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He had an identity all set up in Solitaire. He’d started cultivating it months ago when he realized that was where Will Hunter kept flying off to. He could slip in unnoticed, do the job, and leave again without raising any red flags. It was the smart thing to do, but it wasn’t nearly as satisfying or primal as hunting Brielle Ives. If she died in town, there would be so many more questions than if she died out here, where animals would destroy all the evidence for him. If she was ever even found. In Alaska, people disappeared at twice the national rate. Brielle would just become another name on the long list of the missing.
Yes, he had to find her before she reached Solitaire.
As he poked at his meager campfire, the sound of a dog barking echoed through the dark woods. He froze, his heart doing an excited flip in his chest.
No way.
It couldn’t be Brielle and her dogs. They were miles away by now. He straightened and listened, trying to pinpoint in the muffled, snow-filled silence the direction of the noise. North. Not Brielle then. She’d been headed southwest when he last saw her.
Krane kicked snow over his fire and grabbed his rifle. He elected not to take the snowmobile. The animal sounded close and he didn’t want to alert its owners to his presence until he assessed the situation. He walked for about a half-mile, navigating by the bright light of the moon.
He saw the dog first—a big white ball of fur happily playing in the snow in front of a tiny cabin. The man standing in the cabin’s doorway, backlit by yellow light, held a bottle in one hand and a cigar in the other. The warm, sweet scent of his cigar drifted toward Krane in a cold burst of wind.
There you are, you bastard.
He grinned as a new plan took shape.
18
Ellis jolted awake to chaos. The dogs screamed and pulled on their tethers. Aleu stood guard beside him, holding up her bad paw, a low growl coming from deep in her throat.
He pushed himself upright and shook off the fog of sleep. “Hey. Shh.” He rested a hand on Aleu’s back, felt the tremble of fear under her coat. Alarm had him sitting up straighter. Aleu wasn’t a nervous dog. If something had scared her that meant something scary was coming this way. “What’s wrong, girl?”
He stood on shaky legs and scanned the campsite as the dogs continued to howl and pant and tug anxiously at their tethers.
Bree was gone.
His memory was shot, everything hazy like the fog of a dream, but he did vaguely recall she said something about needing to fix the sled. He spun toward it but didn’t see her. Had she wandered away for a bathroom break? Or had that something scary dragged her away?
He started to call out to her but thought better of it and closed his mouth without making a sound. Someone out there on a snowmachine gunned for them, had already tried to kill them once. He remembered that clearly. Best not to draw unwanted attention.
Unless they had already been found.
Ellis swore under his breath and shuffled over to the box of gear. Every bone in his body ached. He wondered at how he could feel nothing and everything at the same damn time.
He hadn’t brought a knife. Or a gun. Neither had crossed his mind when he left Anchorage. He’d truly thought this would be a quick trip to the interior and when they didn’t find his dad, that would be the end of it. He hadn’t expected a plane crash, a plunge into ice water, a storm with hurricane-force winds, falling off a cliff, or psycho snowmachiners.
He’d been stupid. He’d never make that mistake again. If he survived this one.
He found a spare knife in the gear. Good thing because he heard it now, the thing that had riled up the dogs— something heavy crashed through the trees. He tried to track the direction, but it sounded like it came from everywhere and nowhere.
The cloud cover proved too thick to offer any moonlight. All around him shadows shifted and twisted, trees morphing into monsters then back into trees. He knew there was an extra headlamp somewhere in the gear and blindly groped around for it while keeping an eye on the ever-changing shadows.
One shadow peeled away from the rest. Huge with four long legs. It looked like something from Lovecraft’s imagination, a lumbering and deadly creature here to suck his soul.
No. Couldn’t be. That was crazy.
He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut for an instant, but when he opened them again it was still there. It had stopped at the edge of their camp and eyed them like they were dinner, sending the dogs into another frenzy.
Jesus, where was Bree? She had to hear them. Why hadn’t she come running? He took his gaze off the creature long enough to glance down and find the headlamp. He whipped it up, flashed it on—
And the moose charged.
Moose.
Shit.
The shadow monster was almost a better bet.
