Be smart. Cady’s admonition was there in my brain, but all I could think about was the fact that Saskia hadn’t come back. I’d called, and I’d whistled, and she hadn’t come back.

And that meant that she couldn’t.

I called her name again, and Saskia’s barking took on a more desperate quality. She wanted to get to me as badly as I wanted to get to her. Following the sound, vaguely aware that the rain was coming in sheets now, that I was bone-soaked, the ground beneath me was growing slicker by the second, I hauled myself up onto higher ground and found myself staring at rock—solid rock.

The mountain.

I could hear Saskia, but I couldn’t see her. All around me, stony crags too steep to climb jutted out of the ground.

“Kira!”

I turned. Gabriel was standing maybe fifteen feet away from me. He knelt to the ground, his gaze locked onto…something. I started making my way toward him, but as I did, the sound of Saskia’s barking grew fainter. Everything in me said to turn around, but I didn’t. It wasn’t until I was right on top of Gabriel that I saw what he’d seen—a break in the mountain, an opening large enough for a single person to squeeze through.

I crouched down to get a better look.

“Caves,” Gabriel said. “My brother used to insist that they were out here, but I spent an entire summer looking and never found one.”

I braced my palms against the rocks on either side of the entrance. I couldn’t see very far, but what I could see included a drop—a steep one. I stepped forward.

“Hold up there, princess.” Gabriel moved to block me. “Let’s not do anything rash.”

I squeezed past him, through the opening in the rock, and jumped down. I could hear Gabriel cursing behind me as I landed roughly on the cave’s floor. Lightning flashed behind me, allowing me to see—for an instant—that the cave stretched out for a dozen or so paces, then took a sharp turn to the right. I glanced back.

The entrance was a good seven or eight feet overhead. If Saskia had come this way, she wouldn’t have been able to make it out.

I reached into my pack and took out a flashlight. By the time I’d turned it on, I wasn’t the only one in the cave—and Gabriel wasn’t what I’d call happy about it.

“Does insanity run in your family?” he asked me, his voice a little too pleasant and his jaw clenched.

I held up my flashlight, then jerked my head toward his pack. Before he had his own flashlight out, I was already off and around the corner.