The others, Nathan, Jumper, Serena, and Slow Dog, were spread out in a line a hundred yards wide. All four of them were tough, but each in different ways. Nathan was a bull in both looks and mentality; he was strong enough to smash through just about anything and liked to try. Jumper was all about Parkour and free-running. He was nimble, fast, and weird; and he did not relate to other people very well, so Dahlia figured he was some kind of sociopath. Serena thought she was Lara Croft, and had the body for it, but her mind was more like a snake—cold and ruthless. Slow Dog was probably the sanest of the Pack’s fighters, but that was a pretty low bar. He was loyal to a fault and would do very bad things to anyone who messed with the Pack. He was a nice guy around camp but sometimes he totally lost it in a fight, going way over the top with the amount of damage he needed to inflict in order to win.

Right now, though, Dahlia felt comforted to have all of them at her back. And Trash. Psycho or not, he was an incredible fighter. The old bastard was never going to know what hit him.

Not that she wanted to hurt the guy necessarily, but she did want to take all of his stuff, and maybe let Trash give him a few dents because of what the man had done to the scouts.

That was the thought going through Dahlia’s mind when every single thing went wrong.

She was looking for trip wires and saw one. She was even smiling as she lifted her foot and stepped over it. Dahlia had no idea what a pressure-sensitive field trap was until she heard the faint click. Then the tough, flexible pine bough that had been curved back, taught as a longbow, was released by the ground trigger hidden under dry leaves. The bough caught her in the stomach and folded her in half, lifting her completely off the ground, and swatting her backward into a tangle of berry bushes. The air was smashed from her lungs, but she managed a high, shrill, single-note wail of shock and pain. When she crashed down in the shrubs, Dahlia felt like she had been shot. She briefly thought that’s what had happened.

She lay there, punched deep into the shrubs, splayed like a starfish, gasping for air that seemed to have been sucked out of the whole world.

Nathan rushed over, pulling a heavy-bladed meat cleaver from a leather belt pouch, crying a warning to the others. Dahlia stared, confused, as the forest itself seemed to come alive and consume him. She saw leaves and branches move and fold around him, but there were sounds like knuckles on flesh, and then Nathan was falling, his eyes going high and white, his knees buckling, the cleaver gone from his big fist.