Those words were meant to silence the crowd, and they did. The lack of noise put my senses on high alert. The sound of the man behind me breathing. The snap of a twig beneath a woman’s feet, up and to the right—I forced myself to look at Saskia, who was sitting as close to me as she could get without touching.

“Good girl,” I said softly. The muscles in my chest loosened slightly, and I focused on the man whose voice had sent a hush through the crowd. Based on his uniform, he wasn’t a park ranger.

He was the local sheriff.

“Bella Anthony disappeared from her family’s campsite at the base of Bear Mountain sometime between ten p.m. on Thursday and six a.m. Friday morning.” The sheriff had a visible sidearm and a voice that carried. “Bella is nine years old, four foot two inches tall, and has shoulder-length medium-brown hair. When last seen, she was wearing pale pink pajamas and a red windbreaker.”

The sheriff nodded to one of his men, who began passing out flyers with the child’s picture on them. When the stack came to me, my fingers locked around it with surprising force. I stared at the picture. There was nothing remarkable about the little girl in the black-and-white photo. She could have been any other child.

But she wasn’t.

I knew better than anyone that if Bella Anthony was out there much longer, she wouldn’t ever be any other child again.

A hand brushed the edge of mine. My head whipped up. A man—the heavy breather who’d been standing behind me—gestured to the flyers I was holding. “Take one and pass it on.”

Breathe in. Breathe out. I managed not to recoil from the man’s touch. I took a flyer and passed the stack on. No claws, no fangs, no fight, no flight. I was in control—and I was here for a reason.

“The park rangers are already out there, looking for Bella.” The sheriff picked back up where he had left off, once the flyers had made the rounds. “Our job is to help comb the forest within the radius that Bella could have traveled. You will work in teams of two, walking straight lines no more than thirty feet apart. Call Bella’s name. Look for any evidence of her presence—tracks, food wrappers, disturbed foliage. Once we’ve covered one section of the grid, we’ll move to the next.”

The strategy made sense—for civilians. But Bales Bennett hadn’t brought Cady here to walk the woods.

As the sheriff dismissed us and the crowd began to disperse, snatches of conversation hit me like shrapnel. The quiet had sent my senses into overdrive, and now that quiet was gone.

Jude leaned toward me. “On a scale of yea to nay, how are we doing?”