The question was grim, reminding her that he had a job to do. That he was potentially the one who’d find this poor kid dead in a ditch somewhere or under a copse of trees. It made her realize that he’d been teasing her perhaps as a way of coping with that knowledge.

Great, Marissa. Some shrink you are.

Jackson leaned over and cut Sargent loose. He made a deep sound in his throat and Sargent took off into the woods.

“Keep working the mother,” he said before heading off after his dog.

She did exactly that. Subtly, slowly, waiting for the woman to do something to give herself away.

“I just don’t understand,” she said, dabbing a tissue under red-rimmed eyes. The tears had been genuine at least. Whether it was actual grief or due to fear, that part was hard to tell. It was past 3 am and as far as she knew, Jackson had only taken two breaks, and both of those breaks she suspected were for Sargent’s benefit as opposed to his. The other dog teams from Albany were tied up and still hadn’t arrived. Apparently there was no shortage of missing people that night. Since the Saugerties dog handlers covered a great deal of the townships in the area, the next closest town with a team had been notified. It was spring so the ski teams had come off the mountains and were being called back to join the search. They were just now starting to arrive.

“Damn him, I’m going to nail his ass to the wall,” barked Avery Landon, the precinct captain. “He’s ignoring me on purpose!”

“Tommy was such a good boy,” the mother was saying. “He always, always listened to me. Never did a single thing wrong.”

“I’m going to go out there and get him myself.”

Uh-oh. Trouble. And she knew there was only one person “out there” who would pretend he didn’t hear his captain recalling him if he didn’t want to hear it. He would work himself until he dropped, the noble idiot. He’d let that dog rest, but he’d probably work himself into a—

Was.

Cold seized Marissa by the heart, freezing her breath in her lungs.

Was. Tommy was a good boy. Not is, but was.

And that was when she knew Tommy was most likely dead already. It could have been days ago … who really knew? The only other person to see him had been his teacher on Friday. Two whole days ago. And here he was, missing quite conveniently before he was due to show up in school the next day.

“Excuse me,” she said numbly, standing up and walking over to Landon. “Captain, I know where Jackson is.” She didn’t actually, but she suspected what she had to say would flush him out far quicker than his railing captain would. But she did have his cell number and as soon as she got into the woods and far enough out of earshot, she was going to tell him to come in.

Because as far as she knew, Sargent hadn’t been trained as a cadaver dog. It took a very special type of training for that.

“Where?” Landon demanded on a growl.

“Firstly, Captain, I can appreciate that it’s late and we are all very tired, but snorting like a bull isn’t going to help. Secondly, if you think I’m going to tell you so you can extract your pound of flesh you clearly don’t know me very well. Let me go. There’s as much chance of me talking sense into him than anyone else I guess.”

“You get him and you bring him back ASAP, doc,” Landon ordered. “I swear I’m writing him up this time. He’s gotten more and more insubordinate this last month …”

Marissa tuned out the rest of the tirade, hunching into her sweater, and moving toward the trees quickly before Landon changed his mind and sent someone with her. Actually, it was pretty thoughtless of him not to do so. She probably should have told Landon her suspicions, but a few minutes either way wasn’t going to make much difference. It had been hours, actually, since anyone had made anything resembling headway. Anyone but her.

Was.

It was a horrendous word to use when referring to a child, she thought as she picked her way carefully through the trees and brush, keeping her back to the house and the command station as she moved out of sight. Usually a mother would deny the idea of her child’s death for as long as was logically possible … and even then some. She knew mothers of missing children who never stopped looking, not even decades later. Never stopped hoping that one day their doorbell would ring and there their child would be, all grown up, children in their arms, some miraculous circumstance bringing them home at last. Denial was a painful coping skill. But it was almost always there. Sometimes until the bitter end.

Once she was deep enough into the woods, the terrain suddenly steep and indicative of her having begun to travel up the mountain, she pulled out her cell. Belatedly she realized she might not get a very good signal there. That could be why Jackson wasn’t answering his cell or his radio. Well, the radio was less likely …

“Marissa?” He picked up on the second ring. So much for that theory.

“Landon is so hot you’re going to need to call the fire department to put him out,” she said wryly.

“Yeah I figured he would be.”

“You can come in now. You’re not likely to find him, Jackson.”

There was a long minute of silence.

“Fuck. Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Double fuck.” She winced. She didn’t think she’d ever heard him swear before. He had once told her that if he swore in private it made it too easy to revert to it in public and during the job, when he needed to stay cool or risk enflaming a situation. “Where are you now?”

“In the woods. Actually, I think I may have gotten a little turned around,” she said. It wasn’t the truth, but Jackson needed someone to rescue, no matter how small. It was a silly thing to do, and maybe she was treating him like a child who needed his hand held, but hell … someone had to do it. And if that wasn’t the definition of her job then she sure as hell didn’t know what was.

“Okay, stay where you are. We don’t need to be looking for you as well.”

“It’s not that bad,” she laughed. “It’s not like I’m lost in the badlands or the Grand Canyon or something.”

“Just the same. Let us come to you.”

“But how are you going to know—?”

She realized she was talking to herself when her phone clicked off in her ear. Okay sure, so he had a supersniffing dog, but it’s not as though Sargent had a sample of her scent to go off of. It wasn’t as though they were going to make a beeline straight to her in a matter of minutes.

