At some point, they grabbed hands—no way of knowing who reached first, but it helped balance her as they plowed a path forward.
She turned, squinting through the nasty precipitation at the clear tracks they’d left. A path their pursuers couldn’t fail to follow.
They walked forever, her hands and feet not even feeling like parts of her body after a while.
When she listed to one side, he scooped his arm beneath her shoulders, her armpits. Leaning in, he said something in her ear. She couldn’t hear it, didn’t know what words he’d used, but the heat of his breath against her face melted her a little.
“Hold on,” he said, setting her to lean against a wall that turned out to be a tree. He disappeared, muttering unintelligibly.
Alone, she felt the fear that his presence had staved off. And cold. God, it was freezing out here. Her teeth chattered, slapping together with a constant, wooden rhythm. She slid down the trunk to the cold earth, put her head to her knees, wrapped her arms around them, and waited.
Hands grabbed her. She couldn’t say if they were his or someone else’s.
Her hood fell back and a bare hand landed on her forehead. It felt good—warm and cold at the same time.
“You’re burning up.”
She huffed out a weird sound that felt like a laugh. “I mention I had a stomach thing? Food poisoning, I thought. Maybe it was a bug?”
He paused, eyes wide. “Kidding me?”
“No.” She managed a woozy head shake. “Fun, huh?”
“Right.” His eyes roved over her face. “If all else fails, maybe we can get them with a stomach flu.”
No point mentioning that this whole thing revolved around a virus. “Could work.” She cocked her head. “If you don’t catch it first.”
“Guess we’d better hurry then. Here, I’m giving you meds.” He rooted around in his pack and came out with little pills that she swallowed back without hesitating. Talk about trust.
She smiled, let her head thunk against the tree, and stared up at the whispering branches, blinking at the falling snow. “Thank you, yeti.”
“You’re welcome, Leo.” He bent, grabbed her under the arm, and hauled her up. “Let’s go.”
***
They trudged over slick, uneven ground for another half hour before Elias slowed, narrowing his eyes at the still-dark sky. What a night.
“I’m…fine. Don’t…stop.” Leo caught up to him, lagging and out of breath but apparently forged from steel.
He threw the pack against the thick trunk of a black spruce and just stopped himself from pushing her hood back. Asking permission wasn’t something he did all that much anymore. If something needed doing, he just did it. “Uh, mind if I check that?” He indicated her head and hovered over her, feeling big and backward.
She pushed the hood away, lifted her ski mask, and wiped her sleeve across her snow-flecked eyes, then watched him work.
It didn’t bother him at first, but after a few seconds, he glanced down. “What?”
She blinked fast. “Nothing.”
“You’re looking at me weird.” He yanked off a glove and put his hand to her forehead. “Still feverish?”
“It’s just…you don’t look anything like…” She shut her mouth tight. “Never mind.”
He grunted. Not much of a response, but he figured he knew what she was thinking. That he didn’t look much like the golden boy whose photo the media had plastered everywhere back when it happened.
Well, he didn’t. And he was fine with that. That guy was dead. Gone. He’d done the right thing instead of the smart thing. He’d trusted people he shouldn’t have. And he’d lost his life because of it.
She shook her head. “If I had a camera right now.”
Rage welled up. “What? You’d show the world what I’ve become? How far I’ve fallen from America’s favorite college quarterback? You think I even give a—”
“No.” She faced him head-on, not backing away, despite his obvious fury. “I was gonna say that I’d make a fortune by proving once and for all that Bigfoot’s real.”
When she reached up and brushed a mini avalanche from his beard, it was all he could do not to back away. Not because he was scared of her, but…
Shit. Was he scared of her?
Maybe, though he wouldn’t delve into why right now. What he knew was that, even feverish and wounded, trudging through the roughest terrain in America, in some of the worst weather the place had to offer, she kept a sense of humor.
He liked that. A lot.
Self-consciously, he rubbed at his snow-crusted face, and then, because it was second nature, flicked a look at the wintry trees that clung to the side of the ridge.
His eyes narrowed. Had something moved up in the woods? They’d left tracks behind them, inevitably, but he’d assumed the sleet and wind would erase most signs of their passage. Had he been wrong? Were they blazing a mile-wide trail for whoever was after them? The storm slowing down was a relief—at least physically—but without its scouring effects, following them would be child’s play.
“What? They catching up to us?” she asked, her body appearing as tense as his had suddenly gone.
“Not sure what I saw. Maybe nothing.” Warily, he handed her water. She drank, grimacing while he put his own canteen to his lips and took a long slug. It was achingly cold against his teeth.
His eyes scanned their surroundings, all the while investigating the forest for that extra presence.
It was hard to isolate a single movement with the flurries dancing around them. Though the storm seemed to be settling, motion was everywhere. “No, definitely something.”
“Where?” she whispered.
There. He zeroed in on it. “Your five.” He could have sworn something shifted.
Her nod was a slight dip of the chin, but she didn’t otherwise move. Just her eyeballs, swiveling right.
