Page 32 of Handcuffed to the Bear

Now he just needed to figure out another.

“Caves or cabin?” Casey asked. Her face was white, her voice taut, but she showed no sign of panicking.

“Which one’s closer?”

“Caves, I think,” she said, looking up the slope.

But it was uphill, therefore slower going. And, though the caves might offer better shelter, the cabin was more likely to have something they might be able to improvise into a weapon.

“Cabin,” he decided.

Casey looked at him expectantly. Waiting for him to take up the lead, he realized after a moment. Jack gave her a gentle push.

“You’re the one who can see it. You’ll need to get us there.”

They scrambled downhill, at a diagonal slant across the hillside. All the little creeks that made big valleys farther down the slopes had their headwaters here, which mean constantly climbing in and out of shallow ravines, with tiny trickling streams at the bottom. In a heavy rain, Jack thought, those would turn into raging torrents. Something else to watch out for.

They entered the trees again. It was mostly pines and spruce on these high slopes, their branches tossing in the wind. Casey kept stopping to look downhill, checking their progress. “I can’t see it anymore,” she said.

“Try to find a landmark. A ridge or a gully or something near where you saw it, something you can still see and take your bearings from. See anything like that?”

She hesitated, then nodded.

“Good. Go.”

* * *

The first fat drops of rain struck them as they stumbled out of the sparse woods into the overgrown backyard of the old cabin.

It was hard to say what it had been built for. Jack guessed it was probably a hunter’s warm-up cabin, or maybe somebody’s half-assed attempt at homesteading, before the land had been bought by the Fallons.

The roof was a sheet of corrugated metal, overgrown with moss and half fallen in. A tin stovepipe stuck up from the intact section of roof, with an incongruous tree growing out of it. The log walls still looked pretty solid, though one of them had slumped, bending in the middle as if it was slowly melting. No glass remained in the windows, just the wooden slats that had once held it in place.

“Careful,” Jack said as they padded toward the cabin, wading through chest-high Queen Anne’s lace and other meadow weeds. “Could be nails or glass underfoot. How are you on your tetanus shots?”

“This is a fine time to ask me that. Have you seen the state of my feet lately?”

“I’d rather not see your foot with a nail through it, is the main point.”

And thenhisfoot plunged through something rotten and yielding. There was a sudden shocking sense of space underneath him. Jack yelled and threw his weight the other way, falling against Casey. She grabbed him and they both staggered backward until Jack caught his balance. Then they stared at the gaping dark hole where his foot had gone through. The ragged edges of old boards were visible under the moss.

“What the hell is that?” Casey wanted to know, her voice shaking.

“Old cellar, I think.” Now that he was looking at it, he could see how the weeds dipped slightly in the area he’d stepped onto. “Maybe the top of an old well or septic tank.”

He knelt down, bringing Casey along with him, and fingered the splintered edges of the old boards where they’d broken beneath his foot. Knocking a clod of dirt off the edge, he tilted his head and listened to it thunk wetly against the unseen bottom of the hole.

“Are you okay?” Casey asked.

“Basically.” The sudden movement had dislodged what was left of the moss dressing on his arm, but shifter healing had already closed the edges of the injury well enough to keep it from bleeding. He felt totally wiped out, exhausted and aching with hunger.

But he’d dealt with this before, in other places, other parts of the world. He knew his limits better than most people did, knew how far he could push himself before it was too much. And he wasn’t there yet. But there would come a time when he couldn’t demand more of his body because it simply had no more to give.

Avery, dammit, you always said I didn’t know how to rely on other people. Well, partner, I’m counting on you to save my ass this time, because I don’t think I can get either of us off this island without you.

“Jack?” Casey asked softly, with a nervous glance at the dark forest around them. It was raining harder now.

“Yeah.” He took a handful of loose grass and covered the hole he’d made. The first scattered pieces of a plan were jostling around in his mind, starting to come together into a useful shape.

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