A Dark Lure

by Loreth Anne White

  He nodded. He could feel the painkillers kicking in. Maybe this time they’d just touch sides. Maybe he could hold on.

  “Listen to me—I need to go find Ace. Before the snow gets too thick. I think he’s gone down a bank and can’t get back up somewhere along the marsh trail. I want you to watch Tori for me. Just be with her.”

  She shot a glance at the child, then back to Myron. Clearly she was worried about what he’d been trying to do with the pills.

  “She’s got something I want you to read, Myron. Something important. Please, read it if you can. And just be here with her. Do not leave her—do not let anyone into the house, understand?” She hesitated. “Not even her father.”

  “What’s going on, Olivia? What’s wrong with Burton?”

  “He’s not well. Please, I’ve got to go. Just keep the doors locked. Keep her safe. And you stick around until I get back, you hear me? We’ll talk later.”

  And she was gone, just him and the dark-haired girl staring at him. Alone in the house.

  “You okay?” he said.

  She didn’t reply.

  “What have you got for me to read?”

  “He’s not my father.”

  “Who’s not? Burton?”

  “My father is the Watt Lake Killer.”

  Myron’s jaw dropped. He gathered himself. “What makes you say that?”

  She held out a pink thing.

  “What’s that?”

  “E-reader.”

  Olivia galloped on Spirit to the marsh trailhead. No one was there.

  “Algor!” she called out into the snow, her mare stomping as she reined her in.

  Not a sound. She saw boot tracks leading into the trail. They were quickly becoming obscured by snow.

  “Ace!” she yelled, following the tracks into the marsh. She whistled, then called again. “Ace! Where are you, boy?” She kept her eyes trained on the tracks, going deeper and deeper into the narrowing, twisting trail through tall moss-draped trees. The ground was marshy here. A beaver had dammed the stream. There was lots of deadfall.

  “Over here!” She heard his voice suddenly. “He’s this way!”

  She stopped, listened as she tried to ascertain which direction the voice had come from. Mist and snow swirled. Spirit snorted softly, edgy beneath her.

  “This way!” She heard Algor’s voice again. “I found him! He’s over here! Down the bank! Not moving.”

  Panic, the worst kind of fear, speared through her. Olivia kicked Spirit forward into a trot, bending her head to avoid branches drooping low with snow. The trail widened a little, and she kicked up speed, going too fast for conditions, driven by a sheer desperation at the thought of losing her Ace. It hit like a bolt.

  Across her neck.

  Rope.

  Olivia gasped as she was flung backward off her horse.

  She landed with a hard thud on her back, so hard she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Pain and white pinpricks of light sparked through her brain, blackness swirling at the edges of her consciousness. Spirit fled through the trees.

  It took a few moments before Olivia could wheeze in a breath. Her ribs felt like they might be broken.

  Trying to understand what had just happened, she struggled to reach her arm over her body and to roll onto her side. She managed to edge onto her stomach, push herself up onto her hands and knees. Spirit had spooked off down the trail. All was silent around her.

  She got onto one knee and reached for a branch to pull herself up when something cracked up the side of her head, so hard, with so much force she felt her ear rip from her skull. The blow reverberated through her nasal passages, her brain, sending a bitter taste of bile into her throat. Confusion swamped her. Hot wetness gushed down her neck. Pain was blinding. Dazedly, she put her hand to her ear. It was partly torn from the side of her head. Weakness buckled her knees. She fell forward, into the red blood pouring from her ear into the snow. She grasped out with her hand, tried to crawl, to pull herself forward.

  But someone clutched a handful of her hair and pulled her by the hair to her knees. She screamed in pain, roots tearing from her scalp. Another blow cut across her face, crunching her nose. She gagged, spat out a glob of blood and spittle. Her assailant tossed her backward, onto her back.

  A shadow loomed over her. Blurry.

  Him.

  Algor.

  She reached up, tried to mouth the word help.

