Page 8 of First Light

His dark hair fell past his shoulders in curling waves that reminded Carys of the whorls of grain in polished maple her father had loved.

“He made my mother a drawing table from that wood.” Carys’s head was spinning.

The man narrowed his eyes. “What wood? Who made a table?”

She was really drunk.

Her father had been a shop teacher at the local high school and a carpenter in his spare time. He’d loved the redwood forests of California and had built a small house with his own hands after movinghis wife and infant daughter from rural Wales to the American West Coast.

When she closed her eyes, she was back in Baywood, standing behind that house on the edge of the forest, looking into the trees and peering through the shadowed trunks where the light jumped and danced as branches moved in the breeze.

Her parents weren’t dead in this memory. They hadn’t perished on a hillside in the dead of night, lost to a car crash in the wilderness. Her mother was still painting in her studio, and her father was still polishing wood in the barn.

She watched the faint lights in the forest, dancing like fireflies at twilight.Don’t be curious, my Carys,her mother’s voice whispered in her mind.Leave the rabbit to the wolf. Never follow the lights. They want to lead you away from me.

“Duncan Murray. Here to collect your American friend?”

The bartender’s voice roused her, and Carys opened her eyes.

Duncan was standing over the booth, his arms crossed over his chest. He nodded at the bartender. “Dru.”

Carys looked up at him and squinted. “You.”

The bartender looked up and smiled. “I was just about to ask your friend her name. Perhaps you can tell me.”

“Out of the booth, Dru.” Duncan’s voice was gruff. “You don’t need her name.”

“But I’m fairly sure I know one of them.” The strange man’s eyes were twinkling. “Don’t you want to tell me the other, my dove?”

Carys looked at the man and tasted the sweet burst of berry juice on her tongue. “Nothing you say makes any sense.”

“Not now, but wait.” Dru winked at her. “Very well then.” He slid out of the booth. “Your seat, Duncan?”

“And a glass,” the brutish man said. “Leave the bottle unless it’s one of yours.”

Dru flipped the neck of the bottle with his fingertips, and it seemed to disappear. “I’ll bring you another.”

Duncan slid into the booth across from Carys as Dru walked away. “Of all the pubs you go to, it had to be this one.”

She pointed over her shoulder. “It’s right next to my hotel.”

“Of course it is.” He was folding his hands, then unfolding them. “Listen, I’m sorry I was rude today, but you surprised me and?—”

“You shouldn’t have been surprised. I called you, like, a dozen times after Lachlan went missing.” She was far too drunk to be polite. “What did you think was going to happen when your brother up and left my house and five hours later, his phone was pinging in Scotland?” She leaned forward. “Five hours, Duncan. That’s not possible. At one thirty his phone was at Mad Creek Bridge, and four hours later it was in Edinburgh.”

Duncan stared at her. “You didn’t tell me that part.”

“You didn’t really give me a chance.”

“Fine. Tell me what happened.”

Carys sighed, trying not to think of how many times she’d told this story in the past month. To Laura and Kiersten. To the police. To her dean. “He went for a hike in the forest behind my house.”

Duncan scratched his beard. “You two liked to hike. He told me that.”

“Yeah, and we know how to be safe in the woods. We don’t hike after dark. We take water and protein bars with us. We take a compass because cell phone service is shit back in the hills.”

“What’s in the woods?”

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