Legacy Lost

by Jillian David

  The only thing out in the wilderness that should hold her interest? That victim.

  Their four-person team had been hiking for an hour and were distributed up and over the ridge, spread out as far as safety allowed. No sign of the victim. Her power told her that they were going in the right direction. But the guy could be one hundred feet away next to a rock, or he could be one thousand miles away in Guadalajara. If Shelby relied solely on her gift, she might walk for days before finding people. She could home in on direction. Not distance.

  Ok, then. So maybe she did need the help of the Search and Rescue team to focus her efforts.

  What she didn’t need was Eric Patterson shooting her looks that bordered on pity. Or shame. She didn’t need the judgment his dark blue eyes added. Got the message, thanks.

  To think that once upon a time she’d fantasized about a future with him. What little chance remained was lost when he’d figured out she was a human dowsing rod.

  Actually, no. Any hope for a future with anyone had disappeared years ago when she realized that her other ability to detect emotions rendered her unable to have a relationship with any man. Thus, she had very little to offer a partner other than avoidance and distrust. How great.

  Eric turned and stopped, the rest of the team converging to join him. They’d reached ten thousand feet and the thin air had slowed each rescuer down. Every breath of frigid air razored through raw lung tissue. She lifted her glove and inhaled warm air to soothe her aching throat.

  Marginally better.

  “All right, the features start changing up here. More nooks and crannies where the guy could hide,” Eric said. “Let’s go in teams of two. Rodney and Amanda, take the ridge and follow it for a half mile or so.”

  Catching Eric’s eye, she gave him a tiny shake of the head.

  Thank God the guy could take a hint, at least with respect to her ability. “On second thought, you two go low. Shelby and I will take the exposed ridge.”

  “Anything from Ben?” Rodney asked.

  “Checked in with him a few minutes ago. They haven’t found anything down the gully.”

  Peering down the mountainside, she expected to see the tiny figures of the other team crawling over snow and rocks, but the dense cloud cover had reduced visibility down to fifty feet or so. Wind whipped over the snow, biting into her skin despite her windproof gear and reminding her how much certain parts of this job sucked.

  After separating from Rodney and Amanda, Shelby and Eric trudged up the ridge.

  He spun back, grabbing her arm through the coat. “You know where the victim is, don’t you?” It wasn’t a question. “Damn it, Shel. There’s a person out there.”

  Yanking her arm away, she shrugged. “I found the last three victims on our missions. It’ll look weird if I find this one, too. And it’s time for someone else to get the glory.” She suppressed the urge to cough. No way would she let him see her vulnerable. “Besides, don’t you remember? I can tell direction but not distance. He could be anywhere thataway.” She flung her hand out.

  “But you at least know the direction. That’s more than anyone else out here.”

  “My track record is too good to be coincidence. Sorry, but I will not be the one to find him today. If necessary, I’ll use my power and then nudge the other team.”

  That strong mouth pressed into a hard line. Then he crossed his arms. Uh oh. “Quit the stupid martyr complex. That guy could be hurt. You’re playing with his life.”

  Guilt warred with the need to keep her power secret, which then warred with the driving urge to find the skier. “You know what? Screw you and your judgment, Eric.” Jabbing him in the upper chest, she registered the hard muscle under the gear. Whatever.

  “Oh, so now you’ll use your power only if it’s convenient?”

  The intensity of his retort turned her vision red. Damn it. “Convenient? Give me a break. You were the guy who got mad when Garrison forced me to use my ability to find Zach and Sara.” It had been worth it. Garrison’s son and girlfriend would have died that night if Shelby hadn’t helped.

  “Good point.” He puffed out air. Damn him for smelling like cloves . . . and healthy male.

  She needed to stay in the friend zone.

  “Look, I just want to help our victim out there before he dies,” he said.

  “And I don’t?”

  Even with his eyes hidden behind the sunglasses, his stare bored into her until she squirmed. “That’s not what I’m saying.” He clamped his firm jaw shut.

