Chapter 50

The word she fell over the room with the force of military-grade explosives. Bella’s angel was a woman.

A woman. From one of the founding families. Wants to save someone—someone she loves. My mind racing, I looked down at my hand, my fingers unfurling to reveal the pendant.

“May I?” Mac asked me. This time, I allowed him to take it from my grasp.

“Mac?” Cady fit a thousand questions into a single word.

Mac swallowed. “Saint Anne,” he said finally, his blue eyes intent on Cady’s. “She’s the patron saint of mothers and grandmothers.”

Images flashed through my head. Hash marks on trees. The Circle for the Lost. Five founding families.

In 1922, three children of founding families had gone off into the wilderness and never returned. More than three-quarters of a century later, Cady, Mac, and John Ashby had taken a job in South America—and only two of them had come back.

Ash was my son. The words Ness had said to Cady the day before echoed in my mind. I’d say that gives me a stake in this.

“No,” Cady said. “I know what you’re thinking, Mac—
but no.”

“She taught us every bit as much about survival as your father did,” Mac countered. “And she’s been down with the flu for days.”

Ness had been at the house when we’d arrived, but by that point, Bella had already been missing for more than a day. Enough time for Ness to get her settled in the cave. Enough time for her to come home and convince Bales to bring Cady in on the search.

“Bales is dying.” I knew, somehow, that Cady couldn’t ignore the words if I was the one who said them. “Ness said that he’d been trying to get in touch with you, but you wouldn’t reply.”

Cady weathered that statement like a blow. “My father wouldn’t have asked me to come back for himself. I wouldn’t have come back for him.”

Mac wove a hand through Cady’s, as if he could somehow channel strength from his body into hers. “Ness knows you. She knows Bales. She knows me. It makes sense, Cady. If she wanted to bring us back here…”

“It doesn’t make sense.” Cady took a step away from him, releasing his hand. “There were five bodies in that clearing, Mac. Five.”

Some things cut all the way to the bone.

“The autopsies came back.” The male FBI agent took that moment to remind us of his presence. “We’re still waiting on DNA and some other higher-level tests, but the ME has tentative rulings on cause of death.” He paused. “At least two died of exposure, one appears to have been attacked by some kind of animal, a fourth has the kind of blunt-force trauma we would associate with a fall.”

“And the fifth?” Cady asked, her voice hoarse.