“Suck my fat one?” Kris repeated. “You couldn’t find a more original insult?” She stepped aside to let a frustrated Ashlyn rush by. Her pajama pants were bunched at the bottom, tucked into her socks, and Drake marveled at how young she looked.
After stirring a third heaping spoonful of sugar into his coffee, Drake lifted an eyebrow at Kris, who had found a counter to lean against while she watched him defy Connor’s wishes. Her hips were hidden under several layers of shirts and sweaters. But her stature and the way she held her abdomen was a constant reminder of her delicate state.
“I don’t like her,” Drake admitted after a long pause. “But hell, it sure is fun to offend her.”
“Ashlyn doesn’t get offended. She gets pissy.”
“Same difference, isn’t it?”
“Are you really going to drink that?” Kris stuck her tongue out.
“This?” He held up his cup and took a long and audible sip. “Tastes delicious.”
She shook her head at him. “I’ve never seen you put that much sugar in your coffee.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” he said with a smirk.
“Pissing Connor off just for the fun of it is nothing new for you,” she countered.
“This is true. But seriously, policing the sugar? Doesn’t he have something better to do?”
She shrugged and rubbed at her stomach again, then dropped her arms. “None of us have anything better to do, Drake. He’s not your enemy.” As she exited the room, she paused with her hand on the doorframe and glanced over her shoulder at him. “We all miss her, you know. We all want her back. Don’t forget that.”
He made it barely twenty feet from the back door before the snow swallowed his legs and came up above his hip. Not knowing the natural landscape, he had very little idea of where the land dipped or where it rose. He could clearly see several yards into the edge of the tree line opposite the valley, where the low foliage and shrubs had long since lost their green leaves and become see-through skeletons. The pines, firs and aspens still held full branches though, heavy with snow. Visibility from his distance was limited. He so badly wanted to see what was behind the trees near the top of the mountain, and where the random plume of smoke close to the crest was coming from.
“Shit,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, you got so far this time, mate. I think a whole extra five feet.”
Drake struggled to turn around in the drift and climb out, where the snow was closer to calf-deep. “Shut up, Connor,” he muttered.
“I’m just saying. Valiant effort you’ve made there. Real progress,” Connor pestered.
When Drake looked up, Connor was standing by the open back door, his arms crossed, with a beanie loosely stretched over the top of his head. “Fuck off,” he warned.
“Or what, you’ll eat all the sugar?”
Drake glowered at him, tempted to ball up a handful of snow and chuck it at Connor’s head. “The sugar again. Still pissed about that, huh?”
Connor shook his head with a crooked smile and shifted his stance. “No, Drake, this isn’t about the sugar. It’s about you.”
“Me?” The snow crunched and groaned in protest around him as Drake grunted forward after finally finding a foothold to hoist himself upwards. “I thought I was your favorite person.”
“Hardly.”
Drake regretted his five minutes in the snow the moment he crawled out of the drift and realized his jeans were wet from the waist down and his ankles were numb. “Hope the fire is still going,” he complained.
“How far did you think you would get? You can’t even see the tops of the trees. Another foot of snow is going to be dumped on our heads within the hour.” Connor shrugged at Drake’s glare and pivoted in the doorway, leaving Drake on his own with an eerie silence hanging heavily in the air.
As he was shaking frozen clumps of snow off the lower half of his legs, Drake looked over his shoulder at the white valley just beckoning for someone to stride through and leave their mark in the form of footsteps. Stupid, he thought, thinking he could just walk out there when the heavens were so intent on drowning them in snowflakes.
He left his boots by the door and trudged inside, ignoring Connor’s grumbles as he made his way through the back of the lodge and to the common room, where a fire roared and spat embers into the air, just to be sucked upwards out the chimney. Drake pushed one of the cushioned ottomans close and sat on the edge with his legs inches from the fireplace, waiting for it to take some of the chill out of his body. It didn’t work. The cold came from within him, where a hole was waiting to be filled. Only one person could do that for him. And she was out there, he hoped, somewhere on the other side of all that goddamn snow.
