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at his friend. Alec shook his head, obviously not wanting to share his thoughts.
Kell looked back over his shoulder, meeting Noah’s eyes through his kitchen window. “We go now,” he said.
    W
YLDE remembered when his grandfather had been alive, vaguely. He’d lived in the same house then as the boy and the man, except things had been new and in better shape. But then something had happened one night, his grandpa’s chest had hurt really bad, and he’d… Wylde had fled into the forest.
He’d lived there ever since, on scraps he found in tin cans outside people’s homes or dumpsters in town.
    Twice he’d made friends with people, and they’d seemed nice, one giving him his name, Wylde, but then they’d tried to capture him, hurt him.

M
ORLEY O RRIS parked his truck near the path he used to get to his
    little greenhouse deep in the woods. Morley had lived all his life at the bottom of Sullivan’s Mountain on one branching root of foothill. Early this evening, he’d sat out on his porch and watched the headlights flash past as the men looking for that fool rich boy headed down the mountain to catch some shut-eye before resuming the search.
    Probably wouldn’t find him anymore than they had those hikers last summer, since it was easy to get turned around up there. Even the lumber companies hadn’t had much luck. Morley remembered his father said they’d had some bad luck back in the sixties when they’d shaved slopes of trees in the mess of canyons.
    Thanks to being a bit of a night owl, Morley had an idea what all lived on that mountain. He’d even told one other person the secret. The same person he was blackmailing, it turned out.
    He didn’t especially want to go up the mountain tonight, but he had no choice. His little greenhouse and generator had somehow avoided detection from law enforcement when they looked for the hikers previously, but he couldn’t count on it a third time, not unless he used the camouflage tarp he’d rigged up last time. It had worked like a charm.
    His stock was all ready to go to his connection in Oregon, and although he had no doubt the Chief had better things to do than bust up his crop of Mary Jane, he’d be duty-bound if he stumbled over it, now wouldn’t he? And as lucrative as the blackmail was turning out to be, despite the creepy threats like the dead raccoon whose blood had spelled out “don’t push me” that he’d found on his front porch one morning, he didn’t want to neglect a sure thing.
    Lurching to a stop next to the weedy track he used, Morley didn’t want to leave the warm haven of his truck, but he forced himself to open the door, the creak of metal overloud in the watchful silence of the woods.
    Almost dawn, he comforted himself. He’d be back in his own bed at dawn, and then he could think of how he would spend his latest windfall.
    But as he headed down the path toward his little greenhouse, he was glad that he had his gun, fully loaded, as well as his flashlight.

K
ELL ’ S hand went instinctively to the holstered gun on his hip as
    he studied the shadows. He pushed aside a fir branch with his other hand, heavy with the dew of the deep forest, and scanned the trail ahead.
“Looks like footprints, maybe,” he told Alec, pointing to the ground ahead.
    Alec nodded, his hand clasping his deerskin bundle. He’d been touching it constantly as they tracked, his face contained. “Looks like Thomas Anderson came this way, headin’ toward Morley’s land just like you thought. See, Chief?” Alec indicated the larger footprints in the mud, the imprint from some expensive boots that both men figured belonged to young Anderson.
    Alec knelt for a closer look and then looked up at Kell, waiting a beat as if to see if he’d grasp the significance. “But there’s something else….” He pointed to a soft imprint. “Someone wearing some kind of strange footgear, like leather wrapped around his feet. Seen this before, a time or two. Crude