Spirits of the Season: Eight Haunting Holiday Romances

by Amanda DeWees

  “Good girl,” he said.

  If it hadn’t been for the not-quite-British, not-quite-Australian accent, she would have found the words condescending and sexist, but she could tell that wherever he came from, he’d just given her honest praise.

  “Now, I want you to put your hands where I show you,” he said.

  “I don’t think I–”

  “You can. I’ve just seen you do it.” As a demonstration, he took a deep breath, held it and then let it out. “Breathe, Iris. Breathe down to the bottom of your lungs. The air is icy, refreshing. Let it cool you down. Cool off that temper tantrum your body is throwing.”

  “My body is not throwing a fit.”

  “Breathe, Iris.”

  She breathed. She did as he asked and pulled in as much of the frigid air swirling around the outcropping as her lungs could hold. Gradually, to her astounding relief, the heat ebbed inside her, fire pulling itself back deep into her heart, banking the embers for another time.

  “Good,” Bryce said. “That’s good. We’re going to make our way around this, slowly, carefully, taking all the time we need.”

  She trained her eyes on his hands and used each hold he used, as soon as he was done with it. With every bit of her focus on the rock and her hands, her feet followed without her having to think so hard about them. A minute later, they cleared the outcropping.

  Niki never imagined a three-foot-wide path with a life-threatening drop to either side could be so welcoming. Compared to the experience of the last few minutes, she felt like she could skip along the top of the ridge.

  That was until she saw the place Bryce intended for their descent into the valley.

  A precipice, that’s what it looked like. A freaking cliff. She supposed it was slightly less terrifying than the rock face on the other side of the outcropping, marginally less straight up and down, but the operative word was marginally.

  “It’s easier than it looks,” Bryce said. “Any beginning solo free climber could manage it.”

  “I guess,” she said. “If I were a beginning solo free climber. I don’t even know what that is.”

  “No worries. I’ll be guiding you all the way.”

  Perpendicular slabs stuck out from the main wall in places, forming steps a few inches wide where they could take a breather during the climb down and she could cower as necessary, but in one particularly terrifying spot, the granite bulged well past the next small ledge below it, so that she’d have to drop down blindly and hope her foot didn’t miss, sending her plummeting to the bottom.

  “Uh,” she said.

  “Fifty feet. The rest is fresh powder. Easy sledding.”

  She nodded, but didn’t say anything. If she opened her mouth, she was afraid what would come out. Wailing, most likely. She trudged forward to the obvious starting point, a spot where a natural cut in the rock provided two improvised steps downward.

  Bryce took the steps, then jumped down to the next micro-ledge and swiveled around to look up at her.

  “Take off your snowshoes and buckle them to each other then hang them around your neck.”

  Niki did as instructed, and descended the makeshift steps, but hesitated when it came time to jump down next to him. Lightweight as they were, the snowshoes put a stranglehold around her neck and the poles bounced and clattered awkwardly against the rock. Bryce made a circling motion with his hand, telling her to turn around and take the drop backward. In doing so, she made the mistake of looking down again. If she didn’t catch the ledge just right, the next stop was a sharply angled rock that could take off her head.

  She got into position to slide rather than jump down and waited for the courage.

  And waited. Her knees began to shake uncontrollably.

  “No family,” Bryce said.

  “What?”

  “You asked me a while back if I was here with family. No family.”

  One, then the other, he directed her toward the best handholds.

  “You mean you don’t have any or–”

  “They’re scattered across Scotland and New Zealand.”

  Ah. The mystery of the accent solved.

  So you were born in…?”

  At his urging, she slid over and down. Triumph! She banged her knee, but she’d made it!

  “Scotland,” he said, and climbed down another six feet to the next foothold. “I lived there until I was 12 and my mother emigrated to New Zealand. Da felt it better for a boy to go with his maw. Or so he said. Personally, I think he just didn’t want the responsibility.”

  “Sorry,” she said. She didn’t know what else to say. Her experience with her own mother was so distorted she didn’t qualify to comment.

  Bryce shrugged, a telling gesture. Somewhere in there, a little boy still didn’t understand his father’s loss of interest in him so many years ago.

  “So who’s here with you? At the resort?”

  A girlfriend, probably. What would her name be? What would she look like?

  He refused to answer until she put her hands where he showed her.

  “No one. I’m here alone.”

  “What, you mean like on business?”

  “No.”

  Down another four feet. Niki couldn’t imagine anyone, except maybe herself, vacationing here solo.

  “You must really like to ski. Or party?”

  Trolling for girls. It had to be trolling.

  “I have a reasonable interest in the former. Not so much the later.”

  He executed a diagonal, spider-like scramble to another flat bit of rock about half the depth of an airline tray table, then leapt backward off it to a much larger bonus shelf in the middle of their descent, the first real stopping place.

  “So you came to Sapphire Ridge because…?”

  “I was looking for something. I’ve been looking for it for several years now.”

  “Looking for what?”

  “I wasn’t certain. Nor where I’d find it. I only knew to go where the snow was deep and people were celebrating.”

