Riley
We lost the trail at the creek.
One moment the tracks were there — hoofprints in the soft earth, the faint crush of undergrowth, the occasional scent marker that even a day and a half of weather hadn’t entirely erased. And then the treeline broke and the bank dropped away and there was nothing but water running silver in the last of the evening light, and the trail simply stopped.
I sat on my horse and stared at the creek and felt the white hot thing in my chest turn into something colder and considerably harder to manage.
We had picked up fragments throughout the day. Not much — a hoof print here, a broken branch there, and twice the faint thread of Maggie’s scent drifting through the trees like she’d brushed against the undergrowth in passing. Just Maggie. Never Kaida.
I had b
