Chapter Twenty-Seven #3
“I’m coming…” Johnny whispered, wishing he could scream it so loudly that every living creature near the mountain would hear him for miles. “I’m right behind you.”
The tracks ahead skated around the trees—the monster’s careening slashes on one side and his children’s swoops on the other.
Sharise and Imani had not lost the trail, and he would not either, he vowed.
Maybe Satan, jealous of his sudden attention to God, heard it as a dare.
Johnny had just begun his trek with his eyes on the trail when snow began driving down.
Imani and Sharise both stood staring up at the sky.
New snowflakes swirled across their cheeks, gentle emissaries from the advancing army. The sky and landscape were morphing to a matching white tableau.
Maybe staring up at the source could make it stop. Maybe wishing could make it stop.
This time, Imani was the first to say it. “We have to go back.”
Sharise whimpered, but she wasn’t crying anymore.
Maybe she had run out of tears. As badly as Sharise had wanted to turn back before, she didn’t answer her sister now.
But as soon as the snow began with those first flurries, they both realized they were going to lose Mom’s trail—and soon.
Which meant they were also going to lose their own trail.
Which meant they would be lost.
If it were just a little snow, Imani would want to keep going.
A voice inside of her was screaming that they were close to finding Mom, that there was no reason for the Beast to have taken her much farther, no matter how broad its territory.
It wasn’t a regular animal, but it was some kind of animal, and it would follow animal behaviors.
It must have some kind of nest nearby. She had found some blood, yes, but not much—not another drop on the trail so far—so it probably hadn’t killed Mom yet, at least not intentionally.
With any luck, it planned to store her. (To eat, Imani reminded herself, refusing to sugarcoat it.) Mom had no shoe or sock on at least one of her feet, and no jacket.
If they didn’t find her soon, she would freeze to death.
But the hard snowfall changed everything.
The snow was already altering the beast’s steady trail like dabs from a paintbrush, softening the sharp edges.
Blurring it. In ten or fifteen minutes, there might not be much of a trail at all.
If the snow had brought wind with it, the tracks might already be gone.
Imani was angry with herself for making so many mistakes. They both had their phones, so why hadn’t they taken more photos along the way to document their path? Like back where she had found the sock? Even without a signal, the phones were good for something.
“We should have taken pictures,” Imani said. “Where we’ve been. Before the snow.”
“You have your GoPro,” Sharise said. “Remember?”
Imani felt her forehead, where her GoPro was still strapped across her helmet.
She’d forgotten all about it! She pulled the camera free to check and see if she had turned it on.
She had. The red record button glowed. LOW BATTERY, the reading flashed, but it had been recording this entire time.
She probably had twenty more minutes of juice.
Imani put the camera back in place in its forehead strap and surveyed the land around them, mindful of her footage now.
The trees were thinning ahead in what looked like an open area leading to a craggy rock face they would not be able to climb.
They had never been here before, or anywhere close.
Without glimpses of the mountain’s peak to guide them because of low, snow-gorged clouds, she couldn’t be sure of the direction they were heading.
Imani shrugged herself out of her backpack and squatted to sort through it. How had her algebra book gotten in here? The textbook looked like a relic from another universe. No wonder her pack was so heavy! Annoyed, she tossed the book aside to be buried in the snow.
“What are you looking for?” Sharise asked.
“I have a compass. We were heading north before, straight for the mountain. So now we want to be sure we’re going south.
We need to figure it out, before we lose the trails.
” In her tangle of gear and small kits, Imani felt like she was wasting time they didn’t have.
Emergency blanket—thank goodness. A couple of protein bars. Why hadn’t she packed a water bottle?
“Our phones already have a compass,” Sharise said.
“It’s built in and we don’t need a signal.
” She was already powering up her phone before Imani could pull hers out of her jacket pocket.
“I used it when I went to UCLA for a tour last month and my reception was shit. Mom told me she used the compass when she first started working there, since that place is so huge. See? It’s GPS. ”
She showed Imani her brightly colored compass app, with the needle bouncing, alive.
They were heading more northeast than north.
