To his credit, Jace never looked unsure of where he was going, though he hadn’t been back to his birthplace once in the seven years since my dad had hired him. To me, that said the deer stand was a much more important part of his childhood than he’d let on, and if the same was true for Brett…we might just get lucky.

My pulse spiked at the thought of serving justice to Malone using evidence his own son had given us. The son he’d murdered. Malone’s downfall was imminent. I could feel it.

After an hour and a half of hiking through the woods, Jace stopped and swished his tail to catch our attention. His bearing held no tension and no warning; he was simply telling us we had arrived.

A minute later, the forest gave way to a small clearing with irregular, undefined edges, as if someone had chopped down a few trees to gain just a bit of work-space. And there was the deer stand.

It was built into the branches of a large, sturdy tree on the opposite side of the clearing, maybe twenty-five feet off the ground. The wood was weathered and rough, and looked grayed even in the muted colors of my cat vision. A homemade ladder led from the ground to the edge of the platform overhead, its plank steps made from mismatched lengths of two-by-fours, several of which swung loose on one end.

“Well, at least it’s still standing.” Marc’s voice sounded odd after an hour of hearing nothing but twigs snapping beneath our feet and the occasional rustle of some small creature through the winter-crisp underbrush. “But there’s no telling if it’ll hold our weight.”

“I’ll go. I’m the lightest.”

“No.” Marc grabbed my arm when I started forward, but let go when I winced from the pain in my talon-shaped bruises and turned on him with an angry scowl. “What if it collapses?”

I shrugged. “You’ll catch me.”

“And if I miss, you’ll break your other arm, or a leg, and you won’t be able to fight when we go in for real.”

“Marc, in all the times I’ve fallen, you’ve never failed to catch me.” I tugged my arm from his grip gently and stood on my toes to kiss him, acutely, uncomfortably aware that Jace was watching. Then I turned my back on them both and faced the deer stand.

I tested the first step with one foot before putting my full weight on it. When it held, I started up. The fourth step was hanging from one nail, and the fifth was missing completely, and with the grip of my right hand compromised by my cast, I was afraid to depend too heavily on it. I glanced back at Marc. “Can I get a hand?”

He was behind me before I’d even seen him move, and suddenly I was sitting in his cupped hands. He lifted me easily past the fifth and sixth planks, and I stepped onto the seventh, a good eight feet off the ground. “Thanks,” I murmured, and continued climbing. Marc stayed at the base of the ladder, just in case.