My voice caught in my throat, but I pushed the words out. “We’re good.” I felt like I should say something else, but I’m sorry wouldn’t come. Instead, I knelt to Saskia’s level. “Find Bella.”

Saskia took off again. Gabriel and I set off in the same direction.

“I’m game to ignore the drop of rain I just felt if you are,” he informed me a few minutes later.

I upped my pace. “I’m game.”

Chapter 19

The rain picked up. A clap of thunder sounded overhead, and I felt it, all the way to my bones.

“I don’t like the look of those clouds,” Gabriel told me. “I’m not saying we have to head back to base camp. I’m just saying that most people with smaller self-destructive streaks than mine would probably agree that we should.”

I stopped listening to Gabriel and started listening for Saskia. Horizontal lightning cut across the darkened sky. I brought my index fingers to my mouth and let out a sharp whistle. I trained my gaze in the direction Saskia had gone, waiting.

Nothing.

“Saskia should have checked back by now,” I said.

Gabriel scanned our surroundings and diverted from the path we’d been on a moment before. “She came this way.”

We moved fast and in tandem. The sky blackened, like ink spilling onto a page. On the radio, the call came in for us to take shelter.

It’s just rain, I told myself. But that just rain was suddenly pelting us hard enough to leave marks.

Gabriel pressed past me, taking the worst of it as the wind beat against us.

“I don’t need you to protect me,” I bit out.

Saskia was my responsibility. Not Gabriel’s, not Cady’s—mine. Four years earlier, someone had dumped a bone-thin and bleeding adolescent husky on our property. She’d bristled if you looked at her, skittered backward if you stepped forward, and snapped when you got too close. Cady had managed to treat her wounds but ordered Jude and me to stay away.

I hadn’t. From the moment I’d seen her, from the moment she bared her teeth at me—Saskia was mine.

“Did you hear that?” Gabriel’s face was lit by another bolt of lightning—closer this time.

I froze, listening. Second after second ticked by—long enough for me to think of all the predators who lived in the mountains. Long enough for me to remember what Saskia’s coat had looked like, knotted with blood.

“I don’t hear anything.” The words felt rough against my throat.

Gabriel held up one hand. I stilled—and then I heard it. Faint but audible.

Saskia. Within the span of a heartbeat, I’d taken off running toward the distant sound of barking, toward her. The closer I got, the harder I ran.