The Briars

Prologue

Thick fog pressed down on the valley, snaking ghostly fingers between the foothills and leaving breath on every leaf. It stuck to the ferns in tiny droplets and hung bridal veils over the pines clustered around the shelf of rock jutting out over the gorge.

Ben Gannon sat on the stony outcropping, his gaze fixed far below on the patches of mist gliding along the narrow river like phantom schooners with torn sails. With a sigh, he pried open the lid of his water bottle and took a sip before passing it to his daughter, Layla, who sat at his side.

“Anytime now,” he said as Layla chugged.

Ben angled a finger at the spirals of mist ascending the side of Mount St. Helens. “See there? Lifting already. Twenty minutes from now, it’ll all be burned off.”

Layla tucked the bottle in her backpack and twisted the strap of her pink binoculars with impatient fingers. “Can I have some jerky?”

Ben nodded and a moment later felt her prying into his pack.

He held out his hand as Layla unzipped the bag, and she pressed a piece of jerky into his palm.

Popping it in his mouth, Ben closed his eyes and filled his nostrils with the honeyed scent of May-morning air.

A few minutes passed, and when he opened his eyes again, the other side of the gully was appearing between patches of mist.

“This is it,” he said, rising and kicking out the pins and needles in his left leg. Layla scrambled to her feet beside him, lifting her binoculars.

A mild gust of western wind rippled their clothes and the sun broke through, bathing the valley in warm, weak light.

“Spectacular,” Ben murmured, his hands on his hips.

This particular vista, even half shrouded in fog, never ceased to take his breath away. It was a dramatic view of the rolling foothills that flowed around the base of Mount St. Helens like thick green batter poured over a mold. Green, at least on this side of the mountain.

Odd, that. The contrast between the southwest side and the other, blown to smithereens twelve years before in 1980 and still bare and ugly as a newborn baby bird, while this half of the mountain and their quaint little town of Lake Lumin remained virtually untouched, not a pine tree out of place.

They’d had their fair share of ash rain down from the black cloud that covered the entire state, ash that was now compressed into a single, fine layer several inches belowground, but other than that, you’d never know that the town had been a stone’s throw from an eruption the magnitude of Mount Vesuvius.

Just plain dumb luck that the mountain had blown in that direction, Ben supposed as he gazed at the verdant foothills, each brimming with streams, and old-growth firs, animals, and birds.

The fog was higher now, just kissing the upper rim of the valley, and Ben lifted the binoculars from around his neck. Today was the day. He could feel it.

In perfect synchronization, father and daughter scanned the gully from left to right.

From up here, Ben could just make out a slice of Lake Lumin far below, a little crescent of blue-green water behind the pines in the late-morning sun, with a corner of the old boathouse peeping out around a dark grove of firs.

Ben’s gaze left the lake and swept the vista toward the mountain. Adjusting the focus on his lenses with a finger, he scanned a shadowy pocket on the far side of the gully.

There it was. A massive nest at the very top of a gnarled snag amid the living pines. He’d found it weeks ago, but had yet to catch sight of the bird that built it. One of these days. Maybe today.

For several minutes, Ben kept the binoculars trained on the tip of the snag, where large branches and piles of brush had been twisted into a nest the size of a golf cart.

“Bald eagle,” he said under his breath. “Gotta be.”

“She’s not gonna show.” Layla lowered her binoculars and popped another piece of jerky into her mouth. “There’d be hatchlings in the nest already if she was gonna lay this year.”

“Hon, don’t talk with food in your mouth.”

Ben slid the binoculars away from the snag and grazed his sight left along Lewis Ridge, where a hiking trail ran atop the cliff on the north side of the gorge.

“She might lay late this year,” he said. “Happens all the time.”

Layla gave a derisive little snort as she zipped the baggie shut and tucked it into her pack.

When Ben’s line of sight reached the end of the hillside that dropped down toward the lake, he started back again, slowly, patiently scanning the forest in the direction of the nest. If she was out there somewhere, he wouldn’t miss her this time.

Sudden movement on a shelf of rock caught his eye, the glint of sun against feathers, and he whipped his binoculars toward it, shifting the focus with his index finger in a practiced motion that brought sharpness to his vision.

Ben’s heart skipped a beat.