  She grunted with the effort to replicate Bryce’s fluid moves toward the tray table ledge. “Sounds mysterious.”

  “Life often is. More than people generally think.”

  She jumped back, landing hard on the bigger ledge, which was neither flat, nor level. One of her feet slid off. Overcorrecting, she lunged for a handhold in a crevice in the wall, missed it, and frantically scrambled to clutch something, anything, to save herself.

  Hyperventilating and dizzy, her vertigo returned. The snowshoe straps throttled her and the tip of one of the poles got hung up in a crack. She was afraid to try and pull it out, in case its abrupt release disturbed her precarious balance and sent her flying. Instead, she pivoted torturously on the balls of her feet to put her back to the rock, her, boot soles grinding into the coating of sand-grouted ice atop the overhang. Once facing out toward the valley, she freed the pole and plastered herself into the wall as far as she could get from the edge.

  Oh, God. How did I get here?

  Where was Bryce?

  This was the spot she’d noticed from above, where an overhang bowed outward and made it impossible to see any part of the wall below it.

  I’m stuck. I’m stranded. Oh, God.

  “Bryce?” A non-whisper. No sound. She couldn’t move anything, not even her vocal chords.

  I’m going to fall off.

  Her fingers practically bolted themselves to wall.

  “Are you here with your mother to celebrate Christmas?” a voice asked from below.

  “Huh?” Was someone talking to her?

  Hair tousled by the elements and gone a darker blonde in the shade from the overhang, Bryce’s head edged into her field of vision from below. He’d already conquered the descent and waited for her to continue.

  Not moving. Not even going to try.

  “I asked, are you here with your mother to celebrate Christmas?” he said.

  “What? God, no.”

  “So your mother a
nd you don’t get along?”

  “That’s like asking if Dracula and his next meal are best friends.”

  His hands pantomimed the zigzagging course she should use around the shadowed side of the boulder.

  She shook her head at him.

  Not on your life.

  “Like you and me,” Niki said, “My mother has what you have so politely termed a ‘gift.’”

  “I take it she’s some sort of metaphorical vampire?” he said.

  Having shown her the route, he dropped out of sight again.

  “Less metaphor, more life-sucking. Though not actual blood, of course.”

  “What does she do, exactly? How does her gift work?” His voice grew more distant, faint. Damn him. The Scots-Kiwi bastard was deserting her up here.

  Niki kept talking, just to hear a voice, even if it was her own.

  “Just about anyone who gets near her loses their will to act independently,” Niki said, “regardless of personal risk to their livelihood, career, ethics, relationships with loved ones, or in excessive cases, physical danger. I don’t have any proof, but there was this one producer she didn’t like for some reason she never explained to me. I knew him. He was a nice guy, too soft for the business, but nice. I don’t think he did it willingly.”

  “Did what?” Bryce’s voice, fainter still.

  She snaked along the rough wall until she could see the shallow depressions in the rock as well as the seams he’d indicated were there.

  “Commit suicide, taking his wife with him,” she said, raising her voice to make sure he still heard her.

  “I don’t know.” He was barely audible now. “That sounds pretty far-fetched.”

  “Really.” The level of annoyance in her tone easily matched the decibels at which she shouted her reply.

  She gritted her teeth, released her death grip on the wall and slid on her butt toward the first of the handholds. When it came time to flip over onto hands and knees, however, her courage seized up again.

  “Your mother comes across very likable in her films,” Bryce might have said. He’d moved too far away for her to hear him clearly.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, she’s an actress. What else would you expect?”

  No answer. He was gone.

  That did it. She rolled over and slotted her left boot toe into the nearest depression she could find, though it wasn’t the one he’d shown her. The rest was just ire. How dare he presume to know what life was like with her, Delia. Niki climbed angry.

  Moments later, one heel met a small boulder, tested it for movement, and found it solid. She released her grip on the rock above, put her full weight on the boulder, and turned toward the ravine.

  “Bryce?”

  Chapter 12

  A silent landscape greeted Niki, nothing but the muted breeze softly ruffling the faux fur at her collar. She saw that the worst of the descent was behind her.

  Differentiated heaps and horizontal spars of embedded rock offered relatively easy hiking rather than vertical surfaces to which she had to cling. Further down, bedrock sank beneath a deep and gently sloping mantle of snow all the way to the valley floor.

  She searched for movement, trying to pick out his navy and arctic blue parka from the rest of the terrain. Nothing. How had he gone so far so fast?

  “Bryce!” she shouted, worried. “Bryce!”

  “I knew you had it in you.”

  Niki stumbled and skid across the boulder’s uneven surface, nearly taking a face plant off the side. Less than five feet away, Bryce sat on his haunches under the deepest part of the rock overhang.

  “You–”

  “Tricked you,” he said. “Yes.”

  He’d purposely baited her, intending the conversation about her mother, his unexpected talkativeness, and his pretend abandonment to distract her from her fear of heights.

  “Good job,” she said. “Brilliant fake out.”

