My ankle hurt more with every step, but I nodded anyway. We had no choice.
“Yes, but which direction? What if we end up going round in a circle?”
“It’ll be dark soon, so we can use the sun and the stars to keep us straight as long as it doesn’t cloud over. But I don’t know where we are. I don’t know which way to go.”
I heard the panic in her voice. Rune, I realised, liked to be in control. She liked order. There was an immense amount of knowledge locked up in her head, and a missing piece upset her.
“As long as we go in one direction, we have to hit civilisation eventually. A road, a trail, something like that. I think it’s a tiny bit warmer here than in Richmond, don’t you?”
Rune nodded.
“So Ridley probably drove us south. Which means we want to head north to go home.”
I had no idea whether my logic would pan out, but Rune seemed happier now that we had a plan.
“Okay.” She pointed at the dense wall of green. “We have to go this way.”
Now we were in a race, not only against Ridley if he was still out there, but against time. Would we make it to safety before Rune got sick?
CHAPTER 48 - ALARIC
ALARIC PACED THE hotel room. Emmy was doing the same, and they’d had to synchronise to avoid bumping into each other. She’d apologised a hundred times for Beth and Rune being snatched, and Alaric had never seen her so stressed.
“It should have been me who got taken.”
“It shouldn’t have been any of you.”
“It was Blackwood who went after Kyla Devane.”
“And it was Sirius who led everyone to Kentucky in the first place.”
Alaric and Beth had befriended Harriet, and Alaric had wanted to see justice for Piper Simms as much as anyone. They’d all underestimated how unhinged Ridley would turn out to be. It just so happened that Beth and Rune had ended up paying the price.
The search team had spent the day canvassing the area served by the cell tower in Sevierville, but apart from a barista who thought Ridley might possibly have bought coffee and a panini to go on Friday, maybe, they had no leads. Ridley was as much of a ghost as Dyson.
The similarities between this week’s events and those of eight years ago didn’t escape Alaric. Both times, he’d been happy and lost everything. Both times, he’d found himself alongside Emmy searching for a needle in a haystack.
The main difference? This time, Black was being more cooperative. When the Emerald pay-off disappeared, he’d opened an investigation, but although he’d made the right noises, Alaric hadn’t failed to notice his lack of enthusiasm. This time, he’d thrown the whole of Blackwood at the problem and cleared his entire schedule to head up the search himself.
Not that it was doing much good. Daylight was fading now, which meant another night without the girls Alaric loved.
“Rune’s a tough cookie,” Judd said from his spot by the door. “We know she is. And Bethany’s no pushover either.”
He’d flown in to help, as had Naz and Ravi. Naz was assisting the tech team back in Virginia, while Ravi was going through every property associated with Ridley, just in case he’d left a clue behind. But so far, no dice. Ridley hadn’t sent proof of life either, and every minute that ticked by, another little piece of Alaric’s heart died. He’d worked so fucking hard to rebuild his life, only for it to fall apart again. He wasn’t sure he could do it a second time.
“Message from HQ,” Dan said. “They’ve been monitoring the local police communications, and a camper reported hearing a shot fired in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Said it sounded like a rifle or a large-calibre handgun.”
“Are the police looking into it?” Black asked. “Isn’t hunting banned in national parks?”
“Great Smoky Mountains is the exception, according to the research team. They have a wild hog control program. The cops said it’s most probably the rangers chasing one down.”
“What weapons do the rangers carry?”
“A .38 as standard.”
“Who shoots a wild hog with a .38?” Emmy asked as she flopped back onto the bed. She’d been catnapping earlier, and Alaric had kept a very wary eye on her because her sleepwalking problem was no joke. She’d once destroyed his TV on a nocturnal meander, made all the more alarming by the fact he’d been watching it at the time. “I’d want a .44 Magnum, or better still, a shotgun, especially in the dark. But even if I had a twelve-gauge, I wouldn’t be skipping through the woods tonight because it’s pissing down.”
“Want to check it out, Diamond?”
Grasping at straws? Perhaps. They’d already had three false alarms today—footprints around a derelict gas station that was most likely just kids, a stolen RV they’d found at a local chop shop, and one homeless gent whom they’d scared witless when they burst into a tumbledown shed. A member of Emmy’s team had dropped him off at Target with five hundred bucks and an instruction to buy himself food and clothing.
“Sure beats sitting around here,” she said. “Right now?”
Black nodded his agreement. “You, me, Ana, and Pale.”
Pale. The guy from the gas station. He’d turned up too, along with a different girl—a redhead this time—and an even more garish Hawaiian shirt. Did the guy own any footwear but flip-flops? The chick was still out canvassing along with twenty or so other people. They planned to hit the dive bars, the flophouses, and the late-night convenience stores. The dealers. The fixers. Ridley had to get supplies from somewhere, and maybe he’d tapped into the shadow economy.
Pale hadn’t said much, and nobody had mentioned his background. Alaric
