Wildfire Omens (Wildwood #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Cheyenne

Smoke rose from the fire, drifting into the crisp morning air and disappearing into the still dark sky. I hugged my arms around myself and watched the flames. Something was coming. I could feel it. Could feel the tremors of it in the cold earth underneath me, could hear it in the whispers of the wind that snaked through the trees. The truth of it settled into my soul, bringing unwelcome anxiety.

Change was on the horizon. It moved as certainly as the westward winds that blew in from the foreboding sky. In my experience, change was rarely a good thing. It was loss; it was heartbreak. It was scorched earth and attempting to rebuild from the ashes. It was something I tried to avoid at all costs.

I trembled before shaking myself. Whatever was coming, it would have to wait. I had a job to do, and I needed to block out these feelings so I could focus on it. Because if I didn’t, change was coming for another family, too.

And I’d do everything in my power to stop that from happening.

Sam walked over to the fire, his step dragging and his blue eyes looking bloodshot from pure exhaustion. He pulled off his wool cap and ran a hand through his tawny hair. “Hey, Cheyenne, that coffee ready yet?”

“Probably,” I answered. “Help yourself.”

“Thanks.” He grasped the handle of the percolator with his thick gloves, filling up his thermos before walking over and grabbing mine to fill too.

“Here,” he said after putting the percolator back on the fire. “Drink up. We’re going to need it today.” He dropped down to sit beside me, bumping his shoulder to mine.

“You think?” I took my thermos from him and sipped, closing my eyes in appreciation. Coffee was always worthy of gratitude, but there was something almost divine about steaming-hot coffee cooked over a campfire on a frigid morning.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this one,” Sam muttered. “Too many hours have passed.”

I had a bad feeling too. But something told me mine had nothing to do with our mission.

“We never give up hope,” I said, chiding him.

Sam was always the first one to get negative. But in this case, he had a point. Our average search duration was around five hours. We’d been searching for this hiker for over twenty-four—never a good sign. And we weren’t even the first team to go out. The local guys had done a hasty search before calling us in, and the man’s hiking buddies had searched before that.

It had now been nearly three days since Scott Fairbanks had wandered off alone without his pack, highly intoxicated from the bourbon he and his friends had shared around their evening campfire. He’d stumbled away from the group and simply vanished into the unforgiving terrain of Bighorn National Forest. We were still early in the season, with snow on the ground in the higher parts of the park and temperatures still dropping into the 30s at night even in the lower elevations. Not a great scenario for an inexperienced hiker without supplies.

I knew as well as Sam did that people sometimes died simply from getting lost while looking for a private spot to relieve themselves. It had happened to hikers who were much more experienced than Fairbanks, in areas with more foot traffic and larger search teams. Some people were never found. But we had to maintain hope, and part of my job was to hold on to that hope for all of us.

Sam gave me a pointed look that let me know he was already past the point of believing we’d find Scott alive. If he was right, it wouldn’t be the first time our mission changed from rescue to recovery. And, sadly, it wouldn’t be the last. But I hoped he was wrong—for the team’s sake as much as for Scott and his family.

So I shook my head and gave him a friendly smile. “Just finish that coffee. You’ll find your optimism again before you get to the end of that cup.”

“I doubt that,” he grumbled.

I stood, brushed the dirt from my jeans, and called the rest of the unit over from where they huddled in small groups, tending their horses or shoveling down food and packing up their supplies. They were all weary, and I felt a stab of empathy for them. We’d already thoroughly worked the grid and had reconvened at base camp to grab a few hours of sleep before expanding the search yet again.

“I know you’re all tired,” I said, raising my voice so everyone could hear me. “This has been a difficult search. But this is what we do, and we’ve done worse before. When it gets hard, remember why we’re doing it: Scott Fairbanks. He has a family. A wife and two kids. They need him back, and he’s gotta be anxious to get home to them. We’re going to make that happen. We head out again in fifteen minutes. There’s fresh coffee over here if anyone wants any. Do what you need to do.”

I put on an optimistic face for the team, but Claire, our Sheriff’s Office coordinator, shot me a knowing look. She could always see through me—probably because we’d been best friends since the day I’d moved to Wyoming as a kid. I’d been a quiet, shy, awkwardly tall eight-year-old still reeling from the dissolution of the life I’d known, thanks to my dad deciding he’d like to start a new family with someone else. My mom had packed us up and moved us to her childhood home, where we’d crammed into my grandmother’s house and I’d started a new life that was absolutely nothing like the one I’d had in St. Louis.

It was the worst year of my life—and the best thing that ever happened to me. I’d met Claire Hawkins my first day in school. She was everything I wasn’t—an honest-to-goodness cowgirl, born and raised on a Wyoming horse ranch, who had never met a stranger. She marched over to me that day, her mess of blonde curls only slightly contained by the sparkly green cowboy hat on her head, and announced that we’d be best friends. It was a promise she’d kept even when it would have been easier for her to break it. I loved her fiercely for it.

She meandered over now, slinging an arm around my shoulder.

“What do you really think?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

“I think it got too cold last night. It’s clear he didn’t do the smart thing and stay put when he realized he was lost, and I’m worried he may not have found a water source out here,” I said, matching her quiet tone. “But I’m not giving up hope.”