Beside him, Bo had frozen into one of her poised and ready positions, body vibrating with so much energy he was surprised it didn’t shake the snow from her fur.
The harder he stared, the more it just looked like another innocuous part of the forest—cloaked in night and snow and wind. “Just something off.” He let the words slide from the corner of his barely moving mouth. “Movement in the shadows.”
“You think they’re that close behind us?”
“Hope not.” He had no words to describe what it was that told him danger was near. No way of telling her it wasn’t just sight and sound that guided him, but something else. Something not quite real. She’d probably laugh.
“Should we keep moving?”
“Yep.” He picked up his pack and hefted it onto his back, sending one last uneasy look over his shoulder. “We’ll stick to the river for this last mile. Cover more ground.” Which would, unfortunately, make them easy targets. “Then comes the rough part.” For maybe half a second, he let a smile tug at his lips.
The guarded way she watched him, you’d think he was some wild creature that needed taming, instead of the man who’d pulled her from a plane crash.
But then he realized with the same jolt of self-awareness he felt when he met his own eyes in the mirror—maybe he was the wild creature. Maybe those hunting them were the civilized ones.
If that was civilization, he wanted nothing to do with it.
“Rough part?” One sleek, dark brow disappeared under the bandage’s stained, off-white edge, then lowered again. It was thick and smooth and perfectly arched. Which wasn’t something he’d ever noticed on a woman before.
Shit. Now he was thinking intimate thoughts about eyebrows.
“You’ll see,” he muttered, his good humor gone the way of any refinement he’d once had—crushed to smithereens beneath the boots of those who’d spent the last decade hunting him.
“I’ll see. Great. That bode
s well.”
She didn’t shy away when he reached out and pulled her mask back over her face.
“Need more distance.” He gave the woods a final probing stare before turning toward the river again. “This’ll be hard. But it’s the only way.”
Yeah, it was the hard part. It was also the part that—if it worked, and that was a long shot—would buy them a little time.
***
Got you.
Ash eyed the cave with satisfaction. Two people had slept here recently. Or rested, at the very least. The ground had been scuffed to hide signs of passage, and there, someone had splashed water along the rock. To wash something, perhaps?
He drew close and sniffed.
Blood. It would take a lot more than a little water to mask the iron-rich scent.
He took his time, searching every possible passage out of the cave, noting a temporary latrine and clear footprints in the dust. Tufts of white hair clung to the corners. He’d bet his earnings that it belonged to a canine.
He followed the jumbled prints to a passage, ducked through it, stood, and went stock-still, his jaw hanging open.
A glacier cave—majestic and soaring and absolutely enchanted. Blimey, what a sight. He took a step, nearly fell, and righted himself. Then slowly slid around the space, running a gloved hand over curved ice, taking in the bumps and dips with the wonder of a child. He felt like a child here, younger than he had in ages, and utterly alive, which was sweet and tragic. Tears clouded his vision. It was beautiful, utterly still, frozen in time, like a wave at its apex.
He shut his eyes and fought the pain that tried to tear into the hard black diamond of his heart. After a few steadying breaths, he moved on.
Close to halfway round, he found a second way out—a low, tight tunnel, showing clear signs of passage. Outside, he stepped down, straight onto the frozen river, and took one last, longing look at the gem hidden just inside. The perfect juxtaposition of nature and mathematics, a wave, as symmetrical as a nautilus shell, hidden beneath the surface of this innocuous wash of ice. Not a crystal out of place. The most perfectly designed architecture on the planet.
With a sigh, he let his assessing gaze sweep the chilly scenery. It took a while, but eventually, he spotted what he was looking for through the hard-driving snow, which was lovely as confetti but as painful as tiny shards of glass. A series of peg holes, too even to be random. It could be another animal, of course. But a wolf would have to be absolutely daft to be out in this weather—and those tracks had been made in the last few hours. He knew he was onto them.
He put a gloved hand out and watched, transfixed, as a mix of flakes and ice settled on his palm, some rushing to land while others meandered as if they had all the time in the world, both covering the ground with mesmerizing efficiency.
With a single overloud slap of his hands, he sent so many little masterpieces puffing away to join the others on the smooth ground and followed the dog’s prints west.
Chapter 14
Leo’s gaze remained fixed on Elias’s back as they picked their way along the slippery boulders and geometric ice chunks lining the river. He’d given her one of his poles, which made walking marginally easier, and used the other to test the ground every few steps.
Though visibility was basically nil, Elias walked and climbed as easily as if this were a nice stroll in the woods instead of a constant battle against wind and snow, water and ice and rock formations clearly designed by the devil.
Elias Thorne. His name hit her like a surreal punch to the gut. The whole situation was so out of left field that she wondered if she’d lost her mind. Had she? Was this the fever talking? Was she actually tucked in bed back at Schink’s Station, suffering through an epic flu? If that was the case, wouldn’t her brain have made Bo a blue zebra? Or, hell, her reincarnated mom?
