Page 72 of Easy, Tiger

"She told Ben the storm knocked out power to three cabins and got him running an emergency preparedness meeting at the community center. Free hot chocolate, disaster planning slides, the whole production. Man has no idea he's running crowd control for a search operation." Owen's dry humor cuts through even now. "Half of Red Pine's there. Grace is doing something similar at the library. Nobody's asking questions about lights in the mountains tonight."

Despite everything, something in my chest eases half a degree. My people take care of their own, even the parts of themselves they can't tell the truth about.

"Every fighter the enclave could spare is moving through these mountains tonight," I say, more to calm my own nerves than to inform him. "All of it because a woman who could've run the moment she found out what we are chose to stay instead."

"Then let's bring her home." Owen's transmission cuts out.

I don't waste time standing in one place. The storm has scrubbed most of her scent from the air, but not all of it, and beneath the snow and exhaust and gun oil, I catch a thread of wildflowers and warm skin that no blizzard could fully erase, faint and inconsistent where the engine's fumes overpower it. Following both, scent and tread marks together, I move fast enough that the cold barely registers, though even at this pace an engine's head start refuses to close as quickly as it should on foot. Every few hundred yards the wind gusts hard enough to steal the tracks entirely, forcing me to circle and reacquire the trail by scent alone, losing precious seconds each time.

Twenty minutes in, my radio hisses again, one of the scouts on the eastern approach this time.

"Nolan, we're picking up fragments on an open channel. Sounds like the hunter, cursing at his own gear. Something about a dead battery and a GPS that won't hold a fix."

I nearly stop walking. The satellite phone, the waypoints, all of it lining up exactly how it would if someone had spent an hour alone in a tent with intentional hands and nothing left to lose. She warned me once, back when I first started teaching her to survive out here, that if things ever went wrong, she wouldn't wait around to be found. She meant it. Every step of this mountain proves it.

"Copy," I manage. "Keep listening. Anything about his position?"

"He mentioned two different routes in the last ten minutes, contradicting himself both times. Doesn't sound confident either way."

That tells me everything I need to know. Whatever she fed him back in that tent, whatever lies about migration patterns and the vanguard securing Devil's Gap, it's working on him now, hours and miles removed from the moment she told them. He believed her enough to build a plan around it, and now his own equipment is turning against that plan piece by piece.

Every wrong turn he takes tonight is a turn she chose for him.

Adjusting course toward the granite outcroppings above the old fire road, the terrain offers exactly one defensible stronghold in a half-mile radius. If I were dragging a captive through a blizzard with failing gear, that's where I'd stop.

The climb steepens, and the wind picks up enough to sting even through fur-thick instincts. Snow drives sideways now, thick enough that my night vision struggles to separate falling white from standing white, and I have to slow my pace whether I want to or not. My radio stays silent for the better part of an hour, everyone maintaining the discipline we drilled into ourselves for exactly this kind of operation. Using the silence to think instead of talk, I run the same calculation over and over: what she'd want me to do, not what the bond screams at me to do.

The bond wants blood. It wants me tearing through this storm on four paws with claws bared, consequences be damned. Every advantage Halsey bought with an hour of steady-nerved execution deserves to be spent wisely. She built me time. I owe her the discipline to use it well.

A shape moves low through the trees off to my left, too purposeful to be wind-driven snow. I lock up, every sense straining, until the scent resolves into something familiar. Owen's team, three of them, crouched and silent, moving with the primal rhythm we all learned before we could walk upright.

"Report," Owen murmurs, barely a breath, snow already coating his shoulders white.

"Nothing since the equipment chatter," I say, squinting toward the granite formation, barely visible through the driving snow. "That's my best guess. One defensible vantage point in range, and if he's smart, that's where he'd dig in."

"And if he's not there?"

"Then the storm's buying us time to widen the search." Neither of us says what happens if we run out of it.

Moving in a tight, soundless unit, we fan out into a loose formation that cuts through the whiteout, keeping us visible to one another while we sweep the ground. While the blinding whiteout would cripple a human search party, our shifter eyesight cuts through the driving snow just enough to keep us oriented. The storm works entirely in our favor here, muffling every footstep and erasing every track behind us almost as quickly as we make them, and whatever Nico's hoping for, it won't be a dozen shapes closing in through snow this thick. Near the granite formation, something new floats through the wind toward me, canvas and cold metal, and underneath both of those, the acrid ghost of the same chemical smoke that blinded me an hour ago, faint now and clinging to fabric rather than filling the air as it did before.

At the flick of my raised fist, my team heads instantly to the ground, moving as one before the gesture even finishes. We're a good two hundred yards out, picking our way through drifts deep enough to swallow a boot to the knee, when one of the scouts crouches beside a fresh set of tracks cutting away from the tent's direction.

"Nolan." His whisper barely reaches over the wind. "Snowmobile tracks. Heading southeast, moving fast, no drag marks."

A heavy knot forms in my chest. If Nico left that tent on the snowmobile, there's only one reason he'd do it in a storm like this: to set up his primary ambush site before first light. He's heading straight for Devil's Gap.

Which means Halsey might currently be back there alone. However he's restrained her, unguarded for however long these tracks have been sitting in the snow.

"Owen, take the team and follow him. Stay far enough back that he doesn't feel eyes on him. Halsey must have fed him exactly what we wanted him to hear—that we'd be crossing Devil's Gap during the storm. Let him get into his sniper nest and wait."

"And you?"

"I'm going for the tent." I'm already moving before I finish the sentence, breaking from the group and cutting straight through the drifts instead of around them. "If she's alone in there, I'm not wasting another second getting to her."

"Copy. Go. And Nolan—if you get her, take her to the old ranger cabin a quarter mile west of those outcroppings. It's stocked with wood and medical supplies. She's been a hostage in a blizzard; you don't know her physical state or if she's going into shock. Get her warm and check her for injuries before you even think about moving her down the mountain."

"Understood."