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out a hypodermic needle and syringe filled with clear liquid, tapped it to rid it of air bubbles. With a cotton swab and disinfectant, the doctor prepared Jordan’s shoulder for an injection.
    Pierce had no interest in how the physician intended to bring the man back to consciousness, so he looked out the window again, noticing below and across the street the sheriff on a bench beside a huge man with a boyish, innocent face.
    Pierce gave the two of them little more thought. His mind was on wrapping up the assignment. Capturing the girl.
    They’d found the blouse that Jordan had been using to draw the hounds. Somewhere along the way, she must have made it down the face of the rock. The valley was narrow enough that Mason Lee and the dogs would pick up her scent eventually.
    Pierce hoped she would be found alive. She deserved that chance after all that had been done to her.
    Yet he knew this would not be possible. She might not have survived the climb down. Or, more likely, she would not survive Mason Lee, armed with his legendary shotgun and an equally legendary lack of discrimination in its use. If Mason found her, he had a dry-ice canister, with very specific harvesting instructions. Pierce would have preferred to handle it himself, but he needed to be here if the man on the bed became conscious again.
    All things considered, the assignment should be wrapped up in a day or two. If the fugitive talked, Pierce would learn more about where he sent the girl and why. It might be helpful. At the least, it could lead to more arrests, but that was simply to help the Appalachians. It was part of the agreement that Bar Elohim had brokered with Pierce’s employers to allow Pierce inside.
    Pierce didn’t really care about the politics. His concern was simply to fulfill his assignment, then return Outside. Back to where it was normal.
    Pierce moved away from the window, and his eyes were drawn back to the torn man on the bed. His blood had soaked through the bandages, and in the light of the room, it seemed as black as the blood in Pierce’s memories.

FIVE
    M ason Lee roamed the valley, hunting the fugitive’s daughter.
    No one had ever escaped the bloodhounds before, at least not alive, and Mason Lee was confident the girl would not be the first.
    Wearing a buckskin vest, he walked among the trees on the creek bank with the efficiency of a cougar. The top of the grass had already been dried by the sun, but the ground was still wet, soaking his boots and the hem of his denim pants. Mason held his trademark shotgun in his trademark manner, crooked open over his right arm, a double-barrel 12-gauge loaded with shells of deer shot. At close range, the blast could tear through a tree trunk.
    Mason was with one of four teams with dogs moving along the creek at the bottom of the valley. Three other teams had dispersed nearby in a grid pattern to pick up her trail, if it existed. Mason had little doubt the girl was dead and the climbers would find her body. But if somehow she had survived the descent of the cliff, Mason would find her.
    In two decades of bounty hunting for the Appalachian government, he’d only failed three times—in each case the men had killed themselves before he could capture them. His reputation was such that once fugitives heard that Mason Lee had been hired to track them, as often as not they fled to the sanctuary of the nearest church to seek the protection of an Elder.
    This fugitive had avoided hiding among people, keeping to the woods and hills, but Mason still found and trapped the man the night before, after several days of pursuit with the hounds. Although the agent from Outside had made it clear that the fugitive was to be taken unharmed, dusk masked Mason’s discreet hand signal directing one of his handlers to release a few dogs. To Mason’s satisfaction, the savage attack had nearly killed the man. Nobody, let alone an Outsider, told Mason Lee how to hunt bounty. But there was more at stake for Mason