Page 47 of So Dark

His words were a knife in her gut. “That’s not true. I just… look, they’re not out of nowhere. And damn it, it’s a lot, okay?”

“It’s always a lot,” he replied. “Always. Every problem with you is huge and immediate and terrible and has to be dealt with right this damned second or else. Just…” he sighed. “You know what, forget it. You’re right. I shouldn’t have brought this up. Let’s both of us put our minds to the job and find Kelly Connor.”

To punctuate the end of their conversation, the truck skidded over a patch of ice and spun sideways. Michael swore and twisted the wheel, doing his best to keep the truck straight while it slowed to a stop.

Michael sighed again. “I guess we’re done driving.”

Faith looked out of her side window. Ahead of them loomed Tazlina Lake. In daylight, the ice probably gleamed a beautiful, brilliant white, but at night, it was a pool of solid black.

Michael shut the engine off and picked up the CB from the dash. “Special Agent Prince. Truck is disabled near the mouth of the Tazlina River. Proceeding on foot from here.”

The two of them jumped out of the truck and turned their flashlights on. The terrain was rough but passable on foot without too much difficulty. Faith turned the beam onto the highest setting and shone it into the distance. She could just make out the dim black line of the river three hundred yards away.

“Follow me,” she said. “We’ll look around this side of the river.”

“You don’t think she’ll be closer to St. Anne’s Lake by now?”

“I think we’re here,” she replied. “So this is where we’ll look. Responders from Glennallen are checking the other side of theriver and working their way inward, and Anchorage PD has helicopters looking through the wilderness around St. Anne’s Lake. This is the best we can do.”

“Right. Good point.”

They reached the mouth of the river a few minutes later. Turk put his nose to the ground and trotted forward, sniffing for any sign of Kelly.

Faith looked around. Besides the massive pool of darkness that was Tazlina Lake and the ribbon of black formed by the river, there were the towering evergreens that loomed over them like predatory creatures lurking in their own shadow, waiting for one of the soft juicy grubs stumbling through their home to trip over a root and slake their thirst with its blood. The image was macabre, but not nearly as macabre as the reality that the bodies of their three victims represented.

The ground was rock-hard, frozen by the harsh Alaskan winter. The nights here fell to twenty below zero, sometimes even colder than that. In her thick parka with her mask, gloves and boots, Faith was warm enough as long as she kept moving, but even protected by the thick fur, the cold still chilled her skin. She couldn’t understand why any of the Guardians would want to be out in this weather. The summer was cold enough, but this was deadly. A person could die if they stopped moving or if their fire went out at night.

Maybe that was part of the thrill for people like Kelly Connor. Maybe “survivalism” was just another way to say, “cheating death.” Maybe the knowledge that one mistake or even one bit of bad luck could mean the end of their lives made this lifestyle exciting for them. Faith didn’t know if Kelly was aware of the fact that there was a human killer out there hunting for her, but she knew that there were bears and wolves around. She knew that the weather could kill her even if a predator didn’t. She knewthat if she suffered an injury alone in the wilderness, she would probably freeze to death long before help got to her.

But she still went out. Even knowing the risks, she still did what she loved doing. From Faith’s perspective, she was being irresponsible and foolish, but maybe from Kelly’s perspective, hunting serial killers after being nearly killed by them several times was foolish. From her perspective, enlisting in the Marine Corps to go fight a war thousands of miles from home might be just as stupid as going on a solo hiking trip during the Alaskan winter was to Faith.

It was an odd trait of humans that they fought so hard to push limits and ignore boundaries. Any other animal would avoid dangerous conditions like a plague. If they endured dangerous conditions, it was only because they had no choice, like a polar bear who swam dozens of miles through the Arctic Ocean to find food because he would die otherwise, or salmon who swam upstream and risked predation by brown bears and eagles only to die of exhaustion after they mated because if they didn’t, their eggs and young would be eaten en masse by other fish and seabirds in the ocean.

In fact, nature was full of examples where animals risked danger to avoid worse danger, but as far as Faith knew, humans were the only living things that sought danger for no other reason than to experience a thrill. That was probably what drove humans to become the most adaptable, intelligent and dominant species on the planet, but it was strange to think that so many people were obsessed with doing things that no other animal would even think to attempt.

She wondered where Kelly was now. If she was alive, was she thinking about how exciting it was to be cheating death alone in a harsh and cold wilderness? Was she looking at the vast sky and huddling closer to her fire, regretting her decision to come alone? Was she regretting her choice to pursue a hobby thatcould at any moment sever the rest of her life and leave all of her hopes and dreams and plans unfulfilled?

And if the killer’s trap had already found her, did she wish in her last terrifying moments that she had found fulfillment in something else, something that wouldn’t have ended with her bleeding out in the forest where she might never be found?

She was so lost in these thoughts that she jumped when her cell phone buzzed. It was Wyatt.

“Bold here,” she replied. “Did you find Kelly?”

“No, but we found Graham Nash.”

Her eyes widened. She quickly put the phone on speaker and motioned for Michael to listen. “Say again, Wyatt? You’ve found Graham Nash?”

“We have. He’s in Montana.”

Faith came to a stop. “What?”

“He’s in Montana. He lives in a commune twenty miles outside of Billings. He’s been there for two months. According to him and several other members of the commune, he hasn’t left the community since arriving. I guess he met a woman there and decided he didn’t want to be a survivalist anymore.”

“Son of a bitch,” Faith swore.

As always, she felt a touch of guilt that learning someone wasn’t a murderer disappointed her, but it meant that the killer was still some unknown entity out there preying on people. Her best lead had evaporated once more.

"The good news is we can focus all of our efforts on finding Kelly," Wyatt replied. "I'm doubling the search parties. We're putting more search parties out there, and we have her name and face on all of the alert networks, including GPS alerts."

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