  But he crouched down and pressed a gloved hand hard over her mouth. She choked, blood going down the back of her nose. She shook her head wildly, flailing with her arms, desperate for breath. He brought his face lower. Close. She stilled. His breath was hot on her face. She looked into his eyes, right into his eyes. They were no longer blue. They were the pale yellow eyes of a mountain cat. A hunter. A carnivore.

  “Did you miss me, Sarah?” he whispered into her bloody ear, before raising his hand and delivering another blow to the side of her head. Her vision faded to black.

  Cole drove under the wooden arch with the bleached bull moose antlers into the ranch. Heavily falling snow obliterated the view toward the lodge. Within the next twenty minutes or so, the roads would be impassable via ordinary vehicle.

  As he approached the lodge, a horse came barreling out of the mist and across the road. Cole slammed on brakes, his heart speeding. Quickly he wound down his window. Olivia’s horse? Saddled and riderless. It galloped up the ridge and disappeared into the shroud of snow and cloud along the crest.

  Cole hit the accelerator and raced down the track to the lodge. He saw Olivia’s truck parked near the trail through the alders that led to her cabin. A blue tarp covered the back. He hit the brakes, flung open the door, and raced over to her vehicle. He cast back a corner of the tarp. The bed of the truck was packed with her bags and other gear.

  She was leaving.

  What about the horse?

  He ran down the path to her cabin. Her door was unlocked, her cabin empty.

  Closets empty.

  He spun around, saw a note tucked under a cactus pot. He grabbed it.

  . . . Thank you for everything. Thank you for showing me that I was enough. You gave me back a piece of myself, and I will take that with me wherever I go now. With all my heart I wish you well with Broken Bar. Look after it for me . . .

  He swore. She was leaving. But her truck was still here, her riderless horse fleeing in fright. Something had happened.

  He raced back to the Dodge, drove over snow-covered grass, and skidded to a stop right outside the lodge front entrance. He flung open his truck door, took two stairs apiece up onto the porch, and tried to open the door.

  Locked.

  Cole peered through the side window.

  Dark inside.

  He banged loudly on the door with the base of his fist. “Hello! Open up! It’s Cole!” Nothing. Dry grasses from the harvest wreath on the deck behind him rustled and whispered in the breeze.

  He banged again, harder, louder, another kind of fear biting, eating into his panic. Was his father all right?

  “It’s me, Cole! Open up!”

  The sound of the dead bolt drawing back stopped him. The door edged open. He looked down. Through the crack, the dark-haired Burton kid peered up at him. She looked . . . wrong.

  “Tori? Is . . . is Myron okay? Who’s here?” He pushed the door open past her and stepped inside. He started up the stairs. “Dad!”

  “In here, son. Library.”

  Tori rushed up the stairs and into the library after him.

  “I just saw Olivia’s horse! Where is she?” He stalled dead in his tracks as he registered the look on his father’s face. “Where’s Olivia?”

  “She went on her horse to find Ace. In the otter marsh.”

  “What?”

  “Ace fell down a bank in the marsh,” Tor
i said. “The man from the campsite saw him go in there and came to tell us. He’s helping Olivia find him.”

  Cole dropped to his haunches, grabbed her shoulders. Her jacket was sodden, her hair wet. “What man?!”

  “Algor,” said Tori. “The one with the wife.”

  Panic struck like a hatchet. Adrenaline exploded into his system.

  Olivia came around and coughed blood and saliva out her mouth. It pooled, slimy and sticky under the side of her face, which was pressing into something soft. A mattress. Her body was being rocked about. Fading in and out of blackness, she realized she lay trussed up in the back of a moving camper—hands bound behind her, feet tied at the ankles. Her head was swallowed in pain. The mattress beneath the side of her face was hot and wet with her own blood.

  Confusion swirled around and around in her brain. She tried to recall what had happened. She’d ridden into some kind of ambush. He’d tied a rope across the trail. She tried to recall his words as he’d dragged her by the hair through the snow to the waiting camper, which he must have driven into the marshlands via the cut fencing and deactivated track.