“All right, so much for that idea,” she muttered to herself when, minutes later Sargent came bounding out of the trees at her, barking happily, his master sharp on his heels.

“How do you do that?” she demanded to know. “You couldn’t possibly—”

“Two words. ‘Find Marissa.’ That’s all it took. This dog has a jones for you, doc, or hadn’t you noticed he plants his ass in front of your door any time I’m not paying close enough attention?”

She’d noticed. And it had unnerved her every time she’d come out and found the dog staring and waiting for her to appear, like some kind of canine stalker.

“You probably taught him to do that because you know I’m nervous around dogs.”

That earned a lifted brow. He’d been working at getting her to admit it for three weeks now. His sea-green eyes narrowed on her, the sharp relief of color in the darkness more than a little eerie. She shivered, lecturing herself for letting the woods creep her out. For letting him see any weakness in her at all. She normally wasn’t afraid to be human in front of her coworkers and patients, but when it came to Jackson she felt the need to always be on guard and to always project a wall of strength. It was sometimes like dealing with a wild animal … if you showed any kind of fear it might turn on you.

That was incredibly unfair of her, she thought in the next moment. Jackson had never done anything to her to deserve her cautious behaviors.

Unless you counted propositioning her …

“There’s no need to be afraid of Sargent,” he said, his tone gentling. He reached down and patted the dog. Sargent ate up the attention, his tongue hanging out of his mouth and his panting goofier than usual. She realized then that it was because he had been working nonstop for hours and was visibly tired. So was Jackson for that matter.

“Come on,” she said coaxingly to them both. “It’s time you two got some rest.”

The sound of a shot rang out an instant after some kind of red projectile hit the tree next to Marissa’s kneecap, bark spitting out at her and Sargent. The canine reacted, jumping back, and immediately barking an alarm. Marissa’s heart leaped into her throat and she froze, unable to move, unable to react. Had someone just shot at her? On the heels of that thought was the understanding that had the projectile been an inch more to the right she would be missing a knee and an inch more to the left and Sargent …

She quickly looked up from Sargent and into his master’s gaze. The understanding she had come to was already written clearly in his eyes, and she could see the rage flooding and darkening his beautiful green-blue pupils. The darkness in them took her breath away. The idea of coming within an inch of being shot was nothing compared to the heart clenching alarm that filled her soul. What she was seeing was something so virulently dark that her human instincts, watered down by centuries of domestication, came racing to the forefront, warning her to hightail it out of there.

She watched his head whip to the side, watched as he narrowed all of that rage in a single direction as if he knew exactly where it had come from. No guessing. No debating. He seemed to just know.

A second projectile snapped out of the trees and right before her eyes she saw it tear open a massive hole in Jackson’s chest, the force of the shot jolting his entire body back into a tree.

Yet he did not go down, did not flail. Did not panic. How? How was he standing when it was clear the attacker had just tried to blow a hole in Jackson’s heart? The only thing that had saved Jackson from an instant death was his flack vest.

Thank god, she thought fervently. Oh thank god he had that vest. And then, in the very next instant she realized the exact same thing Jackson was realizing. She did not have a vest.

Jackson did not so much as flinch. Not a single motion in response to the fact that someone had just tried to kill him. He didn’t drop down into the brush like she did, her hands covering her head … as if that would do anything to stop a bullet.

Marissa opened her mouth to shout at him, to yell at him to get down before he got his fool head blown off. But before a single sound could pass her lips she watched him unfurl his hands from the fists that they were in, watched him throw up both of his rigid palms and, with a deep, roaring shout of pure outrage, jolt forward as if shoving against a wall.

A huge blast of energy exploded outward, coming from nowhere and blossoming out from Jackson’s capable body so roughly that every single tree bent under the power of it. Some even snapped in two, making the woods in front of Jackson come alive with the sound of cracking, falling branches. She watched gape-mouthed as he clenched a thick dominant fist, and as though he were yanking on an invisible rope, he jerked the whole of his powerful body back. Then, as if an invisible tether were wrapped around it, a huge pine tree came tearing toward him, plowing through other trees and bracken, rich loamy soil churning up in a dark black path behind it. It came screeching to a halt mere inches from the tips of his toes, a shower of old and new pine needles raining down on him. The roots of the tree remained buried in the soil, as if it had grown up in that very spot all along.

Sounding slightly hysterical in her own head, Marissa found herself thinking that the act gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “moving heaven and earth.” And there, up in the mid branches, sat a man who was clinging to the trunk of the tree.

However, the instant the tree came to a halt the attacker within it burst free of the branches, a power-filled explosion of cracking wood and even more pine needles raining down on Jackson as he leaped up from the ground and into the tree with a mighty flex of uniform-clad thighs. But strong as he was, human strength couldn’t account for the distance he covered in that single leap. He made it all the way up to the attacker’s former position. Then, using it as a secondary launching point, he burst into the air with a roar of fury that made her blood run cold. The two men connected in mid-air, a sharp punch of sound echoing back down to her, forcing her to recognize that it was the savage sound of flesh and, more important, bone snapping to a halt as force met resistance. Jackson grabbed the man by the length of his hair and slammed a vicious elbow into his face right before both men went plummeting to the ground. Marissa screamed in abject horror as she realized gravity had taken the over situation and she was going to watch two men hit the ground at full force.