AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter twenty-four
Silas
“Whatthefuck?”I growled, pissed at yet another delay in my mission to reach Daphne. “Now where the hell are we supposed to go?”
Hawthorn stood beside me, hands on his hips as we both stared at the tumbled wall of trees and boulders in the path ahead of us.
“This isn’t on the map, and it looks pretty fresh,” he mused, wiping his sweaty forehead with the back of his wrist. “I wager the landslide happened last night during the rainstorm.” Digging the trail map out again, Hawthorn hummed and hawed over our predicament while I paced impatiently. “The way I figure,” he finally said, and I moved to his side to examine the map with him, “there are two ways to go about this. The trail forked a ways back there, one branch going north, the other going south. We can either choose one way to go...or we can split up.”
Frowning, I met his eyes, understanding what he wasn’t saying. If we chose a direction, it could be wrong, only slowing us down when we realized our mistake and had to go back.
But, if we split up, we could cover more ground and possibly reach Daphne even faster.
I couldn’t get the crack of that gunshot out of my head, the echo of the sound cutting through the still mountain morning, causing me more stress than any of the ones I’d heard overseas.
Well, almost any.
Shoving down the memory I didn’t have time to acknowledge, I nodded once, my mind made up.
“Right. I’ll take the north trail. You take the south.” Hawthorn didn’t question me; he simply refolded the map and started back the way we had come.
Before long, we were standing at the fork, the place where the three well-worn tracks intersected, preparing to say our goodbyes.
“I want to thank you, brother,” I started, but Hawthorn shook his head.
“Ain’t nothing you wouldn’t have done for me had I landed in your city.” His eyebrow quirked up. “In a private plane.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Seriously, though, Hedge. Next time I’m looking for the girl I’m low-key cyber-stalking because I don’t have the balls to man up and tell her how I feel about her, you can bet I’ll be askin’ for your help.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You better, asshole.” I held out my hand, pulling him in for a quick back slap before we both turned quickly and went on our way with a plan to meet at the trailhead parking lot just off Beaver Kill Road as soon as we could both get there.
The problem with being on my own was that it gave my brain more time to envision all kinds of scenarios about what had happened to Daphne, each one worse than the last. It also gave me time to reflect on my mistakes, all the ways I could have made this situation better before it came to this.
In reality, I likely couldn’t have prevented some psychopath coming after Penelope; that decision was all theirs. But if Daphne had stayed in Las Vegas—if I had given her a reason to stay—then I wouldn’t have found myself hauling ass through a hot as balls forest in upstate New York, counting the seconds until I could get to her, save her.
“No, dumbass,” I muttered to myself. “You’d just be hauling ass through a hot as balls desert in Nevada instead.”
Thankfully, the elevation began to increase again, forcing me to use more brainpower on finding secure footing and less on berating myself for past mistakes. As I neared the summit, I could see a structure standing high above the treetops, looking like a hut on stilts in the middle of the woods. The map in my pocket and all the signage I had passed in these woods indicated to me that I was nearing the Balsam Lake Mountain Observation Tower, strategically placed so that it had a view surrounding woods. Considering every other sign was about fire prevention, it seemed like the kind of thing that was really useful. I was surprised they didn’t have more of them, to be honest.
I hesitated for a moment, considering if it would be at all beneficial for me to climb the thing and look around. Maybe there was some way of spotting where they were holding Daphne. But in the end, I rejected that idea. The forest was so dense and all the trees so tall, there was no way I could spot anything on ground level unless it was in a really massive clearing.
Using the tower to spot smoke was one thing, but a building?
Probably not.
After I passed the Observation Tower turn off, the terrain began to change, and I found myself descending down the other side of the mountain, giving me the opportunity to really pick up the pace. I made good time, reaching the bottom of the path and finding myself at another intersection of two paths. This was where I had told Hawthorn that I would turn south, swinging around the loop and meeting him at the parking lot where we would be forced to either choose another trail and keep going, or admit defeat and head back to the city to regroup.
I was turning south, my mood having taken another significant dive with still no sign of Daphne anywhere, when something in the trees across from me caught my eye.
There, buried just a few feet inside the tree line, was another trial, this one marked ‘Do Not Enter’ with threats of fines for disobeying. According to the sign, this trail was on private property and was strictly for animals, helping the herds move freely in their grazing areas.
I stared at that sign, feeling so fuckin’ stupid.
How could I have ever thought that Daphne would just be hidden in plain sight? That who ever took her would be content to keep her where any hiker could come by at any time. I mean, they had closed off all the surrounding trails and roadways, obviously trying to keep people away, but any old asshole could cut the chains and go on in.
After all, we had.
But this private herd path was a whole other story.
Of course this was where she would be, on private property where the dirtbags who abducted her could find the most seclusion.
Grabbing my phone out of my pocket, I checked for service, but there was none. I typed out texts to both Stone and Hawthorn, letting them know where I was headed, just in case I managed to find a pocket somewhere out here where the signal was able to reach. Setting my phone to silent and sliding it away, I turned onto the herd path, hopped the low chain across the path, and trudged on.
This was obviously not a common trail used by anyone, never mind hikers. The path was completely natural, no indication of maintenance at all, and there was zero signage at all. The trees and shrubs crowded close to the path, wild and thick, blocking out much of the light and giving the forest an ominous feel.
I kept on, knowing the sun was climbing high, but not really able to tell where it was due to the thick canopy. The bugs were insane this deep in the trees, biting at all my exposed flesh like a bunch of assholes and leaving me irritated and itchy.
It wasn’t long before I came to an intersection, not with another trail this time, but with a gravel road. Crouching down, I could see quite clearly where the road bisected the herd path in a north-south direction. But what gave me the most hope I’d had since Stone’s phone had rung back in Las Vegas was that this gravel road contained tire tracks.
“I got you now, you fuckers,” I growled out loud, standing back to get a better look at the tracks. I could tell that a car had driven in both directions, and likely recently due to the puddles in the low spots. The base of the vehicle was wide, but the actual width of the tires themselves appeared to be narrow, meaning they were less likely to belong to a truck or off-road vehicle, and more likely to belong to a car.
Crouching down again, I examined the tracks, analyzing the direction of the gravel spray, until I was confident I could tell which direction the car had come from, noting that it was away from the woods and back down the herd path. Turning south, I followed along the side of the gravel road, hoping that the car leaving the site didn’t mean they had taken Daphne to another location.
Or buried her body in the woods and left her there to rot.
The thought alone made me want to puke, and I swore to myself that if any real harm had come to her, I was going to kill every last one of them.
Hell, I was already leaning that way as it was. If Daphne was hurt, I’d burn the fuckin’ world down.