  You weren’t searching the Internet for your child, were you? It was the cop who brought me to you. Sublime, don’t you think? Design. There is a pattern to all things in nature. What do you think of her—rather beautiful child we made . . .

  She gagged again, spitting out more blood. He’d been in disguise. A chameleon. She hadn’t seen it. But she could now—he was older and had grown gaunt. He’d dyed his hair white-blond and shaved it into a buzz. He’d shaped the Balbo beard and goatee. Blue contact lenses had disguised his pale eyes. The sociopath in him had smiled and conned them all.

  But it was him. She knew it now. His smell. Those eyes that had haunted her darkest nightmares for over a decade. But how? How could it be him, when he was dead in that prison cell? She’d identified him in the lineup. It had been him without a doubt—the man who’d tortured her throughout an entire winter. His DNA matched the child in her stomach.

  Oh, God, how could this be happening again? It was not possible.

  It was him, and it wasn’t.

  It struck her suddenly.

  The wife.

  Her gaze darted around the interior of the camper. Did this belong to the dead woman? Had he assumed the identity of a dead husband? The credit card—it had read Algor Sorenson. What had happened to the real Algor Sorenson?

  A true predator knows how to melt into his environment, Sarah. He knows how to blend, how to fashion a lure. Nature designs things this way. Even prey can camouflage itself in order to try and hide, isn’t that so, Sarah?

  The camper lurched and rolled. She was securely strapped to the bed. She felt the truck tires skidding. They fishtailed. The engine revved. They were going uphill. Along a rugged, unpaved road. He must have turned north along the logging road at the back end of the marsh. He was taking her north. Away from civilization. Storm closing in. Like last time. Tracks being wiped clean.

  On the anniversary.

  All over again. Back to the beginning.

  Tears burned in her eyes. Pain rolled over her in suffocating waves. For over a decade she’d been running. She’d thought she was finally safe.

  She’d thought it was over, but it was only just part of a continuum still playing out.

  Tori, her child. Gage Burton, a cop who’d adopted her baby, a killer’s baby. Why? Melody had said that she and her husband had been trying to conceive. She never knew Melody’s husband was a cop. Melody had kept that from her. She felt betrayed. Consciousness faded in and out. She was unable to pull pieces of logic together.

  She ran through events leading up to her attack in the marsh. He’d lured her with Ace. Her eyes burned and adrenaline surged. Had he killed her dog? Had he taken from her the most precious thing in her life? Olivia struggled wildly against her bonds in a spurt of frustrated panic. She tried to reach her belt with her bound hand, before recalling he’d taken her sat phone. He’d put it in his own pocket. He’d taken her knife.

  Olivia rolled in and out of consciousness with the sickening, yawing, nauseating sway and skid of the truck.

  Would he keep her for another winter? Would he put her out for another spring hunt?

  She just didn’t have the strength to fight it all over again . . .

  Cole grabbed a shotgun from the gun safe, along with several boxes of ammunition. Mind racing, he busted out the front door and ran around the side of the house to the garage that housed the snowmobiles—he’d seen them in there when he’d found his father’s Dodge earlier. As he neared the garage, he caught sight of the severed wires leading up the side of the wall behind the kitchen. He stalled. His gaze shot up, following the cables to the roof. They led to the sat dish. A sinister chill snaked through him. This had been done purposefully. Had the same thing happened to the phone lines?

  The phones had gone dead around the same time as the television set when they were having dinner. Around the same time someone had entered Olivia’s cabin and scrawled that note onto her sheets.

  The entire ranch had been cut off on the cusp of a major storm.

  He slung the shotgun across his back and swung the garage doors open wide. He’d seen several jerry cans of fuel on the back shelves.

  Hurriedly he gassed up one of the snow machines, tested the engine. It roared to life. He swung his leg astride the seat and released the throttle, feeding the machine juice. The tracks rumbled and scraped over concrete as he squeezed past a tractor, sending up sparks as he bumped along a metal frame and shot out of the doors and into the snow. He goosed the machine, kicking up speed, blinking into blizzard-like flakes as he raced toward the otter marsh—he hadn’t had time to search for helmet and visor.

