INTENSITY

As the killer had walked down the roadway to the abandoned car through the headlight beams from the motor home, Chyna had crept upslope through the dark forest, moving parallel to him but in the opposite direction. She had circled behind the tree to the right of her, gripping the revolver in her right hand, with her left hand flat against the trunk for balance in case she stumbled over a root or other obstruction. Under her palm, she had felt the deep pattern of repetitive Gothic arches formed by the fissures in the thick bark. With each uncertain step that she had taken around this great easy curve, she had felt that the tree was less like a tree than like a building, a windowless fortress erected against all the rage of the world.

After navigating a hemisphere of the trunk to the shoulder-wide gap between this tree and the next, she peered out once more. The killer stood near the open door of the Honda, gazing into the forest on the far side of the highway.

She was worried that another motorist would come along before she could carry out her plan.

She moved on, circling the next tree. It was even larger than the previous behemoth. The bark featured the familiar Gothic patterns.

In spite of the shrill wind keening high above and collected drizzles of rain spattering down from the lofty branches, the grove impressed her as a good safe place, dark but not in spirit, cold but not forbidding. She was still alone in her troubles—but curiously, for the first time all night, she didn’t feel alone.

At the next trunk-framed gap in the forest wall, Chyna looked out again and saw the killer getting into the Honda. He would have to move the disabled car out of the way, because there wasn’t room to drive around it.

She glanced at the motor home. Perhaps because she knew what lay within it—a dead man closeted in chains, a dead woman swaddled in a white shroud—the vehicle seemed as ominous as any war machine.

She could just wait in the grove. Forget about her plan. He would leave, and life would go on.

So easy to wait. Survive.

The police would find the girl. Ariel. Somehow. In time. Without the need for heroics.

Chyna leaned against the tree, suddenly weak. Weak and shaking. Shaking and almost physically ill with despair, with fear.

The taillights and interior lights of the Honda dimmed with the grinding of the starter, as the killer tried to get the engine to turn over.

Then another noise came to Chyna. Much closer than the car. Behind her. A rustle, a snap, a soft snort like a startled horse exhaling.

Frightened, she turned.

In the backwash of light from the motor home out on the highway, Chyna saw angels in the redwood grove. Or so it seemed for a moment. Regarding her were gentle faces, pale in the darkness, eyes luminous and inquisitive and kind.

But even in that meager moonlike glow, she was unable to sustain a hope of angels. After a brief initial confusion, she realized that these creatures were a breed of coastal elk without antlers.

Six stood together in a fifteen-foot-wide space between this outer row of trees and the deeper growth, so close that Chyna could have been among them in three steps. Their noble heads were lifted, ears pricked, gazes fixed intently on her.

The elk were curious, but although timid by nature, they seemed oddly unafraid of her.

Once, for two months, she and her mother had stayed on a ranch in Mendocino County, where a group of well-armed survivalists waited for the race wars that they believed would soon destroy the nation, and in that doomsday atmosphere, Chyna had spent as much time as possible exploring the surrounding countryside, hills and vales of singular beauty, groves of pines, golden fields where scattered oaks stood—each alone and huge and black-limbed against the sky—and where small herds of coastal elk appeared from time to time, always keeping at a distance from human beings and their works. She had stalked them not as a hunter but with awkward girlish guile, as shy as the elk themselves but irresistibly attracted to the tranquility and the peace that they radiated in a world otherwise saturated with violence.