  “So . . . what, then? You want me go deeper and check to see if he’s alive?” She tapped her head. The new trick she had discovered when Garrison’s son and girlfriend had gone missing? Using her power to enter the head of the person she tracked. Feeling everything that the person felt —good and bad. Determining how close to death the person was. What a great party trick.

  Eric knew about this ability, too. He’d been with her when she had last used it. When she tapped into that extra power, her vision had blurred and then she passed out cold from the effort. No one knew what would happen if she tried that trick again. Did the side effects get better or worse over time? Would she get brain damage? Seizures? A tumor? Who knew?

  “No, I don’t,” he yelled over an icy gust of wind. “It will hurt you to get into the person’s head.”

  Huh. So now he cared? She shoved that revelation way down and far, far away, because no way did she have the emotional energy to sort through those implications.

  They had a job to do. “Okay, then let’s get going.” A cough burst out again, until she forced it to stop, making her ribs ache.

  “Damn it, Shelby, you’re—”

  “Awesome? A freaking genius?” she offered with a big grin that she straight up did not feel.

  His face displayed a remarkable array of contortions, and she flinched at the wall of emotions flying out from him. He raised his hands to his head, like he wanted to rip his helmet off and stomp it to death. A muscle moved under the stubble. Then he blanked his expression and crushed any feelings he had into a tight ball of professionalism.

  Good job. Push it down. She should know—she was the expert in suppressing feelings.

  With a puff of vapor, he gritted out, “We’ll walk in parallel to Amanda and Rodney. But we need for them to move quickly. We’re leaving in another hour. Safety first, correct?” He raised his hard chin.

  That jaw was at such a perfect angle, her hand itched to punch it.

  See? He knew how that smug comment irritated her. She unclenched her hand. Fine. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a response.

  “Sounds good to me,” she tossed back.

  She reached out for the victim again to reassess direction and got ice-picked again in the skull. Whenever she or any of her siblings used their gifts, it caused headaches. Not being alone in experiencing that side effect didn’t make it okay. Her head still hurt like blazes.

  They trudged in silence that was broken only by periodic check-ins on the radio and whooshes of wind. The wind whipped the snow and swirled the clouds around them, reducing visibility even more. With no reason to actually search because of her direction finder, Shelby and Eric stayed upslope of the other team. Damn Eric, carrying seventy pounds of gear on his back like it was no big deal. Show-off.

  At least he had stopped turning to check on her. Good.

  Only, it wasn’t good, was it?

  She struggled to pull air into her icy, aching lungs and forced her burning legs to keep moving. What did she want? Attention or no attention from Eric?

  Did it matter? The reason he kept an eye on her most likely had to do with her boneheaded brothers making him promise to look after her or something equally Neanderthal. Like she was the baby sister or something. Even her twin, Kerr, only fifteen minutes older, lorded his seniority over her every chance he got.

  Pausing to let her wheezing subside, she relaxed her shoulders and shut her eyes. There—that light background connection she shared
with Kerr continued. The only time it had stopped was after he had been injured and almost died two years ago when he was fighting in Afghanistan. The broken contact had made her physically ill.

  She squinted ahead.

  Great. Eric had all but disappeared in the low cloud cover.

  A strange sensation slithered through her arms and legs. Even though they weren’t asleep, she shook them. How weird.

  Also weird? How she couldn’t resist the urge to check back over her shoulder, like her mind knew that someone was there. Behind some rocks? Was that a shadow? Who could tell with the thick clouds?

  A tendril of burning sulfur air singed her nose. She swatted at her face. Before she could figure out where it had come from, the sensation was gone.

  Rubbing her neck against whatever climbed up there, she double-timed it in Eric’s tracks to catch up.

  She panted and wheezed in the thin air. If the other team didn’t find the skier, then Shelby would do it herself. Secret or no secret, no way would she leave someone out here when she had the power to save a life.

