Uncharted by Adriana Anders
Chapter 13
She followed close behind, her breath snatched straight from her mouth when she emerged into an icy, wind-blown wilderness like nothing she’d ever experienced. And she’d been to Antarctica.
Snow and ice pelted everything. Yesterday’s brown-and-green-flecked landscape was coated in white, washed with the angry, tumultuous gray of a storm that wasn’t close to letting up.
She reached for her bag. When he didn’t immediately release it, she moved in. “We get separated, I’ll need my gear.” Maybe they should have split the fire kit in two. Or maybe they’d just need to stick together.
“Sure you can handle it?”
“Yes,” she lied.
There was no shift in his expression when he handed the thing over, no change to features that were already mysterious behind all that hair, not to mention the screen of ice and snow separating them, but she felt his hesitation.
Without wasting words, she hefted the bag onto her shoulder, nodded once, and blindly followed him into the thick of the storm.
Five minutes in, Leo was already reevaluating her physical fitness. No, more than that, she was reevaluating her entire life. Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training, also known as SERE, had nothing on this. And she’d suffered back then. But this, trudging through more than a foot of hard-crusted snow, without snowshoes, the wind slicing through her, precipitation making visibility essentially nil, was the hardest thing she’d ever done. And she was somewhat protected in Elias’s wake, his bulk serving as a windbreak for her. She had no idea how he plowed on, but he did. Unerringly.
It wasn’t even light yet. How could he tell where they were? Much less where they were headed?
At some point, they grabbed hands—no way of knowing who reached first, but it helped balance her as they plowed a path forward.
She turned, squinting through the nasty precipitation at the clear tracks they’d left. A path their pursuers couldn’t fail to follow.
They walked forever, her hands and feet not even feeling like parts of her body after a while.
When she listed to one side, he scooped his arm beneath her shoulders, her armpits. Leaning in, he said something in her ear. She couldn’t hear it, didn’t know what words he’d used, but the heat of his breath against her face melted her a little.
“Hold on,” he said, setting her to lean against a wall that turned out to be a tree. He disappeared, muttering unintelligibly.
Alone, she felt the fear that his presence had staved off. And cold. God, it was freezing out here. Her teeth chattered, slapping together with a constant, wooden rhythm. She slid down the trunk to the cold earth, put her head to her knees, wrapped her arms around them, and waited.
Hands grabbed her. She couldn’t say if they were his or someone else’s.
Her hood fell back and a bare hand landed on her forehead. It felt good—warm and cold at the same time.
“You’re burning up.”
She huffed out a weird sound that felt like a laugh. “I mention I had a stomach thing? Food poisoning, I thought. Maybe it was a bug?”
He paused, eyes wide. “Kidding me?”
“No.” She managed a woozy head shake. “Fun, huh?”
“Right.” His eyes roved over her face. “If all else fails, maybe we can get them with a stomach flu.”
No point mentioning that this whole thing revolved around a virus. “Could work.” She cocked her head. “If you don’t catch it first.”
“Guess we’d better hurry then. Here, I’m giving you meds.” He rooted around in his pack and came out with little pills that she swallowed back without hesitating. Talk about trust.
She smiled, let her head thunk against the tree, and stared up at the whispering branches, blinking at the falling snow. “Thank you, yeti.”
“You’re welcome, Leo.” He bent, grabbed her under the arm, and hauled her up. “Let’s go.”
***
They trudged over slick, uneven ground for another half hour before Elias slowed, narrowing his eyes at the still-dark sky. What a night.
“I’m…fine. Don’t…stop.” Leo caught up to him, lagging and out of breath but apparently forged from steel.
He threw the pack against the thick trunk of a black spruce and just stopped himself from pushing her hood back. Asking permission wasn’t something he did all that much anymore. If something needed doing, he just did it. “Uh, mind if I check that?” He indicated her head and hovered over her, feeling big and backward.
She pushed the hood away, lifted her ski mask, and wiped her sleeve across her snow-flecked eyes, then watched him work.
It didn’t bother him at first, but after a few seconds, he glanced down. “What?”
She blinked fast. “Nothing.”
“You’re looking at me weird.” He yanked off a glove and put his hand to her forehead. “Still feverish?”
“It’s just…you don’t look anything like…” She shut her mouth tight. “Never mind.”
He grunted. Not much of a response, but he figured he knew what she was thinking. That he didn’t look much like the golden boy whose photo the media had plastered everywhere back when it happened.
Well, he didn’t. And he was fine with that. That guy was dead. Gone. He’d done the right thing instead of the smart thing. He’d trusted people he shouldn’t have. And he’d lost his life because of it.
She shook her head. “If I had a camera right now.”
Rage welled up. “What? You’d show the world what I’ve become? How far I’ve fallen from America’s favorite college quarterback? You think I even give a—”
“No.” She faced him head-on, not backing away, despite his obvious fury. “I was gonna say that I’d make a fortune by proving once and for all that Bigfoot’s real.”
When she reached up and brushed a mini avalanche from his beard, it was all he could do not to back away. Not because he was scared of her, but…
Shit. Was he scared of her?
Maybe, though he wouldn’t delve into why right now. What he knew was that, even feverish and wounded, trudging through the roughest terrain in America, in some of the worst weather the place had to offer, she kept a sense of humor.
He liked that. A lot.