  As he neared the narrow trailhead to the marsh where he and Jimmie used to play, time curved and warped and doubled back on itself. He swung the machine into the narrow trail and bombed along the dense, twisting track. Snow was thick here. It had covered whatever trace Olivia might have left. Then he caught sight of indentations that could have been made by hooves. He slowed to a stop, and cut the engine. He tried to control his breathing as he listened for a sound—anything that might show him direction.

  He heard nothing.

  Restarting the engine, he traveled a little farther into the densely wooded marsh, following what he believed could be horse tracks.

  He cut the engine again, listened. This time he heard a sound. His heart jumped. He slowed his breathing further, waited. He heard it again, a yap—it came from the west, from a ravine tucked behind dense growth.

  He dismounted and scrambled through the scrub to where the ground dropped down a sheer bank. He got onto his stomach, peered over.

  Ace.

  “Hey, buddy! Hang on. I’m coming!”

  The dog barked.

  He scrambled down the bank backward, using branches for support, dislodging small stones from beneath his boots, sliding through snow. He dropped down beside Ace. The dog licked him all over. Cole ran his hands over his fur, checked his legs, paws. He didn’t seem hurt. Then he saw the bone lying in the snow with bits of raw meat still attached. He’d been lured here with food.

  To trap Olivia?

  “Where is she, boy? Can you help me find her? Can you show me her trail?” Cole glanced up the snowy bank, trying to figure out how to get Ace back up. He unhooked the shotgun from his back and removed his jacket before resecuring the gun.

  He wrapped his jacket under Ace’s belly, tying the sleeves around his body to fashion a harness.

  “Okay, you ready, big guy? All you’ve got to do is hold steady while I haul you up, bit by bit.”

  Cole reached up for a branch and pulled himself up the angled slope, kicking the toes of his boots into the bank for leverage as he carefully lugged Ace up, bit by bit, with his other hand.

  He scrambled over
the lip of the slope, muscles burning, sweat mixing with melting snowflakes in his eyes. He helped edge Ace over. The dog scrambled wildly, then licked Cole’s face as he untied the makeshift harness. The animal was stressed, panting.

  “Okay, where’s Olivia, boy? Find her!” he said as he shrugged back into his jacket and once again secured his shotgun across his back. “Find Olivia!”

  Ace snuffled the air, nose held high, nostrils waffling as he tested air currents. His head jerked sideways, as if he’d been yanked by a bull ring in his nose. He scrambled through bushes, making a snorting sound. He was on her trail.

  Cole ducked and pushed scrub and branches aside, going on hands and knees at times in order to clamber over roots and under deadfall. The dog was following scent wafting through air, not tracks, and scent didn’t care about accessibility. Twigs snared in Cole’s hair and slashed across his face. Dislodged snow dumped down his neck.

  “Go, boy! Keep at it!” He was breathing hard now, bare hands frozen.

  They popped out onto a trail. Ace stilled, then gave a weird whimper and lay down in the snow.

  Horror filled Cole as he stepped out of the dense scrub into the trail.

  Blood—great big gouts of it—covered the snow. It was surrounded by depressions, broken branches, drag marks. His heart beat a tattoo against his ribs, anxiety almost blinding him. He ran through the snow to the end of the trail, following what appeared to be deep prints and drag marks, more blood. Along the way were clumps of hair. Olivia’s hair. Roots attached.

  He reached the edge of the trail and burst out onto a wider track. It was the deactivated road that led from the cut fencing they’d seen earlier. Whoever had taken Olivia had been plotting this a while. Her assailant must have surveyed the scene, cut the fence, and driven a vehicle in here, parked it to wait while she was enticed into the marsh using the most treasured thing in her life as a lure—Ace.

  The drag marks ended where fresh tire tracks gouged into snow and showed black dirt.

  She’d been taken.