There she was, and she was a stunner. Huge, the most gorgeous eagle he’d ever seen in his life, standing there against the naked rock in perfect profile, her posture proud, white and auburn feathers fluffed in the wind.

“Layla,” he whispered, nudging her with an elbow. “Honey, look.”

Layla followed his line of sight.

“Oh!”

Ben turned to beam down at his daughter, open-mouthed in wonder behind her binoculars.

“Daddy, what’s she doing?”

Ben lifted his lenses and found the bird again.

“Looks like she caught some critter for breakfast.”

“Oh.” Beside him, Layla’s shoulders fell.

“Every animal has to eat, Lay,” he said softly. “We talked about this, remember?”

Layla nodded, binoculars still at her eyes. “What’s she eating?”

Ben adjusted the focus, squinting. What was that? It was finer and longer than fur. Silken, and floating, somehow.

Wind caught the shelf of rock, sending long dark strands dancing out over the cliffside, and realization washed over Ben in an ice-cold wave.

Slowly, he lowered the binoculars a few inches.

He swallowed, blinked twice, and raised them to his eyes again, magnifying the thing beneath the eagle that seemed to be waving in their direction.

No. He hadn’t imagined it. It was crystal clear. The wind was lifting glossy strands of long brunette hair. A woman was lying face down on the rocks.

Instinct kicked in, and Ben’s hand shot out, pushing Layla’s binoculars away from her eyes.

“Hey!”

“Honey, don’t look.”

His voice was harsh, and Layla blinked up at him in confusion, but Ben was already bringing his lenses back to his eyes, frantically seeking the spot again.

Heart racing, he located the eagle, then angled upward, higher, higher, until he found the trail.

The slender wooden fence that guarded hikers from the edge was unbroken and unoccupied, and there was no one standing at the top, screaming down to the woman who had fallen.

He would have heard it from here anyhow.

Ben swore under his breath and dragged his binoculars back down, praying that somehow, some way, his eyes had been playing tricks on him, but there she was beneath the bird, and though her hair still swirled in the air like a ghost with each breath of wind, she had not moved.

“Dad?”

Layla’s curious voice sounded far away, though she still stood next to him, her fingers tugging at the loose elbow of his flannel shirt.

“Hang on, baby.”

“But—”

“Please,” Ben said urgently. “Please just hang on.”

“Hey!” He shouted across the gully, one hand on the binoculars, the other waving above his head, “Over here! Can you hear me?”

At his echoing shout, the eagle took slow, exaggerated flight, soaring west with the wind and dropping out of sight behind a row of scraggly pines, giving Ben a clear view of the woman on the rocks.

“Who is it?”

Ben didn’t answer as he ran the math. It would take an hour to hike back out the way they’d come, plus there was the several-mile drive to town or the nearest phone.

Too long. If the woman was badly hurt and needed help now, he was her only hope.

Judging the distance, he could be across the gully and climbing up to reach her in less than twenty minutes, if he and Layla hiked fast.

Ben turned to his daughter, stooping to bring them eye to eye as he gripped her hard by the shoulders.

“Listen to me, Layla. Are you listening?”

She nodded.

“We’ve got to get over to the other side of the gully. There’s someone in trouble over there and I need to see if she’s all right. Just follow me and do as I say, understand?”

He kept his voice as steady as possible, but the fear that had blossomed in some small place beneath his rib cage was reflected in his daughter’s eyes as she nodded.

Ben straightened. “Let’s go.”

There was no path down into the steep gully, save a rutted and ferny switchbacking trail carved into the hillside by deer and other forest animals.

Ben nearly turned his ankle twice on the descent to the river, while Layla, for her part, flew between the tree trunks, scrambling downhill like a mountain goat and hopping on his back with a giggle when they reached the rushing stream at the bottom.

The water was ice-cold but mercifully shallow despite the recent rain, and Ben made it across soaked only to midthigh.

He lowered Layla to the muddy bank and eyed the near-sheer climb ahead, finding the woman about sixty feet up, those wispy strands of windblown hair still dancing out over the edge of the rock.

Ben brought both hands to his mouth and gathered his breath.

“Hey!” he called again. “Can you hear me up there?”

A gust of wind ripped through the gully, but in the silence that followed it, there was no cry of distress. No groan of pain.

Ben pressed a hand to Layla’s shoulder. “Stay here, okay? Please don’t move.”

