by Linda Howard
She sat very still, willing the rider to move on past her position. Maybe she faded out of consciousness, her tired body just checking out for a moment, because there was nothing other than blackness inside and out, then suddenly the rider was almost directly in front of her, just down the slope, and a flickering sheet of lightning lit up the landscape again, and all the blood drained out of her head.
She couldn’t see the rider’s face, but she didn’t need to. She knew the way he sat a saddle, and, damn it, she knew that hat. What the hell was Dare Callahan doing out in the storm in the middle of the night?
Angie tried to force her sluggish brain into action. Whatever the reason, he didn’t know about the bear, and he didn’t know about Krugman. With that flashlight in his hand pinpointing his location, he was a sitting duck. Her heart knocked hard against her ribs, and a silent cry formed in her throat.
She didn’t know how she did it. One second she was sitting on the ground against the tree, and the next she was crawling forward, muscles and ankle screaming. She kept trying to pull enough air into her lungs to call to him, tried to force some sound, any sound, past the constriction of her throat, but all that came out was a weak moan that wasn’t even his name.
He was moving past her now. No. No!
Desperately she scraped her hand across the ground, found a rock. She threw it. Rather, she tried to throw it. She didn’t have any strength left. The rock sort of rolled out of her hand and thumped to the ground just a few yards away.
She searched through the mud and darkness, found a stick, and beat it on the ground. The noise was lost in that made by the steady drumming of rain, the increasingly distant rumble of thunder.
She crawled, toward the light, toward Dare. Minutes before she’d had the bleak thought that she might not make it. She wouldn’t give up, she would never just surrender, but the thought had been there, sapping her strength. Now he was here, and she wasn’t alone. He was literally the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel, and he was moving away from her.
Desperately she scrabbled for another rock, couldn’t find one.
“Dare.”
The word was a whisper, strangled in her throat.
He reined the horse around, sweeping the flashlight beam across the ground. The horse shifted nervously, not at all happy with its circumstance but obeying the strong hand holding the reins. Horse and rider changed direction.
Angie fought to orient herself, and abruptly realized he was headed straight for her camp. He must have been at his camp; maybe he’d heard the shots and come to see if anything was wrong, and was having difficulty locating her camp in the darkness and hellish weather. No matter what the reason, he was here, he had no idea what might be waiting at the camp.
No. He couldn’t go there.
She screamed. The sound burst out of her. It was one word, his name. “Dare!” Her voice was nothing more than a croak; she was cold and hoarse and exhausted. But it was loud enough that he reined in the horse, the flashlight beam sweeping around, and she heard his gravelly voice call back.
“Angie? Where the fuck are you?”
Yeah, it was definitely him. If she’d been the crying type, she’d have burst into tears.
He kneed the horse forward, straight toward her. She raised a shaky arm in the air, and almost fell on her face in the mud. Oh my God, she was so happy and relieved to see him she might cry anyway. She couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe he was actually there, couldn’t believe she was actually happy—no, make that ecstatic—to see Dare Callahan. Wasn’t that a kick in the pants?
His voice called out as he came closer. “Where are you? Talk to me, goddamnit. Say something.”
“Here,” she said, louder than before, trying to grab a tree branch and pull herself up, and failing miserably. She sat on her ass in the mud, instead, with rain running down her cheeks, and tried to smile. “I’m here.”
Chapter Thirteen
Dare’s gut was tight as he swept the flashlight beam back and forth, looking for movement that would pinpoint Angie’s location for him, but visibility was low and the landscape around him was in constant motion anyway, with the wind whipping everything back and forth; one more motion wouldn’t necessarily stand out. Angie’s voice had been weak, so weak he couldn’t locate her by sound alone; the rain almost drowned her out entirely. A roll of thunder said another line of storms was approaching; he needed to find her, and fast, so they could get under some kind of shelter.
He’d been pushing his luck with the lightning from the moment he’d left the camp; only a damn fool went horseback riding during a storm, so he guessed this made him a damn fool. Hell, he knew it did. Anyone with a lick of sense would have taken shelter, but instead he’d pushed on, fighting his horse the whole way. He figured that meant the horse had more sense than he did; instead of getting used to the weather and settling down the young buckskin had gotten more fractious by the minute. Controlling the horse was taking almost all of his attention, which meant he couldn’t concentrate on his search. Once more he swept the flashlight from side to side, trying to blink the stinging rain from his eyes and cursing every drop that fell. Then a pale gleam close to the ground caught his eye, and he snapped the light downward. There was something small and muddy, an animal of some kind—Then he took a closer look, and a kind of furious disbelief roared through him.
No, not an animal: Angie. She was just sitting there sort of hunched over, a strange, twisted expression on her face as if she were trying to smile, for fuck’s sake. Something was seriously wrong, because no way in hell would she ever smile at him under normal circumstances.
He reined in hard, an action the buckskin took exception to, but the damn horse had taken exception to everything else from the moment Dare had ridden him out into the storm, so why stop now? Adrenaline flooded through him, throwing his body into automatic combat mode as he pulled his rifle from the scabbard and swung down from the saddle. The horse was too skittish to take him close to Angie, so Dare looped the reins over a low-hanging tree branch and gave the big animal a quick pat on the neck to reassure him, then reached Angie with four long strides.
