Darkness(58)

Gina didn’t move again, barely breathed.

From the sound of it there were four men, all heading down toward the river.

Toward Arvid. Oh, God, he’d been murdered right before her eyes.

She couldn’t help it: she started to shake.

Cal must have felt it, because his hold on her changed. His broad shoulders curved more closely around her. The hand pressing her face into his coat gentled. She thought she felt his cheek rest against the top of her head.

She held on to him like he was the only safe harbor left in the world.

She didn’t know how much time passed before she felt him move. It felt like hours, but from the unchanged quality of light filtering through the fog when he shifted and she opened her eyes she guessed that it had been more like fifteen minutes. Much longer than that and it would have been growing dark. Darkness fell early on Attu.

He was pulling away from her as her eyes rose to meet his. His were narrowed, with a deadly glint in them. Hers, she felt sure, were dazed and traumatized.

Feeling dizzy, she sucked in air.

“Shh.” He pressed a gloved finger to her lips and shook his head at her. She nodded in acknowledgment and almost reluctantly opened her fingers to release his coat from what had been her death grip on it.

In one fluid movement he sat up and rolled into a crouch. The gun ready in his hand, he looked over the rocks that had sheltered them.

Toward the river. Toward Arvid.

Gina felt the shakes coming back.

You are not that big a wuss. But then again, maybe she was.

Curling her legs beneath her, Gina cautiously sat up, brushed snow from her coat, breathed. White tendrils of mist slid past her, as cold on her face as ghostly hands. Gritting her teeth against the image of Arvid being shot that kept threatening to undermine her fragile calm, she did her best to banish the shakes, without entirely succeeding. The fine tremors that remained made her fingers slightly unsteady and her knees feel weak.

Crawling forward until she was kneeling next to Cal, she looked down toward the river, too.

She couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see much of anything. Couldn’t hear much of anything. The distant murmur of voices, maybe? Or was that the wind, or the river? Impossible to tell: there was too much muffling, veiling fog.

Not being able to see the river, the boat, Arvid—oh, God, Arvid!—was probably a blessing. She caught herself praying that he wasn’t dead.

He almost certainly was. She knew that. But that niggle of doubt made the urge to go rushing down to the river, to try to find him, to help him, almost impossible to resist.

But going down there was the best way she could think of to make sure that she also ended up dead. She knew that.

Cal glanced at her. His face was all harsh planes and angles. With the black watch cap pulled low on his forehead and stubble darkening his square jaw, he looked fierce, lethal, and totally badass.

She was desperately thankful he was on her side. Her bear.

“We need to go.” His voice was scarcely louder than a breath.

She nodded and murmured the only sensible answer she could give: “Yes.”

Standing up, he held a hand down to her. Taking it, she let him lift her to her feet. The fog wrapped around them, hiding them, protecting them: it had become their friend. Sliding an arm around her to pull her close against his body, pushing her hood just far enough back to uncover an ear, he spoke almost directly into it. She could feel the warmth of his breath against the delicate whorls.

“I’m almost certain they’re down there by the river.” His voice was so quiet that if his mouth hadn’t been right by her ear she wouldn’t have been able to hear him. She leaned against him, letting him take most of her weight as her knees recovered their ability to keep her upright. Her hands lay flat against the front of his coat. She didn’t grip him, didn’t hold on. She refused to give in to the waves of anguish that assailed her, to the urge to blindly turn responsibility for her survival over to him. I have to stay strong. He continued, “We need to steer clear. Can we get to that cave you were talking about without going that way?”

She had to force her mind to function, force herself to think, but she did it with a fierce determination. She nodded. “The path forks up ahead. The way we need to take doesn’t go to the river.”

“Good. Go. Be as quiet and quick as you can. I’ll be right behind you.”

Gina turned and started walking. The first few steps required a major effort of will, but as she headed steadily away from the river, leaving got easier. As he had promised, Cal stayed right behind her. Again, she thought his intent was to block her from any bullet that might come their way. Nerves jumping, hideously conscious of every rattling pebble and crackling piece of ice underfoot, Gina went as quickly as she could, blessing the whoosh of the wind, the honking geese, even the distant murmur of the river that she couldn’t see, because it masked the sounds of their passing from any unseen ears that might hear.

After what had happened to Arvid, she was all too horribly aware that death could explode out of nowhere at any time.

She couldn’t let herself think about that, or about Arvid, or anything else. Not now, not while she needed all her concentration just to keep putting one foot ahead of the other.

Except for the occasional, nerve-racking moment when an unusually strong gust of wind swept through and lifted whole sections of it, the fog swirled around them, gray and thick. She knew that they probably owed their lives to it. It hid them, hid the marks their boots had to be leaving on the shell of ice and snow that covered the trail. They slipped through it as silently as possible. Listening intently, she continually searched the drifting banks of mist with frightened eyes, but nothing was there. She could see the trail for no more than a few feet in front of her; she was able to follow it only because she knew where it was and how it ran.