There was an edge to his voice, and Layla nodded.

Ben forced his lips into a half smile. “It’ll be okay.”

Layla nodded again, and Ben turned to face the cliff.

It was slow going, with footholds that were narrow and slick with dirt, and more than once he slipped, catching himself with a loud grunt and a white-fingered grip on the rocks.

It had been a while since he’d rock climbed, and muscles he hadn’t used in a couple of years were screaming in protest, but he continued upward, making gradual, steady progress.

A quick glance down through his boots showed Layla thirty feet below.

The drops of sweat beading along Ben’s hairline raced into his eyes as he inched his way closer to the outcropping, growing more and more certain by the second that the woman on the rocks was either dead or unconscious.

Surely she would have heard his ragged breaths by now and peered down to investigate if she was lucid.

Ten more feet. Five. Three.

Neck and back screaming, Ben stretched his right arm up and grasped the lip of the rock. He sought one last foothold for leverage and pushed hard, popping his head and shoulders above the ledge with a grunt.

Dead.

She was dead.

For a split second, Ben almost released his grip and tumbled backward, but he held fast to the rock as a wave of adrenaline overcame him, setting his limbs trembling.

The woman’s head was twisted at an impossible angle, one brilliant eye the color of bright caramel wide open and staring straight up at the sky. Her face was untouched, but he could not say the same for the rest of her body.

Ben looked over the corpse, his mind fighting back against the horror of it. The eagle hadn’t done this to her. Something else had. Something bigger and deadlier, with claws like switchblades.

The back of her shirt and pants were torn to ribbons, as was the skin underneath, flayed in deep gashes that spoke of long claws and sharp teeth. Some predator had torn her apart.

Ben forced himself to take a deep breath, and another, pulling oxygen into his lungs as he stared down at the young woman.

She was barely twenty years old, if that, with a face he didn’t recognize.

Someone that looked like her, as pretty as any of the women on the covers of the teen magazines that Layla was starting to leaf through, would have been well-known in the tiny town of Lake Lumin.

Ben glanced up at the ridge, high overhead. In some tragic hiking accident, some stupid mistake, this woman must have slipped past the wooden fence guarding the cliffside and tumbled to her death.

“Who’s up there?”

Ben swore. He had forgotten that Layla was at the bottom, waiting for him. Watching.

“It’s… it’s a woman,” he called down after a beat. “I think she fell.”

There was a moment of silence before Layla called up, “Is she okay?”

“Baby, I… I don’t know.” The lie tasted bitter in his mouth, and Ben shifted his grip on the rock.

He had to get down before his arms gave out.

The first thing he had to do was just get his feet back on solid ground, and then he’d figure out what came next.

As he adjusted his fingers for a better grip, preparing his muscles for the arduous descent, the wind lifted the woman’s hair again, exposing her neck and the black and purple bruises that ran the length of skin from ear to collarbone.

A curse passed Ben’s lips in a shout.

“What?” Layla called. “What happened?”

For long seconds, Ben stayed frozen to the rock, muscles tensed and straining as he tried hard to blink, to look anywhere else, to come up with something, anything to explain away the ugly bruises that looked like… like… fingers.

But there was no other explanation. Big, rough hands had been around this girl’s neck.

“Daddy?”

Ben flinched at the sound of his daughter’s voice. He had to get down, had to get to a phone, had to tell someone else, someone who would know what to do and could bring the proper equipment to get this poor woman off the rocks.

Limbs trembling, Ben descended. The footing was far worse on the way down, and his eyes were useless, burning with sweat that just wouldn’t quit.

It seemed hours before the heels of his boots touched the ground and he found himself standing before his daughter again, her small face creased with concern and fear.

“What’s wrong with her?” Layla’s voice was high, frightened, but inquisitive with the morbid curiosity of all ten-year-olds.

“She’s… I saw… she’s… she’s up there.” Ben reached for the water bottle in the side pocket of Layla’s backpack.

“Is she dead?”

He pulled the top off the bottle and drained it in long gulps, as though he could wash it down, the painful twist in his throat reaching right through his belly into his guts.

When he’d finished drinking, he handed the bottle back and bent at the waist, supporting himself with his hands on his knees.

“Yeah,” he said, unable to meet his daughter’s eyes. “She’s dead.”