She grinned. “No, we’re not.”

Hank, our base command leader, came over to finalize the plan. He’d been a lifelong search-and-rescue operative, until the arthritis in his knees slowed him down enough that he recognized he was a liability on the ground and switched to running our base instead. We all loved him like a dad, and his experience was invaluable.

He put a hand on my shoulder. “How’s the team holding up?”

“We’ve done worse,” I said. It was a mantra that got us through the hard ones.

“Come take a look at the maps,” he said, motioning to where he had them spread out on the tail bed of his truck. “I want your thoughts.”

I followed him over and looked at the ground we’d covered, comparing it to what we’d been told about our hiker’s last known location. Claire sipped coffee from her bright-red thermos as she watched me study the map.

“We’ve covered a lot of ground,” Hank commented, shaking his head.

“We have,” I agreed.

“You’ve got good instincts. What do you want to do next?”

A thought was beginning to form as I looked over the topography, trying to put myself in Scott Fairbanks’s shoes.

“We followed some tracks this way,” I said, using my finger to trace the areas we’d marked on GPS as possible clues. “If we assume he was smart enough to stop and hunker down once he realized he was lost, then, theoretically, he should be somewhere in the grids we’ve already searched. Somewhere in here,” I said, tracing a circle over an area we’d covered twice.

“Exactly.”

I bit my lip, thinking it over. This was the kind of search where we really needed a canine unit for scent work. “We could send a team or two back through some of the more dense places we’ve already checked or spots where it’s possible he built a shelter from natural elements. Maybe it blended in and he was asleep—or unconscious—and didn’t respond when they called.”

“But…” Hank probed, hearing the skepticism in my voice.

“But when I interviewed his friends, that’s not the picture I got of him. He was inexperienced, the only one of them who’d never done anything like this. Had never built a shelter before, and reportedly didn’t have any equipment to do so. Didn’t take anything except a flashlight and a roll of toilet paper when he walked off, and had been drinking enough that he wasn’t thinking straight. Wasn’t the kind of guy to make the safe choice even when he was.”

I felt a little flicker, a nudge that I was on the right track. “I don’t think he hunkered down and waited for rescue. My gut says he panicked and kept moving.”

“Hmm.” Hank made a non-committal noise, but it didn’t bother me. He always held his opinion until he was sure.

I pointed at a spot that was a few miles from where we’d been searching. “There are caves over here, aren’t there?”

Claire leaned over, looking. “Yes. That’s pretty far from where he was last seen though.” There was a sliver of doubt in her voice, even though I knew she trusted me.

“It is,” I agreed. “Would have taken him some time to make his way over there, especially in this terrain. Add in hunger, thirst, and general weakness… I get it. But a lot of people naturally head toward water.”

I traced my finger over the map, imagining his route in my head. “There’s a fairly large creek that runs that way. It’s a downhill path from where he was last seen, and it lines up with the clues we marked. If he wandered around in circles for a bit like this”—I showed them with my finger—“and hit this trail, he might have thought it was the one they were on to begin with. If he took it far enough to hit that creek, he might have kept going, assuming it would lead him to civilization if nothing else. Then if he saw the caves and was smart enough to use them as a shelter, it would explain why no one was able to spot him from the air.”

There were over a million acres in this forest. It was essentially like looking for a needle in a haystack at this point, and all I had was a hunch and some wild speculation. I glanced at the group, knowing that the wrong decision would force us to expend valuable energy—and morale—looking in the wrong place. But my gut said to check the caves, and it was the first time I’d felt that on this search. I trusted it. So I tapped my finger on the map.

“I really think we need to look here.”

Hank nodded, slapped my shoulder, and called everyone over. “Alright, people. It’s go time. Cheyenne’s gut is saying to check the area around Bear Hollow Cave, so you’re heading there and setting up a new grid. Everyone okay with that plan?”

The group was exhausted, but there were only nods of assent. Tired or not, this was what we lived for.

I headed back to pack up my gear and put out my fire. Then I made my way over to my horse, Wildfire, a deep Chestnut mare. She was my favorite search companion. Not every search called for horses, but I loved the ones that did. I’d rather be out with her than on an ATV or a helicopter any day—and certainly more than trekking on foot. Besides, Wildfire offered more than companionship and steady feet on the trail. She had good instincts of her own and appeared to love the search-and-rescue team as much as the rest of us. Her gentle spirit seemed to understand why we did what we did.

“You ready, girl?” I stroked her neck as she nuzzled into me.

Claire and Sam came up beside me, both already on their horses. Even though Claire was our liaison, she participated in every search, having been a member of the unit long before she joined the Sage County Sheriff’s Office as a deputy. When we divided into search teams, she, Sam, and I were nearly always together.

“You wanna take the lead?” Claire asked.

“Sure,” I answered before swinging up into my saddle. I glanced at Sam and Claire. “Let’s do this.”

For the first time in the last twenty-four hours, I finally had a good feeling about something. My gut said we’d find Scott Fairbanks alive.

But my spirit still said something else was coming. I took one last glance at the sky, shivering as a hard wind blew through camp, rattling Hank’s lanterns and sending up a cloud of dust around us all.

Yes. Something was coming.