She starts to think that maybe the boys have already made it past them, that they’re waiting on the trail somewhere up ahead, planning an ambush. She tries to walk quietly, not make any noise. Strains to listen through the silence for any sound that will give away Brandon and Evan’s position.

She hears nothing. Her whole body is tense, and her mind, too, like a soldier waiting for the next bomb to hit.

The boys are out there; Dawn knows it. She doesn’t know where, and that’s the part that really sucks. She starts to think maybe it would be better if she could hear them howling, just so she wouldn’t feel so damn paranoid.

Then the howling starts up again, and Dawn immediately wants nothing more than to make the noise stop.

Chapter 82

SHE AND LUCAS ARE AT THE END of the first lake when they hear the howling behind them again. There’s a little rise of land that separates the two lakes, and they’re about at the summit of it when the noise tumbles down from high atop the ridge, blows across the lake, and assaults them with that eerie, inhuman, predatory laughter.

Lucas stops and turns back. Squints up at the ridgeline.

“They found our stuff,” he says. “They’re coming down off the ridge.”

Dawn follows his gaze, but she can’t see anything but snow up there. Regardless, if Lucas is right it means the boys are less than two hours’ hike behind them. It means there’s no time to stop and consider which Instagram filter would look best with this lake.

“Come on,” Lucas says, turning to follow the trail over the rise and down toward the second lake. Dawn studies the ridgeline a moment longer. Feels her fear start to grow into panic as she thinks about what’s up there.

Who’s up there.

She pushes the panic down as best as she can. Turns to follow Lucas again.

The next few hours are a slog, exhausting and terrifying in equal measure. Dawn and Lucas find their way down to the second lake, the lake which they camped by on the second night of the trip. They troop past the campsite, empty and abandoned now, and Dawn sees the place where she set up her tarp, where she and Lucas argued over whether the mountain they were going to climb should be called Fart Mountain or the Raven’s Claw.

Dawn sees the place where Lucas marched off to find firewood, after he’d informed her that Warden and Amber were hooking up.

And she sees the place where she lay under her tarp all night, thinking about how Warden had probably saved her life, and hoping what Lucas said wasn’t true, that Warden wasn’t sleeping with Amber after all.

Hoping that Warden might want to hook up with her.

She hurries past the campsite and doesn’t look back.