Page 69 of The Forest of Lost Souls

“I’m not holding them back.”

“It’ll be quicker to turn them loose and let them tree her.”

“This isn’t a raccoon hunt,” Sam says. “They’re not trained to tree anyone.”

“She doesn’t know that. They come at her fast, she’ll panic, climb to keep from being bitten.”

“Maybe she won’t. Anyway, that’s not how they’re trained. They need the leash and commands to follow. Unleash them, they’ll think the hunt is off. They won’t go at her fast or at all,” Sam insists, though his purpose now is to fail at this task without his dogs coming to harm and without taking a bullet in the head.

“All right, but don’t hold them back.”

To Vector and Boschvark and all the others, the woman matters because of something she knows, a secret that could bring them to ruin if exposed, whatever that might be. However, considering that she has remained free and alive with such powerful and unscrupulous people aligned against her suggests to Sam Crockett that the secret she’s discovered is not the most important thing about her. There is something bigger at work here. Some quality or power she possesses that these men resent but also fear.

As they ascend toward the trees among which Vida disappeared, Sam is unaccountably reminded of an event from eighteen years in the past—the fortuneteller whom he paid with photographs of his father, photos that he no longer valued.

The table of many colors, the candle flames, the three figures of light pulsing on the wall, the woman’s piercing stare ...

“Will I be like him?”

“Your father?”

“Yeah.”

“Like him in what way?”

“Will I betray people?”

“No. Not you. Never.”

Although the meadow rises toward higher phalanxes of trees, somewhere ahead the land descends into the valley that is always just one hill away, the valley of the shadow of death.

56

BECOMING

Evergreens crowding one another, the air redolent of pines, the way mostly shadowed, morning light splintering through the boughs, the trail slippery with the dead needles of the trees, the brittle scales of fallen cones crumbling under her feet. In the wake of the gunfire, the only things Vida can hear are her labored breathing and the pounding of her heart. Although the forest mantles thousands of square miles of mountains and valleys, a curious claustrophobia closes around the moment, and the sounds she makes have a hollow quality, as if she is in a barrel or a metal-walled room, running from nowhere to nowhere on a treadmill.

She is fit, but sprinting uphill on a serpentine trail, even with just fifteen pounds on her back, will tax her into physical penury sooner than she dares to consider. At all costs, she must remain positive and focused. Four-legged trackers are fast on her spoor. Gunmen are even more intent on murder than she anticipated. In her frantic ascent, she breathes through her mouth; the piney fragrance is so strong that it isn’t merely a scent, but also a pungent flavor—now medicinal, now janitorial—that cloys in her throat and seems to make breathing more difficult.

She worries about the dogs, about what they might be trained to do to her and how reliably they will adhere to their training,but she also worriesforthe dogs. Lupo is attuned to her in a way that she can’t fully understand, that perhaps no one other than the long-ago fortuneteller could comprehend. If he becomes aware that Vida is in peril and if he arrives with his pack, what might happen when dogs and wolves meet? They are of the same genus but not the same species, the former domesticated and the latter wild. When she was but ten years old, she had been told that she was the protector of Nature and all its creatures. For years, that grand lifework seemed far beyond the talents of a young woman of the mountains, a placer-mine prospector and bookworm with a taste for isolation just short of hermitism. However, day by day since José’s death, hour by hour since Nash Deacon first arrived on her doorstep, Vida has awakened to a deeper truth about herself, to the possibility of a daunting and yet thrilling mission that ongoing events appear to confirm, a destiny alike to what the seer foresaw eighteen years earlier. If there is any chance that such a solemn yet magical responsibility has been settled on her, she must never allow dogs and wolves to clash or to suffer at the hands of the vicious men who pursue her.

She thinks,Have pity on those who love and are separated, on the lonely, on those who mourn, on those who fear, on all the little animals that live their lives as prey, but pity as well the animals that must kill to survive in this fallen world.

Vida has no similar obligation to pity and protectallhuman beings, only those who are innocent as animals are innocent, those who are humble as little children are humble, those who are kind. She doesn’t believe that any of the men on her trail are innocent or humble or kind, but if one such exists among them, she trusts that she will recognize him—and be able to spare him.

If she has a magical purpose, she doesn’t have magical powers with which to fulfill it. The steepening incline and a stretch of trail providing uncertain footing force her to slow from a run to a quick walk. Her breath is hot, and she has broken into a sweat. Her abdominal muscles flutter. Her calves ache.

As her effort declines, she can hear more than her hammering heart and ragged exhalations. The new sound is at first a clatter that seems distant, unnervingly like a machine gun.

However, distance is an auditory illusion, and within seconds she realizes the noise originates nearby and overhead. Not a clatter of metal against metal. A deeper throbbing. Thewhump-whump-whumpof flogged air, the underlying howl of a turbine engine. A helicopter. Something bigger than a sheriff’s department chopper. A gunship? No. They couldn’t have dragged the military into this. Perhaps a rescue helicopter. County law enforcement might have one of those.

Although the day is windless, the trees begin to shiver about thirty yards ahead of her and fifty yards to her right, pine boughs billowing, branches creaking. The disturbance proceeds toward her, passes perhaps twenty yards in front of her, and moves away to the left.

Puzzled by this development, Vida halts, trying to imagine their intention. The forest is so dense that the layered branches overhead allow only flinders of sky to be seen. So little light reaches the ground that the undergrowth is minimal in this area—deciduous ferns, wiry grasses, Corsican sandwort, pale colonies of fungus; the lowest branches of evergreens are often barren witchy-looking configurations. No airborne surveillance is able to provide meaningful assistance to the search party on the ground.Surely even infrared scanning will fail to detect a heat signature here beneath the interlaced and many-storied boughs.

This is not the same sound as in the dream when she was sitting on the porch with the fortuneteller, not mysterious but distinct and easily identified. Yet it portends nothing good.

A change in the pitch of the engine noise alerts her that the chopper is executing a turn, coming back, as though quartering this area to confirm the pilot’s suspicion. Or to take a second reading with some technology she can’t name.

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