Chapter Two
JIN
He wasn’t good with people, his father had told him so. His mother was the more philosophical parent. She always reminded him that if you were your own person, friends would find you. As he sat at the window and watched Riley doze in her chair, he wished he knew what to say to calm her, but words would not help the woman. She had yet to mention any details about how it was that she ended up half-dead in the woods, covered in dried blood that wasn’t all hers, and he wouldn’t ask for them. It was not his story to tell.
Curiosity sure was a nag though.
To settle his mind, he refocused on the view outside the window, at the shadows below their sanctuary that moved around the base of the evergreens trying to find the ones that didn’t belong. Jin had been watching the woods for weeks, more so over the last few days. He knew when Riley had entered them because the normal bird chatter shifted to more of a whisper, more of a warning. Just like they were now. Present, but quiet. Like Riley’s mood.
Jin had grown indifferent with the way the world had become. The silence that had befallen society worked in his favor. He had always been more of an observer than a participant. He didn’t mind the lack of impatient traffic, the missing blare of busy sirens or the absent drone of planes in the sky. He surely didn’t miss the aimless wander of the public; how people in general were so busy living, that they didn’t slow down long enough to actually live. Life had become all about bills, about work, about stature. Not nearly enough about family, or about the little things that make up so much happiness in a person’s life.
Those things, Jin did miss. He missed his family, as small as it was. His mother mostly. In her fortune, she passed before the virus that took his father, as well as billions of others. They were all gone, as was the noise, the pollution, the scattering of hate and greed. All of that eliminated by a bug. He found it ironic that it took something so microscopic to take down the global population of humans to its roots, leaving only the desperate and unfortunate to wander alone. Something Jin wasn’t all too unfamiliar with already.
When Riley stirred in her sleep, Jin glanced up from the night-cloaked ground below them to the sleeping woman in the chair. Most of her bruises had faded, but she still limped and winced on occasion. Her cough was subsiding but slowed her down more than she cared to admit. She was bruised, cut, limping. She was the messy remains of fate. And probably Jin’s only friend.
He nudged her foot till she opened her eyes. “Go lay down,” he suggested. “The view hasn’t changed much.”
She leaned forward and rubbed at her face. “You let me fall asleep?”
“No,” he laughed quietly. “You did that almost immediately.”
“Oh.”
“Go. I’ll let you know if anything changes.”
“Promise?”
He nodded, but she was already upright and padding across the living room, being careful to avoid the lacquered tree column in the center of the room before he could answer. She didn’t have the energy to argue with him, which was good. She needed sleep more than he did.
When he looked back out the window, he felt a small twang of guilt in his gut, because he had lied to her. As he watched from behind the safety of the dark window, a man in snow gear slowly emerged from t
he trees and glanced upwards at their little cabin floating in the sky before retreating into the shadows. The stranger did this three times over the span of an hour. Curious, but not enough that he was willing to make the trek up the stairs to the front door. This struck Jin as interesting, not alarming. At least not yet. The thought crossed his mind that the man was staking the place out, and if Jin was right and the man had an interest in their refuge, there would be a problem on their hands.
What Jin did not understand, was why this stranger only came out to watch them during nightfall. Sure, it provided the man with cover, but it was freezing outside during the day with the onslaught of their most recent blizzard. At night? Just breathing in the air for more than five minutes hurt. The man’s camp had to be close, but Jin saw no smoke from a fire on the mountain, nor could he smell one. So, he watched the watcher. For the time being, it was all he could do.
Riley tossed her coat against the wall, missing the hook, and it fell to the hardwood floor with a soft thump, then she turned to face him with pure anger seething from her eyes.
“For two weeks?! And you didn’t tell me?” she yelled.
