Read Wylde for Free Online Page A

moccasins.”
    “Yeah, me too,” Kell grunted. “But what I want to know is how the hell is the mystery tracker managing to trail Thomas out here in the dark?”
“Might be that this is his… territory,” Alec said. “Seems like he knows the forest.”
     
“Well, whateverthefuck. I want to find that boy. Soon!”
    Alec gave him a straight look, and they both remembered how they’d searched for Ralph Hindle until they’d found a few red bones and a crushed skull. The hikers, a young couple, they’d never found. The mountains were an unforgiving place.
“Yeah,” Alec agreed, climbing back to his feet. “We have to find him soon, before he gets totally lost out here!”
    He raced down the path, leaping over mossy fallen logs in the pre-dawn darkness, and Kell didn’t waste any time following, the back of his neck clammy with sweat.

T
HOMAS A NDERSON covered his mouth, trying to stifle his heavy
    panting. He was so fucking scared! When he’d thought he’d heard something in the woods with him and Jade, he’d shot at it, but the gun going off had been so loud! And then Jade had started in on him, so he’d shoved her, and then he hadn’t heard her again. Had he hurt her? He’d fucking peeled out, trying to get to the house in the woods. Instead, somehow he’d gotten turned around, leaping over rocks, fallen trees, panicked. Worse, for the past few minutes, he’d sensed that something was following him . He could feel it, and sometimes he heard a branch snap under a footfall on his trail. Shit! It was the thing that got into their trash, night after night, the thing some called the ghost, he just knew it.
    Now he bent over, shaking hand clenched over the stitch in his side, huffing for breath as quietly as he could. His face and body stung with scratches, and his shoulder oozed blood from a puncture wound. Somehow he’d lost his Dad’s fucking gun, which was great since the old man was proud of his collection and would have Thomas’s ass.
    Through his tears, he spotted… light? A light moving through the woods!
Someone was out here with him. Someone with a flashlight. Oh, Christ! Tears stung his eyes in painful relief as he gathered himself, almost played out, moving clumsily through the woods toward the bobbing beacon.

“W AIT ….” Alec held up a hand. They paused, listening, looking at
each other as they both caught the sounds of something moving through the brush.
    “Can you tell where it’s coming from?” Kell wiped the sweat from his forehead, and Alec gave him a faintly amused look. “Yeah, been a while since I did regular PT.” Kell shrugged. “I’ll have to add running again to the workout in my home gym.”
    Alec pointed to some crushed prints beside the deer trail they were following. “Sounds like it was coming from that rise just ahead, Chief, but this is what I wanted to show you. Another track. This one from what looks like maybe a full grown man.”
    “That’s not the weird moccasin print or one from Thomas Anderson, that’s sure,” Kell said flatly, feeling a chill prickle down his back.
    “Someone else….” Alec said grimly. “A hunter maybe?” “Come on, we’d better find Thomas!” Kell jogged up the steep incline, grabbing for handholds of roots and granite as he and Alec climbed the next rise.
W
YLDE froze on the trail, waiting, barely breathing.
    At first he’d been following the other kid, wanting to know where he was going. He was running the way Wylde had once run, deep into the woods, scared. But now he had the sense someone else was out here with them. A hunter trailing them? Wylde usually hid from them.
    Light pierced the darkness . Wylde saw it, bouncing off tree trunks and branches in the distance like a dancing fairy from one of his grandpa’s stories in the pre-dawn chill.
    Someone with a flashlight!
The hunter trailing him must have seen it too; Wylde stiffened as he heard something crash through the underbrush nearby, heading swiftly toward the