And her phone was nearly fully charged! Imani’s phone charge was hovering closer to thirty percent, nearly dead like her GoPro battery.
She was so bad at remembering to charge her tech.
Imani hugged her sister so suddenly that it nearly threw them both off balance. She had spent so much of her life feeling alone—the only one with super senses, the only one with ADHD. But she wasn’t alone. She didn’t have to think of everything. Sharise did have her back.
“Uphill will be so much harder,” Imani said.
“It’s barely nine thirty,” Sharise said. “We have plenty of time.”
Before dark, she meant. Dark clouds weren’t much better than a night sky, but at least they had some light. But they didn’t have time to save Mom, maybe. Not anymore.
“We got so close,” Imani whispered. “Why did it have to start snowing?”
Sharise hugged her more tightly, and their helmets knocked together. Sharise’s breath against her was the only warmth. “There is no why. None of this makes sense, Imani. We just have to go to Dad. While we can.”
Despite the discovery that she had turned on her video camera, Imani was angry with herself for so many things she had forgotten.
She should have tried to think of a way to mark their trail as they went.
As many times as she’d seen people lost in the wilderness on survival shows and yelled at her screen, Mark your trail!
, she had forgotten to do it too. People walked in circles in the wild even without snow.
She had taken the Beast’s tracks for granted, with no plan if they vanished.
Sharise was excited about the compass, but it would only help them if it were as simple as walking southwest instead of northeast—and Imani knew it wasn’t that simple.
Any small deviation from their path would plunge them deeper into the national forest, not closer to home.
They had two protein bars and no water, and Imani was already thirsty enough to drink sixteen ounces at once.
And if the snow covered their trail, Dad wouldn’t be able to find them any more than they could find Mom.
They were in trouble, in more ways than one. The snowfall was a catastrophe, a new kind of monster. Please stop, Imani thought again, staring at the sky. If anything, the snow was coming down harder.
Imani looked wistfully again at the Beast’s fading tracks, both for herself and her video footage.
The swishing marks zigzagged ahead for twenty yards and then veered sharply right until they vanished in the distance.
Was it headed toward the rock face, which was veiled in thin fog? Were there hidden caverns?
“It might be heading for a cavern,” Imani said, narrating her footage. “I can see some cliffs ahead, but it’s too far. We have to turn back now because of the snow.”
Giving up was such a gutting defeat that she felt long-restrained tears slip across her cheeks, although she pinched back her sob.
She took off her left glove, which was bright purple, and stuffed it over a craggy branch of what was left of a long-dead pine tree that didn’t have any needles to catch the snow.
The glove was at eye level and would be impossible to miss.
If the snow stopped in time, maybe they could come back and resume their search.
Or someone else could. Someone would know she had been here, at least.
Posed on the branch, fingers splayed wide, her glove looked like it was waving goodbye.
“Don’t you need that?” Sharise said. “I can barely feel my fingers without your glove.”
“I’ll keep my hands in my pockets,” Imani said. “Let’s just take off our boards and go.”
Their passage on the mountain had been full of both ascents and descents.
They had alternated between riding their boards downhill where they could and walking where the snow was more level—or worse, uphill—but a sustained walk uphill in snowboard boots wouldn’t be fun—the stiff ankle support prevented injuries on the board, but made walking uncomfortable.
And they were meant to be strapped on, so the soles didn’t have great traction in the snow either.
Without the boards, the boots were bulky and cumbersome.
The snow here reached their shins when they walked, each step a plunge.
They had tucked their jeans into their boots, but snow still might get inside, which would be a new level of hell.
Imani realized she would never want to see snow again, no matter what.
She had lost giant pieces of herself on this trip that she would never be able to reclaim.
The girls carried their snowboards and walked, following the tracks back toward home.
No, not home, Imani thought bitterly—just to a creaky old lodge owned by a great-grandmother who died ages before she was born, full of problematic movie posters she would be embarrassed to show anyone.
The lodge would never be home—it was an unhome, a place that had destroyed her home.
No wonder Dad had never brought them here. He had known better.