QUINN
He sipped the hot beverage and wrapped his hand around the mug, focusing on the sheer sensual pleasure. Speaking of which… his mind jumped from satiating one hunger with another, thinking about his coupling with Dan.
He smacked himself in the head as he realized how early it was and hoped he hadn’t woken him.
Dan texted back a few minutes later.
Dan: I’ll take you up on that. See you tonight.
Quinn: Sorry for texting so early…I forgot the time.
Dan: Not a problem. I always want to hear from you, no matter what time it is.
Quinn grinned to himself while he rinsed his breakfast dishes and put them in the dishwasher. Maybe I’m not rushing him after all, he thought. He filled a large thermos with coffee and grabbed the lunch he had packed the previous night from the fridge and headed for the station.
Sometimes he found a camper or tourist already waiting in the parking lot for the ranger station to open. Quinn felt grateful that wasn’t the case today. He had a lot on his mind, even aside from his budding relationship with Dan.
What’s going on with the missing hikers?
If they just got lost or injured, the search dogs would have found them.
Did they get carried off by a bear or a wolf?
Why haven’t we picked up on their cell phones or found their clothing?
Could it be the wurm Dan saw? If it’s roaming and attacking people, we’ve got a big problem.
He listened to the station’s voicemail while he powered up his computer and checked email, going through the routine messages quickly.
Quinn added meeting invitations to his calendar, ordered routine supplies, and worked his way through customer service questions.
Most of those could have been answered by consulting the FAQ, but Quinn tried to provide a human touch whenever he could.
Another cup of coffee helped him shake off morning brain fog. Quinn logged into the private chat for park rangers, a vital way to stay connected in a job that could easily become isolating.
Most of the posts were fairly standard. Rangers gossiped about ill-mannered campers or demanding hikers, shared notes about wild animal sightings, and alerted the others to forecasts of bad weather.
He breathed a sigh of relief when no one had spotted poachers or bounty hunters, or even any visitors displaying suspicious behavior.
He frowned when he saw a new thread, “Strange New Animal Sighting,” and clicked through, scanning the messages from several rangers in his general area of the forest.
…like a giant lizard with the head of a big cat…
…kept calling it a dragon…
…farmer says it ate the hog he had hung up to drain…
…doesn’t match anything on record for this area…
Perplexed messages went back and forth among the rangers, and Quinn shared their concern. If the wurm was a magical creation, then few if any of the usual protections against dangerous animals were likely to work against it. That posed a safety hazard for visitors and park staff alike.
“The last thing we need is having the media get wind of this and start traipsing around the woods with their cameras,” Quinn muttered. That not only endangered the reporters, but also ruined the experience for campers and potentially placed area shifters at risk for accidental exposure.
On the positive side, he didn’t see anything in the posts to suggest that the cryptid bounty hunter from the Dover podcast had been sniffing around.
Of course, the hunter might just have evaded official notice by not contacting rangers and talking to locals, but since no one even mentioned a nosy stranger, Quinn hoped they had a grace period, however short, before dealing with that problem.
Quinn figured things wouldn’t stay quiet for long, so he took advantage of the break to get the most essential tasks out of the way. That meant driving the main roads to look for disabled cars or roadkill and alerting the proper helpers to deal with those situations.
Once he finished, a few hours had passed.
Quinn ate lunch and took a bathroom break, then headed out for his afternoon walking circuit.
He took in the beauty of the forest, the smell of the trees, and the sound of the birds.
At the same time, he kept an eye out for any signs of wildfire, gathered stray bits of trash, and watched for any vandalism or broken safety rules.
Quinn knew that some people might consider his daily routine to be lonely, but he felt energized in the forest and enjoyed his role as a guardian.
That just made the infringement of the bounty hunter, poachers, and wurm more vexing because he took the trespassing personally.
And that was before factoring in his protectiveness of Dan and the residents of Fox Hollow.
Will he want to stay in Fox Hollow once the danger passes? And if so, how can I help make it a safe place for him to let his daemon loose in the park without causing too much of a fuss? If he wants to go somewhere else, I’ll go with him. He’s my mate and being with him is what’s most important.