He squared his shoulders and crossed his arms, widening his frame. “There was nothing to tell at the time.”
“At the time? Some freak’s been staking us out for weeks, and there’s nothing to tell?”
“I’ve been careful, keeping an eye out,” he countered.
“Yeah, right. And if I’d known, I could have kept an eye out, too.”
“And what would that have done, other than upset you?”
“Like I’m not upset now?” She kicked at one of her boots and Jin watched it skate across the floor, coming to a stop when it hit the partition shelf between the sitting area and kitchen. With a huff, she collapsed into the nearest chair and covered her face with her hands.
“I’m sorry, but there wasn’t much to tell you. Other than the mysterious visitor.” Jin sat down in the chair opposite from Riley, and waited for her to put her hands down and look at him.
“So,” she began, taking a deep breath. “Exactly how many times has this mystery guy actually visited?”
Jin considered his words carefully, not wanting to upset her further. “I believe he’s come by at least once a night for over a week. The week before, a handful of times.”
She groaned. “And before that…who knows how often he stalked us through the woods, right?”
He nodded. “This is true.”
“No, this is dangerous,” she argued.
She had a point. Perhaps he’d done enough observing.
Even with three layers under the coat, he was shivering. The snow had begun to fall again, teasing them with weightless flakes that danced on the mild, yet frigid breeze. He knew the real storm would be showing its ugly face soon. As long as they had fire, they could survive, because there was no shortage of snow to melt for drinking and cooking. But still, the cold was brutal, and even with Riley’s help, he wasn’t sure they could save the pipes. Soon it would become more than a little uncomfortable living in the treehouse without running water, electricity or plumbing. But it could be worse, it could be much, much worse.
He shifted, grimacing at the loud crunch the snow made beneath his weight, and risked a glance to his right, where Riley’s hiding space was behind the fallen branch of a tree. She glared back at him, having obviously heard his movement. It didn’t matter how loud they were though; he knew they were alone with the creatures of the forest. But five minutes after he had that thought, the trees fell silent, aside from random sighs in the wind, as their boughs bopped up and down and side to side. The four-legged animals darted to safety, and the birds stopped their tweets to listen, because something else was coming.
Jin slowly lifted a hand, his signal to Riley to be still and silent, and she waved her gloved fingers in return. They waited. It felt like an hour, though it had been only minutes; the cold had a way of distorting time, drawing out each second into a long and painful experience. Through the twinkle of fading daylight, the shadows began to shift and take form, releasing from their depths a person, a real one. Jin leaned into his tree trunk, squinting against the glare as the sunset hit the snow drifts, and watched as the man, and he could see now it was a man, struggled in his snowsuit to take long strides, not bothering to be quiet. With each crunching step, Jin studied the stranger. He didn’t appear to be armed, nor have a pack for food. Jin couldn’t even see signs that he carried water on his person. All Jin knew, as the distance between them closed, was that the stranger had a young face.
The plan was to wait till he passed between Riley and Jin so they could take him by surprise, but their prey halted only ten feet from them. He turned his face and looked up at the sky, then he pushed his hood back, soaking up what little warmth remained from the sun. Riley burst from her hiding spot, cursing loudly.
The man was no stranger to her.
RILEY
The moment Cole pushed the hood off his face, I recognized him and sprang from behind my hiding spot as if launched off a catapult. Shocked, the boy stumbled backwards, making it easy for me to reach him before he had the chance to retreat. He was still raising his hands in defense when my fist connected with his nose. Blood burst out around his fingers as his legs collapsed under him, and I brought up a knee, striking him firmly beneath the jaw. He was unconscious before his body fell backwards and his head hit the snow.
“Riley, enough!” Jin hissed. He grabbed at my arm and pulled me away from the bleeding boy.
I watched as Cole’s blood turned the pure-white snow carpet around his slightly turned face a glorious shade of crimson, and began to pool under his cheek. The falling snow was already trying to bury the evidence of my attack, and the cold was turning the flowing blood from Cole’s nostrils into a slushy mess.
