Part 4
The drone stayed above the cabin as if it had been nailed to the sky.
Eli moved Lily away from the windows and doused the lamp. In the gray half-light, the cabin looked smaller than it ever had, every familiar object turned into something that could trap them: the table, the stove, the narrow hall, the only door. Ash paced between the front room and the back wall, his injured paw leaving faint dots of blood on the floorboards.
“Stop wearing yourself down,” Eli told him, though he was pacing too.
The buzzing shifted. A second sound joined it, low and distant at first, then growing into the heavy growl of engines.
They were coming up the logging road.
Eli looked at the shotgun. Two shells loaded. A handful more in the coffee tin. Against Wade Brackett and whoever Grant had sent with him, it was theater. Eli had never been a man eager to die standing in a doorway, and now he had a child breathing behind him.
Ash stopped at the old cedar chest beneath the back window.
It had belonged to Eli’s grandfather and weighed more than a coffin. Ruth used to hide Christmas presents in it because Eli hated moving it. Ash shoved his nose behind it, sniffed, then clawed at the floor.
“Not now,” Eli whispered.
Ash barked once.
Lily stood from the couch. She watched the wolf, then looked at Eli and pointed.
A thread of cold air moved along the floorboards near Eli’s boot.
Memory opened in him so abruptly it made him dizzy: his grandfather, smelling of pipe tobacco, tapping the kitchen floor with a hammer; Ruth laughing when Eli told her the story years later; the old man’s words, half joke and half warning. Every den needs two ways out, boy.
“The crawl,” Eli said.
He shoved his shoulder against the cedar chest. Pain tore through his back. The chest moved half an inch, then another. Ash threw his weight into the side, claws scraping, and together they dragged it far enough to reveal a wide plank with a finger notch blackened by time.
The engines were closer now.
Eli pulled the plank up. Under it was darkness and the damp smell of earth.
Lily backed away, shaking her head.
“I know,” he said. “I know it’s dark.”
She pressed herself against the wall.
The first vehicle stopped outside.
Ash stepped to the opening, looked at Lily, and descended without hesitation. For one terrible second he vanished. Then a soft whine rose from below, patient and low.
Lily crawled to the edge.
“That’s it,” Eli whispered. “Follow Ash. I’ll be right behind you.”
She lowered herself into the dark.
Eli dropped the medical bag, the food, and the shotgun through the opening, then climbed down last. He pulled the plank back over their heads just as the front door burst inward.
The tunnel was narrower than he remembered. It had been dug generations ago by men who were younger, thinner, and more interested in hiding whiskey than saving children. Eli had to crawl on his elbows with dirt filling his sleeves. Above him, boots slammed across the cabin floor.
“Find them,” Wade Brackett barked. His voice came muffled through the boards and earth. “She was here.”
A chair broke.
“Cellar’s empty,” another man called.
“They didn’t walk out,” Wade snapped. “Drone had eyes on the door.”
Eli kept moving. His breath sounded too loud in the tunnel. Ahead, Lily whimpered once. Ash answered with a low chuff, and the sound pulled her forward.
A beam of light slipped through a crack behind them, then vanished.
“Burn it,” Wade said.
Eli froze.
“What?”
“You heard me. Old stove. Old man. Snowstorm. Nobody asks too many questions when a hermit burns himself up.”
Eli closed his eyes for half a second. Ruth’s photograph on the shelf. Her blue spoon jar, already broken. The quilt she had made from their sons’ old shirts. The chair by the stove where she used to read with her feet tucked beneath her.
Then Lily’s hand brushed his in the dark, reaching back to make sure he was still there.
He crawled on.
The tunnel opened under a tangle of sumac and snow-choked brush near the creek bed. Ash burst out first, digging through the crust with frantic speed. Lily followed, gasping as cold air hit her face. Eli rolled into the ravine after her, coughing dirt from his throat.
From the slope, hidden by brush, they watched the cabin catch.
Fire took old wood quickly. It crawled up the porch posts, found the eaves, and ran orange under the roofline. The men outside moved like shadows against the flames. Wade stood by the drive with a phone pressed to his ear.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “No bodies yet. We’ll make sure.”
Lily opened her mouth in a silent cry.
Eli covered her eyes and held her against him. “Don’t look,” he whispered. “That house was only boards.”
It was a lie, but it was the lie she needed.
Ash growled.
Across the ravine, a figure in white winter camouflage stood among the birches. He held a rifle angled toward the ground, his face hidden by a mask. Eli’s hand went to the knife at his belt.
The man lifted one gloved finger to his mouth.
Lily went rigid.
Then she whispered, “Uncle Ray.”
The man lowered his mask.
Ray Keller’s face appeared, hollowed by cold and worry. He had been a conservation officer once, before Grant Whitaker’s people ruined him with a drunk-driving accusation half the county never believed. Eli had known Ray since he was a boy running barefoot in July with fishhooks in his shirt pocket.
Ash did not growl at him. The wolf’s tail moved once, cautiously.
Ray crossed the ravine with his rifle down and stopped several feet away, as if he knew he had no right to come closer.
“Eli,” he said. “We have to move.”
Eli tightened his arm around Lily. “How does she know you?”
Ray looked at the burning cabin. The flames painted his face in restless light. “Because I brought her food,” he said. “And because I was too scared to do anything better…”
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