He figured that he and Liam could work up a plausible piece of fake folklore to explain the Dover Demon’s relocation.
While he didn’t want to call attention to Dan and suffer an onslaught of media and curiosity seekers, sightings were bound to happen, and it would be best to have an answer ready when they did.
With his official work done, Quinn headed for the last known location of the most recently missing hiker.
The police had already scoured the area and left without any public conclusions.
From what Quinn knew of the situation, robbery or kidnapping seemed unlikely, and the man had no obvious reasons for wanting to run away.
The police hadn’t ruled out an attack by normal predators like a bear or wolf, but with no bodies, they couldn’t be sure.
The sudden uptick in missing people meant that something dangerous and unusual was going on.
The park issued warnings for campers and hikers not to go out alone, to always have a phone or walkie-talkie, and to let someone know where they were going.
Quinn wished he could talk to ghosts as well as gather the vibe of the nature spirits around him, but he was grateful for his gift even with its limitations.
He paused on the trail where the energies felt particularly strong, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and focused his concentration. Quinn visualized opening his mind to pick up on the resonance, and while it didn’t display images, it did convey tone.
Usually, the nature spirits were peaceful unless a storm was brewing. Now and then they gave Quinn early warning that something was going to go wrong, like a forest fire or a flood, before the other clues manifested.
Today, the energy felt jangled and uneasy. Whatever had happened here hadn’t been natural, and it had upset the balance. The spirits had an angry resonance, something Quinn rarely felt. He had a clear sense of warning, even if the nature daemons didn’t use words to communicate.
Concerned, Quinn released the energies with thankfulness and a blessing and moved a distance down the trail, away from where the hiker had vanished. Once again, he opened himself to the spirits and waited, trying to validate the impression he received earlier.
Here, Quinn didn’t sense the same disquiet as before, although he had probably traveled less than a mile from his first reading. That reinforced his opinion that whatever had happened to the missing hiker had left a stain behind that altered the natural vibrations.
While he didn’t doubt that would gradually clear, he marked the place in his mind and resolved to ask Jeffries about having a witch come out to release the negativity, just in case.
Might not hurt to bring a medium along, in case the hikers really are dead. Maybe their ghosts can help us figure out what happened, he thought.
Quinn repeated the exercise two more times, at a place where someone else had last been seen and then a neutral spot. The impressions were the same, confirming that whatever took the hikers was probably not natural, and neither wild animals nor human criminals.
Was it the wurm? Quinn felt torn between his duty to keep park visitors safe and not wanting to lose credibility with a hard-to-believe warning.
No pictures. Few sightings. No trail of flattened trees and vegetation. Missing hikers but no savaged bodies left behind. Not even any strange droppings.
Is it a ghost? Only sometimes corporeal and otherwise not? If it’s magic, then our normal ways of tracking and stopping a dangerous animal probably won’t work.
I can’t shut down the park on a rumor, and I don’t want to ruin people’s vacations by scaring them out of their wits. But I’ll hate myself if anyone gets hurt because I didn’t do something to prevent it.
Quinn resolved to discuss the options with Liam and Jeffries to see if a supernatural level of protection could do what normal precautions could not, and sent them both emails suggesting a meeting to discuss options.
His watch beeped, reminding him it was time to return and get ready for his date with Dan.
Although Quinn remained vigilant on his return walk, he didn’t spot anything out of the ordinary.
While he had noticed that regular animals were quieter or absent near the sites where the attacks had occurred, the forest hummed with its normal level of activity elsewhere, and he heard the scuttling of animals in the brush and songs of birds overhead.
That boded well for the woods to recover, but first they had to find what caused the disappearances and put a stop to it before more people got hurt.
Quinn took a shower to wash away the sweat of his trek, tossed his ranger uniform into the wash, and picked a nice shirt and dressier-than-usual jeans.
He resolutely pushed worries aside and did his best to focus on seeing Dan again, hearing about his day, and exploring more sexy times after supper.