When I reached at my hip for my weapon, Jin grabbed me a second time. “No,” he pleaded.
“I know him,” I growled in response.
“Obviously. But we are not killing an unarmed man.”
“This little shit is no man.”
“Okay. But can we ask him a few questions before you break any more bones in his body?” Jin pressed.
“Doesn’t look like he can talk right now.”
With a swipe, I brushed the falling snow off my lashes and nose, leaving behind the tacky residue of frozen pine sap. When I looked at my glove, two fingers were covered in it, transferred from the tree I had been hiding behind just a minute before. I wiped the hand on my jeans and tried to flick the gummy crystals free.
“We can’t bring him back into the house. He stays out here.”
“He already knows where we sleep at night. I’d like to find out why,” Jin said.
I shook my head, breathing in the pure scent of winter, and someone’s body odor. “Probably followed me,” I grumbled. “Why doesn’t matter. We should bury him out here. I promise, you won’t regret it.”
When Jin squatted to rifle through Cole’s pockets, I pushed a section of loose hair back into the hood of my coat. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for clues,” Jin replied.
“Clues? Like what…his wallet? His ID? As if anyone carries that shit around anymore.”
Jin looked over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow. “No, I’m not looking for a wallet. But there’s this.” He lifted his hand with a folded piece of paper held tightly between two of his fingers. “Instructions maybe? A map?”
I grunted. “I already know who he is and the fucked-up place he came from. Let’s tie him up to a tree and go back inside. Something out here will eat him before the stars come out. I’ll tell you all about his friends when I’m in front of the fire wearing dry socks and sipping something hot.”
The snow made a squeaking sound when Jin stood. He shook his head in slow motion. “Is he really that dangerous? Seems like he’s only a boy, with no weapon.”
“Yes, he’s dangerous,” I answered, with a swift kick at Cole’s boot. He didn’t f
linch.
We stood quietly, looking between each other and the kid bleeding into the snow until Jin rubbed at his chin. “We have rope. We can tie him up inside. Keep him alive long enough to answer both our questions.” When I glared back at him, he added, “I can tell you have things to ask, too.”
Partly true. But how Cole found me was not as important as where he came from. He was from the Ark, and the Ark was not to be trusted. Ever again. With a sigh that hurt from the cold air, I knelt by his head and grabbed his nose, twisting it just enough to feel the bones move. Nothing.
“Fine, we’ll take him back,” I relented, standing. “He’s not faking it. But I’m not carrying him.”
Without a word, Jin pulled on Cole’s arms, lifting him into a sitting position, and turned until he had most of Cole’s upper body on his shoulder. He stood with a grunt, but didn’t appear too overwhelmed by the kid’s weight.
“Lead the way,” Jin commanded, a tight smile turning into a controlled grimace. “Quickly, or I may just drop him and leave him in the snow after all.”
The walk back to our cabin didn’t take long, but heaving Cole’s dead weight up the steps and the ramp that twisted around the foundation tree was a nightmare. Jin almost lost his grip twice, but on the third slip, Cole’s limp body fell off Jin’s shoulders and we both scrambled to grab him before he rolled to his death. It took both of us to get Cole upstairs to the small overlook outside the front door, and by then, we were panting from the exertion. Standing still, the high elevation screwed with my tight lungs, but after the hike up the tree, I could barely breathe.
“How the hell did you get me up here without help?” I gasped, kicking the front door open and tossing Cole’s long legs over the threshold.
“I don’t remember it being this hard,” Jin quipped, saving his breath.
We half-rolled and half-lifted Cole into the entryway. Once inside, and with the door closed again, Jin and I kicked off our boots and hung our coats on the wall, then collapsed into the closest chairs. It’s where we stayed until Cole began to moan on the floor.
Find Me Series (Book 4): Where Hope is Lost Page 2