Her breathing quickened, and she felt the first traces of panic creeping down her spine like a pointy-legged spider. Tears leaked out of her closed eyes, loosening things enough that she was finally able to pull one open. She could feel the gunk on her lashes against her cheek every time she blinked, waiting to adjust her vision to a brightness that never came.
Pitch black.
That’s when the reality of her situation hit her.
She was alone, in a dark, dark room with her arms chained above her head.
And she was naked.
The chains rattled again as her hands involuntarily jerked down to cover her bare body, though of course, that proved impossible. Her skin prickled into painful gooseflesh from the damp, unrelenting cold that surrounded her, and try as she might, she couldn’t make out even the most indistinct shapes around her.
Alone in the dark. With only the sound of her teeth chattering to keep her company.
Mommy?
Tara was seventeen years old, far too old to address her mother that way, but she would have given anything to hear her mother’s voice calling, feel her mom’s soft arms around her, taking off the chains, rubbing the soreness from her shoulders.
A soft whimper escaped her. She thought she heard a low sigh in response. A male sound. A sound of satisfaction.
Mommy? Mommymommymommymommymoy!
She didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud until she heard him laughing.
Her body jolted again, sending her spinning to face the sound. “Who are you?” she cried. “What the hell are you, some kind of freak?”
He must have moved, because this time, the laughter came from behind her. She turned again to face him, her bare toes scrambling for purchase on the icy floor. She felt something warm running down her cheeks and realized that she was still crying. It was all coming back to her—the hike to the hot springs with Paula, the way the warm water had felt on her aching feet, the shadow on the rocks, the tall, thin stranger standing above her. She’d tried to speak to him, to say hello, but he’d grabbed her, she’d tried to escape, and then everything had gone black.
He was still laughing. A slow fury boiled up inside her, and she clenched her hands—still stretched above her head—until her fingernails dug painfully into her palms.
“What do you want?”
In response, she heard a small click, and then a brilliant, blinding light assaulted her eyes like an explosion. She turned her head abruptly to the side, squeezing her eyelids shut. She didn’t want to see. She wanted to wake up and find out that this was all just a dream, not real, not this. But after a few seconds of silence, she couldn’t stand it anymore and peered into the brightness, blinking rapidly as her eyesight adjusted.
He was standing in front of a spotlight—the large, portable kind the police sometimes used at crime scenes on TV—lighting a cigarette. The acrid smell of tobacco smoke wafted toward her, and she realized he could see her naked. Then, almost simultaneously, Tara realized that his seeing her was the least of her worries.
At that point, a horrible feeling prickled across her skin, causing her teeth to chatter again, making her whole body tremble and strain against the chains. She wasn’t going to see her mother, not ever again. Not Paula, not her school, not her boyfriend Todd, the captain of the soccer team in a football town. Just this horrible place, with this man whose refusal to speak terrified her more than anything.
“What do you want?” she asked, her voice a small, shaking thing, knowing as she asked that he wouldn’t answer.
He took the cigarette from his lips and smiled. They stared at each other for a long time. And then he finally moved, putting one hand on the back of her neck, the other moving to encircle her waist. Overcome by the urge to throw up, Tara still managed not to scream. Not until she felt him crush his cigarette out on the vulnerable skin at the small of her back.
Chapter Two
As they followed the teenager’s path to its conclusion, Sabrina could practically hear the giant clock in her head ticking the precious seconds away. The sad thing was that even though she was rushing her team down the mountain, she knew they’d never make up those lost hours—and it would be Tara who paid for it.
“Hold up a minute.” She stopped and braced herself with a hand against the rough bark of a pine tree. It was always a bad sign when the mixture of dry pine needles and damp dirt and grass on the ground began to blur, the images smashing together as if someone had put pieces of the forest into a kaleidoscope.
“You want me on point, Bree?” Jessie asked, crunching to a halt behind her.
Sabrina shook her head, and God bless America, her vision cleared once more. “No. No, I’m okay. Just lost the tracks for a minute.” She reached up to rub the bridge of her nose, then dropped her hand to scan the ground. It only took a few seconds to find where Tara’s trail converged with someone else’s—a male who’d left large prints, about a size eleven or so, with a thick zigzag pattern on the sole. But then something odd happened—Tara’s prints vanished, and the man’s continued, bearing telltale scuff marks at the toes, which told them he may have been carrying something heavy. Like a teenaged girl.
She didn’t even want to think about why Tara may have needed to be carried.
They pushed on, until finally, the trees started to thin to the point where the green, wet dimness that had enveloped them all the way down the mountain gave way to stretches of gray sky that provided only a little more illumination. Eventually, with an abruptness that Sabrina had always found a little shocking, nature ran into human construction as the team spilled out onto a slim, gravel-packed logging road. The trees, of course, stopped at the road’s edge.
Unfortunately, so did the tracks.
“Take a rest, Bree,” Jessie said as she moved up beside Sabrina. “You’ve been on point for a while now. Alex and I will check the roadsides, and we can switch positions once we find the trail again.”
If we find the trail again. Blowing upward so her sideswept bangs lifted slightly off her forehead, Sabrina just nodded, refusing to give a voice to her doubts. She reached up to rub the back of her neck, feeling the fatigue starting to creep into her muscles now that she wasn’t moving. Alex and Jessie spread out and started cutting for sign—searching for telltale indicators that they’d found the continuation of the trail—along the sides of the road. Sabrina let her hand drop, and she knew, she knew her flank trackers wouldn’t find anything. She’d noticed the tire tracks the minute they’d set foot on the logging road—noticed, but hadn’t wanted to confront the truth they told.
He’d parked his car here. And with the small amount of traffic that came through this way, it would be a miracle if anyone had seen it—or him. Or Tara.
Here’s a riddle for you: How can you make a girl vanish in the forest so the state’s best trackers can’t find her?
Wrap her up and get her out on a vehicle—car, four-wheeler, dirt bike. Wrap her up. Get her out. Hide until we stop looking.
Feeling a headache coming on, Sabrina rolled her head around, trying to drive out some of the tension settling at the base of her neck and smack in the middle of her right temple. The gray sky suddenly grew brighter, so bright that it almost hurt to keep her eyes open. She ducked her head, looking at the small pools of moisture that had formed in dips in the gravel. She caught one at just the right angle,