She watched Elias’s sturdy silhouette for a few more minutes, mesmerized by the steadiness of him, his constant, unerring progress. No way she’d invent someone like him, who tromped through the storm with the easy confidence of the local wildlife, in well-used, top-of-the-line boots and a worn mud-colored, fur-lined parka that could have come from another century. His pace was almost mechanical in its constancy, as if he were barely human—or so at home here that neither the terrain nor the weather affected him. Only the occasional glance over his shoulder altered his pace. He was checking on her every hundred feet or so.
None of this was the erratic behavior of the mass-murdering psychopath the media had made him out to be back in the day.
She did a quick gut check and came up with nothing but respect for the man. He’d saved her life after all. And even without that, hell, she kind of liked him.
Except not just kind of.
She took in the world around her. Nothing was visible aside from the flat line of the river to her left and the almost sheer vertical rise they’d spent the last half hour skirting. The storm turned everything, including the now nearly invisible shape of the man in front of her, into an almost uniform gray, flattening distances and tamping down sounds. There could be an army out there and she wouldn’t know it.
She needed to hurry or he’d get swallowed up by the weather, a ghost fading into the landscape.
It wasn’t a comfortable feeling—being entirely dependent on the man.
On they trudged for maybe another fifteen minutes, the snow-sleet mix turning so gradually to rain that Leo didn’t notice the change until her clothes were soaked. Ironically, she shivered with cold now that the atmosphere had warmed. Beneath her feet, the ground was turning to soup, the surface of the river dangerously waterlogged in places and deadly slick. The light was so odd, it was hard to tell if it was day or night.
Stopping to catch her breath, she looked right, where the high rock wall they’d followed had tapered off. Left, as far as she could see, was nothing but flat snow. She squinted through the pelting rain.
Nope. That wasn’t snow. It was ice.
“Hey,” she stage-whispered. “Hang on.”
He turned, his coat completely dark, what features she could see pinched, his eyebrows, nose, and beard dripping water.
Slipping and sliding, she caught up to him. “Isn’t this dangerous?”
“What?” he deadpanned.
“Walking on the river in this downpour.”
“Not a river.”
She blinked. “What?”
“We’re on the lake.”
“But isn’t that…” Whatever she was going to say frittered to nothing on the tip of her tongue as she spun in a slow, dizzying three sixty. Was it just yesterday that she’d considered landing on this lake? “There’s got to be a better way.”
“Fastest way to the other side is across. Going around would take at least two days. This, we can manage in a few hours.” He threw a look back in the direction they’d just come from. “Need to get there before the pea soup clears and that helicopter catches us smack in the middle.”
“But doesn’t rain melt ice? Won’t it accelerate breakup?”
“Yep.” After taking a long, swooping look behind them, he turned, giving her his back again. “Better hurry.”
***
It would take them hours to cross the lake, and even then, it could be too late. Because he’d felt that presence. He knew someone was on their tail, dogging the two of them every step of the way.
He didn’t have to see them to know they were there, somewhere. Didn’t have to smell their alien presence or hear the crunch of feet on ice. He felt it—in his bones, along his spine, his nerves, or wherever these things lived.
There were lessons he’d learned the hard way: not to trust strangers—sometimes even family and friends—not to depend on anyone else for survival, and to listen to that sixth sense that told him trouble was near.
Right now, every one of his internal warning bells was going off.
> If nothing else, this woman who’d literally fallen from the sky had pushed the big red button in any number of ways, just by being here.
A little late, as far as warning signals went. And still not entirely to be trusted.
He huffed out a cynical sound.
Trust.
He couldn’t remember how it felt anymore—to really trust a person. Aside from Amka and Daisy, there wasn’t anyone alive who had his back.
One thing was damn sure—judging from the way Leo’d looked at him, she didn’t entirely trust him either, despite what he’d told her. Or maybe because of it. And that was as it should be. Meant she was smart.
He remembered the way she’d sat there and let him work on her head. Okay, so maybe she trusted him a little. Enough to let him stitch her up. Enough to follow him out here.
Enough to sleep against him in the dark.
Up ahead, through the almost horizontal wind-whipped rain, a group of pines slowly appeared, dim and silent, a shadow army emerging from the gloom.
He walked past it, feet splashing through puddles now rather than crunching over freshly fallen snow. His jaw was clenched, teeth gritted against the shocking chill of water soaking through his socks.
Leo was fairly well equipped, but nowhere near ready for this. And with a concussion to boot.
To boot. He huffed out a humorless sound. Since when had he started thinking like an eighty-year-old pioneer man?
Suddenly it felt too close to the truth to be funny.
Had he ever been carefree? No. No, he didn’t think so. Driven, yeah. Goal oriented. Even in college, he’d been hell-bent on success.
Another puddle engulfed his foot, this time with an audible splash.
“Hey,” Leo called. “Is that land?”
“Island.” The one word obviously dashed her hopes. But this was no time for hope. No place for it either. He could survive on his own, but unless this plan of his worked, the two of them, together, probably had about a five percent chance of making it out of this alive.
She drew up alongside him, her face turned away to look at the tiny, pine-spiked land mass. With longing, he imagined. And, sure, it would be good to stop and build a shelter. Get a fire going, warm up their toes.
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