Far From Home

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     "Seth! Seth Sorenson! Bud, where are you?" Warren pushed aside a branch and shone his flashlight around him in a circle. The light caught a movement on his right and for a moment Warren thought he might have found something, but immediately recognized Vanessa's long brown hair, red shirt, and leather pants and sighed. "You find anything?"

     Vanessa shook her head. "Nothing. It's going to take us weeks, even months, to find him. If he's even here. He could have returned to the house already."

     Warren shook his head. "You told me Kendra felt that something had happened to him. I know that feeling. I've had it a few times before when something has happened to Dale and I haven't been around. It's some sort of link between siblings. If she says something has happened, something has happened."

     Vanessa nodded and moved to stand next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "We'll keep searching then. Until we find him."

Warren gave her a sad smile and turned his flashlight around once more. And froze. There, on the ground, was a satchel. Warren rushed forward and lifted it off the ground. Scorched from one side and with blood soaking the other, the emergency satchel was all but destroyed.

     Horror clutched Warren's heart in a tight grip and his eyes flew around him. "SETH! SETH! ANSWER ME!"

     Panic took over, Warren plunged into the thicket, looking around wildly, pushing over whatever stood in his way. Vanessa was telling him to calm down, but his brain wasn't registering anything else but the destroyed object in his hand. He was so focused on trying to find some clue about what had happened that he failed to notice the cliff before his foot slipped on the wet grass on the edge and he toppled forward.

     A firm hand caught the back of his shirt and wrenched him back and onto the ground. Vanessa twisted his arm, grabbed his shirt and flipped him onto the ground and pressed her hand on his chest. Her eyes burned furiously and she slapped him. Hard.

     "You listen to me very closely now, Burgess! I do not need you going crazy on me right now. I do not need you being irresponsible! And I most definitely do not need you falling off a cliff because you're too much of an idiot to pay attention to where you're going! Do you think you being splattered on the rocks thirty meters below us will help us find Seth? Get yourself together and come and help me figure out what happened here!"

     Warren nodded quickly. He loved Vanessa, true. But when she was mad, he was more terrified than in love. And she was really scaring him now. 

     

     With a firm grip, Vanessa pulled him to his feet and dusted him off. She then grabbed the satchel out of his hands and examined it closely.

     "There are scorch marks, alright. Really hot fire. It's a wonder that the satchel isn't crisp though. If this was natural fire or fire from an attacker, the satchel would be toast. It was deliberately burned and then put out. And that blood?" Vanessa sniffed at the dried liquid. "That's not human blood. It's the blood of some creature. Minotaur maybe."

     Warren stared in wonder, finally beginning to calm down. At least someone knew what they were doing.

     Vanessa gently opened the satchel and rummaged what was inside. "Everything's where it should be, so Seth didn't take anything out. "

     "You know what's in his emergency kit?"

     Vanessa gave rolled his eyes at him. "Of course I do. I helped him upgrade it. Anyway, I don't think he got in a fight of any kind, at least not one where he would have had time to take out anything useful. Either something attacked him suddenly, or nothing attacked him at all." Warren walked over to her, not understanding. "What do you mean?"

     Vanessa didn't reply. Instead, her eyes began looking over the ground around them. After a while, she stopped underneath a thick tree and looked closely at one of the branches. She then moved to a tree further away, examining another branch in a similar way. "Something moved on these branches. I think it was carrying the satchel and left it somewhere here, thinking that if it stayed in the air it wouldn't be tracked to the place where everything happened."

     "Where everything happened?" Warren motioned her to explain. An exasperated sigh escaped Vanessa's lips and she glared at him and swung her arm around them.

     "Do you see any signs of a struggle?" Warren didn't. He looked down shamefully. "Which means, that if there was a struggle, it didn't happen here. Someone or something tried to dispose of the emergency kit and throw anyone off searching for its owner."

     Warren bit his lip. "So something or someone attacked him? Deliberately made it look like he was dead, by soaking the satchel in blood and burning it. That way it would look like Seth was dead and whoever would be searching for him would stop."

     Vanessa nodded. "Exactly."

     "But what if he really is dead?" he asked quietly. Without answering, Vanessa headed forward at a brisk pace, sometimes checking the nearby trees for marks, before continuing.

     Soon enough they reached a clearing. Vanessa stopped at the edge, looking around slowly her brows scrunched. She motioned for Warren to stay put and then walked out into the open, moving lightly. She looked up and down at seemingly nothing in the air, but Warren didn't intervene. "Fablehaven's border," she mumbled. She turned around and Warren saw her crouch on the ground in several places and trace her fingers along something. "There were a few people standing here. Some creatures. And... " she gave him a meaningful look," a minotaur."

     She then walked briskly past him, eyes roaming the earth pushing away shrubs. She came to a halt and knelt on the ground a few meters away from where the clearing ended and stared at the ground. Warren moved to stand next to her.

     "What did you find?" he asked.

     Vanessa pointed at the faint footprints on the ground. "These look about the right size to belong to a thirteen-year-old boy, don't you think?" Warren nodded, even though Vanessa couldn't see him. The young woman took a few steps forward, staying crouched, before stopping once more and kneeling. "Look at this."

     Warren crouched next to her. "Looks like somebody took a tumble here."

     Vanessa nodded. "There's a root sticking out there. Maybe that's the reason for the fall?"

     They were quiet for a moment until Vanessa shook her head and rose. Warren looked around and saw another sign about a tumble a few feet away and an odd pattern of dents. "Look at this," he said."Another fall. And those marks look like chains. Look at the way the dents are in a pattern."

     He walked closer and noticed a small splotch of dried blood on a rock. Vanessa appeared next to him. He looked up at her. "Human blood?"

     She nodded. "It's the right color." She moved a few feet away and began following the large hoof marks in the mud back to the clearing. "Someone was on their knees here. Then they fell down and based on the small marks there, they were lifted up. Then the prints disappear into the woods."     "So..." Warren felt worry in his chest once more. "They took Seth with them? Whoever they are." Vanessa nodded and scrunched her brow in worry as she gazed into the woods.

     "Exactly. And whoever took him is already long gone."