Obsession Falls Read Online Free

she found herself outside the cave and upright, clutching the pencil in her fist.
    And alone.
    No Dash.
    She wiped the perspiration off her forehead with her bare arm. Put the pencil back into her waist pack. Looked around and tried to evaluate her situation sensibly.
    Sensibly couldn’t change the facts.
    It was cold and dark. Really cold. She could see her breath. And really dark. Moonless, and the starlight could not pierce the canopy of the ancient trees.
    There were creatures out here. Not just harmless animals like bunnies and mice. Wolf packs lived in Idaho, and black bears, and she was under no illusions about those predators—as she weakened, they would rip her flesh and clean her bones.
    She needed to get to her car and get out of here as fast as she could. She needed to do it before dawn.
    Because in the cave, she had refused to face one truth.
    Every one of those drawings she had deliberately tossed to the wind—every one of those crappy, lousy, humiliating drawings—she had signed every one of them.
    Dash and his murderous cohort knew her name.
    She needed to find her car before they did.

 
     
    CHAPTER SIX
     
    Dawn was breaking when Taylor knelt beside a stream, opened her fold-up cup, dipped it in the freezing water, and took a long, grateful drink.
    She was already so cold she couldn’t feel her fingers, the icy water made her shiver uncontrollably, and she would probably get giardia from unclean water. But better that than dying of dehydration.
    Gritting her teeth, she slid her wrist under the surface and let the water numb the pain and, she hoped, bring down the swelling. She’d slipped more than once in the darkness, and caught herself, and every time agony almost brought her to her knees.
    But she kept going. She didn’t know she had it in her, but desperation did wonderful things for a woman’s stamina and courage.
    When she had calmed the throbbing, she leaned her back against a tall pine, pulled her knees into her chest in a vain attempt to get warm, cradled her arm, and faced hard reality.
    She hadn’t made it back to her car in time. Worse than that, she had done another thing her father had warned her not to do. She had gotten lost in the mountains. The Sawtooth Mountains. Not the kind of mountains they had in the East. Not sissy mountains. The Sawtooths were steep, with elevations towering upward to almost eleven thousand feet. Every night— every night—the temperatures dropped below freezing. People got lost here and never came out. Sometimes an unwary hiker found the body. Sometimes no one found any trace.
    For people who wanted to disappear, the Sawtooth Mountains were the place to do it, as long as they were prepared for cold and loneliness, hunger, wild animals, and winters that started early and ended late.
    Taylor wasn’t totally unprepared. She had a compass—on her phone, which she didn’t dare power up for fear the bad guys would track her.
    She knew how to use the constellations, find the North Star. Her father had taught her. But in these mountains, studded with sudden precipices, steep inclines, and unending trees, seeing enough of the sky to consistently find the Big Dipper was impossible. She could climb higher, out of the tree line, but that was going the wrong way, and she needed to eat. Which wasn’t going to happen soon. And she needed to sleep. That, she could manage. Because her father had taught her how to build a shelter.
    As she uncurled from the tight ball and stood, she said aloud, “Thank you, Daddy.”
    She wasn’t going to like this bed. She wasn’t going to be comfortable. The needles were going to poke her and the sap was going to stick to her skin. Inevitably, there would be bugs. But the branches would hold her up off the cold ground and provide cover to help her retain her body heat. And as the morning progressed, the air would warm and she wouldn’t be so terribly, horribly cold.
    Her father had taught her that anytime she went into the