Chapter 15
“Thunder has the trail,” Wyatt announced.
He could tell by the way the dog moved. His head stayed lower, his pace steadied, and he stopped checking back every few minutes.
Wyatt followed without crowding him. Thunder knew what he was doing. He always had.
“That’s good news?” Kori asked.
“Very good news. It means Mackenzie came out this way.”
Kori quickened her pace. “How long can he follow something like that?”
“Depends on conditions. Temperature, wind, how much traffic’s been through. In snow like this . . .” Wyatt glanced ahead at Thunder. “It can hold scent pretty well if it hasn’t been disturbed.”
“So this could still be from days ago?”
“It could.” He paused. “Or more recent.”
She hesitated. “How does he even know he’s following her and not someone else?”
“We start with a scent article. Something that belongs to the missing person. He locks onto that and filters out everything else.”
“And he just remembers it?”
“He does.”
Kori let out a quiet breath. “That’s incredible.”
Wyatt watched Thunder angle slightly left, more certain now. “Yeah, it really is.”
A few steps passed before she asked, “You trained him?”
“That’s right. We finished certification together.”
She glanced at him. “So you chose this? Search and rescue?”
Wyatt stepped over a fallen branch, his gaze still on Thunder. “I was a guide in Patagonia before this.”
Kori blinked. “That’s . . . a long way from here.”
“There was a search down there. A hiker went missing, and I ended up helping.”
“What happened?”
“The search team had to bring in a dog. Not mine—I didn’t have a dog. This one was part of a local search and rescue team.”
Kori waited for him to continue.
“The dog picked up the trail when the rest of us couldn’t see anything. Just . . . took off like he knew exactly where to go.” He paused. “Led us straight to the guy.”
“Alive?”
Wyatt nodded once. “Barely. But yeah.”
Thunder surged ahead again, and Wyatt’s focus sharpened.
Thunder hadn’t started out as his dog. He’d been Sarah’s.
But after everything that had happened . . . this—training, searching, following a trail until it led somewhere—had given Wyatt something solid to hold on to.
They followed Thunder down the slippery trail. Wyatt kept an eye on Kori’s footing, remembering how close she’d come to going over earlier. That could have turned out much worse.
He didn’t say that.
Right now, she just needed to keep moving.
Kori trailed behind him. Her breathing had evened out, which meant she’d found her rhythm. He’d watched her make the adjustment without saying anything about it.
She recalibrated and kept going.
He respected that.
As they continued, his thoughts drifted back to Flint Gentry.
Kori had given him the outline of the situation—Virginia Tech, old relationship, Mackenzie falling in love with Blue Ridge Hollow on a visit. Everything she’d said was clean and factual and carefully edited.
Kori had given him the shape of her story, but she’d purposely withheld the weight of the situation.
But the weight was there. Wyatt had seen it on her face every time Flint’s name came up. And he’d seen it on Flint’s face on that sidewalk outside Ember & Oak—that fraction of a second before the man’s easy smile came back.
Flint had always been . . . hard to pin down.
The man was good at his job. He was smart.
He knew the forest inside and out. But he didn’t always have much patience for the rules that came with it.
Wyatt had seen him push back on regulations more than once—permits, access restrictions, the layers of approval the Forest Service required for even the simplest things.
Flint had called them inefficient and had claimed the system cared more about paperwork than people. Sometimes Wyatt wondered if the man was in the wrong line of work with those thoughts.
He filed the thought away and focused on Thunder. He couldn’t let himself get distracted—not by Flint, and not by the woman walking behind him. She was here to find her sister. Then she’d go back to her life—her job, her city, everything waiting for her beyond these mountains.
He’d learned long ago that he couldn’t get attached to people whose life goals were different than his. That only ended in heartache.
Thunder slowed, still locked on the trail. But he now picked his way more carefully through the forest.
The terrain had changed. There was now less open forest, more deadfall and rock, and the slope steepened to their right.
Whoever had come through here had known where they were going. This wasn’t the route a casual hiker would take.
The realization wasn’t particularly comforting.
He was working through the implications of that when Thunder stopped.
His nose came up, scenting the air. He took three careful steps then stopped again.
Wyatt moved beside him.
His gaze stopped on what Thunder had found.
Something was half buried in a drift at the base of a fallen pine.
He crouched and brushed away the top layer of snow with his gloved hand.
A backpack with hunter green fabric appeared. It also had a yellow sun patch. Cheerful flowers that looked completely wrong in this frozen, dark forest.
Kori stopped behind him and gasped, “That’s hers. Mackenzie’s.”
His muscles went taut.
Mackenzie had been through here. But why would she have left her backpack? The tent and her sleeping bag were still attached.
That wasn’t a good sign, to say the least. The fact that it was buried meant she hadn’t been here recently.
A woman out in this forest in the snow without supplies?
The odds wouldn’t be in her favor.
As Thunder lifted his head, Wyatt straightened.
To their left—maybe thirty yards into the trees—something moved.
Wyatt froze. Thunder stiffened beside him, his ears forward and every muscle coiled.
Wyatt’s gaze dropped to the snow beneath the trees about ten feet away, in the opposite direction from where they’d come from.
A shallow depression marked the surface, half hidden by falling powder.
It wasn’t an animal track.
It was a boot print. And it was fresh.
Someone else had been standing there. Watching them. Recently.
He looked at Kori and silently told her: Don’t move.
They stood without speaking and waited. Whoever was out there didn’t want to be seen.
He didn’t think it was Mackenzie.
His gut told him that the person out there was far more dangerous.
He waited another thirty seconds.
Then he picked up the backpack and leaned closer to Kori. “We’ll check this later. Right now, we need to head back.”