk or building or any other non-natural structure, but here in the curve and waves of the organic world, it looked as obvious as a flashing light.

Once she’d spotted the first straight line barely marking the dirt, it was easy to follow it to the corner, until the entire large square was marked out in her mind. It would’ve been easier to hide if all the leaves and loose dirt hadn’t been blown off, leaving a smoothly swept surface. Even the bit of snow didn’t help hide it, instead settling against or in the tiny cracks delineating the square. It was smack in the center of the driveway, so anyone driving straight down the middle would run two tires right over it.

As Dahlia gave the almost-hidden square a wide berth, her imagination ran wild, and the temptation to examine it more closely almost got the best of her. Was it something as innocuous as a sensor, alerting Mr. Weird Hermit that someone was approaching? Or was it something more fun—like a trapdoor that’d drop trespassers into a spike-lined pit?

Okay, maybe not so much fun for the trespasser, Dahlia acknowledged, giving the square a final glance before she pushed forward. She couldn’t help the tiniest feeling of smugness for sneaking past not only one but two of Mr. Weird Hermit’s traps. Immediately, she gave herself a mental slap, because getting cocky was how she’d trip her way into whatever came next.

Forcing herself to stay alert, even though this was the longest driveway in the history of driveways, Dahlia pressed on. The flashlight on her cell phone started to dim, and she paused to stare at it, debating whether to preserve the little charge that remained in the battery or use the light for as long as possible. The thought of being stuck in the middle of nowhere with Mr. Weird Hermit and his apparent hatred of trespassers without the ability to even make a 911 call made her turn off the flashlight app and darken her screen.

Once her eyes had adjusted to the small bit of moonlight filtering through the bare tree branches, she started forward again, even more cautiously in the limited light. She made it around a bend in the drive and came to an abrupt stop at the sight in front of her.

The claustrophobic press of forest fell away, and a ten-foot concrete fence rose seemingly from nowhere. It was startling to come upon it, so out of place. Dahlia had expected an Unabomber-type shack, or possibly a single-wide trailer, or—in the best-case scenario—an adorable log cabin with woodsmoke curling from the chimney. This tall, solid fence, so smooth it gleamed in the moonlight, was just…weird.

“You do call him Mr. Weird Hermit for a reason,” she reminded herself very quietly as she approached the fence, angling away from the wrought-iron gate. Although she couldn’t see any obvious cameras, she had to assume they were there. In fact, he’d probably been watching her progress this entire time, but she still didn’t want to be obnoxious about it. There was no reason to throw the fact that she’d outsmarted his traps and made it to…well, this patently unscalable, very tall wall of a fence.

The trees ended a good fifteen feet from the fence, and so did their helpful shadows, so she felt exposed as she moved across the open space. The lack of close by trees was also unfortunate in that there were no helpful overhanging branches that she could use to get over the wall. Once she was right next to it, she sighed. This was going to be tricky.

The painted concrete surface was as smooth as it had appeared from a distance, about twice as tall as she was without any handy toe- and fingerholds. She moved closer to the single gate, hoping for a gap she could slip through if she turned sideways and sucked in, but the wrought-iron bars were so close together that even a Chihuahua would have trouble squeezing through.

Can’t go through, so I guess I’m going over. She grimly eyed the wrought-iron spikes at the top of the gate as she moved closer to the hinges, hoping they’d give her a little bit of a foothold. Tossing the strap of her bag over one of the spikes so it hung high off the ground, she backed away, trying to distract herself from the sheer impossibility of what she was about to attempt by planning the lecture she was going to give Rose when she was found safe and sound in some mountain hippie commune, unable to charge her phone because all the community electricity was needed for the grow lamps in the pot greenhouse. Or maybe Rose had decided to become a Rocky Mountain version of Dian Fossey, and she was holed up in a cave with a pacifist family of bears and no electricity, about to bed down for their winter hibernation.

Honestly, considering her sister, neither would surprise her. But on the small chance Rose was actually in trouble, Dahlia had to at least try channeling her inner parkourist.

She sprinted forward and jumped at the gate, grabbing two vertical bars close to the top. Lifting her feet higher, she pressed them against the bars, her left one finding the tiniest bump of a hinge she could use as a foothold. Releasing her right hand, she grabbed both sides of her bag strap, using it like a rope to help haul herself up as her feet slipped and scrabbled against the bars. The material creaked but held.

“Thank you, Lavinia Holt,” she managed to gasp as her left hand grabbed the top horizontal bar between two vicious spikes. “For designing bags that are…not only cruelty-free…but…also…durable.” Her right hand grasped the top bar as well, and she pulled her body up high enough that she got her left foot onto the top of the fence. After an awkward twisting scramble, she managed to shift around to the other side of the spikes. Yanking up the bag’s strap so it was clear of the spike, she clutched it in her sweaty fist along with the top bar as her feet dangled. Squeezing her eyes closed, she sent a tiny prayer to the patron saint of breaking-and-entering fashionistas, released her hold on the fence, and let herself drop.

Her feet hit the ground with a jarring thump before she fell backward. Opening her eyes, she mentally checked herself for any major injuries, but all her parts seemed to be intact.

“Ha!” she exclaimed before remembering where she was and the importance of being quiet.

Standing on shaky legs, she tugged down her top layers and brushed off her butt before looking around. Prior to scaling the gate, she’d just been able to see a few trees scattered around before everything disappeared into the darkness, but from her new vantage point, she could make out a dark shape big enough to be a dwelling of some sort.

Blowing out a bracing breath, she slung her bag over her shoulder and turned toward what, with her luck, was probably Mr. Weird Hermit’s torture barn and antique doll emporium.

Although she kept half an eye out for any traps, she marched toward the structure with more speed than was probably wise. The problem was that Dahlia was pretty much over the weird hermit’s nonsense. Her muscles were sore and still trembling, her carefully chosen outfit was a definite mess, and the clock was ticking. The longer Rose was missing, the more likely it was that she was seriously hurt or even…

Nope. Dahlia firmly cut off those fatalistic thoughts. Her brain was not allowed to go there. Instead, she focused on the building in front of her, a black shape silhouetted against a not-quite-as-dark sky, and forced her legs to keep walking. Almost there. She was so close to completing her quest. All she had to do in this portion of her find-Rose adventure was defeat the big bad—well, perhaps not defeat, but more just have a chat with—and then she could move up a level, hopefully to the one that Rose was on.

She walked—fine, stomped—closer to the structure, near enough to see that it was indeed a house. The details became clearer the closer she got, and her determined thoughts were whisked straight out of her brain when she saw that there was a man standing on the porch.

No, not a man. A giant. A mountain. A monolith.

The guy was tall. And broad. And, judging by the scowl she could finally see once she reached the base of the porch steps, he was pissed.