Page 49 of Handcuffed to the Bear

The wet world was a wonderland of rich after-rain scents, but she couldn’t smell any lions. Not yet.

She and Jack skirted around the rocky outcrop that sheltered the caves. From there, it was only a short scramble across steep rocks and loose scree to the summit. Jack crouched and crawled the last few yards on his belly. Casey followed suit, and together they peeked over.

It was much steeper on this side. The mountain fell away sharply, plunging down a frightfully steep slope—more of a cliff, really—to scattered patches of wind-gnarled pines attempting to eke out a living on its lower slopes. Long curling banks of mist crept below them, whipped by the wind into shaving-foam humps, concealing and revealing the crawling gray sea far below.

In front of them the sky was black, lit by brief flickers of lightning as the storm blew on inland.

In fact ...

Casey shifted. Her human vision was more acute at a distance than her lynx eyes. She wanted to see if she’d really seen what she thought she had, dimly glimpsed through the heavy curtains of rain.

“Jack!” she said, sinking her hand into his shaggy fur. “I can see land over there. I think it might be the mainland.”

Jack shifted, so now she was gripping his bare arm. “How far?” he asked, squinting.

It was hard to gauge distance, especially through the rain. There wasn’t much she could use to judge scale. She couldn’t make out individual trees, or any features of the landscape at all, really. But it went as far as she could see in both directions, at least until it vanished into mist and rain.

“I don’t think we could swim to it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said dubiously. Lynx and bear could both swim, and wouldn’t be as bothered by the cold water as humans, but she wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer even in her lynx form.

“What else do you see?”

Right. Seeing-eye dog. “Cliffs below us,” she said. “Trees farther down. It’s really steep on this side. I’m glad we came up the gentle side, because I’m not sure if we could have climbed—Oh my God!”

“What, what?” Jack demanded, staring in the general direction she was looking, as if he could penetrate the blurry haze of the distance from sheer willpower alone.

“Jack,” she said slowly, shading her eyes from the residual rain and trying to see better. “I think I know how we got to this island.”

She’d only glimpsed it through the fog and clouds, and now she had to wait for the wind to move that stupid fogbank again and let her get a better look at what she thought she’d seen. Then the clouds below them tore open like a ripping sheet of paper, rolling back in slow motion, and there it was: a dock and a cluster of roofs, tiny as child’s toys from up here. There was a white boat moored at the dock, sleek and teardrop-shaped. It wasn’t the enormous private cruise ship that the Fallons had sailed out of Seattle’s harbor—God, was it only yesterday? But this wasn’t some fisherman’s tiny skiff either.

And there was more. A little way back in the pines, a neatly rectangular green square had been cleared for a helipad. She knew it was a helipad because there was a toy-sized helicopter sitting in it.

She described what she was seeing to Jack as best she could, while the fog closed in again, draping a wet sheet over the sea and dock and scatter of buildings.

“It’s so hard to tell scale from here. I can’t tell if it’s a giant resort and a huge boat, or just a few cabins and a little speedboat.”

“And their own private helicopter,” Jack said. “Don’t forget that. Must be nice to be loaded.”

Casey imagined their limp bodies being shoved out of the helicopter into the trees the previous night. She shuddered. “Can we steal it and fly out of here?”

“I don’t know how to fly one,” Jack said. “Boats, I can do. Can you tell if there’s anyone down there?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see anybody moving around or anything. But it’s so hard to tell from here.”

The sun broke out of the clouds just then and ignited a rainbow across the deep blue gloom of the retreating storm. A second ghostly rainbow shimmered below it. Casey had never seen a double rainbow before.

If she was going to believe in such things, it seemed like a good sign.

“We’re going down there, aren’t we?”

“No choice,” Jack said. “It looks like that’s the only place on this whole damn island that we can get what we need most.”

“A way off.”

“Or at least a way of getting a message out.”

And to do it, Casey thought, they had to go into the actual lion’s den itself.

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