Self-consciously, he rubbed at his snow-crusted face, and then, because it was second nature, flicked a look at the wintry trees that clung to the side of the ridge.
His eyes narrowed. Had something moved up in the woods? They’d left tracks behind them, inevitably, but he’d assumed the sleet and wind would erase most signs of their passage. Had he been wrong? Were they blazing a mile-wide trail for whoever was after them? The storm slowing down was a relief—at least physically—but without its scouring effects, following them would be child’s play.
“What? They catching up to us?” she asked, her body appearing as tense as his had suddenly gone.
“Not sure what I saw. Maybe nothing.” Warily, he handed her water. She drank, grimacing while he put his own canteen to his lips and took a long slug. It was achingly cold against his teeth.
His eyes scanned their surroundings, all the while investigating the forest for that extra presence.
It was hard to isolate a single movement with the flurries dancing around them. Though the storm seemed to be settling, motion was everywhere. “No, definitely something.”
“Where?” she whispered.
There.He zeroed in on it. “Your five.” He could have sworn something shifted.
Her nod was a slight dip of the chin, but she didn’t otherwise move. Just her eyeballs, swiveling right.
Beside him, Bo had frozen into one of her poised and ready positions, body vibrating with so much energy he was surprised it didn’t shake the snow from her fur.
The harder he stared, the more it just looked like another innocuous part of the forest—cloaked in night and snow and wind. “Just something off.” He let the words slide from the corner of his barely moving mouth. “Movement in the shadows.”
“You think they’re that close behind us?”
“Hope not.” He had no words to describe what it was that told him danger was near. No way of telling her it wasn’t just sight and sound that guided him, but something else. Something not quite real. She’d probably laugh.
“Should we keep moving?”
“Yep.” He picked up his pack and hefted it onto his back, sending one last uneasy look over his shoulder. “We’ll stick to the river for this last mile. Cover more ground.” Which would, unfortunately, make them easy targets. “Then comes the rough part.” For maybe half a second, he let a smile tug at his lips.
The guarded way she watched him, you’d think he was some wild creature that needed taming, instead of the man who’d pulled her from a plane crash.
But then he realized with the same jolt of self-awareness he felt when he met his own eyes in the mirror—maybe he was the wild creature. Maybe those hunting them were the civilized ones.
If that was civilization, he wanted nothing to do with it.
“Rough part?” One sleek, dark brow disappeared under the bandage’s stained, off-white edge, then lowered again. It was thick and smooth and perfectly arched. Which wasn’t something he’d ever noticed on a woman before.
Shit. Now he was thinking intimate thoughts about eyebrows.
“You’ll see,” he muttered, his good humor gone the way of any refinement he’d once had—crushed to smithereens beneath the boots of those who’d spent the last decade hunting him.
“I’ll see. Great. That bodes well.”
She didn’t shy away when he reached out and pulled her mask back over her face.
“Need more distance.” He gave the woods a final probing stare before turning toward the river again. “This’ll be hard. But it’s the only way.”
Yeah, it was the hard part. It was also the part that—if it worked, and that was a long shot—would buy them a little time.
***
Got you.
Ash eyed the cave with satisfaction. Two people had slept here recently. Or rested, at the very least. The ground had been scuffed to hide signs of passage, and there, someone had splashed water along the rock. To wash something, perhaps?
He drew close and sniffed.
Blood. It would take a lot more than a little water to mask the iron-rich scent.
He took his time, searching every possible passage out of the cave, noting a temporary latrine and clear footprints in the dust. Tufts of white hair clung to the corners. He’d bet his earnings that it belonged to a canine.
He followed the jumbled prints to a passage, ducked through it, stood, and went stock-still, his jaw hanging open.
A glacier cave—majestic and soaring and absolutely enchanted. Blimey, what a sight. He took a step, nearly fell, and righted himself. Then slowly slid around the space, running a gloved hand over curved ice, taking in the bumps and dips with the wonder of a child. He felt like a child here, younger than he had in ages, and utterly alive, which was sweet and tragic. Tears clouded his vision. It was beautiful, utterly still, frozen in time, like a wave at its apex.
He shut his eyes and fought the pain that tried to tear into the hard black diamond of his heart. After a few steadying breaths, he moved on.
Close to halfway round, he found a second way out—a low, tight tunnel, showing clear signs of passage. Outside, he stepped down, straight onto the frozen river, and took one last, longing look at the gem hidden just inside. The perfect juxtaposition of nature and mathematics, a wave, as symmetrical as a nautilus shell, hidden beneath the surface of this innocuous wash of ice. Not a crystal out of place. The most perfectly designed architecture on the planet.
With a sigh, he let his assessing gaze sweep the chilly scenery. It took a while, but eventually, he spotted what he was looking for through the hard-driving snow, which was lovely as confetti but as painful as tiny shards of glass. A series of peg holes, too even to be random. It could be another animal, of course. But a wolf would have to be absolutely daft to be out in this weather—and those tracks had been made in the last few hours. He knew he was onto them.
He put a gloved hand out and watched, transfixed, as a mix of flakes and ice settled on his palm, some rushing to land while others meandered as if they had all the time in the world, both covering the ground with mesmerizing efficiency.
With a single overloud slap of his hands, he sent so many little masterpieces puffing away to join the others on the smooth ground and followed the dog’s prints west.