If you paid attention, the forest offered no lies.
The birds called through the trees, the deer crunched over leaves as they plodded from meadow to meadow, and even the plants rustled in the breeze.
Now, it offered me the rattling of branches pushed to the side, the hard, crisp crush of undergrowth beneath heavy feet.
Someone was following me.
No, they had been following me, but they’d now given up their secrecy to chase me.
Immediately, panic rushed through my system, revved my engine even higher, and I exploded into a fierce sprint. My headphones ripped from my ears, torn away by the wind as I tore through it, but I was glad for it because I needed to hear.
They were close, just a few yards off me even though when I twisted my head to look briefly behind me, I couldn’t see them through the trees.
Briefly, I thought about slowing down to pull my phone out of the pocket of my spandex shorts to call Nova, Zeus, someone to come help.
But I was in the middle of nowhere with a predator on my tail. What were they going to do to help me?
I was on my own.
So I swerved off the running path into the ferns and moss-covered rock terrain and hoped I would be able to lose him or her in the dense bush.
There was a rough, pained curse from behind me.
A man.
Immediately, I wondered if it might be Dane coming back to try to connect with me, but just as quickly, I abandoned that thought. He would never chase me without calling out that it was him.
I had no idea who might want to stalk me and no idea what they would hope to accomplish by capturing me.
And I wasn’t eager to find out.
“You run, it’ll only cause more trouble,” a rough, out of breath voice shouted, too close behind me.
I stumbled slightly, caught off balance by looking over my shoulder, and I fell hard in the dirt, my shoulder tearing over the hard edge of a rock.
He was on me in a second.
I felt the hand grab my ankle and kicked at it, but he held fast. Flipping to my back so I could see my attacker, I was shocked by the sight of him.
Grizzled and weathered as only a biker can be after years of sun exposure and riding free in the wind, the face that look down on me was the same face I recognized from the night Ellie died.
It was the man who had come to take us away.
He opened his mouth to say something, but I used the leg in his arms as leverage and kicked up with the other one, striking him in the face with the heel of my foot. Immediately, he grunted, letting go of my other foot as he staggered back, blood pouring from his nose or mouth.
I didn’t stop to check.
Lurching to my feet, hopping slightly on a twisted ankle, I took off.
My breath exploded from my mouth as I pushed myself even faster, ducking around trees and leaping over stones almost recklessly. One wrong step and it would have been over.
But I knew this forest like the back of my tattooed hand. I’d spend countless days in it as a girl playing with Dane to get away from the house and then even more hours running through its trails as a woman. When the forest breathed, I breathed, and I had a small, perhaps silly sense, that she was going to help me out of this situation.
I ran for so long, my legs threatened to give out, and my ears buzzed with my erratic, stomping heartbeat.
Finally, I made it to the falls.
The loud rush of water pouring into the basin canceled out any hope I had of hearing those predatory footsteps, but I didn’t need to anymore.
Instead, I raced on tiptoes through the shallow edge of the pool until I was adjacent with the cliff face, and then I slipped along it until I reached the thundering veil of water. I sucked in a deep breath and dove through the edge of the plummeting river, landing on my hands and knees in the cave on the other side.
I wouldn’t be seen from there, obscured by the opaque, spitting sheets of water, but I also couldn’t see what lay on the other side.
My phone was dead, waterlogged with only the hope of a rice bath to bring back its functionality. So I waited.
I waited until my teeth chattered in my mouth, my spine wobbling with cold and fatigue. Until my fingers went white and wrinkled and my pulse nose-dived to a sluggish speed.
When I finally crept out of the fall, the sun had dramatically changed position, presumably sometime after noon when I had left before ten in the morning.
There was no one in sight.