Slash and Burn

Prologue

It was the worst year of her life.

She stumbled and fell, her shoulder ramming the bole of a tree, scraping her skin raw beneath her shirt. She cried out, but instantly clamped her teeth down on her lip to stop the sound travelling through the forest. She scrambled up and fled again, her breath catching in her throat. She wanted to howl in terror, but there was only one thing racing through her mind: Get away. Get away now.

She had to run. Leave everything behind. Everything.

But she couldn’t do that. There was one thing that she had to keep safe. The only thing that would help her end the worst year of her life.

It had been a bad, bad year.

Her husband walked out on her in the spring and took up with a girl half his age. Summer was earmarked by the acrimonious divorce. By the time fall came round, Imogen Ballard didn’t think things could get any worse.

But then came winter.

And now men were trying to kill her.

Already, blood had been spilled. Not hers, but that simple truth was the only chink of light piercing the nightmare she’d found herself in. How long would that stay true when the men hunting her through the forest did so armed with rifles and automatic handguns? Sooner or later they would catch up with her, and then there’d be a lot more blood.

She had to run. Hide. Stay away from those hunting her with the tenacity of bloodhounds. She was at home in the woods, but she was no Lady Rambo. She didn’t know if she was capable of giving them the slip, and she certainly wasn’t able to fight back. Not armed as she was with nothing but a digital video camera.

She was thirty-eight years old. Not as fit as ten years ago when she was regularly competing in triathlons, but still lithe and strong. The problem was, the shock of what she’d witnessed had robbed her of much of the stamina she required to maintain her lead. The hunters were gaining.

As if to remind her, a bullet shrieked by like an angry wasp, cutting a chunk from a tree on her right.

Imogen ducked in reflex. Too late to have saved her if the bullet was on target, of course, but she couldn’t stop the instinctive movement. Then she was pushing on, her boots driving through mounds of moss and twigs as she clambered over a fallen tree. Another bullet streaked past, galvanising her to push even harder.

Shouts from the men chasing her. Maniacal laughter taunting her. Another gun barked, punching the ground in front of her feet. Imogen turned down a narrow trail. The men were toying with her, enjoying her terror; that was the only reason why their bullets hadn’t found her yet.

From somewhere ahead she heard a faint rumble. Her first thought was that they had called in some kind of armoured vehicle as back-up, that even now some great cannon was vectoring in to blow her to smithereens. But that thought was sheer madness. The rumble was from Great Wells, the waterfall she’d earlier scaled on her way up the hillside.

She considered running directly to the falls and throwing herself headlong to the mercy of the white water. But the falls were one hundred and fifty feet of steep cliffs. At the bottom waited not a nice deep pool, but a series of potholes set in jagged rocks. The falls offered no means of escape. In fact, they blocked her way more effectively than an electrified fence would.

She spun from the path, hurdling another fallen tree, and crashing through the lower branches of pines that grew from the steep hillside. Her only way out of here was by an unfamiliar route to her. All she could do was run, and hope that the men gave up before her flagging stamina did.

But she didn’t think they would.