These days, women who lived in the north farmlands slept, ate, and took showers with a gun nearby.

Kasey carried a gun every day, but she'd never had to unholster it on the job. She worked for the Duluth Police, but she wasn't the kind of cop who dealt with drug dealers or armed robberies. Jonathan Stride and Maggie Bei, who led the Detective Bureau that handled the city's major crimes, probably didn't know who she was. She busted kids for breaking windows; she cooled down the hotheads at the bars in Lakeside; she checked out reports of cars parked in the woods and usually found teenagers making out. That was her beat.

Cops weren't supposed to get scared, but Kasey was terrified. It had been days since she'd had a good night's sleep. She was running on adrenaline and caffeine. Her shredded nerves had been on edge throughout the two-hour drive, and now her anxiety spiraled out of control, leaving her dizzy with confusion and panic.

She glanced in the mirror again. 'What do I do?'

The spitting drizzle outside grew heavier. Some of the fallen leaves began to stick to the glass, where they resembled disembodied handprints with outstretched fingers trying to get inside. The swirling threads of fog played tricks on her mind. She saw deer leaping across the narrow road and silhouettes of young children frozen in front of her. The hallucinations became so real that when she saw a car dead ahead, she swung the wheel hard to veer out of the way and pushed the accelerator to give her old Cutlass a burst of speed.

It was another mistake.

A mistake that would change everything.

The asphalt road vanished under her tires and became dirt. Tree branches grasped out from the shoulders and scraped her doors. The car lurched into uneven ruts, making the chassis shiver. She wasn't on a highway anymore, but on a trail leading deeper into the forest.