Unwanted

Four drugged boys wake on a cliff edge in the snow, a hooded man's voice booming behind them: will you die today? Before any can answer, ice cracks and the ground slides.

Four drugged boys wake on a cliff edge in the snow, a hooded man's voice booming behind them: will you die today? Before any can answer, ice cracks and the ground slides. All four tumble over the edge. In the chaos, a dark-haired child with enormous eyes slips a pocketknife into Jak's palm. Jak grabs that child and shoves them onto a tiny ledge—the only handhold big enough for one—then falls into the darkness himself, shouting a single demand: live. Two boys vanish screaming into the abyss below. Jak catches a branch, hits deep snow, and survives. He doesn't know where he is, who took him, or why. He is almost eight years old.

A wild man with a bow emerges after two arrow murders

Helena Springs, Montana, has never seen anything like this—two people killed by arrows in a single week. The first victim, an unidentified woman at the Larkspur bed-and-breakfast, died with an arrow through her throat. The second, a recluse named Isaac Driscoll, was pinned to his cabin wall by an arrow through his chest. When a deputy nearly runs over a massive, fur-clad man carrying a bow on a remote back road, the stranger is brought in for questioning. He gives only one name—Lucas—and stares into the security camera with piercing intelligence. Harper Ward, a local wilderness guide and the orphaned daughter of the former sheriff, is summoned to assist. Watching him on a monitor, she cannot look away. Something about his locket catches her eye.

Harper recognizes her dead mother's locket around a stranger's neck

Agent Mark Gallagher, a seasoned California investigator recently transferred to Montana after his daughter's death from leukemia, takes the lead on both murders. He asks Harper to serve as his wilderness consultant, driving him through terrain he cannot navigate alone. Meanwhile, Harper keeps circling back to that silver locket. Rifling through old family photos, she finds what she feared—her mother wearing an identical pendant engraved with three linked hearts. She drives to Jak's cabin in the snow, rifle in hand, and demands to know where he got it. He opens the locket for her. Inside is a tiny photograph of her father, her mother, and herself as a baby. He found it in a wrecked car at the bottom of a canyon—her parents' car.

Jak leads Harper to her parents' skeletons at the bottom At first light, Jak guides Harper on a trek across frozen valleys and down a treacherous canyon wall. At the bottom, half-buried under branches…