“Where are you hurt? What the hell happened?” he snapped at her, going down on one knee beside her. He shone the flashlight over her, starting at her head and working down. He didn’t see any blood, but she was so covered with mud that he wouldn’t be able to spot anything short of arterial spurting. He noted the bulging saddlebags beside her, and she was clutching a rifle so caked with mud it looked more like a club than a firearm. If she’d needed to shoot, she’d have been shit out of luck.
She was shaking from head to foot, unceasing quakes that were hard enough to rattle her bones, but she grabbed the flashlight and switched it off. “We have to move.” Her voice was thin and hoarse, but forceful for all that. “The light … our position.”
That one word, position, was enough to flip a switch in him, because it could only mean trouble. His heart began pumping hard, but his brain was icy cold and clear as he took an immediate three-sixty threat assessment, looking for whatever had Angie Powell crawling through the mud over a mile from her camp.
He didn’t see anything except trees and rocks and mud, lashed by wind and rain, but his senses stayed on high alert. Just because he couldn’t see trouble coming didn’t mean it wasn’t there. His nerves and instincts had been forged in combat; a lifetime away from war wouldn’t be enough to counteract those instincts. Until the day he died, a part of him would always be ready to react to a split second of warning, and that part immediately understood what she was saying. Someone else, possibly the same someone who had fired those shots tonight, was out there hunting her. He hoped like hell Angie was the one who’d done the shooting, but he figured she’d have hit whatever she was aiming at, so it seemed more likely she’d been the target rather than the shooter.
His spidey sense didn’t pick up that crawly sensation of being watched, though, and his memory of the land told him that they were in s
uch rugged folds of the mountains that, combined with the low visibility, someone would have to be close by to have any chance of seeing the light. Tracking someone in this weather would be impossible and she wasn’t on the trail anyway, which wasn’t even a real trail, just the path of least resistance. In the deluge of rain he’d gone off it himself, which was why he’d doubled back. Thank God he had.
But first things first, and he didn’t like that she hadn’t answered him right away when he asked the first time. He also didn’t like the way she was listing to the side, as if she was about to fall over. He clamped one arm around her, propped her against his raised knee. “Were you hit?”
She was dragging in deep, ragged breaths, the way people breathed when they’d pushed themselves to the limit. Her head wagged to one side. “No. My right ankle.”
“Break or sprain?”
Another shuddering breath. “I don’t know. Sprain, I hope.”
Either way, she obviously couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t do anything for her until he got her back to the camp. He rapidly assessed the situation. There were several things that he needed to do, and they all needed to be done more or less simultaneously, but the obvious number one priority was getting her on the horse. He could find out what happened, tend to her ankle, and use the sat phone to call for help once he had her safe. The sat phone was virtually useless right now, anyway, because of the fucking weather.
“Okay, let’s get you on the horse,” he said gently, hooking the rifle’s strap over his shoulder to free both his hands. He slid his left arm under her knees, his right arm around her back, centered his own balance, and pushed himself up with her cradled in his arms. He’d barely reached an upright stance when he abruptly felt tingles race over his scalp and skin, like hundreds of spiders, making every hair on his body stand up. “Shit!” he said, and even as the word was coming out of his mouth he threw himself down, spread-eagled on the soggy ground with Angie under him, as if he could somehow shield her from a lightning bolt.
The blast of light was deafening. Light should be just light, but this was sound, too, an explosion of sheer energy that was almost like being body-slammed. There was no space between light and noise, it came all at once as if a giant had stomped the earth. The ground shuddered beneath them, something he found vaguely comforting, because if he could feel that then they hadn’t just been fried. His ears rang, his nose burned from the chlorine stench of ozone, and beyond all of that he could hear the horse screaming in panic.
“Shit! Fuck!” He launched himself off Angie, forcing his body to respond even though his head was still reverberating from the force of the nearby strike. The buckskin was rearing, its eyes rolling white in terror, fighting for all it was worth to jerk free. Dare scrabbled on feet and hands for the first couple of feet before he could catch his balance, and in those crucial two seconds the delay cost him, disaster struck, in the form of a tree branch. It wasn’t even that large of a branch, but the whipping wind broke it free and it came sailing out of the night like a rock from a slingshot, and slapped across the animal’s chest and neck.
The buckskin went wild. Before Dare could throw himself at its head and catch the bridle to pull it down, with a powerful wrench of its neck it pulled the reins free and ran. It didn’t just run a few yards and stop, the way horses usually did; it bolted, terrified out of its wits, and in a few seconds was completely lost in the night.
“Goddamnit!” Dare bellowed. “You stupid fuck!” He didn’t know if he meant himself or the horse, but fuck, now they were stuck on foot and the damn sat phone was in the saddlebag, so he couldn’t even call for help when the weather cleared. The horse might stop a hundred yards away, but with the darkness and the weather he’d never be able to see it. He didn’t think so, though; that horse was so scared it might not stop running until it couldn’t run any farther. He hoped it didn’t stumble and break its fool neck.
