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Lucas

The first thing I understand is that I am not on the ground.

My thoughts come back disjointed, scattered and slow, like somebody dumped them on the floor and kicked half of them under furniture. There is pain first. A heavy, pulsing, nauseating pain at the back of my skull that rolls forward behind my eyes every time I try to blink.

My shoulders scream next, and then my wrists, and then the rest of my body finally starts reporting in with the kind of enthusiasm I really could’ve lived without. Cold air sticks damply to my face. Something drips nearby in slow, patient ticks.

I jerk fully awake, and the motion tears a sound out of me before I can swallow it. Rope bites deeper into my wrists, rough and wet where skin has already split. My arms are bound above my head, not just tied but hauled up, stretched until my shoulders scream.

My toes barely brush the ground when I point them down, and even that little contact sends pain through my spine because my body is hanging wrong, weight dragged through joints that were never meant to hold me like this. The air tastes like rust and old water. Like rotting wood and earth, opened and left to sour.

A mineshaft, my mind supplies slowly, with a ranger’s dull, horrified certainty. Old support beams. Narrow rock walls. Damp streaks blackening the stone. Dust, clay, iron, a sagging ceiling where roots have found cracks and curled through like fingers. A lantern sits on an overturned crate a few yards away, its battery light too white.

My head lolls forward, and bile crawls up my throat because the movement sends pain flashing brightly behind my eyes. “Fuck,” I rasp, and my own voice sounds like it belongs to someone dragged out of a creek and beaten with a shovel.

North Ridge. Jonah’s call. The split pine. Parker behind me.

Parker.

I lift my head too fast and almost black out from the pain. A groan catches in my throat, half swallowed because something inside me still thinks giving pain a voice is dangerous. When my vision clears, a scrape of boots pulls my attention sideways.

Parker is here, and he’s pacing.

For one second, relief tries to happen because my brain sees friend before it catches up. Parker. Sandy hair damp with rain. Park Ranger jacket streaked with mud. Hands shaking at his sides.

My oldest friend in Sweet Rivers. The idiot who hugged me in the equipment room when I came back, who made too many jokes and knew too much about my silences and once stole my fries in tenth grade and nearly got stabbed with a plastic fork for it.

Then I remember his boots behind me at the creek. I remember turning and pain exploding at the back of my head. The relief dies so completely, it leaves nothing behind but cold awareness.

“Parker,” I say, and my voice cracks around his name.

He stops pacing and just stares at me. His eyes are wrong—too wide and too shiny—feverish with something that makes my skin tighten. Relief flashes across his face, then it twists into resentment so fast I wonder if I imagined the first part.

“What the hell is goin’ on?” I ask, but my voice comes out hoarse and raw, barely mine. “Where’s Jonah?”

He looks away. The movement sends a cold spike through me. My heart tries to claw its way up my throat, and the bond, distant and muffled, strains toward the fear so hard I almost feel Onyx on the other side of it, but it’s just the shape of him, alarmed and reaching.

I grab for him inside myself, but the bond slips. Something is blocking it.

“Parker,” I say again, and my voice steadier on his name this time. “Where is my nephew?”

He turns back, and for one breath, I see my friend. The boy I knew. The man who sat across from me at the ranger station pretending vending machine coffee wasn’t a hate crime. The one who made jokes when things got too heavy. Then his mouth tightens, and that version of him disappears again.

“Jonah is fine,” he says, too quickly. “Jesus, Lucas, he’s fine. He really did go out hikin’, okay? He really did fall, but before I could call in that he wasn’t here, Sarah radioed to let me know that someone dropped him off in front of the clinic. Weird, but whatever. It doesn’t matter. He called at the perfect time, so I used that openin’ to get you here.”

Rage and confusion cuts through the fog in my head. The pain in my shoulders is bad enough to blur the edges of the room, and my head is still pounding from whatever blow took me down. But that sentence seems to cut through all of it.

Dropped him off. In front of the clinic.

“What the fuck does that mean?” I snap. “Dropped off by who?”

“No one knows, but he’s alive,” Parker waves it off, as if that ends the conversation. “Unconscious, but alive after I convinced him to come up here and be brave. That’s what matters, isn’t it?”

I stare at him, breathing hard, the bond still slipping uselessly under whatever damp, sweet wrongness has wrapped around it. “You used him?”

He shrugs. “I was already trying to figure out how to get you up here, and then little traumatized Jonah was easy enough to manipulate into being brave again, since he wants to follow in his Uncle Luke’s footsteps. I mean, come on. You have to admit the timin’ was funny, almost like the woods wanted it.”

The ropes creak as I strain against them. Pain rips through my shoulders, but I barely feel it under the sudden urge to get my hands around his throat. “You son of a bitch. He trusted you!”