Darkness(11)

A frown creased his brow. “Attu.”

“How many others were on the plane?” Her throat hurt from shouting to be heard over the wind, but she had to ask, just as she had to visually skim every piece of wreckage they passed in case there might be another survivor out there. Although she knew that there was no more time, that staying out any longer on the increasingly wild water would be little short of suicidal, she couldn’t not search, even as she sent the boat scudding across the waves.

“Three. All dead.” His voice was rough and raw. His reply ended in a violent coughing spasm that brought up a gush of seawater and had her wincing for him.

The memory of the severed leg she’d seen popped into her mind. Its owner was almost certainly dead. Even if her passenger was wrong, even if the other victims had wound up alive in the icy water, by now they would probably be beyond saving even if she could find them.

“What’s your name? Where were you headed?” she asked. The sheer amount of debris was defeating her, Gina realized even as she continued to look around.

She knew there was nothing more she could do. Still, the thought that she might be leaving someone behind to die made her stomach turn inside out.

An image of the burned-out plane in which three of the people she’d loved best in the world had died flashed into her mind’s eye. Her heart thudded and her breath caught even as she angrily shook her head to clear it.

Do not go there.

Her gaze again fell on her now-silent passenger, and she was immediately distracted. Not that he was doing anything. At all. In fact, he seemed to be barely breathing now, and that was just it. His eyes were closed again, and he lay motionless. The dark stain on his shirt continued to grow. She was sure now that it was blood. What alarmed her even more than the spreading blood, though, was that he had stopped shivering.

That was one of the signs of advancing hypothermia.

Was he losing consciousness? Going into shock?

Had she rescued him from the water only to have him die on her now?

“Hey,” she said. His head was right behind and below her. She twisted to tap his cheek with her gloved fingers. “You need to stay awake.”

No response. Not even the flicker of an eyelid.

If he was unconscious, there was no way she was going to move him: he was too big. And she knew herself well enough to know that once they reached land she wasn’t going to be able to just leave him behind in the boat to die.

You have to save yourself.

Gina shuddered. She could hear her father screaming those very words at her as distinctly as if she were back in that plane struggling to get him out. He’d been trapped inside when it had plunged into a Mexican jungle, and he’d died. A renowned archaeologist in the Indiana Jones mold, Gavin Sullivan had spent his life adventuring all over the world. Gina’s mother had tired of his nomadic existence when Gina was ten, divorced him, and settled into an ordinary life as a history professor. She was, in Gina’s father’s words, domestically inclined. The contemptuous way in which he’d said that had made Gina, who lived with her mother most of the time, secretly terrified of having him extend that description to her. Because the truth was that she also tended to like having a home and friends and a calm, stable life. To cover up what he would consider those deplorable tendencies, when she’d been with him she’d embraced his lifestyle with outward enthusiasm, going along with his increasingly hair-raising exploits as if she lived for excitement, too.

Oh, God, after all the work she’d done to put the memories behind her, the crash of the silver jet had brought them raging back.

The next contact her hand made with her passenger’s face was more of a smack. “Can you hear me?”

Still nothing.

Straightening, Gina turned her face into the wind in hopes that a blast of icy air would clear her mind, and found herself confronted by the appalling image of the tumbling clouds at the leading edge of the storm swallowing up the crashed plane’s still-upright tail. This evidence of how fast the storm was closing in did what a faceful of snow-spiked wind couldn’t: it cleared her mind instantly. It also terrified her.

Jerking her gaze away from the spine-chilling sight, she pushed the throttle as far forward as it would go and set the boat on a beeline for the rocky beach that was the closest practical spot to land.

Reaching down behind her, she smacked her oblivious passenger again, hard.

“You! Wake—” up, was how she meant to finish that, but the radio interrupted, crackling to life with a sputter of static, making her jump. God, she’d forgotten about it. It was still clipped to her pocket.

“. . . blizzard conditions. Are you there? Gina? This is Ray . . .”

His voice dissolved into more static, but Gina knew who it was: Ray Wheeler. The team leader. Grabbing the radio, she depressed the speaker button and said into it, “Ray. There’s been a—”

Before she could say anything more, before she could tell him about the plane crash and the survivor and where she was and that she urgently needed help to get her and her passenger safely back to camp, the radio was snatched from her hand.

Her mouth dropped open in shock as she watched it sail over the side of the boat to splash down in the churning water, where it immediately vanished.

Then her head swiveled. Her passenger had somehow managed to roll onto his knees. He was right behind her, steadying himself with a hand curled around her seat and another braced against the boat’s side. Their eyes locked. There was no mistaking what was in his this time. They were hard. Brutal. Deadly.