Page 67 of Wind Called

As her dad Jordan had said on multiple occasions, being outdoorsy was great…as long as you protected yourself from the sun and didn’t allow it to turn you into a wrinkled little raisin.

Bellamy had no wish to shrivel into anything, and she knew the fair skin she’d inherited along with her red hair meant she needed to take more precautions than most people. Maybe the hat looked kind of silly, but it did the job.

After all, she knew she didn’t have to worry about impressing Marc anymore.

Now he’d stopped a pace or two in front of her, again with his head up as he surveyed their surroundings. She didn’t see anyplace where the path branched off again, but it didn’t seem as if he was too concerned about that.

“Over there,” he said, this time pointing to their right, which she thought was roughly northwest.

“There isn’t a path,” she replied. And okay, she knew she sounded dubious, but wandering from even the faint trail they’d been following seemed like a recipe for disaster.

“No,” he said. “But I can tell someone’s come this way. See all those bent stalks in the dry grass?”

And he pointed toward the place where he’d been looking.

Sure enough, it did seem as though something had come through here, something big enough to bend the grass. And when she squatted down to look at the dry red earth, she saw something else.

“Footprints,” she said briefly. “Hiking boots, I guess, because I doubt anyone’s stupid enough to come out here in tennis shoes.”

Marc flashed a smile at her, then leaned down to look at the prints in question. “You’d be surprised. I’ve seen people trying to scale rock walls in flip-flops. But you’re right — the tread on these does look more like hiking boots.”

“So…what now?” Bellamy asked, even though she thought she knew the answer.

He straightened, then settled his pack more firmly on his shoulders. “We find out who left those tracks.”

The going was harder than he’d thought it would be, just because he had to keep stopping and peering down at the ground to make sure he hadn’t lost the elusive trail of those hiking boots. Also, whoever had gone this way hadn’t walked in a straight line, but had looped back and forth, sometimes backtracking, sometimes wandering to either side before returning to their original route.

An attempt to throw any pursuers off the scent?

Marc was inclined to think so, even though they hadn’t seen a single soul for the last forty-five minutes and he guessed no one other than the thief…minion…whatever you wanted to call them…had left these tracks.

Or maybe that was too easy. For all he knew, they were following the trail of someone who’d come out here to commune with nature and would be rightly annoyed to have their spirit walk interrupted.

But his instincts were telling him that wasn’t the case at all. More and more landmarks appeared, the same ones he’d seen in his dream. Not just the “rooster” rock, but one that almost looked like the hoodoos in the Bisti wilderness in New Mexico — no, he’d never been there, but he’d seen pictures online — with a rounded rock sitting on top of an impossibly thin column, seeming as if it was going to topple over at any moment. Or there was the one with the sheer, fluted face, looking almost like the red rock version of Half Dome in Yosemite.

All this reassured him that they were headed where they needed to go, even if it felt as though the journey was taking forever. Sure, he’d guessed that their quarry would be hiding out in the middle of nowhere. He just hadn’t understood exactly how far out in the middle of nowhere it would actually be.

Behind him, Bellamy plugged away, following him over the rocky terrain without a single word of complaint. She’d pulled a floppy army green hat out of her pack and put it on her head, probably doing what she could to fend off the sun, which grew hotter and brighter by the minute. The thing made her look absolutely silly and positively adorable at the same time, and he wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her and tell her again how much he loved her.

He didn’t, though, because the same instinct that was driving him forward was also sending the signal that he needed to remain focused. Plenty of time to kiss Bellamy — and a whole lot more — once this was all done.

The ground rose steadily as they walked toward a large rock formation, one that was almost its own small range of hills. Even from this distance, he thought he could see shadowy spots on the red rocks.

Caves?

Sure looked like it to him, although the ones he’d spotted were shallow enough that he guessed they wouldn’t provide any kind of real shelter. Still, if the geological conditions here had allowed for the formation of small caves, then it seemed to him there might be bigger ones somewhere among those rocks, places where a person could hide themselves for days if necessary.

He stopped and pointed at the closest of the caves, barely more than a carve-out in the sheer rock face. “See that?” he said, although he kept his voice down. Yes, it seemed as if he and Bellamy were utterly alone here, but that wasn’t any reason to take chances.

“I see it,” she said in a similar undertone.

“None of the caves on this side of the formation are probably big enough to be hiding our thief,” he went on. “That’s why I think we should circle around to the west and see what we find over there.”

“Do the tracks go that way?” Bellamy asked. Her voice wasn’t quite doubtful, but he got the feeling she didn’t want to go marching off into even more nothing without some kind of indication that they were going in the right direction.

He hadn’t checked, but when he looked down, he saw the faint boot prints curved around to the north of the giant formation. “Yes,” he said. “Harder to see because the brush is even taller here, but I think I should be able to find them.”

“Then lead on, MacDuff,” she told him, then grinned in response to his blank look. “You never didMacbethin high school English?”

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