  Chapter 4

  “All right, we’re turning back, Shel.” Eric pivoted, expecting her right behind him. Nothing. His chest tightened as he peered into the swirling cloud cover.

  Minutes later, she emerged from the blowing snow. Her breaths came out as high-pitched wheezes. Her hands pushed down on her thighs with each slow step in the deep powder. He knew that technique—it helped get a little more power out of the legs, right up until the person totally bonked.

  Damn her, coming on this mission but still not 100 percent healthy. What was she thinking? The team searched at ten thousand feet in the wilderness in deteriorating conditions. Anything could go wrong on the best day.

  What good had that argument done? With Shelby? None at all.

  He waited until she caught up.

  In the lower light, she’d removed the sunglasses and now they hung on a band around her neck. The force of her gaze hit him in the solar plexus. Always had. The gold flecks in her brown eyes glittered like pyrite in a sunlit streambed.

  Or like gentle embers right before exploding into a raging inferno. He flinched at her scowl.

  Freckles dotted her pale skin, which had pinkened from the cold. The Search and Rescue pack dwarfed her tall, thin frame. Her delicate bone structure didn’t deceive him. The woman was tough. But mortal.

  Damn it all, what was he supposed to do with her?

  “We have to turn back for the night,” he said. “The sun—wherever it is—will be down in an hour. Full dark in two.”

  Gold glinted as her eyes narrowed, and she stuffed her fisted hands on her hips and faced him with square shoulders. She drew in a big, angry breath.

  Whatever she was about to say, he didn’t want to hear it.

  “Keep going.” Her voice came out hoarse, ragged. “We’re going to find him.”

  “No. This whole situation is ridiculous. You being up here like this.” He ignored the set of her chin. “You know it’s true.”

  “Come on. I know we can get to him. I can’t let another—” A convenient coughing jag stopped her.

  Another person die. That’s what she’d been about to say. Yeah. Once he’d found out about her ability to find lost people, it didn’t take him long to realize she’d missed a big one years ago. His teenage crush, Leah. Shelby had failed to find his girlfriend before she had died.

  Not that he blamed Shelby. Not exactly. Maybe her power hadn’t fully formed back then. Maybe being a little drunk that night messed up the ability. However, since finding out about her gift, he’d wanted to ask those hard questions, figure out why she had failed to find Leah that night. But he didn’t want to risk alienating Shelby in the process.

  He shifted the pack’s weight. “It’s too dangerous to stay out here. The weather is getting worse. We don’t know how far this guy is from us. Hell, we don’t even know if the guy is alive. If it’s worth us risking our lives out here. Decision made. We’re leaving.”

  She stared at him in frozen silence for a full minute until he worried that she was having a seizure or something.

  “Damn you.”

  Over the wind, he almost missed her whispered words, but he didn’t miss how her entire frame tightened up and hunched into itself.

  Pinching the bridge of her nose, she closed her eyes and slowly rotated until her frame locked into a position, aimed slightly downhill. Her orange eyebrows, still not grown back in from being singed off in the fire, furrowed as she gasped. Oh no, was she—

  “Shelby, stop!”

  She raised a gloved hand, palm toward him, and he didn’t dare touch her. What would breaking her concentration do? Then a guttural sound escaped her lips as what color remained in her face drained away to ash.

  As she pitched forward, Eric hauled her against him, alpine outerwear, backpack and all, using his body to hold her upright.

  A tear leaked from the corner of one of her eyes, and the impact of that bit of moisture hit him far harder than it should have. He ignored how good—how right—it felt to be this close to her, and instead hung onto her for all he was worth.

  After a few seconds, the color on her cheeks improved. She inclined her head and croaked, “That way. He’s alive but barely. If we stop now, he’ll die.”

  “But you don’t know how far—”

  She wet her dry lips. “I’m not leaving without finding this guy.”

