Saskia butted my hand with her head, and my breath stilled in my throat. I trust you, girl. I felt those words, more than thought them. Whatever instinct had possessed Saskia, whatever had led her here—whatever she’d smelled, whatever she’d followed—I trusted that, too.

Standing up, I did a 360, taking in our surroundings. What if the person who’d taken Bella hadn’t left the park permanently? What if this latest lead was just another misdirection? Another game?

What if Saskia had recognized the kidnapper’s scent?

What if she’d recognized Bella’s?

Slowly, I began to make my way from tree to tree, toward a clearing maybe fifty yards away. Two-thirds of the way there, my toe caught on a stone, and I stumbled.

Free caught me. For a moment, her eyes held mine, and I saw in them the same sense of eerie foreboding I felt.

This is it. This is something.

I caught sight of the stone that had tripped me. And the stone next to that—and the one next to that…Each of the rocks was about the size of a bag of flour. They lay in a perfect circle, each one half-buried in the ground.

“That’s not a natural formation.” Gabriel knelt next to me, examining the ground.

“Forest art?” Jude suggested, but even he couldn’t manage a hopeful tone.

Someone had dug into the dirt, buried the rocks, arranged them just so. It felt intentional. It felt ritualistic.

I sank to the ground to get a better look. Saskia came up behind me, pushing herself between my arm and my body. I followed her gaze—uncanny and intense—to a tree positioned at the base of the circle.

A breath caught in my throat. Hash marks—thousands of ragged hash marks—had been carved into the trunk of the tree.

Why? I ran my fingertips over the marks. What do they stand for?

“I choose to believe that those are hash marks of the non-nefarious variety,” Jude said, but the sound of a twig snapping—of footsteps—in the distance had him taking three steps back.

These marks weren’t made all at once, I thought, my heart beating viciously in my throat. Someone has been coming back to this tree—someone has been marking something—for years.

Gabriel stood and positioned himself in front of the rest of us. Saskia whined again, then bolted forward. I grabbed for her but missed.

No. Sass— The words died in my throat, and I was on my feet in seconds.

“Saskia?” A familiar voice broke the tension building in the pit of my stomach a moment before an even more familiar figure came into view.

Cady?

Of all the things—and people—I’d thought Saskia might have scented, this option hadn’t occurred to me. Saskia took up position at Cady’s side, then turned back to me, her tail wagging.