Bounty Hunter [REWRITTEN VERSION]

Chapter 47: A Twist & A Lie

If you see images ^ they shouldn't be there and I'm not sure why they are.

ALEC

They ran around for what felt like hours searching, until they were forced to stop.

"The scent trail ends here."

The canine owner and his dog stopped dead ahead, standing in the mouth of an open cave as light from the outside flooded through and flashed in Alec's eyes. His reaction was to shield them, after too long of having been adjusted to the dark. On the ground, the black shepherd had his nose prowling across the ground and soil, but whatever scent had led them here seemed to have disappeared or gotten mixed in with the scents of the forest that it was becoming too difficult to sort out. And he knew why.

Smoke. The smell of burning and ashes still rested heavily in the air around them. And that's when Alec realized, they were close to the house. He could smell the reminisce of the burning fire in the air, still see the cloud of ugly grey vapour rising from not too far off in the distance above the trees.

"Where are we?" Maize asked, looking around. Her body language was tense, her eyes edgy, as if prepared for another onslaught of attackers to suddenly find their way towards them, but there was nothing. Silence. They were the only ones there.

"This is the same entrance I brought your agent friends to escape through, before coming to save your asses that is," the dog wrangler said, his eyes hard as steel as he stared blankly through the trees ahead. "I told them to keep heading the way we came, which means, for whatever reason, they chose to ignore my instructions and doubled back..."

"They might have had a reason," Maize started, her voice holding an ominous tone that instantly made Alec's mind flashback to the discovery they had made halfway through the tunnels. If the look they shared when she met his eye was any indication, she was thinking the exact same thing.

"They might have been attacked, jumped in the dark, taken by surprise," he suggested, running through possible scenarios that would fit an explanation for the blood they found. A non-lethal amount, but enough that it was clear someone had been hurt in those caves. "Whoever did it probably smashed their radio to cut communication. That would explain the damage and would have given Kishan and Maria a reason to get out of there. We just need to find out where they went and why we can't find them now..." he trailed off, casting a gaze in an arc around them, not sure what he hoped to see. Every tree looked more or less the same to him, he was no woodland tracker, he wouldn't even know the first way to start tracking two people in a forest this size.

The dog owner cut his thoughts short with a low hum of contemplation.

"Yeah..." he murmured quietly. "That's one theory."

Alec turned and furrowed his eyes into a scrutinizing glare, not liking the condescending tone behind the other's voice. "You have another?" he questioned.

Ryder looked up and met his eyes, deadly calm. "That depends..." he said slowly.

"On what?" Alec's patience was running thinner and thinner with every second.

"How well you think you know those agents of yours."

Alec heard the words and narrowed his eyes while Maize regarded her friend with hinting suspicion. "What are you getting at, Ryder?" she asked.

"Look," the other began steadily, shoving his hands in his pockets to appear less on the offensive. "I don't want to derange any confidence you have in those two federal agents of yours...but your detective's theory holds one major wrong-factor."