  If she felt as bad as she looked, Shelby might not be leaving here, period. His heart thumped an extra beat.

  No. She would not die up here if he had anything to do about it.

  “You’re killing me here, Shel.” He kept one arm around her, and refused to inhale the hint of apple pie and fresh air when the top of her helmet-covered head stopped right below his line of sight.

  What good did it do to argue? She gave new meaning to the term stubborn.

  He glanced at his crackling radio. “What do you want me to tell Rodney and Amanda? Because Ben is calling us back to base camp.”

  “Tell them we might have heard something uphill of their position. We’ll go downhill a bit. Have them start walking at an angle toward us, and we’ll meet up.”

  She eased away from him, the deficit leaving him cold, and not from the dropping temperatures.

  Pulling out the radio, he relayed the information to the other team below them and then let Ben know that they were going another fifteen minutes. His team leader was unhappy, given the deteriorating conditions, but gave them the green light to go a little longer.

  A slice of raw, hot fury shook him to his toes.

  She blinked and wheezed, waiting.

  Eric’s decision could cost someone’s life, and he wasn’t talking about the skier.

  The heat swirled away, replaced by ice-cold stabs up his back. The freezing wave flooded his chest and belly. Could he get her out of here in one piece and alive?

  Shit. He had no control over this situation, and his inability to manage everything going on could cost more than he was willing to pay.

  One look at the set of her mouth and wide stance softened his hard-nosed approach. He could no more stop Shelby than he could stop an avalanche. Results might be the same, though.

  Damn it.

  He motioned for her to precede him. “Go on, then, radar. Cut trail, find this guy, and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  She adjusted the pack, stepped around him, and trudged down off the spine of the ridge.

  • • •

  Crap, crap, crap. Shelby was in big trouble.

  She had a problem that could kill her out here, on the edge of a steep alpine ridge in the middle of nowhere in the Tetons.

  She couldn’t see.

  No way would she tell Eric the extent of her breathing problems, but at least she could cover her wheezing well enough. That little show of defiance and pride back there, trying to get into the head of the victim because she wanted to show Eric what’s what? It had blinded her. Even now, she
could barely see in front of her because of the blurriness, worsening by the minute.

  Dumb. One wrong step and she’d slide to her death, thousands of feet to the bottom of the steep mountain. Who the hell hiked up here in a cloudbank, in the blowing snow, with deteriorating conditions and night coming on, and then did something that made them freakin’ blind? Fair enough, it wasn’t like she didn’t know the vision loss might happen again. She’d lost her sight for a few minutes after getting into Zach and Sara’s minds a couple of weeks ago.

  Today, though, it had been fifteen minutes since she activated her ability, and her vision wasn’t clearing up. In fact, it was getting worse. How long would she be impaired this time?

  Fear walked pointy fingers up her spine and rested a thin hand on her neck.

  And squeezed.

  She kept blinking to clear her vision, but it didn’t help. A tremor shook her arms and legs. No way was she safe out here in this condition.

  Was the blindness permanent? Air stopped halfway up her windpipe. Her heart pounded in a tight chest.

  Damn it, what if she became a liability to her family? With Dad’s recent stroke, they couldn’t afford for anyone else in the family to get sick or injured. If she couldn’t see to work on the ranch, that debility would destroy her brothers. Please, let this be temporary.

  Eric mumbled into the radio. She could barely make out the response from Amanda down the hillside, but she could hear her teammate’s—and Rodney’s voices nearby. They were getting closer.

  Even without trying to connect with the search target, she still got a sense of the skier’s mind, like his life force or whatever voodoo you wanted to call it was a magnet, pulling her closer. Another series of harsh coughs strafed her lungs, and she whimpered with each breath.

  Time was running out for this guy; she could feel his life slipping away. Eric would hold her to the fifteen minutes, for the sake of the rest of the team. If they didn’t find the guy in time, he’d be dead. Simple as that.