  Instead of gloating over his cleverness, however, he merely waited for her to catch her breath, collect herself. Niki frowned. Something had changed. His natural vibrancy was dimmed, his attitude somber. For once, he seemed as winded as she was. It was like the sugar coating had been ripped off some part of him, not that she would describe him so far as anything close to sugary, but the stark difference alarmed her. He could have been struggling all along and concealing some other, more serious injury besides the head wound. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became. She had no idea where he’d found the endurance to make this trip twice, but evidently that well of pure stoicism had run dry.

  Bryce was in the red zone. Time to go.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m good. Let’s get this thing done.”

  For once, she grabbed the lead, clambering over boulders and skidding down inclines covered in spills of loose stone. At the edge of the snowfield, she paused only long enough to throw on the snowshoes again. Bryce joined her as she finished with the last buckle.

  She glanced at her cell phone—still no bars—stunned to discover they’d spent less than 45 minutes to get here from the café. Arduous as the journey might have been for her, in reality, they weren’t that far from the resort’s public areas. Yet, she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d made the wrong call. Bryce implied it would have taken longer than this for a rescue team to reach the area. Every last resource was probably tied up at the main avalanche, but how much longer would it have taken to convince those in charge to divert a team and equipment? Ten, fifteen, thirty minutes? Considering the second slide held only a single victim, while dozens lay buried at that horror show back at the resort, the potential for a longer wait might have been higher. They still might end up with no help for hours.

  Niki’s gaze swept the valley. Things looked different down here than from above, the surface of the snow rougher and studded with torn branches, upended tree roots, rocks, and broken lumber. Up there on the ridge, she could have made a good guess where the victim lay based on what Bryce had said about the wall of a ski patrol hut shielding him from the brunt of the slide. Down here, remains of the hut lay scattered from one side of the ravine to the other.

  “Where?” she said.

  Bryce squinted at the debris field. He was losing his focus.

  “I’m…” He searched slowly up and down the cut between hills. “…not sure.”

  “Think, Bryce. Can you point out a general area?”

  Confusion slid in behind his eyes.

  “Bryce, listen to me.” Their roles had reversed. “I need you to hold it together. The moment we find this guy, we call for help.”

  How she’d do that without a cell phone signal, she didn’t know, but one crisis at a time.

  “Bryce!”

  For just a fraction of a second, he came back to her.

  “Energy,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Energy,” he repeated.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you? You should know how your gift works by now.”

  “I can turn ice to steam, so what?”

  “Heat is energy,” he said. “You see energy.”

  “I see…” All these years she’d had the ability and never thought about how it operated. It came so naturally, she’d forgotten how she’d trained herself to use her talent, the way a person forgets how they learned to walk. Bryce was right. She did have to see the energy locked away in something in order to create heat from it. Provided he was still alive, could she reverse the process and find the victim’s body heat, aka his energy, amongst all this snow?

  Until now, she had let Bryce’s urgency drive their mission. With him fading, that urgency infected Niki. Her fear for him hindered rather than aided her. She battled to wipe her mind clean of its apprehension and push her talent outward in a far-ranging way she’d never before attempted.

  You can do it. Let it go. Release it.

  Her warmth unfurled over the valley, a gossamer buzz, seeking, seeking, hunting for a corresponding human spark. I
t touched and probed and trailed across the snow like smoke or something more ephemeral than smoke, silken waves blending and becoming part of the air itself.

  She opened her eyes and gasped.

  Swirls of colored light blanketed the snow and lifted into the sky like a daytime aurora borealis. Energy. Her eyes sensed the flow and ebb of it in a landscape that to any other mind would appear static and unmoving. Potential vibrated in the frozen ice crystals heaped up in drifts and burying the ravine. To others, the slide may seem to have stabilized, but here and there brighter ripples of green and blue suggested hazardous tension and an avalanche not quite done with this place. Danger. The river of debris might have paused, but the torrent hadn’t ceased.

  There.

  Like the reddish-orange glow from an emergency road flare, the human presence she sought radiated distress to the northwest.

  “This way,” she told Bryce and rushed ahead, down the last of the slope, then diagonally across the debris field.

  Running in snowshoes wasn’t in her skill set, but she pushed herself hard, almost achieving a jog over terrain in which great pieces of ice erupted from the snow crust, parts of an ice shelf that had fractured during the avalanche. She drove her poles into hunks of hard snow bigger than a dining table and used the leverage to pull her up and over toward the next obstacle, be it more ice, a tree limb, or torn piece of wood blossoming with bent nails.

  She found the victim tightly wedged beneath the former wall of the small hut, just as Bryce had said. Fashioned from plywood and two-by-fours, the plywood structure had jammed up against two large trees at an angle, like a lean-to, which then filled partially with snow.

  She sprinted the last few yards, tossing her poles on the way and, once there, crouched to unbuckle the snowshoes. The victim lay on his side, back facing her, his body curled under the wood shelter and buried to the midline following the length of his spine. Not an easy dig, but she wondered that Bryce hadn’t been able to free him. Maybe one of his arms or legs was trapped under the wreckage of the hut.