He stood there, breathing hard and fuming with frustration, so angry at himself for not tying the reins more securely that if he hadn’t needed his hat he’d have thrown it on the ground and stomped on it. This was his fault. He’d known how nervous the buckskin was, and instead of just looping the reins around the tree branch he should have actually tied them. He’d been in such a damn hurry to get to Angie that he’d let himself get careless, and now they were in a fine mess, with her hurt and—
She hadn’t made a sound.
A chill ran through him, a chill that had nothing to do with the cold rain or the storm or even the serious situation. Surely to God the lightning current couldn’t have gone through the ground and hit her, without also hitting him. But he’d all but slammed her to the ground; there might have been a rock, she might have hit her head … Slowly, almost sick with dread at what he might see, he turned his head to look at her.
She was struggling to sit, rolling half on her side and using her hands to push herself upright. The hood of her slicker was down, her head unprotected; her dark hair was plastered against her skull and running with water, she’d been crawling over incredibly rough ground for God only knew how long, but she was moving, she was still in the game, still trying.
His stomach clenched. He’d let her down by letting the horse get away. With the horse, he’d have had her safe and dry in about an hour. Now he’d have to carry her out of here, and he had no idea how long it would take on foot to reach his camp. If he were humping a pack on fairly level ground he knew he could easily set a pace of four miles an hour, but carrying a person, in this kind of terrain? No way. He’d end up stepping off a cliff and killing both of them. With luck, they’d reach his camp by daylight, which was hours from now, hours before he could see to her ankle, hours before she could get warm and dry.
He went back to her side, back down on one knee, and helped her to a sitting position. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know.” She looked around, a little dazed. “I feel … a little funny. Where did … it hit?” She was trembling and breathless, and her voice was weak, but there was no hint of hysteria in her tone, thank God. Maybe one day he’d tell her how deeply he appreciated that she’d held it together. Male or female, and he’d seen some guys lose it in combat, hysteria in a life-or-death situation just made the odds for survival get even longer.
“Far enough away that we aren’t dead, and that’s all that matters.” Lightning was still popping, thunder still rolling in metallic echoes across the mountains. Just because they’d survived one lightning strike that was way too close for comfort didn’t mean they’d survive the next one. They weren’t out of danger yet, not by a long shot.
“The horse is gone.” He said it baldly, a flat statement of fact.
She nodded, a single bob of her head.
He waited for the angry blast of recrimination, because no way Angie Powell would let the opportunity pass to tell him what a stupid asshole he’d been. Instead she sat there, her trembling increasing until it wasn’t trembling at all but body-shaking shudders that left her gasping for air, and finally she opened her mouth.
“Chad … Krugman … killed Davis.” She sucked in more air. “Shot at … me. Took the horses.” She stopped, and if possible her shaking intensified. He remained silent, surprised that she hadn’t ripped into him, changing into something far more deadly. Even though he’d called himself all kinds of a fool for riding out in such a dangerous storm, he’d kept going because those pistol shots in the dead of night couldn’t have meant anything good. There were ramifications he had to think about, but not right now. Right now, the most important thing was getting to shelter. He’d concentrate on that for the time being, and after they’d had a chance to get some rest would be the time to think about strategy and possibles.
She tried to say something else but the words just wouldn’t form, whether because she was so cold and exhausted or for some other reason he didn’t yet know. Maybe she was in too much pain. He put his arm around her, pulled her in tight against his chest and shoulders as if by physically bracing
her he could pass some of his strength on to her. He’d done it on battlefields, and for whatever reason the human contact always seemed to help. Finally she gathered her strength and said, “Bear.”
Bear? The word came out of nowhere. His head jerked around, his gaze sharply scanning and his right hand already lifting the rifle he held, but no four-legged threat was in sight. Visibility was so poor that didn’t mean much, but for now he was going with what his eyes were telling him. He scowled down at her. “Whaddaya mean, bear?”
“It came … must have been circling the camp … horses going crazy. It got … Davis’s body. Huge. Biggest bear I’ve seen … I was right there, on the ground—”
She stopped, but then there really was nothing else she needed to say. Dare clamped his jaw tight. Seeing a bear savage a body at close range, even knowing the man was already dead, would be enough to traumatize anyone. And she knew bears, knew the danger she’d be in if this one had scented her.
Fucking great. Not only was there a killer out there after her, but now he had to factor a man-eating bear into the equation. He had only one other question, the most important one: “Grizzly or black?”
“Black.”
He grunted. That sure as hell put the worst twist on an already bad situation. Grizzlies were aggressive as all hell, like a buzz saw wearing stinky fur, but they normally attacked for a reason: intruding into their territory, getting too close to a kill, startling it, or the worst situation of all, getting between a female and her cubs. Black bears were different; they came after people without any of the triggers that would set off a grizzly. Bear lovers could protest all they wanted that bear attacks were almost always the human’s fault, but most people who actually lived in bear country knew better, at least where black bears were concerned.