Vengeance (The Captive #6)(26)

Stepping away from the edge, she fought against the tears burning her eyes as she hurried down the path toward the next cave. He would have done far worse to her, she reminded herself, as she slipped into the cool recesses of the dark cavern. She trembled at the notion of that man touching her or kissing her, but she still couldn’t rid herself of the inward quaking rattling her bones. It had been her second fight and she’d hurt someone far worse than she’d ever planned to do in her life.

Get it together, she told herself. No, she’d never planned to injure someone as badly as she just had, but she hadn’t chosen this situation. It had been forced on her. She may have to do even worse before her journey was over. She wouldn’t like it, but she would do what had to be done in order to save the children.

Fifty feet into the cave, she dug out another rag and tied it to the end of the torch. There would never be any turning back, she realized as she lit the rag and made her way through the cave.

***

Tempest huddled deeper within her heavy, black wool cloak, burying herself inside the thick material the best she could as she fought against the wind trying to tear her hood off her head. Before exiting the final cave, she had slipped it on beneath the white cloak. She’d only kept the white cloak on in order to help her blend in with the world around her. The bottoms of the two cloaks beat against her shins and knees when she lifted her feet from the snow.

She’d lost sensation in her nose and cheeks; she wasn’t sure if she had feet anymore as she sank to the middle of her shins in the snow. Her knee-high boots kept the snow from slipping inside them, but she couldn’t escape the cold of the snow pressing against the outside of the fur-lined boots.

She’d escaped from the caves sometime yesterday, she believed, to discover the snow that had been spiraling down when she’d left the orphanage had turned into a full-fledged blizzard. If she hadn’t encountered the man on the cliff, she would have stayed within the cave and waited out the storm, but she’d been unwilling to take the chance they would find her if she did.

She’d lost track of the day and time in the wind and snow relentlessly beating against her. Exhaustion had claimed all of her muscles and bones; it took all she had to keep going forward. Hunger twisted in her gut; her fangs pressed against her inner lip. She’d expected to be able to hunt animals once she was free of the caves, but they’d all been smart enough to go to ground during the storm.

The world now consisted of the five feet in front of her she could see through the wall of white all around her. She’d lost track of where she was, but she never would have known anyway. Nothing outside of her own town would be familiar to her. She’d left to find help, but she was beginning to believe she would be destroyed by the winter. That she would wander out here for eternity, starving and cold, and the others would all die because of her failure.

That belief kept her trudging onward, struggling against the snow sucking at her boots and weighing down her rubbery legs. She grabbed hold of her hood when the wind snatched it away from her. Pulling it down, she held it close against her face. Crystals of ice coated her lashes; she’d bet she had icicles forming on her nose and clothing.

She took another step forward, stumbled and fell when her legs gave out on her. Kneeling in the snow, her numbed fingers dug into the fluffy flakes piling up around her. The idea of curling up and going to sleep, if only for a little bit, was so entirely tempting she leaned to the side to lie down.

“Agnes, Nora, Abbott, Pallas, Dane, Claude,” she whispered.

With a low groan, she somehow managed to push herself to her feet once more. Her knees throbbed; her legs wobbled as she forced herself onward. She didn’t know how far she went, how long she continued before her legs gave out on her again. Her body slumped to the ground; her shoulders hunched forward against the storm.

Unable to rise again, she sat in the snow swirling around her. Trying to bolster her strength, she recited the names of her loved ones again, but she still couldn’t force herself to rise. Exhaustion beat against her as insistently as the wind and snow. She’d become a vampire snowman before she woke again, but perhaps a small nap would help her.

The idea she’d never rise from a nap flittered across her mind. The cold wouldn’t kill her, but she couldn’t shake the thought she would awaken to find herself buried so far beneath the snow she’d never be able to escape.

She tried to get back to her feet but before she was halfway up, she collapsed again. The urge to cry overtook her, but she didn’t have the energy to summon any tears. Instead, she simply stared at the white now encompassing her entire world. If she’d been home still, she would have loved this storm. She would have started a large fire, settled in with a good book and watched as their world became covered in a blanket of white.

Now, she hated it. It was keeping her from what had to be done, it spelled the death of everyone she’d ever cared about. She shoved her fingers into the snow and staggered to her feet once more. She made it only three feet before her ankle twisted out from under her and she fell again.

Wiping at the white coating her lashes, she blinked against the storm as a murky figure began to take shape. At first, she believed it was a hallucination, that fatigue had pushed her beyond sanity and into a world no longer existing in reality. Then the realization that the invaders had found her hit her. In her mind, she got to her feet once more, but when she blinked again, she realized she hadn’t moved at all.