Page 1 of Burning Secrets

ONE

Normal people,on their day off, might go into town, grab a pizza, a chocolate shake, maybe hang out with the other smokejumpers.

But apparently, she wasn’t normal.

Although, JoJo might have thought to take her tracker ring with her so that when she was mauled and left for dead in the high Alaskan woods, someone might find her carcass and inform her poor mother.

After five years watching her daughter jump out of airplanes into the mouth of the dragon, her worst fears would come true on a bright, sunny day in a clump of wild blueberry bushes.

JoJo held her breath, didn’t move as the grizzly, his feral scent souring the air, snuffled through the thick bushes, hunting for lunch. He’d come up on her like smoke, as if from nowhere, just the redolence of him a hint of trouble as she’d trained her binoculars some forty yards ahead to a secluded burrow near the river.

Please, let the pups still be alive.

The river—just a meandering tributary off the main channel of the Copper River that ran from the lumbering Denali massif—carved out caves and indentations as it cut south through tundra and alpine woods and splashed over rocky cliffs. She would never have located Cleo and her mate, Brutus, if it weren’t for the tracking collars the ADF&G had placed on the wolves two years ago.

And she owed wolf researcher and her mentor, Peyton Samson, the thanks for allowing her to observe the mating pair and their pups for her research paper.

Finally put her master’s degree to bed.

More snuffing, and the mnemonic from her mother trickled through her head.If it’s black, fight back. If it’s brown, lay down.

As in play dead.

She glanced over, spotted the grizzly scruff of its neck in her peripheral vision, maybe twenty yards away, and slowly lowered herself to the stony earth, pulling her hood up, her body in the fetal position.

Her heartbeat rushed in her ears, nearly deafening.

Breathe. Don’t move.

And for some reason, Jade Ransom, her jump boss, entered her head.Where do you go on your days off? You’re always disappearing.

Yeah, maybe she shouldn’t be quite so private. It wasn’t like she was breaking any laws. She just preferred the quiet, the aloneness. No one to get in her way.

No one to break her heart. The breath of the Alaska air, just her and the wilderness.

Maybe she was like her father in that way. She hoped so.

Sticks broke, more rustling. Snuffing.

Her hand trekked down her leg to her bear spray in her thigh holster. Who knew if it might actually repel the grizzly? Better to hide. But should the animal?—

Barking. Then a growl and more barking, and she wanted to push herself up, to see if?—

Yes, it sounded like Brutus. Maybe protecting his den.

Weird that Cleo wasn’t with him, but JoJo hadn’t seen the pups, so maybe Cleo was out hunting. Still, alone? That didn’t feel right.

Although, recently, a lot didn’t feel right. Like her team’s recent run-in with some crazy Alaskan militia group who’d tried to kill them.

And never mind theplane crashthat they’d narrowly escaped. Then, while they’d hiked back to civilization, her other team members had been chased down, met a rogue cult, found dead salmon in a river, found a homesteader lady in the woods who’d been drugged, and one of the team had beenkidnapped.

She hadn’t been sad they’d left without her on that spur-of-the-moment trip. Still, it felt like the entire world had gone crazy up here in the land of the never-ending sun.

The grizzly growled, turning, breaking branches, trampling the bushes.

She pushed herself up. All around her on the hillside, blueberry bushes poked up around boulders. The hill pitched down to a ten-foot drop into a rocky riverbed and its glistening river in the valley below.

Brutus paced on a large flat-topped rock, his fur ruffed, barking, foam at his mouth. The grizzly lumbered nearby, nearly ignoring him as he foraged.

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